Deadly Gamble (DI Sutherland Scottish Crime Thriller Book 4) Read online

  DEADLY GAMBLE

  A DI SUTHERLAND SCOTTISH CRIME THRILLER

  OLIVER DAVIES

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. Tommy

  2. Dominic

  3. Dominic

  4. Dominic

  5. Dominic

  6. Dominic

  7. Ray

  8. Dominic

  9. Dominic

  10. Dominic

  11. Dominic

  12. Dominic

  13. Dominic

  14. Dominic

  15. Ray

  16. Dominic

  17. Dominic

  18. Dominic

  19. Dominic

  20. Ray

  21. Bonnie

  22. Ray

  23. Dominic

  24. Ray

  25. Dominic

  26. Dominic

  27. Dominic

  28. Ray

  29. Dominic

  30. Dominic

  31. Dominic

  32. Dominic

  33. Dominic

  34. Dominic

  35. Ray

  Epilogue

  A Message from the Author

  PROLOGUE

  DOMINIC

  My suitcase stood in the corner of our room.

  It was still zipped up, and it held a host of creased shirts and balled up ties that I had run out of spares of halfway through my brief stay in Inverclyde, each nauseating tie and crinkled seam an integral part of my personality. Seeing me without creased shirt tails was to see a soldier without his camouflage: all wrong. It was to see them vulnerable and naked, metaphorically and physically, too.

  Of course, camouflage was essentially useless when soldiers were face to face with their enemies. Staring straight into the narrowed eyes of a rattlesnake wearing the same uniform as he, only boasting a different symbol on their chest and the vast hole of their muzzle. Close enough to spot the tremble of the enemy's finger on the trigger and the beads of sweat dripping down their temples. Useless when the taste of iron had flooded their own taste buds and when the adrenaline coursing through their veins became a high swarming around their heads. A high that didn’t debilitate but rather heightened the soldier’s ability to make the choices that were to follow.

  It was then when their camouflage served its purpose. Knowing they each belonged to a larger cause, a band of men became willing to sacrifice themselves for the message that very uniform conveyed. Bravery, strength, and courage where others would find none, notably a few of the politicians sitting far away from the combat zone as far could be. That was what the notch on my ties signified to me. The larger cause. Fighting the battles others refused to and all under the rules and regulations of the government.

  A pair of silken legs shifted underneath the covers, and the soles of Bonnie’s size five feet rested on my shins. I welcomed the gentle distraction from the images of war zones and fallback lines and relished in the sensation of familiar goosebumps prickling along my arms, aware that somewhere along the way, I had started thinking of our marriage as a battlefield terrain in the way that most married couples do.

  “Let’s stay like this forever.” Bonnie’s words were groggy, but rarely had they sounded better.

  “Sweaty and out of breath?” A lingering brush of my lips against Bonnie’s neck told her my preferred view on that topic, as did the grazing of them across her own numb lips. Her clammy forehead, too. Eventually, I reached her calves. Her toes. Her ankles. Breathing in the scent I had left on her body, I was a dog who had marked their territory and now returned for more.

  Reality wasn’t quite so sweet.

  “The kids will soon be too old to fool with the lines of us play fighting underneath the duvet,” I said sadly. I concentrated on the freckled face grinning back at me, lit only by the burnt orange glow from the streetlamps filtering through the top of our curtains. “They’re already bordering on the cusp of finding out what their mother and father really do when the lights have gone out. A great deal of childhood trauma would await them if they uncovered the truth with their own eyes.”

  “They had to be put on hold at some point,” Bonnie mused as she took to stroking the trail of hair leading down to my belly button and up again, lying flush against the pillows. The only one allowed to delve beneath my own version of camouflage these days. “I just didn’t expect it to be so soon.”

  “They?”

  “You know. The good old days.”

  “Objection! I think we just proved still in our prime.” I studied the new lines of age that didn’t hinder her beauty a jot and noticed the new lease of life that seemed to fill us both since I’d arrived at the front door later than planned that same evening. After a journey of delayed trains and re-routed lines, Bonnie was perhaps the only thing that could have lifted a deprived spirit. “More or less.”

  “Okay. Maybe they haven’t passed us completely,” she agreed after a brief lull. “We get to watch three of our very own little humans grow into even bigger humans. They’re different days, but an okay, sort of different.”

  “Bliss.”

  “For now,” Bonnie noted. “We won’t be here much longer.”

  “Morbid.”

  “You know what I meant.” Her teeth tugged on my earlobe.

  She meant if the offer went through on the property I’d sought out in our old haunt of Greenock, that we wouldn’t be here in this room. In this house. In the city that had once taken us refuge when we were intent on running away and starting all over again, believing the past wouldn’t seep through the cracks. With all our possessions in boxes, my suitcase was only one part of the clutter. Was it worth even unpacking at all?

