Boyd felt sorry for him. He gently dropped a fist on Minter’s shoulder like he was a best man offering wedding day advice. ‘You’ll do fine. The press lights usually wash everyone out. You won’t really see them. And you just read what’s there.’

  ‘Just the statement, sir?’

  ‘They’ll ask questions at the end. Usually all at the same time. Just pretend to pick one of them out of the noise and answer it with a bland “It’s early days yet”. Plus, it’ll be the end of the day – they’re all going to want to get home straight after. Then you can go home and have a beer.’

  Minter’s face had gone so pale he actually looked like he was about to throw up his fish-and-chip lunch on the incident room’s floor.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Ah… it’s… okay, guv. I just… I’ve just never been very good with public speaking.’

  ‘The British curse.’ Boyd smiled.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The mortal fear of embarrassment. Us awfully polite Brits are castrated by it.’

  He remembered reading an article about the Fear. Apparently a number of Fortune 500 CEO’s had been quizzed about the stresses of their jobs and the things they found hardest and easiest to do. For British CEOs, laying workers off had turned out to be surprisingly low on their list, but right at the top was making the end of year speech at the work’s Christmas Do.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said again, reassuringly. ‘Right then, I’d better get the statement typed up.’

  Boyd returned to his desk and was about to sit down when he noticed that Minter had followed in his wake. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you want me to help you, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope. It’s okay. You go and get yourself ready for your big date.’ Boyd flapped his hand. ‘Go on and let me get on with this. You’ll be fine.’

  30

  ‘Following a number of lines of inquiry, which include the possibility of an act of murder, at sea some three months ago…’

  DS Minter took a deep breath and looked up from his sheet of paper. Boyd was standing a few feet behind him, trying to hide his dressing by turning his head to the left as if staring at something far more interesting than the speaker in front of him.

  The detective sergeant had done well so far. Slow, steady, monotone and dull-as-hell with frankly no more information than Boyd had given out at the press briefing earlier that week.

  Now, however, it was time for questions. The trickier off-script bit.

  ‘All right,’ said Minter gruffly, looking round the room. ‘I’ll take a couple of questions.’

  As Boyd had anticipated, the room was packed this time. The tabloid headline had done a fantastic job of prodding every news editor in the country into sending someone to Hastings to catch up on it.

  ‘Do you know if the murderers were migrants travelling from Calais?’

  Migrants – bingo. Boyd mentally ticked the first box.

  Minter cleared his throat. ‘At this, uh, stage in the investigation… we are not ruling anything in or, uh, indeed, committing to have anything ruled in or out. Even.’

  Boyd resisted the urge to face-palm and instead clamped his jaw shut and carried on studying the very interesting wall to his left.

  ‘There are suggestions that Mr Nix was attempting to provide assistance to a migrant dinghy when they were swarmed. Can you comment on that?’

  Swarmed – bingo again.

  ‘At this… stage in the investigation…’

  Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t say the exact same thing again!

  ‘… we have not ruled out any line of inquiry… at this stage.’

  Better. Jesus.

  ‘Chris Simmons, BBC. Are you certain Mr Nix and his passengers are dead? Is this still a missing persons inquiry or has it become a murder inquiry?’

  Minter absentmindedly scratched the side of his head, a worried expression on his face, and Boyd wondered what that was going to look like on the six o’clock news this evening. Some of the cameras flashed.

  Great. That’s tomorrow’s print image, then.

  ‘Well, we’re uh… we’re not assuming they’re dead, but…’ Minter glanced back over his shoulder at Boydfor help.

  Boyd flashed his eyes angrily at him. Turn back around, you muppet!

  He did so. ‘Uh… since the murders happened three months ago, we’re –’

  ‘So you ARE confirming they’re dead?’

  ‘No. I said we are not assuming that, but… you know…’

  ‘You just said “the murders”,’ replied Simmons.

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ muttered Boyd. He took a step forward and joined Minter at the lectern. ‘The forensic evidence suggests that there was a violent altercation aboard the boat, which may – I’ll stress that word… may – indeed be a murder, but at this stage we can’t say for certain.’

