Rising Tide: A brutal edge-of-your-seat thriller with a killer twist (DI Jamie Johansson Book 2) by Morgan Greene

Author:Morgan Greene [Greene, Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mercury Books
Published: 2021-05-30T22:00:00+00:00

23

Jamie stood in the kitchen of the cafeteria, stirring Vogel’s tea, keeping an eye on her as she scraped Quinn’s blood from between her fingers with her thumbnail.

‘You okay?’ Jamie asked, the spoon clinking softly on the sides of the cup.

She nodded, then sighed. ‘Yeah, just… intense, you know? Unexpected.’ Her German accent brought a certain formalness to the statement. But Jamie knew that it had hit her hard.

‘Tell me about Ehrling,’ Jamie said then. ‘Sugar?’ She looked up at Vogel, who realised then that she was asking about the tea, not calling her that.

‘No, thanks,’ she said, accepting the cup. She put it down on the steel counter, and then pulled a plastic crate off a shelf overhead, taking out a few disposable UHT milk pots. ‘What about him?’ She emptied them into the liquid and then grabbed a wooden spoon from the utensils rack at the back of the counter and used the handle to stir the milk in.

Jamie leaned against the counter, arms folded, and watched the door. Wiik had hung back and was standing outside it, ready to signal her if anyone came.

Two against one was never a good way to get information freely out of someone

‘What’s he like?’ Jamie asked.

‘He’s, uh,’ Vogel started, sipping the tea. ‘He’s okay.’

‘Okay? How long have you worked together?’

‘We both got here around the same time – about ten, no, eleven months ago?’

Jamie offered her a compassionate smile. ‘You’ve been out here all that time?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, every six months, the crew changes – they go home, to their families, their wives, their kids. The head of operations and the assistant stay on. Few weeks off a year while Bolstad does necessary maintenance and overhaul on the rig.’ She shrugged. ‘Not so bad.’

‘You’ve got no one waiting for you back home?’ Jamie tried not to make it sound as lonely as it seemed to her.

Vogel shook her head. ‘No, this line of work doesn’t exactly attract attached people.’

Jamie nodded. ‘I know the feeling.’

Vogel was the one who smiled now. ‘You get used to it, you know? Being out here. It becomes as good as home.’

Jamie also knew that feeling. But she wasn’t here to play ‘Who has the saddest life?’ ‘And Ehrling’s been here all that time, too?’

She nodded.

‘And you said you applied for the job?’

She nodded again.

‘Where did you see it advertised?’

‘I was working for Bolstad already – as a systems analyst,’ she said.

Jamie knew that already, from her file. But wanted to hear it again.

‘There’s an internal Bolstad employees intranet that’s used for all sorts of stuff. Managing contracts, holidays, payslips, that kind of thing. There’s also an opportunities page.’

‘You didn’t want to apply for the head of operations position?’ Jamie asked it casually, but it was an important question.

‘I would have if it was advertised.’

So it wasn’t, then. Ehrling was installed here.

‘Weird that they’d change the head and assistant head at the same time.’ Jamie stuck out her bottom lip. ‘Makes sense they’d want to keep on someone with experience.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.