Dangerous Cargo Read online

  ‘Wasn’t there anything in their papers about it?’ she asked keenly.

  ‘No.’ It wasn’t a lie because he didn’t know. There might have been but he hadn’t looked at them, not even after their death. He’d given instructions for all the paperwork on the boat and in their house to be packed up and despatched to the bank safe deposit in London, where they still languished. The rest of his parents’ belongings had been sold or given away. He hadn’t even overseen that but had left it to his parents’ executor, their solicitor, Michael Colmead.

  She was about to say something more but was prevented by the arrival of their bacon sandwiches. She tucked into hers with relish. Marvik glanced up as the café bell rang and a man in his mid-fifties wearing a sailing jacket entered with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He took a seat at the far table near the counter.

  ‘Have you ever been back to where they died?’ she asked him shyly.

  Only to deter, apprehend and kill pirates, he felt like saying. In the Marines he, along with Strathen, had assisted the Singapore government on missions and on covert assignments targeting and bringing down pirates, many of whom were associated with organized criminal gangs. The region had been declared a high-risk war area. Things had improved recently but pirate attacks still occurred. They had probably done so in 1997 when his parents had dived there, but there had been no evidence pirates had bothered them and Davington hadn’t reported any disturbances. Besides, seventeen years ago piracy hadn’t been such a problem as now. A huge amount of world trade passed through the Straits. The thoughts of Singapore brought his mind back to Bradley Pulford.

  He said, ‘I don’t follow in my parents’ footsteps.’

  She looked up with sympathy in her eyes. ‘It must be painful for you. At least you know what happened to yours,’ she said sadly rather than with any bitterness. He liked her eyes and her soft, gentle manner.

  ‘Tell me about your father?’ he said, glad at last to get down to the real business of why he was here and to push thoughts of his parents to the back of his mind.

  ‘He was reported missing in January 1979 when my mother was eleven weeks pregnant with me.’

  That made her thirty-six. Could she be Pulford’s child? A daughter he had left behind in 1979 before showing up in Swanage and charming his way into Stacey Killbeck’s bed in 1989? Had Sarah come here in search of her stepbrother?

  ‘That’s tough,’ he said.

  ‘It was on my mother. She died seventeen years ago. My father’s disappearance is the reason why I became so keen on marine archaeology. I used to walk this coast as a child with my mother who never gave up hope that he’d return. This is where she thought he had disappeared.’

  Marvik’s interested deepened.

  ‘We’d stare at the sea and I’d imagine him coming out of it, and that led to a curiosity about what was under it and the lives it had claimed and whether the artefacts that had gone down with the people in the ships that had been wrecked could tell me something about them as individuals … certainly about their lives. It’s like trying to piece together the puzzle of someone’s life.’

  ‘And you’ve tried to piece together the puzzle of your father’s?’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t make any sense.’ She chewed her sandwich. Marvik said nothing but ate. The smell of toast and bacon filled the air. The café was getting hot and a film of steam was beginning to form in the corners of the window. The café bell rang again and a dark-haired, stocky man in his mid-forties entered. He glanced at them. His face registered no reaction and he took a table in the centre of the café and withdrew his phone. Marvik swallowed his coffee, his eyes swept the bay. A few boats were anchored up. There didn’t seem to be any activity on them. Nothing seemed out of order. A woman with a dog stopped to talk to a man in his seventies in a sailing jacket, who leaned down and ruffled the dog’s fur, smiling; a jogger ran past them and the seagulls swooped and dipped on to the sandy beach. Marvik turned his attention back to Sarah Redburn as she continued.

  ‘The official report said that he’d come to the Jurassic Coast fossil hunting and must have got caught out by the tide and drowned. He told a friend, Gordon Freynsham, that it was where he was heading, but as far as my mother knew my father had never expressed any interest in fossils. It was Gordon Freynsham’s passion, though. He was a geology student at the polytechnic in Southampton – it’s now the Solent University. My father, Oscar, was president of the student union with a degree in history and politics; he was twenty-six when he went missing. Mr Freynsham’s a renowned fossil dealer now. He trades off the coast of Lyme Regis but last year he fronted a television series on fossil hunting. You might have seen it if you’re into that kind of thing.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Well, it was a hit. They’re making another series with him presenting it.’

  ‘The Jurassic Coast is a hell of a stretch to check – it covers ninety-five miles from East Devon to Dorset. What made your mother believe he came here?’

  ‘They lived in Southampton, and Oscar was studying there so it would have been much easier and closer for him to get to this part of the coast rather than the Devon end of it. I’ve spoken to Gordon Freynsham but he says he has no idea where Oscar was going and I don’t think the police really bothered to look. They thought that he’d left mum because she was pregnant, which of course is a possibility, but according to what she told me and what I’ve discovered about him from my own research, it doesn’t sound right.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked keenly.

