A Killing Coast (8 page)

In the early 1800s, Ventnor was a hamlet of thatched fishermen’s cottages with an old mill, an inn and a couple of humble dwellings; by 1838 it had grown to three hundred and fifty inhabitants.

Horton flicked through the pages of writing, about fifty in total, and saw that Yately’s interest was not only in local history but in the chines, creeks and coves on the east coast of the island. Perhaps this was what had given him the buzz which he had hinted at to his daughter. Could he have been on one of these cliffs when he’d fallen into the sea? But he was back to that damn dress again. And if Yately had gone out for a walk why not take his keys?

There was no sign of a suicide note anywhere. It was time to leave, but before he did he jotted down details of Yately’s GP and dentist, and found three photograph albums in the desk. He didn’t have time to study the pictures so he placed the albums into a bag. He wondered if he’d find a photograph of the former Mrs Yately or another female wearing that patterned dress. Locking up he got the impression of a solitary man, but not necessarily a lonely one.

Tomorrow they’d have the results of the autopsy and then make a decision on how the investigation should proceed if indeed there was an investigation. On the ferry he took the photograph albums up to the lounge with him. In a seat by the window, with a coffee and toasted bacon sandwich in front of him, he began to look through them but was distracted by thoughts of all the photographs he’d taken of Catherine and Emma. Catherine had probably lit a ruddy great bonfire of the photographs of him when she’d kicked him out a year ago, but there must be some left of him and Emma together and he’d like to have them. All he had were two pictures of his daughter, one of which he kept on his boat, the other on his desk.

His mind jumped back to his childhood. He couldn’t remember his mother taking photographs of him but surely she must have done. So where were they? Had they been destroyed when the flat had been cleared out?
Who
had cleared their flat? His mind flicked to Adrian Stanley and what he wasn’t telling him about Jennifer. Checking his watch Horton thought it was too late to telephone Stanley, but he would tomorrow.

He turned his mind back to the photographs in front of him. There were many pictures of Hannah Yately through the ages and of her proud and doting father. There were a few pictures of a woman who must be Hannah’s mother, wearing modern clothes over the years, though to Horton they were slightly on the tarty side, and she was either looking bored or posing into camera, but there was no sign of the maxi-dress with the flowers on it. There was an older woman who could have been Yately’s mother and Hannah’s grandmother. Was she still alive, Horton wondered? If so, perhaps she’d recognize the dress. But Hannah hadn’t mentioned her so he guessed she was dead. Still, they’d check.

As the ferry slid into port he eyed Glenn’s superyacht lit up like a giant advertisement in Piccadilly Circus. He recalled Avril’s jewellery, hoping it was safely locked away at night, before his mind flitted to more pleasing thoughts of her shapely figure and her smile. He speculated over her relationship with her husband and the brief information Mike Danby had given him, and decided to run a few checks on Russell Glenn before meeting him on Friday night.

He headed straight for his boat, deciding that the items he’d collected from Yately’s flat could be sent to the Fingerprint Bureau tomorrow. It was late, it had been a hectic day, and he hoped that sleep would come easily. But it didn’t. His head was too full of Adrian Stanley, of Avril and Russell Glenn, and of Jennifer Horton.

Tuesday

The seagulls were squealing in the harbour when he woke the next morning with a muggy head and with a determination to concentrate on getting to the bottom of Colin Yately’s death. Dr Clayton would have the autopsy results today which might help to make things a little clearer.

By the time Cantelli returned from the ferry and hovercraft ticket offices Horton had telephoned Hannah Yately and told her what he’d found in her father’s flat, which was nothing, and what he’d taken away. He said he’d let her know the moment they had positive confirmation and prayed she wouldn’t ask him why he wanted the photograph albums. She didn’t.

Cantelli plonked himself in the seat across Horton’s desk. ‘There’s no record of Colin Yately travelling on either the Fastcat ferry, the car ferry or the Hovercraft but he could have paid by cash. However, no one I spoke to in the ticket office and none of the marshalling staff recognized him, so it’s likely he never reached here.’

‘Alive that is. He almost made it dead,’ Horton said sombrely. ‘I didn’t find any evidence in his flat to suggest he was into cross-dressing.’

