One Under (2 page)

Faraday shut his eyes a moment, squeezed them very hard, fought the temptation to turn in the water, to kick hard, to strike for home. This is exactly what you shouldn’t do, he told himself. In situations like these, panic was the shortest cut to disaster.

He opened his eyes again, watched his own pale hand wipe the toughened glass in the facemask. He’d been wrong. Not one of them. Not two. But half a dozen. At least. They were circling now, much closer, sleek, curious, terrifying.

All too aware of the quickening rasp of his own breath, Faraday watched the sharks. Every nerve end told him that something unimaginable was about to happen. He hung in the water, his mouth suddenly dry, feeling utterly helpless. He’d never seen creatures like this, so perfectly evolved for the task in hand, so ready, so close. The water rippled over the gills behind their gaping mouths as they slipped through the shafts of dying sunlight, and as they circled closer and closer he became mesmerised by their eyes. The eyes told him everything. They were cold, unblinking, devoid of anything but the expectation of what would happen next. This was their territory. Their world. Trespass was a capital offence.

Faraday had a sudden vision of blood in the water, his own blood, of pinked strips of torn flesh, of jaws closing on his flailing limbs, of line after line of those savage teeth tearing at the rest of his body until nothing was left but a cloud of chemicals and splinters of white bone sinking slowly out of sight.

One of the biggest sharks made a sudden turn and then came at him, the pale body twisting as it lunged, and Faraday felt himself brace as the huge jaws filled his vision. This is death, he thought. This is what happens when you get it so badly wrong.

Another noise, piercing, insistent, familiar. The shark, he thought numbly. The shark.

His heart pounding, Faraday turned over and groped in the half darkness. The mobile was on the chair beside the bed. For a second or two, listening to the voice on the other end, he hadn’t a clue where he was. Then, immeasurably relieved, he managed a response.

‘Sure.’ He fumbled for his watch. ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

 

Buriton is a picturesque Hampshire village tucked beneath the wooded swell of the South Downs. A street of timbered cottages and a couple of pubs led to a twelfth-century church. There were 4×4s everywhere, most of them new, and Faraday slowed to let a harassed-looking mother load her kids into the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser. Buriton, he thought wearily, is where you’d settle if you still believed in a certain version of England - peaceful, safe, white - and had the money to buy it.

He parked beside the pond at the heart of the village. Already, there was a scatter of other cars, most of them badged with the familiar chequerboard of the British Transport Police. Faraday was still eyeing a couple of BTP officers pulling on their wellington boots, wondering quite why a suicide had attracted so much police attention, when there came a tap at his passenger window.

‘Boss … ?’

Surprised, Faraday got out of the Mondeo and shook the extended hand. DS Jerry Proctor was a Crime Scene Manager, a looming, heavyset individual with a reputation for teasing meticulously presented evidence out of the most chaotic situations. The last couple of years, he’d been seconded to the British effort in Iraq, teaching local police recruits how to become forensic investigators.

‘How was the posting?’

‘Bloody.’

‘Glad to be back?’

‘No.’ Proctor nodded towards the parked Transport Police cars. ‘These guys have been here a couple of hours now. They’ve got a DI with them and it needs someone to sort him out.’

Faraday looked away for a moment. Proctor had never seen the point of small talk.

‘You’re telling me the DI’s a problem?’

‘Not at all, sir. But they haven’t got the bodies, not for something like this. You want to come up to the tunnel?’

Proctor was already wearing one of the grey one-piece discardable suits that came with the job. While Faraday pulled on the pair of hiking boots he kept in the back of the car, Proctor brought him up to date.

The driver of the first train out of Pompey had reported hitting a body in the nearby tunnel. The power had been switched off, and control rooms in London alerted. Calls from Transport Police HQ in St James’s Park had roused the duty Rail Incident Officer, who’d driven over from his home in Eastleigh. By then, the batteries on the train were running out of juice and the twenty or so passengers aboard would soon be sitting in the dark.

‘No one got them off?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why not?’

‘The driver didn’t think it was appropriate. Young guy. Cluey.’

