footers, as Shaw took a short cut across the sands off Scolt Head.
Ahead he saw the incoming haar, a wall of phlegm-white mist, as unbroken as the white cliffs of Dover. They’d ride into it, settle her on dry sand, and try to find the yacht on foot.
Shaw slowed to 10 knots as
One crewman took the navigator’s seat and monitored the radio while the rest climbed over the skirt. A turning halogen beacon was activated on the cabin roof, the beam cutting into the mist, sweeping around them like a lighthouse beam.
Driscoll was out on the sand last. ‘Right. Let’s do north, south, east, west. Don’t lose sight of the light. Take a hailer — ping it if you see her. You OK?’
Valentine was watching the water form a moat round his black slip-ons. ‘Sure.’
‘That way,’ said Driscoll, pointing north. ‘There’s a compass on the cuff of the jacket.’
Valentine looked at the little needle, then set out. Shaw went east, encountering only the skeleton of a conger eel in the first fifty yards. He stopped, looking down at the plastic cartilage, then back at the distant light. He walked another fifty, his eyes beginning to lose any sense of proportion or relative distance. It was like being lost in a giant sauna.
The single electronic ping, when it came, was eerie, echoing round him. He ran back to the hovercraft and then saw the others heading north, along Valentine’s trail.
Driscoll threw a weighted rope ladder up and over the deck rail so that it hung down uninvitingly. Shaw climbed first, then held it still for Valentine, who fought to hold on as it corkscrewed under him. The deck was clean, sluiced, spotless; the brass fittings managing a dull gleam despite the gloom.
‘Dr Peploe?’ Shaw felt an idiot shouting, and was unnerved by the echo bouncing back off the impenetrable fret. The first deck was largely enclosed in smoked brown glass. He walked to a glass door, tried to slide it across, but it was locked. He pressed his eye to the glass but could see nothing within except a fly on the inside: a bluebottle, then another.
They climbed to the second deck up a teak staircase with brass runners. Half of this deck was open at the sides and housed the cockpit. It looked like the flight deck of a 747: a sonar pattern in vivid green on black, the radio signal mapped out in decibel bars.
Red warning lights flashed on the engine monitor display.
There was a hatch down into the deck below which opened with an expensive click. Four carpeted steps led
A central corridor led aft from the saloon, teak doors on either side, one into a dining room, another into a Jacuzzi. Another at the far end led to the master bedroom, the bed itself filling most of the cabin, the ceiling a single mirror. In the corner was a spiral staircase leading up to a perspex hatch marked SOLARIUM. A small electric illuminated sign read IN USE.
Shaw climbed until he could get his shoulder up against the hatch. Then he paused. There was a sound, and he looked up through the perspex. Bluebottles, hundreds, wheeling in a demented reel, the iridescent colours making them look like creeping jewels.
Shaw took a breath, pushed the hatch, and the hinges creaked. He climbed another step, bending at the waist, using his body as a lever. Another step, then all his strength applied to unfurl his body. He felt the air- pressure pop in his ears. Then he felt the flies, pouring past him, thudding off his skin in tiny percussions, probing his eyes, his nose, his lips. Forcing his legs to climb, he stumbled into the solarium. The roof was a tinted green- glass bubble, dotted with flies, the hum of the insects amplified in the bowl of the room.
Suspended in a semi-circle were four sun lamps, like operating-theatre lights, the panels emitting a soft cherry-red glow.
38
The flies, spooked by the open hatch, were beginning to return to their meal, massing in the eye sockets and around the nose. Sweat sprang from Shaw’s skin. He walked to the wall where a thermometer hung: 49 °C, 110°F. The surgeon’s skin had burnt on the upper surfaces of the knees and chest — a red burn, black at the edges.
He heard Valentine gagging below. Shaw pulled up the windcheater so that it covered his mouth and nose, zipping it closed.
When had he last seen Peploe? Twenty-four hours ago. If he’d come across the corpse at a crime scene in the open air he’d have guessed it had lain there a week, maybe more. In the oven-like solarium, under the tanning lamps, Gavin Peploe’s body was already in an advanced stage of decomposition.
He heard Valentine’s footsteps on the short staircase. He appeared, holding a grey handkerchief to his mouth.
They stood either side of the corpse. A glass, empty, was on the bedside table beside an iPod and a mobile phone, the concentric rings edged down the side of the beaker showing that the water had evaporated by degrees.
Peploe lay flat, his head supported by a velour inflatable pillow. There was a thin patina of vomit on his lips and chest. The eyes were open, crowded with flies. Shaw tried to close the eyelids, brushing the insects aside.
Shaw felt dizzy in the heat, sick at the sight of such a vibrant, churning death. But he made himself take an inventory of the scene, so that he saw what was in Peploe’s right hand. The fingers had come open so that the object they held had almost dropped free onto the sunbed. It was a plastic sweet dispenser in the shape of a dragon — a cylinder in which candy could be stored, then flipped up into the dragon’s mouth, then knocked out like Tic-Tac mints. It was Play-Doh yellow, with red and blue stripes. The dragon’s mouth was open where the next sweet should be, but they could see that instead of a sweet there was a pill — blue, oval, resting on the plastic pink tongue, like an offering.
Who really knew Gavin Peploe? Within six hours they’d built a picture of the man, a picture not entirely consistent with that of the carefree high-living bachelor. Peploe’s ex-wife collapsed when informed of his death by a WPC on her doorstep in Virginia Water, Surrey. She’d remarried but had maintained regular contact with her former husband. She told a DI from Windsor CID that they’d simply married too young. Peploe was an epileptic, she said, who had taken AEDs — anticonvulsants — since adolescence. He also had a mild marijuana habit — a well-known recreational means of controlling seizures. His harelip had been corrected by surgery at the age of thirteen. Up until then he had had a severe facial deformity the removal of which, his wife said, enhanced a tendency to personal vanity and a need to prove himself as a man who could attract women. It was a vice she’d grown to understand, but could never forgive.
Initial forensics from the yacht were inconclusive. Justina Kazimierz’s examination of the victim in situ found no wounds. The burning of the skin under the lights and the sun had been post-mortem. She suggested either an accidental or deliberate overdose as a possible cause of death. Some of the pills from the dragon dispenser had been sent for analysis at the Forensic Science Service. Hadden’s CSI team had found no evidence in
‘If Peploe was running a black-market trade in illegal transplants, where are his customers?’ Shaw asked Valentine. They were at the Costa Coffee stall in the entrance to A amp;E at the Queen Vic, in the queue, taking a break from the murder incident room which was running at full tilt. Shaw had just briefed the team on the discovery of Gavin Peploe’s body. Outside night had fallen and a revolving emergency light on an ambulance lit the forecourt. ‘The rest I can see, George. But how do you get your clients? You can’t advertise — or perhaps you can. Online? We should check that out.’
Through a side door was a small concrete patio with picnic tables, each surrounded by a few hundred cigarette butts. They took a seat, enjoying the cool air.
‘Find your waiting list first,’ said Valentine.