‘Perhaps he dressed up elsewhere because he was scared his daughter might find the clothes at his flat. He could have used a beach hut or been at a house near the sea or on a boat.’

‘Alone or with someone?’

Cantelli shrugged. ‘If he was with someone who shared his passion, he might be afraid or too ashamed to come forward. He could be married. Yately ended up accidentally in the sea leaving his keys and other identification in his trousers.’

‘But why remove the keys from that fob?’

‘Perhaps he’d put them on a new fob some time ago, only Hannah never noticed. He didn’t want to discard the fob with the picture of his daughter in it because it was too precious to him, and that he always kept on him no matter what.’

Horton glanced at the photograph of Emma on his desk. Yes, he could understand that. Yately’s daughter might be all that the poor man had had left and he’d needed the picture to remind himself he wasn’t alone. Or was that how
he
felt, he thought gloomily? Only he didn’t carry a picture of Emma. He’d learnt in the job a long time ago to have few personal effects on him in case they could be used against him, or destroyed or stolen.

He wondered how soon they’d get a preliminary report from Dr Clayton. He said, ‘Ask Walters if he’s managed to speak to Yately’s dentist and his GP.’ Horton had also detailed Walters to get Yately’s comb and the fountain pen over to the Fingerprint Bureau. Thankfully, Walters had reported that there had been no further house burglaries overnight. Perhaps the extra patrols had deterred the robbers, but they couldn’t keep them up. Horton called up all they had on the case on screen and began to trawl through it, looking for anything that Walters and Cantelli had missed and which could give them a hint of who it might be. He found nothing but sooner or later their burglar would slip up; unfortunately that meant another householder having to suffer the misery of being robbed.

He picked up the disc containing the CCTV footage of the blue van seen at the marina in Gosport and popped it into his computer. He saw that it covered the period from eight in the morning until when Horton had collected it just before one yesterday afternoon. A handful of cars arrived between eight o’clock and nine, and some of them belonged to the staff judging by the direction in which they headed after alighting. Two other cars entered: a top of the range BMW and a Range Rover, then Horton swung into the marina on his Harley at nine twenty-one. A few minutes later came the muddy blue van. Horton frowned. He didn’t care for the closeness of the timing, or for the fact he could swear it was the same van that had been parked outside Stanley’s apartment at Lee-on-the-Solent.

He reached for his phone. He wanted to know if Stanley had seen the van that morning or at any other time. But there was no answer. Horton watched the blue van pull away ten minutes later. He sat back concerned. Had it been following him? He hadn’t seen it on his way to Stanley’s flat or anywhere else since yesterday morning, and certainly not at his marina. And why should someone follow him? Unless they didn’t want him talking to Stanley, and there was only one reason for that, but before he could reason any further the trilling of his phone sliced through his thoughts.

It was Dr Clayton. At last!

‘It’s a suspicious death, Inspector,’ she announced grimly and peremptorily.

Horton’s heart skipped a beat and he cursed silently. It was the last thing he wanted to hear. ‘Tell me,’ he urged.

‘The presence of bleeding in the cranium suggests he was struck violently before entering the water. I found foam in the trachea and main bronchi and evidence of bruising in the neck and chest, which indicates he was alive when submersion occurred. Of course, further tests might confirm the presence of a drug or drink but I don’t think it likely, because I found something else that shouldn’t be there. There was evidence of marks on the wrists and ankles, and I found fragments of a fibre embedded in both, and in his mouth. At some point your body was bound and gagged.’

Horton swore to himself. His heart sank. ‘But he wasn’t bound when he was found,’ he said, thinking aloud.

‘He wasn’t, and neither was he in the water long enough for any restrictions to have rotted. The ties could have become loose while he was in the sea but I’d be very surprised if they had, and even more surprised if the gag had worked its way off. He was only in the sea for about twelve hours, no more than eighteen hours certainly.’

‘But you said—’

‘That he’d been dead for four or five days. And he has. Decomposition was advanced, which is surprising at this time of the year when the sea temperature is still quite cold, barely reaching forty-seven Fahrenheit, and the colder the water the slower the decomposition. There was also no evidence of adipocere; that’s the yellowish-white substance composed of fatty acids and soaps that forms after death on the fatty parts of the body like the abdomen wall and buttocks. It protects against decomposition.’

