The Red Shore, page 23
Time was running out. At around midday, the roller on the company’s big door opened and a truck drove out. It was the same one that had blocked his way on the way up to Haldon yesterday. And Eden had been right. The man in the offices had been lying. The driver was the man he had seen yesterday: the one with the red hair.
Eden waited until the truck was out on the main road before he followed it, out over the mini-roundabout again, and through the outskirts of the next village.
A black Audi was a good car to follow someone in. It was like a thousand others on the road. Keeping his eyes on the GPS, Eden hung back, only driving closer when the vehicle ahead approached a junction. Soon they were on an empty B road, winding through open country into lush valleys. Huge trees overhung the road he was driving along, turning it into a tunnel of green-lit leaves. When the trees parted he caught glimpses of the fringes of Dartmoor up ahead, hills thick with spring bracken.
He had been on the road for ten minutes when the truck slowed and indicated left, bumping down a single-track road. Eden drove past until he found a farm entrance he could turn in, then headed back down the lane slowly, trying to figure out where the truck had gone.
It didn’t take long. The track turned into a farmyard. There was a small hand-painted sign, nailed to a tree. A white arrow with Car parts written in red paint.
Eden reversed a little way down the road, parked the car in a passing place, out of sight of the farmyard, and walked back, up a rise and through the farm gate. The truck he had followed was near the farmhouse. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Between the gate and the main house, there were about twenty cars in various states of disrepair lined up alongside the side of one of the barns. Most looked as if they had been in some kind of accident, bonnets buckled, windows smashed, bumpers torn away.
He walked towards the line of cars and peered into the barn. ‘Hello?’ he said quietly, and got no reply, so he took a step inside.
The vehicles inside were being dismantled, their parts separated, organised into dozens of boxes.
The only car that was different from all the others was the one covered by a red tarpaulin, weighted down by lumps of metal.
He heard a step behind him and before he could turn, a voice said, ‘Can I help you?’
Forty-Eight
Eden turned.
A woman in a checked shirt and khaki trousers stood behind him.
He had no authority to be here; he didn’t have the power to search the place. If they suspected he was interested in what was under that tarp – and if he was right – then he was in a lot of trouble.
‘I’m looking for Jordan’s house,’ he improvised. ‘I think I’m lost.’
‘Jordan?’
‘Jordan Blackburn?’ A name plucked from thin air. Smiling, he looked around. ‘School friend. Farms goats?’
‘Goats?’ She was looking at him, puzzled.
‘It’s OK. I’m in the wrong place. Don’t worry.’
He turned on his feet and began walking back to the entrance.
‘Wait,’ the woman in the checked shirt called.
He continued walking. ‘It’s OK. Won’t trouble you.’
He could hear other voices too now – men’s voices, asking the woman who she was talking to, whether anything was wrong. Eden knew that if he was right, he was in danger if they figured out who he really was.
Yesterday, the man in the truck had said he had seen the biker setting fire to the motorbike, then had watched him running off into the woods. If Eden’s guess was right, that had been a lie, just like the lie he had been told at the Teign Valley Environmental Services office about the man with the red hair not being at work.
‘He was asking about some farmer who keeps goats.’
The gunman must have been in the truck. He had not run off into the woods. That was how he had got away. He may have been lying in the back, or ducking down out of sight in the front seat. Eden quickened his pace, hoping that the truck driver was not among them, and that he would not recognise him as he strode away.
When he reached the road, he broke into a run. His car was parked out of sight. By the time he reached it he was sweating. He had not been to a gym in two weeks, but it was more than that: if he was right, these people were killers.
About ten metres from the car, he took his key fob from his pocket and pressed it, unlocking the doors. Jumping inside, he started the engine and turned the car round in the passing place. Only when he was back out on the B-road, at a safe distance, did he call Sweet.
Sweet picked up straight away. ‘What now?’ he asked.
‘I think I might know where you’ll find my sister’s car,’ he said.
‘Really?’ His voice sounded more interested now.
Eden sent him a location pin from his phone.
‘One more thing,’ said Sweet. ‘I was going to come round to tell you. We have the results of the DNA test on the body.’
Eden could tell from the tone of his voice. ‘It’s my sister, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sweet. ‘Go home now. Look after your boy. Leave this to me.’
When he ended the call, Eden realised how fast his heart was still beating. He had needed to get away fast. If it was the Toyota under that tarp, a murder weapon that linked those people to the murder of Elaine Pritchard, it was important that he was nowhere near it. Good policing was about keeping the evidence uncontaminated. But it was more than just procedural prudence. He had been scared.
Sweet had told him to go home, but he didn’t.
The first thing he did was drive to Exeter and buy an iPad, a pair of headphones and some wrapping paper.
Back home, he approached Apple’s house cautiously, letting himself in at the kitchen door. He looked around, trying to imagine her here, greeting him, showing him round, offering him a cup of some disgusting herbal tea. She was dead. He had known it all along, but now it was confirmed.
