Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  “You’re suggesting the man was killed by the police?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then who?”

  “There’s been such a fuss about the assassination—”

  “Understandably. However much you dislike the man’s politics he was an elected politician.”

  “I just wonder whether the assassin was worried about the amount of attention his crime was getting so found someone to take the blame and close the case.”

  Skye frowned. “Plausible. But then you’re looking at a serial killer.”

  “Not necessarily, just a killer protecting his own back. He may have nobody else in his sights if he thinks he’s got clean away. And he will when the police go public with this.”

  “Have they got a name for this second body? There’s nothing on Twitter or Facebook, or the local news.”

  “They aren’t releasing any details yet but they are pretty certain his name was Ryan O’Donnell.”

  “Wasn’t he one of the crew on Warwick’s yacht? There was an O’Donnell, wasn’t there?”

  Fergal took a few moments to check. “Well remembered. Yes, he was a steward. Joined the crew back in September last year. He seems to have been playing a waiting game if he’s been planning to kill Eden for the best part of a year.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have an opportunity before last week.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I think he’s probably just as much a victim as Warwick Eden.”

  Their thoughts were interrupted by Fergal’s phone vibrating. He answered it, leaving Skye frustrated that she had no idea what was going on. The call lasted nearly five minutes but all Fergal said was ‘Right’, ‘Okay’ and ‘Goodbye’.

  “Who? What?” she asked when he finally ended the call and sat looking at the phone in his hand.

  “That was Anne Hill. They have checked out Beausale and there was no sign of Diane.”

  “No?”

  “There was only a skeleton crew as apparently the captain had recently been fired for arguing with Warwick and, before you suggest it, he is not in the frame for the murder. Apparently he messed up arriving in Dartmouth – the Regatta, I suppose. He flew that evening to Dubai where he still is.”

  “Not a happy man though.”

  “Probably not. Anyway, you’ll never guess who the ranking officer was then.”

  “Ranking officer?”

  “Acting captain I suppose, anyway who do you think it is?”

  “Stop mucking about.”

  “It’s Guy Cliffe.”

  Skye thought for a moment before reacting. “So our guy, Guy, was in charge? He’s in Poole?”

  “Nope. Apparently he left most of the crew in Dartmouth, saying they could have a week’s leave, and left it to the chief engineer and a deckhand to get the yacht to Poole, which they did.”

  “So where’s Diane? Was she on board?”

  “No.” When he saw Skye about to ask another question he put up his hand to stop her. He needed to explain everything that Anne had said while he remembered every detail. “The engineer, Tony Williams, and the deckhand, Don Bahador, an American apparently, were both interviewed and talked about a guest who had been on board for a couple of days in Dartmouth but neither had ever seen the person so they couldn’t be sure whether it was a man or a woman.”

  “Diane?”

  “Impossible to say. The engineer said that it had not been a happy crew, and it all, in his words, ‘turned to shit’ when they discovered Eden had been killed. It seems Guy Cliffe was not very loyal and he left Beausale to join another yacht a couple of days out of Dartmouth. When Anne’s investigator found them there were only the two on board, Williams and Bahador.”

  Fergal paused for breath giving Skye the opportunity to ask another question without interrupting. “And what was the name of this other yacht that Guy Cliffe transferred to?”

  “They didn’t know, at least that’s what Anne said without me even having to ask.”

  “Shame, because he could have transferred the ‘guest’ to that yacht at the same time, couldn’t he?”

  “He could have done.” Fergal nodded agreement.

  “So if our second victim, Ryan O’Donnell, was the O’Donnell on the crew list he must have been one of the ones given shore leave and basically told by Guy to piss off and leave him and the boat, and possibly a captive Diane, more or less alone.”

  “But the other two were still around, weren’t there?”

  “I wonder how easy it would have been to transfer someone from one boat to the other without the engineer and deckhand, whatever their names were…”

  “Williams and Bahador,” Fergal reminded her.

  “Without Williams and Bahador noticing.”

  “They didn’t see the name of the other yacht, did they? So they weren’t very observant. Perhaps they were busy doing something else.”

  “Or perhaps Guy made them busy somewhere else so they couldn’t see what he was up to?” Skye suggested.

  “Possibly.”

  “So,” Fergal said after they had sat thinking their own thoughts for several minutes, “we have two lines of enquiry to pursue.”

  “You mean we’re not going home?”

  Fergal shook his head. “Not yet. There are two things here. First off there’s the yacht or boat or whatever that met up with Beausale and to which Guy transferred, possibly with Diane.”

  “I’m sure Anne will have looked, and I can’t see that we will find something she didn’t.”

  Fergal gave her one of his more scathing looks. They both knew he had a knack for finding things on the internet that everyone else missed.

  “And second,” he said very deliberately, “there’s Ryan O’Donnell. Who is he and how does he fit into all this?”

  “On the first point, surely Anne and her mob in London know exactly which yacht it is?”

