Going back to Poe’s C Auguste Dupin and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, procedural mysteries have an illustrious history in crime fiction. Damien Boyd’s new Seeing Red fits that popular model quite neatly. This is his 16th book in the DI Nick Dixon Crime series, and you feel like you’re in excellent hands from the opening pages to the end.
Acting Detective Superintendent Nick Dixon has been suspended with pay from the Avon and Somerset Police through a combination of a dodgy shooting with a 3D printed gun and a weeks’-old baby in the house. Now his colleagues are delighted he’s back on the job, just in time to lead a new investigation.
The village of West Bagborough seems an unlikely place for a murder until early one morning gravediggers preparing for a funeral find a body already in the grave they dug the day before. Their discovery is eerily similar to three cases that occurred in recent months near Plymouth, Devon. Two of the victims died from a blow to the back of their heads, and a third is still alive but severely incapacitated. Like the Bagborough victim, all three were found in freshly dug graves.
It isn’t much of a leap to think that all four cases are related, and that certainly is the point-of-view of the Devon and Cornwall detectives, who think they should run this new case too. But Dixon believes there are enough differences between the new one and those that went before for the Somerset force to keep it and, possibly, look into the original three as well.
This inter-jurisdictional rivalry won’t go well for the Plymouth crew, you may suspect, but relations between constabularies depend on more than staff competence. Politics also play a role, and the fact that Dixon was recently under a cloud doesn’t help.
The new victim is Lieutenant Commander Victoria Smith, Royal Navy, a communications officer recently serving aboard the nuclear submarine HMS Agincourt. This assignment makes Dixon’s work even trickier, because the work details and whereabouts of these vessels are highly classified.
Victoria was on shore because Agincourt is due for an extensive refit and in a few months she would have received a new assignment. Meanwhile, for those times when she was in port, she lived at the Devonport naval base, HMS Drake, during the week. She recently bought an old house in West Bagborough to use for weekends.
The Devon and Cornwall investigative team have secured matching DNA from their three cases. When it turns out that the same DNA can be identified in Victoria Smith’s case, they are sure they have the investigation locked up. Now, they just need to find out whose DNA it is.
Dixon is not convinced. He repeatedly makes the point, so often overlooked, as every viewer of television police shows knows, that DNA doesn’t prove anything; it’s a piece of evidence that needs to be interpreted like any other.
Dixon and his colleagues interview Victoria’s family, her friends since her training days, her superior officers and colleagues at HMS Drake. None of them can come up with any motive or connection between Victoria and the other victims. Victoria was not the only woman aboard the Agincourt, but the issue of women in the Navy, especially aboard a submarine for months at a time, opens up a number of interesting complications for Dixon’s investigation. There’s a hint she’d been involved with a senior officer, but none of the navy personnel know anything about it, and it’s barely a wisp.
A big part of the fun of this book is Dixon’s methodical working through the information he has, his dissection of the arguments for and against various theories, and the occasional leaps these analyses bring him to.
Then a visitor named Brian Finch tells Dixon about the mysterious deaths of two men who worked for his company. They were on board a boat surveying the sea bottom, looking for places suitable for offshore wind farms. Both were experienced sailors who followed all the company’s safety rules. They drowned in unlikely circumstances, and their cell phones are missing.
Finch believes they were murdered. He received an anonymous call from a woman who promised to reveal some information about the men’s deaths and wants to tell him in person. But she doesn’t show up for their meeting. It was supposed to take place at the church graveyard in West Bagborough. Dixon comes to the same conclusion Finch has; the unknown caller was Victoria.
Now he’s really sailing into tricky waters. Politics. Official Secrets. What could she have been wanting to tell Finch? Why would such a career-oriented officer do something likely to be patently illegal? And was this why she was murdered? He can’t even share information with his wife, also a detective sergeant. There’s a clever moment in which he tells her something important without saying a word.
Poor Dixon! Not only is he still a bit under the microscope because of his last encounter with professional standards, he wants find out who murdered Victoria and why, he wants to put the serial attacker out of business. Despite the Devon and Cornwall detectives’ confidence their cases are practically solved, Dixon wants to help Brian Finch, and it isn’t at all clear he can do any of this without getting everyone involved in a tremendous, career-crushing uproar from much higher up the political ladder. Most of all, perhaps, with a brand-new baby in the house, he wants a good night’s sleep. Fans of Dixon’s dog Monty will be pleased to learn that he’s taken on the role of baby-protector.
Read our interview with Damien Boyd here and another series set in the Avon and Somerset area, Tim Sullivan’s stories about Detective George Cross—most recently, The Tailor.
Thomas & Mercer
Print
£6.99
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
