Peter James - Dead Tomorrow

‘I phone the airport right away,’ Constantinescu assured him. ‘These two, together, should not be hard to find, either at the ticket desk or passport control. I will ask the airport police to arrest the woman on suspicion of human trafficking, yes? You are on your way there?’

‘I am.’

‘I phone you back with the name of the police officer to contact when you get there, OK?’

‘Thank you, Radu. I really appreciate this.’

‘We have drink soon, to celebrate your gong – yes?’

‘We’ll have several!’ Tilling replied.

As the Mercedes headed further away from the city, the traffic thinned out. Marlene Hartmann turned once again to look out of the rear window. To her relief, the headlights of a vehicle that had been behind them for the past forty minutes were fading into the snowy distance.

Simona rested her face against the cold glass of the window, hugging Gogu to her cheek, watching through the snow as the buildings slowly gave way to a vast, dark, empty, translucent landscape.

Marlene Hartmann settled back in her seat, opened her laptop and began to check through her emails. They had a long drive through the night ahead of them.

Roy Grace made it back from Munich just in time for the 6.30 p.m. briefing.

He entered the room hurriedly, reading the agenda as he walked, and trying not to spill his mug of coffee.

‘Successful trip, Roy?’ Norman Potting said. ‘Sorted the Krauts out? Got them to understand who won the war?’

‘Thank you, Norman,’ he said, taking his seat. ‘I think they know that these days.’

Potting raised a finger in the air. ‘They’re devious buggers. Like the Nips. Look at our car industry! Every other car is German!’

‘NORMAN, thank you!’ Grace raised his voice, feeling tired and tetchy after his long day, which was far from over, and trying to finish reading the agenda before everyone had settled down.

Potting shrugged.

Grace read on in silence as more people shuffled in, then he started.

‘Right, this is our sixteenth briefing of Operation Neptune. We have another body, which may or may not be linked to this operation.’ He looked at Glenn. ‘Would our reluctant fisherman like to talk us through it?’

Branson smiled grimly. ‘Seems like we found poor old Jim Towers. Because he’s bound up head to foot, it’s impossible to see if he has had surgery, so we’ll have to wait for the PM. There’s no one available tonight, it’s being done in the morning.’

‘Has he been formally identified?’ Lizzie Mantle said.

‘From a gold bracelet and his watch,’ Branson replied. ‘We decided not to let his wife have a look at him. He’s not a pretty sight. Remember that face, underwater, in Jaws ? The one that popped through the hole in the hull, with its eyeball hanging out, and scared the shit out of Richard Dreyfuss? He looks like that.’

‘Too much information, Glenn!’ Bella Moy said in disgust, changing her mind about popping a Malteser into her mouth.

‘What do we know, so far?’ Grace asked.

‘The boat was scuttled – it wasn’t in a collision.’

‘Any possibility it could have been suicide?’

‘Difficult to scuttle your own boat when you’re trussed up like a mummy in gaffer tape, chief. Unless he had a secret life as an escapologist.’

There was a titter of laugher.

Grace smiled too, then said, ‘For the immediate time being, the investigations will be done by this team. DI Mantle will head a dedicated group investigating this, and will decide whether a separate murder inquiry needs to be set up – to some extent dependent on what the post-mortem tells us.’

He looked at her.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’d want you to be part of this team, Glenn, as you’ve already met Towers’s wife – widow.’

‘Sure.’

‘We need to handle the press carefully on this one,’ Grace said. ‘Again, let’s wait and see what we learn from the post-mortem.’

‘I agree,’ DI Mantle said.

Branson said, ‘I’m increasingly unhappy about Vlad Cosmescu. The DNA tests on the cigarette butts prove he was at Shoreham Harbour. Then the outboard-’

‘It’s evidence that he was there, Glenn,’ Roy Grace corrected him. ‘But not absolute proof. Someone else could have dropped them. You – everyone -’ he paused to look around his team – ‘we all need to be aware that if you say that something confirms or proves something, there is a big danger that in court you could be picked to pieces by a smart brief, who’ll accuse you of misdirecting the jury. The word to use is evidence, OK? Never say proved or proof . It’s the fast-track way to lose a case.’

Almost everyone nodded.

‘So what else do you have on him, Glenn?’

‘We know he’s a Person of Interest to Europol and Interpol, in several inquiries they have running into human trafficking and money laundering.’

‘But no charges, and no convictions against him, on record?’

‘No, Roy.’

‘The Channel’s not turning out to be a very good hiding place, is it?’ Bella Moy commented. ‘If you want to hide a body or an engine, you’d do better to plonk it in the middle of Churchill Square. At least someone might nick it for you!’

‘I’d like to pull him in for questioning, get a search warrant, go through his residence, get his phone details,’ Branson went on.

‘Because of a couple of dog-ends at Shoreham Harbour and an abandoned outboard motor?’ Grace quizzed.

‘Because he was watching the Scoob-Eee through binoculars. Why was he doing that? It’s an old fishing boat, what was so special about it – before the dead teenagers were hauled up on to it? I have a hunch about this man, Roy.’

‘Is the boat salvageable?’ Grace asked.

‘Yes, but it would be a big operation, and extremely expensive. I went through it with Tania Whitlock. I think you’d have a hard time selling the cost to ACC Vosper.’

‘If your hunches are right, you’re going to need evidence he was on that boat – someone who saw him, or something forensic, or something belonging to him.’

Branson looked pensive. ‘Perhaps they could dive on it again and do a thorough search.’

Grace thought for some moments. ‘Do you have any ideas on what his involvement might be, Glenn?’

‘No, chief, but I’m certain he has a connection. And I think we should move on him quickly.’

‘OK,’ Grace agreed. ‘Get a search warrant, but you’ll need to beef up the application a bit. Then see if he’ll talk voluntarily – you might get more out of him that way than if you arrest him and he gets silenced by a brief. Take someone interview-trained. Bella.’ He looked at DI Mantle. ‘OK with you, Lizzie?’

The Detective Inspector nodded.

Grace glanced at his watch, doing a quick calculation. By the time Branson had filled in the search warrant paperwork, then found a magistrate to sign the warrant, it would be at least ten, if they were lucky. Thinking back again to his own sighting of Cosmescu’s Mercedes sports car, he said, ‘The man’s a night owl – you might have a long wait for him.’

‘Then we’ll just have to make ourselves comfy in his pad in the meantime!’ Branson said.

‘God help his CD collection,’ Grace replied.

Branson had the decency to look embarrassed.

‘When you do catch up with him,’ Grace said, ‘I think you’ll find him hard work. He’s been around in the vice world of this city for a decade without being nicked once. You don’t do that unless you know how to play the game.’

Then he glanced back at the agenda.

‘Yesterday we established a Mrs Lynn Beckett, whose phone number I was given by our German police contacts, has a daughter suffering from liver failure.’ He tapped the photocopied wodge. ‘These are phone call logs from the German company I went to see today, Transplantation-Zentrale. I’m not meant to have them, officially, so we’ll have to handle them a bit delicately, but that won’t hinder us.’