Longstone: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 10)

by LJ Ross

  “And leave you to take all the credit? Not likely—”

  Anna listened to their bickering with a heavy heart and thought that power, when left in the wrong hands, could corrupt just as easily as a silver Viking sword could corrode. She turned to the window and saw that, outside, the weather had changed again. Gone were the blue skies of earlier, replaced by the deepening clouds of grey that foretold of more stormy weather before the day was out. As the debate raged on, so too did the rain, which began to patter at first, then pummelled away at the window panes as though it were demanding to be heard.

  She shivered at the sound and found herself wondering whether they were trespassing, treading across the graveyard of souls who had been lost, long before any of them were born.

  Perhaps whatever Iain had found was best left to the sea.

  CHAPTER 10

  A few streets away, Josh Dawson faced the two murder detectives with the same confident demeanour he adopted in most situations, especially those where he felt out of his depth.

  “You seem nervous,” Ryan remarked, in what he hoped was an unthreatening tone. “Try to relax. We only want to know what you can tell us about Iain Tucker.”

  Josh let out an irritable sigh.

  “Look, I don’t know how I can help,” he said. “My mum probably told you all about it and I’m supposed to be at work.”

  “We’d like to hear your version, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

  Another sigh.

  “Fine,” he rolled his shoulders. “Iain was a regular around here. He’d been coming for years.”

  “Since you were a nipper?” Phillips said.

  “Yeah, since I was twelve or thirteen, I guess. He was…” Josh scrubbed a hand over his face then let it fall away again. “He was a decent bloke, alright? He let me tag along with some of the other divers when I was a kid. He showed me how to check tanks, that sort of thing.”

  “Didn’t your mum own a diving school?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah, but she was too busy to teach me. Besides, she kind of closed it down after—after my dad left,” he said. “Shell Seekers was mostly his, anyway.”

  Or so he’d been told.

  Ryan and Phillips exchanged a brief glance. To the untrained eye, there would have been nothing untoward in what Josh had just told them. No malice, no upset—just a statement of fact. But the delivery was too clipped and too rehearsed, as if Josh Dawson had spent his whole life trying to convince himself that the absence of his father meant nothing to him.

  But it did.

  “I, ah, understand you’ve started the diving school up again?” Phillips said, after an awkward pause. “Must be a good diver, yourself?”

  Josh shrugged, and his face adopted its confident expression once more.

  “Yeah, I suppose you could say I get by.”

  Ryan wondered idly whether he, too, had been as cocky at the same age and was forced to admit that the answer was likely to be in the affirmative.

  “Right. So you knew Iain Tucker pretty well.”

  “As well as anyone here,” Josh said. “Iain mostly hung out with Diarmuid O'Brien, but he went back to Ireland a couple of years back. Runs a diving school off the west coast.”

  Phillips made a note of the name.

  “Anyone else he spent a lot of time with?”

  Josh fiddled with the edge of a plaid shirt, which he wore open over a plain white vest. Leather bracelets circled his wrists and a small tattoo graced the underside of his left wrist.

  “Well, I s’pose he would have a pint with Hutch, if he was in the mood,” Josh replied. “But Iain wasn’t really a social butterfly, you know? He was friendly enough but he wouldn’t hang around to chat about the weather, if you know what I mean.”

  They nodded.

  “Did he have a regular diving partner or a group he’d go down with?”

  Josh sighed.

  “You’re supposed to,” he replied. “Iain knew that, but I’d see him going out alone all the time. He just didn’t want to share his secrets.”

  There was a note in his voice that Ryan couldn’t quite place. It sounded like resentment.

  “Did you ask to go down with him? To get in on the action?”

  Josh’s eyes flitted away, to a spot somewhere just to the left of Phillips’ head.

  “Are you kidding? I have a business to run,” he said, affecting a bored tone. “Nobody really believed all that stuff about a Viking wreck, anyway. People searched all the time—”

  He broke off, suddenly.

  “They searched—?”

  “I mean, there are loads of diving and shipwreck tours. Shell Seekers runs a couple of tours a day in summer, and that’s just us. People would have seen something like a Viking longboat before now, wouldn’t they?”

  Ryan merely smiled.

  “Let’s talk about what happened yesterday. When did you last see Iain?”

  There was an infinitesimal pause.

  “Ah, about five-thirty,” he replied. “He came into the dining room downstairs and announced that he’d found a wreck. He ordered some champagne and then offered to buy everyone a drink. It was big of him, since the room was packed out.”

  “Can you give us a list of everyone who was there?” Ryan asked. It would be useful to compare Josh’s recollection with his mother’s.

  “Sure, but why does it matter?”

  They didn’t immediately respond, so the question hung on the air for the few seconds it took Josh to put two and two together.

  “You think somebody went after him? After the treasure?”

  Josh ran both hands through shaggy, overlong hair.

  “You must be kidding. He probably fell, that’s all.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Ryan agreed.

  * * *

  A few hundred feet away, inside the Harbour Office, Mandy Jones slipped her mobile phone back inside the pocket of her jeans and walked across to the window. She needed time to think, to process what was happening and make sense of it all.

  She could hardly believe it.

