Page 63 of The Sunken Truth
Nat beckoned to her husband and pulled out the chair beside her. “There’s no point in getting het up with PC Grainger. He’s only doing his job.”
Resignedly, Harry sat beside Nat and took her hand. “It’s all my fault,” he grumbled.
“It’s not,” Nat said, before switching her attention toFlynn. “Wehavebeen having financial difficulties. Which I dealt with by spending too many evenings in the pub. I ran up a bill that I couldn’t pay, so that didn’t exactly help matters.”
She took a breath. “We’ve both been trying to get ourselves sorted. We agreed we wouldn’t take on seasonal staff this year, and we’d work our arses off to get out of the hole we’d got ourselves in. It was tough going, but we were managing. Then we had a couple of incidents… equipment needing to be replaced and a couple of unexpected bills. You know how it is? Then we had that group making a fuss about payment and it just felt like the final straw.”
Flynn waited patiently while Nat wiped a stray tear from the corner of her eye.
“I called my sister and told her I’d take her up on her offer of a loan. Up until then, I’d declined because I knew Harry would be too proud to accept help from my family.”
“That’s how you paid off the bar bill?” Flynn asked.
She nodded and reached for her phone. “I can show you my bank account with the money going in.” A moment later, she held the phone out and he saw that there was a payment of three thousand pounds deposited the previous day.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry to have to pry into your private lives.”
“I’d rather you know the truth of it,” Nat said. “Better that than you think we sabotaged Ryan’s dive equipment.”
“We might have made some bad decisions,” Harry said. “But we’d never do something like that. No matter how bad things were.”
“Thank you for explaining,” Flynn said as rain tapped gently at the window. “I need to get back to St Mary’s before I get stranded here.”
“Do you need a ride?” Harry asked.
“No, thank you. Hopefully Zack is waiting for me.”
Rain was coming down in earnest when he stepped outside. Pulling his hood up, he took off towards the jetty at a run.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
At the station,Flynn went straight to Sergeant Proctor’s office. While filling him in on the situation with Harry and Nat, he leaned against the counter at the side of the room and did his best to ignore Superintendent Brand’s judgemental glare from where he sat across the desk from the sergeant.
“It seems you’ve ruled the Wrights out of the investigation,” Sergeant Proctor said, rocking back in his chair. “That’s a good thing.”
“Yeah,” Flynn agreed vaguely, wishing it felt more like a win.
“What are you thinking?” Sergeant Proctor asked.
“I’m thinking it’s strange that whatever Ryan found at the wreck hasn’t shown up yet. If he’d just dropped it where he found it, another dive team would surely have found it.”
Sergeant Proctor nodded. “So someone really did sabotage his equipment to get their hands on it.”
“It seems that way.”
“Surely that was obvious,” the superintendent said. “You weren’t thinking it was a coincidence that his hose was cut atthe exact moment he got his hands on something at the dive site?”
With his jaw uncomfortably tight, Flynn kept his focus on the sergeant. “If I could find the artefact, I’d find the person who cut Ryan’s hose. I assumed they were planning on handing it over to Eustace, but maybe they’ve changed their plan now that they’re under scrutiny.”
“If they don’t sell it to Eustace, I don’t see how we’ll track it down,” the sergeant said.
“Presumably there’s no chance of anyone selling anything to the old fella now,” the superintendent added, every word grating on Flynn’s nerves. “Not if you’ve done your job properly, anyway. You did make it clear to him it’s an offence to buy and sell historical artefacts?”
“I told him,” Flynn said, through gritted teeth.
“Did he get the message this time?”
“Yes,” Flynn replied, avoiding eye contact with the superintendent.