  Boyd saw a ripple of camera lenses glinting as they swung ever so fractionally to zero in on him. You buggers all getting a clear shot of my ear, are you?

  He continued, ‘Now, there is evidence that the boat was sabotaged in a bid to make it sink – obviously to eliminate the crime scene and any forensic evidence.’

  ‘We heard reports that this was impact damage from another boat?’ said the BBC journalist. ‘That could suggest a migrant boat encounter? An act of assistance that went wrong, perhaps?’

  ‘No. Not necessarily.’

  ‘Are there any indications that Mr Nix might have been involved in drug smuggling or even migrant trafficking?’ called out someone in the audience

  Boyd’s honest answer to that was there was no evidence to suggest he was involved in that. None whatsoever. But it was Her Madge’s go-to theory and now some twat had just forced him to back it or sack it.

  He felt like a bloody deer caught in the headlights of a container truck.

  ‘It… Well, it can’t be ruled out,’ Boyd answered. ‘But, as far as I’m aware, there’s no evidence to suggest that’s the case.’

  Shit. He’d done it now.

  ‘Do you have a more likely working theory?’ asked someone else.

  Boyd was dimly aware he was standing in the full blinding glare of a dozen or so LED lamps on stands, probably looking pasty-faced and like roadkill to boot… with a sodding bra cup stuck to the side of his head. Well, at least it would keep Minter’s face out of tomorrow’s papers.

  ‘A kidnapping gone wrong,’ he said finally. ‘That’s what I believe we’re most likely dealing with.’

  And I, he thought ruefully, will most likely be dealing with Her Sodding Madge as soon as I get back to the office.

  Thank fuck it’s Friday.

  31

  Boyd was nursing a very sore head.

  Last night he and Emma had ordered a Chinese, watched Bake Off and opened a bottle of red. And once again he’d finished it off after she’d gone to bed. If that wasn’t bad enough, but then he’d gone on to open a second one.

  He’d poured a big glass, turned the lights out in the lounge and sat there, his eyes adjusting to the amber glow from the street lamp outside, and watched the winter rain spatter against the tall windows for what had turned into a couple of hours.

  This morning a lazy mist was lingering along the beach, turning the hill line, the tall seafront townhouses and the pier into a monochrome shadow theatre of haunting grey silhouettes.

  Ozzie was enjoying himself, at least. He’d thrown his anchors down and was stubbornly holding ground as he investigated a tangled clump of seaweed and plastic that the silent tide had left behind.

  Boyd had had a day and a night to review how things had gone down on the Friday.

  Not that well, was his verdict. DSI Sutherland had pulled him aside just as he was getting ready to pick up his coat and head home for the weekend.

  ‘I think we know how this conversation goes, right?’ Sutherland had said.

  ‘The Chief Super’s not happy?’

  ‘Not happy? She’s incandescent. She said you directly disobeyed an order!’

  ‘DS Minter was struggling. I stepped in to help.’

  ‘That’s not what she’s furious about, Boyd. You floated a bloody kidnapping theory – without any evidence, without any warning –’

  ‘There’s more evidence for that than this ludicrous idea that migrants attacked the boat and killed Nix,’ Boyd had countered.

  ‘You check with me first before you announce a new theory. Especially in front of a room full of bloody journalists!’

  ‘I floated the idea to the Chief Super.’

  ‘I know. And she told you that Border Force have an ongoing investigation into Nix. Your blurted-out speculation may have had a detrimental impact on their case. I don’t know how you did things in the Met, Boyd, but you’re here now and you answer to us.’

  ‘So what the hell was I meant to say?’ he’d pushed, obstinately.

  ‘You say what the Chief Super tells you to say. Look –’ Sutherland suddenly softened his tone, obviously trying to turn the bollocking into something more like a piece of big-brotherly advice – ‘the Chief Super wants you to take a week off. Minter’s senior enough and experienced enough to oversee the investigation in the short term, and he’s got DSI Flack on hand if he needs help.’

