The Trawlerman Read online

  ‘They think a suspect in the Younis case might have been camping rough by the ranges.’

  ‘Bob Glass?’

  Alex stared at Bill. ‘You know him?’

  ‘He’s been around here all summer, living here and there. You never notice anything, do you? So they reckon Bob killed Ayman and Mary Younis?’

  ‘He had been squatting in a field behind their house. They think he argued with Ayman Younis about something. What do you think?’

  ‘He’s not a well man. Ex-army. Talks like he was well educated. He was in Afghanistan and Iraq. Saw all his friends blown to bits, I heard.’

  ‘Kill them all, God will know his own.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s what the killer wrote on the walls in Mary Younis’s blood. Maybe that’s a man who had seen everyone around him die.’

  ‘It’s terrible, the way we throw some men away,’ said Bill self-pityingly, and he raised his glass to his lips, though it was empty already. ‘Saw you talking to Curly,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t miss much, even when you’re drunk.’

  ‘Good spot, this. You can see most things from here. Some wind coming in tonight.’

  ‘I was asking if he’d get me on one of the fishing boats going out of Folkestone. A ride along, so to speak.’

  He dropped her hand. ‘What the hell you want to do that for?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Bill. I’m back to work on Monday. Light duties.’

  ‘Bully for you.’

  ‘McAdam has got me seconded to some analyst research project into crime reporting methodology. My life is over, Bill.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  She sighed. ‘You know I’ll give you the money, Bill. Just ask.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I have savings.’

  ‘My own stupid fault I lost the money.’

  ‘The offer stands.’

  ‘Me an ex-cop, and an ex-con, and I fell for it.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Bill. Come here.’ She beckoned him. ‘I bought you a present to cheer you up.’

  He put down his glass and took her hand again, this time so she could pull him up. He was drunker than she had thought, and stumbled a little towards her, ending up with his arms around her. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, stepping back.

  ‘This way,’ she said.

  He followed, walking around the side of the house until they reached the front, then stopped and stared, swaying slightly.

  ‘What in Jesus Christ’s fucking name is that?’ The old Northern Ireland accent emerged when he was drunk.

  ‘It’s a bird bath, Bill. It’s a present.’

  And in the pink of the low evening light, she thought it looked pretty magnificent.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  On unsteady feet, as if swayed by the wind, he walked around it once, then turned away from the sink and walked back inside his front door without saying another word.

  Twenty-three

  Saturday night Alex woke, bolt upright and switched the light on. The wind was banging a door somewhere.

  Zoë was in the bedroom with her, sitting in the armchair at the bottom of her bed wrapped in a duvet.‘What’s wrong? Couldn’t sleep?’ Alex asked.

  Zoë nodded.

  Under her duvet, Alex was roasting. Her cotton pyjamas were soaked with sweat. She pushed off her covers and tried to remember what the dream had been. Zoë always looked so small, her bony head poking out of a mass of bedding.

  ‘Want to get in with me?’ She moved over, making space. Her teenage daughter inched her way across the room, dragging her heavy duvet with her, then flopped down on the mattress beside her.

  ‘There, there,’ Alex said, stroking her daughter’s forehead. ‘Is everything all right?’

  Zoë didn’t answer.

  ‘What is it that woke you up?’

  But her daughter was already asleep; she lay listening to the soft hum of her breath and remembered the fierce, unexpected love she had felt for her when she was newborn.

  And then she was underground again; the earth falling in on her, roots growing around her, trapping her, crushing her chest so tightly she could not breathe. It was terrifying, but also familiar. This was a place she had become used to.

  Her job was to disentangle herself, to work her way out of the darkness, but the earth on her chest pressed down so heavily she knew that would be impossible soon.

  She wasn’t aware of having fallen asleep but when she woke it was bright in her room and someone was shouting. Next to her, her daughter was still asleep, wrapped in that mountainous duvet. Alex stood, opened a crack in the curtains and peered out. Curly was standing out there in a pair of camouflage trousers and a dirty white T-shirt.