  ‘Because of the timing. He was very into politics and he disappeared in the middle of industrial action, something that I find difficult to believe, given how radical he was. He was always involved in demos and protests.’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘You name it, he’d protest it: rising rents, racism, war, capitalism and anything that smacked of it, gay rights, not to mention the protests against the government. The usual stuff that was happening in the seventies: dock strikes, miners’ strike, firefighters’ strike. But it was during the Winter of Discontent in 1978 and 1979 under James Callaghan’s Labour government when Oscar was on the picket line at Southampton docks waving banners in support of the dock strike that he went missing. And from what I’ve learned of him I don’t think he’d have taken a day off to go fossil hunting.’

  It didn’t sound true to Marvik either. ‘What was the strike over?’

  ‘The Labour government had agreements with the Trade Union Congress to restrict pay rises in an attempt to control rising inflation but these agreements ended in July 1978. The government wanted to restrict pay rises to five per cent but the TUC wasn’t having it. The government threatened to impose sanctions on government contractors who broke it. Ford motor car workers were the first to strike in October and the company conceded and awarded a seventeen per cent pay rise.’

  ‘Which kick-started the others.’

  ‘Yes. This included lorry drivers, who not only disrupted fuel supplies but also picketed major ports to prevent the import of goods. The dock workers came out in support. It escalated with more workers going on strike on the twenty-second of January, including nurses, ambulance drivers and refuse collectors. Grave diggers went on strike in Liverpool and Manchester for a fortnight. Liverpool City Council had to hire a warehouse to store the unburied corpses. Makes the mind boggle, doesn’t it?’ She smiled. He returned it and swallowed his coffee.

  ‘The lorry drivers got a twenty per cent pay rise at the end of January and by then Oscar had gone missing. The last time anyone saw him was on the twenty-first of January. It was the day before national industrial action and also bitterly cold, so why did he take a day off from his protests?’

  ‘Perhaps he’d got fed up with being cold.’

  ‘Then he’d have stayed in or gone down the pub, not trekked out along the coast,’ she said with vigour. She pushed away her empty plate and sat forward with an eager expression on her fair face.

  ‘My mother
firmly believed he’d had an accident and his body must have been washed out to sea. Every time a body was discovered on the shore along the south coast and on the Isle of Wight it was examined to see if it was Oscar but there was no routine DNA testing in 1979, only dental records to compare and none of the bodies matched Oscar’s. As time went on the police stopped comparing unknown remains with records of my father. It was too long for them to be his anyway. There wouldn’t have been anything of him left.’

  ‘But you have a new lead.’

  She swallowed her coffee and studied him uncertainly. Perhaps she wasn’t sure how much to tell him. After a moment though her expression cleared and she continued, ‘On the twenty-fourth of January a man contacted me claiming to know something about Oscar’s disappearance.’

  ‘Did he give a name?’ Marvik thought the timing fitted with it being Pulford, whose body had been discovered in Freshwater Bay on the twenty-eighth of January.

  ‘No. He asked to meet me. I was sceptical, as you can imagine. He could be a complete nutcase. He contacted me on my mobile phone. My website gives details of the marine and heritage consultants I occasionally work for and he said he’d phoned them and they gave out my number. I asked them if they had, and they said nobody could remember doing so but they must have done. He said that he knew about Oscar being president of the students’ union and told me that after obtaining his degree in history and politics he’d stayed on to do another degree in sociology, and that my mother’s name was Linda – she was a nurse and that she had been pregnant with me when Oscar disappeared. He sounded genuine but just to be on the safe side I agreed to meet him in a public place. In a coffee shop in Southampton. He didn’t show. I rang the number he’d called me on but there was no answer and no voicemail. I was disappointed and angry and tried to forget it but it nagged away at me. If it was a hoax it was a sick one and why bother? The more I thought of it the more I considered it to be genuine and either he’d got cold feet or he’d had an accident and had been unable to get a message to me. He could have died.’

  Or been killed, Marvik added silently.

  ‘I went to the police. They said it was probably a cruel joke. But I said the file was still open on Oscar’s disappearance and this was new information so surely they should note it, although I realized there was little, if anything, they could do about it. I asked them to trace the telephone number. They said they would but not very enthusiastically – after all, what is one missing person from 1979 when they have a whole load of recent crimes to handle? I didn’t expect to hear from them again but they contacted me soon afterwards to say it had been made from a pay phone at Ocean Village, Southampton. That didn’t get me any further forward. I was working on a project at Eastbourne, along the coast in East Sussex, but in my spare time I thought I’d do some checking.’ She glanced down and stared into her almost empty coffee cup.

  And being an archaeologist, Marvik thought she’d be good at research and digging out facts. She’d also have the patience for it.

  He said, ‘You thought this man could be your father.’

  She looked up. ‘It was possible. I decided to check out the men who had died in the period from the day he called me to a week later. I realized he could have had an accident and be seriously ill, unable to communicate, but I thought I’d start with the obvious assumption first. I didn’t expect anything but it felt that at least I was trying to do something. I started with the premise that either this man was my father or he had known my father so he would be aged between say fifty and sixty. I researched the deaths of men in that age range for the period from the twenty-fourth to the thirty-first of January in or near Southampton. There weren’t many so I rapidly managed to eliminate them. None had any connection with the Southampton Polytechnic of 1979 or the strikes, and none of their relatives claimed to know of an Oscar Redburn.’

