The Seagull Read online

He shook his head. ‘I’ve had more than twenty years to think about it. I don’t remember seeing anyone at all.’

  There were heavy footsteps on the floor outside and the door was opened. An officer. ‘Time to go, mate.’ Sympathetic. Perhaps he considered Brace some sort of hero, let down by the system. Vera would have liked to put him straight, but this wasn’t the time.

  ‘We’ll look into what you’ve told me.’ Her voice was formal and bland as she packed her notebook into her bag. ‘I’ll probably get back to you next week.’

  Brace didn’t say anything as the officer wheeled him away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Back at the station, the team was waiting for her. Vera sailed in, her mind buzzing, and wondered for a moment if this was what kids felt like when they’d just taken drugs. If it was, she could understand how they got addicted. There was no feeling like it: the adrenaline and the sense that anything was possible, that this might be another moment of glory. But she didn’t let her excitement show until they’d gathered together around Charlie’s desk. She had to play this carefully; she still wasn’t entirely sure that John Brace wasn’t playing games of his own, and the last thing she wanted was a public search of a popular spot on the Tyneside coast, only to find nothing. Or, even worse, a few dog or sheep bones. Brace had always delighted in making her look ridiculous.

  ‘We’ll take this quietly.’ She’d hoisted herself onto the desk. Queen bee and mistress of all she surveyed. ‘I’ve had a chat with an old pal who works with the specialist search team. They can be there at first light tomorrow. No fuss, and just a few colleagues doing a favour for a mate.’ A pause and a nod towards the stairs that led to the smart offices where the senior officers worked. ‘No need for them to know anything about it, until we get a result.’

  ‘We’re waiting until tomorrow?’ Holly sounded horrified. Vera suspected she was uncomfortable with the break with established procedure, rather than the wait itself.

  ‘If Robbie Marshall is in that culvert, he’s been there for more than twenty years and another day won’t make any difference.’ But Vera was impatient too, restless, and she wasn’t sure how she’d manage to spend the day. ‘Holly, Brace says he met an informant in Whitley that night. He let slip that they lived in Newcastle, but he wasn’t going to give me a name. Can you go back through the records? Check Brace’s known associates at the time. It’s a long shot, but we could do with finding someone who can confirm his story and it’s the sort of thing you’re brilliant at.’ She’d come to realize that Holly needed a pat on the back every now and again. ‘And if you get a chance, pull together some sort of timeline. Brace said that Mary-Frances had long been dead by the time Robbie Marshall went missing, but I can’t help feeling that somehow they’re all tied together.’

  Holly nodded, and Vera could tell the woman was back on-side.

  ‘Charlie, can you use that memory of yours to give Hol a steer? Anyone Brace might have gone to see late at night in Whitley Bay? He must have been a player, to make Brace give up his Sunday night.’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘You know how it is with informants, Vera. Especially then. A matter of honour to keep their identities secret.’

  ‘But you might know what Brace would be focusing on then. What his priorities would have been and what made him get up in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘You do that, Charlie, and give me a shout if anything comes of it.’ She slid off the desk. Restlessness had got the better of her. ‘Joe, you come with me.’

  * * *

  She got Joe to drive to Whitley Bay. The sun was still shining and she wondered what the weather would have been like that night in June when Robbie Marshall disappeared. It must have been clear then too, because Brace had talked about moonlight and being able to see without a torch.

  They parked in the lay-by next to the cemetery that stood just inland from the bay, and that left a little walk down to St Mary’s. Vera tried to walk more these days, scared – despite herself – by her doctor’s dire warnings about obesity and high blood pressure. A group of mourners stood by the entrance to the graveyard, smoking, stubbing out their cigarettes quickly when the hearse arrived, frightened of missing the burial.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Joe walked easily beside her. He’d always kept fit, and Sal kept an eye on his diet.

  ‘I just want to get a lie of the land. It’s a while since I’ve been here.’

