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The Costains. A name to conjure with.

Flynn knew he should immediately have marched over to the kiosk, interrupted and told the guy to go, told him that
Faye
had developed a fault or something, but he couldn't bring himself to do the sensible thing because his dormant instincts had been well and truly stirred up and he needed to know why a member of the Costain family was about to board his boat. His sardonic curl of the lip turned into a grim smile.

He tossed the bloody contents of the bait box over the side, causing uproar amongst a shoal of tiny fish as they feasted manically on the traces of blood and flesh of their own kind – then scattered in terror as the four barracuda returned and scythed through them on a killing spree.

‘Flynn, can you come here?' Karen called from the booking kiosk.

Flynn looked up from the carnage in the water to see Karen at the hatch and the couple, Costain and his so far unnamed lady friend, all looking over at him.

He refitted the lid on the bait box and jumped off the boat, strode to the kiosk. ‘What's up?'

Karen looked worried and not a little scared. Flynn's hackles rose again. ‘This gentlemen says he doesn't want to go fishing …'

‘That's right,' Costain cut in. ‘Just sightseeing.'

‘And that's not all,' Karen cut back in.

‘Yeah – ditch the crew. We don't need the greasy dago on board, just you, Flynn. I assume you can handle the boat yourself?'

Flynn's face remained impassive as he logged the racist remark and decided that when he had occasion to punch Costain, he would add an extra one on behalf of Jose, just for good measure.

‘It's still fifteen hundred.'

‘Never thought it'd be any different.'

Flynn manoeuvred
Faye
out of her mooring and headed out of Puerto Rico, watching the forlorn figure of Jose, standing accusingly at the end of the sea wall, grow ever smaller as Flynn took the boat further away from land, until he was just a pinprick.

Eventually he turned to Costain and said, ‘Where do you want to go?'

Costain walked unsteadily across to him and stood by his left shoulder. ‘Head east, then when we're out of sight of land, turn back and head north, following but out of sight of the coastline. Sail past Puerto de Mogán and keep going. Think you can do that?'

Flynn glared at him. Costain grinned and said, ‘Sightseeing.'

My arse
, Flynn thought, and twisted around as Costain's girlfriend rose from the seat she had been occupying, lurched across the deck, hit the rail and puked spectacularly over the side of the boat.

Someone's in for a rough ride
, Flynn thought.

O
n a scale of one to ten, one being the least, ten being the most, being adrift on a speedboat over which he had no control was one of the most terrifying experiences Henry Christie had ever had in his life. He would later describe it as nine point nine on the Richter scale.

A swirling eddy knocked Henry off balance and he reeled to one side, grabbing the handrail to stop himself going overboard again as the speedboat, then well and truly caught by the current, did a complete three sixty turnaround. His hands slipped off the chrome rail and he slithered face down on the deck.

Initially he'd thought the river was moving slowly but the boat rocked and spun out into the central channel and he felt it dip and surge as the muddy water seemed to take hold of its belly and throw it westwards in the direction of the coast. It was like being on a conveyor belt.

Henry pulled himself back up to his knees and peered petrified over the side of the boat as the speed increased and the vessel began to hurtle and spin down the river. His terror escalated as he realized he was simply not in control of anything.

‘Oh God,' he moaned and crawled across to the cockpit, then heaved himself up on to the seat, his eyes darting through the wheel at the instrument panel. It looked like a car dashboard, but in truth meant nothing to him, although he did work out where the ignition slot was and that it needed a key of some sort to fire it up.

Then the boat thudded into something. Henry was jerked off the chair on to the deck, striking his head on the edge of the wheel as he fell. Underneath him, the boat juddered, scraped something, then stopped momentarily. Then it spun again and shot backwards down the river, rocking dangerously. He guessed it might have hit a sandbank. Then, as the boat moved, it rocked and turned again, faced forwards and was dragged by the receding tide, fast and sleek.

