Face-to-face interviews – they were a chance to weed out the gremlins before they got into the machinery of an investigation. He’d rather have a smaller team any day than a larger one with a potentially disruptive or toxic idiot in the mix. Through the interviews, he could probe his team for blind spots, chips on shoulders, personal grievances with another member of the team, or even inappropriate relationships that might bugger around with effective team communication.

  His attention returned to the DC in front of him.

  ‘How do I say your name? DC Samantha Oky… Okay…’

  ‘Okeke,’ she replied. ‘Pronounced “car key”. Like “Oh… my car keys”.’

  ‘Ah, great, thanks.’

  ‘It’s Nigerian,’ she said.

  He nodded thoughtfully, stroking the bristles on his chin. He’d have shaved this mess off his face if he could have worked out which cardboard box his electric razor was hiding in. Instead, with a week’s scruffy growth on his cheeks and jaw, he looked like an overgrown and misshapen version of Rafe Spall.

  ‘I had a colleague on the Met called Okafor – that’s a Nigerian name too, right?’

  ‘Igbo,’ she replied. ‘Same as me. That’s the southern, non-Hausa part of Nigeria.’

  ‘Okay, so I see here you’re a fast-track placement. A degree in forensic sciences. That’s helpful.’ He smiled. ‘Very useful to have a bit of science savvy on the team.’ He wondered why, degree in hand, she’d decided to spend time in uniform. ‘It says here you did a uniform year in the Kent police force before transferring here, where you did another two before joining the CID?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Why the transfer? Wasn’t there a CID opportunity in Kent?’

  She looked out of the window, irritated. ‘Personality clash, basically.’

  Boyd waited to see if there was any more. There wasn’t. ‘You don’t want to talk about it?’

  ‘I had three months of “Go get the tea, love”. That was enough for me.’

  ‘And you’ve been here six months?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How many serious crime inquiry teams have you served on?’

  ‘None. I don’t think I’ve actually stepped into the Incident Room yet.’

  ‘Seriously? You’ve got a relevant bloody degree!’

  ‘Yay, me,’ she replied. ‘Like that makes a difference.’

  Her frustration was apparent, but the huge grin on DC Okeke’s face when her name had been called out had told Boyd much of what he wanted to know about her. She was keen. She was obviously eager to prove herself, and clearly she was more than smart enough. Add to that – gender stereotyping aside – a little feminine intuition amid an all-male team could be invaluable.

  ‘Well, good to have you on the team, Okeke,’ he said. ‘Enough of the small talk – you good to get going?’

  DC Samantha Okeke cocked her head. ‘Going?’

  ‘I want to go and get a look at the crime scene. I need your forensic eyes, if you think you’re up to the job.’

  She grinned. ‘Excellent!’

  6

  They took a patrol car from the pool; DC Okeke drove. It started to rain as she pulled out of the forecourt.

  Hastings this morning, absent of the weekend visitors, had the morose look of a ghost town. The half-arsed and meagre Christmas decorations, scattered throughout the retail end, should have been taken down weeks ago. The forced cheer of the pathetic, rain-soaked loops of lights, blinking pointlessly in the drab grey daylight, made the soulless west end look even worse.

  Boyd turned to Okeke. ‘So why are you in the CID room instead of the CSI room?’

  Okeke took a moment to consider her reply. ‘I can still apply the science knowledge while I’m out knocking heads together.’

  He grinned. Good answer.

  ‘Plus, as a detective, you get to see more sunlight than the technicians do.’

  ‘True. But, still, you’ve got an untapped degree. Those things don’t come for free.’

  She signalled left at the roundabout and turned onto Pelham Place. ‘And I owe twenty grand in student loans. Truth was, I started uni doing medicine.’

  ‘That’s one hell of a course correction,’ said Boyd.

  ‘I wanted to work in A&E.’ She sucked air through her teeth. ‘But I don’t know… solving crimes and walloping bad guys seemed far more interesting. So I switched.’

  ‘Makes sense to me,’ he said. ‘There’s something deeply satisfying about putting away some of the arseholes you come across.’

  They were now heading along the coastal promenade. To his right, he could see a long apron of concrete parking; it was virtually empty now. Beyond that was the downward-sloping shingle beach, and the flat grey sea merged with the even flatter grey sky.

