The History Suite (#9 - The Craig Modern Thriller Series)
The History Suite
Catriona King
Copyright © 2015 by Catriona King
Photography: Pauline Breijer
Editor: Maureen Vincent-Northam
Design: Crooked Cat
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Publishing except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
First Black Line Edition, Crooked Cat Publishing Ltd. 2014
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About the Author
Catriona King trained as a doctor and a police Forensic Medical examiner in London, where she worked for many years. She worked closely with the Metropolitan Police on several occasions. In recent years, she has returned to live in Belfast.
She has written since childhood; fiction, fact and reporting.
‘The History Suite’ is the ninth novel in the modern Craig Crime Series. It follows Superintendent Marc Craig and his team as they solve the mysterious murder of a health worker and leads them into a world of drugs, greed and war.
Book ten in the Craig Crime Series, ‘The Sixth Estate’, will be released later in 2015. Book eleven in the series is currently in edits.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Northern Ireland for providing the inspiration for my books.
My thanks to Stewart Lilley, owner of ‘Bespoke Hairdressing’, Belfast.
I would like to thank Crooked Cat Publishing for being so unfailingly supportive and cheerful, as well as my editor, Maureen Vincent-Northam.
Finally I would like to thank all of the police officers that I have ever worked with, anywhere, for their unfailing professionalism, wit and compassion.
Catriona King
Belfast, April 2015
The Craig Crime Series
A Limited Justice
The Grass Tattoo
The Visitor
The Waiting Room
The Broken Shore
The Slowest Cut
The Coercion Key
The Careless Word
The History Suite
Discover more at: www.catrionakingbooks.com
The author may be contacted to engage with about her books at: Catriona_books@yahoo.co.uk
The History Suite
Chapter One
St Mary’s Healthcare Trust, Belfast. Thursday, 9th October 2014. 11 a.m.
“I’ll meet you there in five, Caro. Sister Norton needs fresh towels from the linen room.”
Nurse Caroline Hobbert mimed biting into a cake; then she licked her lips, grinned at her friend and headed for the hospital canteen. Hannah Donard turned towards the large linen room, hoping that she’d find the towels quickly; she was desperate for a coffee. She tugged absentmindedly at the room’s wide wooden door, wondering why the trolley that usually lived inside was outside in the hall. She shrugged; it wasn’t her responsibility to make sure the porters did their jobs, that’s why Norton got paid the big bucks. She’d just begun rummaging through the towels when she saw the shoe. It was a flat, black lace-up that looked familiar, although it took her a second to work out why.
There are moments when people see their reflection where they don’t expect a reflection to be: in a mirror in an unfamiliar room or a newly washed window, even in an unnoticed puddle by their feet. That was how it seemed when Hannah saw the shoe; as if it was her own mirrored unexpectedly in a passing glass. Except that there was no glass or mirror or puddle and the shoe wasn’t hers. Neither was the foot inside it, or the ankle or the leg above. Or the skirt of the pale-blue dress or the soft navy cardigan worn over the top, to keep its owner warm on a long winter’s day; a woman who was always chilly but long past feeling it now.
Hannah Donard stood there, amongst the laundered bedcovers and starched cotton sheets, gazing down at the shoe that wasn’t hers. She was seized by the urge to push away the linen and see the face above the cardigan. To see whose foot filled the shoe and whose body filled the dress; the woman who wasn’t her, lying cold on the linen room floor. But she didn’t push and neither did she run, instead she simply screamed at the top of her voice.
***
Docklands Coordinated Crime Unit. The Murder Squad. 3.30 p.m.
“Of course, you realise what comes next, don’t you?”
Marc Craig lowered his newspaper and scanned his deputy’s face with a wariness born from years of familiarity. Ostensibly Liam Cullen’s freckled countenance looked so innocent that only someone with a heart of stone, or a world-weary cynicism developed from decades of hard knocks, could ever have thought that innocence wasn’t his default mode. His birth right, coded in his DNA, the word stamped through him from head to toe like ‘welcome to Brighton’ on a stick of rock. Ostensibly.
But anyone who had known Liam for more than one week knew that behind his altar boy smile and unfeasibly unlined almost fifty-year-old face lay a piss-taker of Olympic medal standard.
So there was no excuse for Craig taking the bait; he couldn’t plead ignorance or a lack of experience in his defence. Yet take the bait he did, because not to have taken it on the assumption that Liam was working up to a joke might have caused offence, and Craig didn’t like to offend people unless he had good reason to; then he would do it all day long.
He folded his paper and took the bait. “OK, and boy do I know that I’m going to regret asking this, but what does come next?”
Liam smiled. Not the smile of a man who was about to catch someone out, but an indulgent smile that said Craig had called it right.
“Next they’ll be having a baby, that’s what. They’ve been back from honeymoon now for two months; you mark my words, you’ll be hearing the clatter of tiny stethoscopes soon.”
