The Drowning Tide (Blair Dubh Trilogy #2) (5 page)

“Calm down. I meant it’s ours for a few days. It belongs to the parents of a mate at work. They’re in Barcelona at the moment and they hire it out when they’re on holiday.”

“Thank God,” she breathed. Now she was assured on that score she could study it properly. Freya liked the boat. It was a good size with a spacious deck and glass doors leading down into the belly of the vessel. However she had a problem with the name. “It’s called Fart.”

Craig studied the elegant italic script on the stern and frowned. “Bloody Muir, he’s hung the buoys over the rest of the name on purpose as a joke,” he said, pushing them aside to reveal the name
Far Tide.

“That’s better. Is there a crew?”

“No. It’ll just be us.”

“Do you even know how to sail a boat?”

“Blair Dubh born and bred. I was brought up on the water. What about you?”

“After what happened to Dad my mum wouldn’t let me near the water. Then I spent the rest of my life in the city. I’ve never even been on a boat.”

“Oh crap Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I didn’t think.” He gave himself several mental kicks. How could he forget her dad had drowned in a boating accident when she was a baby? He’d been so caught up in the excitement when Muir had made him the offer to cheer him up that he hadn’t thought it through properly. Now she was looking at the vessel with definite apprehension. “You can swim though.”

“Yeah, I can.” She didn’t add that she could only do the doggy paddle. He looked so deflated and she felt terrible for robbing him of his enthusiasm.

“I just thought we could do a wee sail down the coast, we’ll stick close to the shore,” he said.

“It’s a lovely idea. It sounds very peaceful, just what we need.”

“Is that a yes?”

He was like a little kid at Christmas and she couldn’t bear to take it away from him. “Go on then. It’ll be fun.”

“Fantastic,” he beamed, planting a kiss on her lips. “Why don’t you come aboard and have a look around?”

Deftly Craig climbed the ladder but when Freya put a foot on a rung the whole thing moved.

“Craig,” she cried.

He grasped her hands and hauled her over the side, grinning. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“No,” she replied indignantly. When she felt the movement beneath her feet panic seized her and she clung onto him. “Does it ever stop moving?”

“Yeah, water’s known for being a really stable surface.”

“No need to get sarcastic.”

“Sorry,” he smiled. “It’s weird at first but you get used to it. Let’s go down below, it might help you acclimatise.”

He opened the sliding glass door to reveal a set of steps at the bottom of which was a living area complete with bench seats, a table and a small kitchenette. Leading off this room were two more doors, one into a bedroom with two single beds and a bathroom complete with shower.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” she said approvingly. It was immaculate, everything shiny and new. “But we’ll never conceive if we’re in single beds.”

“That’s just the spare room. This will be our room,” he said, taking her hand and leading her back through the living area to another door. He pushed it open to reveal a second bedroom in the nose of the boat. The room was a semicircle, the mattress fitted to contour to the shape of the room. It was so big it took up all the floor space, except for a tiny wardrobe just behind the door. The ceiling was low but not as low as she’d expected.

“Now that’s more like it,” she said.

“You like it?”

“I do and I can’t feel the rocking as much down here.”

“That’s odd, it’s normally better when you’re on deck and you can see around you.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, that’s how it is. We’ll be really cosy down here.”

“Yes we will,” he said, pulling her against him. “So, do you fancy going for that cruise?”

Freya knew they both needed to relax and have some fun after how fraught everything had been lately. “Let’s do it.”

“Great,” he grinned. “We leave tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 6

Docherty jumped awake, dazed and confused, wondering why he was staring at the clear blue sky. Then it came back to him. He was out of prison and, overcome with fatigue, he’d laid down for a nap behind some foliage in a park.

He pushed himself upright, running a shaky hand down his face. He hadn’t had a dream like that for a long time, they’d stopped after he’d been put away. Sally’s murder must have brought them back. The screams still echoed in his head, only this time they were his own.

His ribs ached from lying on the hard dry ground, just as they had regularly when he was a teenager. PC Murphy had been the local bobby in the Glasgow suburb he’d grown up in, patrolling the streets when he was a kid. Docherty had come to his attention because he fell in with a gang that enjoyed hanging around the streets vandalising things, nicking cars, shoplifting and being a general pain in the arse of the local community. They’d even named themselves The Skull Gang because they’d thought it sounded cool and had skulls inked on their backsides - where their parents wouldn’t see them - as part of the initiation ceremony.

Rather than go to the trouble of arresting them Murphy had just beat the crap out of them instead. It worked too. They became so scared of him that they toned down their behaviour until all they did was hang about on park benches chatting, whistling at the girls and enjoying the occasional game of football.

