A Killing Coast (32 page)

Horton’s mobile rang. Seeing it was Uckfield he ignored the call for the third time and headed out of the city for the large building straddling the hill that overlooked Portsmouth. Once there he cleared his mind of the case, not without difficulty, and made for Adrian Stanley’s hospital room, where he drew up startled. It was empty. Or rather there was a man inside it, but he wasn’t lying on the bed and he wasn’t Adrian Stanley.

He spun round. ‘Oh, Inspector, I was just going to call you,’ Robin Stanley said. His face was drawn and his eyes sorrowful. Horton’s heart sank; he knew it was bad news. ‘My father died this afternoon at three fifteen. He had another massive stroke.’

‘I’m sorry.’ So that was it as far as Stanley was concerned. Horton’s hope of discovering some news about his mother’s disappearance from either Glenn or Stanley had come to nothing. After a short pause in which Horton bit back his disappointment, he said, ‘Did your father say anything more?’

‘No.’

Horton let out a long slow breath as he surveyed the hospital room. Robin Stanley had stripped it of his father’s belongings but Horton hoped there was one thing he would allow him to have a copy of. ‘The photograph that was beside your father’s bed. I’d like to see it again, if I may.’

‘You could if I knew where it was.’

Horton started with surprise.

‘When the hospital called me this afternoon it wasn’t there.’ Robin Stanley pointed to the bedside cabinet. ‘I asked the staff if they’d seen it and I’ve looked everywhere but it’s gone.’ He frowned. His eyes filled with tears. ‘Dad was so proud of that moment and so was Mum, why would anyone take that? It doesn’t mean anything to anyone else.’

But Robin was wrong. It meant a great deal to someone and Adrian Stanley had known that.

‘Do you have a copy of the photograph?’ he asked. Robin Stanley must have – it was his father’s proudest moment.

‘There’s not one in Dad’s flat. I can look at home but the house is in a terrible state. We were burgled last night and everything’s still all over the place.’

Horton’s gut twisted tighter. Then the photograph would be missing, Horton had no doubt about that. And he didn’t think Robin Stanley’s burglary had anything to do with the others that had been happening in the north of the city. There would be no sighting of a white transit van outside Stanley’s house, but Horton wondered if there might be one of a muddy blue van.

Robin Stanley dashed a hand over his eyes. ‘It’s all so . . .’

Horton wanted to reach out a comforting hand but couldn’t. All he could repeat were the words, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he was; genuinely sorry. More sorry than Robin Stanley could ever know.

He left. There was nothing more he could do and he doubted that whoever had ransacked Robin Stanley’s house had left any fingerprints. He had reached the Harley when a car door opened and a tall man in an immaculate suit stepped out, leaving in the passenger seat a dark-haired Chinese woman: DCI Harriet Lee.

Horton held Detective Chief Superintendent Sawyer’s steady gaze, as he said, ‘Adrian Stanley’s dead and the photograph is missing, but then you know that. Did you take it?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know who did?’

‘No.’

‘Or the reason why it was taken?’ Horton could see that Sawyer knew something. But what that was, Horton didn’t know. He said, ‘Russell Glenn’s dead.’ No doubt Sawyer already knew this, even though his expression gave nothing away. ‘Was it him that you and DCI Lee were interested in, or was it Oliver Vernon or Lloyd? Or perhaps it was someone who was going to attend the reception tonight?’

There was a fraction of a pause before Sawyer answered. ‘We believe that Glenn had been financing high-level criminal activity.’

‘Involving Zeus.’

Sawyer made no comment and showed no reaction.

Horton said, ‘You thought Glenn, or this other person coming tonight, might help lead you to Zeus.’

‘Might have done,’ Sawyer answered.

Horton wanted to ask him about his missing social services file, and about his mother’s personal belongings, but to do so would mean bargaining for some answers and Horton wasn’t sure he wanted to do that yet. He put on his helmet. Sawyer let him go. Horton needed space. And he needed to think.

Fifteen minutes later he pulled up on the seafront and switched off the Harley. He stared across the black sea to the lights on the Isle of Wight in the distance. In 1981, because of a dock strike at Southampton, a liner had disembarked its passengers here in the Solent. One woman had not alighted alive. Had Russell Glenn killed her or had she died naturally and he’d seized the opportunity to steal from her and begin a new life? They’d probably never know, unless Dr Clayton could penetrate the secret from Sarah’s bones. But what he did know was the necklace Oliver Vernon had taken from Russell Glenn’s dead body had been a fake. A superb one, but a fake, and Vernon would see that the moment they asked him to examine it closely in a good light, not in the dank, derelict interior of a rotting house or in the fog when Vernon had been more preoccupied by the gun in his hand. The real necklace was with Lloyd, wherever he was; ready to be passed on to the next private collector, his real paymaster. How long had Lloyd and his real boss planned this job? Years, Horton thought; long enough for Lloyd to prove himself a loyal and trusted employee of Glenn’s, and to wait for the right opportunity to present itself, which was Avril and Oliver’s plan to blackmail Glenn into handing it over. Lloyd switched necklaces, leaving Glenn to go alone to meet his blackmailer with the fake one. Horton knew they could look for Lloyd, but they wouldn’t find him. There was no longer any point in Sawyer’s surveillance of Glenn’s superyacht because the purchaser wasn’t going to show. Maybe he never intended being there because Lloyd would have switched necklaces anyway.

And the necklace brought Horton back to Adrian Stanley. He knew now what Stanley had been trying to tell him. It had been something to do with the brooch that his wife had been wearing in the photograph taken when Stanley had gone to the Palace to collect his Queen’s Gallantry Medal. Had PC Adrian Stanley stolen it from Jennifer’s flat when following up the missing person’s report, or had someone given it to him as payment for his part in stifling what he had discovered?

Had Stanley’s first stroke been deliberately provoked by shock, or fear? Had someone entered Stanley’s apartment after his visit there on Monday morning, terrorized the man or threatened him into keeping silent about what he knew about Jennifer’s disappearance?

Horton recalled that blue van. But that could have been a decoy, and perhaps the girl with the dog, the man with the canoe or the jogger with his iPod plugged into his ears had been watching Stanley and waiting. And why now? Simple: Horton had made contact with him and with the social services, and if Sawyer knew that, then so too did the person who wanted the real reason behind Jennifer’s disappearance kept secret.

Well, on Monday Horton would return to the social services offices to see if they’d managed to find any more files about his childhood, but he knew they wouldn’t have. Just as in 1978 someone had wiped the trail clean, so they had now. Only this time they’d left a small trace: a missing photograph. The fact that the photograph
was
missing was his first big break, and it was their first mistake. With a grim smile, Horton swung the Harley eastwards and headed for his yacht and home.

AUTHORS NOTE

T
hat Charles X fled to England from France in 1830 and there was a dockers’ strike at Southampton in 1981, forcing passengers to disembark from the SS
Canberra
off Spithead instead of Southampton, is fact. The existence of the Esmeraude Collection and the SS
Agora
are entirely the result of the author’s imagination.

Susan Elizabeth Hague is a real person whose husband bid at a charity auction for her name to be used in this DI Andy Horton novel, thereby helping to raise £1,500 for the Sarah Duffen Centre, Down Syndrome Educational Trust, in Southsea.