Blood in the Water: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller

by Oliver Davies

  “I need you to drink that before we go on, Mrs Price,” he told her dispassionately. “You are showing signs of beginning to suffer from hypoglycaemia, which means that your blood sugar level must be far too low. You may soon become dizzy and lightheaded, and your vision may begin to blur. Confusion and the inability to concentrate will quickly follow, and you won’t be of any further help to us today if that happens. Drink the tea, and eat the biscuits too, please. I’m afraid that if you don’t like sweet drinks, you may find it unpleasant.”

  He was a sneaky devil, my cousin. She was neither sweating nor shaking and was far from being hypoglycaemic as yet, so far as I could tell. But it did not occur to her to doubt him. He was being far too convincingly matter-of-fact and also slightly embarrassed about having to impose on her in such a manner, for that. She obediently did as he asked, not for herself, but so that she could perform what she saw as an essential duty to the best of her abilities. She barely even pulled a face as she drank down her tea.

  “Thank you,” he said politely when she’d finished. “Let’s just give it a few minutes before we start on the footage, shall we? I’ll just pour us all a cup while we’re waiting. How do you prefer your tea normally, Mrs Price?”

  “Strong and unsweetened with a little milk,” she told him unthinkingly, keen to wash the sickly taste out of her mouth.

  He brought a fresh cup for her and another for me before serving Annie and himself. Such a normal, everyday thing to do, sipping at tea in company, and she was so focused on the task before her by then that she didn’t even notice that she’d automatically taken a cheese-topped cracker from another offered plate, mimicking my own actions. Whatever her emotional state, the body knew what it wanted. A heartening step in the right direction.

  “The footage?” I asked once Shay had whisked the cups away again.

  “Second tab. There are several clips from two locations that seemed promising. I’ve added in some cleaned up stills of the best frames at the end of each section.”

  Vanessa leaned forward alertly, waiting for me to start the clips.

  I’d heard Shay quietly get up at around four last night but had dozed off again almost immediately. He often split his sleep into a few hours at night and odd little naps here and there. He’d got another thirty minutes in on the flight over, although how he managed that was a mystery to me. And I’d had no idea that he’d got so much work done before I finally went downstairs myself, a little after six this morning.

  The footage he’d found was the usual low resolution black and white stuff, but the frames he’d cleaned, enhanced and blown up were exceptionally good images, considering their source. The ferry had sailed at 14:10, so he’d run through the four hours before then on each of the available cameras and edited out all the useless parts. It was a shot from inside a petrol station on the road to the Uig ferry terminal that got a reaction from her, a man coming up to the counter to pay. Their CCTV camera must have been set to upload its data regularly, or Shay wouldn’t have had any means of gaining access to it remotely.

  She frowned at the short, jerky clip uncertainly. When the following still came up, she actually jumped a little. The man fitted the description she’d given. He was also wearing a beanie, with barely a strand of hair left loose, not that that mattered in a black-and-white image.

  “That’s him!” she told us, not a flicker of doubt in her face or her voice. “That’s the man I saw talking to Damien.” I didn’t insult her by asking if she was sure. I just let out a long, relieved breath.

  “Thank you, Mrs Price,” I said feelingly. “You have just given us the best possible lead we could have hoped for.”

  “Zoom in a little,” Shay requested. “The inside of his right wrist.” I did as he asked. What looked like part of a tattoo was showing beyond the edge of the man’s sleeve as he reached across the counter to pay for his purchases. “I spotted that earlier. It looks like it might be part of a compass design.”

  A popular choice among merchant seamen, I recalled from somewhere.

  “Possibly,” I decided, unable to be sure, “but whether it is or not, we can get this photo distributed and start running it through our facial recognition software, see if he’s already in the database.”

  At my side, Vanessa Price had paled somewhat and trembled slightly as she stared fixedly at the screen. Not from fear, as I could see very well, but furious, murderous rage.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with, Inspector?” she asked through whitened lips. Actually, there was.

