“Sure,” Euterich said, maintaining his outward appearance of a grieving colleague whilst sliding deep into McAllister, pulling all his experience and memories to the surface, particularly of the Reynolds/McAllister bout of fisticuffs in the games room. “What can I do for you?”
Eddie folded his arms authoritatively across his chest. “You and Reynolds, after your little … contretemps–”
“Our what?”
“Your quarrel last week. You spoken to him since? Any recurrence of the .. .unpleasantness?”
“No.”
“Not been squaring up on the quiet?”
“No need. I think he got the message first time.”
Eddie nodded. “You were in the welding hut today,” he said. A statement and a question.
“You know I was, guv, mending your chair … as ordered.”
“Did you happen to use paraffin or methylated spirits at all?”
“Some meths to clean oil off my hands; solvent to wipe down the metal.” He narrowed his eyes, dragging up some of McAllister’s fiery attitude to add to the mix. “Are you suggesting the fire was my fault? You think I was careless with the gear?”
“No –”
“It was all fine when I left!”
“I’m sure it was –”
“Sure as hell sounds like an accusation!” His raised voice attracted attention, as he knew it would, and Eddie put out his hands, palms forward. A gesture of both pacification and protection.
“Calm down Jock. I’m not suggesting anything of the kind. All I want to know is did you see Reynolds hanging about anywhere near the hut. Did he come in? Was he outside when you left?”
“No. I had the mask on, cutting and welding, getting on with the job. Never saw or heard a thing. Didn’t see him loitering about outside either. I probably wouldn’t have taken any notice of him if I had. I don’t know if you’d noticed, but him and me, we aren’t … weren’t exactly blood brothers.”
At least not in a way you would understand.
“Did you lock up afterwards?” said Eddie.
“No. Welding hut’s never locked. No need. Not like there’s anything in there worth stealing in there.”
“Why didn’t the fire alarm go off?” asked Lydia, suddenly there. Had she been listening in to their conversation?
“There isn’t one,” said Eddie.
“Why not?”
“Think about it. What’s the one thing that goes on in there day in and day out? Heat and smoke, and plenty of it. If it was alarmed, fire crews would be on permanent standby outside the door. It’s purpose built; concrete lined, one small window sealed shut, virtually fireproof, and when the door’s closed it’s pretty much a self contained oven–”
He stopped, his foot firmly in his mouth again.
“That’s why,” he finished.
“I see. Thank you.” She nodded, stepped away, turned, and left.
Bugger. Why could he never learn to shut up before making himself look a complete idiot?
Chapter 28
Shaw and Eddie went over the photographs from Brewer’s camera, selecting the clearest, labelling them and saving them to a pen drive.
Eddie would add copies to his preliminary report, when he got round to writing it, and send it via the satellite link to Longdrift first thing.
Unless they were willing to come and get it, the hard copy and memory card would have to wait until he could deliver it personally.
He studied the pictures closely, looking for clues, but the more he looked, the less he saw. He needed a fresh pair of eyes and someone to give him advice.
Half past one in the morning found Eddie Capstan tapping softly on Lydia’s cabin door, his face close to the wood.
“Lydia? It’s me. Eddie,” he rasped. “I need to talk to you.”
Silence.
Another rap. “Lydia?”
From deep inside came a muffled response. “Go away, Eddie. I’m sleeping.”
“It won’t take a minute.”
Tap, tap, tap.
“Please.”
She groaned, swore, and a few seconds later, wrapped in a towelling robe and rubbing her bleary eyes, she opened the door and let him in.
“This had better be important, Eddie, or I swear I will have to hurt you.”
“It is.” He placed his laptop on her desk, pulled out the chair and sat her down while the computer booted up. He pulled up the spare chair, turned it around and straddled it.
“I want to talk to you about Reynolds and the fight he had with McAllister last week,” he said. “How did he seem when he left you?”
“This is what you get me out of my nice warm bunk for? Two blokes having a scrap?”
“So how was he?”
She yawned widely. “Cracked nose, black eyes, in some pain from his ribs. I bound them up in a compression dressing, gave him some painkillers and told him to contact me again if things changed.”
“Things changed alright.” Eddie bit his lip. “You gave him pills? Any chance they–?” He twirled a finger by his temple. “Sent him bonkers.”
“Like they did with me you mean?”
“I’m just grasping at straws, Lydia.”
“It’s possible, but unlikely. They were only a codeine paracetamol combination, and not very strong. The worst they could have done is made him constipated. What’s going on?”
“Like I said, I’m grasping at straws, looking for some reason why a man like Reynolds, who thought the sun shone out of his own backside, would want to kill himself.”
“Kill himself? You said he died in the fire.”
“At first glance, that’s what I thought.” Eddie rooted the memory stick from his pocket and plugged it in. “Will you look at something for me? Give me your opinion, as a medical person?”
Another yawn. “If I must.”