  She opened the window. He shouted, ‘Mate runs a boat called the Jenny B out of Folkestone. He’s going out on the high tide this afternoon. Want to come?’

  ‘On a Sunday?’

  ‘You’re the one who wanted to go out.’

  ‘Mum?’ Zoë’s voice croaked behind her. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Curly is taking me out on a trawler.’

  ‘Why?’

  She didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure herself.

  ‘Trawling should be banned,’ said Zoë.

  Alex looked at her watch and called down to Curly. ‘What time will we be back?’

  ‘Three in the morning, maybe four. Best to fish in the dark this time of year. They can’t see you coming.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Zoë. ‘I’ll have a party and invite lots of my friends around and we’ll all take ketamine.’

  ‘Do you actually have friends?’

  ‘Let me sleep,’ said Zoë. She stood, eyes not fully open, and shuffled back to her bedroom, two stick-like legs poking out from under her grubby duvet.

  ‘Just so you know,’ said Curly, as he was bumping down the track, too fast as usual. ‘Danny Fagg, guy who owns the boat . . . he’s Frank’s cousin.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah. And he was on the boat the day they lost Frank. So you might want to go a bit easy.’

  The weather was overcast but still, the sea calm.

  ‘He was the guy who called it in to the coastguard?’

  Curly nodded.

  ‘Did the police ever suspect that it was Danny that pushed Frank into the water?’

  ‘What do you think? Course they did. Interviewed him a few times.’ The tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the mirror swung from side to side as he swerved around a pothole.

  ‘Could he have done it?’

  ‘Not a chance. He wouldn’t have it in him to do a thing like that. You’ll see.’ Curly accelerated to make it through an amber traffic light, then slowed again as he rejoined the queue of cars ahead. ‘Say he had, though, not saying he had. You’d never be able to prove anything, would you? Two people on a boat.’

  ‘Nope. Not if they never found the body.’

  ‘Well, if it had been me and Frank on the boat, maybe then you’d have a point. Not Danny though.’

  ‘You didn’t like Frank much, did you?’

  ‘Nope. Don’t know many who did, to be honest.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Bit full of himself, like his father before him. When his father died Frank reckoned he was the big man. Thought he owned the place.’

  ‘But you still worked with him?’

  ‘Sometimes. Beggars and choosers, you know? You don’t have to like everyone you work with. It’s all about the boats with me. My dad was a fisherman. If I couldn’t go out on the boats still, I wouldn’t know what I was.’

  As long as she lived in Dungeness she had known Curly, though it had never been a friendship. He spent his life on the beach or in the pub. Everybody knew him and he seemed to know everyone’s bu
siness.

  Without indicating, he pulled out to overtake a rubbish truck on the long straight Lydd Road. Coming in the other direction, a Jaguar flashed its lights angrily. Curly laughed.

  Folkestone Harbour was an old mess of brick, stone, concrete, steel and wood; a collection of harbour arms, bridges and viaducts. Once, this had been a busy port taking train freight passengers across the Channel. Now they were building apartments where the ships had used to come in.

  The trawler was moored in the harbour off The Stade; a fat blue hull, painted with thick white lines, on the bow in big letters designed to be read a long way off, FE128. Curly parked the truck outside the Ship Inn, facing the water.

  ‘That’s not the same boat . . . ?’

  ‘No. That was The Hopeful. She was a much bigger boat than this. The Hopeful was fifteen metres. Nobody wants them big boats any more because of the quotas. She was sold after Frank disappeared. His family need the cash.’ From the cab of his truck, Curly leaned out of the window, stuck a finger and thumb in his mouth and whistled. On the boat, twenty metres away, a man in a grubby green T-shirt looked up and waved. ‘That’s Danny. He’ll be over to fetch us now.’

