Lost Voyage Page 6

  ‘Or had them in his flat.’

  ‘Walked nearly seven miles to the Birling Gap, carrying these weights, unless he owns a car?’

  ‘He doesn’t and he doesn’t have a driver’s licence.’

  ‘So he walks, and then with these weights stuffed down his trousers—’

  ‘In the pockets of his jacket.’

  ‘Throws himself off a cliff.’

  ‘People do strange things when desperate, and suicidal people aren’t thinking rationally.’

  ‘Like you believe that,’ scoffed Marvik. ‘Yardly’s body was put there after low tide in the early hours of this morning or maybe even late last night because it doesn’t sound like the Gavin Yardly Helen described. I doubt he’d even know what a weight looked like.’ But someone did – his killer.

  ‘She mentioned him, then.’

  ‘Only because I asked her about him.’ Marvik studied Crowder closely. How much did he know? Probably a great deal more than he would reveal. Marvik knew the rules. His role was to start from scratch with only basic information. To go in, start asking questions, stir things up, take risks and provoke the killer into making mistakes, including sometimes making attempts on his life. One such attempt in March, though, hadn’t been linked to the mission he’d been on, or so Crowder claimed, but to his parents’ deaths at sea and his father’s notebook. Marvik’s meeting with Bell from the solicitors’ office yesterday morning now seemed like a lifetime ago.

  He said, ‘Bradshaw tried it on with Helen on board his boat on Monday night. She told him where to get off and left. As she was heading back for the marina she overheard two men on board another boat talking about taking out a target. That target could have been Bradshaw.’

  ‘It was more likely to have been Gavin Yardly.’

  Marvik was taken aback. ‘Why Yardly?’ His interest deepened.

  ‘Bloodstained clothes and trainers have been discovered in his flat. The blood will probably match Bradshaw’s. That doesn’t mean he killed Bradshaw.’ Crowder hastily added, ‘The killer could have worn Yardly’s clothes and shoes to carry out the attack.’

  ‘And then deliberately walked around the body, stood in the blood that spurted from the artery and wiped the weapon he used on Yardly’s clothes. Has it been found?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Marvik thought this was no amateur.

  ‘Have they found a phone on Gavin’s body?’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have one or that Helen didn’t contact him.’

  ‘She didn’t.’ But Marvik was beginning to wonder if, when the police obtained Yardly’s mobile phone records, it would show a phone number that could be linked to Helen. Maybe one from a call box close to the property or at the marina. Not that that would prove she was the caller.

  Crowder was saying, ‘The discovery of Gavin’s body and his identity will be released to the media once the East Sussex police have the autopsy findings and can locate a next of kin, which might prove difficult because, very much like Helen Shannon, Gavin has no family. They will pursue the theory that Yardly, either alone or aided and abetted by Helen, killed Bradshaw. Yardly, unable to live with what he had done, committed suicide and Helen has gone on the run from the police.’

  ‘While in fact Gavin Yardly was killed and Helen and Yardly were set up for Bradshaw’s murder.’ Thank God Helen had had the sense to call him.

  ‘Yes. Because what the police don’t know is that, shortly before his death, Yardly sent a letter to GCHQ.’

  The postage stamp! Writing to the Government’s Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham was hardly normal practice unless he had been applying for a job. And perhaps that was what Gavin Yardly had been doing in the library – job hunting. GCHQ worked with MI5 and MI6 and its American equivalent, the National Security Agency, to combat terrorism, drug trafficking and other serious organized crime, as well as providing intelligence support to help protect the military. He and Strathen had liaised with them on many operations. But if Yardly had been job hunting then Crowder wouldn’t have been interested in him, and Yardly could hardly have been killed because of that.

  ‘Saying?’

  ‘That he’d located the Mary Jo.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘A salvage towing vessel that disappeared in the North Atlantic in July 2003.’

  ‘And he was killed for passing on this information?’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘Which means Gavin’s killer must be someone working within GCHQ or an employee who passed the information on to someone they knew on the outside.’ And Marvik knew that would be a serious breach. ‘Or someone within the intelligence services,’ he added, remembering the language Colbourne and Marwell had used.

