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

until we finally got moving, and I didn’t see anything like that when I checked all the camera views later. What did they do with their dinghy, Mads?”

“Deflated it and put it in the tender garage. I don’t think they wanted to leave it behind for anyone to see.”

No, they wouldn’t have wanted that at all. We all trooped back through the salon and out to the stern deck so we could go on down to the dive platform. Mads lifted up the garage door. The Kværnen’s seven-seater sport jet was sitting snugly in its cradle, and the folded RIB was shoved underneath it. No black backpack in there. We’d need to perform a methodical search when we had time.

I picked up my discarded mask and air tank to carry up with me and added them to the pile of borrowed gear to return to the coastguard. Cory Phelps was awake again by then and glaring up at us murderously. Jordan was barely starting to stir. I ignored the pair of them.

“We don’t have time to perform a proper search now. The helicopter will be back soon.” I turned to Mads. “Herre Nielsen, I’m afraid I was already planning to request that you bring the Kværnen back to Stornoway, instead of travelling on to Tórshavn today. I hope that isn’t going to be too inconvenient?”

“Not at all, Inspector. I was planning to do so anyway. I wouldn’t want any of my guests to think that I would abandon them so callously.” We could all hear the Sikorsky approaching by then. Shay excused himself, saying he still had a couple of things to deal with in the control room, and Mads and I carefully moved the students up to the main deck salon.

Daniels and Verity followed us up. They both seemed to be moving easily enough by then, although Daniels had some pretty nasty ridges of bruised, swollen flesh where the ropes had dug into him. Those marks would take a week or two to disappear entirely. Verity seemed to have got off a lot more lightly, I noticed. There was barely a mark on him.

The Sikorsky took up a hovering position above us, and I went out to watch the winchman come down and confer with him as to what order he wanted to deal with our human cargo.

“We can just leave these two strapped in for the flight back if we leave them ‘til last,” he told me, “so let’s get the other four lifted first. Jack’s got paramedic certification, so he can give them a good checking over as they go up.”

We unhooked Jason’s cradle, and I helped him transfer Signe from the couch and get her securely strapped in. We carried her out, and he rode back up with her. They already had the second cradle ready to hook up, so he was back down again in no time. It didn’t take long for us to get everyone lifted up. As Jordan, the last of the six, rose from the deck, I went back up to the flybridge for a quick radio conference with Jack Morrison.

“If you’re confident that our two prisoners are adequately restrained, I think I’d rather stay with the Kværnen for the ride back to Stornoway,” I told him.

“Not a problem,” he assured me. “If either of them starts acting up, I can give them a little something to quieten them down, and Trish will have a security detail standing by at the hospital when we land. Besides, whoever trussed those two up knew what they were doing. Those bindings won’t cut off their circulation anywhere, but I’d defy Houdini himself to wriggle loose.” Yeah, Shay was pretty good at that. “We’re sending a basket down with your clothes, Conall. Could you put our gear in for us?”

“Of course, Jack.”

Coastguard officers, like their police counterparts, had to fill in ridiculous mountains of paperwork if anything was lost from their equipment inventory. I went back down to the bow deck and rolled everything up neatly, ready to go. The winch operator sent me a cheerful thumbs-up once he’d reeled the basket in, and I watched the Sikorsky speed off.

Dressed again, I headed back inside. Shay must have finished whatever it was he’d wanted to deal with down in the control room and was sitting on one of the couches staring intently at the tablet that Jordan had been using. Mads was busily bustling about in the galley area. There was no sign of Daniels or Verity.

“Mr Daniels is just grabbing something to eat down there before he sets up the autopilot,” my cousin told me as I sat down next to him and leaned in to look at the tablet. “We’ll get going in a few minutes. Mads wants to make us some lunch. He’s an insanely good cook.”

That sounded promising. I was feeling pretty hungry by then.

“And what is Mr Verity getting up to?” I asked, lowering my voice.

“Yeah, I figured you’d notice the lack of rope burns and pressure marks. He could easily have freed himself if he’d needed to. From what I overheard earlier, I think he must have paid a visit to the Jeanie, to warn them about you after we called in here on Thursday as well.”

“So they probably always intended to leave this way.”

“I’d guess so. Why else would they have hung around for so long?” He switched camera views as Verity slipped out of the control room and into one of the guest cabins. “I think the three of them have been running a little side business of their own for quite a while now. Jordan adds their stuff to Locke’s in Spain, and Cory picks it up to hand over to Verity to carry out whenever the Kværnen calls in. He probably arranged for Jordan to be taken on in Cadiz too.”

Verity himself was opening up one of the storage beds down there now. Neither of us was surprised when he pulled out a black backpack which