  “That’s what I was thinking but for some reason they want us to find out for ourselves. So…” Fergal’s voice tailed off as he tried to identify why that would be.

  “So?” Skye prompted when it seemed Fergal was not going to tell her what he was thinking.

  “So, they must want us to do what we do far better than them.”

  “Which is?”

  “The mystery.”

  “What mystery?”

  “Who was involved in killing Warwick and why because I don’t think anyone believes that suicide note. They probably know more pieces of the jigsaw than they’re letting on, but they want us to look at people they either don’t know about or are prohibited by their ethical code from pursuing.”

  “What ethical code!” Skye exclaimed. “We have more ethics in our little fingers than Gordon has in his whole body.”

  Fergal did what he could to hide his pleasure at hearing Skye being critical of Gordon. “That’s being a bit cynical.”

  “Not really. Remember in July, we thought we’d found all the answers to Alex’s life and it turned out they knew more than half of it already and only wanted us to fill in gaps. Perhaps this is the same.”

  “It might be but let’s not think about that. Let’s get on with our own thing in our own way. If we can find at least some of the answers then we might have some idea what other questions we should be asking.”

  “Okay,” Skye agreed. “I’ll do Ryan, you have a go at finding our mystery yacht.”

  Fergal blew a kiss at his wife before turning back to his screen.

  For a few moments Skye looked out of the window and watched the ferry plying backwards and forwards across the river. It was hard to accept that there had been two deaths and one missing woman in such a short period of time and in such a beautiful place. She shrugged before turning back to her computer.

  “Ryan O’Donnell, born son of John and Anne O’Donnell in July 1996. Nothing parti
cularly interesting about his life. He went to the local comprehensive and did reasonably in his exams but didn’t carry on with his education. When he left school, aged just eighteen, he got a job as a bar tender. There’re lots of photos of him on the bar’s Facebook page; it appears he was good at his job and, if the photos are anything to go by, he enjoyed it. He left after a year to join the crew of Warwick Eden’s Beausale. He got the job through an agency and has apparently done well, had good reports blah blah blah. Absolutely nothing interesting about his life.”

  “Except his death.”

  “That obviously.”

  “Any connection of his family to Stratford Eden’s Black Hand Gang?”

  “FP Transactions? No, not as far as I could see. His father, John O’Donnell, doesn’t seem to have been the investing sort. He was a bit of a tearaway in fact. He was born in 1968 and doesn’t seem to ever have had any money let alone a fortune that he could have invested in, and lost, because of FP.”

  “Nothing to link him to the Eden family then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought that note seemed a bit implausible.”

  “He did have a criminal record though.”

  “Who?”

  “Father John.”

  “Really?”

  “One conviction.”

  “When and what for?”

  “He was arrested in November 1988 and charged with committing actual bodily harm. He was jailed for three years.”

  “Any details?”

  “He was involved in a big demonstration in London against the ending of student grants and probably just about everything else that was going on at the time. Remember, this was towards the end of the Thatcher years.”

  “Three years seems a bit harsh. Was it his first offence?”

  “Apparently so. Thing was, his crime was assaulting and badly hurting a police officer.”

  “That would explain it.”

  “But it does seem they wanted to make an example of him.”

  “He certainly doesn’t seem like someone who would make a lot of money and then invest large amounts in a risky hedge fund venture.”

  “He doesn’t, does he?” Skye agreed.

  “What happened when he came out of jail? Have you got any details?”

  “He married, had one child, Ryan, and then seemed to live a quiet and unassuming life. I honestly can’t see any connection to FP Transactions or the Eden family.”

  “Which just seems to add to our conviction that he didn’t kill Eden.”

  “You think he’s just been a convenient stool pigeon?”

  Fergal nodded. “Whoever killed Eden killed Ryan and left the note to tie up loose ends.”

  Skye nodded her agreement. “Seems likely.”

  “That’s what I think, anyway. Especially as I’ve just hooked into the pathologist’s preliminary report.”

  “And?”

  “Cause of death was a knife slit to the throat but, they say, it was highly unlikely it could have been self-inflicted because the knife was in the wrong hand. He was fairly obviously left handed and the knife was in his right hand. Also the angle was wrong for the cut. They’re pretty sure it was murder.”

  “And a very convenient one at that.”

  “But they’re not saying anything about that publicly.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “To let the real murderer think he’s got away with it.”

  “Or she.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Diane?”

  “Oh no. This is a man’s work. And anyway, why would she kill Warwick Eden and then frame a seemingly innocent bar steward?”

  Skye shrugged. “Just a thought.”

  “A silly one.”

  For more than five minutes neither said a word.

  It was Skye who eventually broke the silence. “Do you think that’s why Gordon wanted us down here after all? It’s got nothing to do with finding Diane. They must know she’s probably on the boat, whatever it was, that met up with Beausale. They must have known all that almost as soon as we got down here. I reckon they want us to find out if she’s involved in the murder. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? We’re outsiders. He couldn’t get any of his team, who might have known Diane for years, to investigate her, could he?”

