The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4)

by Gregg Dunnett

  But for as long as they’d known each other, she was the one who understood better what being normal meant. She persuaded him, saying it would be normal – it would look more normal – for a young woman in her position to go home more often in the circumstances she was in. She’d need the support of her family. And from her home it would be easy to go for a drive and end up by the yacht. And so, three weeks after she had discovered Billy alive, she once again boarded the ferry for Lornea Island.

  She went through a similar security process before coming to the yacht – changing her clothes and shoes, not taking her normal cellphone at all this time, but leaving it on at her parents’ house – in fact she lent it to Gracie, so that it wouldn’t stay in one place – which might look suspicious – but instead move about the house. Eventually she got to the head of the muddy lane that led down to Bishop’s Landing. She stopped the car here for a long time, but the road behind and in front of her was completely empty, so she made the turn and carefully skirted around the puddles, until she came to the flood embankment at the end.

  The weather was improving now, and it put Amber in an upbeat mood, which matched the thought of seeing Billy again, a mood which had grown and expanded during the long wait and journey to get here. But the moment she did see him, her mood began to decline. He looked pretty bad. He smelled pretty bad too, as did the inside of the yacht. It had only the most basic of plumbing facilities, a marine toilet which drew water from the surrounding creek and discharged it there too. There was a shower, but it ran from freshwater tanks that had long since been emptied. In a normal situation Billy would have needed to move the boat to a marina or fuel station and top them up, but that wasn’t possible.

  The outside of the little yacht looked unchanged, though there was now a kayak partially concealed behind the work shed where Amber left the car. But inside the yacht things did look different. The place was a mess. Billy seemed to have dismantled most of the other computers she had seen before, and only the new one, which she had bought him, remained on the saloon table. It was running some program and the lights on the front were flashing on and off all the time. The boat’s little sink was filled with dirty dishes.

  “Well?” Amber asked as she looked around. They’d only spoken so far for Billy to ask if she had brought any food. She had, two bags of groceries – she’d pretended to be buying them for her mom and sister, although she couldn’t bring herself to believe anyone was really watching that closely.

  “Well what?”

  “Well have you heard anything?”

  “Like what?” Billy didn’t sound interested. He poked around the groceries.

  “Like? Anything that’s going to help?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” He shrugged in response. “I know it’s not me, but I kinda need some vegetables. I think I’m getting scurvy.”

  “What’s that?” Amber asked, looking at the screen on the new computer.

  “It’s this disease that sailors got on long voyages. Before they invented tinned food. They weren’t getting enough vitamin C…”

  “Not scurvy. I know what that is. What’s that. What are you doing?”

  He followed where she was looking. “I’m just keeping a record of which audio recordings are coming in and who’s present.”

  “Well? Has anyone been there? Have they said anything about the bombings?”

  “No. I don’t think they’re going to now. If they ever did. They’d be pretty stupid to tell Lily. They’d be pretty stupid to talk about it at all.”

  “What?” Amber felt her frustration burn. “I thought that’s what you were hoping for?”

  Billy shrugged, and found a bag of carrots. He pulled one out and inspected it. “Well. I hoped they might. But it was just an idea.”

  “Maybe I could go around again?” Amber suggested. “To Lily’s house. I could say something that forces them to talk about it.” She thought fast. “I could tell her that you told me James did it. She’d confront him with it, and you’d record it!”

  “Yeah.” Billy sounded downbeat. Amber didn’t understand.

  “Well?”

  “Well… You could. But he’s just going to deny it isn’t he? Remember they didn’t plan for me to die. They thought I’d be caught, and that I’d tell the cops they did it. They were always expecting to have to deny it. To use the false evidence they made that makes it look like they weren’t even there. They’re not going to suddenly confess.”

  “But then… What’s all this for then? What’s the point? I don’t understand.”

  Billy put down the carrot and pulled out a bag of cookies instead. “I like these,” he said. “They’re not very good for you, but they do taste nice.”

  “Billy! What the fuck.” She rounded on him, and swiped the cookie from his hand. “You made me bug Lily’s computer, you had me break into that guy’s apartment. I’m aiding a goddamn fugitive. I could go to jail for that too. Are you telling me the whole thing was for nothing? Why?”

  Billy looked at her and at the cookie on the floor. He took a deep breath. Then he sat back down behind the computer.

  “Perhaps you’d better see this,” he said, as his fingers flew over the keys. She came around behind him to see the screen, and realized he was opening a video file. When it was ready to play the starting image was of Amber, sitting nearly exactly where she was now, inside the yacht’s little cabin. But it wasn’t taken now, she was wearing different clothes – the ones, in fact, that she’d worn the last time she was there. Billy pressed play, and the image of Amber on the screen started talking. Amber listened, intrigued at first, and then increasingly confused.

  “I don’t remember saying that.” She said, after a minute. “I don’t remember ever saying that.”