  Last night, she’d watched Iain’s boat heading back out onto the water, in the darkness. But she hadn’t been able to sit around and worry about it all night; she had a life to lead, didn’t she? She worked hard, she was a good mother to Daisy—or, at least, she tried to be—and she deserved some time to herself.

  Or, as it happened, some alone time with the latest man in her life.

  She knew it wouldn’t last; it never did, and she’d stopped believing in the fairy-tale of True Love when she was a girl. All the same, it had been nice to have somebody to spend time with, to be close with.

  Was that too much to ask?

  She heaved a sigh as she watched the people of the town walking past the office, chattering about Iain, no doubt.

  She struggled to make sense of it all; to believe what her mind was telling her.

  After a pleasant, if short-lived, rendezvous the previous evening, she had popped back into the office to collect the emergency radio she’d forgotten in her earlier rush to get away. She’d clattered into the room on four-inch heels, a bit woozy after a few glasses of wine, and rummaged about to find it. It would have looked bad, if anything had come through and she wasn’t there to receive the message, but thankfully nobody would be any the wiser.

  She remembered grasping the radio in her hand and flicking off the lights, starting to turn away from the window, when she’d spotted something in the distance. A tiny flicker, nothing more than a torchlight entering the darkened harbour. She’d thought her eyes had been playing tricks, that she’d had one too many glasses of Merlot.

  But then the shape had come into view.

  A dinghy.

  It had steered carefully away from the east pier, away from the working camera, but she only realised it had been deliberate afterwards. She’d watched from her darkened office, waited with idle curiosity to see who had managed to come into the harbour as a storm began to rage.

  And she
’d seen who it was.

  Still, it had been no more than a passing curiosity, an idle observation, until she’d heard that the coastguard had found a dinghy and that it belonged to Iain’s missing boat. The possibilities had spiralled throughout the day and she’d warred with herself. She knew she should speak to the police, to the tall detective and his sergeant.

  That would be the right thing to do.

  But then, she’d never been much of a one for always doing the right thing. Not when there was something to be gained.

  Smiling now, she reached for her coat and decided to make a short, very personal, house call.

  Time to collect.

  CHAPTER 11

  As the light faded and rain clattered against the roof of the old shipping inn, Ryan and Phillips made their way to the bedroom Iain Tucker had routinely used on his trips to Seahouses.

  “Same room every time,” Phillips said. “Had his breakfast at the same time every day, ate his dinner around the same time too.”

  “Dangerous,” Ryan said softly. “It’s dangerous to be so predictable.”

  Phillips found himself wondering whether he was growing too predictable in his old age, and made a mental note to ask MacKenzie about it. There was a woman who was unafraid to give him the full, unvarnished truth—usually several times a day.

  “Aye, if the wrong kind of person is watching, you’re a sitting duck.”

  “You and your ducks,” Ryan said, coming to stand outside one of the bedrooms. It bore a carved wooden nameplate marked ‘ST. AIDAN’, after another local saint.

  He reached inside his pocket for a fresh set of shoe coveralls and snapped the elastic over his boots before drawing on a pair of nitrile gloves. Phillips did the same and they tapped on the door, which opened to reveal a figure which, at first glance, was not dissimilar to the snowman they’d seen earlier in the day.

  “Afternoon, lads.” Tom Faulkner, the Senior CSI attached to Northumbria CID, was dressed head to toe in a white polypropylene boiler suit, complete with hairnet and hood so that only his mild brown eyes remained visible behind his goggles.

  “Tom.” Ryan nodded a greeting. “Found anything interesting inside?”

  “Come and have a look for yourself.”

  Faulkner’s suit rustled as he led them into the bedroom, where Ryan’s cool gaze swept over the details of the furniture, cataloguing the scene and committing it to memory. A small double bed dominated the room, still fully made-up with the kind of attention to detail employed by an experienced chambermaid. A tartan headboard was fitted to the wall above it and, further above that, there was a decorative stag’s skull Ryan found mildly disconcerting. On the far side of the room, a large mullioned window overlooked the sea and, beneath it, a small bureau and chair had been set up. A suitcase lay open on the floor containing a few personal effects and clothes, and a brief glance through the open doorway to the en suite revealed Tucker’s missing diving gear, which hung from a clothes hanger over the shower rail to dry out.

  “Why would a man intending to go back out on the water not take his diving gear?” Ryan asked, of nobody in particular. “He orders champagne, he gets changed and hangs his suit up to dry. Why would he do all that, if he was planning to head out again? Those are the actions of a man who was settling in for the night.”

  “He can’t have drunk more than a single glass of champagne,” Faulkner chipped in. “The bottle and glass are still here on the bedside table. Just one set of full prints, another partial, but we’ll probably find that the partial belongs to whoever gave him the glass at the bar downstairs.”

  “We can ask for voluntary prints from the residents here,” Phillips said. “Start ruling people out.”

  Ryan continued his survey of the room.

  “No papers, folders, notebooks?”

  “Not so far,” Faulkner said. “Were you expecting any?”

  “How about a laptop or iPad? A tablet of any kind?”

