Death Surge by Pauline Rowson

and whose windows gleamed and sported crisp clean curtains and blinds.
    He had called Cantelli and had asked him to get in early. He knew that wouldn’t be a problem for the sergeant, who had probably spent a very restless night. The heavy circles under his dark worried eyes bore testimony to that. Horton hadn’t exactly had a blissful night’s sleep either. His mind had refused to stop whirling for some time after he had stretched out on his bunk, and when he did sleep his dreams had been a mixed-up mash of Johnnie and Jennifer leaving him to wake with a dull headache of the sort he used to experience when he’d drunk too much booze.
    He’d stopped in his office long enough to email DC Walters the photographs that Sarah Conway had sent to him late last night. There were some good close-up shots of Masefield and his crew and two of the yacht, one from the side looking up at it and the other front on. She might have shot them on a long lens, but however she had taken them Horton knew it would have involved the risk of being thrown overboard from that RIB. On their way to Paulsgrove Horton had called Walters and brought him up to speed with events.
    ‘Wondered why it was like the haunted house in here,’ Walters had said. ‘That’s a bit of a bummer the sarge’s nephew missing.’
    Horton had given him instructions to get down to the Wightlink ferry terminal at midday to interview the marshalling staff. ‘You’ll have to go on-board the twelve thirty and one o’clock sailings and ask the load master, crew and the catering staff if they remember seeing Johnnie, but for goodness’ sake try not to get caught on-board when the bloody ship sails. Is Bliss in?’
    ‘Hang on, I’ll check.’
    Horton had heard him put down the phone and clatter across to the window.
    ‘She’s just pulled in to the car park.’
    Horton had instructed him to liaise with Sergeant Warren and get some officers down to the Camber to show the pictures of Masefield’s yacht and those of Johnnie. He’d then called Bliss on her office number. Swiftly, he’d told her that he and Cantelli were following up a couple of leads on a missing person’s inquiry and relayed the details.
    ‘Does it need both of you?’ she’d demanded curtly.
    He told her that the person in question was Cantelli’s nephew.
    ‘Then I would have thought it best to send another officer. One who wouldn’t be emotionally compromised.’
    ‘They wouldn’t have the background knowledge that I and Sergeant Cantelli have,’ he had answered, without saying anything about Johnnie and his mates’ convictions for arson, adding, ‘and there wasn’t time to brief anyone this morning.’
    He heard her sniff derisively. ‘I want to see you the moment you return, Inspector, and I mean immediately.’ The line went dead.
    An expression of empathy might not have gone amiss, he thought as Cantelli rapped loudly on the battered and scratched door of Ryan Spencer’s house, but that was just wishful thinking. He had about as much chance of getting empathy from the ice maiden as he did of being knighted by the Queen.
    ‘What the bloody hell do you want?’ an obese woman in her early twenties, with straggly dyed black hair hanging around a sullen pale spotty face, demanded as she wrenched open the door and eyed them with open hostility. In her fat tattooed arms she held a child of about a year wearing only a soiled nappy with a snotty nose and a chocolate stained mouth.
    ‘Ryan Spencer?’ Cantelli answered, raising his voice above the noise of a television blaring out.
    ‘Yeah, and who the fuck are you?’
    Tight-lipped, Cantelli showed his warrant card.
    ‘Might have guessed.’ She turned and screeched up the stairs, ‘It’s the pigs for you,’ before turning into a room on her left.
    Cantelli flashed Horton a pained look as they stepped inside. Horton knew his thoughts. How could Johnnie ever have associated with people like this? He closed the door behind him and eyed