  ‘So I’m suspended?’

  Sutherland had shaken his head. ‘This is sick leave. You’ve got a face that looks like you’ve been attacked by a feral cat – and the ear, the concussion…’

  ‘No concussion, sir.’

  ‘The PTSD.’

  ‘I don’t have any –’

  ‘Boyd!’ he’d snapped, his little apple-shaped cheeks suddenly blotching pink. ‘Take the fucking week off.’

  It hadn’t been the most auspicious end to Boyd’s first week in Sussex Police.

  He had a nagging feeling about this kidnapping theory, though. That’s what it was beginning to look like and smell like to him – a kidnapping, or some sort of botched attempt. And, at the moment, the most likely candidate in Boyd’s eyes, was Aiden Rigby, whether he’d been physically involved or not.

  And there was something else niggling away at the back of his mind.

  The girl. Zophie. They had virtually zero to go on, but, based purely on Jo’s descriptions, he was beginning to form a picture.

  Boyd recalled a nature show he’d watched on TV last year. (There’d been a lot of that last year – daytime-telly watching). It was one of those programmes with David Attenborough and his whispery voice-over. It had been about symbiotic relationships between animals. How evolution had produced these weird double acts of co-operating species that figuratively scratched each other’s backs. There’d been the mutually beneficial ones, such as sharks with little fish that cleaned their teeth by eating the shreds of meat caught between them. Then there’d been the more parasitic relationships, where one species didn’t co-operate with another but coerced it, or, more accurately, hijacked it. One particular example that he could distinctly remember was that of the emerald wasp and the cockroach. The wasp would sting the cockroach in the back of its head with a hormone that would turn the cockroach into a lethargic, completely compliant slave.

  Was this mysterious Zophie… an emerald wasp? Maybe this was her MO: trawling for older men with money. Men who thought with their peckers. And she’d stung Nix – sucked him dry of money, then, like the wasp with the roach, she’d steered him out into the middle of nowhere to finish him off.

  But her blood was in that boat too.

  And there’d been the third person.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Boyd was jerked from his wool-gathering by a voice coming out of the cool grey mist. He turned round to see a woman in a parka. She was holding out a small black plastic bag.

  ‘Huh? Is that for me?’ he asked, not quite with it.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ she said gruffly, and thrust the bag towards him.

  He took it, grabbing the saggy bottom. It was warm. ‘Thanks. What the –?’

  She pulled a face. ‘Uh… you might want to hold it from the top, like I was doing.’ She pointed at Ozzie who was busy investigating the Case of the Discarded Chocolate Wrapper. ‘Your chap was busy over there on the shingle.’

  Busy?

  ‘Oh,’ he said, finally catching up. He quickly switched to holding the little bag from the top. ‘Yuck.’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to be that naggy person,’ she said, ‘but kids play on this beach, even in the winter.’

  ‘Right. I’m a bit new to this. It won’t happen again.’

  She handed him a tight roll of black plastic. ‘Poo bags. For all emergencies. Always good to have them on you.’

  ‘Ah, thanks,’ he said, taking them.

  ‘No problem.’ She turned away and called out, ‘Mia, come on!’ Then she headed up the sloping shingle towards the car park with her dog, a smaller, sleeker version of Ozzie.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered, looking down at Ozzie. ‘Well, that was embarrassing, wasn’t it?’

  They headed back the way they’d come, the beach all to themselves and swathed in an ethereal pale mist as the morning sun tried its best to break through. The tide lapped to his right, a soft splash followed by a withdrawing hiss across the shingle, regular as a heartbeat.

  As he made his way diagonally eastwards and up the beach, he spotted a figure to his left, standing on the steep hump of shingle that led up to the promenade path. A solitary figure looking in his direction. A man wearing a hoodie. Staring straight at him, no doubt enjoying the drama of poo-gate.

  For fuck’s sake. My dog shat on the beach, he thought. Gimme a break for Christ’s sake.

  The sea would have washed it away anyway, he reasoned. He bent down to give Ozzie a reassuring pat, and they headed home.