  Marvik thought she ought to meet Strathen. He’d be impressed by her methods.

  ‘Then I came across reports in the newspaper archives of a man’s body washed up on the Isle of Wight on the twenty-eighth of January who hadn’t been identified. I got a copy of the coroner’s report which said that he had been in the sea for three to four days and that he was aged approximately mid- to late fifties. There was no record of his identity in the report so I asked the police if he could have been the man I had been due to meet. They told me his name was Bradley Pulford and his family had been traced. His cause of death remained undetermined but it was either an accident or suicide. His relatives lived in Swanage. They wouldn’t give out the address. I arrived yesterday, too late for the undertakers or the crematorium office to be open so I contacted the local vicars and priests just in case there had been a funeral service, and I found the vicar who had held it on Friday. All he could tell me was that Bradley Pulford had worked as a fisherman with a family called Killbeck, and they weren’t churchgoers. He didn’t have an address for them. I looked them up in the phone directory but they’re not listed and I couldn’t find anything about them on the Internet, except for someone called Jensen Killbeck from Swanage on one of the social networks but no address for him. I asked the guest-house proprietor but she didn’t know them, so I came down to the bay to find a fishing boat and hopefully the owners of it.’

  He could tell her where Matthew Killbeck lived but he only had her word that what she was telling him was the truth. He needed Strathen to check her out first and to get some details on Oscar Redburn. He also needed to get to the church in Steepleridge to see if Irene Templeton could tell him more about the headstone of the Bradley Pulford buried there in 1959.

  ‘What will you do now?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll stick around and see if they show up at the fishing boat or if anyone else does who might be able to tell me where I can find them. If they don’t then tomorrow I’ll call on the undertakers and get an address. I’m hoping to be able to speak to one or a couple of the family before I leave for Gibraltar in two days. I’m undertaking an exploration there. It would be good to know one way or another if Bradley Pulford had any connection with Oscar.’

  Marvik wondered if the undertaker would tell her about his appearance at the funeral and his request for Matthew Killbeck’s address, but by then he hoped to have told her himself and there would be no need for her to call on the undertakers. He’d be interested to see Matthew Killbeck’s reaction to her.

  ‘Have you any information on Bradley Pulford?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I haven’t had time to do any research on him.’

  And even if she had he wondered if she would have discovered what Strathen had.

  The man reading his newspaper rose and paid his bill. Marvik’s eyes swivelled to the bay. Everything looked fine. No sign of any mad motorbike rider. It was time he was moving and time he was telling Strathen all this. As though sensing he was ready to leave she plucked her jacket from the back of the chair, saying, ‘I’d better go. They might be at the fishing boat.’

  He paid the bill, ignoring her protest to contribute her share. Outside, she said slightly nervously, ‘There’s something else I’d like to talk to you about.’

  He could see that it concerned his parents. ‘I’ve got a couple of things to do but perhaps we can get together later. Where are you staying?’

  Eagerly, she said, ‘I’ll give you my mobile number.’

  They exchanged numbers. Marvik said he’d call her but he wasn’t sure when. She looked pleased and relieved at his suggestion. She headed back in the direction of the lifeboat while he made for the town and the nearest taxi office, mentally replaying their conversation. There were several things that didn’t add up, such as why hadn’t she told the police she thought she might be Pulford’s daughter and asked for her DNA to be compared with the body found on the Isle of Wight? Perhaps she had, only she wasn’t ready to tell him that yet. She’d said that she’d discovered the newspaper article about Pulford’s body being washed up on the beach – was that the truth? He wasn’t certain. And why had she been r
eluctant to tell him where she was staying? Was she and her story for real or was she a plant primed to contact him to discover what he knew? All that stuff about being a marine archaeologist could be bullshit. All someone had to do was check out his name and trace it back to his parents and their profession and do some research. Or perhaps she’d been reticent to reveal where she was staying because she didn’t completely trust him despite his parentage.

  While waiting for a taxi to become available he called Strathen from outside the office and relayed what had happened.

  ‘I’ll get what I can on her and on Oscar Redburn,’ Strathen said.

  In the taxi on the way to Steepleridge, Marvik considered the fact that she was for real. What would happen if she located one of the Killbecks? He didn’t much care for the thought because someone had tried to kill him after he’d been enquiring about Pulford and now she was doing the same. Was she in danger? Perhaps. And perhaps he should have stayed with her. He considered turning back but the traffic had ground to a halt. The driver radioed through to see what the problem was: an accident ahead just outside Corfe Castle. After consulting his Ordnance Survey map, Marvik paid off the driver. He’d walk the rest of the way. It was just under four miles across country from Corfe Castle and they were half a mile outside that village with its historic ruined castle perched on the knoll.