‘Cluey how?’

‘He’d taken a good look underneath the train, gone back with a torch, brave lad.’

‘And?’

They were walking round the pond by now, following the narrow lane that wound up towards the railway line. Proctor glanced across at Faraday.

‘He found the impact spot, or what he assumed was the impact spot. Bits of our man were all over the bottom of the train but the torso and legs were still in one piece.’ Proctor touched his own belly. ‘Chained to the line.’

‘
Chained?
’

‘Yeah.’ Proctor nodded. ‘We’re talking serious chain, padlock, the works. Our driver friend thought that was a bit over the top, made another call.’ He shot Faraday a bleak smile. ‘So here we all are.’

‘And the train’s still in the tunnel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Impact point?’

‘About ninety metres in. That’s from the southern end.’

‘How long’s the tunnel?’

‘Five hundred metres. Transport Police are organising a generator and a lighting unit. Plus they’ve laid hands on half a dozen or so blokes to check out the tunnel. Don’t get me wrong, sir. The DI knows what he’s doing. It’s just resources. Not his fault.’

Faraday was doing the sums, trying to imagine the size of the challenge that awaited them all. At worst, he’d assumed they were looking at some kind of complicated suicide. The fact that this body had been physically tied to the line changed everything.

‘The DI’s established a common path?’

‘Yes, sir. Down this lane, under the railway bridge, along a little track, then up the embankment and into the tunnel. The train’s maybe forty metres in.’

‘And that’s the way we get the passengers off?’

‘Has to be. The Incident Officer tells me the rest of it’s fenced miles back in both directions. We’ve got no option.’

Faraday pulled a face. In these situations, absolute priority lay in isolating the crime scene. If Proctor was right about access to the track, then whatever evidence awaited them was about to be trampled.

‘We need Mr Barrie in on this.’ Faraday fumbled for his mobile. Martin Barrie was the new Detective Superintendent in charge of the Major Crimes Team. If it came to any kind of turf war, then Barrie was the man with the ammunition.

Proctor watched while Faraday keyed in a number, then touched him lightly on the arm.

‘That’s another problem, sir.’ He nodded towards the nearby embankment. ‘This is a mobile black spot. Either end of the tunnel, there’s no signal.’

 

The train was visible from the mouth of the tunnel. Faraday stood on the track, peering into the darkness, trying to imagine what five carriages would do to flesh, bone and blood. Like every policeman, he’d attended his share of traffic accidents, successful suicide bids and other incidents when misjudgement or desperation had taken a life, but thankfully he’d never witnessed the cooling remains of a human body torn apart by a train.

Other men, less lucky, spoke of unrecognisable parcels of flesh, of entrails scattered beside the track, of the way that the impact - like the suck of high explosive - could rip the clothes from a man and toss them aside before dismembering him

The image made Faraday pause. Only days ago, three Tube trains had been ripped apart by terrorist bombs in London and some of the media coverage of the consequences had been unusually candid. Was this incident, in some strange way, a twist on that theme? He let the thought settle for a moment, then he was struck by another image, altogether more personal, and he found himself fighting a hot gust of nausea, remembering the oncoming shark of his nightmare and that moment before consciousness when he knew for certain that he, too, was a dead man.

‘Sir?’

It was Proctor again. He’d fetched an Airwave radio to replace Faraday’s mobile. The Transport Police DI wanted a meet as soon as possible. He was waiting back at the cars.

‘Best not go in, sir.’ Proctor nodded towards the tunnel. ‘Not until we’ve had a sort-out, eh?’

Faraday favoured him with a thin smile, the taste of bile still in his mouth, then turned away.

The DI from the British Transport Police turned out to be an ex-Met copper with a realistic grasp of the shape of the coming days. Sure, his guys had jurisdiction on railway property but now wasn’t the time to be throwing their toys out of the pram. There was a procedure here, boxes to be ticked, and - to be frank - he didn’t care a toss who held the pencil.

