Watching from the patrol car, Georgina said, ‘Let’s hope he’s home.’
‘And hospitable,’ Diamond added. ‘Something’s got to happen shortly.’
The heads and shoulders of armed men could be seen moving on the open areas of each of the decks.
Shouting carried to them from the ship, but it wasn’t combative shouting, more like a repeat of the first announcement.
At least another minute went by — and felt like ten.
Then the radio crackled.
‘Mr Diamond, you’d better come up.’
‘Have you got him?’
‘Yes and no.’
What sort of answer was that? He turned to Georgina, eyebrows raised. She spread her hands.
They left the car and ran along the pontoon and boarded the yacht. Officers with drawn guns waved them along a stretch of deck to the main salon, a carpeted space with a marble inlay bar, L-shaped leather sofa and chairs and a fold-down plasma TV. Forward was the dining area, with a walnut wood table capable of seating twelve. Another police officer directed them down the steps of a companionway and into a spacious cabin where Montacute and two others were standing beside a king-size bed with a black duvet.
Georgina said, ‘Tarnation.’
Face down and naked on the duvet was a male body all too familiar to the two novice artists. Davy would not be posing for them again. Nor would he be answering questions.
Diamond said, ‘This wasn’t in the script.’
31
The cause of death appeared obvious. A cocktail of drugs and champagne had killed him. Two empty Bollinger bottles and some used blister packs that must have contained sleeping tablets stood on the bedside shelf.
Self-inflicted? Almost certainly. If you had resolved to take your own life, this method beat most others.
Georgina said, ‘Damn you, Davy!’
Diamond’s anger was focused elsewhere. ‘Some idiot tipped him off. I thought I could trust that dive team.’ He snatched up one of the blister packs and looked at the label. A sedative, one of the benzodiazepine group.
Montacute was shaking his head. ‘I can’t understand his thinking. If he’d cooperated, he’d have got a short stretch.’
How naïve was that? ‘Cooperated by naming his clients, you mean?’ Diamond said. ‘A short stretch is right. He’d have been found dead in his cell in days. These are major criminals with as much clout inside jail as out.’
‘Well, if he’d stayed silent and served a full term, he’d have survived.’
‘He wouldn’t. If he’d stayed silent as a bag of feathers the mob would still have killed him. He was too much of a risk. He knew if ever he was caught, his number was up. When his business was thriving, the killers came to him and paid him well. One failure and he was dead meat.’
All the talk was negative. Montacute tried to be upbeat. ‘We’ll check everything he used, phone, iPad, computer.’
‘Don’t build up your hopes. In a high-risk job like his, you don’t leave a trail. It’s all too easy to drop things overboard.’
The optimism was all used up. ‘I thought this was the breakthrough.’
‘You’re not the only one. We’re stuffed.’
But Diamond knew better than to dwell on it. Out at Selsey, the dive team were standing by to begin recovering bodies. He called Albison. Any recriminations about leaked information would have to wait. He told him tersely to launch the boat.
The man couldn’t resist saying, ‘About bloody time.’
‘Where are you starting from?’
‘Selsey beach — where we were before.’
‘I thought you decided Selsey was too public.’
‘Doesn’t matter where we start from, does it?’ Albison said. ‘Like you said, it’s where we land them that counts.’
Fair comment. ‘So have you chosen somewhere else?’
‘Pagham Harbour. It’s quiet and should be getting dark by the time we return.’
‘Call me the minute you bring the first one up.’
‘One good thing about being from another force,’ he remarked to Georgina when they were being driven back to their hotel. ‘The crime scene is someone else’s problem.’
‘I’m not sure about that, Peter.’
‘Why?’
‘We can’t cut ourselves off from it. As you said on the beach this morning, the press will have a field day when those bodies are brought to the surface. I keep wondering how Commander Hahn will react. It won’t play well in terms of public confidence. Rightly or wrongly he’s going to suspect we exceeded our brief. I entered on this mission from the best of motives, willing to help another force.’
No you didn’t, he thought. You wanted to cosy up to your old flame and get out on the golf course.
She went on: ‘He’s going to wish Davy’s grisly trade had never been exposed.’
She was right about that.
And then a smile flashed across her features like a flick knife and Diamond realised that his boss had seen the light at last.
In the hotel entrance, Georgina said, ‘After the morning we’ve had, we deserve a late lunch.’
‘No offence,’ Diamond said, ‘but I need to make a personal call.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘Depends. Don’t wait for me if you’re hungry.’
‘I’ll find a table for one, then.’
This time, he felt a twinge of guilt. After that smile at Archie Hahn’s expense, she didn’t deserve to eat alone.
The call he made wasn’t on the phone as he’d implied. He left the hotel and walked round to Hen’s flat. The morning’s discoveries would affect her profoundly and he wanted to break the news to her in person.
In a tracksuit and flip-flops, she appeared smaller and more vulnerable than he’d seen her before. ‘Come in, love of my life,’ she said. Whatever you thought of Hen, you couldn’t call her standoffish.
He’d been trying to think of a way of telling her about the bodies under the sea. She was certain to fear Joss was down there with the others. Family ties overrode everything. The fact that she had been proved right to agitate about missing persons would not be high in her thoughts.
He set out the facts as calmly as he could, explaining how Jim Bentley’s information had led him to the discovery of the wreck containing the bodies and to Davy’s suicide, but he could see the increasing alarm in Hen’s eyes.
‘They’re starting to bring them up,’ he said. ‘It’s not a job they can hurry. It may be days before the identification can start.’
‘So I should prepare for the worst. I can’t go on denying it,’ she said. ‘The truth has been staring at me for days. Joss knew too much. She may not have known at the time it was a murdered corpse she was delivering to Littlehampton, but she found out later when the plan went to buggery and started a murder hunt. Poor kid must have been bricking it — and with her own daffy aunt heading the enquiry.’
‘Don’t knock yourself, Hen.’
‘Thanks to my incompetence no arrest was made at the time. The whole thing went on hold. After years went by, she must have hoped she was in the clear. She didn’t know about the DNA match. Finally it all got out because of that whistleblower I prefer to call a rat fink. I was suspended and Joss — now known to the police — put in danger of her life.’
‘You think she knew Rigden’s killer?’
‘Must have got her orders from someone, mustn’t she?’
‘How would she have got into this in the first place?’
‘With her history as a druggie? Obvious, isn’t it? When you’re in deep, you meet bad people and get asked to do bad things. They don’t make life easy for you. I must face it. She’s going to be one of those bodies.’
‘She could have gone into hiding.’
‘Pete, I know you mean well, but this won’t have a happy ending.’