  Fergal sat away from his computer. “You’re saying she could be behind the assassination of a prominent, albeit stupidly arrogant and pompously dangerous, politician?”

  “Maybe. I’ve always thought there was more to Diane than just an amiable old woman who looks after damaged people.”

  “Remember in July when she talked about all Gordon’s people in terms of chess pieces. He was a knight and everyone else was simply a pawn, black or white, on the side of bad or good, but pawns all the same. She never said which colour she was, did she? Perhaps that’s all we are, pawns in a much bigger game whose rules we cannot even begin to guess and whose playing field… I haven’t a clue what the game is and why we’ve been involved to play it. Have you?”

  Skye stared at her husband.

  She was surprised that he was confessing that he had no idea what was going on.

  In the time she had known him she had never heard him admit anything like that. He was always in control.

  “Since we’re never going to answer that question shall we try to answer the ones that are in front of us?” she said with as much energy as she could muster. “Find that bloody second boat.”

  For half an hour Skye stared out of the window.

  Neither she nor Fergal liked being used but then both of them liked solving mysteries. She just wasn’t sure what mystery they were supposed to be solving.

  Perhaps, she admitted to herself, Gordon had seen that in them and perhaps they should be feeling flattered that he had entrusted the mystery, whatever it was, to them to solve.

  Fergal broke into her thoughts. “I’ve got some answers,” she heard him say. She turned around, running her fingers through her hair as if to wipe away the thoughts she had allowed herself.

  “Okay, fire ahead.”

  “Beausale’s transponder was on and off several times while it was hovering around Berry Head and Torbay on Sunday and Monday. Then, as you noticed, it appeared off Portland Bill before arriving in Poole. I’ve concentrated on any vessels that were anywhere near Berry Head on those days who had their transponders on. There were any number of fishing boats; it is, after all, not that far from Brixham. Anyway, there were three others that came within reasonable proximity of where we can only assume Beausale would have been.”

  “And?”

  “I tracked them from Saturday through to today. Of those three, only one seems to fit the bill.”

  “Yes?”

  “She left Poole on Sunday heading south east before disappearing until she was crossing Lyme Bay towards Berry Head and then, after another gap, heading south south west out of the Channel. The other two simply seemed to be on local trips to and from Poole and Lymington.”

  “And this one? Where is it now? What’s it called?”

  “Her name is Peabody Three.”

  “No Warwickshire connection there, then.”

  “I did look and apart from a Peabody Way in Warwick and a John Peabody living in Warwick in the nineteenth century there was nothing. Anyway, it’s not one of Eden’s. It is owned by a trust fund, the Patel Trust, which I have managed to find. It was set up for the benefit of a chap called Arjun Patel. It’s registered, the boat not the trust, in St Lucia. She crossed the Atlantic back in the spring and that was her first trip to Europe having bumbled around the Caribbean for most of her existence. This is definitely outside her normal territory.”

  “If yachts can have territory.” Skye smiled at what she thought was quite a clever comment.

  For
the next two days Fergal and Skye stayed in Dartmouth.

  They followed the progress, or lack of it, made by police in investigating the murder of Ryan O’Donnell and each day they walked into town to check Diane’s house and her computers but no emails arrived for her, nor were there any telephone messages.

  They became convinced that the only answer to her disappearance was that she was on a boat somewhere and they hoped they knew which boat that might be. Every few hours Fergal checked the marine tracking website to see where Peabody Three was but its transponder appeared to have been turned off.

  “She’s on that boat,” Fergal said firmly. “I know it. But whether she’s there because she’s been kidnapped or because it was a well-laid-out plan of escape I have no idea.”

  “You still think she might be the assassin?”

  “It’s a possibility we can’t ignore.”

  “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere here and I can’t see there’s anything we can’t do as well, or better, at home.” Fergal suggested at breakfast on the Saturday. “We’ve been here practically a week and we’ve got nowhere.

  Skye thought Fergal sounded rather depressed, but on the whole she agreed with him. They might feel better about everything if they were at home working in their own kitchen instead of improvising in a hotel room. “What about checking her house again?” she asked tentatively.

  “Don’t you think Anne and Gordon’s lot have got that covered? She’s not going to turn up here unless Peabody Three comes back to the Dart.”

  “You’re sure that’s where Diane is?”

  “Absolutely certain.”

  “Then we might as well go home,” Skye agreed. “I’ll pack up and you book the ferry. We’ll be home by teatime.”

  “I’ve found her!” Fergal called out as Skye was pouring coffee on the Tuesday morning after they had arrived back on the Isle of Wight.

  “Who?” she asked, realising it was a stupid question.

  “Peabody Three.”

  “How? Where?”

  “Every day I’ve been widening the track of my searches. I found out how far she could travel in a day, given favourable tides and weather conditions, and I’ve been searching webcams in ports in that ever widening range.”