83
The Airbus was on its landing approach, steadily sinking through the clear, but bumpy sky. The seat-belt lights had just pinged on. Grace checked his seat was upright, although he hadn’t touched it during the flight. He had been concentrating on the notes a researcher had prepared for him on liver failure, and planning what he wanted to get out of his meeting, later this morning, with the German organ broker.
They were twenty-five minutes later than scheduled, due to air traffic control delays at take-off, which was a sizeable dent in the preciously short time he had here. From his window seat, he peered down. The snowy landscape looked very different from the previous time he had come here, in summer. Then it had been a flat, colourful patchwork quilt of farmland, now it was just a vast expanse of white. There must have been a recent heavy dump, he thought, because even most of the trees were covered.
The ground was looming closer, the buildings getting bigger with every second. He saw small clusters of white houses, their roofs covered in snow, then several thin copses and a small town. More clusters of houses and buildings. The light was so bright he regretted, for a moment, not bringing sunglasses.
It was strange how time changed everything. Not long ago he had come here, to Munich, with real hope that he might find Sandy, finally, after close friends had been sure they had spotted her in a park. But now all those emotions had gone, evaporated. He could honestly say to himself that he no longer had any feelings towards her. He really felt, for the first time, that he was in the final stages of laying all the complexities of his memories of her to rest. The darkness and the light.
Grace heard the clunk of the landing wheels locking beneath him and felt a sudden prick of apprehension. For the first time in so, so long, he really had something to live for. His darling Cleo. He did not think it would be possible to love a human being more than he loved her. She was with him, in his heart, in his soul, in his skin, his bones, his blood, every waking second.
The thought of anything bad happening to her was more than he could bear. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt nervous for his own safety. Nervous of something happening that might prevent them from being together. Just when they had found each other.
Such as this plane crash-landing them all into oblivion.
He’d never been a nervous flier, but today he watched the ground coming steadily closer, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. Overshooting. Undercarriage collapsing. Skidding off. Colliding with another plane. Bird strike. Power failure. He could see the runway now. Distant hangars. Lights. The mysterious markings on the runway and signs at the edge that were like a secret code for pilots. He barely even felt the wheels touching down. In a perfectly judged landing, the plane went seamlessly from flying to taxiing. He heard the roar of the reverse thrust, felt the braking pulling him forwards against his seat belt.
Then, over the intercom system, a hostess with a soft, friendly, guttural accent welcomed them to Franz Josef Strauss International Airport.
*
The rear door of the taxi opened and the woman alighted, her chic dark glasses shielding her eyes from the wintry glare. She paid the driver, giving him a small tip, and, towing her wheeled overnight bag, headed off into the departures hall of the domed terminal building.
An attractive woman in her late-thirties, she was dressed smartly and warmly in a long camel-hair coat over suede boots, a cashmere shawl and leather gloves. After years of dyeing her hair brown and keeping it cropped short, she had recently let it lighten of its own accord, and it was almost back to her natural, fair, not-quite-blonde colour. She had read in a magazine that when a woman is seeking a new man, she will often change her hair. Well, that was right in her case.
She went across to the Lufthansa section and joined the queue for the Economy check-in desks for Miami, a city she had last visited fifteen years ago, in a former life.
The woman behind the counter went through the routine questions with her. Had she packed her own bags? Had her bags been out of her sight? Then she handed her back her passport, her ticket and her frequent-flier card.
‘Ich wünsche Ihnen ein guten Flug, Frau Lohmann.’
‘
Danke.
’
She spoke perfect German now. That had taken a while, because, as everyone had correctly told her, it was a difficult language to learn. Towing her bag, she followed the signs to the gate, knowing from all her many experiences at this airport that it was a long journey.
Riding up the moving staircase, her phone rang. She pulled it out of her handbag and brought it to her ear.
‘
Ja, hallo?
