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

that was a true and accurate statement, and Trish seemed happy to accept it as such. Nothing for her to worry about there.

Eighteen

Our body from the boat was Butler, alright. The photographs that Shay had found for me were enough to tell me that, and a quick check of his wallet confirmed it. His driving licence was in there. I called Doctor Hamilton again on my drive back to town. This time he picked up his office phone himself.

“Aye, I do all the examinations for the coroner’s office here in cases of suspicious deaths.” He confirmed when I asked. “Your man will be coming to me, alright. D’ye have any particular reason to think your Mr Butler didn’t die of natural causes then, Inspector?”

“Only the timing and circumstances of his death for now,” I admitted, “but I would like a toxicology report.”

“Aye, well, I’ll be taking blood and tissue samples from a few areas, as well as urine and hair. If he was poisoned, the general blood screen will show up any substances present at a high enough level to need quantitating. No doubt you’ll be sending your boys in Inverness samples of everything you find on the boat too. They might be able to tell you something useful long before I can.”

“I hope so. Thank you, Doctor Hamilton. I’ll look forward to seeing your report.”

“Aye, well, do I need to warn you not to hold your breath?”

“I’ll count myself lucky if you can present it in under a week, Sir.” I knew how notoriously slow the results of a forensic toxicology report could be.

“Will you now? I’m glad to hear it. I wish our local boys and girls had such realistic expectations.” He rang off, and I spent the next few minutes running through a number of pointless theories about what may have happened on the Jeanie before pulling in at Church Street and parking up again.

Shay glanced up as I walked in. “Our boat’s still a good half hour out,” he told me helpfully. “Was it Butler?”

“It was.” I hung my jacket up. “Can you send over his phone records for the last week?”

“I already did.” One of the nice things about working with my cousin was the frequency with which he anticipated requests like that.

I opened up his email and started going through them. Butler had tried to call the same number over thirty times and also made a twenty-minute call to someone in Aberdeen on Friday evening. I didn’t think it was any kind of a stretch to decide that the missed calls had all been to Phelps’ ‘business’ phone and that it had been turned off the whole time. The call to Aberdeen wasn’t hard to imagine either.

Unable to reach Phelps, Butler would have called whoever he was supposed to contact if something went wrong. He might have been told to remain in place and attempt to find out what the problem was. Check the hospital. Check the local news for reports of arrests, accidents and deaths. Try to find out, discreetly, if Phelps had made the scheduled pick up at the distillery. Butler had also made a few calls to another number, an untagged phone, and Shay had added a note identifying it as the number of Jeanie Shaw, Iain’s little sister.

“Jeanie?” I asked.

“Yeah, I checked out Butler’s social media too. Those two had been living together for over six years.” Which made him part of the family, even if they hadn’t made it official by getting married. “I guess he renamed the boat after her too, huh?”

If Butler had done any online browsing since then, he hadn’t used the phone to do it with.

And Phelps? From the look of things, he and Jordan had made the decision to deal with Sean Osborne themselves and to cut all contact with Locke’s people, taking a fat, parting bonus with them. Apart from Phelps’ desire to deal with Osborne personally, his mere presence there would have made them both feel extremely nervous. If the whole operation was under investigation, then it must have seemed like a very good time to clear the hell out. Jordan had travelled down to Skye on Saturday on the Kværnen, and Phelps must have followed on a ferry.

Whether they’d stashed the packages from the whisky crates somewhere on Lewis and Harris or Jordan had carried them to Skye with him on Kværnen, I didn’t know. Nor could I fill in their movements and activities between Saturday and Wednesday. Damien Price had booked his ferry tickets on Saturday night, and if Shay was right and Phelps had cloned Damien’s phone, Phelps would have known about it the next time he checked for activity. We hadn’t released the phone yet, so we could turn it on and find out easily enough. His car was still here too, but Vanessa could arrange for someone to pick that up when she was ready. Trish would keep it safe for her until then.

“Angelo Barclay travelled from Tarbert down to Uig on the Sunday afternoon ferry as a foot passenger,” Shay confirmed when I asked. “I checked the bookings.”

That reminded me that I’d meant to contact CalMac to ask for a history of tickets purchased under that name. I’d need legitimately obtained documentation of those dates for my case file. I stopped what I was doing to send off an email request to them before turning my attention to the messages on Barclay’s phone. He’d sent off one each evening, starting on Saturday, and they were all vague variants on the theme of unsuccessfully trying to find out where his ‘friend’ was. He had not been sent any replies. Whatever instructions he’d received about how long he should stay here and where he should go when he left must all have been given during Friday’s call. That was disappointing; I’d been hoping to find something more helpful.

“Ready to head down to the marina?” I asked my cousin. I’d already seen the bulging kit bag he’d got