Henry shook his head, feeling it gingerly with his fingertips – nothing broken or cut, though he did feel somewhat woozy. He fought through this sensation and heaved himself back on to the chair behind the wheel. He saw lights either side of the river and tried to work out exactly which point he had reached. He knew the tide was ebbing – fast – and therefore he was Irish Sea bound and if he got that far he would pass the port of Fleetwood on his left and the small town of Knott End-on-Sea on his right (or was that port and starboard?). His grasp of nautical terms was minimal to say the least, his water-borne experience limited to a couple of cross-channel ferries.

He rocked the wheel: it was locked.

The prow of the boat dipped scarily, then ploughed through a wave to emerge upright on the other side of it. Henry clung on to the wheel with one hand and searched his pockets with the other for his phone, which he found, but it refused to turn on.

He tried to clear his head and shivered as a gust of ice-cold wind whipped around him, causing his sodden clothing to mould tightly to his body like an icy coat.

The boat turned a slow forty-five degrees and hit another wave, rocking dangerously. It came through the turbulence, but made Henry get his act together and realize that the boat would probably survive being chucked around and stay upright – he hoped – but if it dipped, swung and tipped and he went overboard he would certainly die from either drowning or hypothermia.

At the very least he was determined not to drown.

In a container next to the chair he found a life jacket which he looped over his head and shoulders and tied in place with tape, noting that his fingers were beginning to go cold and lose their flexibility, the middle joints starting to freeze up.

He glanced around again, trying to work out his location, just as the boat rocked and dipped into a swirling current and rose out of it unscathed.

He recognized where he was. On the left bank were the ICI works, lit up like some sort of science fiction film set. That meant next stop was Fleetwood, then the open sea that was Morecambe Bay, then maybe the Isle of Man.

He tried to stem his rising panic. Not too successfully.

His eyes dropped and came to rest on the flare gun. He slid off the chair and scooped it up, opening the breech like an old-fashioned revolver and pulling out the remnants of the discharged flare, rather like a huge shotgun cartridge, which in essence it was. He looked into the flare box and found a second one, slotted it into place in the chamber and snapped the gun shut.

He raised the flare skywards and pulled the trigger.

It whooshed out of the barrel, leaving a smoke trail behind, and at a height of maybe a thousand feet it burst into red and orange.

Henry watched it hang there for a few moments from his position on his knees until a scraping noise from underneath the boat roused him. Another sandbank, he guessed. The boat skimmed across it and twisted, but did not stop. Henry pulled himself back on to the chair behind the helm, noted his position again, seeing Fleetwood docks and the widening river mouth.

Almost as if the speedboat had seen the same and wanted to go to sea, it surged ahead with the ebb and was drawn quickly past the docks, which Henry stared at in desperation, hopeful someone would spot him. But he didn't see a single figure.

He looked the other way, remembering there was a coastguard station at Knott End, overlooking the estuary. It was unmanned and in darkness and Henry knew that cutbacks in that particular service meant the station was rarely staffed and all emergencies were routed through Liverpool.

Almost like it was showing off, the boat did another complete circle and a bow, then was dragged into a particularly fast current out into the deep central channel used by the car ferries in and out of Fleetwood. The harbour lights became very distant, very quickly.

Henry's terror grew apace as he watched the lights grow dim.

‘I'm fucked,' he thought.

In his life he had been in a few situations where he thought he might die, but he had never thought his end would come in Davy Jones's locker.

Henry tried to keep warm, but eventually gave up. The boat drifted quickly into the bay and into even rougher water, rocking perilously and causing spray to come over the side, pelting Henry's face with what felt like buckets full of frozen pebble-dashing, and though he tried there was really no place to hide from the onslaught. The door to the cabin was locked and Henry could not budge it, although it did seem to him that he would be foolish to go under cover even if he could. He knew he needed to be on deck to be aware of what was going on around him … but it would have been nice to be able to see what was in there. Maybe waterproof clothing or blankets. But that was not to be. He was at sea in his thin work suit from Marks & Spencer and his best shoes, and that was how it was.

The cold invaded mercilessly, cutting through the material of his suit, through his skin, into his bones.

