“That’s good to know.” It was a huge relief, actually. Annie turned to look up at me and smiled shyly.
“She seemed much improved after your visit, Sir, and ate a good bit of her lunch. Maggie even got her out for a bit of air afterwards… but I’m afraid that didn’t end too well. It was the sight of one of the harbour seals, sunning itself on the slipway by the fishing boats, that upset her, or so Maggie thought.”
Yes, I could see that happening. Something like that would automatically make her think of a happy, excited Damien reaching for his camera.
“Well,” I smiled reassuringly back at her, “that’s very encouraging to hear. When you’re trying to come to terms with such a recent loss, memories can ambush you wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. Sitting around and brooding only makes it worse.”
Shay waited patiently for a few more seconds before clearing his throat, and I realised that Annie and I had just been standing there like idiots, eyeing each other very unprofessionally.
“We’re just off for some lunch, if you’d care to join us, constable,” he offered pleasantly.
“That’s very kind of you, Mr Keane, but I’ve already eaten.” Annie’s flush had spread a little too. “It’s time I got back to work, or the Sarge will be wondering what I’m playing at. It was nice to see you, though, and you too, Inspector.” She walked past us and in, very calmly and unhurriedly.
“Whatever you’re about to say, just don’t!” I warned him, and Shay subsided reluctantly as we headed down to the waterfront.
‘Helpful’ comments of the sort he usually produced in situations like these were not what I needed to hear right then. My cousin knew what the word ‘inappropriate’ meant but never seemed to grasp where it really applied, especially when he was talking to the people he felt most comfortable with. Some of the stuff that came out of his mouth, if I didn’t stop him in time, proved that. Just because he liked to pretend that his own body was nothing more than a temperamental piece of machinery that occasionally demanded some inconvenient and rather messy maintenance work to keep it running smoothly, didn’t mean the rest of us felt equally emotionally disconnected from ours.
Sometimes, I was tempted to treat him like a faulty old television and give him a few good hard whacks, as if there was a chance that might fix his picture reception too.
My cousin knew how to take a hint. He behaved impeccably all through lunch, not one single well-intentioned reference to the benefits of a timely ‘oil change,’ ‘tune up’ or even, thank goodness, a ‘full service’ or anything of the sort. He even went out of his way to be very pleasant and polite with the waitress he’d first cautioned and then generously tipped the morning before. He needn’t have bothered. She was so confused and smitten, she could barely get a coherent word out. Both the service speed and the food were great, though.
As good as her word, Trish called down as soon as she’d finished Whitaker’s interview to tell me that she’d added the video recording to our case folder and that one of her DCs would attach the audio transcription as soon as they’d got it done.
“About the distillery?” she asked. “Are you happy for me to send a team out there, or do you have any reason to want to supervise that yourself?”
“That depends on what Aaron Whitaker had to say, Trish. Is he claiming that any of the others there were involved in the smuggling?”
“No, he was adamant that they weren’t, and I believe him.”
“In that case, it would be better if your people took it from here. It might not be a bad idea to have Ewan call Angus to let him know they’re on their way. Have you spoken with Chief Anderson yet?”
I was really glad that I wasn’t going to be involved in what would probably be a long, complex, and mostly frustrating and dull operation. Anderson would need to talk to the Spanish police about discreetly checking out the bodegas, and the shipping companies they worked with, before any kind of major sweep could be organised. It would be far easier to get this particular pipeline shut down at their end than ours. One or two small raids over here, and the game would definitely be up.
Not that shutting it all down in Spain would make much difference in the long run. The smuggling was too profitable for the big players to just stop because of an occasional, costly setback. They always evolved new ways of getting their product over. At least, with Jordan and Phelps tied up in a murder investigation, Whitaker choosing to leave wouldn’t be enough to make Locke think we’d tumbled what he was up to.
“No,” Trish sighed down the phone, “but I will, once the transcript is ready. Then we’ll need to see what the forensic chemists in Inverness find in the samples my team collect.” Our forensics lab was very well equipped, and I doubted she had access to anything like a gas chromatograph or mass spectrometer out here. “At least we know where to focus our attention at the distillery now. You’ll see what I mean when you watch the tape.”
I did. I watched and listened as Aaron described how he extracted the sausage-shaped packages from the casks. The central bunghole of each cask or ‘boca de bojo’ was several centimetres in diameter, as I knew from my reading last night. All Aaron needed to do was remove the modern, silicon bung and lower in a powerful but compact little light on a string. He could then insert the flexible spring-loaded claw tool he’d been supplied with and get a good grip on the end of the first ‘sausage.’ Once he had that in his hands, he could gradually release the others with some careful tugging. His counterpart in Spain fed
