always conjured up. He tried to ignore it and instead thought back to Stanley’s last words to him, uttered from his hospital bed after suffering a stroke following Horton’s visit to his flat. They had been about a brooch, or at least Horton thought that was what Stanley had managed to utter before dying. It tied in with the fact that a photograph of Stanley’s late wife, wearing a brooch when her husband received his Queen’s Gallantry Medal for thwarting an armed robbery, had vanished, along with the brooch itself. But how that connected with his mother’s disappearance Horton didn’t know except he suspected Stanley had either stolen it from her belongings or had been given it as payment to keep quiet about something he’d discovered.
He’d questioned Stanley’s son, Robin, after his house had been broken into the day his father had died. Along with the family photograph albums, jewellery belonging to Robin Stanley’s family had been taken. It was the neatest burglary that Horton had ever come across. No prints, no mess. A double-glazed kitchen door lifted off its hinges, no witnesses, not even a report of a car or van. A highly professional job.
Robin didn’t remember the brooch and said he hadn’t really noticed it in the photograph. And so far Horton had drawn a blank tracing the missing photograph of Adrian Stanley’s wife wearing it. He wished he could remember what the brooch had looked like but he hadn’t realized its significance until too late. So with that line of enquiry a dead end, did he go back to the beginning of Jennifer Horton’s life and try to trace her movements from a young girl until the day she vanished in the hope that somewhere along the line he would find the answer? That would take months, though, years even and could result in nothing. Alternatively should he take up DCS Sawyer’s offer and work with the Intelligence Directorate who believed his mother had connections with a wanted criminal they’d codenamed Zeus? That would be far the quickest and easiest option. He’d already refused Sawyer’s offer twice, not because he was afraid of Zeus, but because he was afraid of what he might discover about his mother and what others, especially his colleagues, might learn in the process. Besides, he had told himself several times, if Jennifer had been involved with this Zeus then in all probability she was dead.
A police siren caught his attention but gradually it faded as it headed along the seafront westwards. It was still hot. What little breeze there had been had died completely. The flags outside the marina office hung limp. He swallowed the remainder of his drink and surveyed the marina a moment longer before going below. All was quiet. As he lay on his bunk Woodley’s funeral again came to mind and along with it that nagging thought that something he’d seen or heard today was significant but try as he might it refused to surface. Perhaps it would come to him in his sleep.
TWO
The trilling of his mobile phone woke him. Scrambling to answer it, he registered it was daylight and six twenty-three. A call at this hour could only mean one thing: work.
‘We’ve got a suspicious death, sir. PCs Somerfield and Seaton are at the scene.’
‘Where?’ asked Horton, fully awake and heading for the shower.
‘The former Tipner Boatyard.’
That was on the western shores of the city and the opposite side of town from his marina. It was a stone’s throw from the commercial ferry port, ten minutes from the police station by car, and about fifteen on the Harley before the rush-hour traffic. He remembered reading that the boatyard had been sold for re-development a couple of years ago and that a salvage operation had only recently begun. They were clearing a Second World War munitions barge from the seabed and he wondered if a skeleton had been discovered during the clearance operation. He asked for more details.
‘Sorry, sir, don’t have them,’ came the unsatisfactory answer. Horton didn’t waste time enquiring why.
‘OK, tell them I’m on my way.’
He ran an electric razor over his chin and was on his Harley heading there within ten minutes, mentally preparing himself for what he might see and hoping that it was a long-ago fatality rather than a recent one. He headed west and then north and soon was turning off the main road and travelling through the narrow streets of terraced houses, which reminded him of Daryl Woodley because this was where he had lived and where Reggie Thomas and the rest of Woodley’s associates still did. Again he considered what was nagging at the back of his mind about the Woodley investigation. It hadn’t surfaced during sleep. As he turned off by the allotments and rode under the motorway bridge onto the small peninsula that butted out on to the upper reaches of Portsmouth harbour, he again tried to conjure up the elusive thought but it refused to come. No matter. It might occur to him later.
He pulled into the boatyard and parked beside the police car. PC Kate Somerfield broke off her conversation with a suntanned, muscular man in his late forties standing beside a van, and headed towards him. There was a frown of concern on her fair face and he thought she looked paler than usual, which didn’t bode well.
‘The body’s on the wreckage, sir,’ she greeted him sombrely.
Several thoughts rapidly ran through Horton’s mind as he made towards it. How long had this wreck been submerged? How long had the body been on it? How did it get there? Were they looking at suicide or an accident? Or was it an unlawful killing? He sincerely hoped it wasn’t the latter, the first two were bad enough but the third would stretch their resources even further and wouldn’t be good for the victim’s relatives either, he thought caustically.
Walking beside him, Somerfield continued with her report. ‘The crane operative, Bill Shoreham, that’s him reading the newspaper, spotted the body as he was setting the wreck down onto the quay. The other man on his mobile phone is Ethan Crombie. He’s the boatman.’
‘I hope he’s not calling the press.’
‘Seaton told them they weren’t to.’
But Horton knew people didn’t always do as they were told.
Somerfield added, ‘Mr Crombie, and another man, piloted the floating crane around from the Camber yesterday on tugs. Mr Crombie returned in one of the small tugs this morning at five thirty and moored up just behind the crane barge.’
Horton could see the black and orange tug boat.
‘The crane operative drove here from where he lives in Fareham. That’s his blue saloon car parked beyond ours. He arrived at about the same time as Mr Crombie,’ Somerfield continued. ‘And Kevin Manley, the man I was talking to when you arrived, sir, who’s in charge of the salvage operation, got here with his team at first light at about five a.m. Mr Manley called us.’
Horton glanced back to see Manley’s crew of three sitting on the ground beside the van. Their diving suits were peeled back to their waists and they were watching the proceedings with interest. Not so Manley, who was pacing the ground impatiently with a frown of irritation.
By now they had reached the hulk. Horton tensed in preparation for what he was about to see.
‘She’s lying face down, sir, sort of wedged into the corner of the wreck. Seaton and I haven’t touched her and neither have the others, or so they claim. It doesn’t look as if she’s been dead very long.’
