COFFIN COVE a gripping murder mystery full of twists (Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 1)

by JACKIE ELLIOTT

  COFFIN

  COVE

  A gripping murder mystery full of twists

  JACKIE ELLIOTT

  Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 1

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2021

  © Jackie Elliott

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Jackie Elliott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Cover art by Nick Castle

  ISBN: 978-1-78931-753-4

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Two Months Later

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

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  Prologue

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  She was dreaming of the river again. She was standing on the bank, feeling the breeze lift her hair and brush it against her cheek. She felt the silt from the riverbed oozing through her toes and the cool water gently lapping around her knees and thighs as she waded further in.

  A perfect afternoon. The silvery flashes of shoals of fish moved below the surface, the darting movements casting shadows on the rocks. She laughed and plunged her hands into the water, and then her shoulders, her skirt billowing up around her waist.

  In her dream, the sun lowered in the sky, casting ominous shadows. The fish disappeared. There was just darkness below her now. She could see a figure, the outline of a man, on the other side of the river. He was waving, gesturing for her to come over. She pushed her feet against the riverbed and struck out in an effort to swim the few feet to the grassy bank. The current was strong, though, and she struggled to make headway.

  The water was cold, swirling around her. She looked up and tried to call out for help, but she couldn’t shout loud enough to make the figure hear her. She tried to raise her hand to wave at the man, but he had melted away and now she felt the presence of her father reaching out his hand to pull her to safety. She was close enough to smell whiskey on his breath. She could hear him, he was imploring her, calling to her, and for a moment, she felt his tears splash against her face.

  She jerked awake.

  It was dark, pitch black. Why was she so cold? She struggled again to move her hand and found that it was clamped behind her back. Her legs were wet, and she couldn’t move them either.

  She gasped a panicked breath, the spell of the dream gone forever. Her head was pounding, and her left cheek was resting against a hard, wet surface. Her legs were partially covered in water.

  She couldn’t see, but she could still smell the river — that part was real. She was shaking violently now. She realized that her hands were bound with some kind of rope, chafing and cutting into her flesh as she struggled. Her ankles were also tied together also. She was trussed like an animal.

  Where was she? What had happened?

  As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, her head cleared and she remembered.

  She opened her mouth to scream and a small reedy sound came out, like in her dream. She tried again and again, as she finally realized where she was.

  Then water fully submerged her legs, and she knew that it would not be long before the river crept up her body and engulfed her.

  She attempted to move her legs backwards and forwards in a snake-like motion, trying to shuffle up and away from the rising current. She struggled, but despite pushing her body to the limits of her strength, she only managed to bang her head against a rock. She knew then that there was no escape.

  “Daddy?” she whispered.

  But she knew he wasn’t coming.

  Chapter One

  The man paused for a moment to breathe in the ocean air. Someone had discarded an old rusty prawn trap on the beach, and a pungent waft of dried seaweed and rotten bait mingled with the fresh night breeze. He was used to that. All he could hear was waves gently lapping against the dock and the occasional thud and groan of boats as they strained against their tie-up lines under the inward tide. All familiar sounds.

  Nothing else. No voices. Far away, beyond the government dock on the way to town, there was the occasional rumble of a diesel truck engine, but they faded away into the night.

  The man felt sure he was alone. But he paused for a minute or two longer anyway. No rush. He leaned against the wooden rail and fumbled in his back pocket for his cigarettes. His fingers closed around the wad of banknotes before he pulled out his smokes and lit up. His hand was shaking. He needed a drink. But first he needed to get this job done. He felt a small frisson of pride.

  He had negotiated well, he thought. People underestimated him all the time. He smirked to himself. They have no idea. He had been firm — half up front, he insisted, and half when the job was completed to the client’s satisfaction. And satisfaction was guaranteed. Guaranteed. Nobody better suited to this job than himself.

  He puffed up his chest a little, a half-smile on his face as he played out the fantasy of his “negotiations” in his mind.

  A dog barking in the distance brought him back to the present. He stubbed out his cigarette and focused his mind on the task ahead.

  The boat was in the usual position. The man had watched its owner expertly dock the boat that afternoon. He had tied up and worked around the deck before disappearing into the galley for an hour or two.

  Probably going for a nap, he thought.

  As
the afternoon light faded, the man watched the boat owner emerge once more onto the deck, lock the galley door, and then hop out of the boat and head up the dock towards the town.

