The Trawlerman Read online

  Alex watched him look over towards Curly, as if for help.‘The Hopeful was on autopilot,’ Curly joined in. ‘Maybe he was having a piss over the side and fell in. Maybe he just tripped. Frank never kept a tidy boat.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have shouted?’

  ‘Might have. No way you’d have heard him down below. And The Hopeful was a bigger boat than this. Once you’re overboard, you’re gone.’

  Danny spoke again. ‘Then I called up the coastguard. That’s all.’ He was staring straight ahead at the horizon as if concentrating on something he had spotted there, but when Alex looked there was nothing at all she could see.

  It was starting to get dark now. Dungeness lighthouse flashed ahead of them. Only the rectangular bulk of the power station interrupted the otherwise flat horizon.

  It was midnight when they dropped the nets for the last time. Away to the south, somewhere over France, there was a thunderstorm lighting the horizon in bursts of yellow. Alex had recovered, though she was hungry now and tired. Danny had offered to share a pale ham sandwich, but fearing it would set her off again, Alex turned it down. She moved to the back of the boat to watch as Danny played out the net. Curly stood by the other side, keeping an eye. It was mesmerising, watching the net disappear into the black water.

  ‘What about his father?’

  ‘Max Hogben? Why you asking about him?’

  ‘Did you ever know him, Danny?’

  Danny nodded. ‘Got killed in his car, did Max. That red thing.’

  ‘Beautiful thing, that was.’ Curly shouted above the noise of the winch. ‘German engine. Went like the clappers.’ Curly knew about cars, loving them almost as much as he did boats.

  ‘I heard that Frank Hogben used to drive it around after his father died in it.’

  Curly said, ‘That’s how it was. Think about it. Pretty bloody weird. Imagine driving round, sitting in the very seat your father died in. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure that one out, do you, Danny?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Hated his father. Can’t say I blame him either. Everyone hated Max Hogben. Whole family did. Even Mandy hated him.’

  ‘From what I heard, no one really liked Frank much either.’

  Danny said, ‘Can’t say I really felt warm towards him.’

  Curly said nothing at all.

  The net was all out now and the winch was suddenly quiet, the noise replaced by the slapping of water against the hull of the trawler. Glancing at her, Curly and Danny seemed to be conferring about something in low voices.

  Cautiously, she went to stand at the back of the boat, looking over the metal edge and down at the water. The cold depth beneath them made her suddenly shiver, and she had a vision of herself, drowned, half underwater. Shocked at how real the premonition felt, she straightened abruptly, turned . . .

  Danny was right behind her, inches away, hands out.

  The jolt made her feet slip on the wet metal and she lost her balance. Throwing out her hand to catch hold of the ropes above her, she missed, and started her fall. For a second she thought she was going into the net, to be pulled down into the cold water with it, but a big hand had shot out already and grabbed her by the upper arm, yanking her back into the boat.

  She looked up at Danny, heart thumping. ‘What the fuck were you doing, creeping up behind me?’

  He had been standing so close, as if ready to push her into the water. Danny looked down at the deck, not answering. She turned towards Curly, but he had disappeared into the wheelhouse.

  Twenty-five

  She scrabbled back towards the wheelhouse and stayed inside as a thin grey rain fell. The sky darkened behind the grey drizzle and the distant outline of the white cliffs vanished.

  They motored on for almost two more hours on autopilot while Danny and Curly gutted plaice with little scoops of their knives and cut the flesh from skates. The boat was a ball of light in a black landscape, illuminating the white gulls that crowded towards them. Alex stayed in the dry. Nobody talked much.

  Back in the harbour, Curly ran the tender alongside the ramp so that she could get back onto dry land.

  ‘I’ll be a while helping Danny finish up with the catch and tidying up the boat,’ said Curly. ‘It’ll be an hour yet. Wait in the truck.’

  ‘Was that how it happened – what happened to me? Danny was there, ready to push me.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. If he hadn’t been there, you’d have gone straight in. He was looking out for you. Dangerous places, trawlers.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll take you home in a bit.’

  ‘I’ll catch a cab. I need some sleep. I have to work in the morning.’

  The little boat accelerated away from the dockside, back to the trawler. She stood on the dock a long time, waiting for a taxi. It was gone two in the morning by the time a car arrived. In just a few hours she would be back at a desk for the first time in weeks.

  ‘Light duties’. No phrase had ever left a heart so heavy.

  She was to work alongside two data analysts, on loan from the Performance section, and an IT specialist seconded from Sussex Police. They had been given a two-month project to devise and test a new system for reporting and categorising data for various crimes of violence that would satisfy new criteria that had been handed down from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. She walked into the small room in the modern outbuilding behind the main HQ building, and three men looked round, warily.

  ‘Kill me now,’ she muttered quietly.

  Here, crime would manifest itself only as numbers, to be subjected to quantitative or qualitative analysis. There was nothing triggering about working at this desk, and that was entirely the point.

  ‘How is it?’ Jill called her from the incident room after she’d been at her desk for the first hour.

  Alex closed the door to her small, bare room. ‘My initial analysis is that the workforce are a hundred per cent men,’ she said.

