Dead Tomorrow

until itstruck the wall. Dawn was starting to break outside his window. The storm had died down overnight and it was a dry morning. But the forecast was bad. Red and pink streaks speared the dark grey sky. How did that old adage go? Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning!
    What do I need to take warning of? What am I missing? he challenged himself. There must be something. What? What the hell is it?
    He stared silently into his coffee cup, as if the answer might lie there in the steaming blackness.
    And then, suddenly, it came to him.
    Sandy used to like pub quiz nights. She was brilliant at general knowledge–far better than he was. He remembered a quiz they had attended, eleven or twelve years ago, and one of the questions had been to guess the size of the English Channel in square miles. Sandy had won, with a correct answer of 29,000.
    He clicked his finger and thumb.
    ‘Yes!’

76
    ‘We are looking in thewrong place,’ Roy Grace announced to his team. ‘And we might be looking at the wrong people. That’s what I think.’
    Instantly, he had the full attention of all twenty-eight police officers and support staff at the morning briefing. Then he tapped the side of his head.
    ‘The wrong place, mentally, not geographically.’
    Twenty-eight pairs of curious eyes locked on to his.
    It was the fourth item on the Fast Track menu of the Murder Investigation Manual that had sparked him.
    ‘I want you all to stop thinking about your own lines of enquiry, for a moment, and focus on Crime Scene Assessment. OK? Now, we’ve been assuming that this choice of dump site was an unlucky or an ignorant one. But think about this. The English Channel covers twenty-nine thousand square miles. That licensed dredge area is a hundred square miles.’
    He looked at Glenn, Guy Batchelor, Bella, E-J and several others.
    ‘Anyone here good at maths?’
    The HOLMES analyst put up her hand.
    ‘What percentage of the Channel is that dredge area, Juliet?’ he asked.
    She did some fast mental arithmetic. ‘Approximately 0.34 per cent, Roy.’
    ‘Small odds,’ Grace said. ‘A third of 1 per cent. We’re talking needle ina haystack percentages. If I was going to dump a body at random out in the Channel, I’d consider myself pretty unlucky to dump it on the dredge area. Actually, I’d rate the chances of that happening to be so slim as to be not worth worrying about. Unless of course I chose that area deliberately.’
    He paused to let this sink in.
    ‘Deliberately?’ Lizzie Mantle queried.
    ‘Hear my reasoning,’ he said. ‘If we take the line that we are dealing with international human trafficking–the fastest-growing criminal business in the world–we can be reasonably sure of one thing: the calibre of the criminals we are dealing with. If they’re sufficiently well organized to be able to bring teenage kids into this country, and to have an effective medical organ transplant facility here, they are likely to be as professional about disposing of the bodies. They wouldn’t just go out to sea in a rubber dinghy and lob them over the side.’
    He saw a general nod of approval.
    ‘I know we’ve been over this ground before, and we concluded the bodies were taken by either private boat or private plane or helicopter. But whatever the perps used, they would have hired a professional skipper or pilot. That person would have had charts, and been aware of the different depths of the Channel, and in all probability would have known these waters like the back of their hand. The dredge area may not be marked on all charts, but even so it is relatively shallow. If you are going to dump bodies, and you’ve got the whole of the Channel, wouldn’t you go for depth? I would.’
    ‘What’s the deepest point, Roy?’ Potting asked.
    ‘There are plenty of places where it is over two hundred feet. So why dump them in sixty-five?’
    ‘Speed?’ Glenn Bransonsuggested. ‘People panic with bodies sometimes, don’t they?’
    ‘Not the kind of people we’re looking at here, Glenn,’ the Detective Superintendent said.
    ‘Maybe they genuinely didn’t see it on their chart,’ Bella Moy said.
    Grace shook his head. ‘Bella, I’m not ruling that out, but I’m postulating they might have been put there deliberately.’
    ‘But I don’t get why, Roy,’ DI Mantle said.
    ‘In the hope that they would be found.’
    ‘For what reason?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
    ‘Someone who doesn’t