’
The voice at the other end was crackly and indistinct. It was her colleague, Hans-Jürgen Waldinger, calling her from his Mini Cooper on a bad line. She could barely hear him. Stepping off the top of the escalator, pulling her bag over the lip and raising her voice, she said again, ‘
Hallo?
’
Then the line went dead. She walked along a short distance, following the signs for the Departure Gate in zone G, heading towards the first section of the moving walkway that could take her to the hall. Then her phone rang again. She answered.
Hans-Jürgen, barely audible for the crackling, said, ‘Sandy? Sandy?’
‘
Ja
, Hans!’ she said, and stepped on to the walkway.
*
Eight hundred yards away, at the arrivals section of zone G, Roy Grace, clutching his thick briefcase, and approaching from the opposite direction, stepped on to the parallel carriageway of the same moving walkway.
84
To Glenn’s relief the sea was calm, or at least about as calm as the English Channel was ever going to get. Even so, the powerboat was still pitching and rolling quite enough in the gentle swell. But so far he felt fine. The breakfast of two boiled eggs and dry toast that Bella had recommended was still safely inside his digestive system rather than becoming part of the boat’s colour scheme, and he hadn’t yet experienced any attack of the roundabouts that had done for him on his last voyage.
It was a cold but glorious day, with a steely-blue sky and bottle-green sea. A gull circled low overhead, on the scrounge and out of luck. Glenn breathed in the rich smells of salt and varnish, and the occasional waft of exhaust fumes, and watched a jellyfish the size of a tractor tyre drift past, deciding he was very happy not to be one of the team going into the water, despite all their protective clothing. He had never experienced any desire to jump out of an aeroplane, or to explore the bottom of the ocean. He’d figured out, a long time ago, that he was definitely a terra-firma kind of a guy.
The tiny red smudge in the distance grew closer as they powered steadily further out to sea, at a diagonal angle to Brighton’s long seafront, on the exact course he and Ray Packham had charted. As they approached closer still, the smudge sharpened into focus and he saw it was in fact a triangle of bobbing pink marker buoys, which the Specialist Search Unit team had placed there yesterday evening.
At the helm, PC Steve Hargrave – Gonzo – throttled back, and their speed dropped from eighteen knots to less than five. Glenn gripped the handrail in front of him, as the sudden loss of motion pushed him forwards. This boat, a thirty-five-foot Sunseeker, was a much more upmarket vessel than the
Scoob-Eee
. It had been chartered in a hurry from a local nightclub owner and was a proper gin palace, with leather chairs and padding all around, teak decking, an enclosed bridge and a luxurious saloon down below, not that any of those on board were using it other than as a storeroom for some of their kit.
Arf, in the SSU team uniform of black baseball cap, with the word police across the front, red windcheater, black trousers and black rubber boots, removed the microphone of the ship-to-shore radio from its cradle and spoke into it.
‘Hotel Uniform Oscar Oscar. This is Suspol Suspol on board MV
Our Current Sea
, calling Solent Coastguard.’
He heard a crackled response. ‘Solent Coastguard. Solent Coastguard. Channel sixty-seven. Over.’
‘This is Suspol,’ Arf repeated. ‘We have ten souls on board. Our position is thirteen nautical miles south-east of Shoreham Harbour.’ He gave the coordinates then announced, ‘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.’
Gonzo pushed the twin throttle levers into neutral. Tania, standing beside him, made some adjustments on the controls to the right of the Humminbird scanner screen.
Glenn looked at the display on the left of the screen:
98ft. 09.52am. 3.2mph
.
‘If you watch now, Glenn, we should just be coming over,’ Tania said, pointing at what looked like a straight, black tarmac road, divided by a white line, running vertically down the centre of the screen. On either side of it was a bluish tinted moonscape.
‘There!’ she called out excitedly.
In the left-hand lane of the black section he saw clearly a boat-shaped shadow, even darker, about half an inch long.
‘You think that’s her? The
Scoob-Eee
?’ he asked.
