The Trawlerman Read online

  ‘I’m a genius.’

  ‘Why do you want to see them? You checking I haven’t done anything illegal there too?’

  ‘I’m curious, that’s all.’ She pulled the lens cap from her pocket. ‘It looks like you found yourself a pretty good vantage point.’

  ‘Ah.’ Georgia took it from her. ‘Yes. As it happens, I did. There’s a pathway. You can’t really see it from the road. I don’t think it’s official. There’s this homeless guy who’s been living in the next field who’s obviously been using it to get to his tent.’

  ‘He’s the murder suspect.’

  ‘You’re shitting me. I was this close to him and I was going to take his photograph but he gave off these vibes . . .’

  ‘I know exactly the vibes you mean,’ said Alex. ‘I have personal experience.’

  ‘Shit, shit, shit. That photo would have been worth thousands. Where is he now?’

  ‘If only we knew. He’s vanished. I wouldn’t try to find him either. He’s a dangerous man. Show me the pictures then, will you?’

  Georgia closed the folder on the laptop, opened another one and brought up a new photo on the wall in front of them.

  Alex said, ‘Oh.’

  ‘What is it?’

  On the screen was a picture of the front door of the Younises’ house. Standing just to the left of the doorway was Jill, dressed from head to toe in a white forensic suit. She had her gloved hands to her eyes and was crying.

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  There was a male constable, also dressed in overalls, an awkward arm around Jill, presumably trying to comfort her. It was Colin Gilchrist. It was a beautiful image; the tilt of her head caught the summer light, making Jill look like a figure from one of the Raphael paintings Alex’s father had taken her to see at the National Gallery when she was young. There was a kind of desperation on Gilchrist’s face too; as if he were as concerned for her as he was for the dead people they had discovered in the house. An unexpected tenderness in the young man’s face.

  ‘I love this photograph,’ said Georgia. ‘That police officer is so beautiful. And yet there’s something so awful about it. The blood on her clothes.’

  It was unmissable; the bright red blood on Jill’s coverall. She had been the second person there. She must have tried to check whether the victims were alive or not. Alex knew just how that felt. ‘So why didn’t you sell this to the papers? You could have made a few quid.’

  Georgia closed her laptop. The wall opposite them turned black. ‘You can get out now if you want to. I don’t have to do this.’

  ‘I’m sorry. My father used to say my mouth runs ahead of me.’

  ‘You think people like me are scum, don’t you?’

  Alex didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m sick of it. I was doing a job. I was earning a living. That doesn’t mean I’m a monster.’

  ‘Would you sell it?’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  ‘What was wrong then? Not enough money.’

  ‘It is a great photo. She’s a public servant. A policewoman. People think you lot are heartless bastards. There’s nothing heartless about her.’ She opened her computer again and woke the screen up. ‘Look at her. She cares. You can tell she really bloody cares.’

  Jill’s face again; the trauma of what she had seen was written into her skin too. ‘Why didn’t you sell it, then?’

  Georgia coloured. ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘That officer’s feelings not being one of them, presumably?’

  ‘She should be proud of that. She’s a hero for going in that house. They all are.’

  Outside, gulls squawked angrily. ‘This was the Thursday, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Alex remembered seeing the coveralls in the boot of Jill’s car; the haunted look on her face. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘How did I know what?’

  ‘How did you know that there had been a murder there? It was on the evening news. This was what, two o’clock in the afternoon? Maybe earlier. Nobody had told the public.’

  Georgia shrugged. ‘I just saw some police cars. Followed them there.’ Alex watched her hands. She had this habit of circling them round each other.

  ‘Right. Just followed a police car.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Alex nodded. ‘Show me some more.’

  She clicked on. More officers coming and going. Alex recognised them all. She still thought of herself as new around here, but all these were her colleagues, people she had grown to trust. She had once been one of them.

  Because of her illness, they had taken her off Serious Crime. When she returned to work next week she would be on what they called ‘light duties’. McAdam said they had found something that wouldn’t upset her.

  Georgia clicked the space bar, scrolling through the pictures. The camera was mostly pointed at people coming and going through the front door. Sometimes she panned a little to the left, as officers seemed to be gathering at the north side of the house.

  ‘I’d found this place under some laurel bushes. It was dark there so they couldn’t see me, but I had to be still or they’d notice. So I couldn’t really get any other angles. I couldn’t move to see what they were doing.’

  A gurney appeared in shot, being dragged over the gravel. Even empty, the paramedics seemed to be making heavy work of it. Another photograph of it disappearing round the left-hand corner of the house.

  ‘That’s them moving the body. I was thinking they were going to come back right past me, but they went round the far side. There’s a stone path there so it would have been easier.’ She looked straight at Alex. ‘And yes. I would have published it if I’d got the shot. It’s public interest.’

  The camera moved again, a little to the left. And then back again for the next shots, to the house, to shadowy figures moving on the inside, where Mary Younis’s body must have been found, but it was too dark to make anything out in there.