  ‘Good-looking men?’

  ‘Sixty-six per cent bearded.’

  ‘Are you going to be OK, Alex? Are you going to have enough to do? I know what you’re like.’

  ‘Thirty-three per cent with personal odour problems,’ said Alex.

  ‘You crack me up. This is going to be good for you, Alex. Change is the law of life.’

  ‘You talk such utter bollocks sometimes, Jill.’

  Jill laughed that high, tinkly laugh that would normally bug the hell out of Alex when she was trying to work. Now she missed it. ‘They seem nice enough, to be honest. One of them even told me a joke this morning.’ Alex could hear the hubbub in the background of Jill’s room. People were chattering, swapping jokes and information. Her workplace was silent.

  ‘McAdam is next to me. He sends his regards. Do you want a word?’

  ‘Tell him I’m fine. Thank him for getting me back to work, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s OK. You’re safe. He’s gone now. So. What’s the joke?’

  Alex pulled open an empty drawer and closed it again. ‘How do you kill a data analyst?’

  ‘I don’t know. How do you kill a data analyst?’

  ‘You don’t have to. They just get broken down by age and sex.’

  Jill’s laugh was as high and piercing as the last. Alex held her phone a little further from her head.

  ‘They sound like a great bunch,’ enthused Jill. ‘You should look on this as an opportunity. Maybe it’s a perfect fit for you and where you are now.’

  Alex didn’t answer.

  ‘Buy some new clothes. Get some new trainers instead of those beaten-up ones you always wear. Or wear heels to the office for a change. Shock me.’

  ‘That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it, Jill?’

  ‘Because it is the answer to everything.’ She sighed. Her voice lowered.
‘Listen. I thought you should know. They’ve made an arrest in the Younis case.’

  Alex sat up. ‘Who?’

  ‘Robert Glass. The ex-squaddie. You know what? They found him living not far from the Younises’ house. He had a little tent set up in the corner of a field there where no one could see him. Found it after we saw him but he’d scarpered. Left surveillance on it. Turned up back there last night. It took fifteen people to bring him in. He ran and climbed a tree. They had to call fire services to get him down and he put one of our guys in hospital on the way, apparently.’

  ‘Did they find a gun?’

  ‘No. Turns out he’s an evangelical Christian, though, if that counts as a smoking gun. He doesn’t talk much at all, apparently. They’re interviewing him this afternoon.’

  Alex was puzzled. ‘Do you want to have a coffee or something?’

  ‘Yeah. Course.’

  ‘Later today?’

  Jill hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Up to my bloody eyeballs today with Bob Glass. I’ll see what I can do.’

  She had a proper job, thought Alex. Her duties were not at all light. Afterwards, Alex, alone in her office, laid her head down on her empty desk and stayed like that for some time as minutes passed, and was still like that when one of the bearded men entered her office. He coughed several times, politely, before she lifted her head.

  Tomorrow she was scheduled to attend a meeting in the Deputy Chief Constable’s office. The DCC was concerned that the proposed new methodology might lead to violent incidents of domestic abuse being under-reported by officers because of the complexity of the proposed reporting methodology. The non-bearded member of the team had already spelled out the answer in broad terms. ‘Yes. The probability is that there would be some under-reporting, but a more robust system might also identify incidents which had been ignored in the past.’

  This was going to be her life. She raised her head from the table, stood and went to the next room. ‘Coffee, anyone?’

  They turned from their screens and looked at her, puzzled, as if no one had ever asked them this question before. When she returned to the office having dished out drinks to her team, she closed the door and opened up Google. She started with the search term ‘ex-military ptsd’.

  Twenty-six

  Violence was a virus. It infected all the stories she found. One ex-Afghanistan soldier had joined G4S security and shot two colleagues dead for no apparent reason. Another ex-army man who had been a victim of a roadside bomb on active service had beaten a friend to death with a scaffolding pole, simply after hearing a loud bang. Afterwards, he told investigators, he had no memory at all of committing the murder. When he was released from jail after nine years he killed another man with a lump hammer. His family said he had been a quiet child before his time in the army. There were ex-servicemen and -women who had left their families, become alcohol and drug dependent, creating havoc around them. The strange make-up of the brain allowed violence to self-replicate. Misery could be passed from parents on to children. Abuse and brutality rippled outwards. She descended into a dark hole, reading these accounts, taking notes in a pad on her desk.

  At one point, one of the men knocked on her door, looking apprehensive.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Coffee? You made one for us, so we thought we’d offer to make one for you.’

  ‘I think we’ve found common ground,’ she said. ‘Flat white please.’

  He smiled nervously back.

  At ten to five, Jill cancelled:

  Sorry. Stuck in meetings all day. Tomorrow morning? Promise xxxxx

  These were meetings she would have been in. The urgency of life in Serious Crime seemed very appealing.

  That evening she went for a long bike ride out into the marshes, up Midley Wall to the flat road that ran along White Kemp Sewer. It was almost dark by the time she got back. She knocked on Bill’s door to check up on him but Arum Cottage was dark. The curtains were all still open. She carried on home.