‘There’s one way to find out,’ Arf said. ‘Coming in with us?’
A flaccid, murky-looking object drifted past. Glenn wasn’t immediately sure if it was another jellyfish or a plastic bag.
‘Nah, think I’d better stay on deck and keep a lookout for pirates. But thanks all the same.’
Arf pointed at the sea. ‘If you change your mind, there’s plenty of room down there.’
85
‘Someone told me your father used to play tennis for Sussex, E-J,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘I’m a bit of a player myself – well – used to be – but not that kind of standard. What’s his name?’
‘Nigel. He played for the under-sixteens – but he hasn’t played seriously for years. He could probably drink for Sussex now. Or, more likely, talk for Sussex.’ She grinned.
‘Gift of the gab?’
‘You could say.’
They were heading west, away from the village of Storrington, with the softly undulating South Downs to their left. She peered at the map on her knees.
‘Should be the next right.’
They turned into a narrow country lane, barely wider than the car and bounded by tall hedgerows. After a quarter of a mile, Emma-Jane directed him to turn left, into an even narrower lane. Police cars, Batchelor thought, were going to be the last vehicles on the planet without SatNav – and the ones that needed it the most. He was about to comment on that to E-J when he heard a muffled call-sign on his radio. Although he was driving, he lifted it to his ear, but it was a request for assistance in a different part of the county, not remotely near them.
‘Should be coming up on the left,’ Emma-Jane said.
He slowed the blue unmarked Mondeo down. Moments later they saw a pair of imposing wrought-iron gates between two pillars topped with stone balls. Written in gold letters on a black plate was the name, THAKEHAM PARK.
They pulled up in front of the gates, under the cyclops gaze of a security camera mounted high up. On the opposite pillar was a yellow sign, with a grinning face, beneath which was written the legend SMILE, YOU ARE ON CCTV.
The young DC climbed out and pressed the button on the speakerphone panel beneath. Moments later, she heard a crackly, broken-English, female voice.
‘Hello?’
‘Detective Sergeant Batchelor and Detective Constable Bout-wood,’ she announced. ‘We have an appointment with Sir Roger Sirius.’
There was a sharp crackle from the speakerphone, then the gates began to open. She climbed back into the car and they drove through, along a tarmac drive, lined by mature trees on either side, which wound steadily for about half a mile up an incline. Then a huge Jacobean mansion came into view, with a circular driveway in front, in the grassed-in centre of which was a lily pond.
Several cars were parked in front of the house including, Guy recognized, a black Aston Martin Vanquish. To their right, on a large concrete circle in the middle of a manicured lawn, sat a dark blue helicopter.
‘Seems like there’s money in medicine!’ he commented.
‘If you are in the right area of it,’ she retorted.
‘Or maybe the
wrong
area,’ he corrected her.
Emma-Jane did not even bother trying to count the number of windows. This place must have twenty or thirty bedrooms – maybe more. It was on the scale of a stately home.
‘I think we chose the wrong career,’ she said.
He drove slowly around the pond and pulled up almost directly in front of the grand front door. ‘Depends what you want out of life, doesn’t it? And the moral code by which you choose to live.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Have you ever met Jack Skerritt?’
‘A few times,’ she said. ‘But only briefly.’
Jack Skerritt was the Chief Superintendent of HQ CID – the most senior detective in Sussex. And the most respected.
‘I had a drink with him a couple of years ago,’ Batchelor said. ‘In the bar at Brighton nick, when he was Commander of Brighton and Hove. We were talking about what coppers earned. He told me he was on seventy-three thousand pounds a year, plus a couple of grand more in allowances.
That might sound a lot
, he said, but it is less than a school headmaster earns – and I’m in charge of the entire city of Brighton and Hove. He then said something I’ll never forget.’
She looked at him inquisitively.
‘He said, In this job, the riches come from within.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘And true. Being a copper, doing this job, makes me feel like a millionaire, every day of my life. I never wanted to be anything else.’