Blood in the Water by Oliver Davies (book club reads .TXT) 📕

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