Luck and Judgement Page 3

  The final item on the list was ‘CCTV ?’. Smith said, ‘In the briefing I was in yesterday afternoon, this was mentioned but it hasn’t been since. I’ve noticed plenty of cameras about the place today. Pretty well covered, isn’t it?’

  Aves agreed.

  ‘Not a hundred per cent, for practical and political reasons – apparently you have to give people a sense of privacy at some point. Personally, I don’t give a toss. But anyway, key areas have 24 hour coverage.’

  ‘For security or safety?’

  ‘Mainly security. Rigs and platforms are targets for all sorts – eco-nuts, criminals, terrorists. Fifty attacks on offshore installations in the past 25 years? No – not a lot of people know that. The North Sea record is excellent but that’s down to what you’re talking about here.’

  ‘Impressive.’

  Aves was suitably encouraged.

  ‘In addition to the onboard, we have satellite monitoring of ship and air approaches. We can see everything that comes and goes up in the operations room.’

  ‘That doesn’t come cheap, does it?’

  ‘These contracts look like telephone numbers now. But some of what I’ve just told you is confidential…’

  Smith tapped the side of his nose.

  Waters had returned. He handed over Smith’s ham sandwich and tea, and then proceeded with his own chicken tikka masala, lemon-scented rice and various side dishes. Smith studied the colourful assortment for a moment, before taking the cellophane off his own lunch – a good thing he had only been joking about spending the night as bunk-mates. He turned back to Aves.

  ‘Speaking professionally, what do you think happened to our James Bell?’

  ‘He went over the side. It’s rare but he wouldn’t be the first.’

  Smith paused halfway to his first bite.

  ‘But these outside walkways all have safety mesh. I don’t see how. You’d have to make a positive effort to…’

  Aves was standing up, putting his plate and cutlery together.

  ‘I’ve got to get on. When you’re done, find your way to the ops room. There’s a bit of CCTV you need to watch.’

  Smith said, ‘Can you run it backwards?’

  Carl, the ops room wizard, clicked the mouse and the images went into reverse.

  ‘A bit more. Keep going – there. No, back a bit more, a bit more… There.’

  The image was grainy, and more grey and green than black and white. The figure had paused for a moment on its journey along the walkway, paused and half-turned as if looking out to sea, even though it was, according to the time stamp in the top right, a quarter past one in the morning. He would have seen no ships. There was a profile etched a little darker against the darkness beyond, and somehow one could tell that it was a man. A collar turned up?

  ‘What’s he wearing?’

  Behind him, Aves’ voice said, ‘Platform issue, like the old donkey jacket.’

  ‘So it’s an outdoor jacket, a coat?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  Smith shrugged – his eyes had not left the screen.

  ‘Just trying to make out what he was thinking. Back to the beginning and run it through again, please.’

  Afterwards, there was a silence. The final image that remained on the screen was of two pale lines converging, the handrails of the empty walkway making a broken, upturned V.

  Aves said, ‘I know what you’re thinking. You don’t see his face clearly but it has to be him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we’ve asked everyone else. Every single person on the platform. No-one has any reason to lie, no-one would get in bother for being there or anywhere, even though it is an odd place to be.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  Smith turned away from the screen finally.

  ‘No, not yet. Show me on there.’

  On the wall to the side was a large floor-plan of the platform, and next to it, a similarly-sized schematic of electrical installations. Aves moved to the floor-plan and pointed towards what would be the northern end of the platform.

  He said, ‘It’s a gantry that runs across between pillars one and two, beneath the main platform floor.’

  Smith said, ‘And where are we now, just so I can make sense of that?’

  Aves pointed to a position close to the centre of the floor-plan.

  It was Waters who asked the next question, the one that Smith had been about to put.

  ‘So where was James Bell’s room?’

  ‘Berth,’ said Smith.

  Aves had to take a step to indicate the accommodation area at the southern end of the platform. Smith nodded.