  “Your husband was here in Lewis and Harris last week, I believe? Part of a business trip around the islands?” I hastily minimised the image.

  “Yes, he was.” She shifted her gaze back to me. “Do you think that man saw him then? Picked him out?”

  “Again, Mrs Price, it is no more than a possibility at this stage, but one that we can’t afford to overlook. Did your husband take any photographs whilst he was here? I’d like to see those if he did… and any you may have taken yourself on the ferry yesterday, too. There’s always a chance our man there accidentally got caught in the background of a shot.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t take any on the boat, but Damien is always snapping away, every chance he gets…” The wrong tense in that statement stopped her dead for a moment. “That is, my husband was always taking photographs. He was a very keen amateur wildlife photographer.” She stood and went to open the wardrobe where a pile of unopened bags were heaped up. She pulled out an expensive-looking photographer’s bag and came to sit down again. I couldn’t help but notice her eyes beginning to water as she opened it and carefully removed Damien’s camera from its padded rest, an object he’d cherished.

  Mr Price had certainly been a real enthusiast. There were three large lenses snuggled down in their individual padded beds, and a long teleconverter lay along the other side of the sectioned nest, spare battery packs and memory cards, the full works. She opened up the card slot on the side of the camera and pulled out a 16GB memory card, which she handed to me.

  “I doubt Damien would have needed to switch cards during his trip. He hardly had any chances to stop to take pictures. You can check the dates, to be sure.” I popped the card into the slot on Shay’s laptop and loaded the file into a new folder on the desktop.

  “These go back to the fourth of May,” I said once I’d checked the first and last of them, “and all the way through to yesterday.”

  “Mr Price set off for his first stop, at Islay, on the 11th,” Shay told me, and Vanessa nodded confirmation.

  “He did. I think the last photos he took with this camera were when we stopped at an exceptionally pretty spot on Skye yesterday morning.” She’d taken a packet of tissues from her pocket and was quietly dabbing at her face, leak firmly plugged up again, for now. “He put the camera bag in the boot before we locked up the car on the ferry. Any pictures he took after that will be on his phone.”

  I ejected the card and handed it back to her.

  “Thank you, Mrs Price. You could not have been more helpful. My apologies again for troubling you today.”

  She stared up at me as I got up, looking considerably less zombielike than she had when we’d first walked in. “And thank you, Inspector, for being the first person here not to offer me any empty condolences or meaningless platitudes, and for giving today any purpose at all for me. Neither of you is unfamiliar with loss, are you?” She looked down at her awkwardly twisting hands. “Sorry, it’s just that looking back now, at things I’ve said to the recently bereaved myself in the past, I just want to cringe. It’s all so useless, isn’t it? As well as being the exact opposite of helpful, however well-meaning you think you’re being.”

  I gave her a solemn, acknowledging nod when she looked up again. Every fresh expression of sympathy just threatened to break you down all over again. Shay was pretending he wasn’t there. She saw that too. We both stood, and Vanessa went to sit at the table while Shay packed up again. My cousin h
efted our bags and paused.

  “The man we’re after,” he told her, sounding a little hesitant and a little heated, his head well down now. “I don’t believe he knows that you saw him, or that your husband sent you that text. He probably thinks he got clean away with it and that the death will be dismissed as an unfortunate accident. He has no idea how close behind him we are.” It was an entirely different voice to the one he’d employed earlier, but I knew damned well that he was using it with calculated purpose. Shay never sounded heated when he was angry, unless, like now, he’d decided to for a reason. “So yes, Mrs Price, we may never know what further crimes you have prevented here today, but your life did have real meaning this morning.” He shot me a look that I had no trouble in reading. “I’ll wait outside.”

  Even after he’d hastily walked out, she stared fixedly at the door he’d disappeared through.

