A Killing Coast Page 0,1

confront the past, and now that he had embarked on this journey it appeared he was powerless to stop. His gut tightened at the thought that what he might eventually discover could be worse than he anticipated. But time to reflect on that later.

Stanley was saying, ‘I told my son, Robin, that if I had to be cooped up in a flat then I wanted the illusion of space, which that view gives me. And there’s always something to see.’

Hence the binoculars, thought Horton.

‘You can look through them if you wish,’ Stanley called out, again demonstrating that uncanny knack of reading Horton’s mind. Horton wasn’t sure he liked that but he guessed there were some things you never lost no matter how long out of the job.

He picked up the binoculars and quickly focused them in, surveying the Solent. It was, as usual, bustling with container ships, tankers, pleasure craft and fishing boats.

‘With a view like this, sir, and your background on the force we could do with your help on Project Neptune,’ Horton called over his shoulder.

‘And what’s that when it’s at home? Diving for deep-sea treasure on sunken wrecks?’

‘Not so dangerous and not so much fun,’ Horton smiled. ‘It’s the brain child of our new Chief Constable, Paul Meredew. We’ve stepped up security because the American submarine, USS Boise, is due to visit Portsmouth in two months’ time. We’ve been recruiting residents, fishermen, sailors and boat owners to report anything suspicious.’ Horton zoomed in on a shapely dark-haired woman in her late twenties throwing a ball to a black mongrel dog on the beach below them, nice figure; the girl not the dog. She stopped to talk to a man in his forties carrying a dog lead.

‘I read about that in the newspaper,’ Stanley came up behind Horton.

Reluctantly Horton removed his gaze from the good-looking woman, who was ruffling the dog’s fur in a way that made Horton very jealous of the mongrel, and swung the glasses on the man she’d been talking to who was now walking past someone launching a canoe from the public slipway. A jogger with his iPod plugged into his ears swerved around them. Finding nothing of interest in the parked cars on the promenade – two saloon cars and a muddy blue van – Horton lowered the binoculars on to the table and took the mug Stanley was holding out for him.

Stanley said, ‘Nobody wants a repeat of what happened in Port Aden in 2000, and there’s plenty of opportunity to launch an attack from a small vessel in the Solent or Portsmouth Harbour, similar to that attack on the USS Cole. It killed seventeen American sailors. Al-Qaeda, wasn’t it?’

Horton nodded. ‘Hence Project Neptune.’ And Horton’s boss, DCI Lorraine Bliss, had been appointed to lead the team overseeing it. It was Project Neptune that had rescued Horton from being shunted out of CID, as Bliss had threatened, and which had also reprieved DC Walters from being banished to the nether regions of the force. Bliss thought Walters idle and incompetent, and him a maverick cop because he didn’t believe that you could solve cases by sitting behind a desk and shuffling endless bits of paper around as Bliss did. Thankfully, she had too much to occupy her time now to worry about breaking in a new detective inspector and detective constable. Working with top brass from the Ministry of Defence police, naval security, the Intelligence Directorate and private maritime intelligence company, Triton, Bliss saw Project Neptune as a step upwards and onwards. Horton sincerely hoped the latter would be sooner rather than later. She was also paranoid that something could go wrong, which meant a hundred missives a day cascading into his email, the latest of which was despatching him to the Isle of Wight on the police launch in about an hour’s time to interview an elderly man who had reported seeing a mysterious light at sea. Normally Horton would have been delighted to be at sea but his desk was buckling under the weight of bureaucratic claptrap and unsolved crimes. Bliss was squawking for results and despite putting in extra unpaid overtime at the weekend he hadn’t even made a small dent in it. Taking a trip to the Isle of Wight when a more junior officer on the Island could easily have dealt with it was time he could ill afford. But no doubt Bliss was making a point to those higher up. And time could be what he