  ‘So he hadn’t just nipped outside his berth for a breath of fresh air. He’d gone for quite a walk. Does that gantry where the CCTV was shot lead to anything in particular?’

  ‘No. It’s part of the access for maintenance and inspection.’

  ‘OK. Let’s have a look.’

  Steps, steps and more steps. Steps up onto walkways and then steps down onto landings and platforms. Metal steps coated with highly-effective non-slip materials but still each footfall rang out, especially from the workers who moved about quickly, purposefully in their boots. Several times they made way for busy-looking men in hi-vis jackets and safety helmets, and once for two young ladies, wearing the same but carrying clipboards and some sort of electronic metering device.

  Everywhere safety screens and meshes, everywhere warning signs, health and safety symbols. They made their way past the point from which one had the best view of the eternally-burning flare of gas, and stopped for a moment to wonder at it, as every other visitor to the platform must have done on seeing it for the first time. Aves wasn’t giving them the full McFarlane tour, though; he just stopped and waited until they were ready to move on. As they were about to do so, three more men passed behind them, heavily gloved and suited up for some particularly dirty job. Two of them were not speaking English, the third was but a strongly-accented version of it. Something was in dispute and all had been laughing. When they saw the visitors they quietened down and one spoke ‘Good afternoon’ – the others nodded and went on their way. Before they were out of earshot, the argument had broken out again in the language that Smith concluded was Spanish.

  ‘Proper little United Nations, isn’t it?’

  Aves said, ‘Every sort under the sun we get, sooner or later. They have to have basic English but they don’t have to speak it. I reckon they should but…’

  He shrugged and walked on towards the northern end.

  ‘There’s the camera. He would have been standing about where your oppo is now when you stopped the recording, facing that way.’

  Aves pointed away from the platform, somewhere towards Norway. They had come down about a dozen steps onto this gantry which ran below the main floor. The footplate was solid steel, the sides heavy gauge mesh, and there was a roof of wire netting, all of which was reassuring because below them the sea was rising and falling choppily, its rhythm disturbed by the presence of the great pillars that had been hammered down into the seabed two hundred feet below them. A huge gull with a black back flew between the pillars and in under the platform, wheeling just yards away from them before giving a burst of wild, lost cries. Smith leaned on the side-mesh and looked down.

  ‘What’s that bit do?’

  Aves had to raise his voice a little to be heard – Waters’ hoped-for abatement hadn’t happened yet.

  ‘Inspection access for the pillar. There’s one near each end.’

  A smaller, narrower walkway, another ten feet or so beneath them, ran at right angles to the one they were standing upon, right across to the side of the pillar. It looked less substantial, and had the side mesh but no netting roof.

  ‘So people go out on that? What for?’

  Aves put up a hand by his mouth and moved closer.

  ‘Pillars are inspected every six months. They use ultrasound. Go along the access walkway. On full inspection
s, they hang down from the top on harnesses. Nutcase work.’

  They moved further along, following the route that Bell must have taken according to the CCTV. At the point where the main gantry joined the access walkway, a dozen steps led downwards to a security gate that separated the two. Smith pointed.

  ‘Could he have gone that way?’

  ‘It’s always locked, you can see. General staff don’t have that key.’

  Yes, thought Smith, I can see that it’s locked. In fact, I can see that it’s got a brand new lock on it, all shiny and bright, when everything else on the gate looks a bit corroded, just as you would expect in these conditions. He looked at his watch. Three hours left and still a lot to do. A tricky one. He can’t simply keep popping back, making a nuisance of himself until something gives, the way he normally would in a situation like this. Say something or not? Decision time.

  He said to Aves, ‘I’ll get DC Waters to take a few pictures on his phone – didn’t think to bring a camera. For my boss, so she can see what we’re on about. You know what they’re like.’

  ‘Woman boss?’

  Smith nodded. Aves said something else that Smith did not catch but it didn’t matter. He was walking away, leaving the two of them to it for a moment.

