The Drowned by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

living ones. They never tell us any lies, anyway.’
    *
    It was two hours before the Navy divers arrived, along with their large blue support van. Three forensic experts from the Technical Bureau turned up shortly afterwards, along with the chief technical officer, Bill Phinner. It was dark now and it had begun to rain.
    Katie went to talk to the reporters who were still waiting outside the port gates.
    ‘A vehicle has been located underwater with several deceased persons in it,’ she said. ‘All I can tell you at the moment is they are not the missing family from Kanturk.’
    ‘How many deceased persons altogether?’ asked Dan Keane from the Examiner .
    ‘I’ll be able to tell you that when the divers raise the vehicle out of the river. As you know yourself, the water in the Lee is not exactly what you’d call limpid.’
    Fionnuala Sweeney started to ask her a question but she was drowned out by the bellowing arrival of a bright green heavy-duty Doggett tractor.
    Katie said, ‘Sorry, Fionnuala. That’s my cue to go.’
    She went back to the quayside and rejoined Detective Sergeant Begley and Detectives Dooley and Scanlan. The divers had already attached a steel hawser to the vehicle and now two of them were dragging it up the slipway. The tractor’s driver reversed to the top of the slipway and they hooked the hawser to the back of it.
    With its engine roaring, the tractor crept slowly forward. The hawser tightened with a series of shuddering twangs and gradually the rear of the vehicle emerged from the water.
    ‘Dark blue people carrier,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘That fits the description of the taxi that picked them up from Barnavara Crescent.’
    ‘Yes, but if it is the taxi that picked them up at Barnavara Crescent, where’s the taxi driver? Don’t tell me a taxi firm would have allowed them to drive themselves home.’
    ‘Maybe it was a rental,’ Detective Sergeant Begley suggested. ‘Or maybe it wasn’t a taxi at all and they just borrowed it.’
    ‘Well, we can soon check on that, one way or another.’
    The people carrier was pulled right up to the top of the slipway, with grey water pouring out from underneath its doors. It was brightly illuminated by the arc lights that the NSDS had set up, so that it looked as if it were being filmed for a horror movie.
    The driver’s window was fully open and the driver was leaning towards it, as if he had been trying to escape. The other four boys were sitting tightly together in the back seat, although one of them was twisted sideways, with one knee over the boy next to him, which suggested that he might have been struggling to get himself free. The two boys sitting beside the doors were both still clutching the door handles.
    All five of them had bloated grey faces, with a bluish tinge around their mouths, as if they had been feasting on blueberries. They were in the early stages of putrescence, so their cheeks and necks were swollen and bulging out of their shirt collars.
    The technical experts circled around the people carrier in their noisy white Tyvek suits, taking videos and scores of flash photographs, so that the rain sparkled. Eventually Bill Phinner came up to Katie and said, ‘Okay to open her up now, ma’am?’
    ‘Yes, go ahead,’ said Katie. ‘But before you remove the bodies, make sure you plot their positions exactly. They were obviously struggling to get out, but why was the driver the only one to open his window? And when he had, why didn’t he manage to escape?’
    Two ambulances were being waved through the gates by the gardaí. Once the drowned boys had been removed from the people carrier they would be taken to the mortuary at Cork University Hospital for post-mortem examinations. The people carrier would be lifted onto a low-loader and driven to the Technical Bureau’s garage for a meticulous forensic study.
    Detective Dooley was holding up his iPhone. ‘I’ve just checked the index marks, ma’am. There’s no such vehicle