‘This man? Describe him—and do not say Albanian.’
‘Why the fuck would I say that? Sheesh, your brain is very weird sometimes; Diesel’s right. Nah, he were English. Dumb kinda accent, like he were putting on a bit of the cockney? Not tall like us, not tiddly like the old woman, ‘bout my age but—’
‘—he speaks as you do? Your fake accent?’
‘Hey, no—yeah. Bit like me, if I do say so meself.’
Aleksey knew exactly who had been monitoring Ben in the chandlers, and he didn’t like it one bit. He didn’t like it almost as much as if Eliam Colter had actually been attempting to sell Ben into sex slavery.
That was how much he didn’t like it.
* * *
Chapter TWELVE
‘And you didn’t tell me about this island incursion because…?’
‘Because I dismissed it as nothing. I did not connect an annoying man I met at a meeting with our treasure. But now I think that, far from scouting for wonderboy’s field trip, he was scouting around for the location of theNicholas.’
‘You didn’t associate him with treasure hunting? This Colter bloke.’
‘No! That is what I just said, Benjamin. Keep up.’
They were alone in Kittiwake, leaning over the charts they’d left on the table. Kneeling on a chair, Aleksey drew his finger across from Cathedral Cliffs to Oasis Rock.
‘Fuck. He said the lighthouse would give him a direct line of sight or something.’
‘This man you didn’t link with treasure hunting?’
Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen was going to get thumped in a minute.
‘Fuck, Molly’s gold coins! Morwenna showed them to the blond wonderboy, and I bet you anything he told Colter—he said he’d been told theRogue Wavewas coming in that day. Who the fuck would have told him that but the fucking owner!’
‘The man with the company that hunts for treasure—full time. As his profession.’
‘Fuck!’ He straightened. ‘Did Mark say he’d contacted Colter to take part in the field trip or the other way around?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there.’
‘What if Colter knows something about theNicholas,and he’s using the cover of the Cambridge study to be incognito in Scilly, hunting for it. So it doesn’t look suspicious where he goes, what he investigates. And then, fuck, two gold coins get washed up on our fucking beach, and the very next fucking day he’s trying to get into the lighthouse above the sands. He’s on the trail, Ben, this is bad.’
‘Stop swearing and no—we’re not going diving now.’
‘But—’
‘No. And why did he come into the chandlers to check me out—if Squeezy’s right.’
‘I know, that doesn’t seem likely.’
‘Thank you.’
He smiled and nudged Ben with his shoulder. ‘Is it the only place to get diving equipment on Scilly?’
‘Dunno.’
‘If it is, maybe he’s got the staff watching out for him to alert him. Fuck, I knew we should have gone down today.’
‘We?’