  ‘You’ve got that phone with the fancy camera?’

  ‘Yes. So have you.’

  ‘Never mind that. Yours is an iThingy. Can you zoom in, do close-ups?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Take some shots of this walkway, the pillar and all that. Then do this gate. Get some real close-ups of that lock.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘Yes. I love a good lock.’

  When he looked up he could see that Aves had reached the end of the walkway, and was watching them. He was also holding up his short-wave radio to his ear and listening, saying very little. Smith put up a hand and gave him a friendly wave.

  Chapter Three

  ‘They can send an ordinary text in now, and it’ll get transmitted via the satellite link. It appears here as an email. When onboard, they can use the satellite to make phone calls home. It’s much freer than it used to be, thanks to wi-fi.’

  Waters was nodding away, looking at all the equipment, which was better than him looking at the pretty communications officer, one of the two young women they had seen out on the platform a short while earlier. Smith felt a proprietorial interest, having been present when the young detective had first met the temporary secretary at the Pisces Marina in Kings Lake last summer.

  Waters said, ‘And this is the actual message received from James Bell on Sunday afternoon?’

  She highlighted and enlarged it a little so that they could all read it easily. It said more or less what Donald McFarlane had told them it did that morning: “From Jimmy Bell – I’ve picked up some stomach bug. No good me coming on and spreading it around. Book me onto Tuesday pm out if you can. Should be OK by then. Let Denes know. And George”

  ‘Denes is the airfield that we flew from this morning?’

  She nodded to Waters.

  ‘So you would tell On-and-Off, which is that desk over there,’ and he pointed to the only other occupant in the room, a quiet, middle-aged Scotsman, at the only other desk in the room, ‘where I came earlier on to rearrange our flight home this afternoon. Thanks again, Derek!’

  Smith said, ‘Who is George?’

  Derek answered – ‘George Layton. He’s head of maintenance schedules.’

  ‘And Jimmy Bell’s line manager?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Smith stood and thought for half a minute, and the others in the room waited in silence. Then he spoke again to the young woman.

  ‘You can let us have any other texts that Jimmy sent in or received in his time here? You keep them?’

  She nodded, and said, ‘For three months.’

  ‘And did he actually make any of those satellite phone calls while he was onboard, in his first tour?’

  She clicked away, once, twice, three or four times.

  ‘He made two calls.’

  ‘Do you record them?’

  She looked disconcerted.

  ‘Do you mean, actually record them? No-’

  ‘But you have a record of dates, times, the number called?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you could let my colleague have all that…’

  Smith went over to the floor-plan on the wall – it seemed to be present in every office – and asked Derek to point out where they might find George Layton at four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.

  Waters leaned over the girl’s desk and wrote down an address to which everything could be emailed. She said quietly and sympathetically, ‘He’s a bit scary when he gets going, isn’t he?’

  Waters smiled and whispered back, ‘He’s a pussycat when you get to know him.’

  But he could see where she was coming from – sometimes, probably without even realising it, DS Smith slipped back into DCI Smith mode, and he was having one of those moments now.

  George Layton, Smith concluded with some surprise, was probably even older than himself. And not much taller either, but the arms looked as if they were still capable of taking hold of a well-bit and driving it down into the gas field manually if necessary. He was another Scot but of the old sort, with a fierce eye and few words to waste.

  ‘If ye’re asking me, he was not a happy boy.’

  ‘I definitely am asking you, Mr Layton. You’re the first person I’ve been able to speak to who actually knew Jimmy Bell. What makes you say he wasn’t happy?’

  ‘Well, we did’nae have a heart to heart. But there was a look about him. If he’d been ten years younger, I might have said he was homesick or the like but… Well, maybe it was that. He’d not been out for a while. Maybe it was that.’