A dialogue box appeared and Eddie placed the pointer over it. “I warn you now, it’s pretty grim,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
A click, and in all their grisly glory a gallery of photographs of the charcoal human figure were displayed – the blackened grinning skull with its boiled away eyes, the split abdomen, the gaping slashes in the arms.
Lydia sat back in her chair, distancing herself from the screen, her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God!”
“See here,” said Eddie, pointing out the sliced wrists. “Straight across, almost down to the bone. Classical suicide wouldn’t you say? I think, for a reason we’ll probably never know, he set a fire and slashed his wrists hoping that when he passed out from blood loss, the fire would finish him off.”
“Did he leave a suicide note?”
“Haven’t found one. It might have burned up.”
“Possibly.” Lydia leaned closer to the screen. “I’m not sure about his method.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s too clean.” She touched the screen. “There would be more cuts.”
“Surely one would be enough, if it’s deep enough.”
“True. But very few are confident enough to slice right through first time. More often than not there are a few exploratory superficial cuts.”
“Which I am presuming would be literally skin deep,” said Eddie. “Shallow enough to be destroyed by the fire?”
“Possibly, but contrary to popular belief, even when done deeply, cutting across is not very effective. The flow is too slow and sometimes it shuts down altogether. There was no guarantee he would even pass out, let alone die from it. Slicing down the arm is much more effective. A vein opened up lengthways bleeds out faster. It was the Roman way and they knew what they were doing.”
“And I suppose you’ve seen plenty of both ways in your line of work?”
“You could say .. .I have a personal interest.”
She held him for a moment with a firm gaze, and then pulled up the left sleeve of her robe.
Eddie’s eyes shifted to her arm, and the fine silver line running from her wrist to her elbow. He gaped at
it, his face turned inside out with astonishment, shock, and horror.
In silence she lowered the fabric, hiding the scar from view, the plaster mask set of her face telling him two things – although she trusted him with the knowledge of the existence of the scar, he should never ask her how she got it, and she in turn would never tell him, even with her dying breath.
A common bond forged itself between them. Both had been taken to the brink of death at the point of a knife and both had been dragged back and given second chances, and neither of them wanted to talk about it.
From his cabin across the hall, Euterich heard every word of their conversation and the clicks of the mouse, and smiled to himself.
Capstan was a very worried man. He had been given a puzzle he couldn’t solve, events were slipping out of his control and it was eating him up, unbalancing him, making him jittery.
This was getting better and better.
However, when a long silence fell, he felt sure something intimate had once more occurred between the pair and it unsettled him, wiping the smile from his face and replacing his feeling of haughty self-satisfaction with a growing envy and detestation. Even hearing Capstan leaving again did nothing to lessen the feeling.
Three a.m, the darkest of the wee small hours when time slowed to a trickle, Eddie Capstan shuffled through the door to the dark and silent mess hall, to find Lydia already occupying a table.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
She turned her mug around on the tabletop. “After that horror show, did you really expect me to be able to close my eyes again tonight…” She looked up at the clock on the wall. “…this morning. Could ask the same about you.”
“Couldn’t get to sleep. Too much going on in here.” He tapped his temple.
“There’s some fresh coffee made.” She held up the mug. “Get me some more will you?”
Eddie placed coffee mugs and two Tunnock’s teacakes on the table between them.
“Why are you here, Lydia?” he asked.
“I told you. Because you woke me up and scared me half to death with your pictures and horror stories.”
“I’m sorry.” He pushed a cake across the table to her. “Peace offering?”
Lydia took the cake and peeled off the red and silver foil wrapper. “You mean why am I here on Bravo, not why am I sitting at this table pigging on chocolate cakes?”
“Aye.”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours, and you go first while I eat this.”
“Because I’m being paid to be here,” Eddie said, picking the wrapper off his own cake. “And when my paymasters say jump, I don’t just ask how high, I just do it and ask if I can kiss their arses on the way back down. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. I’m a company man, I do as I’m told, always have done, always will.”
Lydia laughed. “You really are a numpty aren’t you? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, no matter who’s paying you. There is a world of difference between the individual and the institution; the two are not inextricably linked. You might think you’re just a deep rooted company man, but peel away that veneer and we find plain old Eddie Capstan underneath; a decent guy who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, keeps five miles an hour under the speed limit, has never had a parking ticket, likes meat and potato pie, loves his Mum and never forgets her birthday. He’s a man who probably changes his underpants twice a day because he might get run down by a number nine bus and wouldn’t want to embarrass the nurses. Am I right?”
Eddie cleared his throat and looked at the table top. She had cut a little close to the bone for comfort. He considered himself to be an ordinary, law abiding sort of bloke, who recycled when he could, had been a Boy Scout, and still helped old ladies across the street.
He did also have a passion for a decent meat pie, particularly when it came with a thick flaky pastry crust, and was not allowed, on pain of death, to forget his mother’s birthday.
“Close enough,” he said, and pushed his whole sweet in his mouth, swelling his cheek like an overstuffed hamster’s pouch.
