by Lin Anderson
Hearing the shower in the guest bedroom, he guessed Rhona must also have risen. She’d accepted his offer of somewhere to wash and change, and maybe even sleep a little before the arrival of the Solstice. Her distress at the outcome of their own investigation had been tempered a little by the news that McNab had been located, and further enhanced by word that both Isla Crawford, the girl she’d helped on the mountain, and Amena Tamar had also survived. It seemed too that Brodie and Stefan, Amena’s handler, had been on the tug.
Olsen wished the Norwegian side of the investigation had proved so successful.
He refilled the coffee filter and switched the machine back on. He had nothing here for Rhona to eat, but they could go out for that. The team would have to be debriefed, of course, but that could wait until after they got a forensic team onto the Solstice. He realized with a jolt that they were back with the practicalities of life, rather than the state of war they’d been in for the last twelve hours.
Rhona came through then, looking brighter than Olsen felt.
‘Did you sleep?’ he asked.
‘A little. Is the Solstice here yet?’
‘Soon,’ he promised. ‘They’re just coming into Byfjorden. We could go down to the harbour and get some breakfast. Once we know which dock they’re tying up at, we’ll meet Harald and the rest of the team there.’ He handed her a freshly brewed coffee. ‘Have you made contact with home yet?’
‘With my forensic assistant. I wanted to let her know I was still breathing.’ Immediately the words were out, she looked ill at ease at having said them.
‘The two children we picked up are well,’ he said, then realized she probably didn’t know about the other bodies the SAR teams had pulled from the water. There was no point in keeping that back from her.
‘There were that many on the ship?’ She looked shocked.
‘That was my mistake,’ Olsen said. ‘I should have instigated an official boarding sooner. I gave them time to dispose of their cargo, and they took it.’ Now that he’d said it out loud, he was even more convinced that it was true.
‘If they’d had advance word, they would have done the same thing,’ she said. ‘A raid, any raid, has consequences. Ask McNab.’
She sipped at her coffee. Then made a face.
‘Too strong,’ he offered.
‘McNab would like it very much,’ she assured him.
It had been raining and the cobbles shone underfoot as they walked down towards the guest harbour. Sørensens, Olsen thought, would be open for breakfast. If not, one of the other cafes that lined the quay. They walked together in silence. He liked that, the quiet of their togetherness. It was why Olsen felt comfortable in her presence. What had to be said, was said. Anything else was simply inferred.
It feels like being with Marita.
That thought brought an immediate feeling of guilt, answered almost as swiftly by Marita’s internal voice.
She’s a Scot, like me. What she says, she means. What she says she’ll do, she does. Stop fussing.
He turned to find Rhona’s eyes on him as though those inner words had fashioned themselves into sound.
‘Talking to myself again,’ he apologized.
‘A habit I also have, usually while in the shower,’ she told him with a smile.
The moment passed but Olsen was fairly sure he’d spoken some of the words out loud, and Dr MacLeod was merely covering for him.
They took a table inside and ordered standard breakfast fare. When the flatbread, cheese and smoked fish arrived they both seemed to register at the same moment how hungry they were.
‘You’re a fan of Norwegian food?’ he said.
‘Brown cheese not so much,’ she admitted, ‘but the fish, yes.’
They were just finishing up when the call came through. Harald’s tone had been subdued; his mood, Olsen read, was much as their own.
‘They’re tying up at Strandkaien, across on the west bank,’ Olsen told Rhona when Harald had rung off.
The Solstice was already in place on the opposite side of the harbour from where they now stood. The location, one of those normally used for cruise liners, had been commandeered by the police, and access restricted.
Lying in flat calm water, its sleek red and white lines proudly announcing it as part of the Hagen line, it was hard to believe it was the battered vessel they’d landed on, approaching the height of the storm. Looking up at the Solstice, Rhona relived the early hours of that morning, recalling the high seas, and wondering from where on the ship the children might have been thrown to their deaths.
