‘Hope you brought your dinner jacket,’ WAFI said. ‘You’re going to need it if you are planning on dining at the captain’s table tonight.’
‘Yeah, course I did,’ Glenn replied. It was becoming an effort to speak. And he was freezing cold.
‘Keep looking at the horizon, Glenn,’ Tania said kindly, ‘if you feel queasy.’
Glenn tried to look at the horizon. But it was almost impossible to tell where the grey sky met the grey roiling sea. His stomach was playing hoopla. His brain was trying to follow it, with limited success.
Between himself and the skipper, Jonah, who sat on a padded seat, holding the large, round wheel, was the Humminbird sidescan imaging sonar screen.
‘These are the anomalies we picked up yesterday, Glenn,’ Tania Whitlock said.
She ran a replay on the small blue screen. There was a line down the middle, made by the Towfish sonar device which had been trawled behind the boat. She pointed out two small, barely visible black shadows.
‘Those could be bodies,’ she said.
Glenn was not sure exactly what he was meant to be looking at. The shadows looked tiny, the size of ants.
‘Those there?’ he asked.
‘Yes. We’re about one hour away. Coffee?’
Glenn Branson shook his head.
One hour
, he thought. Shit. A whole hour more of this. He wasn’t sure he could swallow anything. He tried staring at the horizon, but that made him feel even worse.
‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you sure? You look a little peaky,’ Tania said.
‘Never felt better in my life!’ Glenn said.
Ten seconds later he leapt off his stool, lurched to the side of the boat and threw up violently. Last night’s microwaved lasagne and a lot of whisky. As well as this morning’s single piece of toast.
Fortunately for him, and even more so for those near him, he was on the leeward side.
33
Some while later, Glenn was woken by the rattle of the anchor chain. The engine died and suddenly the deck was no longer vibrating. He could feel the motion of the boat. The deck pushing him up, then sinking down beneath him again, rolling him left and right in the process. He heard the creak of a rope. The whine of a winch. The pop-hiss of a canned drink being opened. The crackle of radio static. Then Tania’s voice.
‘Hotel Uniform Oscar Oscar. This is Suspol Suspol on board MV
Scoob-Eee
, calling Solent Coastguard.’
Suspol
was the nautical call sign for Sussex Police.
He heard a crackled response. ‘Solent Coastguard. Solent Coastguard. Channel sixty-seven. Over.’
Then Tania again. ‘This is Suspol. We have ten souls on board. Our position is ten nautical miles south-east of Shoreham Harbour.’ She gave the coordinates. ‘We are over our dive area and about to commence.’
Again the crackly voice. ‘How many divers with you, Suspol, and how many in the water?’
‘Nine divers on board. Two going in.’
Glenn was dimly aware that he had a blanket or a tarpaulin over him and he was no longer so cold. His head was swirling. He wanted to be anywhere, absolutely anywhere, but here. He saw Arf peering down at him.
‘How are you feeling, Glenn?’
‘Not great,’ a disembodied voice that sounded like his own responded.
The stink of Jeyes Fluid was even stronger suddenly.
Arf had a kindly, avuncular face, shaded by the peak of his black baseball cap. Wisps of white hair blew loose on either side, like threads of cotton.
‘There are two kinds of seasickness,’ Arf said. ‘Did you know that?’
Glenn shook his head feebly.
‘The first kind is when you are afraid that you are going to die.’
Glenn stared back at him.
‘The second,’ Arf said, ‘is when you are afraid that you are
not
going to die.’
Around him, Glenn heard laughter.
There was a third kind, Glenn reckoned, which was the one he was experiencing now. It was when you had actually died, but you weren’t able to leave your body.
*
Tania, in her drysuit, was snipping the corners off the white body bag she was taking down with her, to allow the water to flow out in the event of a recovery. Like a lot of police equipment, these bags were not suitable for underwater work, so they had to be adapted.
With her umbilical plumbed into the surface supply panel and comms system, attended by Gonzo, she tested her suit and mask for leaks, and then the breathing and comms lines of her three-core umbilical. When they were both satisfied, she checked her watch.
