Dark Suits and Sad Songs (9 page)

They had been together since the Balkan Wars in the nineties. He supposed that the things he’d done – they’d done – had robbed him of pity, too. Captives first of the West, then mistrusted and ill-treated in equal measure by their new masters in Moscow, he’d made up his mind that he and Pavel would never again have to bow, scrape, or toe
anyone else’s line. They would be their own paymasters; the captains of their own destiny. Governments, crime gangs, global conglomerates, even individuals, from all over the world, paid and paid well for them to do their job. Their efficacy and ruthlessness were now legend throughout the criminal underworld. The growth in their reputation matched that of their Swiss and Cayman Island bank accounts. Soon they would be able to retire; soon, but not yet. So they continued their work. They had already been busy; so busy, in fact, that tonight they had decided to relax. They had sailed away, for the time being, from their most recent job, and were taking it easy. It was their privilege.

He looked at his glass; another one empty. His head was already starting to swim, but he wasn’t ready to sleep yet. He had been uneasy taking this, their most recent commission. It was for the man who had set them up, made them what they were, but still, he was unsettled by it. They would have to operate within a small community where they couldn’t fail to stand out, but the huge amount of money on offer was enough to consign these concerns to the back of his mind. Someone very rich and very powerful was seeking revenge, and he and Pavel were his instruments of persuasion, destruction and everything that came in between.

‘The mist is still bad, yes?’ he shouted to Pavel.

His companion nodded as he descended the stairs, then his face burst out into a large smile.

‘Another half an hour, and when it is fully light, we will find an anchorage, sleep off this shit,’ he said, holding his glass up for Pavel to fill. Before the large man could complete his task, though, he was flung off his feet. There was a loud bang, then a jarring scraping noise, and the boat’s progress halted.

‘Quick, Pavel, get up,’ he said to the man on the floor at his side, as he, himself, struggled to get out of the low chair, the effects of the vodka impeding his movement. ‘We’ve hit something!’

Alice Taylor ran from her berth, up the narrow steps and onto the deck of the family yacht. She had been jolted from her sleep by an ear-splitting bang, a collision which had flung her against the side of her bunk. On deck, her father was in the cockpit. He had a gash over his left eye, which was pouring with blood.

‘Dad! Are you OK? What happened?’

In the mist she could see the outline of a vessel at right angles to their own boat.

‘Stephen, Stephen!’ Alice heard her mother call. ‘Quickly, there’s water everywhere. We’re sinking!’

As her father got unsteadily to his feet, he grabbed her arm. ‘Get onto the radio and broadcast a mayday to the coastguard. Our position’s on the sat nav.’ He struggled down below deck to help his wife and son.

Alice was well acquainted with emergency procedure. She pulled up the handheld radio from its holder next to the wheel, pressed the green button, then hailed the coastguard.

She had just managed to give a brief summary of their predicament and location when she heard the throaty roar of a powerful diesel engine. There was a tearing noise as the other vessel pulled free of the temporary embrace caused by the collision and began to move away from their boat.

‘Come back, we need help!’ Alice shouted as the cabin cruiser sailed clear of the yacht. She felt their boat list sharply;
no doubt more damage had been caused when the other vessel had struggled free.

The mist had cleared somewhat; enough for her to make out the name of the
Corinthian
as it pulled away. In the cockpit of the vessel she could see the figure of a broad-shouldered man with a shaved head, laughing as his boat sped away.

‘Alice, quickly!’ her father shouted as he reached the top of the steps, her mother and brother behind him. ‘Get into the tender, we’re sinking fast!’ He was already making his way to the stern of the boat where a small dinghy was secured. Normally used to access shallow harbours that they couldn’t get to in the larger yacht, today it was their lifeboat.

Still carrying the radio, Alice followed; the image of the laughing man on the other boat seared onto her memory.

Daley had decided to spend the night in his bungalow, where officially he now lived alone, though he had spent hardly any time there in the last few months. He had been put off his stride by the call from Liz, not to mention the day’s death and horror.