  To their left, a procession of top-heavy, white-washed seaside apartment blocks seemed to compress the grubby-looking convenience stores and charity premises, accordion-like, beneath them. Ahead on the right he could see an old Ferris wheel and a flaky helter-skelter looming over a drab, tired-looking arcade.

  He’d glimpsed the arcade on his walk down this morning. He pointed it out to Okeke. ‘That area looks like a bit of fun.’

  ‘Flamingo Arcade?’ she said with a half-smile. ‘You will never find a more a wretched nest of scum and villainy.’

  ‘It’s “hive”.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Ben Kenobi quote,’ said Boyd. ‘You will never find a more a wretched hive of scum and villainy.’

  She looked at him blankly. ‘Who’s Ben Kenobi?’

  ‘Star Wars.’

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry, sir. Never actually watched it.’

  ‘Jesus…’ His head dipped. ‘I think a little piece of George Lucas just died.’

  ‘George who?’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Never mind.’

  They passed a long row of scruffy souvenir shops selling a mixture of plastic beach tat, cheap printed T-shirts, ice creams and bargain no-brand booze.

  ‘Have you explored the town much yet, guv?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘We only moved down last Wednesday and we’ve been unpacking ever since. It’s never-bloody-ending.’

  ‘How’s your wife finding it?’

  ‘It’s just me and my daughter, Emma,’ he said, a little awkwardly.

  Okeke lifted her jaw. ‘Ah, okay.’ She was silent for a moment and then pointed ahead. ‘So, that’s the old town; one street back it’s lovely. Very old and Harry Potter-like. It’s all antique shops and cake shops and some very nice pubs.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ He nodded, appreciating the change of subject.

  This was the end of Hastings he’d been admiring from the East Hill, the traditional fishing village bit – all quirky-shaped buildings with steeply pointed roofs jostling with each other for leg room along narrow streets.

  As the road veered away from the beach and headed inland, Okeke turned right onto a single lane road flanked by tall fishing huts.

  ‘Up ahead is Rock-a-Nore.’

  ‘Rock-a-what?’

  ‘Rock-a-Nore, sir. The little cove at the east end. That’s where the yacht’s secured.’

  They passed a stone building that had once been a fisherman’s chapel. It was now a fishermen’s museum. That was followed by a small aquarium and yet another fish-and-chip shop. Hastings Old Town seemed to have a local economy that relied heavily on the sale of ‘everything battered’.

  The road ended with a height-restriction barrier that led to a small car park.

  ‘That’s the most expensive seaside parking place, guv,’ said Okeke. ‘If you drive into town, you should use the Pelham Parade car park.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be driving into Hastings,’ he replied. ‘My house is just up that hill.’

  She nodded and smiled. ‘Oh, very nice.’

  She drove the car into the car park and swung it round to the right. There was another patrol car directly ahead of them and a couple of very bored and very cold-looking PCs standing by an area cordoned off with perimeter tape. They were peering resentfully up at the spitting grey sky.

  Beyond the coppers, Boyd could see the yacht secured to the side of the breakwater and beside it a small blue forensics tent.

  Okeke parked next to the patrol car and they both climbed out.

  Boyd flashed his warrant card at the policemen and they lifted the tape. Okeke and Boyd ducked underneath and headed down towards the yacht.

  ‘DCI Boyd,’ Boyd announced to the man waiting for them in the white paper forensics suit.

  ‘Ah, you’re our new DCI from the Met, aren’t you?’ He offered a gloved hand. ‘Kevin Sully, today’s lucky SOCO.’

  Sully didn’t look old enough to use the term. These days the fresh intake of eager forensic technicians tended to refer to themselves as CSI – quite probably the Sky Crime effect.

  ‘Permission to board?’ said Boyd with a hint of Long John Silver in his voice. With a Herculean effort, he managed to stifle the mandatory ‘ah-harrrrrrr’ that was on the tip of his tongue.

  Sully shook his head. ‘No Jim-me-bob-shiver-me-timbers-and-blistering-barnacles… etcetera, etcetera?’

  Boyd grinned. ‘Almost… but I thought that might be overdoing it.’

  ‘Oh. Very disappointing.’

