Blood in the Water: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller

by Oliver Davies

  Looking down the street, I could see a sliver of the harbour showing at the bottom. It all made me feel a little jealous. I knew they’d had a full renovation, and an extension done a few years back too. New CID offices, a conference suite and extra storage rooms. Trish Morrison had a much more attractive place to work out of than McKinnon or I did. ‘Northern Constabulary Western Isles Area Office’ was signed on the window to the left of the door. Ewan held that open for us, and we went in.

  “This way, Sir.” He led us through the reception area and up to the office Trish Morrison had chosen to make her own.

  “DCI Keane and his assistant, Ma’am.” Ewan snapped smartly after his knock had been answered by an authoritative ‘Come on in.’ He stepped to the side so we could enter and closed the door behind us all before taking up an easy stand against the wall. It was a roomy, comfortable office with great views of the harbour. My workplace envy level spiked as I took it in with a quick glance around. Area Commander DCI Trish Morrison stood, smiling warmly, and reached across her desk to shake our hands.

  “Welcome to Stornoway, gentlemen,” she said. “I’m delighted to see you here. Chief Anderson told me he was sending me the best help possible to handle this case. He was very effusive, and after seeing your record, Inspector Keane, I can understand why. Please, sit, both of you.”

  Morrison was a large-boned, black-haired woman. She was not tall, only an average five foot six, but her commanding, almost military bearing made her seem taller. She was forty-seven, I knew, from looking her up. Two could play at that game. Her husband was the first officer on one of the Coastguard’s two Search and Rescue helicopters that were based here, and they had two teenage sons, both volunteers with the local RNLI. Trish Morrison was not pretty, but she was what we would call a handsome woman. She had dark eyes that reminded me somewhat of McKinnon, although, thankfully, her nose hadn’t been remodelled over and over like a piece of plasticine.

  “Very kind of you to say so, Ma’am,” I replied, taking one of the offered chairs as Shay plonked himself into the other one. She frowned as she took her own seat again.

  “Oh no,” she warned in a superb, no-nonsense voice, “Don’t even think of ma’aming me, DCI Keane! I’ll not stand for it. We can be Inspector Keane and Inspector Morrison if you insist, but I’d prefer Trish and Conall if you wouldn’t mind. I’m not making the same mistake with you that James McKinnon did.”

  Shay made a small, amused sound, and her gaze swung to him. She took a long, assessing look.

  “Goodness!” she exclaimed, smiling appreciatively, “And here I was, thinking what a handsome young devil Inspector Keane is!” She’d already seen my photo, if she’d looked at the files, but Shay’s was far from complete. The Ids had reluctantly green-lighted a carefully edited version of it for Anderson to use that did not include an identifying photo. “But you’ve just made my day, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Keane.”

  “Shay, please.” He grinned, showing off his flawless teeth. No threat here. I think he’d taken to her as quickly as I had. As if to confirm that, he lifted a hand and moved his glasses up onto his forehead. “And, as a civilian, I’m afraid I don’t do any ma’aming at all, Inspector.”

  “I just bet you don’t.” She snorted with delight. I hoped she’d taken my early morning email to heart. “I gather you’re quite the useful all-rounder for a civilian specialist… SOCO training and experience, technical wizard, research, linguistics, the whole shebang. You Keane boys make a talented and formidable pair. Crafty of James to arrange for you to be sent over with your cousin instead of lending me half a dozen of his own people instead.”

  Perfect. I heard Ewan shift slightly behind us, soaking it all in. It would be all over the building within minutes once we were done in here.

  “Inspector McKinnon is nothing if not crafty,” Shay assured her feelingly. “I suppose it goes with the territory.”

  “You’re probably right.” She turned her attention back to me. “I wasn’t kidding about being glad to see you here, Conall. My area has one of the lowest crime rates in the UK, which is why we usually get outside help when something like this case comes up. I’d much rather have just the two of you borrowing an office than a horde of outsiders taking over half my station and upsetting everyone… but of course, if you need to call anyone else in, I’ll understand perfectly. Whatever it takes, right?”

