Blood in the Water: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller

by Oliver Davies

  “How long before you think you can give me enough information on that boat to justify a search warrant?” he wanted to know.

  “It shouldn’t take long.” I wondered if that was Mr Butler’s phone we’d discovered because it seemed likely that Phelps and Jordan were still keeping all their devices turned off. Neither of them was responding to any of their incoming messages. Besides, they might not even be on that boat. If it was Butler’s phone, I could get a lot of information on him straight from Locke’s hub.

  “I’m just going to make myself a tea before I get started,” I told Conall once he’d let us back into our office and I’d got my jacket off.

  “I’ll get that for you. You just get cracking.” Yeah, it would probably be better if he cleared off for a few minutes and left me to it. Con was fizzing with impatient excitement by then, and he’d only distract me by fidgeting around, anyway. I fished around in my pack and chose a nice fruity matcha blend to toss to him.

  It must have taken ages for the kettle to boil because, by the time he came back, I was already almost finished with compiling a short information sheet for him to present to Trish Morrison. William Butler was employed by Malcolm Locke’s brother-in-law, Iain Shaw. Iain had been on my list, but I hadn’t got around to expanding it to include his employees yet. There were also plenty of messages, back and forth, between Iain Shaw and Cory Phelps, but Trish wouldn’t be able to use those to convince a magistrate to sign the warrant. I couldn’t include the boat’s movements either, for the same reason. They’d want to know how we’d got that information.

  Conall put my tea down by me. It didn’t look ready yet, but he’d left the teabag in, so that was alright. He tucked his refilled thermos away before pulling his chair nearer so he could read as I worked.

  “Locke sold Butler the boat for thirty grand? That seems low. How much is it worth?”

  “At least eighty, even now. More when he bought it. That’s pretty suspicious, right?”

  “It certainly is, but we can’t mention that yet either. It doesn’t matter. You've got us our link between Jeanie and Locke’s organisation. I’ll get Trish to call the Port Authority and get Jeanie’s arrival and departure dates directly from them, that should be quick. I can add the reports of the North East Division's investigations into Locke, as well as Cory Phelps’ employment record with Locke Imports and his prior conviction for smuggling. Along with Whitaker’s confession, implicating Phelps, I’d say that’s more than enough connections to get a warrant on.” He slapped me on the back instead of saying anything because he knew it would only make me uncomfortable if he did.

  I bounced the sheet over to him, and he composed and sent his email to Trish before rushing out again. I was just fishing my teabag out when Ewan tapped on the door.

  “Hi, Mr Keane. The Inspector asked me to bring you this.” He deposited a little white bakery box, a small plate and a fork on the desk. “He seemed awfully pleased about something when I bumped into him a while ago. I hope that means the investigation is going well.” He didn’t quite make it a question.

  “We might have caught a break, but we’ll just have to wait and see.” I frowned at the box. “Thanks for obliging him, Ewan, but he shouldn’t have asked you to do that. You’re not an errand boy.”

  “Oh no, it wasn’t like that, Mr Keane. I was on my way out to fetch everyone’s afternoon orders anyway, so I asked if I could get him anything when I saw him waiting for the kettle.” Well, that was alright then. Ewan tipped me a little nod and a smile and went off again, closing the door behind him.

  My generous serving of apple pie, when I lifted it out, was still warm, and there was even a little tub of cream in the box too. I felt ever so appreciated as I sampled a first melting mouthful. I knew perfectly well how highly Con thought of the work I did, but if he wanted to say it with pie today, that was fine by me.

  Seventeen

  I stood by Trish’s window, staring out across the sun-sparkled water below while she talked to the harbour master. From her side of the conversation, I gathered that she and ‘Arnold’ were old friends. In a place this size, Trish was probably familiar with far more people than I’d ever been anywhere I’d worked. That could be very useful, professionally, but I wasn’t too sure I’d enjoy the obligatory socialising that came with it.