As the car pulled up alongside, Olsen told her that he would leave her here with Harald.
‘You’re not coming aboard?’ Rhona asked, obviously surprised.
‘I want to interview the two men I saw with the children,’ he explained. ‘If they realize the man they met was really a police officer, we might get them to talk. The other crew members are likely to clam up and deny everything.’
‘What about Hagen?’
‘He’s already been in touch offering his full cooperation “in this startling and horrific find on board one of his Tunisian-staffed ships”.’
‘So a full denial?’
‘The only direct connection we have between Hagen and this trade is your mountain killer. The elusive Iceman. And we’ve yet to locate him.’
‘You believe he may have been aboard the Solstice?’ Rhona asked.
‘According to your detective sergeant, he wasn’t on the tug and the last Isla saw of him was in the plane. He may have made directly for the Solstice in advance of the delivery, perhaps via the helicopter you saw in the hangar. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the tug was heading there too.’
‘So we try and find forensic evidence that he was on the Solstice, and if he had contact with the children held there.’
‘That would be a start,’ Olsen agreed, then added, ‘Call Detective Sergeant McNab. Talk things through with him. There might be something that happened to him which could help direct your search here.’
McNab sounded hoarse. ‘I spent most of the time honking up, which fucked my throat,’ he explained.
‘So not a sailor then?’ Rhona said.
‘Let’s say I’m better off in the police than the navy.’
Their light interchange over, McNab gave her a brief but succinct overview regarding his time on the tug.
‘And Brodie?’ she asked.
‘In hospital, under guard.’ Before Rhona could ask why the hospital, McNab said, ‘I speared him in the groin with a broken mirror.’ Then he swiftly moved on. ‘A forensic team’s aboard the tug at the moment, searching for cocaine. They suspect there’s a load somewhere in the ballast, like the previous shipment on the Turkish tug, but if so, it’s well hidden.’
‘And Isla?’ Rhona said.
‘She’s okay. They checked her out, then allowed her home.’
Her final question was about Amena. Here, McNab’s tone changed. ‘It turns out she’s pregnant,’ he said sharply.
Rhona swore under her breath. ‘They didn’t check that the first time she was in hospital?’
‘The test was negative back then.’
It wasn’t unusual to have a negative pregnancy test followed later by a positive, but a positive was rarely wrong.
‘One of the bastards at the Delta Club, probably,’ McNab said.
‘Maybe.’ Rhona chose not to confirm something that might spike McNab’s anger further.
‘When are you back?’ he demanded.
‘When we finish with the Solstice.’
85
McNab fingered the empty coffee cup. Now back at the police station, he hadn’t been fully honest with Rhona. At least not regarding Brodie. The groin wound had, of course, been inflicted by Isla. He’d told the girl that he had to take ownership of it, otherwise she could face an assault charge.
‘I was aiming for the artery,’ she’d told him on the bridge as they’d waited for help to appear on th
e horizon. ‘I wanted him dead.’
Dressed in a selection of items borrowed from the others, she’d stopped shivering, although the nerve at the side of her mouth had still twitched from either adrenaline or fury.
‘It’s better if I own up to it,’ McNab had insisted.
‘Brodie will like that,’ she’d offered.
Brodie might dispute McNab’s version of events, but McNab thought he would probably go along with it in the hope of inflicting damage of some sort on me.
He threw the empty espresso cup in the bin and pressed the button for another. His next move should be to speak to Davey, which he’d been warned against doing by Ollie.
‘I had to hand in the mobile and laptop.’ Ollie had sounded apologetic. ‘I told them you’d asked me to check it out for a friend who thought they’d been hacked. Then Davey came to the station of his own volition.’
That had been the big surprise.
McNab, however, wasn’t sold on its sincerity. To his mind, Davey had known or suspected that the police would be on to him, even with me disappeared, because of the laptop, and he decided to come to them before they came for him. Davey, the businessman, understood the nature of a deal.
