Peter James - Not Dead Yet

‘I want Roy Grace,’ Smallbone replied, his skin tightening so hard around his face that Tilney could see his skull beneath it. ‘I’ve got information about him. Apparently the Chief Constable’s made him personally responsible for looking after Gaia while she’s in town. You know what I’m going to do? Piss on his parade, that’s what. I’m going to make him look very stupid.’ Then he gave a leer. ‘I’m going to have her hotel suite burgled.’

‘And where’s that going to get you?’

Smallbone gave an oily smile. ‘Revenge, all right? And a bit of money. I’ve spent twelve years dreaming about paying him back. You know what he did to me last night?’

‘You told me twice already.’

‘Yeah, well, I ain’t Amis Smallbone for nothing.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘I thought you was my friend.’

‘I am, mate, so let me give you some straight talking. The world has changed in the last twelve years, in case you was too busy to read a newspaper. Burgling’s a mug’s game, too much hard work, too high risk. Drugs and the internet’s where the dough is – and with minimal risk. And you need to remember something.’

‘What?’ Smallbone asked, sullenly. He had the feeling he was being put in his place.

‘You were never as good as you thought you was. Your dad – now there was a class act. Everyone feared your dad, and everyone respected him. You’ve always lived on that, traded on being your dad’s son, but you was never half the man he was.’

‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘You need to hear this,’ Tilney went on. ‘You’ve always been small time, talking the big talk. You had all that flash stuff, the fancy houses, the cars, the yacht, but did you ever actually own any of it? It was all rented, wasn’t it? All smoke and mirrors, that’s why you ain’t got nothing now.’ He took a swig of his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You know what I do? I look forward. You and Roy Grace, that’s history. Forget about it. Forget Gaia – she’s going to have bodyguards coming out of her jacksie while she’s here.’

Smallbone glared at him.

‘Grab yourself a beer, sit down, relax, chill out a little. In fact, hey, while you’re about it grab two beers – one for yourself and one for your ego.’

David Green’s strategy was to start a ground search of the area around the lake by Scenes of Crime officers, supervised by himself, and an underwater search of the lake by divers from the Specialist Search Unit, supervised by Police Search Adviser Sergeant Lorna Dennison-Wilkins, who had managed the search of the chicken farm.

The large yellow SSU truck was parked behind the growing collection of vehicles along the track which, to Glenn Branson’s relief, so far did not include any reporters – one positive about this remote location.

Lorna Dennison-Wilkins was an elfin, attractive woman of thirty, with short brown hair. Glenn always found it hard to believe how ably she coped with the tough, grim jobs her unit faced almost daily. The SSU had to do all the tasks that were considered beyond the remit of ordinary police officers. These ranged from recovering decomposing corpses from sewers, wells, drains, the seabed and from lakes like this one, to crawling on their hands and knees doing fingertip searches in mud or excrement, such as in the chicken farm, to conducting the same kind of searches for body parts or murder weapons in waste tips. When they weren’t doing that, they searched through the homes of drug dealers, risking at every moment being spiked by hidden hypodermic needles.

One image that had never left him was Lorna’s description, a year or so back, of how she and her team had had to recover, from a frozen tree, fragments of the face, skull and brains of a man who had stuck a twelve-bore shotgun under his chin.

The silence of the lake and surrounding woodland was broken by the rasp of the outboard motor of the Specialist Search Unit’s grey inflatable dinghy. Two of the team were in the boat, in scuba gear but minus their masks and tanks, one helming, the other studying the screen of the sidescan sonar. Glenn stood watching on the jetty. The smell of spent petrol from the outboard’s exhaust suddenly reached his nostrils, momentarily blotting out the pleasant tang of muddy water and plants. As there was no permanent boat on this lake, they restricted the search area to what they estimated to be throwing distance from the bank.

The dinghy suddenly slowed, and there was a splash as a pink marker buoy was dropped into the water, marking the spot where there was an anomaly – something on the screen that looked as if it did not belong on the lake bed.

Over the course of the next forty minutes three more marker buoys were dropped – two in the far section of the lake. Then the dinghy returned to the jetty, and Glenn followed the two men back to their truck for a debrief.

The interior of the vehicle smelled of rubber, plastic and diesel. They sat around the small table, and Glenn was grateful for the mug of tea someone pushed in front of him. Jon Lelliott, one of the most experienced members of the unit, well able to read accurately the often indistinct images on the screen, said, ‘There are four anomalies. Wrapped up, I think, corresponding in shape and size to human limbs.’

Outside, twenty minutes later, Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell had finished taking photographs of the strip of suit cloth, which had now been bagged. He was now positioning his camera on a tripod directly above a muddy footprint that had been found in close proximity to where the fabric had been snagged on the gorse bush. A plastic yellow marker, stencilled with a black number 2, was wedged into the ground beside it, and a ruler lay alongside the footprint. This would enable him to make an exact size photographic print of it later. Working with precision, he was using a spirit level to ensure the camera was exactly perpendicular to the footprint, before setting up lights to ensure the camera recorded all the intricacies of the footprint as clearly as possible.

Five SOCOs were working through the dense, wooded surrounds of the lake in line formation. To avoid further contaminating the area by treading anywhere unnecessarily, Glenn returned to the observation post on the wooden decking of the jetty, where he had stationed himself, watching and waiting, on his phone most of the time, getting updates from members of his enquiry team. He also took a call from his solicitor, which ended with him shouting down the phone at the woman who was informing him that Ari had now changed her mind about the agreed custody arrangements for their children. In the meantime Bella was having a hard time back at the entrance gate, explaining to several club members who had turned up anticipating a quiet day’s fishing, that their lake was now a cordoned-off crime scene.

Glenn ended the call to his solicitor, and glared out across the water for some moments. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Dappled sunlight was beaming down through the overhead branches from a clear sky. A pair of coots paddled jerkily out of a tall screen of reeds, curious but seemingly unconcerned about the divers. He watched a water boatman, about an inch long, sculling along just beneath him. Startled by a light splash from a fish rising, he looked back towards the middle of the lake and saw the concentric ripples where it had been.

Two divers were entering the water, one on the right and one on the left, each holding a black and red underwater recovery bag. They were in scuba outfits, with bright yellow harnesses from which a green and yellow cord trailed up to a spool held by an attendant, also in a dry suit, for each of them. A dive supervisor stood observing. Glenn, standing near him, watched as they sank below the surface in a maelstrom of bubbles.