  Boyd liked Sully already. CSI types, in his experience, tended to be a dour lot. Not that much fun at Christmas dos, or Friday drinks. Not that great at having fun at all actually, unless you could call pushing negatives or sample bags around on a light table having fun.

  ‘Gloves and slippers please, folks,’ instructed Sully, as he gestured to the tent. ‘If you’re well behaved, have some sea legs and not too clumsy, I’ll let you forego the romper suit.’

  Boyd turned to look at the yacht. A tarpaulin had been stretched over the boat’s boom and tied down to the railings around the cockpit, creating what looked like a traditional boy scout’s tent over it.

  ‘The sodding boom’s in the way,’ said Sully, following his gaze. ‘We couldn’t get our forensic sheet up over the cockpit.’ He nodded at his improvised solution. ‘That works just as well, though.’

  Boyd and Okeke donned rubber gloves and shoe mitts. Sully handed them a paper face mask each. ‘You want some menthol rub on the outside?’

  ‘Is it that bad?’ asked Boyd.

  ‘It’s pretty ripe in there, to be fair.’

  Boyd and Okeke nodded. Sully took back the masks, dipped his thumb into a tub of Vicks VapoRub and smeared a dab on the outside of each mask. ‘Here. Get your glad rags on and I’ll give you the fifty-pence tour.’

  Sully stepped aboard first, offering a hand to Okeke. She raised a brow at him and hopped aboard effortlessly.

  Sully shuffled along the side deck until he reached the draped tarpaulin. ‘It’s an interesting crime scene, this one,’ he said, voice muffled slightly by the mask. ‘We have a total of zero bodies but, on the positive side, oodles of blood and artful blood splatter patterns to analyse, and even one or two small chunks of meat bobbing around.’

  He lifted the canvas flap, and blinding light flooded out from within. Boyd recoiled slightly and the boat rocked. He frantically gabbed for a halyard to stop himself toppling over the side.

  ‘Oops, sorry,’ said Sully. ‘Should’ve warned you about that. We’ve got some serious stage lighting in here.’

  He ducked down into the makeshift tent and gestured for them to follow.

  Beneath the thick tarp, the light was dazzling. It was coming from a solitary 500-watt halogen bulb mounted in a protective cage on a low, robust tripod stand. The light reflected brightly off the white fibreglass of the cockpit. Boyd felt as though he’d emerged from a subterranean nightclub into a brilliantly sunny day.

  The blood at the bottom of the cockpit, by contrast, glistened darkly as it rippled around like maple syrup.

  Sully turned to Okeke. ‘You walked through a murder scene before?’

  She caught Boyd’s eye and somehow managed not to eye-roll.

  ‘Yes, actually, I have,’ she replied politely.

  He looked disappointed. ‘Okay, then I can dispense with the caveats.’

  Sully hunched over and shuffled, crab-like, along the bench seat to the rear of the cockpit, then round to the far side to give them a clear view of the floor. Boyd was too big and nowhere near as agile enough to follow suit, so he shuffled unceremoniously along on his bum, and Okeke crouched in beside him.

  The three of them faced each other across the gently rippling pool of sepia liquid.

  ‘We’ve had the helm and the collapsible wooden table removed for lab swabbing,’ said Sully, pointing to a couple of bare fibreglass stands in the middle. ‘That also means we can move around in here more easily.’

  Boyd looked down at the blood. It was only a few inches deep and, as the boat gently rocked, the liquid sloshed its own tidal wave around, leaving shallows at the edges, where ragged shreds of flesh lay temporarily grounded.

  ‘Is that human tissue?’ asked Boyd.

  ‘Yup.’ Sully reached down with a gloved finger and scooped up a shred of flesh the size of a bottom lip. ‘There was a lot of pretty amateurish hacking going on in here. Not somebody who was particularly good at the job, or had the right tools to hand.’

  Boyd looked at the slither of wet tissue. It looked like a piece of muscle or tendon. ‘I’m guessing this was a dismembering, to get rid of a body?’

  ‘That or someone was prepping kebabs,’ remarked Sully.

  Okeke made a noise behind her mask. It took Boyd a moment to realise that she was chuckling. ‘Well, there’s another meal suggestion ruined for life.’

  Sully let the piece of meat slide off his finger and splash back into the charnel pool.

