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‘That was twelve years ago, Miss Cormac. You seem very sure.’
‘My mother and sister died on the voyage.’
Ogilvy leans back. ‘That’s a very serious allegation. You must have evidence – witnesses, letters, photographs – something that can corroborate what you’re telling me.’
‘She was a child,’ says Florence.
‘Exactly,’ says the detective. ‘And children make things up.’
‘Angus Radford was the skipper of the trawler,’ says Florence. ‘He’s facing charges of deliberately sinking a small boat off the Lincolnshire coast. Seventeen people drowned.’
‘That doesn’t make him sound like a people smuggler. Quite the opposite.’ Ogilvy hasn’t taken his eyes off me. ‘Did Finn Radford recognise you?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘Did he threaten you?’
‘He told us to leave.’
‘But you refused.’
Florence interrupts. ‘Excuse me, Sergeant, but you haven’t offered one scrap of evidence to support any charges against my clients. A deeply troubled young man, with a history of alcoholism and depression, took his own life. Evie and Cyrus will sign statements to that effect. Unless you have something more, we’re done here.’
She gets to her feet. Ogilvy tries to hold her gaze or to summon some killer one-liner that might restore his self-esteem but fails miserably. Florence is at the door.
‘Wait,’ he says, before leaving the interview room. He returns a few minutes later with a typed one-page statement. I read the words. There’s no mention of people smuggling or the sinking of the Arianna or why we visited Finn Radford. Does my signature make it the truth?
‘You were amazing,’ I whisper to Florence, as we leave the room.
‘Did you notice anything unusual about that interview?’ she asks.
‘How you torched him?’
‘He didn’t have the recording equipment switched on.’
18
Cyrus
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.’