  The three men in front of them were struggling to loosen the giant nuts and bolts that secured a huge generator to the floor of the platform. One had shifted to brace his legs against the cage that covered it before heaving with both arms on the three-foot long wrench. Layton looked on disapprovingly.

  Smith said, ‘I believe he’d been off the rigs for about six years. That must be hard. Do many come back?’

  ‘Oh aye, plenty try and some manage it. It’s the money, of course, but also the life. They think they’ll get their youth back. I reckon it took mine away.’

  ‘What was he like, as a worker? You only had him for a couple of weeks, I know.’

  ‘He was OK. You see plenty in a twelve hour shift. He’d have coped with it. Knew his way around a rig.’

  ‘But you don’t seem to think he’ll be back, Mr Layton.’

  This time there was no answer. Then Smith realized that he hadn’t actually asked a question.

  ‘What do you think has happened to him? The general opinion seems to be that he had an accident, fell overboard somehow.’

  Layton turned away from the struggle between man and machine, or perhaps between man and rust, and seemed to give Smith his full attention for the first time.

  ‘You might not hae noticed but t’fall off a rig is actually quite a hard thing t’do.’

  ‘As it happens, Mr Layton, I had noticed that very thing.’

  The hard, flinty eyes looked into his own for a long second, maybe two or three.

  ‘And no, I don’t think he’ll be back.’

  They were taken to Jimmy Bell’s berth by the Mess Manager, or at least that’s what his ID badge said, but it was clear that most workers not actively engaged in the mechanics of gas extraction had multiple roles. Roy Henman was a big man with a camp manner and an effeminate-seeming voice; the tattoos that ran up his arms and under the shirt sleeves, however, told Smith that this character had spent a good few years in the Royal Navy.

  The first surprise was that it was a shared berth, a double room with two single beds. He asked Henman about that.

  ‘Lots of the rooms are like it for non-management. It’s not as bad as it seems though, because they’r
e usually on opposite twelve-hour shifts, so you basically get the room to yourself for sleeping and time off. In the old days, this room might have held four, two on and two off, but numbers have fallen.’

  Smith looked a question at him.

  ‘More mechanized, computer controlled from remote locations. They tell me there are some rigs in the Pacific that are fully automated now.’

  The room was set out as a mirror image; only a straight dotted line down the middle was missing. A bed and matching furniture in each half, wardrobe, set of drawers, two chairs, more drawers built in under the bed – but it was immediately clear that one half had been lived in by the same individual for a while and that the other had not. From the doorway where the three of them stood, the side to the left had lots of personal possessions and touches, and the side to the right had none. Jimmy Bell’s half of the space had no pictures or photographs propped up on the bedside cabinet, no books on the floor by the bed, no little stack of magazines in the wall rack, no mini hi-fi, no tangle of chargers and wires for iPad and iPod, and all the other little iThings that people these days need for their iLives.

  The difference between the two sides was such that Smith did not ask the Mess Manager to confirm which side belonged to the new arrival, but the fact that it was a shared room did introduce a complication.

  He said to Roy Henman, ‘Have you got ten minutes to help us out? We need to have a quick look over it but I’d rather someone else was here as it’s a shared room and all that. Otherwise we’ll have to go and pull this other chap off whatever he’s doing and half the cookers of England might shut down. Would you mind?’

  Henman nodded and leaned against the doorframe; an ex-Navy man knew not to question the chance of some unexpected at-ease.

  ‘DC Waters, if you start at that end and I’ll start at this – doesn’t look as if we’ll be here for long.’

  The wardrobe contained a few clothes, spare jeans, a couple of T shirts, some socks and underwear. On its own hanger, a nice Moroccan leather belt, well worn, a couple of different holes used over the years – just about the only really personal item in the berth that Smith could see. He moved on to the drawers in the small table up against the wall, but found only a few leaflets and information sheets about life on Elizabeth; medical needs, dentistry, how to make contact with home routinely and in an emergency, how not to be alone – join the film club or the weight-trainers or get onto the chess ladder.