Dead Tomorrow (2 page)

It was shortly after her ninth birthday that Caitlin had first been diagnosed with liver disease. It felt like the two of them had been in a long, dark tunnel ever since. The never-ending visits to the specialists. The tests. The brief periods of hospitalization down here in Sussex, and longer periods, one of almost a year, in the liver unit of the Royal South London Hospital. She’d endured operations to insert stents in her bile ducts. Then operations to remove stents. Endless transfusions. At times she was so low on energy from her illness that she would regularly fall asleep in class. She became unable to play her beloved saxophone because she found it hard to breathe. And all along, as she became a teenager, Caitlin was getting more angry and rebellious. Demanding to know
Why me?

The question Lynn was unable to answer.

She’d long ago lost count of the times she had sat anxiously in A &E at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, while medics treated her daughter. Once, at thirteen, Caitlin had had to have her stomach pumped after stealing a bottle of vodka from the drinks cabinet. Another time, at fourteen, she fell off a roof, stoned on hash. Then there was the horrific night she came into Lynn’s bedroom at two in the morning, glassy-eyed, sweating and so cold her teeth were chattering, announcing she had downed an Ecstasy tablet given to her by some lowlife in Brighton and that her head hurt.

On each occasion, Dr Hunter came to the hospital and stayed with Caitlin until he knew she was out of danger. He didn’t have to do it, but that was the kind of man he was.

And now the door was opening and he was coming in. A tall, elegant figure in a pinstriped suit with fine posture, he had a handsome face, framed with wavy salt and pepper hair, and gentle, caring green eyes that were partially concealed by half-moon glasses.

‘ Lynn!’ he said, his strong, brisk voice oddly subdued this morning. ‘Come on in.’

Dr Ross Hunter had two different expressions for greeting his patients. His normal, genuinely warm, happy-to-see-you smile was the only one Lynn had ever seen in all the years that she had been his patient. She had never before encountered his wistful biting-of-the-lower-lip grimace. The one he kept in the closet and hated to bring out.

The one he had on his face today.

It was a good place for a speed trap. Commuters hurrying into Brighton who regularly drove down this stretch of the Lewes Road knew that, although there was a forty-mile-an-hour limit, they could accelerate safely after the lights and not have to slow down again along the dual carriageway until they reached the speed camera, almost a mile on.

The blue, yellow and silver Battenburg markings of the BMW estate car, parked in a side road and partially obscured from their view by a bus shelter, came as an unwelcome early-morning surprise to most of them.

PC Tony Omotoso stood on the far side of the car, holding the laser gun, using the roof as a rest, aiming the red dot at the front number plates, which gave the best reading on any vehicle he estimated to be speeding. He clicked the trigger on the plate of a Toyota saloon. The digital readout said 44 mph. The driver had spotted them and had already hit the brakes. Using the rigid guidelines, he allowed a tolerance of 10 per cent over the limit, plus two. The Toyota carried on past, its brake lights glowing. Next he sighted on the plate of a white Transit van – 43 mph. Then a black Harley Softail motorbike sped past, going way over the limit, but he wasn’t able to get a fix in time.

Standing to his left, ready to jump out the moment Tony called, was his fellow Road Policing Officer, PC Ian Upperton, tall and thin, in his cap and yellow high-visibility jacket. Both men were freezing.

Upperton watched the Harley. He liked them – he liked all bikes, and his ambition was to become a motorcycle officer. But Harleys were cruising bikes. His real passion was for the high-speed road-racer machines, like BMWs, Suzuki Hayabusas, Honda Fireblades. Bikes where you had to lean into bends in order to get round them, not merely turn the handlebars like a steering wheel.

A red Ducati was going past now, but the rider had spotted them and slowed almost to a crawl. The clapped-out-looking green Fiesta coming up in the outside lane, however, clearly had not.

‘The Fiesta!’ Omotoso called out. ‘Fifty-two!’

PC Upperton stepped out and signalled the car over. But, whether blindly or wilfully, the car shot past.

‘OK, let’s go.’ He called out the number plate – ‘Whiskey Four-Three-Two Charlie Papa November’ – then jumped behind the wheel.

‘Fuckers!’

