‘Jesus.’
‘We can call him that if you like,’ she said, ‘as long as he’s a boy.’
To my surprise, I started to giggle. ‘We might have to,’ I chuckled, a little manically. ‘We’ll be running out of boys’ names soon.’
My mild hysteria passed very quickly. ‘Have you thought any more about this?’ I asked.
‘Pretty much all day.’
‘And?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m forty but I’m fit. There’s no physical reason why I can’t deliver a normal healthy child. At my age any consultant will want to do an amniotic fluid test to check against the outside chance of Down’s Syndrome and other foetal abnormalities. As for my work, maternity leave is my statutory right, regardless of my job.’
‘And?’ I repeated.
‘No,’ she said, firmly. ‘You first. How do you feel about another child?’
I drew a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, and all the time I was thinking. I didn’t reply until I was truly certain of what I wanted to say.
‘I’m fifty-three,’ I began, when I was ready, ‘and I’m fit. I have my last police medical, eight months ago, as evidence. I have four children by three different women, plus one who’s adopted . . . Ray Charles had twelve by ten, so I’m nowhere near a record-breaker. My daughter is thirty, and my older son, the one I’ve only just learned about, is about to be twenty. The thought of all that should scramble my brain, but it doesn’t. I love all my children in different ways, but I love them all equally. Love isn’t something you can quantify. It isn’t something of which there is a finite supply in every person. It’s unlimited.’
I took Sarah’s hand and looked her in the eye. ‘If you go ahead and have this baby, I will love him or her as I love all the others, no more no less, in the same special, individual way.’
‘Is that a yes?’ she asked, quietly.
‘It’s a statement of unqualified support for whatever you decide,’ I promised her.
‘In that case, it’s a yes.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’ve been certain since I saw the message on the tester. I’ve been doubting myself all day, trying to pin down how I feel, but when I saw that word in the window, it all went away.’
‘How pregnant are you?’
‘From the date of my last period, five weeks; I’ll be due some time in October.’
‘Around the time Ignacio’s due for release on parole. I’d better call the architect,’ I said. ‘We will definitely need to crack on with that extension.’
‘I’ll sell the Edinburgh house; that’ll pay for it.’
‘I can afford it,’ I protested.
‘We can afford it,’ she corrected me.
‘Can we afford a small wedding reception as well?’
She dug me in the ribs, and looked up at me, sideways. ‘You sure about that?’
‘I have been for a while,’ I confessed. ‘I’ve been meaning to broach the subject.’
She winked at me. ‘In that case, I accept.’
‘Champagne to celebrate?’ I suggested.
‘Not until the bombshell arrives,’ she said. ‘We should let Trish provide that,’ she laughed. ‘This keeps her in certain employment for the foreseeable future.’
In the event we decided to postpone the announcement until the weekend, when Alex had promised to visit. Instead we had a normal family supper, with me wondering whether we’d need a bigger table as well.
Thirty-Eight
Next morning I had trouble refocusing on the job, but once Sarah had gone to work, and the kids to school, with an effort of will I managed it.
I was slightly annoyed that Jock Hodgson hadn’t got back in touch, irked enough to call him again, and leave a slightly testier message on his phone. With that out of the way, I decided to pick up on my discussion with Walter Hurrell and on the leads that had come out of it.
Before I got round to that, though, I made one more phone call.
Clyde Houseman and I go back a long way, twenty years in fact, to the time when I was a detective super and he was a teenage gang-banger in the very roughest part of Edinburgh. These days, he credits me with pointing him in the right direction when we had our street encounter. If so that’s all I did; the journey and the hard labour it involved were all down to him.
It led him to the Marines, to Special Forces and finally to the Security Service, where he is now, in its secretive Glasgow office. Its number is programmed into my phone, under the label ‘Chiropractor’.
He was in when I called. ‘Sir,’ he said, his voice clipped, without accent. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m great,’ I replied.
‘Are you going to be joining us any time soon?’ he asked, boldly.
‘You never know,’ I replied. ‘If the director has a need for me, she knows she can call.’ In truth, Amanda Dennis, my friend and his boss, and I had talked around the idea, but only in the vaguest of terms.
‘But right now you have a need for us. Is that the case?’
‘More for you than for the service,’ I told him. ‘I’ve come across a man who claims to have been in your old outfit. By that I mean Special Forces, not the Marines. A naval petty officer; he’s called Walter Hurrell. I’d like to know about him.’
‘There’s something familiar about that name,’ Clyde said, ‘but I can’t pin it down. We weren’t big on surnames or ranks in the SBS. Let me make inquiries and come back to you. What’s the context?’
‘I’m doing a private job for a rich acquaintance who’s been robbed of a high-value item. Hurrell works for him and there’s a vibe coming off him. If he isn’t straight, I need to know.’
‘Okay. I’ll find out,’ Clyde promised.
That done, I went back to the notes that I’d made after my session with Hurrell. He’d been adamant that the Princess Alison hadn’t been spirited away on a larger vessel and I was inclined to agree with him. He was almost as sure that she was still afloat, sold on to wealthy, wide-boy buyers, possibly, even, in the US.
Thinking about her range and about possible routes, I struggled to see why anyone would have chosen the American option. Fuelled up, Iceland would be well within her range. But from there, the closest refuelling point would be Nuuk, in Greenland, or St John’s in Newfoundland. Either would be stretching it, and more; in winter it would be a cold and risky voyage. Why take the chance when you could go south and into the Mediterranean, where there would be potential buyers aplenty? Finally I decided to trust Hurrell and make that my first choice.
Which would mean the part of criminal investigation that I have always hated the most: a desk job; just me, a computer and a phone. To find where the Princess had headed, I would have to find her first refuelling station.
‘There was enough fuel in the tank for them to get her to the west coast of Ireland,’ Hurrell had said. How many marine diesel fuel pumps were there within that range? I had no idea, and I didn’t have much of an idea of how to find out. It was another job I’d have been happy to delegate to Carrie McDaniels, but she was fully occupied. I could understand why Randolph bloody McGarry couldn’t be arsed to do it himself, even if I couldn’t excuse him his omission.
I went on to my computer and eventually found a website called Marinas Online that gave me particulars of eighty-nine marinas in the UK. Fortunately they weren’t all coastal; once I had filtered out inland waterways I was left with a list of a dozen, dotted along the north-west coast of England and down into Wales. Manageable, I thought, until I moved on to Ireland and found another web page; that trebled the number of potential stopping places.
My next problem was the lack of a specific date. I knew that the boat had been stolen on 4 October, but that was as precise as I could be. The only advantage I had was the sheer size of the beast. There couldn’t be too many seventy-five-foot motor cruisers around, surely.