  “No, nothing like that, although we found a mobile phone. I’ve bagged it up—it was on the bathroom shelf, just there.”

  He turned and pointed towards a small marker which had been left in its place.

  “Probably checked his messages while he was sitting on the throne,” Phillips said.

  Ryan pulled a face.

  “Bit unhygienic,” he observed, and Phillips reddened a bit.

  “Aye, well, I’m just saying that’s what he might have done.”

  “Right. The important thing is whether he had anything interesting to say while he was contemplating state business.”

  “I had a quick look before the battery died,” Faulkner said. “Password was a simple ‘1234’, so it wasn’t like cracking the enigma code. There were a couple of messages from his son, a couple that look work-related, and one from a woman called ‘Sandy’ who was asking if he still wanted to have dinner next week. None of them mentioned the wreck, but there were a couple of outgoing calls on his list—one to Anna and a couple to some area codes I didn’t recognise. Few missed calls from this morning, too.”

  “We’ll check it all out,” Ryan said. “One of them was probably the Receiver of Wreck, another would have been Anna.”

  Faulkner nodded.

  “There was one funny thing,” he said. “I looked for Iain’s phone charger but couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  “Could have forgotten to bring it with him,” Phillips offered.

  “Seems unlikely,” Ryan said. “Iain had been here for over a week. No way he managed to survive on a single battery charge that whole time.”

  “Could have left it on the boat?” Phillips tried again, but that seemed unlikely too, since there wasn’t much in the way of electricity supply on a dive boat.

  “No electronics, no papers,” Ryan murmured.

  He could almost imagine it, could almost see a shadow moving through the nondescript bedroom, hurriedly snatching up Iain’s belongings, taking anything that might contain details of the location of his discovery.

  “Somebody’s been in here,” he said aloud. “They’ve removed anything incriminating but, in their rush, they took the phone charger without remembering to take the phone.”

  Phillips felt a tingle, the kind an experienced hunter gets when they first scent their quarry.

  “Nobody ever thinks to check the netty,” he said, sagely.

  “In terms of finding anything else remotely useful in here, I’m sorry to tell you there isn’t much,” Faulkner said. “The place is covered in prints, most of them probably quite old, and the recent ones will belong to Iain and whoever has been coming in to clean his room. We’ll swab as much as we can, but it’ll be the same story for bodily fluids. No blood spatter anywhere, either.”

  Ryan stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans in a gesture they’d come to recognise as frustration.

  “Who’s in the room next door?” he asked, suddenly. “A man doesn’t just disappear in a place this small. Somebody must have heard him coming in or out.”

  “I didn’t see any cameras inside,” Phillips said. “But there might be one outside. Hutch would know.”

  Ryan took one last look around the room, then nodded.

  “Let’s ask him.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “You alright?”

  Anna turned and smiled at the man she’d known since nursery school. He was grown, now, and life had changed them both since the days when they’d chased each other around the playground. By rights, there shouldn’t be much of a friendship left between them, not after all that had happened on the island, but she supposed that was a testament to the human spirit and its power of forgiveness—of each other, of those who had hurt them, and of themselves.

  “Just coming up for air,” she replied, and leaned back against the wall of the Coastguard’s Office. The rain had eased off, temporarily, as if the gods had known she needed to escape the cloying, competitive atmosphere within and feel the misty air cleanse her skin and her mind.

  “This remi
nds me of school,” Alex said, with a smile. “Back then, we’d have been pretending to smoke cigarettes around the back of the bike shed, not talking about murder and shipwrecks.”

  Anna laughed.

  “You’d have been smoking. I’d have been in the library,” she reminded him.

  “You always were a nerd.”

  She gave him a half-hearted shove.

  “How’s life treating you, Alex? Have you—” She stopped herself, wondering whether it would be insensitive to ask about relationships. Three years before, the man Alex loved had been murdered—brutally, and by Alex’s own father. That was enough for any heart to withstand in the space of a lifetime but, by the same token, the capacity for love was unlimited, or so she had always believed. If a person had loved once, they could do so again.

  “Have I met anyone, you mean?” Alex came to lean against the wall beside her. “If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have said I’d never be interested in meeting anyone ever again. Then, I realised something important. Loneliness isn’t what Rob would have wanted for me, or what I would have expected of him, if the situation were reversed. I grieved…I still do,” he amended quietly. “And I miss him all the time. But I’ve started to say ‘yes’ when people suggest a drink or a bit of dinner. It’s a start.”

  Anna reached over to clasp his hand.

  “You deserve a bit of happiness.”

  “Thanks. I didn’t think I deserved anything after—well, after what my father did. It took everything I had in me, just to go back to work and hold my head up high. I thought people would want nothing to do with me, that they would think I was just like him.”

  “People are idiots,” she acknowledged, and made him laugh. It was only the truth, after all. “But you didn’t kill anyone, Alex, and you couldn’t be more different from your father.”

  It was the biggest compliment she could have paid.

  “Thanks,” he said, and pulled her in for a hug.

  “Well, well,” a voice drawled, and they pulled apart in surprise. “Oh, don’t let me interrupt your little…reunion.”

  Alex’s face fell into hard lines of anger.