A Killing Coast dah-7 Read online

  A Killing Coast

  ( DI Andy Horton - 7 )

  Pauline Rowson

  Pauline Rowson

  A Killing Coast

  ONE

  Monday

  ‘It’s good of you to see me, sir, and so early.’ Andy Horton followed the stooping silver-haired man through a small lobby into a bright and sunny lounge that overlooked the East Solent.

  ‘Not at all, Inspector. And it’s not early for me. Like many older people I don’t sleep very well, and it makes a nice change to have company, whatever the hour. Oh, I know I’ve got all the company I need here,’ Adrian Stanley tossed over his shoulder, as though reading Horton’s mind. ‘These retirement apartments are full of people like me, widowers, and widows, but sometimes it’s nice to see a younger face. Coffee? Or would you prefer something stronger? You’re off duty I take it,’ he added, eyeing Horton’s leather biker jacket. ‘Not that that made much difference in my day. Policing was very different in the seventies and eighties before the politically correct brigade hijacked it.’

  ‘Coffee, black, no sugar would be great,’ Horton said smiling, thinking if Adrian Stanley drank alcohol at this time in the morning then he had a serious problem. There were no signs of the elderly man being an alcoholic though, quite the contrary; his lined face boasted a healthy complexion and his grey eyes were bright and keen for a man in his seventies. The small apartment smelt and looked clean.

  Stanley stepped into the modern kitchen and flicked on the kettle. ‘You can take your jacket off if you like. It is rather hot in here.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Horton eased off the Harley Davidson jacket taking a quick glance around the neat lounge with three easy armchairs, a coffee table in front of a fireplace, television, DVD, modern music system, and a range of family photographs on the mantelpiece of young children with their parents and grandfather. There were more of the same on a wall unit and here Horton saw a slender smiling woman beside Adrian Stanley in several photographs who, he assumed, was the late Mrs Stanley.

  Horton draped his jacket over one of the two chairs beside a drop-leaf oak table noting the powerful binoculars on it, before turning towards the window. Stanley was correct; the room was hot despite the fact that the April sun had not yet gained full height or strength, but it was a bright morning and the apartment faced south. It was also on the top floor of the four storey modern building and the central heating was full on.

  ‘You’ve certainly got a lovely view, sir,’ Horton said gazing across the sparkling blue of the Solent at a handful of yachts heading into the harbour of Cowes on the Isle of Wight. He would like to have been out there himself, sailing his new yacht, Mystery Lady, but since buying it a fortnight ago he’d barely had the chance. And it was looking doubtful he’d get the opportunity to sail her this week. Not only was his stretched, under-resourced CID department experiencing a mini crime wave, but a new superyacht had moored up at Oyster Quays on Sunday, and that would act like a magnet to every toerag criminal for miles around. Horton had left a message for DC Walters to urgently check its security this morning. The last thing he needed was a high-profile robbery on his patch. He would have preferred to send Cantelli, but the sergeant would throw up the moment he got on the water and Horton didn’t think the owner — a man called Russell Glenn, whom Horton had never heard of — would appreciate that on his nice shiny new yacht.

  ‘It’s one of the reasons I chose to live here,’ Stanley called out from the kitchen, bringing Horton back to the matter in hand, which had nothing to do with his job. He was here on a personal matter, hence the early visit before officially being on duty. His heart beat a little faster at the thought that the former PC might have information that could help him trace his mother who had walked out of their council tower block one chilly November morning in 1978, consigning Horton to years of anguish and torment in a succession of children’s homes. And on Friday morning he had an appointment with the social services department to view the case file that had been compiled on him while he’d been in care. He knew it would make grim reading and bring back painful memories, which was why he’d never requested access to it before. But events over recent months had forced him to confront the past, and now that he had embarked on this journey it appeared he was powerless to stop. His gut tightened at the thought that what he might eventually discover could be worse than he anticipated. But time to reflect on that later.

