One Under Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Afterwards

  Teaser chapter

  Critical acclaim for Graham Hurley

  ONE UNDER

  ‘There is no one writing better police procedurals today than Graham Hurley. He gives an almost cinematic quality to the narrative, creating a convincing sense of watching a team of real detectives at work’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Hurley is one of the great talents of British police procedurals. Every book he delivers is better than the last and One Under is no exception. I can’t recommend it highly enough’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘One Under is a majestic book. It’s immaculately plotted, has a strong character to anchor it, and shows police work in all its graft and frustrations’

  reviewingtheevidence.com

  ‘A wonderfully plotted yarn’

  Sunday Tribune

  BLOOD AND HONEY

  ‘Hurley’s decent, persistent cop is cementing his reputation as one of Britain’s most credible official sleuths, crisscrossing the mean streets of a city that is a brilliantly depicted microcosm of contemporary Britain … The unfolding panorama of Blair’s England is both edifying and shameful, and a sterling demonstration of the way crime writing can target society’s woes’

  Guardian

  ‘There is no doubt that his series of police-procedural novels is one of the best since the genre was invented more than half a century ago’

  Literary Review

  DEADLIGHT

  ‘I officially declare myself a fan of Graham Hurley. His attention to detail (without slowing the pace of the novel) and realistic display of police work mark him as a most accomplished purveyor of the British police procedural’

  Deadly Pleasures

  ‘Graham Hurley’s Deadlight is excellent modern British crime writing. Hurley demonstrates great attention to detail in regard to police procedure, as well as highlighting the conflicts of ideology that exist within the police force’

  Independent on Sunday

  Graham Hurley is the author of the critically acclaimed D/I Faraday and Paul Winter series. Blood and Honey and One Under have been shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Award for Best Crime Novel. A one-time award-winning TV documentary maker and a committed competitive open-water rower, Graham writes full time. He lives with his wife, Lin in Exmouth.

  www.grahamhurley.co.uk

  One Under

  GRAHAM HURLEY

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Orion Books

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Graham Hurley 2007

  The moral right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 1 4091 2351 4

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  For Kate and Tom

  with love

  I like the consistency of the dark. It keeps me safe

  - Don McCullin

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to the following for their time and advice: John Ashworth, Steve Beards, Derek Bish, Dorothy Bone, Martin Chudley, Roly Dumont, Andy Edwards, Norman Feeriat, Woody Fisher, Pat Forsyth, Diana Franklin, Jason Goodwin, Andy Harrington, David Horsley, Jack Hurley, Lisa John, Richard John, Bernard Knight, Barbara Large, Neil Maxwell, John Molyneux, Kevin Monks, Susan Newcombe, Ray Odell, Liz Oliver, Tim Pepper, Dave Sackman, Sally Spedding and Tara Walker. My editor, Simon Spanton, has piloted the series through occasionally rough waters while my wife, Lin, has remained the keeper of the charts. Thanks is too small a word.

  Prelude

  Monday, 11 July 2005, 04.30

  Every driver’s nightmare.

  Assigned to the first train out of Portsmouth, he’d checked in at the Fratton depot before dawn, double-locking his Suzuki 900, stowing his helmet in the crew room, and then making his way upstairs to glance through the emergency speed restrictions and confirm his station stops. This time in the morning, the five-car set would be virtually empty. A handful of staff hitching a ride to stations up the line, maybe a dozen or so City-bound commuters, plus occasionally a drunk or two, slumped in the corner of the carriage, unconscious after a night in the Southsea clubs.

  He was two minutes late off Portsmouth Harbour, waiting for a lone punter from the Isle of Wight Fast Cat, but made up the time before the miles of trackside terraces began to thin and the train clattered over Portsbridge Creek, leaving the city silhouetted against the fierce spill of light to the east.

  The station at Havant looked deserted. Coasting to a halt, he waited barely fifteen seconds before the guard closed the doors again. Picking up speed, heading north now, he wondered whether the promised thunder-storms would really happen, and whether his partner would remember to close the greenhouse door in case the wind got up.

  Beyond the long curve of Rowland’s Castle station, the gradient began to steepen. Ahead lay the dark swell of the South Downs. He added more power, watching the speedo needle creep round towards seventy. These new Desiros knocked spots off the old stock. German kit, he thought. Never fails.

