‘Peter, are you alone?’
‘She’s on a siesta.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘She’s totally stressed out.’
‘She is?’
‘A rare admission of frailty. She tells me the minimum. I wish there’d been some way of tipping you off about the visit.’
‘Did I look as if I’d seen a ghost? I was reeling and rocking.’
‘You were fine.’
‘Until I let rip. What a dumbo.’
‘You aren’t. She got what was coming. She’s like that about rank. It comes from insecurity.’
‘And she’s your assistant chief constable?’
‘Almost as long as I remember. You didn’t meet her ten years ago when we worked together on that body on the beach case. She was away on a cruise.’
‘A cruise? Siestas and cruises. Not a bad life.’
‘It means I get a break sometimes.’
‘How the hell do you cope?’
‘We understand each other. I’m not easy to get on with either. Georgina has a good side I see occasionally.’
‘She thinks I let down the whole of womankind. I saw it in her eyes.’
‘Failing to investigate your niece? Women are allowed to show compassion.’
‘Don’t tell me. Tell your boss. Oh forget it. She’s right. I screwed up. What do they call it, favouring your family?’
‘Nepotism.’
‘Right on. I admit it. Nepotist of the year. I don’t deserve to stay in the job. Didn’t I say it loud and clear to Dallymore?’
‘You did — but something was missing.’
‘What was that?’
‘A little “ma’am” at the end.’
They both laughed.
Hen’s voice improved. She wasn’t back to her boisterous best, and might never be, but she made a try. ‘Peter, my old cock sparrow, I don’t know how you worked it, but I’m chuffed to have you on board.’
He let the ‘old cock sparrow’ wash over him. ‘You can credit Georgina, not me. I tried to wriggle out of it — but then I didn’t know you were the officer under suspension. Do you know who fingered you?’
‘No.’
‘Could it have been Montacute, who is now doing your job?’
‘Too obvious.’
‘Why — don’t you get on with him?’
‘He’s a moaner, but he doesn’t want me out of it. He might be forced to make decisions of his own.’
‘Got to be someone with an agenda. Are the others loyal?’
‘Does it matter? I’ve admitted to all and sundry I fouled up. I don’t lose any sleep trying to guess who the whistleblower was.’
‘But you are losing sleep. I saw it in your face.’
‘Is it as obvious as that? Joss was only eighteen when Rigden was murdered. What was she doing to get her DNA in that bloody car, Peter? And where has she bunked off to, now the heat is on?’
‘That’s for us to work out.’
‘You and Dallymore?’
‘With any help we can get from you. Someone has to untangle this mess. We’ll manage.’
‘Find Joss. I don’t care what happens to me.’
‘You made that obvious. But I have a sense that your part in all this is going to seem small beer when everything is understood.’
‘Commander Hahn may disagree. He’d like to see me roast in hell.’
‘Hahn? He’s got bigger things to worry about than you. He’s spooked in case Danny Stapleton sues for wrongful conviction.’
‘And he blames me.’
‘Get this straight, Hen. You did your job with the investigation. Stapleton was caught with a murdered body in a car he’d stolen. His defence was paper thin. A judge and jury heard the case and convicted him.’
In the pause that followed he could almost hear her brain ticking over. Finally she said, ‘You’re music to my ears, darling. I was feeling lower than a snake’s belly this morning. If Dallymore picked you for this mission she can’t be all bad. I don’t mind calling her ma’am. I’ll call her your royal highness if she doesn’t send you home.’
He hadn’t made this call just to restore Hen’s spirits, or his own. ‘There was something you said this morning about recent cases you were working on.’
‘You’ll have to remind me. My head was in a whirl.’
‘Missing persons. What’s that about? Every police authority has missing persons.’
‘Sure, and most of them turn up, one way or another, dead or alive. This is serious stuff, Peter, and it’s been going on some time. Far too many stay missing. They vanish. No one hears from them again.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Petty criminals mostly. The sort who mess with the local crime barons. In former times their bodies would be found riddled with bullets in a local quarry or some abandoned house. You expect it with rival gangs. Over recent years it’s become more efficient. Plenty of victims still get taken out. We hear the same distress calls from their nearest and dearest. But the bodies aren’t found. Death and disposal on an industrial scale.’
‘And you were on to it? How far did you get?’
‘Nowhere. Well, almost nowhere. I made a start. The first stage as always was to learn as much as we could from informants. The only message coming back is that someone has a foolproof method.’
‘Of disposal?’
‘A business operation.’
‘Murder Inc — in Chichester?’
‘Not just Chichester. All along this stretch of the south coast, from Brighton to Portsmouth. Forty miles, give or take.’
‘So other forces are onto this?’
‘I spoke to my CID oppos in all the main towns. Bloody hard convincing some of them anything is wrong.’
‘These were informal contacts?’
‘You bet. The top brass are going to take a lot of convincing. When the government judges us by the crime figures and the murder rates are falling, who in his right mind wants to know about killings that have gone unreported? I had to hammer the point home. When we put our information together it was bloody obvious this was too serious to ignore. So who do you think was volunteered to carry the thing forward?’
‘You’re a glutton for punishment. When did you start?’
‘Two weeks before I was suspended.’
‘And you say you got almost nowhere?’
‘We’d barely started.’
‘You must have some theories.’
‘The obvious one — being so close to the coast — is that they take the bodies out to sea and dump them overboard. If so, they do it well. I can’t find a single instance in the last two years of a murdered corpse being washed up or found floating.’
‘Isn’t the sea always supposed to give up its dead?’
‘That’s horseshit. No offence, my love, but it’s one of those Biblical sayings that gets misquoted all the time. On the day of reckoning all the people who were ever drowned will come to life — that’s what the good book says.’
‘Didn’t know you were a Bible-basher.’
‘I’m not. So many people quoted it at me that I looked it up.’
‘But there’s an element of truth. Bodies don’t stay under water indefinitely.’
‘OK, a submerged body inflates with internal gases after a while and will rise to the surface, but if the disposal man is the professional we think he is he’ll surely weigh the things down.’
‘Have you talked to pathologists?’
‘No help at all. If I could find them a body to slice up they’d give me all sorts of information. The whole point of this brain-teaser is that there ain’t no evidence.’
‘You’ve obviously thought of other methods?’
‘There’s no shortage of ideas. Everyone has a favourite theory, from acid baths to car crushers.’
‘Old mineshafts?’
‘Not in these parts. Mind, it wouldn’t be much trouble to drive the bodies to Wales or Cornwall. Why are you so interested in this?’