Dead Tomorrow

Maybe Caitlin would become a huge star. It was possible. She was beautiful; people noticed her. She had personality. If she had her health back, she could be anything she wanted.

If.

Ly

‘Wisconsin must be six or seven hours behind the UK, right?’

Luke nodded pensively. ‘Phoenix will be about the same.’

‘So it would be the middle of the night. I would particularly like to talk to the mother there – I’ll call her this afternoon.’

‘The one in Manchester has a daughter of a similar age. You should be able to get hold of her. I think you should kick off with her.’

Ly

‘Good thinking,’ she said, and dialled the woman’s home number. After six rings it went to voicemail. Then she tried the mobile.

Almost instantly there was a click, followed by a loud background roar, as if the woman was driving.

‘Hello?’ she said in a thick Mancunian accent.

Ly

‘I’m just dropping the young ones off,’ she replied. ‘I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Can I call you back?’

‘Of course.’

‘And listen, love, don’t worry. Marlene Hartma

‘Absolutely fine, thank you!’ Ly

She put the phone down with hope suddenly soaring in her heart.

78

As Gle

A few minutes later he was in the cluttered conference room, which doubled as the canteen and shared communal office, with a mug of coffee beside him, carefully spreading out the photocopy of an Admiralty chart, which Ray Packham had helped him to prepare, on the large table.

There were charts on the walls, wooden shields, a whiteboard, some framed photos of the team, as well as a bravery award certificate. The view through the window was on to the car park and the featureless grey metal wall of the warehouse beyond. On the windowsill was a goldfish bowl, containing a solitary fish and a toy deep-sea diver.

Smurf, Jonah, Arf and WAFI were already seated. The young woman sergeant wore a black, zippered fleece, embroidered with the word police and the Sussex Police shield above it. The three men wore blue, short-sleeved shirts, with their numbers on the epaulettes.

Gonzo, also wearing a fleece, came in and handed Gle

The other four gri

Gle

‘To throw up in,’ Gonzo said.

‘It’s quite rough outside!’ Jonah said.

‘Yeah, and this whole building moves a bit on a windy day,’ said WAFI, ‘so we thought – you know – bearing in mind last time you were with us…’

Tania Whitlock gave Gle

‘Yeah, very witty,’ he retorted.

‘Heard you applied for a transfer to this unit, Gle

‘Mutiny on the Bounty springs to mind,’ Gle

‘So, Gle

The chart showed a section of coastline from Worthing to Seaford. There were three crude red ink rings drawn on it, marked A, B and C, with a sizeable space between each. A green dotted line plotted a course out to sea from the mouth of Shoreham Harbour, with a childlike drawing of a boat at the end of it, beside which someone had written Das Boot. There was also a large blue arc.

‘OK,’ Branson said. ‘The skipper of the Scoob-Eee, Jim Towers, had a mobile phone on the O2 network. These three red circles indicate the O2 base stations and masts covering this section of coast. The phone company has given us a plot, which is all marked on here, of base station signals received from Towers’s mobile phone on Friday evening, between 8.55 p.m., when it was noticed by a harbour pilot and by a shore boatman passing through the lock, and 10.08 p.m., when the last signal was received.’

‘Gle

‘No, Tania. When the phone is in standby mode, once every twenty minutes it sends out a signal to a base station, a bit like the way, when I was with you, you radioed the coastguard from time to time and gave him your position, yeah?’ he explained, pleased with his analogy. ‘It’s like checking in – calling home. It’s called, technically, a location update.’

They all nodded.

‘The signal gets picked up by the nearest base station – unless it’s busy, and then it gets passed to the next one. If there’s more than one base station in range, it could be picked up by two or even three.’

‘Blimey, Gle

‘Piss off!’ he retorted with a big grin. Then, continuing, he said, ‘So this is what was happening here. After the boat left Shoreham Harbour, the first location update was picked up by this Shoreham base station and this Worthing one.’ He pointed at the ones marked A and B. ‘Twenty minutes later, the second signal home was also picked up by these two. But the third one, approximately one hour after leaving harbour, was picked up by this third one as well, just east of Brighton Marina.’ He pointed at C. ‘That tells us Towers was steering a south-easterly course – which we’ve marked, as a best guess, with this green dotted line.’

‘Good film, Das Boot,’ Gonzo said.

‘Now here’s where it gets interesting,’ said Gle

‘Oh, great!’ WAFI said. ‘We’ve been waiting for it to get interesting, because it’s been pretty boring so far!’

The DS waited patiently for them all to stop laughing.

‘The timing advance can be anything from zero to sixty-three for a given link with a phone,’ Gle

‘OK,’ Gonzo said. ‘If I’m understanding this correctly, you said this shows the direction the boat was heading. So this is its last known position before it went out of range?’

Gle

‘No, I don’t think it went out of range.’

He looked up. The others all frowned.

‘This is where the fourth and last signal – the last location update – was transmitted from,’ he continued. ‘Now, the seaward range from standard base stations is about twenty miles. But I was told that the mobile phone companies, where possible, build their coastal masts exceptionally high to increase range, so they can pick up lucrative roaming charges from foreign ships passing, so the range here is probably quite a bit further than that – could be as much as thirty miles.’

Gonzo scrawled some calculations down on a notepad.

‘Right,’ Gle