Dead Tomorrow

since.
    No accidents at sea had been logged by the coastguard, she had told Glenn. Jim and his boat had literally disappeared into thin air.
    Suddenly, in his sleepless state, he remembered something. It might be nothing. But Roy Grace had taught him many important lessons about being a good detective and one of them was going around in his head now. Clear the ground under your feet .
    He was thinking back to Friday morning, when he had been standing on the quay at Aldrington Basin, waiting to board the Scoob-Eee . To a glint of light he had seen as they cast off, on the far side of the harbour, beside a cluster of refinery tanks.
    At half past six that morning, Glenn pulled his unmarked police Hyundai Getz up, putting two wheels on the pavement of Kingsway, opposite a row of houses. He climbed out into drizzle and breaking daylight, eased himself over the low wall, then, clutching his torch, half slid and half ran down the grassy embankment behind the cluster of white petroleum storage tanks, until he reached the bottom. Across the far side of the dark grey water he could make out the timber yard, the gantry and, further up, the lights of the Arco Dee dredger, disgorging its latest cargo of gravel and sand. He could hear the rattle of its conveyor belt and the falling shingle.
    He worked out the position where he had boarded the Scoob-Eee with the police diving team, right in front of that timber yard, and where he had seen that glint of light across the water, between the fourth and fifth tanks, and made his way to the gap.
    A fishing boat, with its navigation lights on, was coming down the harbour, its engine put-put-putting in the morning silence. Gulls cried above him.
    His nostrils filled with the smells of the harbour–rotting seaweed mixed with oil and rust and sawn timber and burning asphalt. He shone the beam of the torch directly at the ground beneath his feet. Then briefly up at the white cylindrical walls of the refinery storage tanks. They were much bigger now he was close up to them than they had appeared on Friday.
    He checked his watch. He had just under an hour and a half before he needed to leave to get to the morning briefing in time. He pointed the beam back down on to the wet grass. Looking for a footprint that might still be there from Friday morning. Or any other clue.
    Suddenly he saw a cigarette butt. Probably nothing significant, he thought. But those words of Roy Grace buzzed inside his head, like a mantra.
    Clear the ground under your feet .
    He knelt and picked it up with the neck of an evidence bag he had brought along–just in case. Printed around the butt were the words, in purple, Silk Cut.
    Moments later, he saw a second one. It was the same brand.
    To drop one cigarette butt here could have meantsomeone was just passing by. But two, that meant someone was waiting here.
    For what?
    Maybe, if he got lucky, DNA analysis would reveal something.
    He continued to look for the next hour. There were no further clues, but he headed towards the morning briefing with wet shoes and a sense of achievement.

48
    ‘Pleasetell me you are joking?’ Lynn begged.
    She was utterly exhausted after the sleepless night she had just spent in the chair beside Caitlin’s bed, in the small, claustrophobic room off the liver ward. A muted cartoon was playing on the small, badly tuned television bolted to an extension arm on the wall above the bed. A tap was dripping in the sink. The room smelled of poached eggs from breakfast trays out in the main ward, weak coffee and disinfectant.
    It must have been like the kind of tense, desperate last night a prisoner spends before being executed at dawn, hoping for that last-minute reprieve, she thought.
    Lights coming on and off. Constant interruptions. Constant examinations, injections and pills given to Caitlin, and blood and fluid samples being taken from her. The alarm handle dangling from a cord above her. The empty drip stands and the oxygen pump that she did not need.
    Caitlin fretting, unable to sleep, telling her over and over again that she was itching and scared, and wanted to go home , and Lynn trying to comfort her. Trying to reassure her that in the morning everything would be fine. That in three weeks she would be leaving the hospital with a brand-new liver. If all went well, she would be home in time for Christmas, OK, not to Winter Cottage, but to the place that was now her home.
    It would be the best Christmas ever!
    And now this woman was