  “My cousin,” I explained, stifling a sigh, “is very good at his job, but he has some rather strong feelings about stopping those who destroy other people’s lives. I’m afraid that meeting people like yourself sometimes causes him to become a little angry, Mrs Price.”

  “Who did he lose?” she asked. “Who was killed?” How had he known she’d ask me that?

  “Both of his parents, and his maternal grandparents as well,” I told her evenly, but not without some rigorous self-control. It was not a time in our lives I ever wished to even think about if I could help it. “When he was twelve.”

  I’d been so wrapped up in what we were doing that I’d forgotten all about Annie MacLeod. She’d been keeping so still and so quiet until that small, strangled sound escaped her. Vanessa just nodded.

  “And so here you both are,” she said. “Doing something usefully meaningful… as much as anyone or anything ever can in a senseless world like this.” She picked up another cracker and examined it critically. “That seems like a reasonable way of coming to terms with a personal tragedy, to build something truly good out of it, but I can’t begin to imagine how devastating that must have been for the poor child. Was he there? At the time?”

  “Outside, yes. They didn’t see him. He was able to identify the culprits.” He had, eventually. It had taken a younger and, I’d always believed, completely out of his mind at the time, Shay quite a while to track them down. I didn’t see any need to mention that twenty-seven other people had also been killed in the explosion that wiped out his family. And I especially wasn’t feeling inclined to talk about how we’d thought that Shay was dead too, for six whole fucking weeks. I felt a sting as my fingernails dug into my palm and carefully unclenched my fist.

  “I see.” She was looking out of the window again, but not blankly, like before. Vanessa Price looked extremely thoughtful now. “Hypoglycaemia, was it? What an interesting young man. Thank you, Inspector. Do let me know if there’s anything else I can do, won’t you?”

  I motioned to Annie MacLeod, and she stood. I wanted a quiet word with that one. We both heard the crunch of Vanessa’s teeth biting down as we let ourselves out.

  Six

  Shay

  I didn’t see how that could have gone any better. A positive identification! That particular image had raised my hopes when I’d seen it earlier, I’ll admit, but a lot of people could have fitted the description Mrs Price had given the local police yesterday, so I hadn’t made too big a deal of it. I’d started a few facial recognition searches on it, though, just in case, because why not? I’d never been the sort to object to anything that made a job like this quicker and easier, and I was rather keen to wrap this one up.

  For one thing, I really wanted to get back to the new house as soon as I could, before the workmen made a mistake that would set back what was already a pretty tight schedule.

  It was sad to see poor Mrs Price in that state, of course, it was, but she’d do alright, I thought, after some drastic reprogramming. Vanessa version 1.8, or whatever number her ego’s operating system had been up to before yesterday, was pretty much totalled, but v 2.0 should kick in soon and then the rebuild could get properly underway. She’d never be the same person again, but none of us ever were, really. Egos were far more plastic than most people realised. They could be reshaped in countless different ways and constantly updated themselves behind your back, if you didn’t keep an eye on them properly. Nobody’s ever exactly the same person from moment to moment. Organic intelligences are always changing in a way that nobody else seems to notice, not in the short term, anyway.

  Just because Mrs Price wanted to curl up and die right now didn’t mean she might not still have a great life ahead of her, eventually. There was nothing I could do about any of that anyway, so it wouldn’t make any sense to let myself get upset about it and lose efficiency. Who would that help, apart from the person we needed to apprehend?

  I went down to the lobby to wait for Conall and paced up and down for a bit until I felt less fizzy. He’d be done up there in a minute or two, after he’d had a word with that nice little constable, and I needed to be perfectly calm by the time he came down. I knew what he got like if he thought I was ‘emotionally compromised.’ Ugh! Neither of us needed any of that nonsense right now. Cool, calm, perfectly rational thinking; that was what was required.