He already had a bus on standby, ready to be called forward when the passengers were detrained. In the meantime came the business of putting a team together. Getting the right people in the right places, properly briefed, would take hours. Amongst them would undoubtedly be the Home Office pathologist, who’d need a decent run at whatever remained of the body. Only after he’d finished would the search teams start trawling through the tunnel, on hands and knees, looking for every shred of evidence, human or otherwise. All that, he concluded, was best handled at county level.

‘You’ve been inside yourself?’ Faraday nodded in the direction of the tunnel.

The DI shook his head.

‘The Incident Officer briefed me. Not pretty.’

‘ID?’

‘Nothing we’ve found yet. His clothing was in a pile at the side of the track. Jeans, trainers jacket, T-shirt - normal clobber.’

‘You’re telling me he was naked?’

‘Apparently. Excuse me.’

He broke off to confer briefly with a colleague who’d just arrived, then threw a glance at Faraday and hurried away. Bit of a crisis with South West Trains. He’d be back as soon as he could.

The DI gone, Faraday settled down with the Airwave radio, sitting in his Mondeo with the door open, still thinking about the implications of a naked body in the tunnel. By now, nearly nine o’clock, the new Detective Superintendent should be at his desk in the Major Crimes Suite back in Portsmouth.

After Geoff Willard, who had moved on to become force Head of CID, Martin Barrie had come as something of a surprise. He had none of Willard’s physical presence, none of his style, none of his bullish determination to steamroller any obstacle en route to court. On the contrary, Barrie was a slight man, thin to the point of emaciation, and seemed to have absolutely no interest in self-image. But the flat Essex accent and the nicotine stains from a lifetime of roll-ups masked an intelligence so acute and so subtle that it took someone in his own league to recognise it. From the start, Faraday had liked him a great deal.

On the Airwave radio, Faraday summarised progress to date. Thanks to the Transport Police DI, there were no turf issues. And thanks to Jerry Proctor, a decent team should have assembled by lunchtime. The search in the tunnel should be well under way by close of play and if Barrie was happy to carry the overtime, the lads could press on into the evening. With luck, a proper trawl would recover documentation and establish an ID, and if that didn’t happen then there might be prints or DNA from the post-mortem that would raise a ping from the usual databases. As ever in these situations, it would be a name that turned the key in the investigative lock.

‘You’ll need to fire up the MIR.’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Leave it to me. I’ll get it organised.’

The MIR was the Major Incident Room, the beating heart of any enquiry, with plenty of space for the datainputters and specialist officers who would drive the investigation forward. There was a long silence. Barrie was evidently deep in thought. When he came back on the line, he wanted to know who Faraday had in mind to head the Intelligence Cell - the officer who would try to tease an ID, a timeline and some shadowy first guess at a motive from the flood of incoming information.

Faraday was gazing down at the pond, watching a family of mallards emerging from the water.

‘DC Winter,’ he said at once. ‘Please.’

 

Paul Winter was still in his pyjamas when the call came through. He’d been up for hours, circling the roomy apartment with mug after mug of tea, enjoying the sheer busyness of the scene that unfolded daily beyond the big picture windows. Just now, one of the huge P&O ferries was rumbling towards the harbour mouth. Purposeful and unlovely, it seemed to catch the essence of the city.

Winter bent to the phone. Conversations with Faraday were becoming a habit.

‘Boss?’

Faraday apologised for intruding on a rest day but something had come up.

‘Like what?’ Winter’s interest quickened at once. His attention had strayed to a woman on the promenade below, waving at someone on the fast-disappearing P&O.

Faraday explained briefly about the body chained to the line in the Buriton Tunnel. Barrie was throwing serious resources at what was obviously a suspicious death. Operation
Coppice
was going to need a beefed-up Intelligence Cell. Given Winter’s new job on Major Crimes, Faraday wanted him involved from the start.

‘No problem.’ Winter took a sip of tea. The woman had turned round now. Nice figure.

‘You’re OK for today?’

Winter glanced at his watch. ‘Give me half an hour,’ he told Faraday, ‘and I’ll take a cab in.’

‘No need. I’ve briefed Suttle already. He’ll drop by and pick you up in fifteen minutes.’