Road Kill (52 page)

“Did she describe the man?”

William shook his head. “The only thing she noticed about him was he had plaster across his face, like his nose was broken . . .”

The shrill warbling tone of a mobile phone started up and I realised we must still be close enough to land to pick up a signal.

Daz had sunk down onto the nearest row of seating as soon as he’d come out of the lounge, still looking dazed. Now we turned to see him slowly come out of his stupor long enough to dig automatically in his pocket, pulling out his phone and staring at it as though he didn’t know what the noise meant. It was William who went across and took it out of his hands, pressing the receive key. He listened in silence, then turned back, holding the phone out.

“Charlie,” he said, nonplussed. “It’s for you.”

Equally puzzled, I walked across and took the call.

“Hello?”

“Well now, I was right about you, wasn’t I, Charlie?” said a soft voice at the other end of the line, hardly audible over the background noise. “You
have
got some fire in your belly, haven’t you?”

“It’s all over, Eamonn,” I said, earning myself sharp glances from both Sean and William. “What do you hope to gain by this?”

“I want my diamonds.”

“Do you really. And who says they’re yours?”

Eamonn laughed, a sound entirely without mirth. “Well, they’re certainly not yours,” he said. “Let’s just say that Isobel here promised them to me in return for cancelling certain debts. And I always collect what’s owed to me.”

“We don’t have them,” I said.

“Oh, I think you’ll find you’re mistaken, Charlie,” Eamonn said easily. “Let’s hope so, or good old Jacob’s not going to need to bother with a divorce, is he now? Tell me, do they still bury family members in one grave these days?”

“We don’t have them,” I repeated through gritted teeth.

“Don’t lie to me, you little
bitch
,” Eamonn snapped, his lazy drawl snuffed out like a flame. “I’ll give you ten minutes to come to your senses, or these two start dying. And trust me, unlike your friend there, I won’t make it quick.”

The phone went dead in my hand. My face was bloodless as I turned to Sean.

“Eamonn wants the diamonds,” I said through lips suddenly stiff. “In ten minutes or he’s going to start killing them. But we don’t have the bloody diamonds!”

Sean said nothing, just turned his gaze very slowly towards Daz. As if he could sense the weight of it, Daz lifted his face out of his hands, eyes darting from one of us to the other.

“
Do
we have them, Daz?” Sean asked then, his voice quiet and cold.

Daz flushed. “They were in the glovebox of the van,” he admitted at last, little more than a mutter. “I got the money back, too. Well, there was no point in just
leaving
them, was there?”

Sean moved in on him. Daz hesitated for a second, then reached inside the jacket of his leathers and pulled out a black pouch, dumping it into his outstretched hand.

With his back to any passers by, Sean undid the drawstring and tilted the bag up. A shower of sharply defined stones, glistening and brilliant, dropped into his cupped palm. Sean rolled them a little, so they sparked and scintillated as they caught the light. He looked at Daz, his face bleak.

“If they weren’t blood diamonds before,” he said in that deadly calm voice of his, “they certainly are now.”

Daz tore his eyes away from the diamonds as though breaking thrall.

“Take them,” he said bitterly. “Do what you have to.”

Sean bagged the gems up again and slipped them into his pocket, zipping it shut.

“William,” he said, “Charlie and I have just swept this ship from the bow backwards and didn’t see any sign of Eamonn. You know the layout. Where could he be hiding?”

William frowned in concentration. “We were outside on the starboard after deck and I’m sure we would have seen Jamie and Isobel being hustled past us,” he said. He nodded to the set of doors nearest to us. “If they went out on this side, and went aft, I suppose they could have got back down to the car decks. But the doors will have been locked off as soon as we left harbour.”

Sean glanced at the Breitling on his wrist. “You’d better call Eamonn back and tell him we’re willing to do a deal,” he said to me. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll have cell coverage.”

I nodded, scrolling through the mobile phone menu until I found the list of received calls and hitting the dial key. It connected and rang out four times before Eamonn answered the call.

“So, changed your mind, have you?” he said slyly, by way of greeting. “Thought you might.”

“We’re prepared to make an exchange,” I said, clipped. “When and where?”

“Engine room,” Eamonn said. “I get the gems, you get Isobel and that brat of hers, and we all walk away happy.”

“As simple as that,” I said, not bothering to hide the scepticism. “What guarantees do we have that you haven’t already pushed them over the side?”

“Oh, don’t tempt me,” Eamonn said, almost jovial again. “Here.”

There was a pause, then Jamie’s voice came on the line, high in his distress. “Charlie! I’m sorry, I—”

“OK, that’s enough,” Eamonn said, cutting in. “They’re both fine – for the moment. It’s up to you how long they stay that way. Engine room, Charlie. You’ve got four minutes.”

I stabbed my thumb on the End key even though Eamonn had already finished the call.

I swore under my breath. “How the hell does he think he’s going to get away with this?” I muttered. “He must know that we’ll ring ahead and as soon as the boat docks in Troon the police will be all over him.”

“So we plan for the worst,” Sean said, grim. He picked up his helmet and ripped the ear-piece and microphone for his radio out of the lining, reattaching it to the rest of the unit inside his jacket and draping it round his collar. William, Daz and I quickly followed suit.

“OK, William, I want you to stay on the outside, in case this all goes pear-shaped,” Sean said to him. “Eamonn’s got to be planning a double-cross, but at the moment we don’t know what. You’re known to the crew. If it all sounds like it’s going bad you’re probably the best person to get us some help. Daz, you’re with us. OK?”

They nodded, faces tight with apprehension. They must have thought, after the strike on the van, their brush with danger on this trip was over.

We were all wrong.

