Blood in the Water: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller

by Oliver Davies

  “It wouldn’t be hard to hide a few little packages in a shipment of casks. And if their product was properly wrapped, all the dogs would get was a strong whiff of sherry. Did you know that the casks are always sent over with a good few litres still in them, to prevent them from drying up? And that’s apart from all the wine the wood has already soaked up. Because I didn’t until I looked it up.”

  Nor had I. I was thinking it over.

  “They’d have to have a man in the distillery, to recover the packages, and maybe sometimes slip them into the right orders. Then whoever picked them up could remove them before delivering the whisky.”

  “They could also put them into any order they were sending out by courier service, if the courier was theirs too,” Shay pointed out. Yeah, that made it a lot more efficient. I didn’t think many distilleries operated like Angus MacLeod’s little place. We looked at each other, both wondering how big an operation this might be.

  “We’re just speculating,” I cautioned.

  “We are,” Shay agreed. “But at least there aren’t many people at MacLeod’s place to look into. And none of that explains why either Phelps or Jordan would feel any need to eliminate Damien Price. Nearly everyone who visits the distillery must take a few snapshots. I think Vanessa Price would have known if something had been bothering her husband too, so it’s unlikely he witnessed anything odd.” He made a couple of good points there. I was also wondering, now, if Aaron Whittaker’s apparent embarrassment at having so little to tell us had actually been discomfort at our unexpected presence there.

  “I’ve emailed Trish Morrison with Phelps’ details. If she’s switched off for the night, at least she’ll see it first thing and get his photo out too.”

  “Good.” Shay finished what he was doing and got up again, still looking rather depressed. “I’m pretty beat, Con. I think I need to call it a night.”

  “Of course. It’s been a long day.” No doubt he’d be up again in the early hours. I closed my laptop and got up with it. Seeing my face, which I wasn’t controlling as well as I should have been, he impulsively gave me a quick, reassuring hug and slapped me on the back before stepping away again.

  “It’ll be fine, don’t worry,” he told me, mouth quirking a little, on command. “I’ll bounce back soon enough. You know what I’m like when I start worrying about things I can’t fix.” Yes, I bloody well did. “It’s an irrational waste of time, doing that.” He sniffed. “Our stupid organic brains flood with stupid chemicals, and you just have to think as logically as you can until it wears off again. It soon does. ‘Night, Cuz.”

  “Goodnight, Shay. Sleep well.” I picked up my laptop and left him to brood in peace until he felt ‘normal’ again.

  Much as I’d have liked to throw something or punch something just then, the noise would only upset him and make him feel guilty. I went to give my teeth a vicious brushing and splashed some cold water over my stubbled face instead. It was my judgment that Shay trusted, not his own. It always had been. That was ‘my area’ as far as he was concerned, because I was better at dealing with people and understanding them than he was.

  He was wrong about the ‘understanding’ part of that, in some ways. He knew far more about how human beings operate, and how we ‘malfunctioned’ than I did. As for the rest of it, we’d both realised, when we were still kids, that there was a limit to how much we’d be able to achieve. The world was too messed up, our societal structure too complex, for us to do more than make a very small impact, whichever career path we decided to follow. Every choice had its drawbacks, so why not do what we both wanted to do anyway and choose paths that would put us in a position to do what little damage control we could?

  Despite its many deficiencies, the system we had to work with was a hell of a lot better than no system at all. I knew that, but sometimes, like now, that knowledge didn’t make me feel any better either. I used my highly overestimated ‘good judgment’ to make a rare and carefully considered decision. Tomorrow was probably going to be a very busy day again. I gave my own stupid brain chemicals half a sleeping pill to calm them down and took myself off to bed.

  Twelve

  I woke up again to the sound of Shay moving around at about half-past five and decided I might as well get up too. Our early night meant I’d already slept more than a solid seven hours and dozing off again would only make me feel groggy when I woke up for a second time. Why did oversleeping feel more tiring than not getting enough?

  I had a good, long, refreshing shower before cleaning my teeth and shaving. Was it my imagination, or was my morning stubble still getting thicker every year? Well, I wasn’t about to take the kind of drastic steps Shay had, however time-consuming this little daily chore might be.

  It had been a bit disturbing, witnessing his disgusted, almost hysterical reaction as his body began to sprout hairs in his early teens. Da hadn’t said anything, he’d just gone out and bought Shay his first laser kit, and that had been the end of that little crisis. Adding up the time that I’d spent shaving since then, I reckoned my cousin had already saved himself hundreds of hours by not needing to. Da had even driven him to a few supervised clinic sessions too. He’d always seemed to know the best way to handle some of Shay’s adolescent problems without embarrassing him by attempting to discuss them.

  Full daylight was seeping in through the curtains by the time I’d finished in the bathroom, so I opened them up and flicked the light off before throwing on some gym gear. I wasn’t sitting around in a suit until it was time to head out.

  My cousin must have opened the connecting door a crack at some point while I was showering, and an ambrosial smell began to waft in from his room. Coffee? Where on earth had he managed to get real coffee for me at this time? I hadn’t even heard him go out. I followed my disbelieving nose, and he grinned hugely, directing my gaze to the side of the desk where a little black cylinder about thirty centimetres high was standing. Apart from the button and the light on the front, it could have been an ordinary flask.