  They crossed the dual carriageway from the cemetery and got the full view of the bay, the sweep of sand that had once attracted holidaymakers from Scotland and day-trippers from urban Newcastle. Once the guest houses and hotels had been full of people; now the hotels were being knocked down or converted to apartments for commuters to the city, and the guest houses were used for people who wouldn’t consider their move to the coast a holiday. But the sea was the same and the sound of the gulls; there was the sense of space and the reflected light. They could see the impressive white globe of the Dome in the distance. Vera was lost in thought, conjuring up the noise and colour of Spanish City as it had been in the nineties, thinking there’d been another building on the skyline then, a sleek white nightclub called The Seagull, which had been burned down in a fire. Built in the thirties, it had seemed to sum up the town’s glory days. And when it went, the resulting gap on the sea front had seemed to represent its decline. She was trying to picture the place when she was nearly knocked over by a cyclist in Lycra.

  ‘Bloody menace. Why can’t they ride in the road?’

  ‘You’re standing in the middle of the cycle path.’

  She thought there probably hadn’t been cycle paths here in the nineties, either. On the other side of the road there was a caravan site; from the path they could see the kiddies’ play park. Vera decided that the site had been there for as long as she could remember, but she knew it would be hard to track down any possible witnesses after so many years. They walked slowly towards the lighthouse, Joe matching Vera’s pace, keeping quiet. He’d know she wouldn’t want to be disturbed. The nature reserve had been newly fenced – though the fences would never have kept Hector away from the nesting waders – and there were hides for photographers and birders. The tide had just gone out and a scattering of people walked across the short, narrow causeway to St Mary’s Island. Vera did a rough calculation in her head and thought it should be low water first thing in the morning. Just what they needed. In the car park at the point, one van was selling doughnuts and another ice creams. They’d be making the most of the late summer.

  Next to the vans there was a big sign – wood covered in Perspex – containing a brightly coloured map and explaining plans for the regeneration of the area. They seemed to centre around a new cafe and restaurant, to be built just where they were standing. There was an architect’s drawing of the proposal that was all glass and pale wood. It looked bonny enough, but Vera guessed there’d be no room then for the ice-cream and doughnut-sellers, and the vans had been there for as long as she could remember. The idea of change disturbed her. Surely there were already plenty of cafes in Whitley fighting for business. She walked on and down to the rocky shore, looking for Brace’s culvert. If it wasn’t there, she wasn’t sure what she’d do.

  The shore here was quiet. The children were back at school, so there were no families and the joggers and cyclists mostly kept to the tracks. An elderly couple sat on a bench looking towards her, but they had their eyes shut and their faces turned to the sun. Joe was nimbler on his feet and had scrambled ahead of her. Vera was struggling to keep her balance and was having second thoughts about rock pools and Patty’s bairns.

  ‘Is this it, do you think?’ Joe was pointing at a cleft in the rock. It was man-made and might once have held a drainage pipe, but that had disintegrated decades ago, probably long before Brace had met his informant at the top of the bank. Vera thought the pipe might once have extended right out to the North Sea, carrying Edwardian sewage into the salt water. There were still rusty
bolts in some of the rocks, showing where the frame to hold the outlet pipe had been fixed.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a field drain, but it fits the description.’ And at night, panicking a bit, looking for somewhere to dispose of a body – the body of his friend since childhood – she thought Brace wouldn’t have noticed the difference. ‘That’s where the team can start looking tomorrow, at least.’ She felt an urge to start pulling out the boulders and rocks that clogged the entrance to the culvert. ‘We’d best go back,’ she said. ‘The last thing we need is to draw attention to ourselves.’

  Joe started to climb back to the footpath, but she stayed where she was for a while, staring at the gash in the shallow cliff.

  When she reached Joe, he was standing by the ice-cream van with a cornet in each hand, a chocolate flake sticking out of the top. ‘I thought, if we were playing the part of day-trippers, we should do it properly.’

  She thought he was as excited as she was. ‘Oh aye, and what part am I playing? Your mam?’

  He grinned. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘My nan.’