Craig searched his D.C.I.’s face for an imminent laugh but it was nowhere to be found. Liam was serious! He actually believed that the Director of Forensic Pathology, John Winter and his new wife Natalie would be making a happy announcement soon. Craig frowned, unsure how he felt about the idea. John had been his friend since grammar school and now they worked together solving crimes, with John in pathology and him heading up the murder squad. He’d been best man at the Caribbean wedding in August where John had married Natalie Ingrams, a surgeon at St Mary’s Healthcare Trust, and he’d just about got his head around that; the idea of them being parents someday hadn’t even occurred to him!
Liam was still pontificating so neither of them noticed Nicky Morris, Craig’s P.A., standing by his open office door. How they’d missed her was anyone’s guess, given that today’s outfit was a lime green catsuit with matching platformed boots. To say that Nicky’s fashion sense was unusual was like saying that Lady Gaga liked putting on a show; obvious.
Nicky’s husky voice cut through Craig’s thoughts. “I agree with Liam. They’re both getting on a bit, so they won’t want to waste time.”
Craig spluttered out the coffee he’d just sipped. “Getting on a bit! Don’t sugar-coat it, will you!”
Nicky folded her arms, showing a cerise lining to her cuffs that Craig guessed she’d added specia
lly, to ‘brighten the outfit up a bit’.
“There’s no point you saying they’re not, sir. Natalie’s thirty-six and Doctor Winter’s pushing forty-five.”
“He’s just turned forty-three and he’s only year younger than me!”
Nicky shrugged. “Well, you’re pushing it too.” As Craig gawped she gazed pointedly at his desk-phone. “You’ve knocked it off the hook again.”
He glanced at the handset and saw she was right.
“I’ve been trying to put Dr Winter through for five minutes. I think we have a case.”
Craig thanked God silently. They’d been sitting around for weeks with no new cases and all their paperwork done; he was bored stiff. Plus it was giving Nicky and Liam too much time to speculate about other people’s private lives.
He grabbed at the telephone so eagerly that even he knew it was wrong; someone somewhere had died, it wasn’t a reason to get excited, but…
“Hi, John, what’s the story?”
“No small talk? A man could be offended.”
Craig smiled. If John knew what they’d just been discussing he’d have choked on his words.
“Liam’s here so I’m putting you on speaker. Fire ahead.”
Winter paused for a moment and his silence told them everything they needed to know about their victim. All murders were sad and all of them were ugly, but some provoked an added layer of sorrow, pity or disgust. When the victims were especially vulnerable, young or old, or when they were people who’d spent their lives just trying to help. It wasn’t that there was a hierarchy of victimhood or that one life was worth than another, just that sometimes the outrage that accompanied every murder felt even more raw.
John swallowed hard. “There’s no nice way to say this. It’s a nurse from St Mary’s. Female, twenty-five.”
It was Craig’s turn to be silent so Liam stepped into the gap.
“When and where, Doc? And why did they call you?”
John laughed unexpectedly, lightening the mood. “Well… the janitor was busy and I was the next one on the list.”
Liam blustered. “I didn’t mean that, I…”
Craig found his voice. “He’s just winding you up, Liam. But he’s right, John, why did they call you instead of us?”
“They didn’t. I was at St Mary’s for a meeting when they found the body so they called me to have a look.”
Liam gawped. “It happened in the hospital?”
He thought of the last case they’d had in a hospital; at the M.P.E., the Maternity, Paediatric and Endocrine unit, part of the Trust across town from the main site. It was one of the nastiest messes they’d ever had to clean up and he hoped fervently this wasn’t going to be the same. Craig was thinking the same and adding media interest to the trouble heading their way.
“OK. Bring us up to speed.”
“The deceased’s name was Eleanor Rudd. She was a nurse on the Elderly Medicine Unit, the E.M.U. She was found in the unit’s linen room.”
“What time?”
“Eleven o’clock. She’d been dead for less than an hour. Manual strangulation.”
Craig frowned. “Manual? How big was she?”
“Five-eight and around ten stone, so whoever did it would’ve had to be strong. You can start ruling out just on that.” He continued thoughtfully. “She fought back hard, Marc. There were scratch marks on her neck where she’d tried to break their grip and injuries to both her hands. They broke two of her fingers, probably when they prised them off.”
Craig shook his head, picturing the nurse’s last moments. He nodded to Liam and they readied to leave.
“We’re coming now. Don’t start the post-mortem until we do.”
***
The Ivory Restaurant. Victoria Square Shopping Centre.
D.I. Annette McElroy glanced at her watch and then slid her hand slowly from beneath the man’s opposite. He shook his head and smiled as she scanned the restaurant for the tenth time since they’d entered. It was as if she expected to be recognised, or that at any moment some ageing relative who’d travelled all the way from her childhood home in Maghera especially, would burst through the door to point a wizened finger and place a scarlet ‘A’ for adulterer on her chest.