Dunn had looked crestfallen when he had told her he thought it best they cool things off for a while. Considering the seriousness of the crimes they had to investigate, and the likely appearance of Chief Superintendent Donald, it seemed the sensible thing to do. Mercifully, Donald had left Daley to his own devices so far and hadn’t been in Kinloch for some time. His exalted position in the new national force had kept him occupied elsewhere. That wouldn’t last forever; he knew the man too well.

Dunn had asked if his decision was due to Liz’s phone call. The question had caught him by surprise, but he should have
realised that tongues in the station would wag. It was a small office, and Daley felt as though he was under scrutiny a lot of the time.

He stood on the wooden decking, watching the early morning sun burn its way through the mist. To his left most of Kinloch was on display, lights twinkling under the foggy blanket, while on his right the large island loomed over the entrance to the loch, protecting the town from the Kilbrannan Sound, a sept of the restless Atlantic beyond. It was at times like this – alone, troubled and deep in contemplation – that he most missed his old smoking habit.

Thoughts of tobacco turned his mind to Brian Scott. His colleague and friend had always enjoyed a fag and a drink; most of their peers in the job did. Somehow though, since winning his fight for life, a fight that at one point had looked to be lost, he had crossed the line. Daley recalled one of his recent visits to Scott’s home, where he had watched his DS dispose of most of a bottle of whisky before moving onto beer; all that was left in the house. There was a profound sadness, and a lack of confidence, in his usually ebullient companion. Struggling with demons was something with which Daley had sympathy – he fought his own, continuously – but deep down, Daley feared that his right-hand man’s time as a police officer might be over.

He felt sorry for Mary Dunn, too. But he had repeatedly cheated on his wife. That was how he felt about it – cheating – even though he and Liz had been apart for months. It somehow seemed wrong, now that Liz had been in touch. Did he owe his wife the chance to prove she was right, that his fears about Mark Henderson were unfounded? He had been pulled from the depths of despair by Mary as his
marriage crumbled and his best friend hovered between life and death. He was warmed by her affection and touched by her devotion to him, but every time they made love, there would be a moment – just an instant – when he thought of Liz. Only the other night, as he’d passed his hand over her smooth skin and caressed her soft breasts, as she’d moved astride him with her head bent down and her long auburn hair covering her face, he’d almost gasped at her resemblance to his wife. He was part of Mary’s world, but not of it. In twenty years she would still be younger than he was now, and where would he be? If he followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, the answer was simple: dead.

Death: there it was again. Did the workings of his mind always have to end in the same way?

Suddenly, the sun burst from behind the island, transforming the scene. Grey water turned blue and the grass a deeper, more vivid shade of green. Above the loch, seabirds flocked, united in a renewed frenzy.

Kinloch faced another day.

Daley walked back into the bungalow and picked the blue-and-white paper bag from the dining-room table. He carefully tore the packaging apart, read the instructions briefly, then set about the inside of his cheek with a small spatula. He placed the results into the plastic jar provided and sealed it tight, before heading for the bathroom. He had to give a sample of fresh morning urine, which, after some difficulty, he managed to provide, then sealed the test tube up as instructed and placed both it and the other small jar in the large padded envelope.

He wondered if the people who would open that bag would realise how much they could make or break his life.

The baby was his, or it wasn’t. No need to complicate matters.

He promised himself not to think about it for the rest of the day.

To take his mind off domestic affairs he decided to study the photocopy of the map found on Cudihey’s boat. His investigation had so far uncovered the solitary fact that the line drawn on the map terminated on a nondescript stretch of beach to the north of Kinloch. Despite staring at the map intently, nothing more would come.

Scott sat on the end of the single bed in his room in the County Hotel. Sweat was pouring from his forehead, and he was finding it difficult to swallow. He reached down for the bottle of water on the floor which, with trembling hands, he made three attempts to open, before propelling it against the wardrobe with such force that it left a dent in the door panel.