  I nodded. “I couldn’t agree more. Let’s just see how far we can get before we start thinking about reinforcements, shall we?” We shared a mutually approving look.

  “Now, as I requested yesterday, Caldonian MacBrayne has managed to shuffle things around a bit, and the Price’s ferry will dock here for thirty minutes at eleven, so you can speak with the captain yourself and have a look around.” Good news. I really needed to see it all for myself. “And Constable MacLeod here will be at your full disposal while you’re here,” she added. “Feel free to make full use of his colleagues too, if you need them. As for my local CID team, Anderson seemed to think I wouldn’t need to pull any of them off their current cases?” No, I certainly didn’t want to borrow any of her detectives.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I assured her. “I can call for my own people if I need them. You know how it is.”

  She did. As in sports, a team that were used to working together performed best. Besides, we didn’t want her own team spending any real time with us if we could avoid it. If any of them were worth their salaries, they’d soon figure out that Shay was no run of the mill ‘specialist.’

  “Well then.” She stood up again, and so did we. More handshakes all round. “Ewan will show you the office we’ve reserved for your use and the rest of the facilities. You don’t mind bunking in with the constabulary boys and girls, do you, Conall?”

  “Not at all. It’s what I’m used to.” She smiled, and I smiled back. Shay donned his glasses again, and Ewan moved to open the door for us as soon as we turned round. The three of us trooped back downstairs, and he showed us our office.

  It was small but adequate, with two desks, a filing cabinet and a lovely view of a neighbouring wall. Well, we could admire the scenery while we were out and about. We’d both be glued to our screens when we were in here, anyway. He also pointed out the break room, the toilet facilities, and the ‘bullpen’ office down the hall where he could be found when we wanted him.

  After that little tour, we went to get our bags from the car, and he escorted us to our hotel. Ewan had been right, it was very conveniently close by. There, we discovered that the departmental budget had stretched to booking us a shared twin room, which seemed a bit parsimonious of them. Shay booked the adjoining ‘superior’ double for himself while we were still at the reception desk, and I made a mental note to make sure to cover half the cost after. It was worth it just to have our own bathrooms.

  After we’d both freshened up, we grabbed our laptop bags again and headed back down to where Ewan was waiting to take us to see Vanessa Price. He was a chatty, friendly lad. He seemed to spend a lot of his working hours collaborating on Search and Rescue missions and performing routine community policing duties. All the thefts and drug busts and major things like that were usually handed over to the detectives. It wasn’t the sort of place where suspicious deaths occurred with any frequency, although one local lad had been stabbed to death a few years back. Just awful! That had been their first such incident in forty years. Oh, and a nice lady from Harris had been killed during a holiday in Glasgow, but that kind of thing happened a lot over there, didn’t it? A dangerous place, from what he’d heard. The mainlanders were welcome to keep it. No offence, Sir.

  Shay rattled something off in Scots Gaelic that made Ewan laugh and then blink, casting a surprised look in my cousin’s direction. I knew Shay had all the different dialects in his head, because he’d once spent an hour torturing me with them until I could understand quite a few odd bits of the language by comparing it to Irish. Our "Go rabh maith agat" sometimes became "Gun robh
math agad", which was comprehensible enough, but most of it was nowhere near that simple.

  “The Lewis dialect has a big Irish/Scandinavian influence,” he’d said, “and the Harris dialect is totally different again. Although I don’t see why that causes anyone any difficulty.”

  I’d seen constable MacLeod look blank at a phrase or two there. Not fully fluent? A lot of the islanders weren’t, these days. We walked along quietly after that and soon came to the Royal Hotel, where Damien and Vanessa Price had intended to spend the first four nights of their holiday on the islands. As always, I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the job at all.