  But Crowder suggested otherwise. ‘Not necessarily. Gavin could have told someone about this letter before or after he posted it.’

  ‘You mean Helen? He didn’t, but the killer won’t know that. She said Gavin asked her for a stamp nine days ago on a Sunday night but that she has no idea what the contents of the letter were or even that it was a letter he wanted to post.’ Helen was in even greater peril than he’d realized. ‘For Yardly to have been fitted up for Bradshaw’s death he must have been decoyed somewhere – possibly on Thursday night, the last time Helen saw him. He wasn’t at work on Friday or Monday and Helen claims he wasn’t in his flat at the weekend. For the frame-up and suicide theory to work he must have been held captive until he could be dumped on that shore. If the letter was posted a week ago last Sunday, it would have been collected from the post box on Monday and delivered to GCHQ by Wednesday latest. Why wasn’t Yardly located and questioned by GCHQ then? Or killed then?’

  ‘The letter arrived on Thursday even though it had a first-class stamp on it. There was some delay. That’s being investigated.’

  ‘You mean it might have been tampered with in the post?’

  ‘It seems unlikely but not impossible. Yardly didn’t give an address or contact number in his letter. It was treated rather dismissively, thought to be a prank.’

  Marvik raised his eyebrows disbelievingly.

  Crowder’s lips shaped a brief, knowing smile. ‘It was Saturday before it reached someone in authority who decided to look up the Mary Jo. It was a salvage tug, of no significance and nothing to say it, or the letter mentioning it, posed any threat to security. There was no need for an immediate alert. But instructions were given for Gavin Yardly to be traced. It soon became clear that he wasn’t active on the Internet, or if he was then he was very careful, very clever and very experienced.’

  ‘Which made the powers that be at GCHQ take more notice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They dug more deeply into the Mary Jo.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And found there was more to its disappearance than they’d thought.’

  Crowder unzipped the case on the table and withdrew a manila folder. He took two photographs from it. Both were of ships, one a sizeable cruise liner but clearly not a modern one, the other a salvage tug, the Mary Jo.

  ‘The cruise ship in that picture started life as the MS Lyudmila. It was a small Russian cruise ship built in Volkseigener Betrieb Mathias-Thesen-Werft shipyard in the Baltic port of Wismar – which in 1961 was in communist controlled East Germany – for the Soviet Union’s Baltic Shipping Company, and was launched in 1964. It was named after a famous Russian sniper in the Second World War and was one of many built there between 1958 and 1964. The Lyudmila was built with greater hull strength and stability than a normal vessel of this type in order to enable it to navigate through broken ice. In its heyday it took wealthy Russian tourists on Arctic cruises.’

  Crowder’s words struck a chord with Marvik. The Arctic had been his father’s area of expertise and his passion. It had been where he had met Marvik’s mother while on a joint expedition with Norway in 1989. His father, Dan Coulter, had been engaged in a study on ocean turbulence and the development of underwater robotics, his mother
on a team working on charting wrecks. Eerika had been thirteen years his junior. They’d married seven months later. Marvik thought fleetingly of the floppy disk before bringing his full concentration back to Crowder.

  ‘The Lyudmila was also built to be used as a troopship if necessary, which meant it had unusually large storage areas and was equipped with powerful deck-lifting gear able to transport armoured vehicles on board if required. We believe it was built to carry approximately eight hundred passengers, although that number was never confirmed. It’s documented that she spent some time in the 1970s on the Leningrad to Montreal route, calling in at Helsinki, Copenhagen, London, Quebec and Montreal. Records show she stopped off at Bremerhaven during the summer months. She was a popular choice for Finnish passengers sailing to London and to Canada.

