Five hundred yards ahead, a container ship heading out of Felixstowe.
Passing the huge monster, we came to the Cape Ore harbour, where the wooden pier rose twenty feet above the waterline, supported by pylons and beams. We moored a floating podium on the nearside.
I disengaged the throttle, letting the engine idle. I steadied the dinghy and threw a rope round a rusting cleat on the podium, drawing us closer. I switched on a spotlight. Swing into the darker shadows beneath the pier, searching amid the weathered grey wood.
A flash of white. The figure of a woman suspended above the water, gazing at me. They looped a noose around her neck. Another rope around her abdomen disappears into the water.
The body swings as if moved by an unseen hand. Her outstretched toes pirouette on the surface.
"Do you recognise her?"
The elderly man inquired.
"Yes."
Alexis's eyes are open. Two crimson orbs. Blood vessels burst in the whites, and her pupils disappeared. They dressed her in the same clothes I last saw her. Salt in the air has stiffened the fabric.
The skiff is rising and sinking in the slight swell. The old guy settled it, and I stepped onto the podium. A metal ladder bolted to a pylon leads up to the jetty. Seagulls watch from the navigation buoys and a nearby barge.
I climbed the ladder. The pier's planks are ancient. Gaps in between wide enough to look at the top of Alexis's head.
They knotted the rope around her collar to a metal bollard used for mooring ships.
They tied the yarn around her abdomen to a breeze-block. Cement dust on her hands, and front of jacket.
They made her jump. The certainty is a vision. She held the breeze-block in her arms, and they pushed her down the last step. She dropped fifteen feet before the rope stopped her. The cement brick tore from her fingers. Falling until the second rope, tied around her waistline, drew taut. My stomach shares the drop.
"How did she get out of here?" The man yelled from the skiff.
I motioned along the wharf.
"It's fenced off, warning signs. Of course, that encourages people."
"You're not thinking suicide?"
"She didn't carry that lump of concrete out here by herself."
In the distance, whitecaps where the water is less sheltered from the wind. A fishing boat is coming home.
"She was MI5." I substantiated.
As I walk along the jetty, Cape Ore has changed and become mysterious and more dangerous. I long for the familiar.
"What should we do with him?"
The old man gestured to our captive.
I got the silenced weapon from my waistband, aimed it at the tied-up Russian, still in the dinghy.
An abandoned crane is deteriorating on the shoreline. It looks wreckage from an ancient war. Alexis's body is till spinning in my mind, pirouetting on her toes.
I have been a fool. My good intentions have set off a chain of events that led to this. And I don't see where it ends or who else may die. I realise one thing. I desire to know who did it. This isn't looking at something. It's bigger than that. I need to make their suffering more poignant than others. Never in my life have I felt so capable of executing someone.
I pulled the trigger.
The Russian's head snapped back.
The bullet entered the brain via the forehead. Killing him in an instant.
His eyes rolled up into his skull.
A puppet without its strings.
He flopped backwards into the dark waters of Cape Ore harbour without the whisper of a splash.
The old man looked at me, shocked. His mouth opens.
"Why did you do that?"
"There's no 'why.' No justification needed. I executed him or he assassinated me, and then you, and now we'd both be where he is. I don't justify slaughtering someone who may have murdered at least three times more. And if he wasn't a murderer, he showed tonight to murder. I murdered him with no thought, compassion, or remorse. As if I had tramped on a black widow spider."
"You can't go around acting as public executioner."
"If it's a choice between them and me, I can and will."
"This won't cause any problems for Mary, will it?"
"Can't answer that. Let's take you to safety.
"Where is that?"
I got him to the police station. Fitzgerald placed the old man in protective custody. I informed him concerning Alexis. I look at the tensions rise to his shoulders. Move to his neck. His eyes close. He takes a ragged breath.
Within an hour, they unlocked the harbour gates at the far end of the pier. A forensic team arrives in a van. The water is dark. Waves wrinkle on a sluggish sea.
Seagulls circle and swoop for insects in the beams of the spotlights. They appear so graceful in flight, and yet squabble as fish-wives on the ground. They always sound sad, wailing in anguish as creatures condemned to hell.
Fitzgerald joined me as a law enforcement officer in climbing gear abseils over the side. He swings in a harness beside her body. We watched in silence as they lashed Alexis into a stretcher cage.
"Are you okay?" Fitzgerald inquired.
"I need another favour."
"Not a helicopter?"
"No. Scuba gear."
"Why?"
"I'm going fishing."