  Annie MacLeod would be in for it if she ever repeated a word of what she’d seen and heard up there to anyone, and he’d be making sure she knew it. I wondered if she was clued up enough to realise how odd it was for us to have had all those files already prepared. Hopefully not. It was Conall’s sort you had to watch out for. Most police detectives were a compulsively snoopy and questioning bunch. Plus they knew how long it should take to compile a catalogue of images like that. Mind you, for all they knew, Conall could have had a whole team working through the night on it back in Inverness, so maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem either.

  My cousin came down soon enough. He eyed me consideringly, before shaking his head in that ‘Did you have to do it like that?’ way of his. Sometimes, he liked to point out that a little less calculated manipulation wasn’t always a bad thing in his book. Sometimes he was right, but not this time. What little could be done in the way of helping anyone in Vanessa Price’s shoes had been effectively accomplished. Her family, her friends, and the passing of a considerable amount of time would have to take it from here.

  “All good with constable MacLeod up there?” I asked, having made my rebuttal with an answering look of my own. Our non-verbal communication skills were pretty outstanding. I wished everyone was as easy as Conall to exchange information with.

  “Yeah, all sorted.” He glanced at the clock on the wall behind the reception desk. “The ferry should arrive in just under half an hour, but it’s only a three-minute walk over there. I assume you’ve already got searches running on our man?” Well, duh! “There’s a cafe next door. How about a proper hot drink?”

  “Sure.” He looked like he could use a caffeine fix, and I wouldn’t say no to something with some decent flavour to it myself. Neither of us enjoyed dealing with situations like that business upstairs had been. He pulled the door open, and we walked a few feet along the pavement to the cafe entrance.

  “It’ll be a short stop at the ship,” he said, “but a look around ourselves might give us a better idea of how our man managed to get on and off, and I’d like to look at the crime scene myself.”

  Fair enough. Conall pushed the cafe door open and chose us a table where I could slouch comfortably with my back to the room. I could hear the staff at the counter, making admiring comments as he seated himself across from me. A pair of giggly young local girls. I don’t know that I’d agree with some of the adjectives they were using, but he did look good, mind, even in that stupid black suit he had to wear. Being a civilian and all, I could wear what I damned well pleased, thank you very much. I was very comfortable with my favourite outdoor summer jacket over my long baggy shirt. My black cargo pants were presentable enough too, so it wasn’t like I looked scruffy or anything, but I certainly wasn’
t showing my figure off the way he obliviously was. I glanced through the drinks menu and was pleased to see they offered a green chai. Just what I fancied.

  “Any updates?” Conall asked, and I fished my phone out to turn silent mode back off and check. You don’t walk into a meeting like that one with the volume on. One of the gigglers came over, and Conall ordered himself his usual double espresso and water. I asked for my chai without looking up before adding, in the local dialect, that it was a bit rude to make objectifying comments about people like the stuff they’d been spouting. From the way Conall’s big grey eyes widened, the poor girl must have turned crimson from her neck to the roots of her hair before she fled.

  “What did you just say to that girl?” he leaned across to ask.

  “A free lesson in good manners,” I told him, “before they tried that trick on the wrong person. You can’t just assume people don’t have a clue what you’re saying, whatever language you’re using. No matches on our man yet.” I put my phone down, “So, the ferry? What are you thinking? How did he get on and off?” I could tell by his face that he was a bit surprised I’d told her off, because I usually ignored that kind of thing. “They were drooling over you, you idiot, and a bit too crudely to be considered polite, especially these days.”

  Yeah, that always seemed to take him by surprise. I don’t know what Conall thinks he looks like, but I’d always found that particular underestimation an amusing and rather endearing little quirk in my cousin.

  “Actually,” he said, shaking it off dismissively, “I’ve been wondering how thorough the local force was with the vehicle checks when they let the passengers disembark. What if our man had a driver working with him?” Now that was an interesting thought.

  “Simple and effective,” I allowed. “They checked the car boots and the vans, though, right?”