  “You didn’t,” Billy replied. But before he could explain further there was the unmistakable sensation of a person stepping onto the yacht, tipping it heavily with their weight. At almost the same time the tarpaulin covering the cockpit was ripped clear. Then a gun was pointed into the cabin.

  “Freeze! FBI. DO NOT MOVE!”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  The first alarm came from the boy’s father. His financial history showed he paid for groceries at the SuperU store on the outskirts of Newlea almost every week, using a bank card. Since the supposed death of his son he either stopped buying food there – or apparently anywhere else either – or he’d started paying cash. The question was, why?

  Although by now agent’s Black and West were only allowed to allocate fifty percent of their week to the case, they were able to establish roughly how much he was spending, from records of cash withdrawn at two ATMs on the island, in Silverlea and in Newlea. And they were able to compare this with two previous periods – when Billy Wheatley had been living with him, and attending high school, and when Billy had been living on the mainland attending college. Of the three periods, his expenditure was highest now. And yet they had no visibility on how the money was being spent, since it was mostly going out as cash.

  Accessing financial records was one thing, the agents needed a separate court order to put a tracker on his truck, and they needed authorization from West’s boss in order to apply. He took some convincing, but ultimately seemed as intrigued as they were. The judge waved it through without a second look. No body, therefore, no question the boy might have faked his death. The two agents returned to the island to fit the device.

  It wasn’t the easiest to fit. Sam Wheatley lived in a small house right on the clifftop overlooking the wide stretch of Silverlea Bay. He left the vehicle close by the house, clearly visible from the kitchen and living room windows, where he seemed to spend most of his time when at home. There was no easy place to hide out and wait, so the only option was to come in the night, at three am, and hope the guy wasn’t an insomniac. It wouldn’t have been a problem if they could have used the micro tracker, that could be installed in moments, but it only had a battery life of about three days. So West wanted to use the much larger version
which would last indefinitely, but had to be wired into the truck’s battery. And that meant jimmying the hood open. Working by flashlight it would take at least five minutes. Five minutes when they could be spotted.

  However, she was fortunate to have a partner in Black who loved this side of the job. His father ran a garage, and he and his brothers had grown up around cars. She kept watch while he worked, getting it open in less than twenty seconds, and fitting the wires, then feeding them down so the device itself could be fixed on the truck’s underside. A skilled mechanic could now do a full service and wouldn’t notice anything was wrong, only an electrical auto engineer might wonder what the additional wires were running from the battery. Better hope he didn’t break down.

  They tracked Wheatley for a week, charting where he went and how long he stayed, building up a picture. He slept at home most nights, but had a girlfriend in Newlea, a woman they identified to be one Milla Reynolds, a nurse working at Newlea General Hospital. They ran the full electronic works onto her, but if she was sheltering Billy Wheatley at her address, she was keeping quiet about it.

  Sam Wheatley was buying food though, too much of it, and using cash to buy it. They pulled the CCTV from the store to get an idea what he was buying, and those raised more doubts. There was a lot of pasta, dried stuff. Plus bottles of water. Even more odd, he was buying fuel. They watched him fill up four twenty-liter plastic jerry cans, again paying cash. But then they sat there in the back of his truck for three days, while he drove around. Always the same places – home, Milla’s place in Newlea, and the boatyard in Holport where his boat was out of the water being antifouled.

  Then he went somewhere else.

  By then though, frustratingly, West and Black were off the island, catching up with paperwork in the FBI base in Chelsea, having only been given permission to spend three days over there. They watched Sam Wheatley’s movements on the screen of West’s computer.

  “What’s at this Moors’ Point then?” Black asked, leaning in for a better look. The tracker recorded its routes overlaid on a Google map, but that had little information on where exactly Wheatley had gone, it was just a blank expanse of green.

  “I’ll get a map from the map room,” West said, pushing back in her chair.

  Ten minutes later the two of them pored over an old-fashioned fold-out map. It had far more detail, showing footpaths leading up and down the low cliffs from the small parking area. A sandy bay to the south, and, behind a corner of the island, more marshy area to the north. There were no buildings though, no obvious reason why he’d visit.

  “Maybe he was going for a hike?” Black observed. “Guy has just lost his kid after all.”

  “Yeah. Only we’re working on the theory he hasn’t lost his kid.” West replied. She tapped a finger on the map, near to where it showed the parking area. “What’s this mean?”

  Black checked the legend. “Viewpoint.”

  “No, this symbol.”

  “Oh.” Black looked again. “Sea caves.”

  The second alarm came a couple weeks later. That was the way the system worked. It was designed to get triggered either by a single highly unusual event, or a combination of smaller, less significant anomalies that together could mean something. The way law enforcement was going, soon the whole damn thing would be automated, at least that’s what Black said, sounding like he was himself an old-timer, instead of a young guy just starting out.