  After she’d finished with her call, I went over to sit down in the same chair I’d occupied earlier. That pile of files in her In basket looked just as high as it had before lunch, but I could see that she’d been busy. The Out basket stack had risen quite a bit since then. McKinnon’s desk nearly always had a seemingly endless stream of reports flowing across it too. I didn’t envy either of them. Maybe, in another fifteen or twenty years, being chained to a desk for most of the time would seem like a more attractive prospect to me, but I’d resign before letting Anderson tie me down like that now. Well, I’d at least make him believe that I would.

  “The Port Authority will send over the requested information on the Jeanie as soon as they’ve retrieved it. Arnold said it should only take a few minutes.” Trish was eyeing me curiously. “I suppose you already know which dates are going to show up, somehow.” It wasn’t quite a question, so I didn’t feel any need to respond to that comment. Instead, I voiced my most pressing concern.

  “I’m not sure how we proceed once we have the warrant, Trish. I don’t know how things usually work in your area. What happens next? Do you contact the Ullapool people to deal with Butler when he arrives?” I wasn’t used to working in a place where you couldn’t drive wherever you needed to go. How was I supposed to get over there quickly?

  “Yes, absolutely. We should just let them handle it.” She’d probably decided she’d rather not know exactly what Shay had been up to, anyway. He didn’t operate under the same rules and restrictions that we did, and most police officers were uncomfortable with the thought of what kind of covert snooping the government might be allowing behind our backs. “If Phelps or Jordan are on board, Ullapool can hold them for you until you get there. We can get you a lift over there without much delay if that happens. Let’s just see if it’s worth the trip first, shall we?” That made sense. “You said that your cousin has eyes on Jeanie?” So we’ll know if she changes course, or stops to drop anyone off before Ullapool?

  “He has access to a live satellite feed, yes.” That, at least, was totally legitimate and disclosable. “I’ll let you know if there’s any change to report.”

  “Yes, please do, Conall.” I left her to get on with her side of things, confident that she’d deal with everything that needed to be seen to before the Jeanie reached the mainland.

  When I got back to our office Shay had sort of melted backwards into his chair, legs stretched out, fork in one hand and plate in the other.

  “Anyone would think you got stoned on that stuff,” I told him, both amused and pleased as he smiled up at me beatifically. It must be really good pie. The better they were, the slower he ate them. I wasn’t a fan myself.

  “S’got cinnamon in it,” he informed me happily, mumbling around his current mouthful. Well, he’d certainly deserved his little treat after that insane coding session he’d pulled off down at South Beach. I rarely got to see him produce such spectacular results out of thin air like that. I’d timed him too, under thirty minutes from start to finish.

  I opened up my report, unsure of how to word the latest development. Best not to get too specific.

  ‘After Aaron Whitaker confirmed that he had been recruited by Cory Phelps. Mr Keane and I expanded our search on people known to be connected to Malcolm Locke and discovered that William Butler, an employee of Locke’s brother-in-law, Iain Shaw, was the registered owner of a motor cruiser, Jeanie. The Stornoway Port Authority was able to confirm that Jeanie had visited Stornoway on the following dates…’

  Yeah, that would do it. I finished off the short addition and saved the file. Shay must have been keeping an eye on his screen the whole time because he sat up and gave me a
nudge.

  “She’s losing speed.”

  I moved my chair over so I could read the information he had on display on the right side of his screen. Speed, position, distance from Stornoway, distance to Ullapool. The satellite feed on the left showed me that Jeanie had almost reached Priest Island by then, an uninhabited little nature reserve colonised by a healthy variety of seabirds. Our boat wasn’t merely losing speed by the looks of it, she was coming to a dead stop. Was it deliberate, or were they having engine trouble?

  “Wait,” Shay advised as I reached for the phone. “Give it a few minutes to see if there’s any sign of activity.”

  No unfocused blobs that might be people emerged to check on the twin engines mounted at the stern. He zoomed out. No other vessels on a course to intercept our boat anywhere nearby either. He switched back to the closest view we could get. We gave it a good five minutes, but there was still no sign of life on board.

