Peter James - Dead Tomorrow

In about twenty minutes or so it would be time to raise the dredge pipe. Malcolm, taking a quick break in the empty mess room, sat on a battered sofa, cradling a mug of tea and eating a tabnab – as scones were called in navy slang. The television was on, but the picture was too blurry to make anything out. His attention wandered distractedly to the evening meal menu, which was scrawled in red marker pen on a whiteboard: Cream of leek soup, Bread roll, Scotch egg, Chips, Fresh salad, Steamed sponge and custard. Once they returned to port, there were several hours of hard work unloading the cargo before dinner, and by then normally he would be ravenous. But at the moment, his thoughts on Caitlin, he lost interest in the scone after a couple of bites and dropped it in the bin. As he did so, he heard a voice behind him.

‘Mal…’

He turned to see the second mate, a burly Scouser in overalls, hard hat and thick protective gloves.

‘We’ve got a blockage in the drag head, Chief. I think we need to raise the pipe.’

Mal grabbed his hard hat, following the second mate out on to the deck. Looking upwards, he immediately saw only a trickle of water coming down the chute. Blockages were unusual because normally the heavy steel pincers of the drag head pushed obstacles clear of the nozzle, but just occasionally a fishing net was sucked up.

Shouting out instructions to his crew of two, Mal waited till the suction pumps and the chute were switched off, then activated the winding gear to raise the pipe. He stood, peering over the side, watching the churning water as it slowly came into view. And when he saw the object that rose to the surface, firmly wedged between the massive steel claws, he felt a sudden tightening in his gullet.

‘What the fuck’s that?’ the Scouser said.

For a moment, they all fell silent.

Roy Grace felt increasingly that his life was a constant challenge against the clock. As if he was a contestant in a game show that did not actually offer any prize for winning, because it had no end. For every email he succeeded in answering, another fifty came in. For every file on his desk that he managed to clear, another ten were brought in by his Management Support Assistant, Eleanor Hodgson, or by someone else – most recently by Emily Gaylor, from the Criminal Justice Department, who was there to assist him in preparing his cases for trial, but who seemed to take a malevolent delight in dumping more and more bundles of documents on his desk.

This week he was the duty Senior Investigating Officer, which meant that if any major crime happened in the Sussex area, he would have to take charge. He silently prayed to whichever god protected police officers that it would be a quiet week.

But that particular god was having a day off.

His phone rang. It was an operator called Ron King he knew from the Force Control Department. ‘Roy,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had a call from the coastguard. A dredger out of Shoreham has pulled up a body, ten miles out in the Channel.’

Oh great! Grace thought. All I bloody need. Being a coastal city, Brighton received a quantity of dead bodies from the sea every year. Some were floaters, usually suicide victims or unfortunate yacht crew who had gone overboard. Some were people who had been buried at sea, hooked in nets by fishermen who hadn’t read their charts and had trawled over one of the areas marked out for funerals. Mostly, they could be dealt with by a uniformed PC, but the fact that he was being called indicated something was not right.

‘What information do you have about it?’ he asked dutifully, making a mental note not to say anything to King about his cats. Last time the controller had gone on about them for ten minutes.

‘Male, looks young, early to mid-teens. Not been down long. Preserved in plastic sheeting and weighted.’

‘Not a burial at sea?’

‘Doesn’t sound like it. Not the usual kind of floater either. The coastguard said the captain is concerned it looks like it might be some kind of ritual killing – apparently. There is a strange incision on the body. Do you want me to ask the coastguard to send a boat out to bring it in?’

Grace sat still for a moment, his brain churning, switching his thoughts into investigation mode. Everything on his desk and in his computer was now going to have to wait, at least until he had seen the body.

‘Is it on the deck or in the cargo hold?’ he asked.

‘It’s wedged in the drag head. Beyond slitting open the plastic sheeting to see what it was, they haven’t moved it.’

‘They’re operating out of Shoreham?’

‘Yes.’

Grace had been on a dredger which had hauled up a severely decomposed body some years ago and remembered a little about the machinery.

‘I don’t want the body moved, Ron,’ he said. There could be key forensic evidence lodged around the body or in the nozzle of the dredge pipe. ‘Tell them to secure and preserve it as best they can, and get them to make an exact note on the chart where the body came up.’

As soon as he had terminated his call with Ron, he made a further series of calls, assembling the immediate team he needed. One was to the Coroner, informing her of the incident and requesting a Home Office pathologist to attend. Most bodies taken or washed up from the sea would be collected by the mortuary team straight away, after a cursory examination by a police surgeon or paramedic at the scene to certify death, no matter how obvious it was that the person was dead, and then assessed back at the mortuary for a suspicious or natural death. But here, Grace felt from the sound it, there was little doubt this was suspicious.

Thirty minutes later he was at the wheel of a pool Hyundai, heading towards the harbour, with Detective Inspector Lizzie Mantle, with whom he had worked on a number of previous inquiries, beside him. She was a highly competent detective, and the fact that she was nice to look at was another bonus. She had shoulder-length fair hair, a pretty face, and was dressed, as she always seemed to be, in a man’s style of suit, today in a blue chalk-stripe over a crisp white blouse. On some women it would have looked quite butch, but on her it was businesslike while still feminine.

They drove around the end of the harbour, passing the private driveway leading to the cul-de-sac where Heather Mills’s house was.

Seeing Grace turn his head, as if perhaps to get a glimpse of the Beatle’s former wife, she asked, ‘Did you ever meet Paul McCartney?’

‘No.’

‘You’re quite into music, aren’t you?’

He nodded. ‘Some.’

‘Would you have liked to be a rock star? You know, like one of the Beatles?’

Grace thought about it for a moment. It was not something he had ever considered. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ he said. Then he hesitated, slowing down, looking out for the right part of the quay. ‘Because I have a crap voice!’

She grinned.

‘But even if I was able to sing, I always wanted to do something that would make a difference.’ He shrugged. ‘You know? A difference to the world. That’s why I joined the police force. It may sound clichéd – but it’s why I do what I do.’

‘You think a police officer can make more difference than a rock megastar?’

He smiled. ‘I think we corrupt fewer people.’

‘But do we make a difference?’

They were passing a lumber yard. Then Grace saw the dark green van bearing the gold crest of the city of Brighton and Hove Coroner, parked close to the edge of the quay, and pulled up a short distance from it. None of the rest of the team had arrived so far.

‘I thought the ship was supposed to be here already,’ he said a little irritably, mindful of the time, and of the retirement party he had to be at tonight. Several of the top brass of the Sussex Police Force would be there, which meant it would be a good opportunity to do a spot of brown-nosing, so he had been anxious to be there punctually. But there was no chance now.