In view of Brodie’s capture, Davey’s twelve-hour standard stint in custody had been extended to twenty-four, on the decision of a senior officer, so he was still in the building. McNab made up his mind. As he drank down the second espresso, he said a silent apology to Ollie.
They had him in a holding cell, not quite as plush as Davey’s usual surroundings. Back in school, they’d had bets on who would be the first one to get lifted by the police. It’d turned out to be McNab, although he hadn’t been lifted, merely given a warning. They’d been with a group messing about in a cemetery with a couple of girls, drinking vodka they’d got an older guy to buy for them. At fourteen, it had been innocent in comparison to what others were up to.
It seems someone had spotted them and told the police of their underage drinking den. McNab had been the one to get caught, actively slugging from the bottle. After giving his address as demanded by the officer, a pissed McNab had found himself being driven home in a squad car, and delivered to his mother, in full view of their neighbours. Her reaction had scared him more than his first brush with the law.
The bold Davey had of course got away with it, having hidden among the stones until the police had left.
He was always good at getting what he wanted, McNab thought, including Mary.
Davey was pale under the tan, which he topped up, McNab knew, during frequent visits to the Spanish villa they owned in Marbella. Recalling the existence of the villa, McNab wondered why Davey hadn’t just escaped there rather than walk into the police station and give himself up.
Davey, spotting his entry, quickly rose from the bed, the expression on his face one that McNab realized could only be interpreted as joy.
‘Mikey, you’re okay.’
McNab stepped back, perturbed at both the echo of his youthful name and the tenor of the voice that had just said it.
Davey, seeing his reaction, halted, the joy in his face being replaced by – what? Sadness, disappointment? Or simply guilt?
McNab stood in silence, for once unsure how to play this. It wasn’t and couldn’t be an official interrogation. Someone would interview him about Davey. Then someone would interview Davey concerning him. And so much would be lost in between, in particular, the truth.
At least, if I questioned him, we might get close to it.
‘I didn’t put that stuff on the laptop,’ Davey was saying. ‘Brodie framed me to keep me under control.’
McNab snorted his derision. ‘Really. That wasn’t your face I saw? Your arse? Your prick?’ McNab took a breath to try to control his anger. ‘You were at the Delta Club. You took part in one of Brodie’s sessions.’
Davey opened his mouth and shut it again. ‘Okay, I had sex with probably a prostitute, and he filmed it. That’s how he caught me.’
McNab could feel his teeth grinding together, taste the sick, much like on the tug, after he’d just vomited for the zillionth fucking time. ‘Not a prostitute. A thirteen-year-old trafficked refugee by the name of Amena Tamar.’
It had taken time for the images to distil and come together. His memory of the video he’d watched with Ollie of that fateful night at the Delta Club, the clips on Davey’s machine. But then Ollie as a super-recognizer had confirmed what McNab couldn’t bear to acknowledge. Davey, on some earlier occasion, had been one of the men using Amena.
Davey was staring at him, horror in his eyes.
‘I swear I didn’t know. They fed me cocaine. They—’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ McNab said.
But he didn’t; Davey just kept on going.
‘I didn’t betray you, Mikey. I tried to tell you they were on their way to your place. I called your mobile. Remember? I was driving the vehicle that lifted you, but then I came here to the station and told them about the boat. That you might be on it. That’s why you’re alive, Mikey. I’m the reason you’re alive.’
McNab turned and banged on the door.
He wanted out and fast, so that he might vomit up all those weasel words he’d just swallowed in that room.
86
A small shoe. A torn notebook containing drawings and words in Arabic and English. A hairband Rhona had extracted from a corner, the tangled dark strands bound tight to the elastic like a rope. But it was the smell of the place that told the story. Of incarceration, lingering fear and outright terror.
From here, Olsen had watched the children led out, tied together. He’d tried to stop it happening and had failed, something that would probably haunt him to the end of his days.