He wished he had come here when she was still alive. Upstairs, he went into Finn’s room, and looked around that too: the small bed, the piles of clothes, the PS5 he had shown no interest in. Noticed a piece of paper folded on his desk. Curious, Eden reached out and picked it up.
It was a poem, titled ‘The Red Rock’.
Eden read it:
Sometimes I am so angry
I can’t help it
sometimes I feel so angry
that if I get any angrier
I will explode into a million million pieces
and they will cut into anyone who is close to me
Into pieces
Or I will flood all over you
Like a big wave
I won’t be able to stop it happening
Or I will mash you like a red rock
A big one
Falling down a cliff
Right on top of you
And your squishy head
So don’t make me angry
In Miss Killick’s neat red biro: ‘This is very good indeed, Finn. Well done.’
Eden folded the paper and put it back on the table by Finn’s bed. Downstairs, he plugged in the new iPad and registered it to Finn Driscoll. Sitting at the small table, looking out at the low tide, he opened the Voice Notes app and started to record.
‘I know you like listening to stories. I’ve bought you a subscription to an audiobook thing, where you can listen to all sorts. It’ll work on this machine. Ask a grown-up to show you how to do it. You can choose any books you want. I hope the stories will help you sleep. And there are some headphones you can use too.’
He pressed pause and thought for a while, looking through the glass door, then continued.
‘And now, because I’m not sure how long it would be before I got the chance to do it in person, I’m going to tell you the rest of the story about me and your mum, and the bad thing that happened. I don’t know if you’ll understand this, or if you’ll understand what I did, but you wanted me to tell you the story… and I owe you it, so here it is.’
He took a breath and continued.
‘So we were on the last trip I ever had on the Calliope. We set off from El Jebha, heading north. I made a point of taking a shower, even though Dad had told us to use the showers in the hotel. You know the shower in Calliope. It’s probably the same. It’s tiny and it uses a lot of water. When he discovered what I was doing, it made Dad really angry. And then Apple made a stupid joke about teenage boys taking showers and that made him angrier still. By then I think we’d all figured out what he was doing, why we were sailing to North Africa so much, but nobody admitted it. Nobody said anything. I hated that. But all through the crossing back to Europe, I kept using as much water as I could, doing the washing-up, everything like that. I left the tap running and when he went to put the night-sailing lights on, Dad couldn’t work out why the boat’s battery had gone flat and he had to charge it again by running the engine, which he hated to do.
‘By the time we reached Portugal and moored below the cliffs near this place called Albufeira, the tank was pretty much empty. We always moored up somewhere no other boats could see us. It’s what happened each time.’
And Eden paused again and thought about what he had just said, and something occurred to him. He took out the printouts that Molly had given him and stared at them for a long while before continuing the story he was recording for Finn.
‘So now I’m going to tell you how it ends. You have to remember there were no mobile phones in those days. Maybe there were, but we didn’t have them. Just a radio on board. When the boat was moored, back on the Portuguese side of the sea, Dad used the radio to give a signal to the men with the hearse that he was back. And then we would all get in the tender – you know what a tender is, don’t you? The little boat you row to shore on. We would all get in the tender and he would take Mum, me and Apple onto the shore…’
He talked for another twenty minutes as the day moved into the afternoon. A couple of times he stopped, edited the file, re-recorded a minute or two, and then continued. When he’d finished, he labelled the file ‘Story for Finn’ and added a shortcut to the home screen so he would find it. Then he paired the headphones with the iPad, put the device back into its box, carefully wrapped it in paper and put it on the dining table, ready to give to Finn when the time was right.
It was almost three in the afternoon. It would be time to pick his nephew up from school soon, for the last time.
Back downstairs, he flicked through the pages of the printout again, looking at the sweep of the bay, from Lyme Regis to Start Point, and all the vessels in it.
The symbols on the A4 sheets were small, mostly clustered in places like Exmouth and Dartmouth. He turned over the pages, watching Calliope make her way out of the harbour before her symbol disappeared, turning them back, reversing time to watch her retreat into port.
He stopped. He had not noticed it before and there was no time to look at it properly now – he had to go and pick up Finn – but before Calliope had set sail, there had been two dots inside the estuary at Teignmouth. Two hours after Calliope left her mooring, the second dot made its way out of the estuary mouth, into open water.
Forty-Nine
He let Molly in by the beach door. ‘My stupid brother,’ she said. ‘What was he doing?’
Eden reached out and put his arms around her, pulling her out of the rain. ‘Thanks for coming round.’
‘Where’s Finn?’
‘He’s upstairs in bed,’ said Eden.
It was nine-thirty and dark outside. He sat Molly down at the table and gave her one of Apple’s beach towels from the cupboard to dry her wet hair with.
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think your brother was involved in something bad. I was thinking Apple was too. But I called you over because I wanted to show you something.’ He took out one of the sheets of A4 and pointed to the arrow that left the port an hour after Apple had. ‘What’s that boat?’
‘I don’t know. You can’t tell from the printout. I’d have to look at it on a browser.’
‘Can you do that?’
‘Yes. If I log into my account.’