  “It’s a portable espresso machine,” he told me. “It’s got a proper fifteen bars of pressure too, but you have to put capsules in it, sorry. Coffee in seconds, well, once the water’s heated. But it’s dead quick if you fill it from the kettle or a thermos… I got a few different capsules in for you to try.” He managed to stop bouncing excitedly for long enough to hand me the little cup of freshly made espresso, and I tasted it cautiously.

  “That’s very good coffee!” I gulped it down. “Better than a lot I’ve been served in coffee shops.” What a neat little gadget. Fifteen bars? It was tiny! “I didn’t even know these things existed. Show me how it works?”

  He did, thoroughly enjoying my enthusiastic reaction to his little surprise. He went to rinse the cup out, and we turned the cylinder over to feed it another capsule. I carefully added some more boiling water to the little reservoir at the top and screwed the lid back on. Shay stood the whole thing back on the drinking cup before pressing the power button ‘til the light came on. He brewed himself a masala chai while we waited for it to start pumping again.

  “The battery’s only good for a few cups, between charges, but it came with a car adapter too.”

  “It’s amazing!” I heard the sweet sound of the quiet little pump starting up as my second cup began to come through. The little light on the front turned green in the promised few seconds. The second coffee was even better than the first cup had been. “Which one was that?”

  “Supremo,” he told me. “Stick to the decaf ones for a bit if you’re going to keep playing with it.” He put his tea down to do something with his busy laptop, and I pounced quickly, getting behind his chair and grabbing his head so I could lean down to plant a kiss on the top of it before he wriggled out of reach.

  “Thanks, Shay, this is brilliant! You’ve always been my favourite cousin, you know?” I messed his hair up for good measure.

  “I’m your only bloody cousin, you daft git.” But his eyes were gleaming, and
he looked childishly delighted at his little success. He shook his head slightly, and every shining strand fell neatly back into place. “I thought that if Anderson was going to start sending us off like this, you might enjoy something small enough to pack. I got it weeks ago.”

  I made sure my favourite new toy was charging and went to fill my water bottle and fetch my own laptop. Shay had thoughtfully put out some mixed nuts for me to pick at until they started serving breakfast, and I munched my way through some of those, propped up by both pillows on his comfy double bed as I checked my emails. Trish had fired off a quick reply to the one I’d sent last night, informing me that she’d sent Cory Phelps’ picture out and hoped we’d enjoyed our swim. She’d made a point of telling me she was glad to hear we meant to take a ‘bit of a break,’ at least, when I went to ask about a car.

  “Nothing odd about Angus MacLeod’s bank accounts, or any of the other three. If one of them is being paid off, they’re not banking the money,” Shay told me after a quick check through his open tabs.

  “I’ll call Angus after nine, see if he minds if we conduct a search there, or if we’d need to get a warrant first. That could be a problem, as we have nothing but guesswork to base it on.”

  “I don’t think he’ll object. He didn’t seem the sort to withhold consent, especially not on a murder case. They have a detection dog here, too, paired up with one of the constables. You should ask if we can borrow them for a bit.” He finished his tea and opened himself a snack bag of dulse to nibble on while he worked.

  I started reading through the information my cousin had sent over about sherry casks. They had a limited life span when serving as whisky casks because the flavour weakened each time they were used, and customers didn’t appreciate it when a preferred blend changed its flavour too much. That meant fresh ones would be coming in quite often. Most of the major bodegas in the sherry triangle were specially producing casks for the whisky industry nowadays. The new oak casks would be filled with a young sherry wine from the latest harvest and left to soak for a year or two, and then the wine would be transferred to another new cask. After being used a few times, the resulting ‘sherry’ could then be used to make sherry brandy or sherry vinegar but could no longer be sold as sherry wine. That had to be produced in a properly seasoned sherry cask. The older, the better.

  The bodegas were very happy with the arrangement because they got paid twice over, for the pricey casks and for the brandy or vinegar they could sell. The prepared casks were shipped to buyers in Scotland, and as Shay had said, five to ten litres of sherry were always left in them to prevent the casks from drying up. The wood itself had already soaked up ten to twelve litres by then, after sitting full for a year or two, so he was probably right about the smell of them. The distillers here poured the unwanted liquid out before filling the casks up with whisky. And what did that long soaking achieve? Apparently, it modified the flavour compounds of the oak and removed the unwanted tannins, sulphur-notes and bitter-notes from the wood that were considered being so detrimental to the process of whisky maturation.

  It was all interesting stuff, but it didn’t tell me how many casks a year might be coming into Scotland. I poked around online myself a bit and found that over twenty million maturing casks of whisky were lying around the country. Wow! That was a lot more than I’d expected there to be. I had no idea how many of those might be sherry casks. Whisky was by far our biggest food and drink export, bringing in over five billion pounds a year. That was over twenty per cent of the entire UK’s food and drink exports, which also seemed pretty incredible. Some distillers only used the cheaper bourbon casks from America, some used sherry casks for over forty per cent of their production, and others maybe twenty or twenty-five per cent. Still, even with those few figures to work from, I’d guess that at least a few thousand casks must be coming in from Spain every year.

