can free some more, the whole lot will get loose. There are tools in the shed.’ Hang the consequences, she thought. We’re here to do a job. She broke in again and chose a metal stake she could use as a crowbar, returned, passed it under one of the six-inch stainless steel springs, and levered it upwards. The looped end slid over the head of the anchor with a twang and the tension eased. She freed two more.
‘Keep going,’ Gemma said.
‘Get another stake from the shed and help me.’
They worked steadily along the pool edges, forcing off the springs.
In a short time the cover began to dip at the centre. The side that had been freed was dragged into the pool and starting to sink.
‘This can’t be the recommended way,’ Gemma said. ‘We’ll end up with the cover on the bottom.’
‘So what?’ Jo was too fired up to be concerned. ‘Like we said, we’re not leaving the place as we found it. Can you free some more on the other side?’
Action of any sort was such a relief.
They progressed along both sides of the pool until the cover was entirely unfastened. It didn’t sink.
‘There’s some air trapped under it,’ Gemma said.
Jo wasn’t sure. ‘Gem, I don’t think it is air. Come round this side and help me give it a pull.’
Gemma joined her and they grabbed the edge and hauled, stepping back as far as they could go. The whole thing weighed a lot.
‘We’re in the flowerbed,’ Gemma said.
About a quarter of the cover was out of the water.
‘Oh, no!’ Jo said. She dropped the cover and ran to the edge of the pool. Every pulse in her body pounded.
The far edge of the cover was undulating in the blue water. A human leg protruded from it.
TWENTY
Jo couldn’t speak.
Gemma let go of the pool cover and joined her at the water’s edge. ‘Oh my God, what have we got here?’
Pure panic.
Jo felt as if her throat was gripped by an unseen hand.
‘Is it him?’ Gemma asked.
Jo found her voice. ‘Not unless he paints his toenails.’
A gasp from Gemma. ‘Another dead woman?’
‘She looks well dead to me.’
‘Shall we do a runner?’
‘Can’t do that again,’ Jo said, trying to get a grip. ‘The police have got to be told.’
‘Who’s going to tell them?’
Jo didn’t answer. ‘I’m not touching her, but I think we should pull the cover off and see who she is.’
‘Let’s do it then.’
Together they dragged more of the cover back and revealed the gruesome spectacle of a chalk-white female corpse floating face upwards, but mostly submerged, the head low in the water and the abdomen slightly distended and seeming to keep it from sinking. The torso was contained by a pink one-piece swimsuit in nice condition, at odds with the dead flesh.
Gemma said. ‘Gross. I feel like covering her up again.’
‘That would be difficult.’
There was a shocked silence.
‘Well, who is she?’ Jo said in an effort to be practical.
‘I don’t think we’re going to find out. Even if we knew her, would we recognise her in this state?’
Jo let out a long, shaky breath.
Neither spoke as each struggled to subdue the nightmare. Finally Gemma spoke again. ‘It’s your call. What do we do?’
Jo said for the second time, ‘Tell the police, of course. If they need proof that Cartwright is a serial killer this is it. Three drownings.’
‘They’ll get us for the break-in.’
‘Bollocks, Gem. This matters more than anything you and I have done. It proves they’ve got the wrong man. They’ll have to let Jake go.’
‘What do we say to them?’
‘That we did some investigating ourselves because we suspected Cartwright all along.’
‘They won’t like it.’
‘They can lump it.’ She took the phone from her pocket. ‘Are you with me, or do I do this alone?’
‘I’m on the team, kiddo,’ Gemma said, ‘but I’ll vomit if I stay here looking at that.’
‘We’ll call them from the car.’
The incident room was short of senior officers when the call came. Hen and Stella were having another session with Jake in the interview room. Sergeant Murphy, still wrestling with Cornish drowning statistics, found himself dealing with the new emergency. He coped well, got the name of the informant and the Apuldram address, and radioed for a car to speed to the scene. Then he knocked on the door of Interview Room 2.
Hen came out saying this had better be something special.
Paddy Murphy updated her.
Special it was.
She shook her head. ‘Another one? I had a gut feeling this might happen. And the body is at Cartwright’s place in Apuldram? But we sent a search team there.’
‘They didn’t look in the pool, apparently. The cover was over it.’
Hen’s face turned crimson. ‘Morons! That’s the first place I would have looked.’ She was on the point of demanding names. Then, appalled, she remembered who she’d put in charge of the search team.
Stella.
Loyal, dependable Stella, who she’d insisted came with her as deputy when she’d transferred to Chichester. How could Stell have missed something as obvious as the pool?
‘To be fair, guv,’ Murphy was saying, ‘the search team were looking for Cartwright, or clues to his whereabouts. He wouldn’t have hidden in the pool because he’d never have been able to fit the cover over himself.’ He was straining every sinew to cover for Stella. Everyone in the team adored her.
But Murphy’s special pleading only forced Hen to counter it more strongly. ‘You can’t excuse them, Paddy. Someone is going to be hung out to dry for this. Who discovered the body?’
Murphy cleared his throat like a bit-part actor playing to the gallery. ‘Two of the women you interviewed: Jo Stevens and Gemma Casey.’
Hen’s eyes didn’t register much. The long pause was enough to show her reaction. ‘This gets worse. Those two?’
‘It seems they weren’t impressed with our efforts.’
‘They’re not impressed? I’m not impressed.’
‘So they did some sleuthing of their own.’
‘They had the savvy to search the pool after our team ignored it? Give me strength. Are they still at the scene?’
‘I told them to wait. A car will be there by now. I radioed all units as soon as the shout came.’
‘I must get out there. Make sure everyone is alerted: crime scene people, pathologist. I’ll need anyone from uniform we can raise. Where’s Gary?’
‘Canteen, I think.’