‘Yeah, cunts!’

‘Why don’t you go chasing real criminals, right?’

‘Yeah, ’stead of fuckin’ persecuting motorists.’

Tony Omotoso turned his head and saw two youths slouching past.

Because 3,500 people die on the roads of England every year, against 500 a year who are murdered, that’s why, he wanted to say to them. Because me and Ian scrape dead and broken bodies off the roads every damn day of the week, because of arseholes like this one in the Fiesta.

But he didn’t have time. His colleague already had the blue roof spinners flashing and the siren
whup-whooping
. He tossed the laser gun on to the back seat, climbed in the front, slammed the door and began tugging his seat belt on, as Upperton gunned the car out into a gap in the traffic and floored the accelerator.

And now the adrenalin was kicking in as he felt the thrust of acceleration in the pit of his stomach and his spine pressed against the rear of the seat. Oh yes, this was one of the highs of the job.

The Automatic Number Plate Recognition video screen mounted on the dash was beeping at them, showing the Fiesta’s index. Whiskey Four-Three-Two Charlie Papa November had no tax, no insurance and was registered to a disqualified driver.

Upperton pulled over into the outside lane, gaining fast on the Fiesta.

Then a radio call came through. ‘Hotel Tango Four-Two?’

Omotoso answered. ‘Hotel Tango Four-Two, yes, yes?’

The controller said, ‘We have a reported serious road traffic collision. Motorcycle and car at the intersection of Coldean Lane and Ditchling Road. Can you attend?’

Shit, he thought, not wanting to let the Fiesta go. ‘Yes, yes, on our way. Put out an alert for Brighton patrols. Ford Fiesta, index Whiskey Four-Three-Two Charlie Papa November, colour green, travelling south on Lewes Road at speed, approaching gyratory system. Suspected disqualified driver.’

He didn’t need to tell his colleague to spin the car around. Upperton was already braking hard, his right-turn indicators blinking, looking for a gap in the oncoming traffic.

Malcolm Beckett could smell the sea getting closer as his thirty-year-old blue MGB GT halted at the traffic lights to the slip road. It was like a drug, as if the salt of the oceans was in his veins, and after any absence he needed his fix. Since his late teens, when he joined the Royal Navy as a trainee engineer, he had spent his entire career at sea. Ten years in the Royal Navy and then twenty-one years in the Merchant Navy.

He loved Brighton, where he was born and raised, because of its proximity to the coast, but he was always happiest when on board ship. Today was the end of his three weeks’ shore leave and the start of three weeks back at sea, on the
Arco Dee
, where he was Chief Engineer. Not so long ago, he rued, he had been the youngest chief engineer in the entire Merchant Navy, but now, at forty-seven, he was fast becoming a veteran, an old sea dog.

Just like his beloved ship, every rivet of which he knew, he knew every nut and bolt of his car, which he had taken apart and put back together again more times than he could remember. He listened fondly to the rumble of the idling engine now, deciding that he could hear a bit of tappet noise, that he would need to take the cylinder head off on his next leave and make some adjustments.

‘You OK?’ Jane asked.

‘Me? Yep. Absolutely.’

It was a fine morning, crisp blue sky, no wind, the sea flat as a millpond. After the late autumn storms that had made his last spell on board pretty grim, the weather was set fair, at least for today. It would be chilly, but glorious.

‘Are you going to miss me?’

He wormed his arm around her shoulder, gave her a squeeze. ‘Madly.’

‘Liar!’

He kissed her. ‘I miss you every second I’m away from you.’

‘Bullshit!’

He kissed her again.

As the lights turned to green, she depressed the clutch, crunched the gear lever into first and accelerated down the incline.

‘It’s really hard to compete against a ship,’ she said.

He grinned. ‘That was a great bonk this morning.’

‘It had better last you.’

‘It will.’

They turned left, driving round the end of the Hove Lagoon, a pair of artificial lakes where people could take out rowing boats, have windsurfing lessons and sail model ships. Ahead of them, adjoining the eastern perimeter of the harbour, was a private street of white, Moorish-styled beachfront houses where rich celebrities, including Heather Mills and Fatboy Slim, had homes.

