by Lin Anderson
Because there were a lot of sick bastards that liked fucking kids, and on camera.
McNab turned and retched quietly in the corner. That would be the last for a while, he decided. He would save it all now and use it to his advantage. He checked the corridor, then rose, holding on to the wall. The tug was still battling the waves, but built like a tank with an engine that could pull and push ships many times its size, it would, McNab thought, survive, despite the high seas.
The question was, would he?
76
There were perhaps six or seven of them sitting squashed together in the cramped damp space. A dim overhead light revealed only the mixed shadows of their upturned faces. The pervading smell was of body odour and fear. Isla recognized the scent, because it reminded her of herself in the ice cave.
Tarik had led her down below, further towards the stern. He’d seemed able to steady himself regardless of the motion, whereas Isla had stumbled along, longing for firm ground beneath her feet. When she’d asked how he’d got free, Tarik revealed that since the storm began they’d been left unguarded. She’d still wondered how they would pass through the tug unchallenged, but it had become obvious that Tarik had devised a route which, although tortuous in parts, appeared to avoid human contact, especially in such high seas.
At one point, however, their chosen path had required them to go on deck, albeit briefly. The few seconds they were exposed to the storm were more terrifying than any mountain Isla had ever climbed. Up to that point she’d only imagined the waves and the wind. The reality of both was much more frightening, despite the fact that Tarik had gripped her hand throughout.
As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, Isla did a quick head count. It looked like five girls and two boys. Ages, at a guess, somewhere between ten and fifteen.
Children.
Isla now understood what Tarik had tried to tell her. There were other prisoners on this boat besides herself. And she was looking at them now. Shocked by the discovery, she tried to compose herself as tears sprang into her eyes. The group, having established her presence, now talked excitedly, until a worried-looking Tarik put his finger to his lips to indicate they must quieten down.
‘Do any of them speak English?’ Isla said.
‘Some have a little,’ Tarik told her.
‘Where have you come from?’
‘Fari from Nigeria, Mohammed from Sudan, Amena and myself from Syria.’ He stopped as Isla interrupted him.
‘One of the girls is called Amena?’ she said, recalling McNab’s earlier enquiry.
The exchange of the name caused a ripple of interest to run through the group, and they all turned to one dark-eyed, pretty girl, who sat at the back. The girl’s expression was one of bewilderment that she’d been singled out.
‘Yes, why?’ Tarik asked.
‘A policeman, DS McNab, is looking for her,’ Isla said.
When Tarik translated this, the girl gave a small excited gasp. ‘Michael?’ she said in surprise.
Isla couldn’t recall if that was the policeman’s first name, but the expression on the girl’s face suggested that it might be.
‘Where is this policeman?’ Tarik asked.
‘Here,’ Isla told him, ‘on the boat. He was a prisoner too, but he got free.’
Tarik’s quick translation of her explanation caused another excited explosion of talking, until his quick order for silence.
‘He’s trying to get a message out,’ Isla explained.
Tarik looked concerned. ‘By radio?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Isla said, realizing she hadn’t been party to the exact plan, even though she’d offered to accompany McNab.
‘I’ll find him,’ Tarik said.
McNab had checked two cabins before this one. Both had displayed evidence of an occupant, but were empty. This one, he decided, would be his final try before he went looking for the radio room. He was conscious that Isla would be worried about him and the longer he stayed away the worse it would be.
In truth his plan to enact revenge was fading a little, as common sense told him that getting word out of their position would be a better way to use his time before they caught him. As they would.
The storm couldn’t occupy them forever. Never having paid any heed to shipping forecasts, McNab had no idea how long conditions like these might last in the North Sea. He’d caught a weather forecast on the radio prior to his capture that had promised high winds and possible power lines down in the north of Scotland, but since Glasgow hadn’t been mentioned, he’d barely registered the warning.
There was one thing he was sure of. Once the storm was over, they’d be back looking for him, and Isla. Should they already know they’d escaped from their separate prisons, they also knew that neither of them could get off the ship until they reached their destination.
Despite the wild conditions, the tug seemed to be moving doggedly onward, heading somewhere in as big a hurry as was possible. Where, McNab had no idea. Although Isla’s captor had insisted she would wish she was dead when the tug reached its final destination.
McNab pressed his ear to the door and heard what he thought might be a muffled snore.
Third time lucky.
A wall of stale vomit met him on entry. Whoever was lying in the bunk was as bad a sailor as himself, so it was unlikely to be a member of the crew. Cologne guy hadn’t seemed perturbed by the swell when he’d visited McNab in the bilge, so it probably wasn’t him. And by the length of the body in the bunk, it wasn’t the tall Iceman.
McNab crept close enough to view the face properly, registering that the sour smell was emanating from the waste bin by the bed. A dusting of white powder on a nearby shelf suggested the patient, who was definitely Brodie, had been self-medicating. McNab ran his finger along it, sniffed, then realizing what it was, chose to rub some on his gums in the hope it might quieten his own heaving stomach.
Brodie’s next snore was loud enough to disturb his slumber, and he shifted to turn his face to the wall. McNab had instinctively stepped back, his heart moving up a pace, no doubt aided by the coke. He waited for Brodie to settle, and eventually the snores became steady once again.
