By the time I’d finished with that little sales pitch, all hopes of walking away from this virtually unscathed had fled Whitaker’s head, solicitor or no solicitor. What he needed now was a few minutes to think my offer over and, dry-mouthed or not, I’d noticed that he’d barely touched his water.
“Now, I know we kept you waiting for a while until Area Commander Morrison was free to join us, and I apologise for that unavoidable delay,” I told him. “If you’d like to visit the bathroom before we continue, Constable MacLeod can take you.”
He nodded gratefully, and Ewan got up to take him by the arm. After they’d gone out, Trish just shook her head at me.
“Christ, that’s some technique you’ve got there, Conall. He couldn’t even break eye contact once you got going. How on earth did you get so good at that?” It was a rhetorical question. “And what was all that about gambling and horses?”
“A little tip my cousin gave me.” She’d read the edited version of Shay’s file and could certainly put two and two together, but she knew better than to comment. What Shay was ‘authorised’ to do was none of her business, and she’d really rather not know.
Ewan soon brought Aaron back, and once he was seated again, he emptied his glass thirstily. I refilled it for him.
“What’s the best I can hope for, if I cooperate fully, Inspector Keane?” he asked, and I resisted the urge to sag with relief. Instead, I leaned back and considered him carefully.
“To be honest, there’s a limit to what I can promise you, Aaron. Most importantly, to start with, we could relocate you and make sure you aren’t held on remand in some godawful category B prison for months, while you’re awaiting a trial date. You’d have to agree to an electronic tag, but that’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Depending on how helpful you are, with a guaranteed good word from Area Commander Morrison, I’d say you’d then be looking at anything from a suspended sentence and a hefty fine to up to three years, tops. We could also make sure you served any sentence in a low-security prison, where you’d be among other relatively harmless low-risk offenders and not a bunch of psychotic, violent criminals.”
I could promise him that much because I knew that my cousin would make damned sure of it. He hadn’t liked reading about Cory Phelps’ overly harsh punishment and wouldn’t want to see a repeat of it with anyone whose fate he felt partly responsible for. Aaron slumped and sat with his head in his hands for a while, breathing shakily.
“Christ! I really fucked up, didn’t I? But it all seemed so harmless. I mean, I was getting paid legitimately to help make whisky, right? And alcohol kills thousands of Brits every year. Cory Phelps showed me the figures. Less than thirty cannabis-related deaths, most years. What kind of sense does that make? My illegal activity seemed far less harmful than my legal activity.” He looked up at me. “The rest of it never occurred to me. All that stuff you said about organised crime and Cory being tricked into smuggling worse things... I’d never even heard of that Locke guy you mentioned at the airport before today. I thought it was just Cory and Brian, nothing major.”
I nodded understandingly. “They probably tell everyone a similar story, at every distillery they manage to infiltrate. Most people wouldn’t touch it otherwise.”
Every distillery? His eyes widened again as that sank in. How long would it take us, now, to find others like him who might be very eager indeed to jump at our offer? After that, it was all quick and easy. No, Aaron didn’t want to wait for a solicitor. He wanted to tell us everything he could immediately. I looked at Trish, and she stood up.
“Thank you, Inspector Keane. I’ll take it from here. Mr Whitaker, Constable MacLeod will escort you up to our main interview room, and I’ll join you there shortly. Ewan, see if Mr Whitaker would like a tea or coffee before we start, please, and maybe have someone fetch him some lunch?”
“Yes, Ma’am.” He led our shaky, dejected culprit away, the poor, dumb idiot.
I got up myself, feeling like a wrung-out rag. I don’t know how Shay kept up that level of physical control for extended periods.
“Great job Conall.” Trish was eyeing me speculatively. “It’s no fun, is it, dealing with the small, unappetising fish we haul in? I’ll get the recording to you immediately, once we’re done, although I doubt he’ll be able to help you with your manhunt much.”
So did I. It didn’t seem likely that Phelps or Jordan would have told him of their plans. He hadn’t even known they’d been responsible for the murder of Damien Price. I was sure of that.
“Thank you, I’d appreciate it.”
She checked her watch. “Quarter to one. Have you two stopped for lunch yet?” Aaron had turned up at the airport well before he needed to check-in. We’d been back here with him before half-past eleven. It felt like much more time had passed since then.
“Next on our list,” I assured her. “You?”
“Oh, you know how it is when you’re working through routine paperwork. I ate at my desk.” We walked out and set off back towards my office. “I doubt I’ll be done with Whitaker before you’re back, Conall. You don’t need to rush it.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” I assured her. I didn’t know many officers who regularly used up their full break allowances, which varied depending on the length of their working days. Still, you soon learned to recognise the signs that told you that you needed to stop, refuel and refresh to keep your efficiency up.
We parted ways at the bottom of the stairs, and I went to detach my cousin from his laptop. I knew he wanted to try a ‘promising’ wrap from the lunch menu he’d looked at in the cafe yesterday morning. It shouldn’t be difficult.
