The Killing Year (The Craig Crime Series Book 17) Read online

Page 13


  Craig was thinking that he agreed when he nodded Andy on.

  “Tell us about the position they found the body in.”

  Andy tapped the sheet of paper he’d brought with him. “Maria Drake was lying at ninety degrees to the horizontal, like three of the other victims.”

  “Who?”

  “Joseph Loughry, Velma Ryland and Rick Jarvis.”

  Craig turned back to Deidre. “Any other commonalities between the four?”

  “Susan was checking out Ryland and Jarvis, but no commonalities between Loughry and Drake so far.”

  “OK.” He could see that Andy had something more. “What else, Andy?”

  The artistic DCI screwed up his face. “Well, it may be nothing…”

  Liam moved him on. “But?”

  “But Jarvis was found facing downwards.”

  “Huh?”

  Andy responded by drawing a set of X and Y axes. “If this is the horizontal X axis, and this is the ninety degrees vertical Y axis, then Rick Jarvis’ body was left parallel to the Y axis and pointing down towards the X, whereas the other three were all pointing away from the X axis when they were found. I don’t know what it means yet-”

  Craig cut in. “It means something. Definitely. Keep on it. I want anything there is on Jarvis.” He turned towards his junior analyst, who was stroking his smart-pad in an almost erotic way.

  “Get a room, Ash. But before you do, tell me about where Maria Drake died.”

  The analyst showed them instead, tapping on the map to enlarge it.

  “OK. We know Maria Drake was abducted here, in the carpark of her offices in Antrim-”

  Craig raised a finger to halt him. “They knew that how?”

  “Her handbag was found lying beside her car.”

  “OK, go on.”

  Ash shifted the map to the east. “But her body was found here, in a children’s play park in Templepatrick.”

  Liam shook his head. “The Doc said it was just a park. There was no mention of kids.”

  “The children’s park is in a corner of the main one.”

  Andy asked the obvious question. “Who found it?”

  It made the analyst grimace. “Some woman who’d brought her toddler to the park to play. The body was on open display right beside a pathway, but thankfully the mother found it and not the kid.”

  Liam grunted. “Not that the killer would’ve given a monkey’s either way.”

  Ash nodded. “There’s not much more I can say until I get all the killings mapped against home and work locations, chief. I should have that done for the briefing.”

  “Good. Andy, I’ll need an update on the angles then as well. Could you tell Aidan I want something on the injuries too, please.”

  With that he nodded them out and turned back to the two remaining DCIs.

  “Deidre, tell us more about the hate crime side.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure there is any more, but as Drake was gay I just-”

  Liam finished her sentence. “Thought you’d better rule it out. Sounds sensible to me, boss.”

  “Me too.” Craig rose from his chair “Right. Liam, you take a trip to Hate Crimes, so we can get an answer on that either way.” He walked towards the gap. “I’ll be in my office if you need me. I need to think.”

  ****

  The Labs.

  John Winter shook his head firmly, several more times than was strictly necessary to get his “No” across. It was a mime artist’s equivalent of ‘hell, no’, but just for clarity he added a post-script.

  “It’s for your own good you know, Des. You really need to learn to handle your own staff.”

  It sounded pompous even to him, and the Head of Forensics agreed.

  “Enough with the sermon, already.” Des stood up, the better to glare down at his now ex-friend, adding huffily. “Next time you need a DNA result rushed through, just don’t come crying to me.”

  He fingered the bribe he still had secreted in his pocket and added in a hurt tone. “And to think I was going to give you my Spanish Inquisition branding iron too.” He swept theatrically towards the door. “That would have been a real mistake.”

  “Your seventeenth century Inquisition torture iron?” John felt panic rising in his chest and he leapt to his feet. “Now, Des, there’s no need to leave, is there? Perhaps I was a little hasty.”

  The wheedling told Des that his case was strengthening, so he decided to play it for all it was worth. He strode into the outer office, heading for the stairwell as John scurried to keep up.

