Dead Man's Time

please,’ he asked.
    A few moments later, the driver handed him back the phone, just as it was answered by a breezy-sounding male voice.
    ‘Hudson Scuba. How can we help?’
    ‘This may be an unusual request,’ Gavin Daly said. ‘I need a dive boat, with a trained scuba diver, in thirty minutes – or sooner. I don’t know what you charge, but
on top of that I’m prepared to give you a ten thousand dollar bonus if you can make it happen.’

114
    Roy Grace was in a subdued mood as Detective Lieutenant Cobb drove the Crown Victoria over the Brooklyn Bridge, heading back to Pat Lanigan’s office. He’d arranged
to rendezvous there with Guy Batchelor and Jack Alexander to discuss their next moves – but he did not know, at this moment, what they should be.
    It wasn’t helping that he’d slept badly, or that he was in a foreign city – one countless times larger than Brighton, and one that, despite his previous visits here, and his
love of it, currently felt totally alien. Although he had the full resources of the NYPD at his disposal, it was hard to work out how and where to deploy them to his best advantage. In England he
would have had no such problem.
    Glancing out of the window and down towards the Hudson, he noticed a helicopter lifting off from a pad close to the water; then a barge laden with timber making its way upriver, about to pass
beneath them on the sparkling, cobalt water. As the tyres bumped almost silently over the joins in the surface beneath him, he was preoccupied with his thoughts. How the hell had Amis Smallbone
been allowed to rent the house next door to Cleo? The bloody Probation Service were meant to monitor things like that – why hadn’t they? Or was he being unfair to them through his
tiredness?
    Because the house was in Cleo’s name and no one had made the connection, he knew. That was the truth. They’d had a lucky escape. Shit.
    He shuddered.
    Just how close an escape had Cleo and Noah had?
    How the hell could he protect them in the future? What could he do? Quit the police force and spend the rest of his life guarding them? That was how he felt right now.
    His thoughts switched to the link that the informer, Donny Loncrane in Lewes Prison, had told him about. Amis Smallbone and Eamonn Pollock, thick together, many years back.
    He hadn’t given it too much significance at the time, but the latest news about Smallbone was making him rethink, hard. Smallbone had rented the house next door to Cleo, clearly with some
very nasty intent, and had installed listening equipment so he could eavesdrop on them. Now he was dead, apparently fallen from the rooftop fire escape the day after someone had broken into the
letting agency’s offices and stolen the spare keys to his rented house.
    How coincidental was that?
    Smallbone’s house was now a crime scene, and SOCOs would be hunting for any evidence of an intruder. Who had wanted Smallbone dead? It could have been any number of people who the nasty
little shit, and his equally vile criminal family, had crossed over the years. But if someone wanted to get Smallbone for revenge purposes, they would almost certainly have had him sorted during
his twelve years in prison. That was the place scores were settled.
    If Smallbone’s death was not an accident, and he had been pushed, it had to be for altogether another reason.
    To silence him?
    Was the connection between Eamonn Pollock and Amis Smallbone, however historic, a factor?
    Pat Lanigan took a call, but Grace barely noticed, he was so deep in thought. Could Pollock have wanted Smallbone silenced? Had Smallbone been involved in this robbery in some way? As a fence?
Donny Loncrane had said Pollock was a fence – so were the two of them involved?
    One person might know: Gareth Dupont – but would he talk?
    He switched to a different track. Eamonn Pollock’s two henchmen in Spain had been found dead. Almost certainly, Lucas Daly was involved. Daly had travelled to Marbella with Augustine
Krasniki; his golf caddy, he had said. Bollocks.
    Intelligence on Krasniki had revealed him to be Lucas Daly’s minder. An Albanian immigrant; a thug; Lucas Daly’s hired muscle. So had the two of them gone to Marbella to kill Macario
and Barnes. For what reason? Why would they have wanted those two men dead? Revenge? To silence them? Or another motive altogether?
    And now Lucas Daly, like his father, was in New York. What the hell was going on?
    Suddenly, Pat Lanigan was leaning over