Murphy hadn’t been a big man, he was quite tall but slender with it. Upright, military bearing, small blue eyes, stern almost expressionless face that would only show emotion when he was kicking the shit out of him or his friends. That look had never left Docherty. Those small eyes would be wide and bright with pleasure. His mouth would hang open, often a string of drool hanging from his lower lip, a feral grunt sounding in the back of his throat with each punch or kick. He’d been a wiry man but his strength was phenomenal, one hit enough to put the strongest of lads on their back. Once he’d set about a friend of Docherty’s for vandalising a bus shelter. Docherty and another of their little gang attempted to intervene when it seemed this time the beating wasn’t going to stop. Murphy had taken all of them down, three strong lads who were no strangers to street fights.

Murphy had been a hero to the local community, putting the out-of-control youths in their place, but it had been a different time back then, before police were so tightly controlled by rules, regulations and technology. Everyone had turned a blind eye to the broken ribs and noses, the black eyes and missing teeth of the local boys. When they tried to complain they were told they must have done it to each other or they were told to stop sullying the name of a wonderful officer. PC Murphy was a hero, a credit to the uniform. Only Docherty and the other boys knew the truth; that PC Murphy’s valiant efforts were in fact his way of getting his sexual kicks. Often when Docherty looked up at him from the ground through rapidly swelling eyes, bleeding from the mouth and aching all over, he would be confronted by the obscene bulge in Murphy’s trousers. If they were isolated enough, such as if you were unlucky enough to have him catch up with you down a quiet back street or under a bridge, his hand would be moving inside his trousers, the feral grunts accompanied by a horrible panting until he released a groan and his whole body shook. After that sickening shudder you braced yourself for one last kick or punch then he would wander off. It was over.

It was this shame that had kept a lot of the boys silent, more so than the threat of physical violence. Docherty had never discussed this aspect of the attacks with the other boys but he could see it in their eyes whenever Murphy’s name was mentioned - the same humiliation he’d felt.

Murphy’s photo was always in the local papers, receiving another commendation from a local dignitary for services to the community. Docherty often wondered if the mayor would still have shaken Murphy’s right hand had he known what he did with it.

As the boys got older Murphy’s interest in them waned. When they turned eighteen they were left alone altogether. Whether that was because he worried now that they were men they were more likely to retaliate or have their complaints listened to, or whether he just preferred them younger, he’d never been sure.

Docherty moved out of the area as soon as he could, desperate to escape from the family that never really noticed him, unless it was to chastise him before turning their attention back to his sick younger brother, weakened by cystic fibrosis.

The power Murphy had wielded always stayed with Docherty, so he decided to get some of his own. After joining the force he did some research and discovered that Murphy had retired with full honours. He’d got away with it. If Murphy could do it then so could he, only his tastes were for young attractive women, not teenage boys. By the time he was in uniform control on police officers was much tighter so he couldn’t just attack who he felt like as Murphy had. He had to select the weak and vulnerable, the ones who had no one to complain to and who his colleagues wouldn’t listen to. Plenty of girls ran away from home every year, some of them running straight into him. He didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him his experiences at Murphy’s hands had influenced a lot of his behaviour. He needed to hurt others so he could transfer some of the shame from himself onto someone else that still grated inside him from his teenage years. But it wasn’t just that. He did it because he liked it.

He leaned back on his elbows, lapping up the sun, thinking over what he was going to do to Anita, number two on his list. Thanks to Sally she’d been much easier to find. In fact he knew where she was right now.

He jumped to his feet and sauntered towards the gates leading to the main road, already getting hard as he mulled over how he was going to finish her.

Prison Officer Will McMillan wished he was dead. He’d just woken to a pain so intense he thought he’d go mad. His face felt like it had been thoroughly done over with a cheese grater then covered in acid and set on fire, his chest and stomach ached horribly and his head pounded. He managed to release a groan and forced his eyelids open. A face peered down at him and he was heartened to see it was his good friend and colleague, Clive Crossley. Will couldn’t understand why his friend’s eyes were filled with hate.

“You’re finally awake you wee shite. We were all hoping you’d croak it.”

Will was staggered. When he tried to ask why one of his best friends was hoping he’d die he found he couldn’t move his mouth. Tentatively he pressed the fingertips of one hand to his cheek and panic seized him when he realised his face was covered with bandages. When he tried to raise his other hand it refused to move, the clanking sound telling him he was cuffed to the bed, but that didn’t worry him as much as what had happened to his face. Frantically he checked the other cheek with his one free hand then his forehead, nose, chin, the fire in his skin spiking every time his fingers brushed against the bandages. Tears of confusion and fear welled in his eyes, blurring Clive’s face.

“They cut you up good and proper, nothing less than you deserve,” continued Clive in a nasty tone Will had only ever heard him use on the inmates. “I wish they’d stuck that blade in your heart, one less fucking useless tossbag in this world.”

Will blinked away his tears, bringing Clive’s face back into sharp focus. Unable to bear the loathing in his eyes Will tilted his head away, fighting through the pain the movement caused him. He tried to speak but all he could manage was a grunt.

“If you ever recover from this Docherty you’re going to be one ugly bastard.”

Docherty? Why was he calling him Docherty? Will was so confused he thought he might burst into tears. He wanted his mum. Why wasn’t she here? Surely if he was critically ill she’d have dragged her lazy arse down from Aberdeen to see him? He was tired and in pain and he struggled to fight through the fog to work out what the bloody hell was going on.