  ‘As the cruise market expanded and with greater global competition, not to mention the oil crisis in 1973, things became more difficult, and in 1979 the Soviet Union decided to withdraw it from service. She sat in Murmansk shipyard for six years with everything inside her intact, including murals, ornamental structures and balustrades made of bronze and silver. The Chinese expressed an interest and in 1985 bought her but quickly resold her to a Norwegian shipping line in 1987 without even moving her. She was renamed the SS Celeste and moved to the Lloyd Werft Bremerhaven shipyard, where she underwent renovations to be put back into service, once again cruising the Arctic and the fjords. The interior was redesigned and renovated, the storage areas converted into cabins and public areas and she resumed service in 1991. She was successful for some time but again the competition began to bite. Slowly she lost the cache of being for wealthy cruises and became a bargain cruise ship. She began to develop several mechanical failures, causing delays and breakdowns, until in 2000 there was a boiler explosion on board and she was towed into St John’s, Newfoundland, where she stayed. The shipping company failed to pay the port bills and she was confiscated and sold in 2003 to a British company for salvage, Helmsley Marine, based in Newhaven, East Sussex.’

  So now they were back closer to home. Newhaven was about thirteen miles along the coastal road to the west of Eastbourne.

  Crowder continued, ‘Helmsley Marine, using their salvage vessel the Mary Jo, were to tow her from St John’s to the UK to be broken up. This was around the same time that thirteen rusting American warships were to be transported to Hartlepool for dismantling. Environmentalists, and some of the people of Hartlepool, were none too pleased about that. The obsolete American warships were labelled toxic ghost ships because of the hazardous substances on board, including asbestos, heavy diesel, mercury, lead-based paints and polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs.’

  Marvik interjected. ‘Most ships, if not all built in the 1960s contained asbestos. Had it been stripped out of the Celeste?’

  ‘No. It also contained PCBs and radioactive materials in the smoke-detection systems, but the people of Hartlepool and the media were focused on the American warships, not a cruise liner. It didn’t attract any attention. The Mary Jo never arrived in Newfoundland and has never been found. Or rather, it hadn’t until Gavin Yardly claimed to have discovered it.’

  ‘The authorities must have tried to locate it in 2003.’

  ‘They did. The Canadian Coast Guard searched for it after it failed to arrive. There was no Mayday call and they found no wreckage or bodies. It was assumed it went down in heavy seas. It had no Automatic Identification System but it did have a beacon, only no one picked it up. If it could have been tracked by satellite there might have been a chance of finding it, but there was no satellite sophisticated enough then to do so, and once the trail goes cold and it’s lost it can stay lost for ever, especially in the Arctic.’

  And Marvik knew that better than anyone, not because of his experience in the Marines but because his parents had spent their working lives looking for lost ships. He’d thought they had died trying to find one.

  ‘How did Gavin Yardly find it then?’

  ‘If he did?’

  ‘He didn’t give you the location?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not there now. We’re looking for it.’

  Marvik almost said a bit late for that but didn’t. ‘You think he lied?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  If he had, there was a reason for it. ‘What happened to the Celeste?’

  ‘It was sold on to another marine salvage company, Almbridge, also based in Newhaven, who successfully towed it out of Newfoundland and transported it to India to be dismantled, which it duly was.’

  ‘Do Helmsley Marine know that Gavin Yardly claimed to have located the Mary Jo, their missing tug?’

  ‘Both the owners of Helmsley Marine, Martin Elmsley and Duncan Helmslow, are dead. Elmsley died in 2001 and Helmslow in 2004. The company was acquired by Almbridge in 2004. No one has told Alec Royden, the owner of Almbridge, or Meryl Landguard, the widow of the salvage master on the Mary Jo, Timothy Landguard, that Gavin located it.’

  Marvik knew that was his job. To ask questions, stir things up and see what transpired. He said, ‘Did Gavin have a computer?’

  ‘He might have done but none was found in his flat. Meryl Landguard lives in a village called East Dean, which lies to the west of Eastbourne and north of the Birling Gap.’ He passed over the folder with the photographs of the vessels and Meryl Landguard’s address.

  ‘And the other crew members?’

  ‘The second officer was Simon Warrendale, the engineer was Peter Goodhead and the final crew member was Lewis Chale. Strathen will find their details in the marine accident investigation report on the Mary Jo.’