  In front of them, tourists ambled eating ice cream. Curly pulled overalls and boots from the back of the truck and walked to the metal stairs that had been attached to the old stone quayside.

  It was a while before Danny was ready, and when he was, he hopped down into a large tender and rowed towards them, standing up in the boat as he leaned on the oars. A chain ran between the iron post on the edge of the quay. Alex ducked under it and followed Curly down the metal ladder.

  Danny was a huge man, arms like pink sausages poking out from the T-shirt that overhung his belly. Curly hopped on board and turned to hold a hand out for Alex.

  ‘Danny. This is Alex, who I told you about.’

  Danny nodded. He was a man with a generous smile, younger than Curly, with pale ginger hair and a million freckles. He rowed them across the water, watched by tourists with ice creams.

  Alex clambered up the side of the boat onto a broad empty deck with orange and green nets bundled at one end and a huge winch at the other. As soon as Curly had tied the dinghy onto the mooring, Danny started the diesel, put the engine in reverse and hauled up the anchor.

  Inside the wheelhouse, Danny made a place for her to sit.

  ‘She’s come to see how the other half lives, Danny.’

  Danny nodded nervily, said nothing as the trawler headed down past the harbour arm towards the open water.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Danny quietly. ‘Gets a bit bumpy, this bit.’

  He was right; as they rounded the breakwater the boat lurched up one wave and then banged down onto the next.

  Tomorrow she would be back at work behind a desk. The wind had raised a swell. The boat felt suddenly out of place, too heavy for the sea to hold. Always that sense that something bad was going to happen. She tried to push it aside. It was a neuro-dysfunction, Terry Neill had told her; bad things happened, but not just because she believed they would. Nothing bad would happen here.

  Twenty-four

  The boat started to roll the moment it left harbour. When they were clear, Danny turned the boat south-east and headed along the coast.

  ‘What was the weather like, that day seven years ago, when Frank disappeared?’

  ‘Pretty heavy weather. A good deal worse than this, wouldn’t you say, Danny?’

  Danny nodded.

  ‘There was a north-easterly moving up the Channel, so coming back, the boat was heading right into the waves.’

  ‘A lot of up and down?’

  ‘You could call it that. Pitching.’ Curly motioned with his hands.

  Another smaller boat was approaching from the bow, heading in to Folkestone as they headed out. It was stacked with lobster pots, marker buoys adorned with blue and red flags that flapped in the headwind like heraldic banners. One man stood at the wheel, another on deck, beside the wheelhouse, waving.

  A few seconds later, the radio crackled. ‘Got new crew, Danny?’ a man’s voice called.

  Danny flushed. A giggle escaped him.

  Curly picked up the handset. ‘What’s it to you, mate?’

  ‘There’s someone better-looking than either of you on board.’

  ‘Don’t understand what you’re saying, bro. We’re all beautiful on this boat,’ Curly said.

  ‘Woman aboard a trawler,’ explained Curly. ‘Always gets the lads excited.’

  ‘I thought we were bad luck.’

  ‘She thinks we’re all pagans who believe in mermaids, Danny,’ said Curly.

  Danny snickered.

  ‘Course, we’ll blame you if Danny doesn’t catch nothing, won’t we?’

  She was used to seeing Curly in the bar, or on the beach, endlessly tinkering with his own boat. On land he was a man with a half-full glass. She had never seen him on the water. Out here, he seemed to become somebody much more confident. This was his element, she realised; he had come alive. She watched him, eyes fixed on the horizon as Danny steered.

  Alex checked her phone for any messages from Zoë. The signal was still strong, but there was nothing. She checked in her email too to see if there were any messages from Jill – there weren’t – then went on to the local news site to see if there had been any developments in the Younis case, which there also hadn’t been.

  It was a mistake, looking at a small screen as the boat rocked. She felt a sudden thickness in her chest, nausea rising.

  ‘OK?’ Curly was frowning at her.