Annette sighed, knowing that her caution was redundant. A man on a galloping horse could have spotted she was having an affair; there was no point trying to hide it. Even if the pale band of skin on her left ring finger hadn’t indicated a hastily removed wedding ring, the way she was gazing at her companion in the middle of the afternoon tannoyed it loud and clear.
She didn’t feel guilty, even though her upbringing shouted that she should. Her husband Pete had broken the trust between them, not her. She’d struggled to forgive his affair for over a year, trying not to flinch each time his mobile beeped with a text and resisting the temptation to check who it was from. She’d tried hard to trust him when he’d said that he was working late, or couldn’t go to John and Natalie’s wedding because he’d been tasked by the headmaster to lead a summer camp. But every night she’d lain awake, comparing herself to a woman whom she’d never met, and every day she’d avoided looking in the mirror, in case it confirmed what she feared most. That she was ugly: frumpy, undesirable, a career woman who had lost her man. A woman who’d put her job before her husband, the tabloid press’ most unforgivable crime of all. You can be a thief or a liar, even a mass-murderer, girls, but for goodness sake make sure you cook his dinner and iron his shirts.
Of course Pete had had an affair, to believe the media any normal man in his position would. After all, she was always at work, instead of being there to cook and clean as she had for the first twenty years of their married life. How dare she work to better herself and earn money to improve all their lives? Mea Culpa. How dare she enjoy her job and worry more about her children’s futures than she did about the needs of an adult man? An adult man who she’d thought loved her enough to understand what she, what they were both, working for: their children’s futures and their old age.
She’d tried to forgive his affair for over a year, tried to cope with the images of him in bed with another woman that had flashed into her head each time he touched her. She’d fought hard not to cry and push him away when he’d expected their sex life to return to what it had been before. Better in fact; he’d expected her to perform like a porn-star to prove that she’d been wrong to make him stray.
He’d said the affair had meant nothing to him, so that meant it should mean nothing to her. And she’d tried, God how she’d tried, but the trust had gone and its absence had been corrosive, dissolving her love for him and replacing it with hate. It had left her lonely and vulnerable to another man’s glance, and to his kind words that made her feel attractive again.
Annette smiled at the man across the table then she buttoned the jacket of her middle-range suit across her middle-aged body, struggling to be sensible again. Because she was, sensible that is. Sensible was her middle name, sandwiched between Annette and Elizabeth as if her parents had actually said it while she’d dangled above a font in the vicar’s hands. I name you Annette Sensible Elizabeth Eakin, like some Wild West pioneer wife, whose friends had names like Patience, Hope and Faith.
Her lips tightened at the image and she reached for the man’s hand again. She’d been sensible all her life. A sensible daughter and then a sensible nurse, a sensible wife and mother and now a sensible cop. Well, she was sick of it! She wanted to rip off her prim suit and run naked through the streets of Belfast, to show just how wild she could be. She wanted to get blind drunk and have a tattoo that said ‘girls just want to have fun’ on her backside. Except… she was too sensible.
So instead Annette McElroy née Eakin did the wildest thing that she could think of at that moment. She reached across the table and in full view of the shoppers in Victoria Square she kissed the man who wasn’t her husband hard upon the lips. Then she lifted the sensible handbag that held her sensible wedding ring and walked sensibly back to the m
urder squad to work.
***
The Pathology Lab. 4.30 p.m.
Liam spread his legs so wide apart that they threatened to squeeze Craig into one corner of John’s small office. If a normal man sat with their legs akimbo they would occupy a limited amount of space, but Liam wasn’t any normal man; he was six-feet-six and seventeen stone of inelegant blue-white flesh. Craig shoved a leg away and waved John to carry on.
“Did I say she was twenty-five?”
Craig nodded.
“She worked on the Elderly Medicine wards. Well, it’s a self-contained unit really, with an acute ward and a long-stay suite.”
Craig cut in. “Long-stay? You mean like a mini nursing home?”
“Exactly like.” John warmed to his theme. “It’s a fascinating set-up actually. The Professor of Geriatrics set up a suite where elderly people with chronic health problems could live out the rest of their lives.”
“What sort of chronic health problems?”
John smiled. “That’s the beauty of it. None of them is life threatening: asthma, diabetes, that sort of thing, but they’re too much for some residential homes to cope with so the Prof got funding for the suite. He does research on them.”
Liam’s eyes widened. “You mean he cuts them up?”
Craig and John gawped simultaneously and then John nodded his head.
“Yes, that’s right, Liam. We allow that on the NHS.” He saw Liam starting to believe him so he rolled his eyes. “Of course he doesn’t cut them up! He just carries out hearing tests, eye assessments and the rest. He’s trying to see what would happen if doctors ignored chronological age and treated elderly people as vigorously as they did the young, with all the same medication, operations etc.”