Fifteen
We bumped into constable Annie MacLeod on our way out to get some lunch. She was looking much better rested than she’d appeared the morning before at The Royal Hotel. Her pale complexion even had a fetching rosy flush to it today, as if she’d spent the morning on healthy outdoor activity. She probably had. I gathered that there had been a spate of minor vandalism in the area lately; bored kids with nothing better to do than act like the kind of hoodlum they’d be cursing about themselves when they were older. Some things never changed. Dashing around town, responding to a few outraged calls, would certainly have got her colour up.
“Hi, Annie,” Shay greeted her, ducking his head reflexively. “Did Mrs Price’s mother and sister turn up alright yesterday?”
“They did, Mr Keane,” she assured him, “and they all flew out again early this morning, heading back to Glasgow. I think Mrs Price will be staying with her parents for a while until she’s ready to go back to Oban. She’ll be in good hands there.” She spoke to him very naturally, with no hint of awkwardness, as if she’d forgotten every word of what she’d heard yesterday and didn’t find it at all odd to direct her answer at a wall of hair.
That was rare. Most new people found a way to put their foot wrong with him almost instantly, one way or another.
“That’s good to know.” It was a huge relief, actually. Annie turned to look up at me and smiled shyly.
“She seemed much improved after your visit, Sir, and ate a good bit of her lunch. Maggie even got her out for a bit of air afterwards… but I’m afraid that didn’t end too well. It was the sight of one of the harbour seals, sunning itself on the slipway by the fishing boats, that upset her, or so Maggie thought.”
Yes, I could see that happening. Something like that would automatically make her think of a happy, excited Damien reaching for his camera.
“Well,” I smiled reassuringly back at her, “that’s very encouraging to hear. When you’re trying to come to terms with such a recent loss, memories can ambush you wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. Sitting around and brooding only makes it worse.”
Shay waited patiently for a few more seconds before clearing his throat, and I realised that Annie and I had just been standing there like idiots, eyeing each other very unprofessionally.
“We’re just off for some lunch, if you’d
care to join us, constable,” he offered pleasantly.
“That’s very kind of you, Mr Keane, but I’ve already eaten.” Annie’s flush had spread a little too. “It’s time I got back to work, or the Sarge will be wondering what I’m playing at. It was nice to see you, though, and you too, Inspector.” She walked past us and in, very calmly and unhurriedly.
“Whatever you’re about to say, just don’t!” I warned him, and Shay subsided reluctantly as we headed down to the waterfront.
‘Helpful’ comments of the sort he usually produced in situations like these were not what I needed to hear right then. My cousin knew what the word ‘inappropriate’ meant but never seemed to grasp where it really applied, especially when he was talking to the people he felt most comfortable with. Some of the stuff that came out of his mouth, if I didn’t stop him in time, proved that. Just because he liked to pretend that his own body was nothing more than a temperamental piece of machinery that occasionally demanded some inconvenient and rather messy maintenance work to keep it running smoothly, didn’t mean the rest of us felt equally emotionally disconnected from ours.
Sometimes, I was tempted to treat him like a faulty old television and give him a few good hard whacks, as if there was a chance that might fix his picture reception too.
My cousin knew how to take a hint. He behaved impeccably all through lunch, not one single well-intentioned reference to the benefits of a timely ‘oil change,’ ‘tune up’ or even, thank goodness, a ‘full service’ or anything of the sort. He even went out of his way to be very pleasant and polite with the waitress he’d first cautioned and then generously tipped the morning before. He needn’t have bothered. She was so confused and smitten, she could barely get a coherent word out. Both the service speed and the food were great, though.
As good as her word, Trish called down as soon as she’d finished Whitaker’s interview to tell me that she’d added the video recording to our case folder and that one of her DCs would attach the audio transcription as soon as they’d got it done.
“About the distillery?” she asked. “Are you happy for me to send a team out there, or do you have any reason to want to supervise that yourself?”
“That depends on what Aaron Whitaker had to say, Trish. Is he claiming that any of the others there were involved in the smuggling?”
“No, he was adamant that they weren’t, and I believe him.”
“In that case, it would be better if your people took it from here. It might not be a bad idea to have Ewan call Angus to let him know they’re on their way. Have you spoken with Chief Anderson yet?”
I was really glad that I wasn’t going to be involved in what would probably be a long, complex, and mostly frustrating and dull operation. Anderson would need to talk to the Spanish police about discreetly checking out the bodegas, and the shipping companies they worked with, before any kind of major sweep could be organised. It would be far easier to get this particular pipeline shut down at their end than ours. One or two small raids over here, and the game would definitely be up.
Not that shutting it all down in Spain would make much difference in the long run. The smuggling was too profitable for the big players to just stop because of an occasional, costly setback. They always evolved new ways of getting their product over. At least, with Jordan and Phelps tied up in a murder investigation, Whitaker choosing to leave wouldn’t be enough to make Locke think we’d tumbled what he was up to.