  Bonnie drove her ice cube toes further into my calves, a pair of koalas clinging to their honing trees. After a while of listening to our inhales and exhales, followed by a few interludes of impatient drivers on the wet street below, the things bubbling away below the surface broke free of their restraints.

  I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I feel like I’m choking.”

  “Sorry.” Bonnie went to reposition herself, but I held her down.

  “Not you. The air.” I sucked in to prove my point. “It’s thicker down here than I remember. Full of smog.”

  “Says the man who used to smoke twenty a day and spent the last couple of weeks in the company of our old DCI, the poster boy for Lucky Strikes and Camels.” She slicked her bangs back in amusement. “Marlborough too. Definitely those.”

  I chuckled, then stopped abruptly.

  “Do you miss him already?” Bonnie asked.

  “Not as much as I missed you and the kids.”

  “That wasn’t an answer!” Bonnie pummelled my chest. “You go up to Greenock to ask the Chief a question and end up staying for weeks longer than you’ve ever dared to stay away from home. Next thing I know, you’re convincing me to join you in lugging our lives all the way back up to the country we fled from, and after being thrust into that old lifestyle full of excitement, you can’t admit that you’ve been missing the man for a while now. I’m not blind, Dominic. Seeing him must have opened a healing wound.”

  DCI Aikman had been as unpredictable as I’d remembered. I couldn’t figure out if it was a defining feature of his leadership or a flaw, and it was quickly driving me around the bend. I couldn’t even lie in bed with my wife without images of the nicotine-stained beast intruding, an addict trying to come clean from the chief, who had been like a father figure to us.

  I should have known. Relapses, for addicts, are always imminent.

  “I prefer to think of it as a floodgate.” I pulle
d the duvet up towards my neck. “Being away from Scotland, they’ve stayed firmly closed. Being up there for the first time since God-knows-when opened a crack. No, something wider than a crack.”

  “Because you don’t have the incentive to push the brooding thoughts away anymore,” Bonnie said, as though there was nothing simpler. “You’ve discovered our fears we were certain existed up there were fears which only existed in our heads–”

  “They were real at the time,” I was quick to point out.

  “Now they were no more than a monster under the bed,” she pressed on. “After searching underneath, you discovered there’s nothing more than empty space between the mattress and the floor, plus a few old toys you’d thought you’d lost and had tried forgetting about. The fear element has disappeared, see? You’ve finally released questions you’ve bottled up for too long and ideas about DCI Aikman and our old lifestyle you haven’t let yourself indulge in until now.”

  How could she think so logically? We were in the same boat and had been all along. Except Bonnie had a bloody good method of detaching herself from a situation, seeing the best option, and taking on a subjective point of view. Perhaps I was jet lagged despite there being no time difference between here and Inverclyde?

  “You astound me,” I stated.

  “I’ve got to have something up my sleeve to keep you entertained. Anyway, who knows?” Bonnie yawned. “Maybe all of this was meant to be. You being inspired to reach out to DCI Aikman to start with? Divine intervention, or whatever that stuff is called.”

  My ear broke free from her belly button. The mattress was much larger than it had been a second ago, the non-existent space between us appeared much bigger. Vast. A fist of dread enclosed around my heart, the same dread that used to keep me awake during our long past pursuits.

  “What?” Bonnie's toes paused halfway through their curling, and she cut the stretching of her limbs short.

  “Nothing,” I said. She craned over to plant a kiss on the back of my shoulder, halting the shivers spreading across my abdomen. Just by searching her subdued face in the shadows, she instinctively understood I wasn’t telling the truth. “You’ve said that sort of thing to me before, that’s all. It sent me to that… that place for a moment.” I struggled to give that period of time a name, so I didn’t bother trying.

  “I was lost after what we had to go through during that case,” Bonnie said as my insistence fell on deaf ears. “My actions reflected that, and yours did too, in your own way. This isn’t then. I promised that I wouldn’t let you go to that place again, and that means I’m staying for the long haul. You’re stuck with me, Dominic Sutherland.”

  “That wasn’t a cause for an explanation. We were hurting. You were hurting.” I met her widened eyes with my narrowed pair, and I brushed a stray piece of her fringe away from her curtain of lashes. “It’s just that everything is set to change again, the same as it did then. Completely. I know, I know I want it. Initiated it by going back to Greenock–”

  “Anyone could see you haven't been truly happy for a while now.”

  “I’m happy with you.”

  “Okay, but that doesn’t mean you’re fulfilled,” Bonnie clicked her tongue. “Career-wise.”

  “A lot of people hate their job but are content with their home life. It’s probably selfish of me to think we can have it all. I could have it all.” I sighed, throwing myself onto the springs. “This move could result in the same thing happening all over again, leaving me with the feeling that something still isn’t quite fulfilled inside of me. What then? Do you think, maybe, something’s wrong with my biology? An effect of my childhood, of always wanting to chase what I don’t have. Something’s going to have to give eventually, isn’t it? I’m going to have to settle down at some point.”

