The Drowned by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

for a laugh. It’s amazing how many people drown because they’ve jumped into the river just for the fun of it.’
    ‘Some fun,’ said Katie. ‘Anyway, thank you.’
    Fergus only grunted in reply. He sent the pictures he had taken to John’s tablet and then went over to the Missing Persons van to take off his diving suit.
    ‘Don’t mind Fergus,’ said John. ‘He’s one of the best divers we’ve ever had, but he’s a bit humpy-like, do you know what I mean? I think he thinks that life should have been kinder to him – for instance, he should have won the lotto or married one of the Nolan sisters. Anyway, come over to my car and we can take a sconce at his pictures.’
    As they walked across to John’s car, another car drew up behind it and a young Naval Service officer in a long blue raincoat climbed out. Katie could see his naval cap on the dashboard of his car, but he didn’t put it on. She had met him several times before – mostly here, at the Port of Cork marina, when frogmen from the Naval Service Diving Section had been called in to help retrieve bodies.
    ‘Lieutenant Breen, how’s it going?’ she called out as he came walking smartly towards them.
    ‘You could have timed this better, DS Maguire,’ he called back. ‘I have a Navy veterans’ dinner this evening.’ Then, ‘Hello, John. What’s the story?’
    Katie thought that Lieutenant Breen was quite handsome in a clear-eyed, square-jawed, clean-cut, military way. He had been trained as an NSDS diver himself, and since only nine per cent of applicants were ever accepted for the diving section, that meant that he was not only good-looking but physically very fit. Katie, though, was more attracted to men who were a little more louche and had the smell of danger about them.
    John told him about the vehicle that they had found underwater at the bottom of the slipway. Then he took out his tablet and scrolled through it until he found the photographs that Fergus O’Farrell had just taken.
    Although the light on Fergus’s camera was intensely bright, the river water was so cloudy that the figures sitting in the submerged vehicle looked like ghosts in a fog. There was nobody sitting in the front passenger seat, but they could just make out the driver, leaning at an angle away from the camera. The other four figures were all sitting close together in the back seat and one of them had his face pressed against the window. He looked swollen and moon-like, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open. He reminded Katie of an inflatable sex toy.
    ‘That looks like one of the missing lads,’ said Katie. ‘I’m not sure what his name is, but it’s almost certainly him. You saw the photographs, didn’t you, Sean? He was the one who was holding up a bottle of beer.’
    ‘We can extract the bodies and then winch the vehicle back up the slipway,’ said Lieutenant Breen.
    ‘It’s going to be dark soon,’ said Katie.
    ‘That really doesn’t make too much difference. We have portable arc lamps in our support van, and the water’s so filthy you can’t tell whether it’s day or night anyway. Now that I’ve seen the location, I can call in our recovery team and they can be here in less than an hour.’
    ‘One thing, though,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t want you to extricate the bodies before you winch the vehicle out. I don’t want your divers to touch them at all.’
    ‘Well, we generally remove the bodies first,’ said Lieutenant Breen. ‘It depends on the circumstances and it’s a matter of respect as much as anything else – especially if a vehicle’s turned upside down, which they often do if they hit the water at any speed. But if that’s the way you want us to do it—’
    ‘I want to see them exactly as they were when they went into the river,’ said Katie. ‘I also want our scene-of-crime technicians to examine them in situ . They always say that dead men don’t tell tales, but most of the time they tell us a whole lot more than