  “Maybe I was too harsh. After all, handling staffing issues doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and as a doctor, I’ve got more experience of dealing with difficult emotions. With patients-”

  The words made Des stop in his tracks. “The last time you saw a live patient was in the nineties!” He saw John’s expression harden slightly and reined himself in before he overplayed his hand. “But then you probably saw an awful lot of them in your early training, and I’ve never had to deal with difficult emotions in my work.”

  John decided to accept the sucking-up and gave a mollified nod. It was Des’ signal to press his case again.

  “So, you’ll do it? Talk to Grace for me?”

  John nodded regally. “I will. I mean what are friends for, after all?”

  The forensic scientist smiled inwardly; John wouldn’t be using the friend word so blithely when he’d dealt with Grace in full flow.

  The men stood in awkward silence for a moment; John was desperate to see the antique brand, but to ask about it too quickly seemed vulgar, and Des knew exactly what was running though his mind. But the pathologist’s elegant manners were instantly forgotten when Des moved back towards the stairs.

  “Where’s the branding iron, Des?”

  The scientist halted again, withdrawing the prized possession from his pocket so slowly it was as if he was giving birth. He held it out behind him, his face turned away, and as John’s eager hands closed around his treasure, Des Marsham gritted his teeth manfully and began to climb the stairs.

  ****

  Near Strangford Lough.

  It seemed like she’d spent forever waiting but it had only been a few hours. The relentless drip, drip, drip of the rain against the walls of her prison had had a tormenting effect and had finally made her beseech the sky to open and let loose a flood.

  That hadn’t happened. Instead, the precipitation had fallen in droplets and then in light showers, teasing her with its variability without ever offering much more in each brief episode than enough to soak her through.

  But it had all added up, and without the sun to dry it up precious inches of water had slowly risen above her cell’s clay base to lap around her thighs, until Sarah had found herself tentatively pushing off against the solid earth and doggy paddling for a moment, before realising that her sparse energy would be better conserved until the water neared the lip of her trench.

  All that was necessary until then was to keep her face above the rising tide. To let the water first buoy her and then carry her upwards, until her view became more than just distant sky and mud cell but grass and stone and whatever signs of habitation there might be. And instead of the empty silence that surrounded her, she could hear and feel the wind.

  ****

  The Dark Horse Café. The Cathedral Quarter. 3.30 p.m.

  Interviewing the victims’ relatives had proved an unexciting experience so far, as Kyle Spence had predicted by their deceased loved ones’ temperance. Not that falling down drunk was a prerequisite for having a good time in his book, but adjectives like merry and happy were applied to ‘having a few’ for a reason, and the dullness of the people on his list said that they might have benefited from a dose.

  He’d been known to make merry himself on occasion, although, he acknowledged ruefully, not half as often nowadays as he had in his youth. There was something about having to get up for work in the morning that put a dampener on tying one on mid-week. That an
d he’d noticed a disconcerting tendency for his beer-buzz to become a headache on the morning after nowadays, and for his once smooth countenance to mimic a bloodhound’s, jowls and all. It had generated a grudging admission the year before that he was no longer twenty-one, something that most forty-somethings would have accepted at least a decade before.

  The ex-Intelligence Officer took a sip of his americano and reviewed his list again. Only five victims’ families down and he was already losing the will to live. Why was talking to relatives so boring? He knew there’d been a reason for him joining Intelligence all those years ago; he may have had to wade through a sea of whining informants and undercovers, but at least none of them had been a victim’s mum.

  If Kyle had possessed any insight, never mind compassion, he would have known that labelling the bereaved boring was harsh, but then if he’d possessed an iota of compassion he would never have been a good spook.

  The DI set down his coffee and glanced quickly at his watch; just time for one last human obstacle course before he trudged back to the ranch. A quick scan of the victims’ names yielded the best candidate. Not the closest, the youngest or the oldest, but the one with the least number of surviving relatives and friends who were likely to give a damn.

  ****

  The C.C.U. 6th Floor.

  Aidan Hughes had spread his papers out across the chilly office, which had a strangely convenient, for his purposes, configuration of desks. They were arranged end-to-end in an octagon, with an empty space in the middle that made him think of a courtroom dock. He pictured a judge and jury arranging themselves around the perimeter to pass sentence on a pitiable defendant, unable to break through the desks and escape.