  ‘Go back,’ said Alex abruptly.

  Georgia flicked at her keyboard.

  ‘Back again. There.’

  In her attempt to follow the paramedics she had photographed the garage, a red brick building with a tiled roof at the end of the driveway. The door was open. Alex leaned forward on the sofa.

  Twenty-one

  Alex stared at the image on the wall for a long time. From the photograph it looked as if no one had parked a car in the garage for a while. It was full of all sorts of junk. After a while, she got up off the sofa and walked closer.

  ‘Anything?’

  Alex shook her head slowly.

  ‘You wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you?’

  She turned and smiled. ‘Course not.’

  ‘I can send you that if you want.’

  ‘No charge?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, will you? I want this person found as much as you do. It’s monstrous what they did.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Alex. She reached down, picked up her cup and took a sip of coffee. ‘Yes, I would appreciate that. Let me give you my email.’ She wrote it on a page in her notebook, tore it out, handed it over.

  ‘Personal email? Shouldn’t this have a police address on it?’

  ‘It should, yes. But trust me, OK? I’m not reporting you for invasion of privacy. Give me a bit of rope as well, will you? Did you sell any of these photos at all?’

  Georgia clicked through the last few photographs. ‘Just the one of the house with the police car outside. You know. Murder house. It was in the locals, the Mail and the Telegraph.’

  ‘I hope it was worth it.’ She replaced the cup on the table. ‘Was it Colin?’ she asked, watching Georgia’s face closely.

  Barely a twitch of her face as she asked the question. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘It w
as Colin who told you about the house, wasn’t it? The officer in the photograph, standing behind the woman officer who was crying.’

  ‘No,’ Georgia said, a bit too readily. When she’d said the name Colin, she hadn’t asked who she was talking about, either.

  ‘That’s why you didn’t want to sell it, even though it was your best photograph. You didn’t want to get him into the shit because he was the one who leaked it to you.’

  ‘I don’t even know who Colin is.’ Her hands were twisting round in front of her again.

  Alex smiled. ‘OK.’ She stood. That’s what it was like around here. Everyone knew everyone else.

  Alex was almost home when she saw the two women dragging suitcases from the light-blue shack, down the boardwalk towards the road, bickering as they went.

  The honeymoon was over. They had arrived on a Thursday and they were leaving a week later. It wasn’t just trauma that affected the sense of how time passed. Without work, the days were formless. It was a surprise to realise that it had been seven days since she had first met them by the railway station cafe, on the day that Frank Hogben’s mother had appeared with a knife. Ayman and Mary’s killer had not been found. The suspect, the army veteran Robert Glass, seemed to have disappeared.

  Stones caught the suitcase’s wheels.

  ‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ complained Tina.

  ‘You have to lift it.’ Stella abandoned her case to help her.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Tina snapped.

  ‘Don’t be daft. Let me.’

  A taxi waited on the road for them, boot open. They would be sweating in this heat with those large bags. The taxi driver, head down looking at something on his phone, made no attempt to help them.

  Alex started to trot over towards the newly-weds. ‘Hey,’ she called out.

  They were too busy struggling with the cases to hear her and were already almost at the road when she reached them. ‘You’re going?’

  ‘Back to normality.’ Stella hefted her purple plastic suitcase into the boot. ‘Worst luck.’

  ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Next time I get married I’ll go to Barcelona,’ said Tina.

  ‘Shut up, Tina. We loved it. Best time ever. We said Zoë can come and stay with us in Folkestone any time. Hope that’s all right?’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘She’s magic.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘She actually is.’

  Tina’s case was aluminium. Alex watched her as she lifted it, determined to do it on her own to prove a point to Stella, tried to swing it up as high as the boot, and smashed it instead into the back of the car. Her eyes went wide as she realised she had knocked a chip out of the paintwork.

  The taxi driver, who had ignored them until now, was out of the car in a second. ‘What the bloody hell have you done?’

  Stella and Tina looked at each other.

  ‘Look at it, you fucking idiot.’

  Stella seemed to grow in size. ‘Don’t you dare speak to my wife like that.’

  The man rolled his eyes. ‘Two hundred pounds,’ he said.

  ‘If you’d got off your fat arse,’ Stella said, her face in his, ‘this would never have happened.’

  The man seemed to consider the situation. ‘Fifty pounds,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s call another taxi,’ said Stella.

  The taxi driver picked up the case and threw it into the boot. ‘Get in.’

  Stella turned and put her arms around Tina. ‘See? It’s OK,’ she said soothingly. ‘It’s all OK.’

  Alex noticed that Tina was rigid; as if her muscles were all working at once to hold her in place. She was staring straight ahead of her, eyes wide.

  Stella’s voice was low and quiet. ‘Are you OK to catch this taxi, or do you need to wait for another one?’

  Tina said nothing; it was as if she had somehow become incapable of any thought.

  ‘Come on,’ mumbled the driver. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Ssh.’ A gentle noise, like one would make to calm a child. Alex realised she was watching Stella deal with something that had happened more than once.