  The trigger was Amber Atherton, the young woman West and Black had interviewed, and identified as perhaps Wheatley’s only friend – certainly his closest friend. She’d traveled back to the island to attend his memorial service, and now she was heading back again, three weeks after that. The odd thing – she hadn’t been back once in the six months previous.

  She had no car, and even if she had, there wasn’t enough to get a court order to put a tracker on it, so they had to do it the old fashioned way, flying back to the island and sitting outside her old house, where her mother and younger sister still lived. Since they had her ferry booking in advance they were able to get there in time to watch her arrive. And after that they didn’t have to wait that long.

  An hour later she’d walked three doors down, and spent ten minutes inside the house of one of her neighbors. From there she’d taken the car off the drive, and headed north. The two agents followed at a distance, the traffic on the island was light enough there was little danger of losing her.

  “You think she’s going to this Moors’ Point,” Black asked, looking again at the map. They were certainly headed in the same direction. West didn’t reply. They both knew this road now, having been to Moors Point twice. But there’d been nothing there. Just an empty parking area, and a couple of picnic tables. But they came to the turn off for Moors’ Point and kept going.

  Finally the car ahead had slowed, and then turned off the road, onto a single lane track. West didn’t stop but continued past, only glancing casually as the little car trundling sideways away from them towards the area of marshland.

  “What’s down there?” she asked, as they swept past.

  “Not a lot,” Black replied. “A place called Bishop’s Landing.”

  They stopped a few hundred meters further on, and waited for a while, studying the map. The lane led only to one place, and there appeared to be no other turnings. So they returned to the turn off, and this time, West pointed the car down the lane, and drove down slowly. Neither of them talked.

  The lane ended with the road rising up to an embankment, designed to protect the low lying land from flooding. Atop it sat a wooden building, some kind of workshop, or boat house. The girl had parked her car behind it, but the two agents exited their vehicle on the lane below, drawing their weapons as they crept forward up the slope. West sniffed, as she led the way, picking up the salty smell of the water, and something else.

  “Gasoline.”

  There was a noise too, not subtle, the clatter of a generator, that was coming from the wooden building. Half way up the slope now, West saw there was something else here – a yacht moored up against a rickety jetty that cut out into the creek. It was covered by a tarp, but a power cord ran from the wooden building, down the other side of the slope and out along the jetty.

  They checked the building first, pushing open the unlocked door, and quickly ensuring it was unoccupied. They found the generator, working away, plus the same red plastic jerry cans they’d witnessed Sam Wheatley purchase in the previous weeks. West pointed back outside and at the boat.

  “The yacht.” She mouthed.

  The only way to approach it was along the jetty, and they did so with their weapons readied. They heard the voices from halfway along: two people, one female voice, one male. They seemed to be arguing.

  “On my signal,” West mouthed, and Black nodded. She prepared to board at the very stern, using the rear wire stays to help her aboard. He was ready at the side, where it was easier but he had a less direct route to aim his weapon into the cabin.

  “Two, Three, NOW!” Together they stepped onto the boat, feeling it rock underneath them.

  “Freeze. FBI. DO NOT MOVE!” West yelled, her weapon secure in both hands.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  There was a scream – the girl, Atherton, as Black stepped beside her.

  “She said don’t move.” He took over, and this time the two occupants of the yacht did what they were told.

  “Hands up where I can see them.” Black went on. “Do it now, and slowly. Or I will fire.” He glanced at West, asking permission to step in front of her into the yacht’s cabin. She nodded, checking around them in case there were any other threats they hadn’t seen, Wheatley’s father, perhaps. But around them was quiet. She followed him down into the yacht’s cabin. It was dominated by a large computer sat on the saloon table.

  “Very slowly bring your hands behind your back,” Black was speaking to the male, and West had no doubts it was Billy Wheatley. Even though she hadn’t seen him for years, she’d been loo
king at plenty of photos. He did exactly as he was told, and her partner cuffed him, but he wasn’t looking at Black, his eyes were fixed resolutely onto her. It was almost unsettling. She heard her voice read him his rights.

  “Billy Wheatley I’m arresting you under suspicion of the murder of Keith Waterhouse. You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Anything you do say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to consult an attorney before speaking, and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning if you wish. Do you understand?”

  While she spoke Black had put cuffs on the Atherton girl as well.

  “Hello Jess,” Billy replied at last. “I was wondering when you’d come.”

  Black stared at West in surprise, but she didn’t acknowledge him, instead she offered a smile to Billy, failing in her attempt to stop it looking snarky.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  He shrugged. “It’s pretty hard to stay dead these days.”

  She turned to her partner. “Call it in. Get some back-up here. We can take them to the police station at Newlea.”

  “Before you do, there’s something I’d like to show you.” Billy interrupted. Everyone in the yacht turned first to him, then when he waited, unmoving, to West.