Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

She did a double take when she saw the vessel waiting to take her and Phil out to the scene about a mile off Berry Head, just where the shelf of the seabed dropped from around 30 meters to 50. It was what she knew the professionals called a rigid inflatable. To her it was a rubber dinghy. This was going to be a bumpy ride. Gritting her teeth she quickly removed her light waterproof in order to don the set of oilskins and the lifejacket provided by the two police divers crewing the boat. She removed her trainers and replaced them with rubber boots, hoping that conditions were not going to be as bad as these precautions suggested, and then clambered aboard.

It took less than twenty minutes to reach the crime scene, but the ride was every bit as bumpy and as wet as Karen had expected. There, to her relief, a larger hard boat, the Blue Rose , a fishing vessel chartered from Brixham she was told, stood at anchor. The inflatable was moored alongside and all aboard transferred to the Blue Rose where they were greeted by the diving supervisor, Brian Stokes, a uniformed sergeant from Newton Abbot, whom Karen recognized by sight.

“What puzzles me, Brian, if that body has been down there as long as we think it may have been, is how it’s remained undiscovered for so long. There’s so much diving goes on off Berry Head, and all divers like shipwrecks.”

“Yes, but this one was designated a war grave, ma’am, because the bodies of the crew were never recovered at the time,” Stokes responded. “So it was a restricted area. Now that doesn’t always stop divers, but also, this particular wreck was fairly inaccessible and 50 meters is a bit deeper than most sports divers will go. Deeper than they should go, anyway. My guys only get around nine minutes’ bottom time and they’re diving on surface demand too, which makes it a lot safer because if they do have a problem and need to make extra decompression stops, at least they won’t run out of air.”

Karen nodded. She understood police diving procedure and the high standards that were adhered to. All the men and women were only part-time divers and had other jobs in the force, but they were trained to the very highest level.

“I read about this U-boat, of course,” she said. “She went down towards the end of the war, and some historian has worked out that there could be some important papers aboard, if they could possibly have survived, that might give information about what happened to Hitler, what he was planning if things went wrong. Isn’t that it?”

“More or less, ma’am. Bit far fetched if you ask me, but these marine archaeologists were called in and given permission to go down. And, of course, they had the same sort of equipment as we use. I’ve got two men down there at the moment, by the way, and the team that went down earlier today found a load of antique gold jewelry, Nazi booty presumably.”

Karen expressed polite interest and concentrated on the scene around her. She was a West Country girl. She liked being on water, although she preferred rather pleasanter conditions. Mercifully, however, the rain had eased a little, and peering out towards the horizon she could see that the ominous black clouds she had studied so assiduously earlier were beginning to lift. The Blue Rose , a sturdily built vessel, was moving only relatively gently in the swell. Although, of course, it might just seem that way in comparison to the turbulent bounce of the RI, Karen thought.

She turned to face the coast, just a grey mass in the distance, and leaned against the iron rails surrounding the deck of the Blue Rose . Whatever anybody might be doing aboard a boat this far out to sea could not be properly seen from the shore, that was for certain, not even with binoculars.

Karen shivered. But not with the cold. Although conditions were still pretty unpleasant, she was warm and dry enough within her oilskins. No. Karen shivered because the trip out to sea had done exactly what she had hoped it would do. It had taken her back to that fateful day twenty-eight years ago when she believed even more fervently than ever that Marshall had disposed of his family in this cold cruel place. But would she ever be able to prove it? Would anyone ever be able to prove it?

They stayed out at the site for about an hour, watching proceedings. There was not much to see. The two dry-suit-clad divers who had been down below when Karen and Cooper had arrived emerged after half an hour or so and that was the big excitement of the visit. They had, however, found nothing pertaining to the body, although they reported the discovery of still more gold jewelry which they had yet to bring to the surface.

Another team of two divers was duly dispatched, but eventually even Karen had to agree, to Phil Cooper’s relief she suspected, that there was no further purpose in the senior investigating officer staying out at sea any longer. She had a big and important operation to run, and she wasn’t going to be able to do so bobbing about off Berry Head, that was for certain.

The rigid inflatable had bumped and bucked its way almost back to Torquay when Brian Stokes came on the portable radio from the Blue Rose asking to speak to Karen.

“The boys have found something,” he said. “A gold watch. Definitely well post-war, we reckon. It was mixed up with the other stuff.”

Karen’s heart rate quickened.

“Let’s get back there,” she commanded.

Standing next to her, Phil Cooper uttered the smallest of moans, virtually imperceptible. Karen heard him, though. She had good ears. She turned to look at him. She had already noticed, to her amusement, that the big man was not actually nearly as at home at sea as might be expected from looking at him. In fact his ruddy complexion had turned quite pale.

“You all right, Phil?”

“Never better, boss,” he replied with a wan smile.

Back at the site the watch had already been safely installed in a transparent plastic evidence bag which Brian Stokes promptly handed to her. There could be no conventional forensic evidence on an item which had been at the bottom of the ocean for one year let alone twenty-eight, if indeed that was the case, but at the very least the watch had to be protected from further deterioration.

Karen studied it closely. If it had been dumped in the ocean at the time, as she suspected, it was in rather better condition than she would have imagined it to be, but then gold lasts for centuries underwater and this appeared to be a solid-gold watch. Indeed, it was a gold watch of a very particular make and style. Karen couldn’t believe it. He heart was really racing now.

“It’s a Rolex, Phil,” she breathed.

Cooper was leaning over her shoulder, peering at this unlikely find which had been retrieved from 50 meters below the surface of the ocean.

“Not again, boss,” he muttered. “That’s extraordinary. Could be just the stroke of luck we need.”

“Yes, well, the only bugger who’s ever had any luck in this case before, is that jammy bastard Marshall.” She thought of Kelly and his last words to her the previous day at the hospital. “It’s time,” she said. “It’s time the luck changed.”

She held the plastic bag up in order to catch the best of the light. A shaft of watery sunlight had broken through a patch in the clouds. The tarnished watch gleamed. Karen willed it to speak to her, to tell her who its owner was, at least.

Phil was right. This could be lucky, very lucky indeed. But was it too much to hope for that history would repeat itself so effectively? For a few seconds Karen reflected on that other case, so familiar to everyone within the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.

Five years earlier a body had become caught in fishermen’s nets off the South Devon coast and freakishly retrieved virtually before any deterioration had set in. But nobody had a clue who the dead man might be, and therefore DNA was of little help. A Rolex watch was, however, found on the corpse and it turned out that this could be identified positively because each Rolex watch has a unique case number. Rolex were able to supply the name of the German jeweller who had sold the watch. That had not actually taken the matter any further as the jeweller had been unable to tell from his records to whom he had then sold the watch, but Rolex UK then turned serious detective. They had looked inside the watch and found a repair number. This had led directly to the dead man and subsequently to his murderer who had even moved into his house.