  When she got out of the shower, she switched on the news. ‘It’s understood,’ said the young, fair-haired woman on the local news, dropping her perky smile for this item, ‘that the accused, Robert Glass, is a former army officer who had been living in the New Romney area for over a year.’

  Zoë looked up from the computer on her lap. When Alex caught her eye, she realised that it was her she was looking at, not the TV screen.

  Alex pretended not to look interested. The item changed to a dispute over farm waste that was polluting a local watercourse.

  The next morning the police canteen was quiet. She found Jill alone at a table with a cup of herb tea, looking through a pile of papers. ‘Can’t stay long,’ she said, looking up as Alex put down her coffee cup. ‘Got an evidence assessment meeting in fifteen minutes. It’s doing my head in.’

  ‘You look tired.’

  ‘Miss you on the team. There’s a load of shit to get through, you know?’

  ‘God, yes. Sounds absolutely bloody great.’

  Jill laughed, then stopped. ‘I know what you want to say. You’re sure it’s not Bob Glass as well, aren’t you? Because frankly, I’m nervous about this.’

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  ‘I know. I can’t see it. It was a murder that was planned to look chaotic, rather than a chaotic murder, you’re bang on there. But McAdam is convinced of it right now. He thinks the Ocado order was just a coincidence. He’s going to be charging him this afternoon.’

  ‘I think you’re walking into something you’ll regret.’

  ‘You’re best out of it, Alex. It’s wrong.’

  ‘So they think he was the man the postman heard arguing with Ayman Younis?’

  ‘He denies it.’

  ‘They ever find the gun?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Or the knife?’

  ‘Maybe. I mean, the man had a whole bunch of knives. His tent was like Freddie Krueger. He was, like, preparing for the End Times or something. They’re all being tested for matches now.’

  Alex picked up the salt cellar and poured a little onto the table.

  ‘What about the fraud investigation? They any nearer finding out where the money went?’

  Jill picked a pinch of the salt and threw it backwards over her shoulder. ‘Alex. Leave this alone.’

  Alex said, ‘Oh, go on.’

  ‘It’s going nowhere, Alex. They’ll never get that money back. We’ve pretty much been told that now. It’s layers within layers.’ She leaned forward and kissed Alex on the forehead. ‘I have to run,’ said Jill, standing. ‘It’s bonkers right now.’

  Alex scowled. She sat on her own, finishing her coffee, then stood, and was about to return to her office on the other side of the wide car park when she paused, returned to the countertop, and ordered three cups of take-out coffee to take to her team.

  That afternoon she came out of the meeting with the DCC with a headache and a sense that she had prepared for completely different questions from the ones she had been asked and a sense that the metrics her project was intended to produce were less about fighting crime than about justifying spending and applying for future funding. She had always done her best to avoid dipping into police bureaucracy, but in this new role she was swimming deep into it.

  The meeting had been in the main HQ – that solid 1950s red neo-classical architecture that spoke of an era when the police went about their business unquestioned. It felt strange being in there now. She already felt like an exile. And then, descending the stairs towards the front door, she ran into DI McAdam coming the other way.

  He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Glad to see you back here, Alex. How’s the new job?’

  She clutched her folder. ‘Dull.’

  ‘Excellent. Exactly what the doctor ordered.’

  ‘And how’s it going with the Younis case? How did the interview w
ith Bob Glass go?’

  Toby McAdam crossed his arms; as close an expression of disapproval as he ever gave. ‘You shouldn’t even be asking about this stuff, Alex.’

  ‘Did he actually confess before you charged him?’

  He looked a little uncomfortable. ‘No.’

  They had stopped in one of the busiest places in the building. People continued around them, walking up and down the stairs. ‘I didn’t think he would. And you have him in the location that night?’

  ‘Of course. Multiple witnesses saw him in the area. And we have him arguing with Ayman Younis on several occasions, and one particular occasion in which threatening words appear to have been used.’

  ‘You have a witness who saw that?’

  McAdam hesitated. ‘Overheard.’

  She turned and walked on down the stairs.

  She had made it to the floor below before he finally leaned over the banister and said, ‘Why are you asking me this?’

  She called up. ‘Because he didn’t do it. You do know that, don’t you? He’s mentally ill.’

  She was outside onto the path at the front of the building by the time he caught up with her.

  ‘We’re aware of his mental health issues.’

  ‘It wasn’t the work of a madman.’

  ‘You’ve been talking to Jill, then?’ His face hardened. ‘I know she’s your friend, but I’m going to have to ask her not to discuss the details of this case with you. It’s for your own good, you know, Alex. We all care a great deal about you.’

  He stood looking at her for a full thirty seconds. People passed around them, busy with their own work. ‘I am aware of Jill’s theory, but it doesn’t stand up. We’ve checked the IP address. The email came from the household’s own address. It was a coincidence that they ordered so little, that’s all. Not everyone is logical all the time. Not every person suffering from delusions is illogical either.’

  They stood awkwardly.

  ‘I miss you, Alex. You ask the right questions. But this is not the time. You need to get better first. Leave it to us now. For your own good.’