  ‘Cheeky monkey.’ But, licking her ice cream, Vera thought she hadn’t felt this happy for months.

  * * *

  They met at the St Mary’s car park early the next morning before it was light. Holly and Charlie were in Holly’s car, and Vera had picked up Joe in the battered Land Rover on her way from the hills. The search team spilled out of an anonymous transit van and there were lots of mock complaints about the lack of coffee and the early hour.

  ‘You find what we’re looking for,’ Vera said, ‘and there’ll be a full English breakfast on me.’ She’d slept briefly but deeply and felt very awake and alert. There was a grey light on the horizon now and she led them over the rocks to where Joe had found the culvert, without the need for a torch. They were all steadier on their feet than her, but they let her go first. It was her call and she was in charge. She was dressed in corduroy trousers and walking boots; Holly sported a pair of designer wellies covered in flowers and butterflies. They reached the culvert just as the light over the sea turned pink. Vera nodded to the slit in the shallow cliff. ‘This is the place he described. We’ll just let you get on with it, shall we?’

  The team leader nodded and grinned. ‘Aye, we don’t want you amateurs getting in the way.’

  So Vera and the other detectives found a flat rock to sit on and watched from a distance. Vera thought any early-morning jogger would have the men down as a team from a water company or the council, maybe doing a first survey before the planned development. She wasn’t sure what they’d make of the four people gathered on the rock, watching: Charlie in his ancient overcoat, smoking a tab and turning away from the others to blow away the smoke; Holly managing to look smart and sophisticated, despite her obvious discomfort; Joe intent and anxious, staring at the men carefully lifting boulders from the mouth of the culvert; and Vera – Vera, so big that she dwarfed the rest of them. Sometimes she worried that she swamped them with her personality and her prejudices too, and that she didn’t give them the space or the confidence to make their own decisions. But, she told herself now, she was usually right, and she wouldn’t be doing them any favours if she let them make their own mistakes. The cold from the rock seeped through her coat and into her bones.

  It was properly light now. The sunrise made an orange path over the water towards them. In the distance three merchant vessels made their way out of the Tyne, dark silhouettes against the sun. A couple of vehicles pulled into the car park above them. A birder wearing an oiled jacket and carrying an expensive pair of binoculars walked along the footpath at the top of the bank, but seemed more interested in looking inland towards the reserve than down at them. The search team had cleared the entrance to the culvert and one of the skinnier men had disappeared inside with a torch in his hand. Vera was growing impatient. They should have found what they were looking for by now. She started planning her revenge on John Brace for pissing her about.

  ‘Guv.’ The skinny man’s overall was covered in sand and muck and there was a bit of seaweed on his hood. Vera thought he looked a bit like one of the characters she’d seen when the morris men performed outside the pub in Monkseaton on New Year’s Day. The Green Man. He stood at the culvert entrance and looked out at her. ‘There’s something a bit weird in here.’

  ‘What sort of weird? Have we got a body or not?’ She was tense, couldn’t believe that she might have been duped. John Brace had convinced her with his story of friendship, his love for his daughter.

  ‘There’s certainly a complete human skeleton, stuffed at the back of the culvert, but there are too many bones.’

  There was a moment of relief when she heard the first words. She’d been right all along. She hadn’t pulled these men out on a wild-goose chase. She could cope with most things but she hated ridicule and, if she’d got this seriously wrong, word would get out all over the service. Vera’s gone dangerously loopy this time. She dragged a whole search team out because she dreamed up some fantasy about a dead villain. Then the last phrase registered in her brain. ‘What do you mean: too many bones?’

  There was a moment’s silence. The officer shielded his eyes against the low sun with one hand, so that Vera could only see the lower part of his face. ‘I’d say there were two bodies hidden away in here. Not one.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Joe waited to supervise at the scene while Vera went back to the station to brief Watkins. The wheels of a murder inquiry would be set in motion; word would get out, and the media would soon be hounding the press office. It was better that she got her side of the story in with the boss first. She needed a plausible explanation for not keeping him in the loop from the start. She phoned him from the St Mary’s Island car park, her back turned to the sea and the breeze that had picked up since they’d first arrived. The last thing she needed was some other officious officer to get to the boss before her.