  Minutes later, deep in a cutting, came the sudden gape of the Buriton Tunnel. He slowed to 40 mph and sounded the horn, raising a flurry of wood pigeons from the surrounding trees. Then the world suddenly went black, the clatter of the train pulled tight around him, and he peered into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Moments later, still enfolded by the tunnel, he had a sudden glimpse of something ahead on the line. In the dim throw of light from the front of the train, the oncoming shape resolved itself into a body spreadeagled on the nearside rail, then - for a split second - he was looking at a pair of legs, scissored open, and the unmistakable whiteness of naked flesh.

  Instinctively, a single reflex movement, he took the speed off and pushed the brake handle fully forward, feeling his body tensing for the impact, the way he might on the bike, some dickhead stepping out onto the road. Then came a jolt, nothing major, and he knew with a terrible certainty that his eyes hadn’t betrayed him, that what he’d seen, what he’d felt, was even now being shredded in the roaring darkness beneath the train.

  The cab began to shudder under the bite of the brakes. The tunnel exit in sight, he pulled the train to a halt
and reached for the cab-secure radio that would take him to the signalman back at Havant. When the signalman answered, he gave him the train code and location, asked for power isolation, declared an emergency.

  ‘What’s up then?’ the man wanted to know.

  The driver blinked, still staring ahead, aware of the guard repeating his question on the internal comms.

  ‘One under,’ he managed, reaching for the door.

  One

  Monday, 11 July 2005, 07.53

  This time, Faraday knew there’d be no escape.

  He’d taken to the water an hour or so earlier, finning slowly out of the bay, scanning the reefs below, enjoying the lazy rise and fall of the incoming swell. An evening with a reference book he’d picked up in Bangkok let him put a name to the shapes that swam into view.

  Beneath him, he could see yellow-ringed parrotfish, nosing for food amongst the coral; half a dozen milky white batfish, stately, taking their time, slowly unfurling like banners; even, for a glorious minute or two, the sight of a solitary clownfish drifting over the underwater meadows of softly waving fronds. The head of the clownfish was daubed with a startling shade of scarlet but it was the huge eyes, doleful, disconsolate, that had Faraday blasting water from his snorkel tube. The little fish reminded him of an Inspector he’d once served under in his uniformed days. The same sense of tribulation. The same air of unfathomable regret. Laughing underwater, Faraday discovered, wasn’t a great idea.

  Further out the colours changed, and with the blues and greens shading ever deeper, Faraday became aware of the schools of fish beginning to thin. He’d never been out this far, not by a long way, and a lift of his head told him that he must have covered nearly a mile since he’d slipped into the water. He could see the tiny wooden bungalow clinging to the rocks above the tideline. A line of washing on the veranda told him that Eadie must have finally surfaced. Shame.

  Adjusting the mask and clearing the snorkel again, Faraday ducked his head. It was hard to judge distance underwater but twenty metres down, maybe more, he could just make out a tumble of boulders on the seabed. This, he imagined, would be the point where the coral shallows suddenly plunged away into something infinitely deeper. In the beachside bar, only yesterday, he’d heard a couple of French lads describing a dive they’d just made. Faraday was no linguist but his French was adequate enough to understand profondeur and requin. The latter word came with a repertoire of gestures and had raised an appreciative shiver in one of the listening women. Requin meant shark.

  Floating on the surface, barely moving, Faraday was overwhelmed by a sense of sudden chill. A mile was a long way out. There were no lifeguards, no rescue boats. Trying to slow his pulse rate, he scanned the depths below him. A thin drizzle of tiny particles was drifting down through the dapple of surface sunlight, down towards the inky blue nothingness. Then, way off to the right, he caught a flicker of movement, the briefest glimpse of something much, much bigger than the carnival of cartoon fish he’d left in the shallows.

  Faraday shut his eyes a moment, squeezed them very hard, fought the temptation to turn in the water, to kick hard, to strike for home. This is exactly what you shouldn’t do, he told himself. In situations like these, panic was the shortest cut to disaster.

  He opened his eyes again, watched his own pale hand wipe the toughened glass in the facemask. He’d been wrong. Not one of them. Not two. But half a dozen. At least. They were circling now, much closer, sleek, curious, terrifying.

  All too aware of the quickening rasp of his own breath, Faraday watched the sharks. Every nerve end told him that something unimaginable was about to happen. He hung in the water, his mouth suddenly dry, feeling utterly helpless. He’d never seen creatures like this, so perfectly evolved for the task in hand, so ready, so close. The water rippled over the gills behind their gaping mouths as they slipped through the shafts of dying sunlight, and as they circled closer and closer he became mesmerised by their eyes. The eyes told him everything. They were cold, unblinking, devoid of anything but the expectation of what would happen next. This was their territory. Their world. Trespass was a capital offence.