The salt in the air was stronger now, with the sulphurous reeks of the harbour, and the smells of oil, rope, tar, paint and coal.

Shoreham Harbour, at the western extremity of the city of Brighton and Hove, consisted of a mile-long basin, lined with timber yards, warehouses, bunkering stations and aggregate depots on both sides, as well as yacht marinas and a scattering of private houses and flats. It had once been a busy trading port, but the advent of increasingly large container ships, too big for this harbour, had changed its character.

Tankers, smaller cargo vessels and fishing boats still made constant use of it, but much of the traffic consisted of commercial dredgers, like his own ship, mining the seabed for gravel and sand to sell as aggregate to the construction industry.

‘What have you got on in the next three weeks?’ he asked.

Trusting the wives they left behind was an issue for all sailors. When he had first started in the Royal Navy he’d been told that the wives of some mariners used to stick a packet of OMO washing powder in their front windows when their husbands were away on a tour of duty. It signalled Old Man Overseas.

‘Jemma’s nativity play, which you’ll just miss,’ she answered. ‘And Amy breaks up in a fortnight. I’ll have her moping around the house.’

Amy was Jane’s eleven-year-old by her first marriage. Mal got on fine with her, although there was always an invisible barrier between them. Jemma was the six-year-old daughter they had together, with whom he was much closer. She was so affectionate, so bright, such a positive little person. A complete contrast to his own strange, remote and sickly daughter by his first marriage, whom he was fond of but had never really connected to, despite all his efforts. He was gutted that he would be missing Jemma playing the Virgin Mary, but was long used to the family sacrifices that his chosen career entailed. It had been a major contributing factor to his divorce from his first wife, and something he still thought about constantly.

He looked at Jane as she drove, turning right past the houses into the long, straight road along the south side of the harbour basin, going almost deliberately slowly now as if eking out her last minutes with him. Feisty but so lovely, with her short bob of red hair and her pert snub nose, she was wearing a leather jacket over a white T-shirt and ripped blue jeans. There was such a difference between the two women. Jane, who was a therapist specializing in phobias, told him that she liked her independence, loved the fact that she had her three weeks of freedom, that it made her appreciate him all the more when he was home.

Whereas Lynn, who worked for a debt collection agency, had always been needy. Too needy. It was one thing to be wanted by a woman, desired by a woman, lusted after by a woman. But to be
needed
. It was the need that had ultimately driven them apart. He’d hoped – in fact, they had both hoped – that having a child would have changed that. But it hadn’t.

It had actually made things worse.

The car was slowing down and Jane was indicating. They stopped, let a truck loaded with timber thunder past, then turned right, in through the open gates of Solent Aggregates. Then she halted the car in front of the security Portakabin.

Mal climbed out, already in his white boiler suit and rubber-soled sea boots, and flipped up the tailgate. He hefted out his large, soft bag and pulled on his yellow hard hat. Then he leaned in through the window and kissed Jane goodbye. It was a long, lingering kiss. Even after seven years, their passion was still intense – one of the pluses of regularly spending three weeks apart.

‘Love you,’ he said.

‘Love you too,’ she replied, and kissed him again.

A tall man, lean and strong, he was good-looking, with an open, honest face and a thatch of short, thinning fair hair. He was the kind of man colleagues instantly liked and respected; there was no
side
to him. What you saw was what you got.

He stood watching her reverse, listening to the burble of the exhaust, concerned about the sound when she revved. One of the baffles in the twin silencers needed replacing. He would have to put it up on the hoist when he got back. Also, he needed to take a look at the shocks, the car didn’t seem to be riding as well as it should over bumps. Could be the front shock absorbers needed replacing.

But, as he entered the Portakabin and signed his name in the log, exchanging pleasantries with the security guard, other things were starting to occupy his mind. The starboard engine of the
Arco Dee
was coming up to 20,000 hours, which was the company’s limit for an overhaul. He needed to do some calculations to pick the optimum time for that to happen. Dry docks would be shut down over the coming Christmas holiday period. But the owners of the
Arco Dee
weren’t concerned about holidays. If he’d spent £19 million on a boat, he probably wouldn’t be either, he reckoned. Which was why they liked to keep it working 24/7 for as much of the year as possible.