  Five

  I sent Ewan MacLeod back to the station with a thank you. He was a likeable young man and had been helpful, but I was sure he had better things to do than hang around waiting for us. It wasn’t as if we couldn’t find our own way around a town this size easily enough. Shay and I entered the pretty white harbourfront hotel, and I had the girl at the reception desk call up to the room to ask if Mrs Price could see us. She told me that the nice lady constable who was with her said yes. We followed the receptionist’s directions up to the next floor and down a carpeted hallway, and I tapped quietly at the door. The constable slipped out, pulling it almost closed behind her, and we walked back along the hallway to the head of the stairs so we could confer.

  “Constable Annie MacLeod, Sir,” she introduced herself, “I was informed of your arrival.” Annie MacLeod was a pretty girl with very dark hair, wide black eyes and a milky, clear complexion. No trace of any Viking ancestry in those little bones. She reminded me a bit of Mair, in a way, although they were not at all alike. Strong old bloodlines from pre-Roman times showing in both our Bangor girl from north Wales and this island Scot. I found out later that if she was any relation to Ewan, the connection was too far back for either of them to be aware of it. There was no shortage of MacLeods on either island. Both the Lewis clan and the Harris clan had been dominant presences in these parts for centuries.

  “Nice to meet you, Annie.” I shook her hand. She looked drawn, tired and sad. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and her uniform shirt looked as if it had been slept in. “How is Mrs Price holding up this morning?”

  “Not very well at all, Sir,” she told me. “I doubt she snatched more than an hour or two of sleep, on and off. And she didn’t touch her supper or her breakfast, apart from taking a drop of tea and a bite of toast before losing interest. The doctor left something to help her sleep, but she wouldn’t take it.” She twisted her hands miserably. “I think our being there is making her feel even worse, Sir, but the doctor said she shouldn’t be left alone. Maggie and I, that’s Constable MacAdam, Sir, have been spelling each other since yesterday, so we both got our heads down at the station for a few hours each in turn - but Mrs Price doesn’t want us in there with her, and it’s all been very awkward.”

  No, having strangers around wouldn’t help to make Vanessa Price feel any better at all, but if the doctor had been concerned enough to request constant observation, it was better to be safe than sorry. Vanessa Price wouldn’t be the first person confronting an intolerable loss to decide that dying seemed far easier than facing another day. In the mentally healthy, the danger period was relatively brief, thank goodness. Wishing you could just die and actually killing yourself were two entirely different things. Nobody in their right minds would do such an awful thing to their families.

  I looked to Shay, who was hanging back behind Annie’s shoulder. His photochromatic glasses had lightened to a semi-opaque, lighter shade of blue in the dimmer indoor light. My cousin’s face had unsurprisingly become an unreadable blank mask, what was visible of it when he lifted his head like that, anyway. His sympathetic resonance with the bereaved was always far stronger than any regret he might feel for the victims themselves; it wasn’t as if they could feel any pain now.

  “Are any of the family on their way yet?” he asked in a perfectly normal, mildly interested low tone.

  “Her Mam and her sister, aye,” Annie told him, without turning. “They’ll be on the afternoon flight from Glasgow.”

  I was glad to hear it. It was a great pity they hadn’t been able to get here sooner, but at least Vanessa Price would soon be in the best possible hands. No doubt Annie and her friend Maggie were both very much looking forward to their arrival too. It was hard to imagine a less palatable assignment than their current one. I’d take a day of dumpster diving over that kind of watch without hesitation.

  “Well, there’s no helping it,” though I really wished there was. “We need to speak with her as soon as possible, so we’d best get on with it.” Annie nodded and led us back along the hall.

  “Go with the preventing further harm angle,” Shay advised me in an almost inaudible whisper before we reached the room. “It might be the only thing that could get her focused right now.” He took my bag off me and put it on his free shoulder, just like a good PA would.

  Vanessa Price looked absolutely ghastly. She may have dozed a little, on and off, but her eyes were reddened and swollen in a blotchy, puffy face, and I don’t think she was even aware of the state of her clothes or her hair. The sleek brown mane I’d seen in the photographs was a dull, matted tangle now. The woman we saw leaning against the wall staring sightlessly out of the far window was beyond being able to give a damn about anything as trivial as her appearance. She just seemed empty, hollowed out, desolate. I was given a brief, dismissive stare as Annie introduced me.