  Faraday had a sudden vision of blood in the water, his own blood, of pinked strips of torn flesh, of jaws closing on his flailing limbs, of line after line of those savage teeth tearing at the rest of his body until nothing was left but a cloud of chemicals and splinters of white bone sinking slowly out of sight.

  One of the biggest sharks made a sudden turn and then came at him, the pale body twisting as it lunged, and Faraday felt himself brace as the huge jaws filled his vision. This is death, he thought. This is what happens when you get it so badly wrong.

  Another noise, piercing, insistent, familiar. The shark, he thought numbly. The shark.

  His heart pounding, Faraday turned over and groped in the half darkness. The mobile was on the chair beside the bed. For a second or two, listening to the voice on the other end, he hadn’t a clue where he was. Then, immeasurably relieved, he managed a response.

  ‘Sure.’ He fumbled for his watch. ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

  Buriton is a picturesque Hampshire village tucked beneath the wooded swell of the South Downs. A street of timbered cottages and a couple of pubs led to a twelfth-century church. There were 4×4s everywhere, most of them new, and Faraday slowed to let a harassed-looking mother load her kids into the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser. Buriton, he thought wearily, is where you’d settle if you still believed in a certain version of England - peaceful, safe, white - and had the money to buy it.

  He parked beside the pond at the heart of the village. Already, there was a scatter of other cars, most of them badged with the familiar chequerboard of the British Transport Police. Faraday was still eyeing a couple of BTP officers pulling on their wellington boots, wondering quite why a suicide had attracted so much police attention, when there came a tap at his passenger window.

  ‘Boss … ?’

  Surprised, Faraday got out of the Mondeo and shook the extended hand. DS Jerry Proctor was a Crime Scene Manager, a looming, heavyset individual with a reputation for teasing meticulously presented evidence out of the most chaotic situations. The last couple of years, he’d been seconded to the British effort in Iraq, teaching local police recruits how to become forensic investigators.

  ‘How was the posting?’

  ‘Bloody.’

  ‘Glad to be back?’

  ‘No.’ Proctor nodded towards the parked Transport Police cars. ‘These guys have been here a couple of hours now. They’ve got a DI with them and it needs someone to sort him out.’

  Faraday looked away for a moment. Proctor had never seen the point of small talk.

  ‘You’re telling me the DI’s a problem?’

  ‘Not at all, sir. But they haven’t got the bodies, not for something like this. You want to come up to the tunnel?’

  Proctor was already wearing one of the grey one-piece discardable suits that came with the job. While Faraday pulled on the pair of hiking boots he kept in the back of the car, Proctor brought him up to date.

  The driver of the first train out of Pompey had reported hitting a body in the nearby tunnel. The power had been switched off, and control rooms in London alerted. Calls from Transport Police HQ in St James’s Park had roused the duty Rail Incident Officer, who’d driven over from his home in Eastleigh. By then, the batteries on the train were running out of juice and the twenty or so passengers aboard would soon be sitting in the dark.

  ‘No one got them off?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The driver didn’t think it was appropriate. Young guy. Cluey.’

  ‘Cluey how?’

  ‘He’d taken a good look underneath the train, gone back with a torch, brave lad.’

  ‘And?’

  They were walking round the pond by now, following the narrow lane that wound up towards the railway line. Proctor glanced across at Faraday.

  ‘He found the impact spo
t, or what he assumed was the impact spot. Bits of our man were all over the bottom of the train but the torso and legs were still in one piece.’ Proctor touched his own belly. ‘Chained to the line.’

  ‘Chained?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Proctor nodded. ‘We’re talking serious chain, padlock, the works. Our driver friend thought that was a bit over the top, made another call.’ He shot Faraday a bleak smile. ‘So here we all are.’

  ‘And the train’s still in the tunnel?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Impact point?’

  ‘About ninety metres in. That’s from the southern end.’

  ‘How long’s the tunnel?’

  ‘Five hundred metres. Transport Police are organising a generator and a lighting unit. Plus they’ve laid hands on half a dozen or so blokes to check out the tunnel. Don’t get me wrong, sir. The DI knows what he’s doing. It’s just resources. Not his fault.’

  Faraday was doing the sums, trying to imagine the size of the challenge that awaited them all. At worst, he’d assumed they were looking at some kind of complicated suicide. The fact that this body had been physically tied to the line changed everything.

  ‘The DI’s established a common path?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Down this lane, under the railway bridge, along a little track, then up the embankment and into the tunnel. The train’s maybe forty metres in.’