  “You’ve already settled.” Bonnie twisted the band on her finger to prove her point. “There’s nothing wrong in wanting to chase what makes you feel fully alive to your core, even if that means acting on what seems to others like a whim. Working next to DCI Aikman is where you felt most alive. Anybody could see it. You’ve tried to push that away for all these years for our sake, and those feelings remain strong. That’s gotta mean something.”

  “Hm. But there were those moments during DCI Aikman’s leadership that led to the heartache we both can’t forget. You said so yourself, we got lost. Afraid. We were hurt during those days. Burned. It’s not facing the ghosts waiting for us in Greenock that’s an issue. I already knew we were ready to cross that bridge. I didn’t stop to think that—”

  “Dominic?” Bonnie cut in.

  “It’s no secret that DCI Aikman has always allowed me to be a bit of a loose cannon.” I grimaced. “And we both know if I rejoin his team, he won’t be able to help concoct operations that are as dangerous as they used to be. Neither will I, because I’m addicted to that too. Amongst everything else. With you and the kids by my side, I’ve so much more to lose this time around. Us. This. Not to mention you need a husband and a father next to yours.”

  “Exactly.” Bonnie smiled. Wide. So wide that her dimples joined the rest of her body on display.

  “What?”

  “Us. You said ‘us.’ You’re different now, and if the opportunity arises where a proposal of another sort of high stakes operation is made, you can see it from a different perspective. A responsible point of view where you’re in control of whether you agree or disagree, depending on the risks. Of what those risks might mean to your family.”

  That’s when it hit me.

  Bonnie and I were lucky to have escaped with our futures ahead of us during DCI Aikman’s ongoing reign at Greenock station. Especially after the case I’d had a hand in furthering, the prospect of a future I’d taken away from a man in exactly the same position as I was currently in. An officer with a child waiting for him to return home to their family. And here I was, willing to walk straight back into DCI Aikman’s yellowing grip. Another well-known fact was that soldiers often returned to the battlefield.

  One more tour, they would claim. Then, when they had returned to either Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever they were posted, all they wanted to do was return home. They’d forget amidst the horrors of the battlefield what would wait for them upon retiring home, when their camouflage was stashed in a drawer or left in a heated pile on the floor. The PTSD waiting to creep up on them during their mundane washing of their coffee cup in the mornings. Flashbacks of no-man's-land whilst they were fiddling with the thermostat. Landmines whilst changing the car oil. Their fingers twitching on the triggers during the shower. Staring down their enemies in their dreams whilst in the bed they shared with their wives, wondering whether those foes were really their friends. Fighting merely because they each believed their own side had been on the right side of history.

  We had been on the right side.

  Hadn’t we?

  ONE

  TOMMY

  Tommy Smith was doing his best to stay afloat amidst a sea of questions.

  Some of which had been answered. Most of which hadn’t. Yes, the man with the slicked down sideburns and supple leather jacket was definitely his visitor. No, they had never met before. Tommy would have remembered those wide lips of a native descent and been able to recall the broad shoulders that led into an equally thick body. The defect above the left eyebrows and the mark on the bridge of his wide nose.

  The bars to the prison cells clinked in the distance. Tommy wiped away the sweat beneath his collar. Wary sweat… if such a thing existed. Underlined with a sense of intrigue, and, frustratingly, it was always the intrigue which seemed to have a better hold over Tommy. Shifting to the edge of his seat, the plastic creaked underneath his weight. The uneven legs lurched.

  “I’ve been inside here for over a year.” He met the unblinking eyes of his visitor, eerily similar to the lumps of coal often found on the face of a snowman. “There must be a reason you’ve chosen to visit me now?”

  “I can see how DI Sutherland has gotten fond
of talking with you. You don’t ask the obvious questions. What would force me to visit a man I’ve never met before under these circumstances, for example.” His visitor mused and unfolded his palms. They were covered in a similar sheen to Tommy’s.

  “You can stop that.” Tommy inwardly cursed that his pitch had been higher than he had hoped. “I get it. You know everything about me, whilst I know nothing about you—”

  “And wouldn’t it be nice for it to stay that way?” The dark skinned visitor guessed. “Because you’re already aware what knowing too much can do to men like us, aren’t you? It gets us involved. Caught in the web, a fly can writhe as much as it likes, but it won’t save them from the big, bad spider coming to get them.”

  His sticky palm hovered over his padded jacket pocket, accustomed to reaching for a weapon trigger that sprung back once pressed and the gravity of which organisation the man with the striking looks was connected to jolted Tommy upright in his seat. He willed the ground to swallow him up. Whole. Nightmares were supposed to end when you woke up. For Tommy, they never did.

  “You got involved with them, Tommy, and much more involved than you ever intended to be,” his visitor continued. “All you were supposed to do was drive the brothers to the store. In and out again, just like that.” He clicked. “Leave the robbery and the guns to the professionals, then go back to your life with clean hands and a slightly murky conscience. No shooting. No confession. No investigation–”