  “She’s drifting slightly. About fifteen feet a minute. I think we’d better get the coastguard to go and check her out, or she’ll be on the rocks in an hour.”

  Trish came down herself to see what we were talking about when I called her. “You’re right,” she decided, “She’s acting like an unmanned vessel. I’ll call it in and get a Search and Rescue helicopter sent out to look. The RNLI can send a boat out from Lochinver if they’re needed. They’re only half our distance from there.” She made the call to the Stornoway Coastguard team from my desk phone.

  “Could you two bring that laptop up to my office?” she asked after hanging up, “We can patch into their radio up there and listen in as well as observe.” Was that because her husband, Jack Morrison, was first officer on one of the helicopters, or did all the Area Commanders here have that facility? Probably the latter, I decided. The police here worked a lot of Search and Rescue missions with the Coastguard.

  “How long until they reach her?” Not long, surely? The Coastguard had two Sikorsky s-92s based here, and they weren’t just big. They were also fast. They could hit two hundred miles an hour if they needed to.

  “It’s a short flight. It just depends on how quickly they can get in the air. Fifteen to thirty minutes, tops.”

  “We’ll come up in a few minutes then, if that’s alright.”

  “Good, thanks. No need to knock. I’ll be expecting you.” Shay waited until she’d gone before beginning to work through all the other tabs he had open. “I don’t want to shut any of these down. I’ll just hide them and silence all the alerts temporarily.”

  “Alright. I’m going to nip to the loo before we head up.” I collected his tea things and the empty box to take out while I was at it. If Jeanie had suffered a mechanical failure, why hadn’t anyone appeared on deck to see what the problem was? I flattened the box and put it in the recycling bin. Maybe Butler had taken ill? Was he alone on that boat after all? I hoped not. There had been a good chance that he was giving Jordan and Phelps a lift out of here, or so I’d thought.

  I put the last of our little batch of washing up into the draining rack and dried my hands. Had Phelps even reported his sighting of ‘Sean Osborne’ at the distillery to Butler? From the reading material I’d gone through on Malcolm Locke, their boss didn’t seem the type to order a hit on anyone. Given his chosen profession, Locke appeared to be unusually non-confrontational and non-violent. It seemed far more likely that he’d just shut the operation down for now and watch and wait. Well, one thing at a time. Our first priority right now was dealing with the recovery of the boat and anyone on board her. I made my quick pit stop and went back to collect my cousin.

  Upstairs, Trish pulled her chair round to our side of the desk so she could watch the drifting boat with us. Her VHF relay to the Coastguard station crackled into life long before we saw any sign of the approaching helicopter on Shay’s screen.

  “CGOC Stornoway, this is Rescue 948. We have our drifting vessel in sight. We are not receiving any distress signal from her. We’ll try to reach her on the open channels. Over.”

  “Acknowledged Rescue 948. This is OIC Randall. We’ll await your next communication. Over.” There was nothing but white noise on our frequency for a minute after that.

  “She’s not responding, Randall.” Our bird came into view, flying in from the West, and took up a hovering stance above the Jeanie. The Sikorsky looked enormous to me. She was a seventeen metre long red and white helicopter with a bulging fuselage that was over five metres wide. She dwarfed our little police airbuses. We couldn’t see much of the boat sticking out beneath her hovering bulk now. “No sign of movement onboard. We may have a medical emergency down there. Do we have authorisation to board? Over.”

  “That’s a go, Rescue 948. Over.” Trish stirred slightly.

  “They’ll winch two of the team down to assess the situation. Let’s just hope they aren’t met with a hostile reaction when they hit the deck. A thought that had not even occurred to me, although it certainly should have. I waited nervously for the next communication to come through, which wasn’t for several, stretched out minutes.

  “We have one adult male, deceased. Attempted CPR resuscitation failed. He must have cut the engines before he collapsed. No signs of external trauma. Possible coronary failure. We’re sending down a stretcher to winch him up. Over.”

