Pauline Rowson - A Killing Coast

Monday

‘It’s good of you to see me, sir, and so early.’ Andy Horton followed the stooping silver-haired man through a small lobby into a bright and sunny lounge that overlooked the East Solent.

‘Not at all, Inspector. And it’s not early for me. Like many older people I don’t sleep very well, and it makes a nice change to have company, whatever the hour. Oh, I know I’ve got all the company I need here,’ Adrian Stanley tossed over his shoulder, as though reading Horton’s mind. ‘These retirement apartments are full of people like me, widowers, and widows, but sometimes it’s nice to see a younger face. Coffee? Or would you prefer something stronger? You’re off duty I take it,’ he added, eyeing Horton’s leather biker jacket. ‘Not that that made much difference in my day. Policing was very different in the seventies and eighties before the politically correct brigade hijacked it.’

‘Coffee, black, no sugar would be great,’ Horton said smiling, thinking if Adrian Stanley drank alcohol at this time in the morning then he had a serious problem. There were no signs of the elderly man being an alcoholic though, quite the contrary; his lined face boasted a healthy complexion and his grey eyes were bright and keen for a man in his seventies. The small apartment smelt and looked clean.

Stanley stepped into the modern kitchen and flicked on the kettle. ‘You can take your jacket off if you like. It is rather hot in here.’

‘Thanks.’ Horton eased off the Harley Davidson jacket taking a quick glance around the neat lounge with three easy armchairs, a coffee table in front of a fireplace, television, DVD, modern music system, and a range of family photographs on the mantelpiece of young children with their parents and grandfather. There were more of the same on a wall unit and here Horton saw a slender smiling woman beside Adrian Stanley in several photographs who, he assumed, was the late Mrs Stanley.

Horton draped his jacket over one of the two chairs beside a drop-leaf oak table noting the powerful binoculars on it, before turning towards the window. Stanley was correct; the room was hot despite the fact that the April sun had not yet gained full height or strength, but it was a bright morning and the apartment faced south. It was also on the top floor of the four storey modern building and the central heating was full on.

‘You’ve certainly got a lovely view, sir,’ Horton said gazing across the sparkling blue of the Solent at a handful of yachts heading into the harbour of Cowes on the Isle of Wight. He would like to have been out there himself, sailing his new yacht, Mystery Lady , but since buying it a fortnight ago he’d barely had the chance. And it was looking doubtful he’d get the opportunity to sail her this week. Not only was his stretched, under-resourced CID department experiencing a mini crime wave, but a new superyacht had moored up at Oyster Quays on Sunday, and that would act like a magnet to every toerag criminal for miles around. Horton had left a message for DC Walters to urgently check its security this morning. The last thing he needed was a high-profile robbery on his patch. He would have preferred to send Cantelli, but the sergeant would throw up the moment he got on the water and Horton didn’t think the owner — a man called Russell Glenn, whom Horton had never heard of — would appreciate that on his nice shiny new yacht.

‘It’s one of the reasons I chose to live here,’ Stanley called out from the kitchen, bringing Horton back to the matter in hand, which had nothing to do with his job. He was here on a personal matter, hence the early visit before officially being on duty. His heart beat a little faster at the thought that the former PC might have information that could help him trace his mother who had walked out of their council tower block one chilly November morning in 1978, consigning Horton to years of anguish and torment in a succession of children’s homes. And on Friday morning he had an appointment with the social services department to view the case file that had been compiled on him while he’d been in care. He knew it would make grim reading and bring back painful memories, which was why he’d never requested access to it before. But events over recent months had forced him to confront the past, and now that he had embarked on this journey it appeared he was powerless to stop. His gut tightened at the thought that what he might eventually discover could be worse than he anticipated. But time to reflect on that later.

Stanley was saying, ‘I told my son, Robin, that if I had to be cooped up in a flat then I wanted the illusion of space, which that view gives me. And there’s always something to see.’

Hence the binoculars, thought Horton.

‘You can look through them if you wish,’ Stanley called out, again demonstrating that uncanny knack of reading Horton’s mind. Horton wasn’t sure he liked that but he guessed there were some things you never lost no matter how long out of the job.

He picked up the binoculars and quickly focused them in, surveying the Solent. It was, as usual, bustling with container ships, tankers, pleasure craft and fishing boats.

‘With a view like this, sir, and your background on the force we could do with your help on Project Neptune,’ Horton called over his shoulder.

‘And what’s that when it’s at home? Diving for deep-sea treasure on sunken wrecks?’

‘Not so dangerous and not so much fun,’ Horton smiled. ‘It’s the brain child of our new Chief Constable, Paul Meredew. We’ve stepped up security because the American submarine, USS Boise , is due to visit Portsmouth in two months’ time. We’ve been recruiting residents, fishermen, sailors and boat owners to report anything suspicious.’ Horton zoomed in on a shapely dark-haired woman in her late twenties throwing a ball to a black mongrel dog on the beach below them, nice figure; the girl not the dog. She stopped to talk to a man in his forties carrying a dog lead.

‘I read about that in the newspaper,’ Stanley came up behind Horton.

Reluctantly Horton removed his gaze from the good-looking woman, who was ruffling the dog’s fur in a way that made Horton very jealous of the mongrel, and swung the glasses on the man she’d been talking to who was now walking past someone launching a canoe from the public slipway. A jogger with his iPod plugged into his ears swerved around them. Finding nothing of interest in the parked cars on the promenade — two saloon cars and a muddy blue van — Horton lowered the binoculars on to the table and took the mug Stanley was holding out for him.

Stanley said, ‘Nobody wants a repeat of what happened in Port Aden in 2000, and there’s plenty of opportunity to launch an attack from a small vessel in the Solent or Portsmouth Harbour, similar to that attack on the USS Cole. It killed seventeen American sailors. Al-Qaeda, wasn’t it?’

Horton nodded. ‘Hence Project Neptune.’ And Horton’s boss, DCI Lorraine Bliss, had been appointed to lead the team overseeing it. It was Project Neptune that had rescued Horton from being shunted out of CID, as Bliss had threatened, and which had also reprieved DC Walters from being banished to the nether regions of the force. Bliss thought Walters idle and incompetent, and him a maverick cop because he didn’t believe that you could solve cases by sitting behind a desk and shuffling endless bits of paper around as Bliss did. Thankfully, she had too much to occupy her time now to worry about breaking in a new detective inspector and detective constable. Working with top brass from the Ministry of Defence police, naval security, the Intelligence Directorate and private maritime intelligence company, Triton, Bliss saw Project Neptune as a step upwards and onwards. Horton sincerely hoped the latter would be sooner rather than later. She was also paranoid that something could go wrong, which meant a hundred missives a day cascading into his email, the latest of which was despatching him to the Isle of Wight on the police launch in about an hour’s time to interview an elderly man who had reported seeing a mysterious light at sea. Normally Horton would have been delighted to be at sea but his desk was buckling under the weight of bureaucratic claptrap and unsolved crimes. Bliss was squawking for results and despite putting in extra unpaid overtime at the weekend he hadn’t even made a small dent in it. Taking a trip to the Isle of Wight when a more junior officer on the Island could easily have dealt with it was time he could ill afford. But no doubt Bliss was making a point to those higher up. And time could be what he was wasting here, he thought, as Stanley gestured him into an easy chair in front of the modern electric fire.