He was certain he could feel them freezing. His nose was about to drop off and he was sure his fingers had frostbite and would soon be brittle enough to snap off like a Kit Kat.

It surprised him just how cold it was. The end of September was not far away, the very tail end of summer; the weather had been half-decent and he would have expected it to reflect that at sea.

But no.

The chatter of his teeth echoed around his skull as his battle to keep the cold at bay was being lost.

He slithered off the chair and curled up on the deck in a foetal position, that elemental position from the womb that people in desperate situations often turned to. He hugged himself tightly and fought the urge to close his eyes, believing that drifting into sleep would mean death.

He began to drift mentally and hallucinate, suddenly believing there was an overwhelming whump-whump noise above him, then a downdraught, then a strong bright light bathing him in a white glow – until he realized there was a rescue helicopter hovering over him.

He looked up, his mind fuzzy but functioning just enough to wonder if this rescue would feature on TV sometime in the future.

By nine a.m. Henry's body had just about returned to its normal temperature – mostly. His toes were still like little chunks of ice, his nose red raw and constantly dripping, and he refused to relinquish the foil body wrap his rescuers had trussed him up in like a turkey. Underneath he was wearing a surgical gown and a nurse had kindly fitted a Tubigrip bandage over each foot to keep them warm.

He was sitting in a cubicle in the A&E unit at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, feeling exhausted and sorry for himself as well as completely embarrassed by the way things had turned out. His hands encircled a mug of steaming hot, sweet tea and though he was desperate to pee he did not want to move.

The curtain around the cubicle was drawn back, revealing his fiancée, Alison. She had an assortment of clothes folded over her left arm, a pair of trainers in her hand. Following her initial visit to Henry earlier, she had been to his house in Blackpool and found a change of clothing for him.

He gave her a ‘sorry for himself' grin.

‘Hello again.' She stepped into the cubicle and drew the curtain. ‘How are you feeling?'

‘That's just it,' he moaned. ‘I'm not feeling. I'm a block of ice.' He gave an exaggerated shiver.

‘You were lucky.'

‘On more than one front … at least I'm alive.'

‘Yeah, thank God.' Alison lay out his clothing on the bed, then hugged him tightly, making the foil surrounding him crinkle and crackle.

‘They're making “get out of here” noises,' Henry told her, ‘so I suppose I'd better comply. They've finished with me.'

Alison backed away. He stood up and reluctantly unwrapped himself.

‘I'll let you get dressed,' she said and reversed out of the cubicle.

Henry removed the surgical gown, unrolled the Tubigrip socks and got into the clothes Alison had brought for him – underwear, jeans, socks, a T-shirt and a zip-up jacket. He then picked up the large plastic bag his original, sodden clothing had been stuffed into, opened the curtain and revealed himself. His expression said it all.

Alison sighed. ‘Despite what you've just been through, you're not coming home, are you?'

‘You know me so well.'

She shrugged. It wasn't unexpected. Henry had stumbled on a double murder, a gangland style execution, had almost become a victim of the killer himself, so there was no way he could even contemplate going home, even though he had not now slept in over twenty-four hours.

Once Henry had been formally discharged, Alison drove him in her Suzuki four by four out to Pool Foot Lane. She could not turn into it because it had been sealed off at both ends, so pulled up on Garstang New Road to let Henry get out and walk back to Percy's house. He leaned across and kissed her. For a fleeting moment she was brittle – annoyed that Henry wasn't coming home. Anyone else in their right mind would have – but then she capitulated, melted, turned to him and gave him a passionate kiss on the lips, almost dragging him back into the car. When the kiss ended, they looked into each other's eyes for a moment.

‘I love you, Henry.'

‘And I love you too, babe.'

‘Mm.' Her lips pursed.

‘I don't intend to stay here all day,' he said, seeing her expression. ‘Just want to catch up on things, see what I didn't see last night, make sure it's all running smoothly. Then I'll collect my car and head back to your place. It's curry night … how could I miss that?'