Graham Hurley: Western Approaches

He awakes, as usual, at 03.55. For a second or two he lies in the clammy darkness, trying to work out what’s gone wrong .

The last couple of days a thick tongue of high pressure has pushed up from the Azores, exciting weather forecasters all over northern Europe. He’s listened to the headlines on the short-wave radio: 32 °C in Amsterdam; hotter still in Paris; 35° expected this afternoon in London .

Christ, he thinks. London .

He searches for the T-shirt he carefully folded two hours earlier, checks with his fingers that it’s not inside out. His mouth tastes of the tin of sardines they’d shared last night and he knows that his breath stinks. Sardines on Ryvita. Again .

He runs his tongue along his teeth and tries to pinch the darkness from his eyes. Something’s definitely wrong. He knows it is. But, still groggy, he can’t quite fathom what .

He pulls on the T-shirt. The last week or so, before the high pressure arrived, the weather and the ocean have been brutal. Sheer concentration has kept exhaustion at bay, but now, in the eerie calm, he feels totally wiped out. Yesterday he spent hour after hour checking their progress on the GPS, a habit — in Kate’s phrase — that has become a nervous tic. But he can’t help it. Without the suck and gurgle of a following sea, no matter how hard they pull, they seem to be going nowhere. He’s sure of nothing except the heat of the day, a thick blanket that presses down on them, bringing everything to a halt: conversation, energy, belief, even the small comfort of a decent horizon. The ocean, poster blue, shimmers in the heat. Everything has become a blur. And now, as dawn breaks, this .

He struggles into his shorts, wincing with the effort. He has a couple of boils on his arse, incredibly painful. He checks them with a mirror when Kate’s not watching. She’s squeezed them dry as best she can and made him start on the antibiotics against the infection but he can feel, or he thinks he can feel, another one coming .

He’s on his side now, up on one elbow, waiting for his arse to settle down. He can feel tangles of hair hanging round his shoulders and his head nudges against the roughness of the cabin roof. Ten days ago, riding out yet another storm, he’d popped a bottle of cooking oil in this khazi of a cave and everything still feels sticky to the touch. They lost a jar of coffee too, same storm, and the granules are everywhere. They melt in the sweat from his body and he’s yet to emerge from the cabin without the telltale smears of brown all over his face. Kate, who seems immune from Nescaf é Gold, has taken to calling him Coco the Clown. He thinks she means it as a joke but there are moments, especially recently, when he’s not altogether sure .

The alarm on his wristwatch begins to ping. Four o’clock. He’s learned to hate this sound with a fierce passion, the way some people react to the whine of a nearby mosquito. It means he has to move, gather himself together, face another day .

His fingers find the stainless-steel latches that keep the hatch in place. At last, thicko, he’s realised what’s wrong. The boat isn’t moving. He can’t hear the regular splash-splash of the oars, can’t sense the faint tug as the boat inches forward. He feels nothing but the gentle sway of the ocean .

Anxious now, he fights to open the hatch. He knows how much Kate loves the slow drama of sunrise, that hour or so when the huge orange ball eases itself free of the ocean. Yesterday, she told him, was the best ever. Today, just maybe, might be better still .

Kate is keeping a record of everything. As the last latch comes free he can picture her squatting midships, her face to the rising sun, steadying her Nikon for yet another shot .

Daylight floods the chaos of the tiny cabin. He blinks at the familiar tableau of boat, of lashed-down gear, of sea, of the rich yellow spill of the new day. He wriggles his upper body through the hatch and rubs his eyes again, looking round, trying to find his wife .

But Kate has gone .

This, at least, was the way he explained it in the first of several interviews with Devon and Cornwall CID.

SUNDAY, 10 APRIL 2011

Nearly a year later, D/S Jimmy Suttle stumbled downstairs, knotting his tie, his mobile wedged against his ear. In theory, this was a precious weekend off. In theory, he should still be in bed.

‘Where did you say?’

‘Exmouth Quays. Sus death. Mr Nandy wants to blitz it. Asap, Jimmy. Do I hear a yes?’

The line went dead, leaving Suttle in the chaos of the tiny kitchen. In these situations, D/I Carole Houghton seldom bothered with anything but the barest of facts. That way she was already on to the next call.

Suttle gazed around. The tap he’d promised to fix this very morning was still dripping onto the pile of unwashed plates. Two empty bottles of cheap red and the remains of yet another Chinese takeaway were stuffed into the lidless waste bin. Even the cat, a tormented stray Lizzie had rescued from down the lane, wasn’t interested in the curls of battered fish in gloopy sauce.

Suttle found it next door in the sitting room, crouched behind the sofa. Here, the carpet stank of animal piss and a fainter smell that signalled a more general neglect. In one of her blacker moods Lizzie had christened the cat Dexter in memory of a nightmare boyfriend at her long-ago Pompey comp. Now, his back to the wall, Dexter would do anything to defend his patch against all-comers. Suttle, wondering why he hadn’t swallowed more ibuprofen last night, knew exactly how he felt.

Upstairs, he could hear Grace talking to the mobile over her cot. This, he knew, was a prelude to the full lung-busting wail with which she greeted every new day. Normally it would be Lizzie who got up and answered the summons, leaving Suttle with a few snatched extra minutes in bed. Last night, switching off the light, he’d promised to sort out his daughter himself, giving Lizzie a lie-in. Now, looking for his leather jacket, he was trying to remember whether the car had enough fuel to get him to Exmouth.

Grace began to howl. Pulling on his jacket, Suttle headed for the door.

Exmouth, an old-fashioned low-rise seaside resort with a reputation for kite surfing, birdwatching and lively Friday nights, lies nine miles south of Exeter. Exmouth Quays is a marina development built around the basin of the old commercial docks, a quieter frieze of expensive waterside homes in various shades of New England pastel. Suttle, who’d been here before, had always regarded it as a film set, not quite real, a showcase destination for people who wanted to make a certain kind of statement about themselves.

He parked the Impreza beside Houghton’s Vauxhall estate. Her dog, a mongrel terrier, lay curled on the back seat. A couple of uniforms had already taped off an area of walkway beneath the biggest of the apartment blocks, a towering confection with a faux clapboard finish and stainless steel trim.

Suttle crossed the bridge that spanned the dock entrance, flashed his ID at the uniforms and ducked under the tape. The apartment block was called Regatta Court. A banner draped across the fourth floor warned that only three apartments remained for sale while an accompanying poster asked WHY LIVE ANYWHERE ELSE? Why indeed, thought Suttle, eyeing the body at the feet of the grey-clad Crime Scene Investigator.

He’d worked with the CSI on a job in Torquay only last month. Difficult guy. Ex-marine. Mad about R amp; B. Lost his left leg after stepping on an IED in Afghan.