  Stanley was saying, ‘I told my son, Robin, that if I had to be cooped up in a flat then I wanted the illusion of space, which that view gives me. And there’s always something to see.’

  Hence the binoculars, thought Horton.

  ‘You can look through them if you wish,’ Stanley called out, again demonstrating that uncanny knack of reading Horton’s mind. Horton wasn’t sure he liked that but he guessed there were some things you never lost no matter how long out of the job.

  He picked up the binoculars and quickly focused them in, surveying the Solent. It was, as usual, bustling with container ships, tankers, pleasure craft and fishing boats.

  ‘With a view like this, sir, and your background on the force we could do with your help on Project Neptune,’ Horton called over his shoulder.

  ‘And what’s that when it’s at home? Diving for deep-sea treasure on sunken wrecks?’

  ‘Not so dangerous and not so much fun,’ Horton smiled. ‘It’s the brain child of our new Chief Constable, Paul Meredew. We’ve stepped up security because the American submarine, USS Boise, is due to visit Portsmouth in two months’ time. We’ve been recruiting residents, fishermen, sailors and boat owners to report anything suspicious.’ Horton zoomed in on a shapely dark-haired woman in her late twenties throwing a ball to a black mongrel dog on the beach below them, nice figure; the girl not the dog. She stopped to talk to a man in his forties carrying a dog lead.

  ‘I read about that in the newspaper,’ Stanley came up behind Horton.

  Reluctantly Horton removed his gaze from the good-looking woman, who was ruffling the dog’s fur in a way that made Horton very jealous of the mongrel, and swung the glasses on the man she’d been talking to who was now walking past someone launching a canoe from the public slipway. A jogger with his iPod plugged into his ears swerved around them. Finding nothing of interest in the parked cars on the promenade — two saloon cars and a muddy blue van — Horton lowered the binoculars on to the table and took the mug Stanley was holding out for him.

  Stanley said, ‘Nobody wants a repeat of what happened in Port Aden in 2000, and there’s plenty of opportunity to launch an attack from a small vessel in the Solent or Portsmouth Harbour, similar to that attack on the USS Cole. It killed seventeen American sailors. Al-Qaeda, wasn’t it?’

  Horton nodded. ‘Hence Project Neptune.’ And Horton’s boss, DCI Lorraine Bliss, had been appointed to lead the team overseeing it. It was Project Neptune that had rescued Horton from being shunted out of CID, as Bliss had threatened, and which had also reprieved DC Walters from being banished to the nether regions of the force. Bliss thought Walters idle and incompetent, and him a maverick cop because he didn’t believe that you could solve cases by sitting behind a desk and shuffling endless bits of paper around as Bliss did. Thankfully, she had too much to occupy her time now to worry about breaking in a new detective inspector and detective constable. Working with top brass from the Ministry of Defence police, naval security, the Intelligence Directorate and private maritime intelligence company, Triton, Bliss saw Project Neptune as a step upwards and onwards. Horton sincerely hoped the latter would be sooner rather than later. She was also paranoid that something could go wrong, which meant a hundred missives a day cascading into his email, the latest of which was despatching him to the Isle of Wight on the poli
ce launch in about an hour’s time to interview an elderly man who had reported seeing a mysterious light at sea. Normally Horton would have been delighted to be at sea but his desk was buckling under the weight of bureaucratic claptrap and unsolved crimes. Bliss was squawking for results and despite putting in extra unpaid overtime at the weekend he hadn’t even made a small dent in it. Taking a trip to the Isle of Wight when a more junior officer on the Island could easily have dealt with it was time he could ill afford. But no doubt Bliss was making a point to those higher up. And time could be what he was wasting here, he thought, as Stanley gestured him into an easy chair in front of the modern electric fire.

  ‘I’d be only too glad to help with Project Neptune,’ Stanley said, settling himself opposite. ‘It would give me a reason for peering through the binoculars without being accused of being a peeping Tom. The things people get up to you’d be surprised, or rather you would if you weren’t a copper.’ He put his coffee on a coaster strategically positioned on the table between them and eyed Horton curiously. ‘But that’s not why you’re here. You said on the phone that you’d like to talk to me about a missing person case from 1978. You mean Jennifer Horton, don’t you?’