  The man had been waiting. The early spring evenings were getting lighter, so he had to wait for the sweet spot — dark enough for him to move around unobserved, but not too late to be disturbed by the returning boat owner.

  Now. He moved quickly along the dock. At low tide the metal walkway was steep and hard to navigate in the dark, so the man was relieved for the high tide.

  When he reached the boat, he took one last look around before hopping over the stern onto the deck. He hadn’t been able to see if the owner had left his keys, but it was a well-known fact: go onto any boat and you’ll find the keys an arm’s length from the galley door.

  He stood in front of the locked galley door and stretched up to feel along the narrow ledge at the top. Nothing. He then stretched his arms out wide, feeling in the dark for small spaces that would conceal keys.

  But still nothing. The man fumbled around again, panic rising. Where would they be?

  Relax and think.

  The boat owner was taller. Of course! The man rose as high as he could on tiptoes and stretched up again. Sure enough, his fingers found a small gap behind a light above the galley door and a small bunch of keys on a chain.

  He laughed to himself with relief and then delight as he saw that there was a tiny bronze key, a well-worn door key, and what looked like ignition keys.

  Fucking idiot, the man almost laughed. This would be easy now.

  The galley door popped open, and he stuffed the keys in his pocket. He’d need those again later. The man stood for a second, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. It was cloudy, with no moonlight to help him, but he didn’t mind.

  He got to work quickly. He knew that galleys had a multitude of storage areas tucked away, making the best use of small spaces. He ignored the small cupboards and instead pulled up the cushions behind the galley table and opened the long narrow cupboards above the windows. Nothing. He eased himself into the stateroom in the boat’s bow and looked around. An open laptop was on the bunk, emitting a low blue light which illuminated the space. On reflex he reached out to grab the laptop, but snatched his hand back, remembering the words from his client: Touch nothing. Take nothing. Just get the gun. Deviate from these instructions and not getting paid will be the least of your worries.

  The man slid his hands under the mattress on the bunk, but no luck there.

  He thought for a moment, then exited the state room, careful not to disturb anything, and stood once more in the galley.

  He looked at the galley table and realized that it doubled as a chart table. He reached underneath and eased out a long drawer. There was a tiny lock in the centre, and he pulled out the keychain and found the small bronze key. The drawer opened, and he grinned. A .22 calibre rifle and a box of bullets.

  He grabbed the gun but left the box.

  Didn’t want to drop them all over the place, and his client hadn’t said anything about bullets.

  Estimating that he’d been in the boat over five minutes, he realized he needed to leave. He re-locked the drawer, pushed it back under the table with the charts and looked around one last time to make sure he hadn’t left any cupboard doors open or cushions out of place.

  Once out on the deck, the man put the gun down beside him and then stretched up again to replace the keys in the cubbyhole where he found them.

  Then he was out of the boat carrying the rifle in one hand, scurrying up the dock as quiet as a rat, finally merging into the shadows.

  Chapter Two

  Harry Brown brewed some coffee in the galley just as the pale sun edged out of the ocean, throwing its first rays across the glassy surface of the morning tide. The percolator spluttered steaming hot water through freshly ground beans, the same as it had done for the last thirty years, even when the boat was bucking and thrashing. The smell of fresh coffee and the morning ocean always revived Harry, even those mornings when he had seen the sun come up and go down several times without a hint of sleep in between.

  Tied to the Coffin Cove Government Dock, Harry normally drank his first cup of the day sitting in a faded canvas chair placed on the stern of his pride and joy — a sixty-foot aluminium purse-seiner, the Pipe Dream. Not today, though. As Harry waited for his coffee, dark clouds obscured the late winter sun, and the first fat drops of rain splashed down the windows.

  Harry sighed. He was used to bone-chilling wind and relentless rain, but today marked thirty-five straight days of rain, and even he was getting cabin fever.

  Harry took up a lot of space in the tiny galley. Over six feet and nearing 300 pounds of solid muscle earned working on fish boats for his entire adult life, he looked as though he would be clumsy in such a small area. But he was used to confined spaces and knew that the secret to avoiding chaos was efficiency and organization. Everything in the galley had a use, and everything had its place.

  He ran his fingers through his shock of greying curls and examined his beard in a cracked mirror above the tiny sink. It was also showing signs of salt and pepper. Even this early in the year, Harry had a weathered tan. He had inherited his father’s dark skin.

