Strange Tide (47 page)

‘Oh don't worry about that,' said Bryant reassuringly. ‘I'm allowed to stick my hooter in wherever I like.'

Yong-nyeo Kim went off to locate the documentation while Bryant studied the properties on offer in the Finston's brochure and realized that he could not afford to buy a part-share in a collapsed garden shed from them. He was still staring forlornly at page after page of perpendicular palaces when she returned with some photocopies. ‘This is all I can give you,' she said apologetically.

Bryant scanned the sheets and his beady eye snagged on the only quirk he could find. In the transfer reference box, where you were supposed to write something that would remind you about the nature of the transaction, was handwritten ‘Athena Marine'.

It's possible that no one else would have made the connection, but to Bryant it struck a significant note. As he thanked Yong-nyeo Kim and left, he called Longbright. ‘Janice, I need you to find something for me; a boatyard somewhere on the Greenwich Peninsula called Athena Marine. There used to be an Athena Road around there. It was where the lightermen went for their piecework. It's possible either Bill Crooms or Dimitri Gilyov were hired by the company. See what they're up to.'

‘Is that it?' said Longbright. ‘No explanation, no plan of action, just have a poke around?'

‘All right, find out who Crooms and Gilyov were working for and see if he transferred one point eight million euros into Lynsey Dalladay's account before she died, how about that? She used the money to buy the centre's outpost at Chiswick. Whoever gave it to her either knows how Gilyov died or killed him themselves. Is that enough for you?'

‘On our way,' said Longbright.

There was only one boatyard listed with that name, and it was on the Isle of Dogs in South-East London, where once the stubs of ancient quays had formed a maze of basins and docks. Now the slums had been torn down and replaced with apartment buildings, lushly photographed on websites and in brochures, but somehow still melancholy and inhospitable in the gathering darkness sweeping in from the river.

The sky had become blemished, but it was hard to tell whether it was nightfall or just the next wave of bad weather rolling in, until Longbright looked up and saw the seagulls tumbling against the wind, driven inland by the approaching storm front.

Developers were still building around the old quays. A few street names were all that remained of the area's dockland past: Tiller Road, Pepper Street, Ferry Street, Crews Street, Spindrift Avenue. Longbright had seen photographs of masted schooners in dock with their bowsprits thrusting out across the pavements, so closely were they moored to the dockers' houses.

Longbright checked the map on her phone. ‘This is the place all right.'

Colin Bimsley stepped back into the road to get a better view. ‘It looks like it's been closed down. What has this got to do with the Dalladay murder?'

‘That, my clumsy young friend, is a question only your boss can answer,' said Longbright, walking up to the black-painted main doors and looking for a bell. ‘See any way in?'

‘Down here.' At a broad-shouldered six foot one the spatially challenged Bimsley was a hefty lad who could prove surprisingly nimble when he wasn't confronting immovable objects with his head. Longbright had to trot to keep up with him. He shot down the yard's side alley, to a wide steel shed where an Alsatian was barking.

‘Police officers, take him inside, sir,' he called as a young black security guard appeared with the dog on a chain.

The guard obediently unlocked the gate and backed away. ‘What's in the shed?' Longbright asked.

‘It's where they repair the launches,' the boy explained.

‘We just need to take a quick look inside.'

‘I thought you said Mr Bryant wanted us to check for Gilyov's contact?' said Bimsley.

Longbright shrugged. ‘Well, while we're here.'

The guard removed the padlocks from the boatyard door and pushed one side back. ‘There are no lights any more,' he said. ‘They've been taken out.'

‘Don't worry, lad, we've got torches,' said Longbright. ‘Make yourself scarce for a few minutes. Go and have a coffee somewhere.'

The tarpaulin-covered boats were raised on trailers and standing in dry-dock supports. Long steel bars hung on chains, homemade block and tackle rigs ready to haul engines into place. As they made their way between the hulls, rain began rattling the roof overhead. It sounded as if someone was emptying gravel on to the corrugated metal.

‘What are we looking for?' Bimsley shone his jacket-torch across the starboard deck of a battered cruiser, picking up the flat glare of a rudder, a glint of chromium railing.

‘Whoa, back up – what's that?' Longbright stopped beside a black-painted hull and ran her hand over the paintwork. ‘This is a chop-job. Look.' She pointed to the crooked seam that ran beneath the hull's paintwork.

‘Fraternity told me there's a trade in reconditioned boats, just as there is in road vehicles. There's nothing wrong with that.'

‘Who are they selling them to?'

‘You'll need the log books.'

‘Then let's find out who's running this set-up.' She walked to the bow of the longest vessel and climbed the stepladder that had been placed beside it. ‘Someone's here; the paint's still wet.' She tilted her head on one side, thinking. She turned suddenly and sniffed the air. ‘What's that?'

An overpowering smell of scorching varnish filled her nostrils. Still balanced on the ladder, Longbright scanned the shed with her torch beam. A low light source flickered in the corner, throwing strange shadows on the roof. She could make out the shape of a human figure, someone inside the boatyard with them. ‘Colin, I don't like the—'

It was as far as she got. The explosion was muffled by the presence of so many large structures in the boatyard, but the wave of heat it generated still knocked her from the steps. She landed hard on the concrete floor. When she managed to get back on her feet, wiping her bloodied left palm on her thigh, she saw that the entire end wall of the shed was engulfed in rising flame. ‘Colin!' she called. ‘You OK?'

‘Yeah, think so.' He came around the corner to find her.

‘Your back's on fire.'

‘Oh, right.' He tried to see over his shoulder. ‘I can't get injured again; Meera will kill me.'

