18 Cyrus

18

The custody sergeant returns our phones and personal belongings, including belts and shoelaces and Evie's hairclip. It has been sixteen hours since Finn Radford's suicide, but it feels like a week has passed. My Fiat is parked opposite. Florence has her Kawasaki propped nearby.

The first order of business is breakfast. We find an old-fashioned ‘caff' in the high street with a chalk menu, Formica tables and enough steam in the air to fog up the front windows. A nervy waitress with a nose-stud takes our orders, and nobody says anything of importance until our plates are clean and the tea leaves can be read in our empty mugs.

Florence has been on the road since yesterday afternoon but rejects any suggestion that we stop to let her rest. She takes her laptop from her satchel.

‘You asked me about Polaris Pelagic. It's a private limited company, incorporated fourteen years ago. The nature of the business is processing and preserving fish, crustaceans and molluscs.'

‘What's a mollusc?' asks Evie.

‘Scallops, oysters, mussels, limpets.'

‘Snot rocks.'

Florence laughs. ‘The directors are Maureen Collie and William Radford, but there is a third party, Temple Court Holdings – a non-trading company that was dissolved six years ago. The shareholders of that company were both lawyers from Edinburgh.'

‘Any link to North Star Holdings?' I ask.

‘None that I've found. I asked Simon Buchan, but he had never heard of Polaris Pelagic. He suggested I talk to the trust's lawyers.'

‘Lawyers who work for his brother.'

‘Who is nothing like Simon,' says Florence, with a sharp edge to her voice. She goes back to her laptop. ‘Polaris Pelagic has no debts, no overdue tax returns and no VAT issues. I might be able to find out more details from council records and local newspapers.'

‘St Claire has a library,' says Evie, trying to get involved. ‘I can take you there.'

‘OK, you do that. I have a few errands to run,' I say.

‘Shouldn't we stick together?' asks Florence.

‘We will, but first I need some answers. If the Arianna II went to Spain and came back with a boatload of refugees, why does satellite tracking show it never left Dogger Bank in the North Sea? And how did Evie get off the trawler? A coastguard helicopter flew from Inverness and a lifeboat was sent from Aberdeen to pick up the survivors. Surely somebody would have noticed a girl among them.'

‘You think it was covered up?' says Florence.

‘Either that or I'm missing something obvious.'

The old author is weeding his small garden when I arrive at his cottage. Dressed in a wide-brimmed hat with his white hair poking out at the sides, he looks even more Hobbit-like than I remember.

‘You're still here,' says Fishy, setting down his secateurs and taking off his gardening gloves to shake my hand. ‘Cold drink? Ah'm having one.'

I wait at an outside table while he fetches a jug of iced water and a bottle of concentrated lemon cordial. Ice rattles in the glasses as he pours. Sits. Drinks. Wipes his lips. ‘How can I help you?'

‘I want to ask you about smuggling.'

‘The world's second-oldest profession.'

‘Are trawlers ever involved?'

A rumbling laugh. ‘Does a bear shit in the woods? Does the Tin Man have a sheet-metal cock?'

‘I'll take that as a yes.'

‘Back in the day, trawlers were regularly crossing the Channel or the North Sea, bringing back booze, cigarettes, cheese, caviar. The Russians, the Dutch, the Norwegians, they'd come here. We'd go there.'

‘What about customs patrols and the police?'

‘Scotland has more'n eleven thousand miles of coastline if yer count the islands. Nobody can patrol that.'

‘How easy would it be to smuggle a person on board a trawler?'

‘Just the one?'

‘Maybe more.'

‘Aye, well, I could tell yer that never happens, but I'd be lying. Trawlers come and go as they please. Some skippers don't bother providing a crew list before they leave port. They might fill out the logbook once the boat has sailed, but if the trawler goes down, there's no record of who was on board.'

‘So, they could pick up someone and bring them back?'

‘Yeah. If they wanted to break the law, but these are professional fishermen. Good men, most of 'em. Trusted.' He pauses and lowers his glass. ‘Does this have something to do with the Arianna?'

‘She was smuggling people from Spain when she sank.'

‘I showed you the satellite tracking. She was fishing Dogger Bank.'

‘Can two trawlers have the same AIS signature?'

‘No. Each signal is unique.'

‘If you were trying to hide a trawler's movements, what would you do?'

Fishy pauses in contemplation. ‘Well, yer cannae turn off the AIS withoot raising an alarm, but yer could transfer it to another boat. It would only stop transmitting for a few minutes, while yer made the switch.'

‘One boat could pretend to be another,' I say.

‘Aye. It's possible.'

The idea seems to trigger a memory in Fishy, who goes into the cottage and returns a few minutes later with a folder.

‘Ever heard of pair trawling?' he asks.

‘No.'

‘It's where two boats fish together, each towing a warp – a towing cable attached to the same net. By combining, the trawlers have more power, and can pull a bigger net and move faster. It's useful in shallow waters where the noise from a single vessel can scare fish away, but two vessels, working together, can herd fish into the path of the net.'

He shows me a photograph of two boats on the open sea, about two hundred yards apart.

‘They're pair trawling,' he says, showing me where the cables touch the water. He points to the nearer of the two boats. ‘That's the Arianna II.'

‘And the other boat?'

He turns over the photograph. The caption is written in smudged ink. Neetha Dawn.

Fishy raises his eyes to mine, as we both recognise the name. This was the nearest trawler to the Arianna II when Angus Radford sent the mayday call. The Neetha Dawn rescued the crew from the sinking vessel before the coastguard chopper and RNLI lifeboat arrived.

‘It could be a coincidence,' says Fishy, scratching at his unshaven cheek.

‘Who owns the Neetha Dawn?' I ask.

‘It used to belong to Sean Murdoch, but he sold her a while back. Now he owns a pub in St Claire.'

‘The Waterfront Inn?'

‘Aye.'

I look again at the photograph, thinking out loud. ‘That's how a boat can be in two places at once.'