The Man Every Family Owes

Chapter Six: Sandwick

Declan drove the coast road through the night with the window down and the phone on the seat beside him, and he reached Sandwick long before Sutter's train.

It was a small fishing town that smelled of diesel and salt, a crescent of shuttered cottages around a harbor full of trawlers. Gordon Platt wasn't living in any of the cottages. He was living on a forty-foot sailing yacht at the end of the visitors' pier, white and gleaming under the dock lights. Tamsin read out the numbers in his ear as he walked toward it. "The boat cost three hundred and ten thousand, paid in cash two months after your trial. Platt's chauffeur pension is nineteen thousand a year."

The cabin lights were on. Declan stepped aboard without knocking.

Platt sat at the galley table with a bottle of rum and a glass he no longer bothered to use. He had been a big, upright man once, always waiting beside the Fairholm Rolls in his grey cap with the door already open. Now he was soft and red-eyed, his hair gone thin. He looked up, saw Declan, and the bottle slipped from his hand and rolled across the floor.

"No," he said. "No, no. You're dead."

"People keep telling me that." Declan set his phone on the table, recording, and sat down across from him. "I want the truth about Corbel Bridge, Gordon. All of it."

He had come ready to work for it, with everything the ledger held on Platt. He didn't need any of it. Platt had been waiting seven years for someone to ask, and he broke almost at once.

"She paid me," he said, his voice cracking. "Mrs. Fairholm. Fifty thousand before the trial and the rest after, to swear I saw you driving the car that hit Mr. Sebastian." He scrubbed his face with both hands. "I didn't see you. I didn't see anybody."

"Then what did you see?"

"Me." Platt stared at the table. "I drove it. Your car, the old blue Ford. Someone left the keys with me and told me to take it onto Corbel Bridge at one in the morning and put it into the barrier, hard. So I did. Then a man in a car with no plates handed me a medical bag, sealed, the kind they use at blood banks. He told me to smear it on the bumper and the grille, and I did that too." His hands were trembling. "I never saw Mr. Sebastian get hit. I never saw a body."

Declan gripped the edge of the table, and it had nothing to do with the swell. "There was a funeral."

"Closed coffin," Platt whispered. "The family insisted. Nobody saw him, Declan. Not one person I know ever saw him."

Declan made him go through it again, slowly, with dates and times, and the phone caught every word. He was reaching to stop the recording when he felt the boat dip at the stern under new weight, once, twice, three times. Someone had come aboard.

"Declan," Tamsin said sharply in his ear. "Sutter's in Sandwick. He isn't alone."

Declan pushed Platt down beneath the table and moved. The yacht was rocking on the incoming tide, and he had spent seven years learning to fight on worse footing than this. He went up the galley steps low and fast as a torch beam swept the deck. The first gunman stood silhouetted against the harbor lights. Declan came out under the boom, caught a loose line from the rigging and whipped it around the man's gun arm, then wrenched hard as the hull rolled. The pistol skittered across the deck. An elbow to the throat left the man gasping against the mast.

The second man fired twice, wild. Declan waited for the next roll of the tide, used it to close the distance, and drove into him low across the hips. The man went over the rail and into the black water of the harbor with a shout and a splash.

A third shot cracked from the stern, and below deck, Platt screamed.

Sutter stood by the wheel with a revolver, swinging it toward Declan, but he was too slow. Declan crossed the deck in three strides, slammed his wrist against the wheel until the gun dropped, and drove him face first into the planks. Something crunched. When Declan rolled him over and pinned him with a knee to the chest, blood was pouring from Sutter's nose, and he was laughing.

"You think Beatrice sent me?" He spat red onto the deck. "She doesn't even know I'm here. I'm not on her leash anymore, Hurst."

"Then whose leash are you on?"

Still laughing, Sutter dragged his phone from his jacket and tossed it down. Declan thumbed it open and read the last incoming number to Tamsin.

There was a pause on the line. "That number has no owner, no billing address, nothing," she said quietly. "But I've seen it before. It's the same number that bought Ferro. Whoever owns the judge sent Sutter here to kill your witness."

Declan took the handcuffs from Sutter's belt and locked him to the steel rail at the stern. He called the Sandwick police, gave them the name of the boat, and went below.

Platt was curled against the galley bench, clutching his shoulder, blood soaking through his fingers. The bullet had gone clean through. Declan packed the wound with a dish towel, hauled him up the steps and along the pier to the car, and laid him across the back seat. Sirens were already rising from the town as he pulled away.

He drove to the hospital himself, one hand on the wheel and the other reaching back to keep pressure on Platt's shoulder. The dashboard clock read ten past four. He had five hours until court, and the recording was safe in his pocket. For the first time in seven years, someone had said out loud that Declan Hurst was never on that bridge.

His phone rang as he pulled into the emergency bay. It was Margot, and she sounded as if she hadn't slept either.

"Beatrice's lawyers just filed their witness list," she said. "They've got a star witness who'll swear June is an unfit mother. That she drinks, leaves the kid alone, can't feed her. All of it."

"Who?"

Margot was silent for a moment. "Lorraine Tarrant."

June's own mother.