  ‘Fine.’ She put her phone away and looked out at the horizon instead, not wanting to seem weak.

  It was an hour before Danny slowed the engine and went back with Curly to prepare the nets, then Alex watched the green and orange nylon playing out from the rear of the boat as Danny pulled the boat forwards. There were three sets of nets; each needed to be dropped separately. Then the boat moved more slowly, pulling the gear along the bottom.

  ‘Too light yet to catch much,’ said Danny.

  ‘Never know. That wind last night stirred it up a bit.’

  The fish would see the net coming, they explained, unless it was dark or the water murky.

  The wind was warm. It was about an hour into the first trawl when she started throwing up over the side.

  ‘Some people get it worse than others,’ said Danny, with a sympathetic smile. ‘It’s not even that rough today. Think how much worse it would be if the wind came up.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Welcome.’

  Crouched against the gunwale, she watched her sick splashing down the blue hull of the boat. She felt rotten and wished she had not come out here. It was stupid. For some reason, in her head, she had imagined she would be good at this, but she wasn’t. She didn’t know what she had expected to learn; but all that she was learning was that she could never do this job.

  Some time later, they started the winch and hauled the first net back up. To Alex the nylon seemed full of shiny wriggling fish, mouths poking between the holes, gasping for water. Danny’s face showed no particular emotion, but Curly looked contemptuous. ‘Rubbish,’ Curly said, tugging at the opening at the bottom of the net.

  Fish and crabs poured out like a thick liquid onto the deck. She watched them disentangling the struggling creatures from the ragged net, bodies flashing silver in the dull afternoon light. Small dogfish, black-eyed and pale, writhed in their death throes, mouths opening and closing slowly. When the other two nets had been dragged up, Danny and Curly stood over them, dividing them between white plastic crates. The dogfish went into one. Crabs thunked into another, crawling slowly over each other to try and escape. Plaice and turbot went into a third, while a single skate went into the fourth; white sides up, their gasping mouths looking unsettlingly human to her.

  Gulls
gathered behind them, hoping to catch anything thrown back overboard.

  They worked quickly, clearing the deck of what they had dragged up. For the first time, watching him pick out the fish, she noticed Danny had only three fingers on his right hand. ‘What happened to your hand, Danny?’

  His face flushed. ‘Accident.’

  ‘He caught it in the winch, didn’t you, Danny?’

  Bile rose in her throat again.

  ‘I’ll make tea,’ she suggested.

  ‘Best stay out here,’ said Danny.

  She was going to object, but Curly added, ‘Going inside will make you sick again.’ And on cue, she retched again, though her stomach was empty now.

  It took them the best part of an hour to sort the fish and sluice the decks, and then they set about dropping the nets for a second haul.

  She joined the men in the wheelhouse, standing in the glow of the screen that showed the map of the seabed beneath them, and the line of the course they were travelling. They were approaching a strange black T-shape. ‘Is that a wreck?’

  ‘Plane,’ said Danny. ‘That one’s a Dornier.’

  Looking closer, she could see it was a tiny symbol of an aeroplane.

  ‘See that one there?’ He pointed to another one further ahead that they would also pass close to. ‘Spitfire. I pulled up a window from that one in the net. It had bullet holes in the glass.’ He grinned.

  ‘Danny knows where they all are like nobody else does. Anyone different comes trawling round here and the chances are they’ll snag their nets on them.’

  ‘So this is his territory?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Curly.

  ‘You were on The Hopeful, the day Frank Hogben disappeared,’ she said to Danny.

  She caught Danny giving Curly a glance, a roll of the eyes. ‘Yep.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Sleeping.’ He pointed to the opening at the front of the wheelhouse. Steep wooden steps descended to a cramped cabin in the ‘V’ of the bow. There were two small bunks in there. ‘I’d been asleep for half an hour, forty minutes maybe. Woke up, he was gone. Just me on the boat. That’s all.’