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

of sleek, expensive engineering the moment you reached that end of the waterfront. I belatedly remembered Shay mentioning, back at Angus MacLeod’s distillery on Thursday, that she was due to sail on Saturday.

I called the harbour master's office and identified myself. Yes, I was told, Kværnen had left on schedule at eight, to head up to the Faroe Islands. All the Border Force paperwork had been in order, and her mooring fees had all been booked and paid in advance. Well, the boat might be in a dead zone. If none of them could get reception out there, that would explain why nobody was picking up.

Somehow, I doubted it. Surely the yacht would be kitted out with both the radio antennas and the satellite link required to never be out of contact range.

Not for a second did it cross my mind that Shay might still be on board. He wouldn’t go off like that without telling me, and Nielsen wasn’t insane. No matter how much of a fancy he’d taken to my cousin, he wouldn’t try anything as crazy as abducting him. If I wanted to find out what time Shay had left, I’d need the coastguard to set me up with a radio link. No, it was far too soon to start kicking up that sort of fuss.

I didn’t know what I should do. Had something gone horribly and unexpectedly wrong with Nielsen last night? If it had, Shay would probably have wanted a little time alone to process and bury it, the way he always did. Both da and I knew, from bitter experience, how bad an idea it was to get him to talk about ‘unpleasant’ incidents of the kind I was beginning to imagine. But no, surely not. I’d have confidently bet a year’s salary that my cousin had nothing to worry about there. There was no way in hell I’d have let him go if I’d thought otherwise.

Should I do a round of the local cafes and see if I could find him? No, that was pointless. He might just have easily gone over to the castle grounds again for all I knew, and that would really be a needle in a haystack job, especially if he was moving. That estate was enormous. I checked my phone again to make sure I hadn’t missed any ‘new mail’ alerts. Nothing in my work or private accounts.

Well, Shay might have run his phone battery down or turned it off accidentally. Granted, that wasn’t normal, but it was far likelier than some of the things I was beginning to worry about. I doubted anyone could have grabbed him off the street on his way back last night without being seen, and besides, Shay wasn’t exactly an easy target.

The best thing I could do, I decided, was to go back to the hotel and wait. It was far too soon to think of doing anything as drastic as calling the Ids. Maybe, if he hadn’t turned up by twelve, I’d have to resort to that, but I was really hoping to avoid it. God alone knew what kind of new restrictions they’d try to impose if they found out that I’d lost him.

I could check the hospital, just in case. Back in my room, I tapped my laptop awake again to pull up the number and then dropped into the chair disbelievingly. A new download had opened up on my screen while I’d been out. My cousin had sent me some still images, all from the Kværnen.

I clicked on the first image to enlarge it. It was a camera view of Mads Nielsen at the helm. He was sporting a cut, swollen lip and a darkly bruised cheek. Cory Phelps was sitting a few feet behind him, only his head and upper body visible from that angle. The time and date stamp told me it had been taken only minutes before.

The second image showed the four students, slumped on a long couch beneath a curving, room-length window. Their hands and ankles were bound, and none of them looked conscious. Daniels and Verity had been left awake, but they were even better secured, and they’d been gagged too. Brian Jordan was lounging against a stack of pillows on the enormous bed, watching them all. There was a pistol resting on more pillows by his hand, alongside a hand radio and a tablet. The main stateroom?

The next image was a screenshot of the GPS chart plotter with a note typed over it.

‘Hijackers both armed. They don’t know I’m on board. Managed to access the control room after we left harbour. Can kill engines. Can feed false info to helm. Try to join us, quietly, at 13:00, 60°00'00.0"N, 6°00'00.0"W. Can’t use phones, Jordan is monitoring.’

I checked the GPS chart again. If he wasn’t discovered before then and could nudge their speed and direction a bit without anyone noticing, Shay could certainly manage that rendezvous.

I choked back a mouthful of bile. This mess was a fucking nightmare. We’d all been too quick to conclude that Jordan and Phelps would have been long gone, once we realised they’d taken the Jeanie’s RIB tender, but I should have known better than to assume any such thing. Considering how careless they’d been up until then, I hadn’t had the least suspicion that our suspects wouldn’t head for the mainland as fast as they could.

All things considered, stealing a ride up to the Faroes was a far better move for them to make. There was no alert out for them anywhere outside the UK, yet, and from Tórshavn they could fly out to several European destinations. For all I knew, they might have already disposed of anything they’d been carrying. Or they might be planning to switch to another boat. Why hadn’t I even considered the idea that they might come back and try this? I’d known that Jordan was familiar with the Kværnen.

I didn’t like that ‘Try to join us…’ either. What the hell was Shay