  Horton’s heart jolted at the sound of his mother’s name. He so seldom heard it spoken because only a handful of people knew about her and the fact she’d abandoned him when he was ten. Catherine, his estranged wife, was one, along with Sergeant Cantelli who was the closest friend he had in a lifetime spent shutting people out for fear of being hurt. Detective Superintendent Steve Uckfield, now head of the Major Crime Unit, and once a close friend was another. Their relationship had been tested over the last year when Uckfield had believed him capable of both rape and murder, the former of which had cost Horton his marriage despite him being exonerated and had wrecked his chances of raising his young daughter, Emma, who had now been banished to a boarding school by Catherine. Admittedly it was a good one and she’d wanted to go. He’d also agreed, but he couldn’t help feeling anxious that she might be experiencing the same loneliness he had felt at his mother’s desertion.

  ‘You’re the little boy she left behind,’ Stanley said, his sharp grey eyes studying Horton carefully.

  It hadn’t been difficult for Stanley to put two and two together. Horton steeled himself. ‘Do you remember the case, sir?’ he asked evenly, pushing away the painful memories of his lonely and angry childhood, trying to sound as if he didn’t care. He was also trying not to raise his hopes that Stanley might be able to tell him something that would help him discover what had happened to Jennifer. When Stanley remained silent, Horton prompted, ‘You filed the missing person’s report and spoke to Jennifer’s neighbour, Mrs Cobden, at Jensen House. Jennifer was last seen leaving the flat at about one o’clock on the thirtieth of November 1978 wearing her best clothes and make-up, and was in good spirits. No one knows what happened to her next or where she was going, only that she didn’t turn up for work that evening at the casino. I wondered if there was anything that stuck in your mind, anything different or unusual that might help me to trace her movements.’

  Horton’s mind flashed back. It hadn’t been the first time he’d been left alone at night. Often he’d come home from school, open the letterbox and pull out a piece of string with the key attached on the end, get himself a drink from the fridge and a chunk of bread and jam, sit in front of the television and go to bed alone. But he’d always wake up to find his mother there. Except on the first of December she hadn’t been. He felt the ache in the pit of his stomach as the memory haunted him.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Stanley said frowning.

  But Horton wasn’t going to accept that. ‘Can you recall anything being mentioned about Jennifer’s parents? Did anyone question them?’ Horton knew the answer but he wanted to see just how much Stanley had forgotten.

  ‘They were dead.’

  Horton saw a slight narrowing of Stanley’s eyes. The ex-copper knew Horton was testing him. Maybe Stanley could have gone higher in the ranks but perhaps, like Cantelli, he’d been happy to stay a sergeant. From what Horton had read about him, Stanley had also been brave and had earned himself the rare award of the Queen’s Gallantry Medal in 1980 when he and another officer had gone in pursuit of armed robbers and had come under intense fire.

  He said, ‘Do you know how Jennifer’s parents died and when?’

  ‘No, but you can easily check that yourself, if you haven’t already done so.’

  Horton hadn’t. He didn’t have their death certificates but he could obtain copies. And he no longer had a copy of his mother’s birth certificate, which, along with the only photograph he’d had of her, had gone up in flames when his previous yacht, Nutmeg, had been torched by a killer trying to scare him into dropping an investigation. It had only served to have the opposite effect. Since then he had run a check through the General Register Office but only for a record of Jennifer’s death. He hadn’t found it. That didn’t mean that she wasn’t dead though. Her body might never have been discovered; she might have died in another country. Equally she might have assumed another identity. Or her body could be lying in a mortuary somewhere unidentified, female unknown. If he allowed his DNA to be run through the database he’d have an answer to the last question but that would mean explaining why, and he wasn’t prepared to do that, yet.

  He said, ‘Why weren’t her friends questioned?’