  32

  ‘Sorry about the roast, Dad.’ Emma grimaced apologetically.

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ Boyd, who’d been surreptitiously feeding Ozzie under the table, feigned what he hoped was disbelief. ‘It was lovely.’

  ‘No it wasn’t, Dad! The spuds were awful and the chicken was pink in the middle.’

  Emma had had to microwave their plated meals to make sure the chicken didn’t kill them both. The end result was that the roast potatoes were waxy little bags stuffed with dry mash, the greens looked like they’d been boiled in a school kitchen all day long, and the chicken was the lifeless grey of a pathologist’s cadaver.

  ‘It’s a new cooker for us to get our heads around, Ems,’ he said reassuringly.

  ‘It’s gas. I’ve never worked with a gas oven before.’

  ‘Well, there you are. It’s not your fault, love.’ He smiled over at her.

  He could see that she’d made an extra-special effort today – for their first proper Sunday lunch in the house. She’d spread out the red tablecloth that Boyd recognised as one of the ones Julia used to lay out for Christmas and Boxing Day meals. The nice cutlery was out. She’d placed a candle in the middle of the table, and she’d got Aretha Franklin on Spotify, piping some life into the tired old creaking bones of the house.

  ‘I’ll get it right next Sunday,’ she said, smiling back at him.

  They gathered up the plates and headed into the tiny kitchen. Ozzie followed, just in case there were any further scraps to be had.

  ‘It’s my turn next Sunday, Em. How about we score each other’s roasts?’

  She grinned. ‘Okay – but I have to say, even after today, I fancy my chances!’

  ‘Well,’ he said, laughing, ‘your effort today gets a less than stellar seven out of ten.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ She pressed her lips. ‘Higher than I thought.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘Too generous. Let’s call it six.’

  ‘Hey!’ she exclaimed, swatting him on the arm.

  He put the two-minute chocolate sponges in the microwave and turned the kettle on for their instant custard.

  ‘I’m okay, you know,’ he said, as they went back to sit down in the dining room to wait for Chef Mike’s ping.

  ‘Huh?’

  He gestured at the table, the candle. ‘All this. It’s lovely and I appreciate it – really, I do – but I hope you didn’t do it just for me. Cos I’m okay. I don’t need special treatment.’

  She frowned. ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘Well –’ he fiddled with the spoon beside his place mat – ‘I’m more worried about you.’ When she didn’t say anything, he carried on. ‘Look, Emma – I’ve been a basket case for the last year, and you’ve had to deal with literally everything. I think it’s about time I started looking after you.’

  ‘Dad –’

  ‘You treat me as though –’ he scratched his beard – ‘you’re carrying around a bin bag full of fragile porcelain. I’m not going to break into pieces, Ems – not any more.’

  He could see she was chewing relentlessly on her bottom lip – a childhood tic that never went away. He was willing to bet her future husband – wherever and whenever he was – was going to fall for that first.

  ‘I just…’ She looked away from him. ‘I just don’t want to lose you as well, Dad.’ He could hear the wobble in her voice as she tried not to cry. ‘I don’t want to go on without any family left. I want you there on my wedding day, to give me away. I want my kids to know at least one of my parents.’

  A tear spilled over and tumbled down her cheek.

  Boyd reached out a hand and grabbed hers. ‘I’ll be there, Emma. I’m sticking around, I promise.’

  ‘You’d better keep that promise.’ She wiped her nose and then patted her cheek dry with the heel of her other hand. ‘So tell me. Why did they suspend you at work?’

  ‘It’s a week of sick leave. That’s all,’ he said. ‘I think a cop with half a bra stuck to the side of his head doesn’t make for great optics.’

  She snorted a wet laugh.

  ‘It’s also a bit of politics,’ he went on. ‘This is about telling me not to be such an arse.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘No one. I did. It’s the whole “copper moves out from the big bad city to little town and thinks he can tell everyone how to do their job” cliché.’ He smiled. ‘What was that Simon Pegg film?’