  So if someone like Malcolm Locke had decided it would be a clever way of getting his hashish, or far less bulky concentrated cannabis oil into the country, he’d have plenty of opportunities for doing so. What would he need?

  There’d be a few people to pay off at each end, but that wouldn’t eat into his profits much. On the surface, at least, it was certainly looking like a viable method so far. Yes, we were guessing, based on very little circumstantial evidence, but you’d be surprised how often we were right about things like this. I’d say that, right then, there was a 50/50 chance we were onto something here. And what would we do with ourselves if we didn’t spend the morning chasing up the possibility that we were right?

  We couldn’t start searching over eight hundred square miles of land for our two suspects, even if we’d been certain they were still on Lewis and Harris. Shay had his biometric scanning software monitoring the feed from the few traffic cams and live webcams available, and all the local police, hotels, restaurants and bars were looking out for them. They couldn’t get off via the airport or the ferry ports either. On top of all that, there was a very good chance that they didn’t even know they were suspects, in the murder of Damien Price or any other crime. The very fact that they’d felt confident enough to leave their fingerprints all over the van they’d abandoned pretty much confirmed that. A surprised Angelo Barclay would eventually have been contacted about the vehicle, but would anyone have bothered to get a SOCO team in to process it before the rental agency sent someone over to drive it back to Portree?

  Not likely.

  I put my laptop down and went to get my Powerball. I’d neglected that yesterday, and it would give me something to do while I cogitated.

  “How are the fingers?” Shay asked without looking round as I got it going, and it started to whine.

  “Almost there now. We could even plan a climb next month if we feel like it.”

  “Bit short notice for the gang to tag along but yeah, maybe.” He typed rapidly, and I watched a few lines of gobbledygook code scroll past.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “This? I’m just finishing putting together some careful feelers to send out to poke around in the Port Authority database here and the Harbour Office down in Tarbert. I want to get a record of all the arriving and departing private boats since Wednesday. I thought it would be worth checking to see if any of the owners connect up with our persons of interest.”

  “How long will that take? We could just call them and ask for that information, you know?”

  “A few hours maybe,” he admitted, “but if you call them, it will probably take them ages to get it together and send it over, anyway. And someone could carelessly miss a few off the list, so I’d still want to check for myself. Besides, we don’t know if they’re all squeaky clean over there. Someone could tip our guys off.” That seemed highly unlikely, but why risk it if we didn’t need to? “I’ve put together a list of relatives and known associates for Phelps, Jordan and Locke, but it could be awhile before my boat list comes in to check against that. I started on the phone checks and stuff earlier.” He went back to his typing while I finished my physio session.

  If he did find a connection to a boat here, it could certainly speed things up a bit. If Phelps and Jordan had tucked themselves away on one of those and were keeping their heads down, our chances of finding them any time soon were not great. Yes, the Port people were ‘checking in’ with departing vessels, but they weren’t searching them for extra passengers, and I didn’t think any magistrate would sign a warrant allowing us to search every boat on Lewis and Harris. Not on a ‘maybe,’ and we couldn’t call in the manpower to perform a search like that, anyway. Anderson would blow a fuse if I tried to pull a stunt like that. Manpower was an ever more finite resource these days. I let my Powerball wind down again and went to put it away.

  “It’s coming up to seven. They’ll start serving breakfast soon,” I warned my cousin as he kept typing. “You might want to start thinking about getting ready.”

  “I’m going to wait ‘til after half-past and go along to The Crown Inn instead. ‘Break
fast included’ usually means ‘breakfast inedible’, and I’d rather not, thank you.” He must have read some off-putting reviews and checked out the best alternative options.

  “Alright, we’ll go there then. Meet you there at eight? If we’re delaying breakfast, I’m going to have a bit of a walk around first, check out the view from Gallows Hill, and stretch my legs a bit.”

  “Give me five minutes, and I’ll come with. I want to see that too.” The staccato tapping accelerated to his top speed. He wouldn’t say ‘five minutes’ if it was going to take him more than ten.

  I checked the weather forecast. We were in for another nice day, by the looks of it, but it would be chilly out for a while yet. I went to fetch the light coat I’d brought along and put it on over my sweatshirt. Shay locked and secured his laptop and pulled yesterday’s trousers back on before grabbing a fresh top from his bag. Non-iron, like everything he’d brought along. This one was an oversized burgundy coloured Henley neck, and he pulled it on over his t-shirt before slipping his trainers on. Jacket, phone, glasses, and he was good to go.

  It was slightly chilly out, and there was a brisk breeze blowing, but it was great walking weather. We headed down to the waterfront and turned north to reach the pedestrian bridge on Bayhead that would take us over to the castle grounds. Shay eyed the trees warily as we entered their shelter, and the wind dropped a little.

  “You won’t need your spray,” I told him. “If we keep moving, the midges won’t get us even if the wind drops further and they launch, which it won’t. Come on, let’s head up to where we can get a really good view of the harbour.”