Clive disappeared from view and a nurse with a pretty round face and large brown eyes took his place. She was a stranger but at least she looked sympathetic.

“Is it painful?” she asked him.

He released another ugly gurgle and she gave him a gentle smile, which was like the sun coming out on a dark day.

“I’ll top up your pain medication,” she said, producing a needle and sticking it into the IV attached to his arm.

A warm delicious sensation overcame Will. As his eyes grew heavy he focused on the pretty face floating above him. He thought she must be an angel. His eyes slid shut and he returned to blessed unconsciousness, his dreams sweeter than the hell he’d woken to find himself trapped in.

Anita had done better for herself than Sally. She’d never be an upstanding member of the community but at least she had a roof over head and didn’t have to flog her arse to fund her drug habit. She was living with a not very successful drug dealer in a crappy tenement nine floors above the ground. Neither Anita nor her boyfriend had a job or any sort of schedule so their comings and goings were erratic at the best of times. Docherty had been forced to hang around the shrubbery that looked onto the block of flats where she lived and wait for her to come out alone. So far he’d been here three hours and nothing. He was hot, hungry and pissed off. On top of that he needed to get more money soon. The bit he’d stolen from Sally had been enough to cover a couple of burgers, some crisps and a drink but that was it. On the bright side there was some cabaret in the form of a bunch of fledgling neds hanging around the front of the flats, attempting to look tough and anarchic and failing miserably, kicking cans about and drawing on walls, real master criminal stuff. They wouldn’t last five minutes in prison with the real hard men, thought Docherty. He almost laughed out loud when one of them tried to spit and somehow managed to fail even at that, the mess of phlegm landing on his own t-shirt instead.

With a collective noise of grunts the cabaret decided it wanted chips and went on a quest for food.

“Pricks,” muttered Docherty, watching the parade depart.

When they’d gone he was even more bored but he refused to leave until he saw Anita. Worry nagged at him. He was on a time limit. Eventually someone would realise the poor bastard in hospital with a face like pate wasn’t him and the hunt would begin and he still had one more bitch on his hit list after Anita, the worst one of all. The rage he’d nursed for years was on a steady simmer but for now he would keep a lid on it, he was saving the worst of it for Freya. He hoped to get that ugly bastard DCI Gray too who had built the whole case against him, sanctimonious do-gooding wanker, but he would be a bonus, he didn’t know if he’d be able to get near him. Freya was the main prize. He had special tortures reserved for her so he could relive her death over and over when he was back inside.

He sighed with frustration. This was getting ridiculous and the cut on his forehead was starting to ache. He wondered if it was infected? When he’d done Anita he’d nick some antiseptic, that’s if he didn’t die of blood poisoning first.

Just as he was thinking of a way to flush out Anita she exited the front door of the flats. Christ she looked rough, not as bad as Sally but still minging, like she hadn’t had a good wash in days and her clothes were grubby. He guessed the tracksuit she wore had once been white but now it was a dirty grey. Her greasy brown hair was scraped back into a bun and her skin was pasty and acne-riddled. When he’d known her she’d been attractive but back then she was new to the streets and the drugs hadn’t had the chance to take their toll. Now they had her firmly in their grip.

Anita paused to light up a cigarette then scratched herself under her saggy breasts. He matched her step for step through the shrubbery as she walked in the direction the neds had gone, towards the shops. He had to grab her before she reached civilisation. To reach the footpath leading out of the courtyard she had to pass right by his hiding place. He’d only get one chance and he was buggered if he was going to hang about this shithole any longer.

Docherty went into a crouch, eyes riveted to his quarry, attempting to control his breathing, which was wildly accelerating. Sally had given him the thirst again, he ached to hear Anita’s cries, see the fear in her eyes, only this time he wouldn’t stop. There was no warrant card to inhibit him now.

As she neared the bushes where he waited his body tensed, ready to spring, every muscle and sinew rigid with anticipation. His plan was to pull her into the bushes and knife her to death to make it look like a mugging gone wrong. He didn’t want her murder linked to Sally’s. A homeless prostitute beaten to death by a punter would never be connected to a waster druggie knifed for a few quid in another part of the city. As long as he was careful to leave no forensic traces he should be home free, but if Anita’s death was connected to Sally’s then the authorities might cotton on to the fact that he wasn’t safely locked up in prison.

Just as he prepared to strike the bunch of neds returned, eating chips from plastic trays.

“Fuck,” he whispered, furious as he was forced to let Anita walk by. “Alright, you’ve got a bit longer to live,” he said, watching her disappear. She was probably only nipping out for some fags anyway. Women like her didn’t go anywhere exciting or new, they didn’t like to stray more than five miles from their manky homes.

He had to content himself with watching the neds throwing chips at each other and making noises reminiscent of a group of subnormal monkeys. When they ran out of chips they decided to move on, leaving the birds with a feast.