Silent tide, p.1
Silent Tide, page 1
SILENT TIDE
A DCI BOYD THRILLER
Alex Scarrow
Copyright © 2021 by Alex Scarrow
All rights reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published by GrrBooks
Contents
Chapter 1
Three months later
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
DCI BOYD RETURNS IN…
Acknowledgments
Also by Alex Scarrow
About the Author
For Debbie Scarrow, whose wisdom, love and support keeps me sane
1
It’s funny how flesh in the moonlight looks like puff pastry. Blood, of course, looks like ink. He stared at the abattoir in the cockpit, watching the blood slosh around as the sea gently played with the boat.
It was interesting – how much of it there was in the human body. And, contained like it was in this small area, unable to run-off or soak away into anything, there was so much of it. A small dark pond.
He stared at his handiwork.
If the killing had been hard, the sawing had been brutal. His arms ached from the labour. With a hacksaw, the job would have been a whole lot easier.
But with just a kitchen knife to hand, it had taken all night.
Three months later
2
Magpie didn’t look like your typical migrant boat. They were usually beaten-up old small fishing boats or – far worse – unseaworthy inflatables. This was a yacht; although, to be fair, it did appear to be somewhat beaten up. It was wallowing low in the water and a sail trailed behind it, like a bride’s wedding train. To Duncan’s eye, it looked as if it had been drifting in the Channel for some time, gradually taking on water.
The vessel had been called in by a Danish tanker heading north-east up the Channel. The tanker crew had tried raising it on short-wave and got nothing. They said that they hadn’t spotted anyone on the boat waving for help, so assumed it had been abandoned.
Still, it had taken four hours for the crew to finally call it in due to a shift change on the bridge.
Bloody idiots.
It had only taken the RNLI Shannon, scrambled out of Hastings, eighteen minutes to get there.
Duncan Cudmore was standing at the prow as his helmsman, Ryan, nudged them carefully forward through the last dozen yards of choppy water. The yacht’s aft was higher than her bow, the foredeck only inches above sea level and spending almost as much time under it as above it.
It was a woeful sight.
He tried his loudhailer again. ‘Magpie – this is the RNLI Shannon. Is there anyone aboard? If so, please make yourselves known!’
There was no response. He raised a hand, and Ryan reverse-throttled the boat for a couple of seconds to slow their drifting approach. He was good with Shannon, handled her beautifully.
The last few feet between the vessels closed, and Duncan swung a leg over the rail and stepped cautiously onto the swamped foredeck of the yacht.
He had an uneasy feeling about this call-out. In the last year migrant-boat encounters had become more hazardous. The freezing, terrified wretches on board were prone to scramble en masse onto any intercepting vessel, sometimes even jumping into the Channel to get to them.
The cold shock of the water could be deadly. Far too often it was.
The boats they usually encountered tended to be overburdened rubber dinghies with outboards that had crapped out or run out of fuel. It was almost as if the traffickers wanted their clientele to die. He supposed dead clients couldn’t ring back home and warn their loved ones not to make the same mistake.
Duncan was pretty sure no one was aboard. The yacht looked as though it had been drifting for days. Possibly weeks. He made his way carefully up the gentle incline towards the aft, listening out for any faint cries for help from within.
But it was quiet, save for the clanking of halyards and the lazy sea slapping the boat’s raised backside.
‘Anyone aboard?’ he shouted.
No answer.
Good. That was good news. If anyone was on board they’d surely be in an appalling condition. Whoever had been on this boat must have assumed the yacht was going to sink and had bailed. He suspected it had hit some debris floating in the Channel. It happened from time to time; there were enough container ships going up and down it that floating debris – slipped freight – was a thing to be mindful of.
The sea rocked the boat gently and the boom swung lazily away from Duncan, dragging the tattered sail with it. As the boom swung, the canvas pulled clear of the cockpit, revealing the contents.
The stench was overwhelming.
Duncan stared down into the sloshing mixture of blood and seawater below.
3
William Boyd – Bill. Only Julia called him that. Boyd to his friends – simply wasn’t used to seeing this much open sky in one helping. He was more used to glimpses, between facing rows of townhouses or city-centre blocks, tinged either a mean-spirited grey or a sickly light-polluted sodium orange.
This was horizon-to-horizon sky. All-you-can-eat.