  They stood in strange silence for another minute, Stella stroking Tina’s hair, the taxi driver standing impatiently beside them, until Tina finally seemed to unwind. She nodded and said, ‘Let’s go in this car.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll be OK.’ Stella opened the car’s rear door and Tina got in. Walking round to the other side of the car Stella paused in front of Alex, leaned forward and kissed her gently on the cheek. ‘Look after yourself, copper. You look bloody rough.’

  It had been a strange scene. Afterwards, Alex replayed it, over and over in her head, trying to make sense of it.

  Twenty-two

  Further down the track, next to the Snack Shack, Curly was hauling fish boxes into the back of his Ford Ranger pickup. The smell was heavy in the thick summer air.

  Alex walked across the stones to his old truck. ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘Not bad.’ Curly swept a hand through his hair. ‘Not good.’

  ‘Seen Bill?’

  ‘Yeah. Not good.’

  This was a small community. Word got around.

  ‘What do we do to help him, Curly?’

  He pulled a tin of tobacco out of his pocket. ‘Stay out of his way, mostly. He needs to come out the other side of this and be able to look us all in the eye again.’

  It was probably true, she thought, but it wouldn’t help the fact that he was broke now. ‘I was wondering. Do you still fish out of Folkestone?’

  He looked at her warily. ‘Not often. If one of the boats needs crew, sometimes they ask me.’

  ‘If I wanted to go out on a boat from there . . .’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘I need a career change,’ she said.

  When Curly laughed it was like sun breaking out behind clouds. ‘Seriously. Why?’

  ‘From Monday morning, I’m going to be stuck behind a desk.’

  His smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. ‘Is this about Frank Hogben? You were asking Bill about him.’

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘He fell overboard. He wasn’t much of a fisherman.’

  A gull landed on the cab of Curly’s truck, head cocked, one eye on the fish boxes.

  ‘I just want to see.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He thought about this for a while. ‘Working boats aren’t big. They don’t usually take people who aren’t crew.’

  ‘I understand.’ She stood a little while longer.

  A second gull landed on the roof and the two birds started bickering loudly.

  ‘It was just a thought.’ She turned and started to walk back to her car.

  She was almost at the track when she heard the crackle of tyres behind her. When he was alongside her, he leaned out of the window. ‘I could ask around,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that.’

  When he reached the track he floored the accelerator, sending black smoke out of his exhaust. The speed limit around here was twenty miles an hour. Curly had been born here and didn’t think regulations like that applied to him.

  And then she saw two cars, blue lights flashing, coming down the road towards them and watched Curly slow, as if he thought they were coming for him.

  The first car sped to the end of the track, pulling over to park just after the old lighthouse. The second slowed as it approach Alex.

  There was a woman she didn’t recognise behind the wheel, but Colin Gilchrist was in the passenger seat.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘They found signs of someone camping up at the firing ranges. They think it’s Robert Glass . .
. the suspect. We’re heading that way up the beach.’

  The army firing ranges were huge, taking up the whole of the north-west of the spit of land up to Camber. Finding someone there would not be easy.

  ‘What’s his story? Robert Glass.’

  The woman next to him coughed. ‘Dunno. Listen. We have to go.’

  Alex leaned a little closer. ‘By the way, I think we have a mutual acquaintance. Georgia Coaker.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  She had checked Facebook. Georgia Coaker and Colin Gilchrist had been at primary school together. ‘Be careful who you talk to in future, Colin. Do you understand? They could kick you out for that.’

  She watched the blush as blood rushed to his neck and ears and thought of Terry Neill and his banana.

  She leaned in closer still. ‘I won’t tell. But I want you do to something for me. OK?’

  As she drove off, Alex heard the driver ask, ‘What’s all that about?’

  She watched them drive up the road, park and take their Kevlar jackets out of the boot. A gust of wind blew down the shoreline, shivering the sea kale and sending hair into Alex’s eyes.

  Far off she saw a figure sitting on the back step of Arum Cottage.

  She drove on up the track, turning up towards home, parking outside his house.

  Getting out, she opened the boot. Bill South sat with a glass of whisky in his hand.

  ‘I came to say sorry,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Not your fault.’ He lifted his glass and took a sip. ‘Want one?’

  ‘Not much. If it’s any consolation, Terry Neill said he was completely taken in too.’

  Bill chuckled, took another swig. ‘Terry Neill isn’t going to miss it, believe me. Have you seen his house?’

  ‘Bitter doesn’t suit you, Bill. That house would be a bit flashy for you, I’d have thought.’

  Bill nodded. ‘Your daughter says we shouldn’t need money anyway.’

  Alex laughed. ‘That’s the kind of interesting thing she says.’ She held a hand out towards him; he took it with the one he wasn’t holding a glass with and gently squeezed it. ‘You told her to go away though.’

  ‘I wasn’t really in the mood. What are all the coppers doing on the beach?’