‘Hang on.' Longbright grabbed the end of a tarpaulin and pulled it free from a tender, throwing it over Colin's head and slapping him hard on the shoulder blades.

‘All right, blimey, go easy,' he yelled.

‘I've already been set alight once this year, I'm an old hand at this,' said Longbright.

Smoke from the burning varnish was replacing the oxygen with an acrid, unbreathable poison. Crouching low, they ran between the hulls, searching for an exit. The torches had been knocked from their hands and had spun beneath the boats. The door by which they had entered was now locked from the outside.

‘Other end.' Colin waved and led the way back.

By now the smoke was so thick they could barely draw breath. Away somewhere to the right of them, a series of canisters overheated and detonated. Janice's lungs were burning. She stumbled on, following Colin. A fresh wave of searing air blasted over them. She slipped and fell on to one knee. It should have been easy to get back up, but instead her other knee gave way and she dropped flat.

A strong hand pulled her back up. Colin's face appeared through the smoke, his nose and mouth masked by a rag. He began dragging her towards the side of the building. She couldn't understand what he was doing – there were no doors or exits of any kind here.

Behind them, a series of fresh discharges detonated in the boats. The whole of the yard was now burning fiercely.

Once she started coughing, she could not stop. Colin was pressing his hands against the wall. Her head hurt so badly that it was impossible to think clearly. What was he doing? As she tried to understand, he grabbed one of the steel bars overhead and pulled himself up, swinging high and forward, hitting the wall with an echoing boom. His boots broke through the panelled side of the shed. At the end of the second swing it fell away and he was able to drag Longbright through the gap into the open air.

They fell down together as further explosions rocked the shed.

‘Your leg.' She tried to speak but doubled over, hacking out dark mucus. Colin's left calf was pouring blood from a jagged tear in his jeans. He sat her down against a low brick wall and ran off. She coughed hard again, trying to understand what had happened, then lay back with her head on the brickwork and lost consciousness.

Colin ran. The cold rain-dashed air he drew in cleared his burning lungs. Ahead, the bald, thick-set man he had seen inside the boat-shed was heading towards the end of the road and the dock beyond. For once there was nothing in Colin's path, which was just as well because right now, any collision involving the DC and a moving vehicle would have resulted in the latter coming off worse.

Pounding across the road without stopping to look, he caught up with Mick Draycott just as he made the fatal mistake of turning around. Colin lifted him off the ground with one spectacular uppercut to the jaw, sending him over the low chain-link fence and down into the pungent mud of the dock at low tide.

John May paced back and forth across his living room, listening to Raymond Land's excuses on the phone.

‘I can't do it, John,' Land insisted. ‘If I let you back in now you'll be in violation of your house arrest and the case will be automatically prejudiced against you. If you really want to do something, forget about the Dalladay girl and concentrate on your own defence. Think about why someone wanted to get rid of Mrs North.'

The detectives generally used Raymond Land as a kind of reverse barometer, taking his indications to mean that the absolute opposite was true, but once in a while he accidentally hit the nail on the head. When May rang off, angrily throwing his phone on to the sofa, he realized that the unit chief was right; he'd been considering the investigation as a whole only to find that each new fact contradicted the previous ones. Going back to the notepad he had been filling with ideas, he seated himself before his coffee table and went over all the possibilities again. He'd assumed he had been deliberately set up for a fall, but now he concentrated on finding a reason why someone would specifically wish to kill Marion North.

He tried to recall exactly how she had looked, standing before him on Victoria Embankment, a handsome woman, facing him squarely and holding his gaze, her red lips catching the light – red lips, red scarf – and in that moment he regretted not having seen her sooner. His decision not to continue seeing her was linked to his history with married women; he had always found reasons to end relationships before they became too demanding. But he was sure he had left her with his scarf to give her a reason for seeing him again. The whole passive-aggressive thing was absurd in a man of his years.

I've been a bloody fool
, he thought,
allowing each of them to escape and pretending to be sorry when they didn't call. I wanted to see her again, but how I enjoyed letting her go in the first place! I told myself I was putting the needs of the unit first, as if I was committing an unselfish act by pushing each of them away.

For too long he had been content to act as the straight man to Arthur in their little double-act. He only had himself to blame for his present situation. May always took the path of least resistance, and this time he had ended up as a suspect in his own murder investigation. Well, no more. Grabbing his coat, he headed for the door.

Raymond Land was nervous. His detectives were missing and almost everyone else had disappeared. He was left with Crippen, currently spraying gravel about in her litter tray, the two Daves, who sounded as if they were taking the basement apart with road-drills and gongs, and Barbara Biddle, who was locked in the common room with boxes of files, wearily checking her watch while she searched for further infringements. At least she hadn't submitted her report yet.

When Longbright and Bimsley came in through the door looking as if they'd been standing too close to a controlled demolition, he got a definite sense that things were rapidly moving on without him. ‘What the hell happened to you two?' he asked, rising in alarm. ‘What have you done to your leg?'

Bimsley shrugged. ‘It just needed some butterfly stitches.'

‘We had a run-in with the guy Fraternity arrested,' said Longbright. ‘This time he won't be getting out on bail. Is Mr Bryant back yet?'

‘Back from where?' asked Land. ‘I can't raise him on his phone. I can't get hold of anyone.'

‘Who's looking for me?' Arthur Bryant sauntered in eating a banana. ‘I've been hearing about you, Colin. How's the leg? Nice punch, by the way. You broke Draycott's jaw in two places. Couldn't you have just stamped all over him like Fraternity did? He's unlikely to sue, though, what with the attempted murder charge and all.'