Now McNab saw what his hand had been resting on as the muzzle of a gun peeked out at him from below the pillow. A desire to vomit over Brodie evaporated as McNab’s immediate wish moved to possessing the gun.
Men like Neil Brodie understood the power of guns. For persuasion and retribution. That’s why any self-respecting drug dealer carried one, and was willing to use it. Were the gun in his hands, McNab decided, it could serve the same purpose.
But he would need a steady hand to extract it.
The beating, followed by constant nausea, had rendered McNab’s hands shaky, but the small amount of cocaine he’d already ingested seemed to be helping. Wetting his finger, he hoovered up all that remained on the shelf and applied it as before, waiting for a repeat of the cocaine rush.
Now he was ready.
77
The fixed rig they’d set down on earlier had been battered by waves, but still had the solidity of a small island. The Solstice was another matter. Rhona was used to sailing in the waters off the west coast of Scotland. Her adoptive father had been keen on boats and had taught her the rudiments. She’d never been seasick then, or even on the notorious Irish Sea crossings as a child, but she had no idea how her normally steady stomach would cope with the obvious and sickening swell they were dealing with now.
‘You okay?’ Harald checked.
‘So far,’ Rhona said, gripping the rail to steady herself as the boat gave another lurch.
Olsen had waited for their escort to leave, then proposed that they should take a look round the Solstice for themselves.
‘If they have nothing to hide …’
They’d split up then, with Rhona and Harald looking for the infirmary. Where Olsen had planned to go, he hadn’t shared, but Rhona didn’t think he was headed for the bridge, not right away. There’d been no si
gn of the chopper crew since they’d landed, something that bothered Rhona, because it meant she and Harald had no forensic kit, bar what was in the small backpack she carried.
‘It’s not easy hangaring a large chopper on a pitching deck,’ Harald had told her. ‘It’ll take time. Alvis is right. Better that we take a look around while the storm is keeping everybody occupied.’
Their first stop had been at a wall panel, detailing the layout of the Solstice, including its muster stations, plus what they sought, an area called Sykehus on the next level up.
‘The hospital,’ Harald confirmed.
At that moment, a couple of men appeared at the end of the corridor and, spotting their presence, looked interested enough to begin heading their way.
Harald, stepping in front of Rhona, told her to make for the hospital. ‘I’ll meet you there,’ he promised.
Quickly doubling back, Rhona hurried along the corridor until she found a set of steps leading upwards. At the top, a wider space declared itself as an area to meet should an emergency occur aboard, something Rhona fervently hoped wouldn’t happen.
She hesitated there, trying to recall the map below and the position of the hospital relative to where she now stood. Three corridors led off from here and she eventually settled on one, after checking the sign above which mentioned the word Sykehus.
If what Olsen believed was true, there should be some evidence to support it in the infirmary or operating theatre. Men took ill offshore, just as they did on land, and could require urgent treatment as near to their rig as possible.
A glance at the map Harald had shown her back in Stavanger of the Norwegian sector of the North Sea had given Rhona the impression of an area the size of another country lying just off the coast. With a quarter of a million people working in the oil industry, the majority of them on rigs and supply vessels, plus the ever-present possibility of a major disaster, the oil business – just like the Royal Navy – needed support and hospital vessels like this one.
But operating theatres could be used for more than just saving lives.
‘Dr Rhona MacLeod.’ Rhona offered her hand to the young male auxiliary who was stationed just inside the main door to the infirmary. ‘I arrived on the SAR chopper that’s just landed.’
He looked startled both by her arrival and her announcement. ‘Did you bring a casualty aboard?’ he asked anxiously.
Rhona reassured him that that wasn’t the case. ‘We attended a call, then the weather hit us and we needed a place to sit out the storm.’
His worried expression faded and he visibly relaxed, giving the impression that he wouldn’t have liked it if she had brought him a patient, which made Rhona wonder why.
‘Yes. It is a bad one,’ he agreed about the storm. ‘If you’re not here about a casualty …’ he began.
‘I heard the Solstice had a hospital and an operating theatre aboard, and I thought I’d come and take a look.’
The perturbed look was back.
‘We don’t have any patients at the moment. And nothing scheduled for surgery. In fact there’s no one here but me.’
Rhona wasn’t, according to Chrissy, a very good liar. Hence her ineptitude at poker. She might not be an expert at telling a lie, but she could spot one.
‘I thought you’d be filled with seasickness cases,’ she joked.
He gave a half-smile. ‘Sailors don’t get seasick. Otherwise they’re in the wrong job.’
‘True,’ Rhona said. ‘So since I’m not disturbing anyone, may I take a quick look at your facilities?’
‘Dr Toppe’s off-duty at the moment, and I’m not supposed to leave the desk unattended, just in case we do get an emergency,’ he told her.
Rhona adopted a conspiratorial look. ‘The truth is,’ she began, ‘I’m considering a job offer from Mr Hagen to work on one of his hospital ships.’
As that appeared to sway him, Rhona vowed to learn to play poker properly and confound Chrissy into the bargain.