In total contrast, Lydia broke the chocolate dome delicately with her teeth and picked out a loose piece, exposing the soft white fondant beneath. She explored the cavity with her tongue. It came out coated in foamy white and she sooked it into her mouth, catching every tiny morsel. More dipping. More sooking.
Satisfied that the sweet bubble had nothing left to offer, she nibbled it away until only the sponge base remained, which she popped into her mouth whole, letting her tongue sweep over her lips and into the corners of her mouth, seeking out any stray flake of chocolate.
Eddie watched fascinated, and more than a little turned on. He had never before seen anyone eat a chocolate teacake in such a seductive manner and he felt sure he would never be able to look at one again without getting a hard on. Not a good look in the biscuit aisle of his local Tesco.
“That was nice,” Lydia said, screwing the foil wrapper into the tiniest possible ball. “I enjoyed it.”
“Want another?” offered Eddie, a little too quickly. “I can find one.”
He dearly hoped she would say yes, because he would gladly have given his entire week’s rations to see her do it again.
“No,” she said, patting her stomach. “Got to watch the old waistline.”
Bugger!
Silence.
“So …” Eddie said. “Your turn.”
Lydia rolled the silver foil ball between her fingers. “It’s a bit of a cliché, but I’m here to get away from it all, to give myself some time to take stock of where I am and where I’m going with my life,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about making some changes for a while, but I can’t decide what or how, and if I bugger about for too long, it might be too late to do anything at all. I’ll be too old and too poor to enjoy it, and if you can’t enjoy it, what’s the point in doing it?”
“You’ve been given a second chance, you don’t want to waste it,” said Eddie, risking a cautious dig.
No answer. Fair enough. He expected as much.
“But of all the places in all the world, why here?” he said.
“It’s as good a place as any for an adventure. And let’s face it, how many people get the chance to spend time on an oil rig out at sea?”
“Thousands.”
“For fun?”
“You call this fun?”
“Compared to what I’ve been doing for the last ten years, potting up broken limbs, clearing up after fights, patching up scratches and gouges, doling out inoculations and antibiotics, mopping up blood and shit and sick, believe me this is pure Disneyland. At least it was until …”
“Until we lost two crewmen?”
“None of what’s happened is your fault, you know,” she said, taking hold of his hand.
Eddie wrapped his fingers around hers. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” he said. “Whatever happens, and to whom, the ultimate responsibility is mine. That’s what they are paying me for.”
“Now there are two people gone, will Longdrift send someone out to investigate?”
Silence.
“Eddie?”
“They can’t investigate what they don’t know about.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I haven’t told them about Reynolds’ death yet –”
“Eddie!”
“I will. Soon. Tomorrow. I just wanted to get things straight in my head first. That’s why I showed you the pictures, to get your opinion, to get things straight before I said anything.”
“Did I help … or make it worse?”
He shook his head and took a long slow mouthful of his coffee, his tired world weary face contorted with angst. “A bit of both. You gave me something to think about and… um …I’ve changed my mind. I’m not so sure Daz did kill himself.”
“So what do you think did happen?”
“Something more … sinister.”
Another mouthful of coffee, a tense rub of the b
row, a deep sigh of fatigue.
“Consider how things have been over the last few weeks,” he said. “Living cheek by jowl, overworked and overtired. Throw in the booze and dope and you’ve got a powder keg ready to go up, and where there’s been any trouble, there’s been one person either the instigator or somewhere in the thick of it. Desmond Reynolds.” Another scoof of coffee. “In a way it is my fault. I’ve known since day one that there’s illegal drink and drugs on board and I’ve turned a blind eye even though it makes me an accessory, but what else could I do? Stepped in and confiscated it? I can tell you now why I didn’t – because I would’ve been the first one over the rail.”
“What I think you should or shouldn’t have done doesn’t make a whit of difference,” she said, giving his fingers a light squeeze. Had she forgotten she still had hold of his hand? “Go on with your theory.”
“I think one of the others had had enough of Reynolds taking the piss, snapped and killed him,” he said. “Afterwards they cut him and set the fire to make it look like suicide to cover their tracks.”
The hold on his hand became a painful crush as she leaned forward, her voice lowered, even though they were alone in the room.
“By one of the others, you mean Jock McAllister don’t you?”
“He would be my prime candidate, yes. He certainly has a temper and they’ve already had a scrap over nothing. It was Jock who threw the first punch. You saw the results.”
“I know, but suspecting him of murder. It’s absurd, just as it is to suspect any of the others, especially someone like Duncan or Dr Brewer? I can’t believe you could think any one of them even capable.”
Brewer, no, but why did she pick Cameron and not Shaw or McDougal? Why was he so special? Was something going on between them that she wanted to protect him, seeing as they were already on first name terms and all? Something in Eddie’s gut shifted. Could this be what jealousy felt like?
“Everyone is capable, Lyd,” he said. “It’s just a matter of being driven to it. I said it was just an idea, I have no proof of anything. I could be totally wrong.”
“Then let somebody else sort it out. But they can’t do that, of course, until you report it.”
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