  Harry felt most comfortable on a boat. His happiest memories were with his father, Edward, on their tiny wooden trawler, leaving the dock before the sun rose, the smell of coffee on the old oil stove, and a day of jigging cod and pulling prawn traps. That was before the booze ravaged Ed’s body and mind and left a spiteful whining husk in place of the laughing hulk of a man, with long dark hair and warm brown eyes that charmed many a barmaid over the years. Harry preferred to remember Ed that way. The smell of the coffee always took him back to that happy place.

  Fishing was in Harry’s blood, even though his father liked to remind him they weren’t a fishing family.

  “You’ll never make it. Those people will step all over you. It’s a pipe dream, son, go logging.”

  Harry had left school and gone to work on a fish boat when he was fifteen. The first summer he practically worked for nothing. His skipper, Lloyd, took him on only because a deckhand had quit, and he needed another body. He screamed orders at Harry all day long, had him running here and there, cleaning, sorting, sweeping, mending nets and cleaning out the one toilet that seemed, miraculously, to get plugged with shit every day.

  But Harry wanted to learn, and when all the other deckies were snoring on their bunks, he snuck up to the wheelhouse and sat with Lloyd, learning how to read the charts and the tides. He soaked up knowledge. And saved every penny he could.

  Three years later, he made a down payment on his own boat, and Lloyd co-signed for the loan. Harry remembered picking up Ed and taking him down to the dock to show him the tiny vessel, piled up with second-hand prawn traps, and rope and equipment that Lloyd let him take from his net sheds.

  “See, Dad? I told you I could do it!”

  “You fucking idiot,” Ed sneered at him. “You’ll be selling that before the season’s out, and you’ll be broke.” He turned and walked away.

  Eighteen-year-old Harry had wiped away the last tears he would ever cry over his father and gone fishing. He did sell the boat. He traded up for the Pipe Dream a few years later.

  Harry had stopped being angry at his father as he watched good men, great fishermen, beaten down by booze, and sometimes drugs, over the years. He forgave Ed finally, and dropped off a few fresh prawns and salmon now and then to the rundown trailer that Ed moved into when Greta, Harry’s mother, had finally had enough of the drinking and left, taking Harry’s baby sister with her.

  Harry sat at the galley table with his coffee and let his mind wander back to the golden years of fishing, indulging himself with memories of the glory days.

  And it had been like a gold rush back then. Fresh seafood from the pristine Canadian waters suddenly became a prized commodity in Japan. Buyers arrived in their chartered jets, with their slick suits, imma
culate shoes and briefcases full of cash, in return for the finest sashimi-grade seafood in the world.

  With cash came trouble.

  Harry recalled sitting at his galley table doling out hundred-dollar bills to his crew with a loaded shotgun resting by his side. Mugging was a common occurrence in Coffin Cove. Drunk deckhands with their pockets full of cash in between openings were easy pickings for the drifters and grifters who always seemed to blow in wherever they thought there was easy money to be had.

  Coffin Cove was a lot less sleepy then, Harry remembered. The rain had let up enough for Harry to take his second cup of coffee out to the deck, and from there he watched the trickle of trucks congregate in the Pulp Mill parking lot for the shift change. In the eighties, the Pulp Mill employed 2,000 men, and there were a hundred purse-seiners and gill-netters jostling for position at the docks. The fish plant was heaving with tons of product being processed and flash-frozen every day, and anyone who had any kind of trade experience was sought after and paid handsomely.

  Young men graduated (or not) from the now boarded-up high school and either walked into a job at the mill, or down to the docks.

  Harry looked around.

  Twenty, maybe thirty boats? Sporties in among the commercial guys. The fish plant was boarded up, the warehouses derelict. These days, the boats unloaded further up the coast or in Vancouver. The small fish markets were gone. Instead of multiple buyers vying for their product, the fishermen had to take the price on offer — which often barely covered fuel and expenses. Quotas and licenses had been bought up by major corporations and they could screw down the prices because they owned the quotas, the processing plants, even the reefer trucks that collected the fish. The industry had changed beyond Harry’s recognition. He missed being on the water but was glad he wasn’t in the thick of it anymore. The boats were high speed, fitted with all the electronics and radar equipment they felt they needed to find the fish, and to pay for all that and make a slim profit, there was no room for the camaraderie of the old days. When Harry had first started fishing, it was the unspoken etiquette to hand over spare parts if a boat had broken down or needed a tow. Now, a boat drifting, unable to set a net, was a competitive advantage to the next man.