For all trained divers, awareness of the risk of the bends, or decompression sickness, was a vital part of their operating procedure. The bends was caused by nitrogen particles building up in the blood. It could be excruciatingly painful, sometimes fatal, and the way to avoid it was by taking frequent stops on the way up from the seabed, some of them for long periods, depending on the length and depth of the dive. Dive time began the moment the diver left the surface.
She looked once more at her umbilical, checked the position of the pink marker buoy a few yards from the boat, then launched herself backwards, jumping clear of the boat, and plunged into the turbulent sea.
For a moment, as she went under the surface in a maelstrom of bubbles, she experienced the beautiful calm that lay beneath. Total silence, except for the hollow, echoing roar of her breathing. Then she bobbed up and, instantly, waves broke over her. She gave Gonzo the thumbs-up.
Although she had dived countless times, both for her work and at every opportunity on holiday, entering the water gave her a fresh adrenalin rush each time. No two dives were ever the same. You didn’t know what you were going to find or experience. And she still could not quite believe her luck that she had landed this job, with this unit, which gave her the opportunity to dive somewhere almost weekly.
Although, admittedly, diving for bodies in filthy canals full of discarded fridges, garden tools, coiled chicken wire, supermarket trolleys and stolen cars was a poor substitute for the tropical fish and marine fauna of the Maldives.
She looked around for the pink buoy, which had momentarily disappeared behind a wave, swam a few clumsy strokes over to it, then gripped the heavily weighted shot line with her rubber gloves and sank a short distance below the surface.
It was instantly calm again here. This was always a moment she loved, descending from the waves and the wind into a completely different world. She continued steadily down, swallowing to equalize the pressure in her ears, keeping an arm looped around the rope, the visibility rapidly fading, until she was in total darkness.
When she reached the bottom, her feet sinking into the sand, she could see nothing at all. On fine days there was reasonable visibility underwater in the Channel. But today the currents had churned up the sand and silt on the bottom into cloud that was as dark as a coal cellar. There was no point in switching on her camera and her torch, she would have to do it all by feel.
She checked the luminous depth gauge on her wrist, struggling to read the dial. It indicated sixty-seven feet. Her lapsed time since she had entered the sea was two minutes. She signalled to the surface by speaking on her voice comms: ‘Diver made bottom. Starting work.’ Then she felt for the underwater jackstay line.
Yesterday, when the scanner had picked up the two anomalies on the seabed, they had gridded them with anchored marker buoys and jackstay lines – ropes on the seabed held down by leaded weights.
What she now had to do, with the body bag tucked under her left arm, was swim across the seabed, skimming the surface, holding the jackstay line with her left hand and sweeping with her right. She would move her right hand away from her body, then back to it, in a continual arc, until she struck the object she was looking for. If she reached the weight at the far end, she would shift it a couple of feet to the right and then work her way back along it. When she arrived at her starting point, she would move that weight a couple of feet to the right and repeat the process.
The scanner was not sophisticated enough to tell her what the anomalies on the seabed were, giving only shape and approximate size. Each one was approximately six feet long and a couple of feet wide. Consistent with a human body. But not necessarily bodies. They could have been pieces of equipment or discarded rubbish from a ship, or unexploded torpedoes from the war or the wreckage of a crashed plane, or plenty of other things. The worst thing, when underwater in darkness, was striking a sharp object.
Something bumped into her mask, then was gone. A bottom-feeder fish, a sole or a plaice or a flounder, or maybe an eel, she assumed.
Slowly, holding the jackstay line with her left hand, she started swimming through the inky blackness. She swept her right arm backwards and forwards, in a continual arc, like a windscreen wiper.
Every time she searched like this, her mind wanted to play games with her. It wanted to remind her of every horror film she had ever seen. Of every kind of monster or demon that might be lurking on the seabed, waiting for her.
But she had dived in plenty worse places than open sea. She had dived to recover the body of a ten-year-old boy in a canal. She had dived in reservoirs, in ditches and in potholes. In her view, there was nothing that would hurt her here. There was just an
anomaly.