  ‘I spoke to the woman next door, and Jennifer’s boss, George Warner. He owned a string of amusement arcades, nightclubs and the casino at Southsea where Jennifer worked. He said she was a bubbly, good-looking woman and had started working for him early in 1977.’

  And that tied with what Horton already knew.

  Stanley frowned in recollection of the case. ‘There was another woman I seem to remember who said that Jennifer was seeing a man.’

  ‘Irene Ebury. She’s dead.’ Horton had been called to an investigation in a nursing home in January and had discovered that Irene Ebury had been a resident there, and that her belongings had mysteriously gone missing. It had brought him into contact with Detective Chief Superintendent Sawyer, Head of the Intelligence Directorate, and the knowledge that Sawyer was interested in Jennifer’s disappearance because he believed she could have been linked to a master criminal the Intelligence Directorate called Zeus. Was that the man Jennifer had run away with? Sawyer seemed to think so and he wanted to enlist Horton’s help in finding him. But Horton had declined for fear of putting Emma’s life in danger, though now that Emma was at Northover School Horton hoped she was safe from nutters and villains like this Zeus was reputed to be. By visiting Stanley, Horton knew he had publicly declared his interest in finding his mother and he wondered how long it would take for the lean, silver-haired chief superintendent to approach him. Not long was his guess.

  He brought his mind back to George Warner and the casino where his mother had worked. The casino was now flats and George Warner and his empire long since gone. Trying to track down and speak to anyone who might have worked there and who would remember Jennifer, or know anything about this man she might have associated with, would take for ever and probably result in zilch. It was a dead end.

  Stanley said, ‘I’m sorry, Inspector, but there’s not much I can tell you, and it’s all on file. No one hinted at foul play.’

  ‘Did you keep any of your notebooks where you might have jotted down something?’

  ‘No.’

  Horton wasn’t sure if he believed him. It sounded like the truth and Stanley maintained eye contact, but then he had been a copper. ‘What was the word on the street, the gossip about her and her disappearance? There must have been some.’ Horton could hear the desperation in his voice and hated himself for it. When Stanley looked uncomfortable Horton wished he hadn’t asked. He braced himself to hear what others had already told him over the years.

  ‘There wasn’t much. She probably got bored with being trapped inside a poky flat with a kid and wanted a good time, but
that was only rumour.’

  ‘What do you think happened to her?’

  ‘It could have been true.’

  Horton eyed the former policeman closely and saw only his concerned expression, and yet he felt there was something more. Perhaps Stanley was being economical with the truth to spare his feelings. Horton knew there had been two men in his mother’s life in 1977 and that neither of them had been upstanding citizens, in fact, quite the opposite; villains to the core, and both were now dead. Jennifer’s track record of choosing lovers wasn’t exactly healthy, which made Horton consider briefly who his father was. But that was a road he certainly didn’t want to travel down.

  He said, ‘Do you know what happened to her belongings?’

  But Stanley shook his head.

  ‘You went into the flat I take it?’

  Horton thought Stanley looked uneasy. ‘No. I spoke to the neighbour, to George Warner and a couple of his staff, and that was it.’

  Horton wasn’t convinced. Sensing this Stanley quickly added, ‘I was a PC, told to talk to anyone who knew Jennifer Horton, and they were the only people I came up with. She didn’t seem to have any friends outside work.’

  There was something in Stanley’s tone, in his manner and posture, that made Horton doubt this neatly wrapped excuse. He sensed there was more to it. Had Stanley or anyone really looked for Jennifer’s friends? It seemed not to him. The more questions Horton asked the more he seemed to generate and the fewer answers he got.

  ‘Why weren’t any fingerprints taken?’ If they had been then they certainly weren’t on the file.

  Stanley shrugged. ‘No idea. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.’

  Horton decided not to press him. For now. He rose and handed Stanley a business card. ‘If you remember anything would you give me a call?’

  Stanley took the card with a sense of relief, Horton thought. After a moment Stanley said, ‘I hope you find out what happened to her.’