The low clouds surged above him like angry grey whales across a Tupperware-white sky. The wind was stiff up here, cold, rattling his anorak against him.
He stood on the brow of East Hill looking down onto the old part of Hastings. So picturesque – all the obligatory clichés of a small fishing town: boats drawn up on the shingle beach, tall dark wooden net huts. And gulls.
Hundreds of the vicious little bastards.
Since moving down from London, gulls had become his nemesis. At least London pigeons, dirty scavengers though they were, didn’t have the same arsey stare-you-down attitude that these buggers did.
These were chavs with wings.
Gulls aside, the view was pretty. It hit all the right notes. A picture-perfect rendition of a Sussex seaside town – well, this end of it anyway. The far end of Hastings, the ‘modern bit’, was less so.
Boyd sucked in a deep breath of the bracingly cold morning air, tasting sea salt instead of the usual car exhaust or the Tube stew of body odour and Lynx.
Today was his first day back at work.
After nearly two years spent hiding at home, watching the world outside struggle with Covid while he wrestled with his own personal battle, he was going back into an environment where he’d be referred to as ‘guv’.
Two years of compassionate leave. The Met had been generous giving him the headspace and that amount of time to recover. And then, after all that, they’d granted his request to transfer to another force entirely.
His gaze was drawn by movement to his left, down on the small shingle cove directly beneath him. He could see a yacht tethered to a jetty and beside it a CSI van. Two people in their forensic bunny suits were attempting to assemble a protective canopy over the rear end of the boat.
CSI meant serious crime. The backdrop to his life may have changed but the work looked as though it would remain the same.
Murder – the gift that keeps on giving.
Boyd thought that would make a handy T-shirt slogan for all the boys and girls of CID. Maybe he’d print one up and put it into next year’s Secret Santa gift pool.
He checked his watch. It was gone eight.
Time to get back to being a copper, Boyd. You ready for this?
‘Am I fuck,’ he muttered.
4
The police station on Bohemia Road was like many other stations he’d seen in his nineteen years on the force – a three-storey red-brick and tinted-glass sandwich with a forecourt packed with patrol cars, dog vans and arrest wagons.
The station, District HQ for Sussex Police, was at the west end of Hastings – the ‘modern’ bit – at the point where the town seamlessly and inexplicably became St Leonards. It was flanked by a Travelodge on one side and the magistrates’ cou rt on the other.
Boyd had decided to walk to work this morning, since there were some promising threads of blue in the sky and he wanted to get a feel for whether the daily commute was going to be walkable. He’d put on a stone and a half over the last twenty-four months – most of it around his middle. He was damned if it was going to take him twenty-four months to lose it.
He entered the station’s reception and walked up to the Perspex-shielded front desk.
‘DCI Boyd, starting here today.’ He flashed his warrant card next to his face.
The desk sergeant looked up and frowned at the picture on the ID card. Boyd was clean-shaven in that, nearly a couple of stone lighter and about five years younger. The face beside the ID was framed with a scruffy dark beard and wilful dark brown hair that refused to stay down. The sergeant took an insultingly long time to reconcile the slim face in the photograph with the flabby stranger glaring down at him.
‘Morning, sir,’ he finally conceded.
He pressed the buzzer and a light went on above the security door next to the counter. Boyd stepped through.
‘Ah, you must be Boyd!’
Detective Superintendent Iain Sutherland stood up behind his desk and waved him inside. His office was a small glass-walled cubicle at one end of the CID’s open-plan floor. It reminded Boyd of the obligatory aquarium in a dentist’s waiting room.
Boyd closed the door behind him, muting the office hubbub outside.
Sutherland was short and plump. He had narrow shoulders that were doing a damned fine job of keeping his perfectly round head from rolling off. He had a tuft of white hair on his chin and a toothbrush of white bristles across his upper lip: a goatee, sort of – but, honestly, blink and you’d miss it.
‘I’m really sorry we can’t give you a proper welcome aboard. Things just got very busy this morning.’
‘The yacht?’ said Boyd.
‘Yes. You’ve seen it, then?’
‘From the cliff top.’
‘It was pulled in last night.’
Boyd reached for the back of the one visitor’s seat, but Sutherland came round the desk. He had to look up at his new DCI, the height difference much more apparent up close.
‘This is not a sit-down meeting with coffee and biscuits, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh.’ Boyd had just been walking for fifty minutes. Sitting down, having a cuppa, would have actually been quite nice. Biscuits even better.