Suddenly her hand struck something.
It felt like a human face inside plastic.
And, despite herself, her heart burst clean out of her chest. And she damn nearly spat her face mask off in shock.
A bolus of iced water exploded through her veins.
Shit-shit-shit.
Her husband, the BA pilot, didn’t dive. She had tried to explain the excitement, the rush, to him many times. He got all the excitement he needed in the cockpit of a 747, he told her. It was dry and warm there, with plenty of hot drinks and food from the first-class galley. And now, for a moment, she understood his point.
She ran her hand over the face. The head. Feeling through the heavy-duty plastic sheeting. Shoulders. Back. Buttocks. Thighs. Legs. Feet.
34
‘Nice dog!’ the woman said. ‘What breed is he?’ She spoke with a foreign accent.
It was a dumb question. Only a visitor to Bucharest would ever ask such a question. Romeo, kneeling in the weeds beside the dirt road, was giving the dog its daily meal. He had no idea what breed it was. Like most of the thousands of stray dogs that roamed the outer districts of Bucharest, it was a mongrel. Twenty-nine years before Romeo had been born, one of Ceauşescu’s early acts as president was to throw the Romanian bourgeoisie out of their homes. Most were forced to leave behind their dogs, which ran wild and had been living and breeding on the streets ever since.
But the dogs were smart, figuring out that if they were mean, people would kick them and throw stones at them, but if they were friendly, they got fed. Over the years the stray dogs and the street people of the city had bonded. The dogs guarded the street people and, in turn, the street people fed the dogs.
‘I’d say he’s got some schnauzer in him,’ the woman said.
She looked at the boy’s cute, grubby face, and his round blue eyes, and his jet-black hair, messily cut, and his withered left hand. She observed his clothes, his worn-out jeans, his ragged, hooded top and his threadbare trainers, studying him carefully, as if inspecting him. Although she already knew for sure the kind of person he was and the world he inhabited. And, crucially, how to get through to him.
The boy thought the woman had a kind face. She was pretty, with a tangle of fair hair that was being blown about by the wind, casually dressed, but in the kind of expensive clothes that did not belong here in this district. An elegant, shiny, tight-fitting leather jacket, with the collar turned up, over a dark roll-neck jumper of fine wool, studded jeans tucked into black suede boots, big jewellery and beautiful black leather gloves. The kind of woman he would see emerging from a limousine outside one of the big hotels, laden with shopping bags, or being disgorged, in her finery, at a smart restaurant. People like her inhabited a different world from his own.
‘His name’s Artur,’ he said.
‘That’s a nice name.’ She smiled and said it out aloud. ‘Artur. Artur. Yes, a very nice name. It suits him!’
The boy pulled some out-of-date kidneys from a plastic bag and put them in Artur’s mouth. The dog ate them greedily, in one gulp. Then he dug his hand into the bag again. There was a butcher around the corner who was always kind to him, giving him strips of meat, pieces of offal and bones every day.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Romeo.’
The boy was sizing her up. A wealthy visitor. Rich pickings! He pulled out a rank pig’s trotter and the dog clamped its jaws on to it.
The woman smiled. ‘Do you live around here?’ she asked, although she already knew full well that he did, and where.
He nodded, eyeing her. Eyeing her handbag. It was ruched leather, with chains and buckles, and a huge brass clasp on it. In his mind, he was sizing it up, thinking of all the things it might contain. A purse with cash, a mobile phone. Maybe some other stuff too, like an iPod, that he could sell. He glanced around, but so far as he could see she was unaccompanied. There were no smart cars parked nearby that she could have come from.
He could grab the bag and run!
But at the moment, she had the strap over her shoulder and her left arm was looped through the chain, gripping the top of the bag with her gloved hand, as if streetwise herself. He would need to distract her.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘I’m from Germany,’ she said. ‘München. Munich. Have you been to Germany?’
‘No.’
‘Would you like to go there?’
He shrugged.
‘What country would you like to go to, if you could?’