Someone Who Isn't Me, Danuta Kot [good books to read for adults TXT] 📗

map replaced Andy’s face on the screen, showing the coast, and the vast expanse of the Humber Estuary. A blue line ran straight down the map to a small outcropping by the water. It switched again to satellite view, and now they could all see a small area of land, flat and green with areas of marsh to either side. The blue line had become a narrow trench filled with dull, brown water. A scene of crime officer talked them through it, using a pointer to identify the important locations.

‘This area, Sunk Island, is very isolated. There are a few farms and a small number of houses. No pubs, no cafés, no shops, no schools. This drain –’ the pointer moved slightly – ‘Spragger Drain, empties into the estuary here via a tidal sluice. There’s a raised path along the banks, and this bit –’ he pointed to a small outcrop – ‘is hardstanding. The drain cuts through it, protected by a fence. Spragger Drain sluice. The sluice gate is tidal – the tide comes in, it closes, the tide goes out, it opens. It works by water pressure, no one monitors it and no one lives close by.’

He explained that Andy’s body had been dumped in the drain. The post-mortem suggested that Andy had died the night he vanished, but heavy rain had kept walkers and anglers away from the already deserted place, so he wasn’t found until yesterday morning. The rain had washed away most of the evidence.

The crime scene photographs appeared on the screen. Dinah felt a frisson round the room, heard a faint murmur. People had been impassive, maybe sad before. Now she saw anger.

She felt it too, a sense of outrage that someone had done this to her colleague – her friend.

The pictures had been taken by the water’s edge in a dull, dreary light. The first one showed a hardstanding of cracked concrete where a wire barrier, damaged and hanging loose, protected a deep culvert, and the drop into the estuary itself.

The next photograph was down into the culvert, where something was caught on the rotting timbers. It looked like discarded rags, but a glimmer of white became a face in the next image. This one was hard to look at, because it was clearly Andy, but the eyes were flattened, the features had slipped, just a little, robbing it of its humanity. The mouth gaped, the head lolled back, as if it was no longer fully attached to the body.

The next photograph showed Andy lying on the hardstanding. His face was an unclear white blur, but they could all see the wound where his throat had been cut across. Dinah felt her mouth fill with saliva, and made herself swallow, and swallow again. She could feel pressure in her sinuses and behind her eyes, and started scribbling random notes in her book so she could keep her face concealed.

She wasn’t the only one fighting to suppress her emotions.

Hammond was speaking now, his tone austere. ‘It’s pretty clear he wasn’t meant to be found. They put him in the drain and he should have been swept out into the estuary. Some bodies wash up, but not all. We got lucky, though. His clothes got caught on the timbers and kept his head above the water, which is why it wasn’t battered to pieces. We got an identification straight away, but this is the only break we’ve had so far.

‘Sir,’ one of the DCs spoke up, ‘the pathology report says a wound to his chest, but it looks like his neck…’

‘Yes. The chest wound was fatal. Whoever cut his throat did it post-mortem.’

There was silence round the room. They’d killed Andy, stuck a knife in his chest, then one of them had used the knife again, practically decapitating him. And then they had dumped him in a drain.

Dinah could feel the same determination that was building up in her growing in the room. Andy’s death had been brutal. They were going to get the people who had done this.

‘Several things we don’t know, and we need to know,’ Hammond said, taking over. ‘Was he killed because he was a copper, or was he killed because he was Andy Yeatson? What was he doing that night? How did he get from Brid, where he was last seen, to Sunk Island? What do we actually know about Andy’s movements that night? Karen?’

DI Karen Innes, went to the laptop, and a map of Bridlington appeared on the screen. ‘On Tuesday night, Andy Yeatson was on the evening shift. According to DS Mark Curwen, he was supposed to be completing his reports for the drugs operation that had been running through the summer until recently. Instead, he went out at nineteen twenty. At nineteen thirty-five, his car was picked up on CCTV just outside the centre, heading up this road. It was found parked on this side street, about five hours after he had been reported missing.’ Dinah knew the street – a nondescript, run-down place with a small amusements centre, a local supermarket and a hand car wash.

‘So we don’t know where he went after that?’ someone asked.

‘No. He called his babysitter at…’ Innes checked her notes. ‘Nineteen fifty. He usually called around that time to check everything was OK. He told her he’d be back at the usual time. She thought he was outside when he called – it was quite windy that night, if you remember, and she couldn’t hear him properly.’

Dinah wrote windy in her notebook, then crossed it out. Focus, she told herself.

‘Now, this is interesting,’ Innes continued. ‘She heard someone shout, and Andy said something like, Oh, hang on. And then she thought he was talking to someone but she couldn’t catch what he was saying because the phone was muffled. Then he came back to her and said, Got to go. See you later.’

‘How did he sound?’

‘Fine, according to her. Like he’d met someone he knew.’ Innes zoomed in on the map,