  “Yes, they said another detective was going to come and talk to me today,” Vanessa said lifelessly and went to sit rigidly on the edge of the couch.

  The Prices had booked themselves a large, family room, with good views of the harbour from both of the windows. Apart from the expected furnishings of a standard hotel room, it also had a desk, a small table with two chairs, and the sofa Vanessa was perching on. I pulled up a chair and placed myself a few feet away from her.

  Shay took Annie MacLeod to one side and muttered a few sentences in a low voice. She nodded and went out. He placed my bag on the floor against the wall by the desk and went about setting his own laptop up and getting it ready for us.

  “My apologies for being compelled to intrude on you like this, Mrs Price,” I said in a brisk, businesslike tone. “But from what you were able to tell my colleagues yesterday, finding the man you saw with your husband is of the greatest urgency. If he’s killed once, he could kill again, and I really don’t want to have to face anyone else in your position any time soon. Not if I can prevent it.”

  Shay had been right. Her head snapped up again at that.

  “You really think that might happen?” she asked. I caught her eyes and was pleased to see a spark of life in them.

  “It’s certainly a real possibility,” I told her honestly, “and until we know more, we can’t risk ignoring that fact. Someone went to the trouble of posing as a crewmember, so that they could lure your husband into a secluded place, where nobody would witness what then occurred. Whether Mr Price was specifically targeted for a reason or picked at random remains to be seen. Not all killers behave in a way we would consider being predictable, or rational.”

  A sense of purpose came into her expression then. If pulling herself together could help prevent another tragedy, then she could not help but see it as her moral duty to do so.

  “What do you need from me, Inspector?” she asked. “How can I help?”

  I gestured towards the desk. “We have prepared a catalogue of photographs of all the adult male passengers who were on your ferry. I’d like you to study their faces and tell us if any of them resemble the man you saw. We also have some footage from a couple of CCTV cameras that we’d like you to look at as well. Can you do that for us, Mrs Price?”

  “Yes… yes, of course, I can.” Was that a slightly offended note in the voice there? A good sign, I thought, if it was. “I have a very clear image of that man’s face in my mind. After what happened, I doubt I’ll ever be able to fo
rget it.” We both stood, and Shay pulled out the desk chair for her while I carried mine over to set beside it.

  “Please try to ignore hair colour,” I advised. “Your man may have been wearing a wig to mislead anyone who happened to spot him. Focus on the faces.”

  She nodded. “He had wide-set eyes, a long face and very prominent cheekbones. His jaw was narrow. Believe me, Inspector, I’ll know that face if I see it.” That matched what she’d told the officers she’d spoken with yesterday, a promising consistency. I reached across and tapped the left touchpad button to bring up the first image.

  “No,” she said without hesitation.

  “Here,” I suggested. “Just tap this button each time you’re ready to move to the next one. Beards and moustaches come and go too, so please pay special attention to the faces that have those. Some of these photos are a few years old.” Shay, standing at my shoulder, was ready to register which images caused her any pause. There were not many that did, and she soon dismissed each of them.

  A light tapping at the door a few minutes later announced the return of constable Annie MacLeod, and I asked Vanessa to stop and wait as Shay went to open it. Annie had her hands full, carrying a laden tea tray. Shay relieved her of it and walked over to set it on the table. As Annie settled on the far edge of the sofa at a gesture from me, Shay came back to my side, and we continued.

  Vanessa Price seemed unusually sure of herself as she worked through all the pictures. Less than ten minutes after we’d started, she’d reached the last of them. She leaned back in her chair and shook her head.

  “If that was all the male passengers, then he wasn’t one of them. He must have come aboard without a ticket somehow.” Yes, and disappeared again afterwards. Shay glided away to the table, and I heard him pouring. Then he came to place a cup and saucer and a small plate of sweet biscuits at Vanessa’s elbow.