Blood in the Water: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller by Oliver Davies (read full novel txt) 📗

“No, it’s nothing like that.” Mads waved away that concern with a languid gesture. “My dinner guest simply wished to see what you and Mr Verity did down here, that’s all. He’s a very curious man.”

I don’t think Daniels picked up on the way he’d meant that. As far as Mads was concerned, I was the object of curiosity. Daniels looked at me a little blankly, and I didn’t blame him. What would someone like me know about any of this? I didn’t mind. I’d already moved to where I could see all his display screens properly. Oh yes, they had everything I’d expected them to have, alright. This boat had a lot of state-of-the-art oceanographic research equipment fitted.

“What’s wrong with your Seapath?” I asked him, frowning at one of the screens. “I thought those things were supposed to be accurate to one-hundredth of a degree. That roll and pitch reading doesn’t look right at all.”

Mads moved nearer to check it for himself, and Daniels cast me a startled look.

“It isn’t. There’s a bug in the integrated computer system. I did send you a memo about it, Herre Nielsen. It’s been like that since that update we’re beta testing came in earlier.”

“Yes, I saw it, thank you. It didn’t seem like anything that required urgent attention. May I?” Daniels got up, and Mads slid into his chair, logged into his own user profile, and opened up the Syslog. He pulled up the update patch and set himself an overwrite option. I watched, silently, as he ran various automated checks on it.

“Scroll up a bit. There.” I leant on the chair back and pointed out the problem cluster. “It’s not a runtime error, it’s just sloppy editing. Whoever wrote this accidentally doubled that string.” The knock-on exponential effect from that was what was causing the problem.

“So they did.” He erased the unwanted duplicate.

“How is it now?”

“It looks good,” Daniels told him, and I turned my attention to all the other screens.

Herre Nielsen Senior was definitely expanding into the offshore wind farm business, I decided. They had a super accurate wind speed and direction sensing system. He’d probably done some pretty heavy investing in that sector already. He’d have been crazy not to, the way things were going. It was a shame we weren’t out on the water so I could see everything in action properly, but it didn’t matter. I’d already noted a way I could sneak in and snoop around remotely if I wanted to. This wasn’t a dumb, waste of space boat after all, although they could have put all of this stuff on something much less flashy if they’d wanted to.

I straightened up. “Well, thank you for letting me see everything, Mr Daniels. I hope it wasn’t too much of an intrusion.”

“What, Shay, no questions?” Mads twisted round, eyebrows arched comically. “I thought you wanted to see all the cool toys.” He had a few more skills up his own sleeve than I’d expected. He certainly hadn’t had any trouble finding his way around the system.

“They’re all on display right here, as you know perfectly well,” I snorted. Who did he think he was fooling? “I know most of them aren’t doing anything right now, but it’s an awesome setup. She might not be anything like a Royal Research Ship, but for a privately owned boat of this size, it’s very impressive. I mean, look at that.” I pointed at a screen currently showing a 3D map of the surrounding seafloor. “That’s a top-of-the-line Kongsberg multibeam echo sounder, and that screen’s where any activity for your little ecoSUBs would show up, if they were deployed. And that lovely little extension there is a sub-bottom profiler. I know a couple of archaeologists who’d love to play with a system like this in the Aegean for a few months.” You could find submerged ancient buildings and shipwrecks with that profiler. Liam and Marie would be thrilled at a chance of a month or two with this setup. Mads just shook his head at my weird enthusiasm and got up again.

“Well, my thanks to you also, Mr Daniels. It was kind of you to indulge us.”

“Not at all, Sir. Enjoy your evening, gentlemen.”

With that, I followed Mads back out into the corridor.

“So you’re a programmer as well, Shay? I’m beginning to wonder if I should simply ask what you can’t do instead of what you can. It might save some time.”

“You seemed to know what you were doing in there yourself, and quite competently too.” Mads dismissed that with another of his signature hand waves.

“Just enough basic knowledge to run all my sister Elise’s little checks for her. She’s the computer geek in the family. I bet she’d just love to pick your brain, among other things. She certainly wouldn’t let you get away with breathing down her neck like that without doing something about it.” Oh. I hadn’t done that on purpose. He turned on the stairs to look down at me with an amused little smile. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you didn’t mean to.”

Well, that was alright then. We collected our abandoned wine glasses and took our refills over to the couches where we could sit comfortably.

“How is your case progressing?” he asked. I think Mads had forgotten all about that until Daniels referred to it.

“Oh, we’ve already accomplished all we can here. Our suspects seem to have slipped away, for now, so we’re heading back to Inverness tomorrow. Conall can wrap everything up neatly when they’re found.”

He didn’t probe for details.

“You two work quickly! I got the impression, last night, that he’s more like a brother to you than a cousin. He certainly seemed to be giving off the same, protective vibe my siblings used to have around me.”

“I suppose he does. We pretty much grew up together.” It was odd, thinking of Mads as the baby of his family, but I could see