  ‘And information on Gavin?’

  ‘Aged twenty-nine, born and brought up in Hastings on the coast. His mother worked in a supermarket. She died in 1999, and his father worked on railway maintenance at nights. He died in 2006. Gavin left school at seventeen with qualifications in maths, computer science, English, music and art. He went to Hastings College to study A-levels in computer science, music technology and maths and achieved top grades. After that he drifted around, picking up jobs here and there: bar work, cleaning, labouring, some IT support work – anything he could get. He moved to Eastbourne, took that flat in Harold Road eight weeks ago and started working for Ian Bradshaw six weeks ago. He was a loner, didn’t make friends easily. A handy profile for a killer.’

  ‘Do the police know where Gavin was from Thursday?’

  ‘In his room, brooding, preparing to kill Bradshaw.’

  But Marvik didn’t believe that for an instant and neither did Crowder. Somewhere in the town a CCTV camera might have picked up Yardly’s movements, but would the police bother looking? Not if the evidence showed they had Bradshaw’s killer in the mortuary.

  He followed Crowder up on deck, but as Crowder made to disembark, Marvik said, ‘Why did Gavin Yardly write to GCHQ with this information? Why not MI5 or the National Crime Agency?’

  ‘Perhaps he was making a point.’

  And Marvik could conjecture what that was. In fact, it could be two things. Gavin had managed to penetrate the government’s satellite system and was showing how clever he was, or that someone within or connected to GCHQ had been involved in what had happened to the Mary Jo in 2003 and subsequently in the murders of Gavin Yardly and Ian Bradshaw. It was his job to discover who that was and why.

  He cast off and headed for Eastbourne. Tomorrow morning he’d start by talking to the widow of the master of the Mary Jo, Meryl Landguard.

  SIX

  Wednesday

  It was just after eight thirty when Marvik pressed his finger on the brass bell of Meryl Landguard’s house. Its metallic clang echoed inside the substantial red-brick detached property set back from the road and approached via a gravel drive. There was a white Audi parked outside the detached double garage with a child seat in the back.

  He’d taken a taxi from the railway station at Eastbourne but had asked the driver to drop him off on the main road a couple of hundred yards fro
m the turning to East Dean. The house hadn’t been difficult to locate. The village was small and many of the houses were spread out along the road that led south to the Birling Gap and the coast.

  Last night, on arrival at the marina, he’d called Strathen on the mission mobile, a very basic, old model very much like the one Crowder had given him. Both were functional for text and calls only, although there was also a torch and a radio. But there was no access to the Internet on either phone, and therefore no location identifier and no phone contract so no records for anyone to peruse. He’d brought Strathen up to speed with events, after which Strathen had said he would get what he could on the Mary Jo and its crew. Helen would see if she could dig up more on Gavin Yardly, which Marvik thought unlikely because if GCHQ couldn’t find it then it was doubtful Helen would, except she had known Yardly and Crowder could have been withholding information.

  Marvik’s thoughts turned to Meryl Landguard as he again rang the bell. It would be upsetting for her having the past and her husband’s tragic death dragged up, made even more traumatic by the fact there had been no body to bring back home and lay to rest. No finality about it. At least he’d had that with his parents’ deaths.

  He heard the clip of footsteps in the hall and steeled himself to meet a woman who had been grieving and wondering for years about the fate of her husband. He wasn’t sure how he envisaged her but a smartly dressed, slender woman in tight-fitting black trousers and a multicoloured top answered the door. She was in her late fifties with highlighted short blonde hair and a fair, clear and relatively unlined skin. Her eyes looked troubled as they flicked to Marvik’s scars on the right-hand side of his face. The door closed a fraction. He’d already decided to begin by seeing if Gavin Yardly had approached her with the news that he’d located her husband’s lost ship. Hastily, he said, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs Landguard, but I wondered if you could help me.’

  Thinking he was a door-to-door salesman, she said crossly, ‘I’m not interested,’ and made to close the door, but then it registered he had used her name.