We pushed the outer door open and went out. The outer deck smelled of salt and diesel and chip fat from the extractor vents out of the restaurant kitchen. It was driven into our faces by the fierce wind whipping up off the Irish Sea and I was glad I was still wearing my leathers.

The sea was lumpy and getting worse. There were only a couple of the hardier passengers braving the elements and we kept an eye on them as William led us through a low gate that was clearly marked as Off Limits. From there we broke into a half-jog, half-stagger towards the stern, trying to compensate for the lurching of the deck under our feet.

Gouts of spray were being thrown up over the railing. I glanced at the increasingly rough dark green swell and hoped that, whatever Eamonn had planned, it didn’t involve any of us ending up in the water.

On a day like today, anybody going over the side wouldn’t stand a chance in hell.

William led us confidently to a heavy steel door in the superstructure that opened into a steep stairwell. The inside was never intended for passenger eyes. It was industrial in its construction, lined with padding to prevent injury in rough seas like these were increasingly becoming. The ferry’s stabilisers were working hard to compensate for the motion but we held on tight to the handrail all the way down, nevertheless.

At the bottom William indicated another doorway into the engine control room. It was loud down there, and hot enough to break me out in a sweat under my leathers. William opened the door slightly and peered cautiously through the crack. He glanced back, frowning.

“There should be at least a couple of crew down here,” he said, keeping his voice low as he pushed the door wide. “I don’t know where—”

As the door swung open we caught sight of two men in ferry company uniform, slumped on the floor.

“Well, it looks like we’re heading the right way,” Sean muttered, derisive. “You want to know where Eamonn is, just follow the trail of bodies.”

He crouched by the two men, checking for pulses. One of them stirred at his touch, groaning.

“The engine room’s through there,” William said, jerking his head. “The lever operates the door.”

“OK,” Sean said, straightening. “Do what you can for these two and then get topside. I’ve a feeling we might need you up there.”

William nodded, eyes sliding over us from an impassive face. “I take it all back, what I said earlier,” he said, stony. “If you get the chance to kill that bastard, take it.”

If the engine control room was hot and noisy, that was nothing compared to the engine room itself. The place was crowded with pipes and wires and the steel grate flooring vibrated hard under our feet. Huge cooling fans were fighting a losing battle to circulate the sweltering stale air and the stink of engine oil overlaid everything, thick enough to taste.

We found ourselves on a mezzanine walkway overlooking one of the massive diesel engines that drove the ferry. The top of the engine casing itself must have been three or four metres in length. There was no sign of any crew, or of Eamonn.

Sean nudged my arm and indicated we should go forward and keep our eyes peeled. I jerked my head to Daz and we moved off. There was little point in trying for stealth. The racket of the engines running covered any sounds we might have made.

“Ah, there you are now. I was beginning to think you’d decided these two weren’t worth giving up a small fortune in diamonds for,” Eamonn’s voice called out above the clamour. “Not that I’d have blamed you, after the trouble they’ve caused.”

We stepped forward to the railing to see Eamonn down on the engine room floor below us, previously hidden by the bulk of the engine itself. He had forsaken the suit he’d worn during our last encounter for jeans and a flying jacket.

The extendible baton he’d used to kill Paxo was in his hand, the lethal metal tip resting lightly on his shoulder. Another like the one Sean had taken away from him at Jacob and Clare’s, and the one I’d taken away from the man in the Merc van. I wished I’d kept hold of it.

Jamie and Isobel had been handcuffed to each other’s wrists, face to face, around a steel support pillar. Jamie was on his knees, hugging the metalwork, his eyes closed and his face drenched with sweat. For a moment I wondered what the hell Eamonn had done to him, then I remembered his acute queasiness on the outward voyage, when the sea had been almost glassy compared to this. The plunging of the ship and the lack of a visible horizon was making even me feel unbalanced, and I didn’t suffer from seasickness.

“I hardly think they’re the troublemakers round here, do you?” Sean said, his voice loud enough to carry but icily controlled. “They haven’t quite extended their range to common murder.”

Eamonn smiled nastily at us from beneath the plaster that stretched across his nose, partly obscuring his face. He took a step sideways and circled the shackled mother and son like a shark.

“Oh but now that’s not true,” Eamonn declared. He stopped, pushed the edge of the baton under Isobel’s chin and forced her head back with it. “Is it now, Isobel my darlin’?”

Isobel stayed stubbornly mute, pressing her lips together into a thin line and glaring at him with pure hatred in her face. Eamonn studied her dispassionately for a moment, then lowered the baton and moved round to Jamie, grasping his hair to lift his slack head up and wedge the baton across his throat. Jamie’s eyes flew open as he began to choke.

“Tell them,” Eamonn goaded, gaze locked on Isobel.

Up on the walkway we saw Jamie begin to struggle in Eamonn’s hands and moved forward instinctively. Eamonn’s head jerked round towards us.

“Hold off or I’ll snap his neck in a heartbeat and there won’t be a thing you can do to stop me,” he commanded. We stopped. He turned his attention back to Isobel. “Tell them, or your lying face will be the last thing your little boy sees.”

“All right,” Isobel said from between clenched teeth. “I killed him, is that what you want to hear? Well, I admit it and to hell with you!”

“Not good enough,” Eamonn said, tightening his grip. Jamie was panicking now, hands jerking so that Isobel was forced hard up against the other side of the pillar. “Tell them, Isobel,” Eamonn taunted her. “Tell them the kind of woman you really are. They’re prepared to die for you and this worthless brat of yours. Don’t you think they’re entitled to know?”

“I-I killed Slick Grannell,” she said, her voice wobbling. “It was an accident. I wasn’t aiming for him. I just wanted to stop that scrawny bitch from giving Jamie the money.” Her scornful gaze swept over her former lover. “I was trying to keep my son out of all this. To protect him from
you
.”