It wasn’t difficult to image that scene as, on hands and knees, Rhona went over every square inch of their prison. There might not have been visible evidence other than the small collection of objects they’d left behind, but there was plenty of other evidence of the children who’d been imprisoned here, and probably of the men who had guarded them.
The number involved in the cull last night, judging by the live casualties and bodies retrieved from the water, numbered thirteen in total, and only two of those remained alive. Olsen had been able to identify a girl the helicopter winchman had plucked from the waves as being part of the group he’d watched being taken from this container.
Startled by recognition as she’d been hoisted semi-conscious into the aircraft, he’d told Rhona that the same girl had silently begged him for help, even as she’d passed him by.
Rhona looked up from her work to find Harald watching her. Fully suited like herself, the only way he was recognizable from the army of Norwegian SOCOs that had invaded the ship was by his bulk and his eyes.
‘How are you doing?’ he said through the mask.
‘Fine,’ she acknowledged.
‘Want to take a look at what we’ve found?’
The suite of rooms lay to the rear of the cargo hold, although discovering them without prior knowledge of their existence would, Rhona suspected, have been difficult. According to Harald, sometime between the discovery that the police were on board and the time the NH-90 had taken off again, a team had been dispatched down here to wall up the evidence.
‘They did a good job,’ Harald said. ‘If it hadn’t been for the noise of the storm we might have heard them.’
Rhona stepped through the door that had been cut in the recently constructed metal bulwark to find a short corridor with open doors on either side. In each of the cabins, a SOCO was at work.
Rhona watched as one swabbed blood from a wall. Above him, a camera eye lay dormant.
‘All the cameras are linked to a central source at the end of this corridor. The equipment’s state of the art. The desire for the commodity they were exploiting, international. The money being made from it …’ Harald ground to a halt, shaking his head in disbelief.
‘How long do you think the Solstice was being used like this?’ Rhona
said.
‘Alvis picked up on rumours maybe three years ago. His wife was an investigative journalist following stories about trafficking of refugees, predominantly from North Africa. Then one of Marita’s Tunisian contacts prompted him to look into the Hagen Corporation, who recruit their crews mainly in Sousse. Nobody believed him at first, especially me,’ Harald admitted.
‘They’ve taken the computer equipment off the boat now,’ he went on. ‘I’m glad I’m not going to be one of the people who has to view that stuff.’ He threw Rhona a look of horror. ‘Makes our job seem like a piece of cake, doesn’t it?’
Olsen scooped the scrambled eggs onto two plates and added the smoked salmon on top.
‘I apologize. This is more like a Norwegian breakfast than dinner. Except for the wine, of course.’ He topped up Rhona’s glass.
Leaving the Solstice earlier, she’d discovered Olsen waiting for her on the quayside.
‘Harald told me he was calling it a day. I thought you might appreciate some food, and a shower,’ he’d said.
An offer which Rhona had gratefully accepted.
‘We could eat out, or …’
Rhona had indicated the ‘or’ would be better. All she’d wanted to do at that point was stand under a hot shower and wash away the terrible smell of that container.
As they’d made their way back to his flat, Olsen had asked how the forensic search had gone.
‘My part’s done. Harald’s team will be there for a while yet. I’ll head home tomorrow and we’ll keep in touch about the results from both sides of the investigation.’ She’d looked round at Olsen then. ‘Did you interview the two men?’
‘I did. They decided not to recognize me and denied there had ever been children on the Solstice, even though the younger one had a dislocated kneecap and broken wrist from our encounter. I expect that to be the same for everyone employed on the ship.’
‘How do they explain the bodies in their wake then?’
‘I suspect the story will be refugees trying to reach Norway by sea, rather than land. Their boat went down in a terrible storm and they drowned. The press and public are more likely to go for that explanation, because it’s easier to believe than one that might implicate someone like Hagen. He’s the image of an internationally respected Norwegian company, which employs a great many people.’ Olsen paused, a pained look on his face. ‘And the truth is no country really wants refugees arriving uninvited on their shores, even if they are children.’