‘Wait a minute.’ He went upstairs and returned with his laptop and opened it up for her. ‘I’ve done a lot of thinking, and I believe the police have got everything completely wrong,’ said Eden. ‘About my sister – and about your brother.’
‘And you think this proves something?’
‘It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just something we hadn’t spotted before.’
She leaned forward, staring at the screen until she’d found the right files. ‘What time are you looking at?’
‘Around 10 p.m.,’ said Eden. ‘Can you find that?’
She put her finger on the mouse pad and clicked a couple of times. ‘Is that it?’
‘There.’ Eden pointed at the small arrow leaving the mouth of the River Teign for open sea. ‘What’s the name of that boat?’
She clicked on the symbol, then turned to him, mouth open. ‘Sheena,’ she said. When you clicked on it, the photo popped up. Blue hull, red cabin.
‘I thought it might be. Do you fish for lobsters at night?’ he asked Molly.
Her eyebrows moved closer together. ‘You could, I suppose.’
‘They were loading up with those barrels of bait last night at some crazy hour.’
‘Barrels?’
‘Four of them.’
‘That’s a lot of bait.’
‘I think we’ve been looking at this all wrong,’ said Eden. He pointed to the printed pages again. ‘That’s my sister’s boat, leaving Teignmouth on the Friday evening she disappeared.’ Eden pointed to the arrow on the map and followed it through the next three sheets. ‘You can see her heading out to sea and then she disappears.’
‘Because she switched off her transmitter.’
‘But I don’t think it was because she was doing something illegal. It was because she didn’t want to be seen, sure, but what if she was trying to hide from someone else?’
‘Who?’
‘Look.’ He pointed to the sheet on which Calliope had vanished. Calliope disappeared just as Sheena emerged from Teignmouth Docks.
Jackie’s husband had been loading it with something last night. Apple could have spotted him doing it, just as Eden had.
‘You think Apple turned off her AIS to hide from Sheena?’
‘Maybe Apple wanted to figure out what Sheena was doing out there. She reckoned that if she didn’t have AIS on she might be able to get close enough to see?’
‘Sheena has radar. It would be able to make out boats coming close.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she just wanted to hide who she was, then. Get close enough to see then run for it without anyone knowing who she was. Either way, she wanted to go off grid. She had seen something that was wrong and she had gone to find out what it was, or to figure out how she could stop it.’ He hesitated. ‘I need to make a call.’ He pulled out his phone and dialled Sweet. When he answered, Eden asked straight away, ‘Did you find the car?’
It sounded as though Sweet was watching the TV. ‘What time of day do you call this, Eden? I have a life.’
‘Sorry.’
He heard Sweet leave the room, closing the door behind him. ‘No, I haven’t found the car yet,’ the detective sergeant said. ‘We are doing this by the book. We have to. I have applied for a warrant to search the premises.’
‘By which time they might have got rid of the vehicle.’
‘By the book, Eden. That’s the way we do things down here, to build a case that won’t fall apart. You probably do things differently in London.’
Eden wondered if he had heard about the Ronan Pan debacle. Word seemed to get around. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Something else. Your daughter does babysitting, doesn’t she?’
‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘Parent at the primary school told me. Is she free tonight?’
‘What? Why?’
‘I was going to go out somewhere with Molly,’ Eden said.
‘What?’ mouthed Molly.
‘Really?’ Sweet said. He lowered his voice. ‘Is that a good idea right now? You two together? Her brother just got killed, almost certainly in a hit.’
If he told Sweet the real reason he wanted to go out, he doubted he would agree to let his daughter babysit. ‘It may not be a good idea, but Mike, we both need a break for different reasons. Molly needs some support right now. But if I’m taking her out, I need someone to look after Finn for a while. Tell her I’ll give her twice what she usually charges.’
‘This time of night? It’s late already.’
‘Please. I’ve just put Finn to bed. It’s easy money for her.’
Sweet went quiet for a while. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask her.’ They heard him shout, ‘Ella!’ Sweet muted the phone while the conversation took place. He was back after a few seconds. ‘She can do it, but she has college in the morning, so don’t make it too late.’
‘OK,’ said Eden. ‘I’ll put her in a taxi.’
‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ said Sweet.
‘I hope so too.’
‘I’ll drop her down there myself.’
‘What the hell?’ said Molly when he had ended the call. ‘We’re going out?’
‘Look out of the door,’ said Eden. ‘What do you see?’
Molly moved to the door. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Sheena isn’t there. She set sail thirty minutes ago. Around the same time that she disappeared two weeks ago. Last night she was loading up with what looked like bait. Tonight she’s gone. Don’t you want to know what she’s doing out there?’
‘What? You think she’s gone to pick up drugs?’
‘No. I don’t. I think she’s taken something out there in those bait barrels, but I don’t know what.’
She frowned. ‘Seriously?’
He thought of the car under the tarp. ‘Police round here take their time doing everything. I’m pretty sure I found Apple’s car today, but Sweet hasn’t done anything about it yet. We can’t afford to wait for the evidence to disappear. If we want to find out what that boat is doing, we’re going to have to take a look for ourselves.’