“No,” Trish sighed down the phone, “but I will, once the transcript is ready. Then we’ll need to see what the forensic chemists in Inverness find in the samples my team collect.” Our forensics lab was very well equipped, and I doubted she had access to anything like a gas chromatograph or mass spectrometer out here. “At least we know where to focus our attention at the distillery now. You’ll see what I mean when you watch the tape.”
I did. I watched and listened as Aaron described how he extracted the sausage-shaped packages from the casks. The central bunghole of each cask or ‘boca de bojo’ was several centimetres in diameter, as I knew from my reading last night. All Aaron needed to do was remove the modern, silicon bung and lower in a powerful but compact little light on a string. He could then insert the flexible spring-loaded claw tool he’d been supplied with and get a good grip on the end of the first ‘sausage.’ Once he had that in his hands, he could gradually release the others with some careful tugging. His counterpart in Spain fed them in carefully, and powerful magnets on each sausage-shaped package in the link held them in place, lined up around the inside of one of the iron hoops on the outside of the barrel.
Aaron would then stash the retrieved packages in a box at the back of a storeroom cupboard where nobody had ever stumbled across them. That was where Trish’s team had the best chance of finding any material that may hold chemical traces. Working late, alone, after a batch of casks arrived, made all of that ridiculously easy for Aaron to accomplish unobserved, and he ‘ran late’ often enough to make his staying behind another half hour at the end of the day unremarkable. As for the orders, as the lowest man on the ladder at the distillery, packing those up and getting them ready had already been one of his regular, unsupervised duties months before Cory Phelps had approached him. Once Angus and the others were satisfied that Aaron could handle the job perfectly well by himself, they’d just left him to it. I wondered if their man in Spain also siphoned off a little liquid from each barrel to readjust the weight.
Aaron had received four thousand pounds for each shipment he handled and estimated that they probably added up to between ten and twenty kilos a time, at most. That last part was the most useful piece of information I got from the tape. With everyone who needed to be paid, both in Spain and over here, the street value of Moroccan hashish wasn’t high enough to make it worth the bother of buying and smuggling it at those rates. I couldn’t see Malcolm Locke paying out that much to any of his people for so little return. But what if Phelps and Jordan were working a little scheme of their own that Locke didn’t know about? If Aaron Whitaker was the only guy they had to pay, and Locke was covering some of that cost anyway, maybe they’d been adding a little something of their own to the casks destined for Angus MacLeod’s distillery?
If I were Phelps and had found, upon my release, that I couldn’t get a decent, legitimate job anywhere and ended up working for Locke, I might well be tempted to find a way of drastically increasing my earnings so I could get out as fast as I could. Why not? He was already risking arrest and imprisonment again for relatively little return. Jordan could easily have been slipping a little something of theirs into some of those shipments for Cory Phelps to retrieve at this end. What was bothering me was that Aaron swore that Price had not witnessed anything unusual when he’d visited the distillery last Friday, and he certainly hadn’t said anything to Phelps or Jordan about him. So why had he been killed?
I could hear one of Shay’s alerts pinging every few minutes, as one of the accounts he was tapping received another message. There’d be a little pause as he checked it, and then he’d go back to whatever he’d been typing. Nothing from our two yet, or he’d have said something by now.
“How’s your boat owners’ check coming along?” I asked.
“I got that in a while ago.” From his tone, I gathered it hadn’t paid off. “If Jordan and Phelps are on a boat, the owner wasn’t on my initial list. I might look for a wider ring of possible contacts if we don’t get anywhere soon.” Well, he was at least as accustomed as I was to hitting dead ends, and he didn’t seem disappointed. “The important thing is that I now have full access to both the Stornoway Port Authority and Tarbert Harbour databases and can pull the records for the dates we’re interested in and cross-check all the boats that were here each time a collection was made. I mean, it’s not like Locke would risk his guys moving his stuff on a public ferry. It’s too risky. You don’t go to so much trouble to get your product into the country just to hand it over to the police once it’s come this far, right? He has
to be using a private boat, or more than one, to get it over to the mainland.”
Having witnessed Flex in action myself, I wasn’t about to disagree with his reasoning there.
The lack of any apparent motive for targeting and killing Damien Price was really bugging me by then. The background check that Shay had done on him had ruled out any possibility that he’d been involved in any form of illegal activity himself, and there was nothing to connect him to our pair in any way, except for his visit to the distillery.
Cory must have made that ferry trip, and others like it, many times during the years he’d been making collections for Locke. He would have been familiar with both the routine and with the layout of the ship and had obviously selected his site and planned his timing carefully. But how had he even known that Damien was going to be on that ferry on Wednesday?
I tried to work through it. Phelps and Jordan saw Damien Price snapping pictures while they were loading their crates. For some unknown reason, one or both of them decided that he was a threat. Maybe they’d heard enough of his conversation with Angus, before they went inside, to tell them who Damien was. They could easily have checked online directories for his home address in Oban after that and found out where he lived. Then what? Did one of them shadow him back to Oban to snoop around? How and where did they access the information that he was coming back here on Wednesday? And which ferry he’d be travelling on?
Blood in the Water: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller Page 14