  ‘Something you should know about, sir.’ She described the discovery of the body as if she’d been following a purely tentative lead. ‘I didn’t want the hoopla of a formal investigation until we’d checked out the possibility that it might be true. The last thing I expected was two sets of bones.’

  ‘They’re sure? It’s not just one skeleton and the bones have been scattered by animals?’

  She’d asked that too, but she’d not gone in to check herself. Even though the bodies had been there for at least twenty years, the scene should be relatively uncontaminated. By humans at least. It hadn’t looked to her as if the boulders blocking the entrance had been moved since Brace had put them there. She imagined that rats had been in – there’d been gaps in the rocks to let water drain away. Sea creatures might have seeped through at a very high tide. The last thing the investigation needed was more cops trampling all over the place. Joe Ashworth and the CSIs were deciding now how best to keep the area secure and what to do next. It might be possible to construct a tent around the entrance to the culvert, until the bones had been photographed and checked in detail, but when the tide came in, the officers would be paddling in several inches of water. Vera thought it would be best to get the bones out as quickly as possible. They’d already cordoned off the footpath to the island and the north end of the car park, to keep gawpers away.

  ‘We’ll need the pathologist on that one,’ she said. ‘Maybe a forensic anthropologist. I’m assuming the bodies were placed there at the same time, but maybe they’ll be able to pin it down more accurately.’

  * * *

  Now she was in the office where she’d sat the week before; she’d been resentful then at being sent to a prison to talk about victims. Today they were still talking about the same subject: victims of violent crime. Watkins wasn’t Welsh, as far as she knew, despite the name. He didn’t seem to have any sort of accent; there was no way of placing him, except that she knew he was a university graduate in his early forties. One of the smart-talking, media-savvy new breed, and he always made her defensive. Today he was wearin
g a grey suit that was as bland as he was.

  ‘So you have ID for one of the victims?’

  ‘According to John Brace. No confirmation yet.’

  He raised his eyebrows. He’d heard of John Brace, even though he’d been appointed after the man had been convicted and sent to prison.

  ‘He was one of the group, when you sent me to Warkworth to talk to the…’ she tried to remember the acronym, ‘… EDW.’

  ‘And Brace casually passed on the information that a body was buried in a culvert near St Mary’s Island.’ Watkins obviously hadn’t heard that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit.

  ‘Not then,’ Vera said. ‘He wanted me to check that his daughter was doing okay. He has a daughter in her thirties, three grandkids.’

  ‘But I understand that his ex-wife’s very much alive and engaged in political activity. Wouldn’t she be looking out for the family?’

  Vera could sense that he was losing patience, but she didn’t care. ‘Judith wasn’t the woman’s mother.’ A pause. ‘I went to see the woman and her family and then, as a kind of trade-off, Brace gave me the information about Robbie Marshall.’

  ‘Who we assume to be one of the victims at St Mary’s?’

  Whom. She was tempted to correct him. She’d had an English teacher who’d been a stickler for grammar. But she restrained herself. Maybe Watkins wasn’t as well educated as he liked to make out. The thought cheered her.

  ‘He was an associate of Brace’s.’ Vera paused again. ‘And of my father’s.’ Better to get that into the open now, because some bugger would tell him.

  ‘Your father knew Brace?’ Watkins looked up, surprised.

  ‘They went birdwatching together occasionally,’ Vera said. ‘Not much more than that. Besides, Hector’s been dead for years. There’s no conflict of interest.’

  There was a moment’s silence, the background hum of something electrical in the office next door. Watkins seemed inclined to let the connection between Hector and Brace go. Perhaps he knew Vera was the detective with the best clear-up rate on the force and this was going to be complicated. Also, he’d be happy for her to carry the can if the investigation went tits up.