‘My other DCI, Geoff Flack, is bogged down with an ongoing operation at the moment. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to dump this case straight on you.’
‘What is it looking like?’
‘It’s looking very much like a murder,’ said Sutherland.
Boyd felt a lurch in his gut. He knew he needed to be back and busy, for his own sanity, but heading up a murder inquiry as he – literally – walked through the door into his new posting was being gifted with too much too soon.
‘You’re aware I’ve been out of it for quite a while?’ he said.
‘Compassionate leave, yes.’ Sutherland’s perfectly round head wobbled up and down and threatened to roll off. ‘I’ve read your HR file.’ He paused to find something suitable to say. ‘I really can’t begin to imagine how horrendous it’s been for you.’
Boyd nodded. How many times had he heard that bloody phrase or very similar? A year ago his therapist had told him over a Zoom session to write his own self-help essay on ‘How to Deal with the Grieving’ – to structure it like a list of do’s and don’ts. She said he should print it out and pin it to his fridge, or even pin it to the top of his all-but-abandoned Facebook page. However, like every well-intentioned plan he’d put together, it had remained an unticked item on his to-do list.
‘But,’ continued Sutherland, ‘this is probably the best way to get you stuck back into the job, don’t you think?’
‘A murder?’ Boyd managed a look of incredulity mixed with sliver of sarcasm. ‘I would have thought something less ambitious, maybe. To ease me in.’
‘Nonsense.’ Sutherland smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ve read your record. You’re a very capable detective, Boyd, and you’ve got a ton of experience. It’ll all come back to you, I’m sure. It’s like riding a bike.’
‘Riding a bike?’ Boyd sucked in a deep breath. ‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.’
Sutherland clapped his shoulder again. ‘Come on, let’s go and meet the kids.’
5
‘All right – shut up, everyone. And sit down!’
Sutherland had a voice designed for the golden era of silent movies – it was pitched a touch higher than average with a burbly tone that sounded like a quick cough into a fist would clear it.
His voice filled the CID floor. ‘Come on! Come on, people!’
The men and women of Hasting’s CID pulled up chairs and perched on desk corners as Sutherland stepped to the side and gestured at Boyd, as though he was unveiling some new monument.
‘This is our new DCI, William Boyd. Relocated down from London last week, if I’m not mistaken.’
Boyd nodded. ‘I’m learning all about walking to work and the bloody steep hills of Hastings at the moment.’
‘You’ll be back in the car with cankles like the rest of us soon enough,’ laughed the only female officer and BAME representative in the room. Boyd was used to more of a mix.
‘Watch out for all the gull shit, boss,’ said someone else. ‘That stuff literally rains down from those bastards here.’ There were murmurs of agreement. It seemed that Hastings had its own unique public order issues for the police to deal with.
‘I’m sure you lot have heard the rumour that’s linked to this yacht case.’
‘Surely it’s a Border Force case,’ said one of the detectives. The floor filled with a collective moan and one or two pantomime boos.
‘Yes, well, Chief Super has made the call that it’s staying with us,’ Sutherland said firmly, ‘so some of you lucky boys and girls are going to be pulled onto this one.’
The room filled with another moan, and Sutherland flapped his hands like a supply teacher to quieten them. ‘That’s enough. The Chief Super has pronounced on the matter, so it is what it is.’
He turned to Boyd. ‘DCI Boyd, you’re SIO and I’ve already picked out a small team for you since, well… you don’t know this lot of idiots from Adam.’
‘Thanks,’ said Boyd, looking at the officers before him.
‘Don’t worry. They’re all good ’uns.’
Boyd nodded. ‘Sure they are, sir.’
‘Right. DS Minter, DC Warren, DC O’Neal and DC Okeke are this week’s lucky winners on Strictly Come Grafting.’
The CID room erupted with a mixture of cheers and jeers, whistles and groans, as four of the eighteen strangers in front of Boyd got up. One of them was the ‘token’ officer. While the other three puffed wearily with resigned indifference, she was beaming with delight.
Boyd was given a temporary fish-bowl office opposite the Incident Room, as the larger room was being tidied after a previous case. The one-on-one interviews with his small team were punctuated by the sounds of doors creaking open and slamming shut as boxes of files, office stationery and the usual office crap were carried out and past his window.