With dread, Horton said, ‘You’re saying that he was killed, his body left somewhere for a few days, then it was untied before being dumped at sea sometime between Sunday night and early Monday morning?’

‘Worse.’

Shit. What could be worse, he groaned silently.

‘The evidence points to the fact that the gag was removed but not the wrist and ankle restrictions. While he was bound he was submerged, hence the bruising in the neck and chest and the foam in the trachea as the poor man struggled to free himself. Then came exhaustion, followed by coughing and vomiting, loss of consciousness and death by drowning some minutes later.’

Horton drew in a deep breath. His gut tightened as Gaye continued.

‘I think his captor knocked him out, tied him up and gagged him. When the victim regained consciousness his captor dropped him into the sea, removing the gag but not the wrist and ankle restraints. When the poor man eventually drowned, your killer hauled him out, untied him and left him somewhere on land, which is supported by the patterns of animal and bird life eating into the corpse. The body was then either washed out to sea or taken out to sea. The dress acted as a buoyancy aid allowing the body to float rather than sink as it would normally have done.’

Did the killer realize that or had he misjudged it, Horton wondered, his mind reeling from Dr Clayton’s findings and seeing again that small ordinary flat and that average, ordinary man in the photograph. He’d seen nothing to indicate that Colin Yately should be bound and tossed into the sea to die. Should he have looked harder? Had he missed something? Clearly he must have done. To make sure that it was Colin Yately’s body, he said, ‘Can you confirm if he ever suffered a broken left leg?’

‘Yes, and he’d had surgery on his right knee. He’s about late fifties.’

That seemed to seal it but just for good measure, Dr Clayton added, ‘Walters emailed me details of Colin Yately’s dentist, it’s why I’ve taken longer to get back to you. I wanted to check. I can confirm from examining the dental records on line that they match with the victim. It’s Colin Yately all right.’

Horton thanked her and rang off. It was nasty and they were looking for a particularly callous and ruthless killer. But what the devil did Yately have that a killer wanted so desperately? Who could he have angered so much to warrant such a violent death?

He recalled Yately’s daughter and the thought of what this news might do to her, as his mind raced with the implications of Dr Clayton’s findings. They would need to return to Yately’s apartment and take it apart. And although Horton doubted Yately had been taken captive at his flat it still needed to be treated as a crime scene, and with a sinking heart he thought that was what he should have done in the first place.

SIX

I
t was a view shared by Detective Superintendent Uckfield who expressed it vehemently for the third time in an hour as Horton climbed the stairs behind him to the passenger lounge on the Wightlink car ferry. Horton said nothing. There was no point reiterating what he’d already said in Uckfield’s office earlier about having no evidence to suggest that Yately’s death was suspicious.

‘He was wearing a dress, I call that highly bloody suspicious,’ Uckfield had bellowed.

Horton didn’t point out that it didn’t necessarily follow that Yately had been killed. He’d told both Bliss and Uckfield that he hadn’t had enough evidence to warrant posting a police officer outside the door to Yately’s apartment and another outside the Victorian house for over twenty-four hours until they had the autopsy report, and that a piece of blue-and-white tape alone, saying ‘Crime Scene Do Not Enter’, was hardly going to deter anyone from entering the apartment if they wanted to.

Bliss didn’t back him up. He hadn’t expected her to. When he’d relayed Dr Clayton’s findings to her, she’d accused him of gross incompetence, told him that he should have reported back to her as soon as the body had been found and that
she
should have made the decision. He didn’t bother reminding her that he had mentioned the body, only she’d been too interested in Project Neptune and his performance targets to listen. Even if she had listened he knew her decision wouldn’t have been any different to his. She was covering her arse in case the investigation went tits up, and if it did then he knew who would carry the can. Him. So nothing new there. She finished her bollocking by telling him that his error of judgement could have seriously hindered the investigation. But Horton
was
irked that he’d made the wrong decision. Cantelli had told him that hindsight was a wonderful thing.