‘Okay,’ he finally conceded. ‘Go on in.’
Rhona felt his eyes follow her as she opened the inner door, and knew that it was more than likely he would check up on her once she was out of sight.
Which meant she should work fast.
The door led into a corridor lined with individual rooms on one side, much like the layout of a modern hospital, where traditional larger wards had been replaced by private ones. The auxiliary had intimated they had no patients in the infirmary at present. Certainly the rooms Rhona passed were all empty, although a portion of the beds had been made up, as though in preparation for possible arrivals.
Having no idea what the Norwegian word for operating theatre was, she took a guess at Operasjonssal and found it to be right. Not being a medical doctor, let alone a surgeon, an operating theatre wasn’t a familiar place, but what Rhona found looked state of the art, to her at least. And, she thought, ready for use.
The only things missing in the suite of rooms were patients and staff.
Emerging from the theatre, Rhona did a quick check on the other doors in the corridor, finding all of them locked. Not surprising, if they contained equipment or medicines. Aware that if she didn’t reappear soon, the auxiliary might come looking for her, Rhona decided to retreat and try to locate Harald.
As she made her way back down the corridor, something caught her eye. The object lay near the back wall under one of the made-up beds, barely in view through the glass partition. Opening the door, Rhona dropped to her knees and, stretching beneath the bed, retrieved it.
Bedraggled, dirty, with most of its stuffing missing, it was undoubtedly a child’s soft toy. Something completely incongruous in such a setting.
But not, if what Olsen suspected about the Solstice was true.
Rhona retrieved an evidence bag from her backpack and dropped the toy inside, just as footsteps came down the corridor. Rising, she decided rather than exit the room, she would just stand there, as though admiring it. After all, she was ‘taking a look around’, and with permission.
The figure who now regarded Rhona was female, possibly mid-fifties, dressed in standard hospital scrubs.
Rhona, smiling, introduced herself as she’d done earlier to the auxiliary. ‘I assume you’re Dr Toppe?’
The woman’s face didn’t change from what Rhona read as blank anger. ‘Why are you in here?’ she said in English, with the slightest tinge of an accent.
‘I wanted to see the ship’s hospital.’
‘Did you enter the operating theatre?’ she demanded.
‘No. I merely glanced in,’ Rhona said.
‘The facility has been prepared in case it’s required. Wandering about, introducing germs … I thought as a doctor yourself, you would understand that.’
Rhona didn’t dispute the accusation, even though it was over the top. It was obvious she was unwelcome here, and the best thing would be to leave, but she had something she wanted to ask first.
‘Do you ever treat children on board the Solstice?’
The question startled Dr Toppe. ‘This facility is for oil workers,’ the woman said, her tone sharply dismissive. ‘There are no children out here in the North Sea.’
‘Of course not,’ Rhona said.
As she was ushered out of the room, then the facility, Rhona contemplated whether the toy may have belonged to an oil worker’s child, kept with them as a reminder of home. But, were that the case, it was unlikely to have been left behind.
Dr Toppe, Rhona thought, is lying.
A child had been here, and more, if Olsen’s suspicions proved to be true, were expected.
Harald examined the contents of the evidence bag without handling the toy.
‘Where did you find this?’
‘In one of the side wards.’
‘Did Dr Toppe see it?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘The place is set up to receive patients.’
‘How many beds?’
‘Six made u
p,’ Rhona said.
‘Alvis believed a shipment was expected, which is why we made our move. I think the weather has delayed that.’
After their brief interchange, Dr Toppe had delivered Rhona into the hands of the two men she’d seen in the corridor, who in turn had escorted her back to the original waiting room, and Harald.
At that point, Harald had attempted to extract information from the reluctant crewmen regarding the storm’s status. Their response in rapid Norwegian was that it was expected to reach its peak within the next two hours, and everyone was required at their stations, including the captain, who’d requested that they follow orders and remain here, for their own safety. This was said with such a degree of concern that it made Rhona think it might be true.
She caught enough of what followed to realize Harald was asking about the whereabouts of the SAR crew, but didn’t understand anything in the reply.
‘They’re lying,’ Harald said, when the men had gone. ‘I think it’s unlikely the SAR crew have stayed with the chopper. The hangar’s hardly the place to be in a storm like this. They’re keeping us apart on purpose, and, I think, away from the helicopter.’
‘Why away from the chopper?’ Rhona asked.
‘To cut our lines of communication.’
78
For a moment McNab was paralysed by indecision. The sliver of glass was in his hand. The neck it might slice inches away. It would be so easy to finish Brodie here and now. Noiseless. Swift. Were their places reversed, he knew that Brodie wouldn’t hesitate. The jugular vein was both discernible and easily accessed. It would be over in minutes. Brodie would feel no pain, which was a shame, but the world would be rid of a scumbag, and Mary would be revenged.
Or would she?
If he ended Brodie now, what would happen to Davey, wherever he was? And Mary? Not forgetting that Davey may have implicated Ellie in all of this. A flicker of horror began to form at that thought. Might they not all be punished for Brodie’s death at his hands? Brodie was like an octopus, tentacles waving, suckers spreading in all directions.
