Flight Path: A Wright & Tran Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

share. Eventually he said, “My Company Sergeant Major.”
    Kara nodded and left the café.

Chapter 4
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Woodbridge, Suffolk.
     
    It had take n Tien less than half an hour to track down Francis Matthew Amberley. He was the owner of the Heather-Anne, a twenty-two foot fishing boat that was the last place anyone had seen Derek Swift.
    According to the police file, Amberley and Swift had been friends since high school and had regularly fished together. Amberley was the deputy-manager of his local marina, a title, which as far as Tien could work out from the interview transcripts, meant he looked after all the maintenance issues. His social media presence was non-existent, but she had built up a profile of him from Franklyn’s file, a biography on the marina’s website, a few media reports about the company and the local Suffolk newspaper reports about the Swift case.
    “So, what you’re saying is, he’s a local boy who has stayed local. Likes fishing, works with boats, plays with boats, is that it?” Kara asked.
    “Pretty much,” Tien nodded. “His interviews with the police paint a fairly bland picture. He lives in a modest terrace house that used to be his parents and is now his. He’s single, keeps himself to himself. Likes pub quizzes at his local and that’s about it.”
    “You’ve just described every serial killer on the planet,” Kara quipped. “Quiet bloke, kept himself to himself, liked gardening, always digging up his patio he was,” she said in an affected west-country accent.
    Tien laughed, “It sounds like that doesn’t it. Seems our Mr Amberley is just a quiet chap.”
    “How does he afford a fishing boat?”
    “I looked it up, you can get a boat like his for less than twenty grand, second-hand. So not much more than a car, which he doesn’t own by the way. He lives within walking distance of the marina and just around the corner from the railway station, should he need to go further afield. The boat is parked in the marina too, so I imagine he gets that as a perk of the job.”
    “I think that’s docked, or moored, or berthed, not parked,” Kara said with a grin.
    “Yeah, it’s all wavy navy stuff, so no matter. How do you want to do this?”
    “He’s our only lead. We have nothing except he was out on the boat with Swift and therefore the last person to see Swift alive. From what I read here,” Kara said, flicking through the police interviews, “he gave nothing to the cops other than he went below into the galley and when he came back up, his friend was gone. Simple story and he didn’t waver from it.”
    “Maybe he didn’t waver because it’s true,” Tien said.
    “Maybe, but all we can do is go talk to him.”
     
    ɸ
     
    It was always their preferred method to know the ground environment before setting up a meeting. In their previous lives they could have spent weeks getting familiar with the territory, planning contingencies, ensuring their options for extraction were well considered. But Suffolk was not southern Iraq, nor Helmand Province, nor any of the other less than permissive environments they had operated in.
    To balance the reduced threat they had reduced assets. When they’d been with the Field Intelligence Tactical Team, they could rely on deployed teams of a dozen or more, and when they ran short, as Kara had in Iraq in 2006, they could borrow from the nearest Intelligence Corps billet. Now, in the constraints of a civilian operation, they were limited. People they might call on to help had lives to lead. They couldn’t just drop everything, like they often had whilst in the Service.
    Kara and Tien’s first choice of protection was always Dan and Eugene O’Neill. The brothers were ex-paratroopers and had worked on security details with both women during their time in the military and extensively afterwards. But Dan and Eugene were currently attending their eldest sister’s wedding in Perth, Australia, so they weren’t an