I went through to the living room and got my laptop up and running again. Trish Morrison’s file had come in while I was in the car, so I occupied myself by reading through it while I waited for Shay. Our body belonged to a gentleman named Damien Price, aged thirty-seven, which made him only a year older than Caitlin. He was the co-director of a Wines & Spirits company based in Oban. His wife Vanessa, who he’d been holidaying with, was thirty-four. She was an estate agent. The couple lived in Oban and had no children. They’d been married for twelve years and, from the photos attached to the file, it looked like they’d been happy together. Poor Vanessa Price was probably in shock right now, unless things were not as they seemed. Either way, Damien was beyond all such concerns. Permanently.
I looked through all the attachments. Their ferry had been far from full, but there had still been nearly five hundred people on board, and over two hundred of those had been adult males. Not the smallest suspect list in the world. Vanessa said the crew man she’d seen with her husband had been over six feet tall, which would certainly cut those numbers further, if she was right. But what if he’d had lifts in his boots? Would she have noticed? Red-haired too, although, again, would she have noticed a high quality, well-placed wig?
The text was certainly genuine. It had been sent from Damien’s phone to hers. But if I started as I should, by disbelieving everyone, Vanessa could have lied about everything she’d told Morrison’s people and had someone else send that text, once Damien’s neck had been broken. Only that made no sense. If she’d simply said nothing at all, her husband’s death would soon have been ruled accidental by the local coroner.
No, Vanessa Price was off the suspect list, provisionally, and I was comfortable accepting the text as genuine.
I had only two pieces of incontrovertible information to work from. One, Damien Price had ended up dead with his neck broken. Two, his death had not been the result of a random, unwitnessed accident.
Three
Shay finally rolled up at twenty past six, handing Da his car keys back before dropping into a boneless sprawl at my side. “Thanks for lending me the car again, Uncle Danny. I topped her up at Tesco’s for you earlier. I had some stuff to pick up in town, anyway.”
“Thanks, son,” Da said absently, putting down the notes he’d been noodling with and bouncing up out of his chair. “Well, that’s me off then, boys. There’s supper for you both in the oven. Just turn it off at seven, mind.”
“Grand!” Shay grinned up at him. “Off on the prowl, again, are you?”
“Keep your nosy beak out, Seabhac.” Da tapped the side of his nose. “When a nice lady offers to feed a man, it’s rude to disappoint. I’ll be back before my Ford threatens to turn into a pumpkin.” He sauntered off whistling, and Shay made a tolerant, amused sound.
“Sounds like he’s found one that can cook, for a change,” my cousin said lightly, knowing full well by then that Caitlin’s highest culinary ambitions extended no further than a basic fry up, half of which she usually partly burned somehow. “That’s nice.” Yes, I agreed inwardly. It was. “So? What’s this case we’re being sent off on then?”
I pulled up the email and forwarded it to him. “Go and grab your laptop. We can still get out for a bit if you get a move on.”
Grumbling, he heaved himself up again.
“Want a brew? I’ll stick the kettle on.” He did so, returning with his laptop and pulling another stand around putting it on. Back with our teas, a nice, zingy lemon and ginger this time. He settled himself on the couch again and opened up his email account. I drank my tea down while he read through the little information we had.
“If you want photo IDs on our possibles, I should just do the adult male passengers as a first priority, right?” Shay asked, putting his mug down so he could feed the list into a sorter programme. With this many names to go through, that was probably best.
“Yeah.” I agreed, and he punched a couple of keys. Caledonian MacBrayne (CalMac), the ferry company, had already given us photo IDs for the crew. A spreadsheet with the new, shorter list appeared, names, addresses, payment details and, in the case of those who were driving the vehicles on board, registration details. Shay divided that list into vehicle drivers and others with another few keystrokes.
“I’ll send the drive-on batch through first. They’ll be quicker to find,” he told me, copying that section and switching tabs to feed them into his DVLA access. Then he went back for the rest and opened up a second search in the DVLA database for those too. “Might as well wait until those come back before we hit the passport records. You know how slow results from there can be. Most of them probably have driving licences, even if they’re riding in someone else’s car or went aboard as foot passengers.” He picked up his mug again and emptied it. “I’ll start up some checks on the Prices before we head out too. Want to load up the paddleboards and get ready?”
“Sure.” I took his empty mug off him and went through to the kitchen. “What do you think?” I called back. “Turn the oven off and let it finish cooking when we get back, or just lower the temperature to minimum so it slow cooks?”
“Turn it off when we leave. I don’t trust that crappy thing. The temperature control is way off.” He was probably right.
I went out to the garage and grabbed the two inflatable paddle board packs to stick in the