  ‘If I can draw your attention to these –’ Sully pointed to the vertical sides of the cockpit – ‘patterns of dried blood. We can see that the water in here was only about six inches deep.’ He looked at them both. ‘Rainwater, not seawater.’

  ‘Does that tell us anything useful?’ asked Boyd.

  ‘Um…’ Sully tapped his gloved fingertips together thoughtfully. ‘It tells us it rained?’

  ‘Hilarious. You should be on the stage,’ said Boyd dryly. No doubt about it, he was going to like working with this SOCO.

  ‘The spatter ovals have long tails,’ he continued, ‘which suggests high-impact velocity.’

  ‘A fight?’ offered Okeke.

  Sully nodded. ‘Swing-back momentum is a possibility,’ he said, miming an over-the-head striking action as best he could. ‘You’d get that shape thrown from a knife blade if it’s yanked out, raised quickly and then thrust down again repeatedly.’

  ‘So maybe a fight out here, then,’ said Boyd.

  ‘Or it could be windborne?’ suggested Okeke.

  ‘Right.’ Sully nodded again. ‘We’re outside, and we’re at sea. If it had been gusty when whatever happened here took place, the wind could have been throwing the droplets around.’

  Boyd could see thick circles drawn round most of the dried droplets, ID numbers written beside them. ‘And this has all been photographed and logged now?’

  ‘All done,’ said Sully. ‘Obviously, try not to rub against the sides if you can, but if anything gets smeared or scraped off, it’s not the end of the world.’

  Boyd took another look around the cockpit. ‘What’re the helm and table like?’

  Sully’s expression seemed to change beneath the mask. It could have been a grin or a grimace. ‘A Jackson Pollock original.’

  Okeke chuckled again. ‘Nice.’

  Sully gestured towards the hatch down into the yacht. ‘You folks ready for down below?’

  ‘There’s more?’ asked Boyd.

  Sully smiled. ‘Oh, yes.’ He then shuffled along the bench and carefully stepped across to the lip of the hatchway. ‘Mind you don’t slip. One of my lot managed to do that. Took a bit of a dunking in the soup.’

  Boyd followed him down the steps. At the bottom, he was pleasantly surprised to see he could stand up straight without bashing his head on the ceiling. The main cabin was also brilliantly illuminated by another 500-watt lamp squatting on the galley table.

  ‘It really is a lovely sailing boat, this,’ said Sully. ‘I used to have an Esquire 32-footer. This puts it thoroughly to shame, though.’

  The interior was what Boyd had been expecting from the sleek and modern design of the outside. Expensive. Beautifully finessed. To his right was a navigator’s station with high-tech touch-screen panels: a marine radio, a depth sounder, weather radar, the works – all arranged above a mahogany map table like SpaceX Mission Control.

  To the left, a galley with all the usual fittings. The cooking hob on a two-axis stabilising gimbal, a sink, an oven, a microwave, a preparation area with slide out add-ons – whoever had designed this had made ingenious use of the space.

  The main cabin itself was dominated by a large C-shaped cream leather sofa, which surrounded a mahogany dining table, folded down on both sides to allow the CSI team space to move around.

  ‘Nice, huh?’ said Sully.

  Okeke appeared beside Boyd. ‘Whoa,’ she said. ‘So this is how rich people mess around on the water?’

  The luxurious interior was somewhat let down by the lazy wave of seawater that was rolling from side to side across the lower deck. A scum line, a foot up from the boards, indicated that there’d been a lot more water down here earlier. Boyd looked questioningly at Sully.

  ‘Yeah, we pumped most of it out. The water was almost up to the table level, and of course, because this thing has been bobbing around out there for some time, it’s experienced some choppy periods where the water’s been tossed around all over the shop.’ He pointed at the navigation equipment. ‘All that’s water-damaged.’

  ‘How long do you think it’s been floating around out there?’ asked Boyd.

  Sully pulled a face. ‘I dunno. Weeks. Maybe a month or two? It’s hard to say.’

  ‘Was the boat sinking?’ asked Okeke.

  ‘Very slowly. I think it would have gone under eventually. We caught it in time. There’s a hole in the hull; you’ll see that in the forward cabin. The seawater’s been coming in slowly that way, plus whatever rainwater got in through the open hatch.’