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

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?

“Shay?” I asked. “How hard is it to access Caledonian MacBrayne’s bookings data?”

“The whole database or just a single account? Because you’d need a decent hacker to penetrate their database, but if you managed to obtain the