  Had they found Butler or someone else? Well, we’d find out soon enough.

  “Acknowledged Rescue 948. We’ll have an ambulance standing by. Is there anyone else on board? Over.”

  “Negative. No other people on board.” I heard some indecipherable background noise. “Signs of recent occupation by at least one other person. Over.”

  Shay and I exchanged equally puzzled looks. If Jordan and Phelps had been hiding out on the Jeanie, why had they abandoned their free ride to the mainland? None of this seemed to be making any sense. We caught a brief glimpse of the loaded stretcher being winched up, steadied by one of the two men who’d boarded, and another of him being lowered again.

  The Coastguard team on the boat confirmed that there didn’t seem to be a problem with the engines, and there was plenty of fuel onboard. It was agreed, during a three-way conference with Trish, that they’d bring her back into Stornoway, touching as little as possible and keeping their gloves on the whole time.

  “I’d better get out to the airport to meet the helicopter,” I told Trish, getting up again. “I want to see if I can identify the body they’re bringing in as quickly as possible.” It might not even be Butler. “I’ll be back long before they bring the Jeanie in.” Shay got up too and picked up his laptop.

  “Alright, then.” Trish wheeled her chair back into its proper place and sat down. “It’s after four now, and I doubt they’ll make port before half five. It was nice to see you again, Mr Keane,” she added as she saw Shay edging impatiently towards the door. “Thank you for obliging me by coming up here, I can only imagine how busy Conall’s been keeping you, and I must say, the results you two have obtained so far are very impressive.”

  Shay snorted softly at the unvoiced query in her tone and flashed his teeth at her.

  “Just following my usual, routine procedure, Inspector Morrison. Nothing out of the ordinary.” As Shay’s routine procedure was to poke into whatever he liked or whatever I asked him to, that was a true and accurate statement, and Trish seemed happy to accept it as such. Nothing for her to worry about there.

  Eighteen

  Our body from the boat was Butler, alright. The photographs that Shay had found for me were enough to tell me that, and a quick check of his wallet confirmed it. His driving licence was in there. I called Doctor Hamilton again on my drive back to town. This time he picked up his office phone himself.

  “Aye, I do all the examinations for the coroner’s office here in cases of suspicious deaths.” He confirmed when I asked. “Your man will be coming to me, alright. D’ye have any particular reason to think your Mr Butler didn’t die of natural causes then, Inspector?”

  “Only the timing and ci
rcumstances of his death for now,” I admitted, “but I would like a toxicology report.”

  “Aye, well, I’ll be taking blood and tissue samples from a few areas, as well as urine and hair. If he was poisoned, the general blood screen will show up any substances present at a high enough level to need quantitating. No doubt you’ll be sending your boys in Inverness samples of everything you find on the boat too. They might be able to tell you something useful long before I can.”

  “I hope so. Thank you, Doctor Hamilton. I’ll look forward to seeing your report.”

  “Aye, well, do I need to warn you not to hold your breath?”

  “I’ll count myself lucky if you can present it in under a week, Sir.” I knew how notoriously slow the results of a forensic toxicology report could be.

  “Will you now? I’m glad to hear it. I wish our local boys and girls had such realistic expectations.” He rang off, and I spent the next few minutes running through a number of pointless theories about what may have happened on the Jeanie before pulling in at Church Street and parking up again.

  Shay glanced up as I walked in. “Our boat’s still a good half hour out,” he told me helpfully. “Was it Butler?”

  “It was.” I hung my jacket up. “Can you send over his phone records for the last week?”

  “I already did.” One of the nice things about working with my cousin was the frequency with which he anticipated requests like that.

  I opened up his email and started going through them. Butler had tried to call the same number over thirty times and also made a twenty-minute call to someone in Aberdeen on Friday evening. I didn’t think it was any kind of a stretch to decide that the missed calls had all been to Phelps’ ‘business’ phone and that it had been turned off the whole time. The call to Aberdeen wasn’t hard to imagine either.