Still Water by Stuart Harrison Page B

middle of the night acting a little strangely, and maybe dumping something over the side of her boat, you have to admit it looks a little suspicious.”
    “Doesn’t matter how it looks,” Matt said. “Bryan was alive and well when he left the dock that night and there’s nothing to tie him with Ella after that. You said yourself Carl Johnson didn’t know what he saw exactly. There’s nothing in any of this that would hold up in court. It’s all circumstantial.”
    Baxter appeared a little taken aback. “Nobody’s talking about any court here. I just want to hear from Ella what she was doing, that’s all.”
    Matt had the impression that Baxter, whatever suspicions he had, was telling the truth about not liking any of this, and that so far at least he hadn’t drawn any firm conclusions from what Johnson had told him.
    “Okay, but give me a minute with her first.”
    “Take as long as you need. You have to wonder though,” Baxter added, ‘if Ella doesn’t have anything to hide, how come she called you?”
    Matt had been asking himself the same question. Before he went in the office he composed his features, trying to disguise the fact that what he had just heard had unsettled him deeply, but the second Ella saw him he felt as if she’d read the uncertainty in his expression as if it were an open book.
    “What is it?”
    He sat down, and briefly went through what he’d learned. “Carl Johnson reported hearing gunshots,” he concluded. “And you’ve already admitted threatening Bryan with a rifle earlier that same night.”
    “I had no reason to deny it.”
    “What exactly happened? Can you remember what was said?”
    “He tried to get on board the Santorini. I told him if he put a foot on my boat it’d be the last thing he did.”
    Inwardly Matt winced. He pictured her, holding the rifle as she warned Bryan off and he found he could envisage it quite easily, and then he saw her wielding a length of wood as it split open a man’s skull. He put the incident with Bryan to one side for the time being to concentrate on what Carl Johnson had seen and heard, and opened the page of notes he’d made when he’d spoken to Baxter.
    “So, you were out there near the cove? It was your boat Johnson saw?” She nodded. “And he spoke to you on the radio?” She nodded again. “What time was it?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe around three if that’s what Carl said.”
    He made a note. “So what were you doing out there?”
    He watched her carefully and she hesitated just a fraction before answering.
    “I was fishing.”
    “And what time did you go out?”
    “About nine, maybe nine-thirty.”
    “Which was how long after your fight with Bryan?”
    “Half an hour, thereabouts.”
    Matt made another note. “Were you alone?”
    “Alone?”
    “Were you fishing alone? Was there anybody with you?”
    “No. I mean yes, I was alone.”
    “You fish a lot at night by yourself?”
    “Sometimes. Not often.”
    “You catch much that night?”
    “A little.”
    “Johnson said you had your lights off. Is that true?”
    “Yes. I had a faulty battery connection.”
    “Right, that’s what he said you told him. You remember talking to him?”
    “Of course.”
    He made another note, he now had a series of ticks on his page. So far Ella hadn’t denied anything Johnson had said.
    “Was there a moon that night? I mean how was the visibility?”
    “There was a moon, but it was partly cloudy.”
    “Could you see Johnson’s boat clearly, I mean how far away was he?”
    “It was dark. He was, I don’t know, a hundred and fifty yards away. Maybe a little more.”
    “But you could see his boat clearly?”
    “I could see it.”
    Matt took a second to make another notation, and while he did he asked his next question without looking at her. “So you were out there fishing that night. Carl Johnson said he thought you had some kind of big bundle rigged to your davit when he saw you, and to him it looked like you were