‘What’s up?’ McNab said.

‘I can’t reach Mark. His mobile’s out of action and his landline just rings out.’

McNab could hear the mounting fear in her voice, and Ava Clouston hadn’t struck him as a woman who scared easily.

‘Text me his address. I’ll go round there.’

There was a short silence. ‘You’re in London?’ she said.

‘I’m on my way there now.’

‘Is this to do with Go Wild?’

‘It’s police business, that’s all I can say.’

The tense silence that followed made McNab ask, ‘What’s happened?’

‘My brother’s disappeared. He took off after the cow was found stabbed to death.’

‘Does DI Flett know?’ McNab said.

‘I’ve spoken to Erling. He knows Dougie does this when he’s upset. He did it when our parents were killed in the car accident.’ She sounded as though she was trying to persuade herself. ‘Erling believes he’ll be back when he’s thought things through.’ She halted there and a pregnant silence followed.

McNab knew avoidance when he heard it, having played that tune many times himself. Ava was hiding something. And he thought it might, just might, have a link to her brother’s disappearance.

‘If there’s anything you’re not telling me?’

A pause, then . . .

‘Mark suspects people high up were using Go Wild’s services. Hence the reticence by the Met and the probability of a cover-up.’

‘Okay, I’ll find him and talk to him,’ he promised.

He felt her sense of relief, even over the phone.

When she rang off, he found the woman at the next table watching him. How much had she heard and did it matter?

The two businessmen had gone. They were alone now, apart from the hovering barman.

McNab thought of the made-up bunk, the chance for a sleep. But would he sleep?

She was smiling over at him, and the next thing he knew he’d ordered up another cocktail for her and a whisky for him.

Any doubts he’d had about such an encounter he blotted out with the image of the new boyfriend giving him the finger from Ellie’s front window.

33

He’d told Erling that the ship was haunting his life. That he wanted it to go.

‘It will soon,’ Erling had promised. ‘They’ll tow it down to the Central Belt where it’ll be scrapped.’

In Erling’s keenness to reassure Dougie, it had slipped out that there was no one aboard now that the bodies and evidence had been removed.

‘The coastguard are keeping an eye on it,’ had been his parting shot.

Dougie reached out now and grabbed the rusty ladder, tying the Fear Not to the bottom rung. Daylight almost gone, he’d already donned his head torch and fastened the climbing harness on Finn so that he could pull him up once he reached the deck himself.

If he reached the deck.