When he rose to his feet he felt the world spin and almost fell backwards again. He took a moment to steady himself, then walked through to the tiny bathroom where he turned on the tap above the sink and poured himself a cold glass of water. He emptied it in three gulps, his tremor so bad that the tumbler rattled off his teeth. After a further two refills, he splashed water over his face and wetted his hair. This done, he looked at his reflection. He had always hated hotel shaving mirrors; they were illuminated with such ice-white intensity that every wrinkle and blemish in his face was made glaringly obvious. The dishevelled figure that returned his gaze bore no resemblance to the image of himself he carried in his head. The man before him looked old and tired; bleary
eyes stared from a lined face, and he could make out individual pores on his nose and bulging eye bags.

He passed his hand over his chin; his fingers rasped over salt-and-pepper stubble. He tried to remember what had happened the previous evening, but found it hard to piece together the run of events. He remembered Daley, Annie, the bar, but little else. He had a gnawing feeling at the pit of his stomach, a notion that he wasn’t flavour of the month – again.

Without warning, he felt his bile rise, so he quickly bent over the toilet bowl and retched. He stared down at the contents of the pan, which were black and reeked unhealthily. Flecks of dark vomit now covered the front of the shirt he had slept in. It was almost eight thirty. He needed to brush his teeth and banish the awful taste that filled his mouth; he needed to shower and change quickly; he needed to pull himself together.

Instead, Brian Scott leant against the sink and wept.

13

They were cold as they drift ed, waiting for help. The oars, normally contained within the tiny vessel, had been dislodged in their rush to save themselves from the sinking yacht, the stern of which still poked out above the petrol-blue water as they wallowed in the small tender nearby.

Thankfully, much of the mist had lifted and they had a reasonably clear view in the direction from which they expected help to arrive. They shivered from shock, the open sea and their damp clothes.

Alice could not force the image of the laughing man from her mind, no matter how hard she tried. They had been in peril for their lives and he had sailed away, caring nothing for their plight, despite it being his fault. They’d been at anchor off the sea-lanes, displaying the correct lights; he had hit them and then callously left them to their fate. The thought made her sick.

Her mother was sobbing quietly, her head buried in Stephen’s chest as he stared into the distance for the lifeboat. Her brother was slumped forward; despite their situation, he’d managed to drift back off to sleep. Typical, Alice thought.

Though only a mile or so from the coast, they were stranded, alone and vulnerable, with only a few millimetres
of vulcanised rubber between them and the cold, vast empty ocean. The sky looked huge and the waves, despite the bright sunshine, were cold and forbidding.

Alice sat tight, and prayed that help would come soon.

He hadn’t felt panic for a long time. His world was so ordered, so well planned and structured, that the feeling was all the more unsettling because of its unfamiliarity. To be in control was to be at ease; he no longer controlled this situation.

‘So you saw someone on deck, then what, Pavel?’

He watched as the other man wrote furiously on a notepad that he retained for such communication. He snatched the paper and read:
It was a girl. She was standing on the deck. She saw me. She called for help as we left.

She had seen them; she could describe the boat – or even identify it by name. They now had presence where they’d sought earnestly to have none. They were suddenly tangible; they could be pointed out in a crowd, or pulled from a database somewhere. People knew they existed, that they were there. They could be pursued; caught and questioned. This whole house of carefully placed cards was about to topple.

‘Quickly, Pavel,’ he said, getting to his feet. At least the adrenaline had cleared his head. ‘They are at least two hours from rescue; it will take that time for help to come from Kinloch.’ He bent over a sea chart. ‘We are, at the most, only half an hour away. We will put an end to this problem. Now.’

Pavel started to giggle as he ascended the steps into the cockpit of the cabin cruiser, while his companion removed an elongated leather case that had been battened down onto a shelf. He unfastened the clasps to reveal a long barrelled rifle with a sight attached to its upper casing. He took a
magazine clip from the case, checked it, and forced it into the corresponding slot on the rifle. He made his way onto the deck above then looked about. The sea mist had almost lift ed. The rifle was so powerful, its range so long, that his victims wouldn’t know where death had come from. He smiled; the resolution to his problem was at hand.