let her know the moment they had positive confirmation and prayed she wouldn’t ask him why he wanted the photograph albums. She didn’t.
Cantelli plonked himself in the seat across Horton’s desk. ‘There’s no record of Colin Yately travelling on either the Fastcat ferry, the car ferry or the Hovercraft but he could have paid by cash. However, no one I spoke to in the ticket office and none of the marshalling staff recognized him, so it’s likely he never reached here.’
‘Alive that is. He almost made it dead,’ Horton said sombrely. ‘I didn’t find any evidence in his flat to suggest he was into cross-dressing.’
‘Perhaps he dressed up elsewhere because he was scared his daughter might find the clothes at his flat. He could have used a beach hut or been at a house near the sea or on a boat.’
‘Alone or with someone?’
Cantelli shrugged. ‘If he was with someone who shared his passion, he might be afraid or too ashamed to come forward. He could be married. Yately ended up accidentally in the sea leaving his keys and other identification in his trousers.’
‘But why remove the keys from that fob?’
‘Perhaps he’d put them on a new fob some time ago, only Hannah never noticed. He didn’t want to discard the fob with the picture of his daughter in it because it was too precious to him, and that he always kept on him no matter what.’
Horton glanced at the photograph of Emma on his desk. Yes, he could understand that. Yately’s daughter might be all that the poor man had had left and he’d needed the picture to remind himself he wasn’t alone. Or was that how
He wondered how soon they’d get a preliminary report from Dr Clayton. He said, ‘Ask Walters if he’s managed to speak to Yately’s dentist and his GP.’ Horton had also detailed Walters to get Yately’s comb and the fountain pen over to the Fingerprint Bureau. Thankfully, Walters had reported that there had been no further house burglaries overnight. Perhaps the extra patrols had deterred the robbers, but they couldn’t keep them up. Horton called up all they had on the case on screen and began to trawl through it, looking for anything that Walters and Cantelli had missed and which could give them a hint of who it might be. He found nothing but sooner or later their burglar would slip up; unfortunately that meant another householder having to suffer the misery of being robbed.
He picked up the disc containing the CCTV footage of the blue van seen at the marina in Gosport and popped it into his computer. He saw that it covered the period from eight in the morning until when Horton had collected it just before one yesterday afternoon. A handful of cars arrived between eight o’clock and nine, and some of them belonged to the staff judging by the direction in which they headed after alighting. Two other cars entered: a top of the range BMW and a Range Rover, then Horton swung into the marina on his Harley at nine twenty-one. A few minutes later came the muddy blue van. Horton frowned. He didn’t care for the closeness of the timing, or for the fact he could swear it was the same van that had been parked outside Stanley’s apartment at Lee-on-the- Solent.
He reached for his phone. He wanted to know if Stanley had seen the van that morning or at any other time. But there was no answer. Horton watched the blue van pull away ten minutes later. He sat back concerned. Had it been following him? He hadn’t seen it on his way to Stanley’s flat or anywhere else since yesterday morning, and certainly not at his marina. And why should someone follow him? Unless they didn’t want him talking to Stanley, and there was only one reason for that, but before he could reason any further the trilling of his phone sliced through his thoughts.
It was Dr Clayton. At last!
‘It’s a suspicious death, Inspector,’ she announced grimly and peremptorily.
Horton’s heart skipped a beat and he cursed silently. It was the last thing he wanted to hear. ‘Tell me,’ he urged.
‘The presence of bleeding in the cranium suggests he was struck violently before entering the water. I found foam in the trachea and main bronchi and evidence of bruising in the neck and chest, which indicates he was alive when submersion occurred. Of course, further tests might confirm the presence of a drug or drink but I don’t think it likely, because I found something else that shouldn’t be there. There was evidence of marks on the wrists and ankles, and I found fragments of a fibre embedded in both, and in his mouth. At some point your body was bound and gagged.’
Horton swore to himself. His heart sank. ‘But he wasn’t bound when he was found,’ he said, thinking aloud.
‘He wasn’t, and neither was he in the water long enough for any restrictions to have rotted. The ties could have become loose while he was in the sea but I’d be very surprised if they had, and even more surprised if the gag had worked its way off. He was only in the sea for about twelve hours, no more than eighteen hours certainly.’
‘But you said-’
‘That he’d been dead for four or five days. And he has. Decomposition was advanced, which is surprising at this time of the year when the sea temperature is still quite cold, barely reaching forty-seven Fahrenheit, and the colder the water the slower the decomposition. There was also no evidence of adipocere; that’s the yellowish-white substance composed of fatty acids and soaps that forms after death on the fatty parts of the body like the abdomen wall and buttocks. It protects against decomposition.’
With dread, Horton said, ‘You’re saying that he was killed, his body left somewhere for a few days, then it was untied before being dumped at sea sometime between Sunday night and early Monday morning?’
‘Worse.’
Shit. What could be worse, he groaned silently.
‘The evidence points to the fact that the gag was removed but not the wrist and ankle restrictions. While he was bound he was submerged, hence the bruising in the neck and chest and the foam in the trachea as the poor man struggled to free himself. Then came exhaustion, followed by coughing and vomiting, loss of consciousness and death by drowning some minutes later.’
Horton drew in a deep breath. His gut tightened as Gaye continued.
‘I think his captor knocked him out, tied him up and gagged him. When the victim regained consciousness his captor dropped him into the sea, removing the gag but not the wrist and ankle restraints. When the poor man eventually drowned, your killer hauled him out, untied him and left him somewhere on land, which is supported by the patterns of animal and bird life eating into the corpse. The body was then either washed out to sea or taken out to sea. The dress acted as a buoyancy aid allowing the body to float rather than sink as it would normally have done.’
Did the killer realize that or had he misjudged it, Horton wondered, his mind reeling from Dr Clayton’s findings and seeing again that small ordinary flat and that average, ordinary man in the photograph. He’d seen nothing to indicate that Colin Yately should be bound and tossed into the sea to die. Should he have looked harder? Had he missed something? Clearly he must have done. To make sure that it was Colin Yately’s body, he said, ‘Can you confirm if he ever suffered a broken left leg?’
‘Yes, and he’d had surgery on his right knee. He’s about late fifties.’
That seemed to seal it but just for good measure, Dr Clayton added, ‘Walters emailed me details of Colin Yately’s dentist, it’s why I’ve taken longer to get back to you. I wanted to check. I can confirm from examining the dental records on line that they match with the victim. It’s Colin Yately all right.’
Horton thanked her and rang off. It was nasty and they were looking for a particularly callous and ruthless killer. But what the devil did Yately have that a killer wanted so desperately? Who could he have angered so much to warrant such a violent death?
He recalled Yately’s daughter and the thought of what this news might do to her, as his mind raced with the implications of Dr Clayton’s findings. They would need to return to Yately’s apartment and take it apart. And although Horton doubted Yately had been taken captive at his flat it still needed to be treated as a crime scene, and with a sinking heart he thought that was what he should have done in the first place.