  The DCI smiled at his own fancifulness and turned his attention back to the case in hand, scanning the panorama of crime scene and post-mortem photographs in front of him and trying to arrange them coherently in his head. Each victim’s images were laid out separately, with their crime scene and P.M. photographs side by side, and he’d been staring at them for the previous hour to no avail.

  Given the famous Einstein quote that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, although actually, Aidan had never agreed with that; you might continue to do the same thing but that didn’t mean that everything around the situation stayed the same, time itself would have moved on and with that other parameters might have changed. But if he accepted that Einstein’s assertion was correct, then staring at the same photographs for another hour was unlikely to yield anything new. Unless…

  The DCI quickly set all the crime scene photographs to one side and then looked again, this time at only the post-mortem shots. After a further ten minutes during which he felt more excited but still not ecstatic he decided on a further sweep, this time removing everything but the photos that showed only the victims’ external injuries, front and back. This time what he saw made him freeze.

  The images weren’t exactly shouting ‘this is the answer’, but they were whispering that he was on the right track. The ex-Vice officer knelt on the floor of the dock, and in a moment of inspiration, ignoring the names that headed each image and the sexes and ages of their owners, he began to arrange the injury photographs from head to toe. Within a minute he was looking at the front and back of one body, a body that had been horribly traumatised.

  Hughes sat back on his heels, his mind racing with his approach’s complete lack of logic and yet knowing in his gut that there was something here. But twenty minutes more staring didn’t bring him the answer and the clock ticking noisily on the wall said that it was getting late. It would soon be time to head upstairs for the briefing, but not before he’d taken two new photographs of his own.

  ****

  The C.C.U. 4.30 p.m.

  Liam was standing by Nicky’s desk waving his arms in the air windmill-like, and given his size it was generating quite a breeze.

  “Roll up, roll up, get your coffee and buns here.”

  Craig had popped down to High Street an hour before to see Jack Harris and splashed out at the nearby Patisserie Valerie on the way.

  “Only don’t touch the Vanilla Slices or you’re dead.”

  He grabbed proprietorially at the plate bearing them, underlining his point.

  Craig lifted a coffee, shaking his head. “You missed your vocation, Liam. You should have worked on a fairground.”

  “Did. Two summers before I left school.”

  No-one expressed surprise.

  As the DCI bit into his first mille-feuille Craig took over his tannoy role.

  “Right everyone, thirty seconds and we start.”

  He nodded to Aidan, who had just rushed past him on his way to Davy, holding his mobile phone out at arm’s length.

  “Can you download some photos for me, Davy?”

  “The same as the P.M. and s…scene ones from earlier on?”

  The detective’s glance said not.

  “OK, no problem. Pass me your phone and I’ll load them up. Nod when you need them shown.”

  It was Aidan’s cue to get them both drinks. Craig was true to his word; the DCI had barely had time to sit down before he started.

  “OK. Is everyone here?” A quick check said yes. “Good. John, thanks for coming again.”

  The pathologist mumbled through a mouthful of chocolate and nuts. “My pleasure. I enjoy it.”

  Liam nodded sagely to Andy. “He doesn’t get out much. About as often as you.”

  There was no time for bite back before Craig jumped to his feet.

  “Right.” He tapped the white board meaningfully. “Eleven victims over twelve months and I don’t want any more. Let’s get to it-”

  He was cut off by a noisy sigh, and he knew who it belonged to without looking.

  “Yes, Susan?”

  The ex-Director folded her arms across her sizable chest. “Shouldn’t you have introduced us?”

  The next sigh came from Deidre Murray. “Come off it, Suz. Everyone here knows who we are, and just in case they don’t.” She smiled around the group. “I’m DCI Deidre, Dee, Murray, from the County Down Murder Squad, and this,” she jerked a thumb at her companion, “pain in the ass is DCI Susan Richie, from Antrim.”

  Before Richie could object she’d smiled Craig on, earning his gratitude and a wink from Liam.

  “OK, you’ve all been working on different things, so I’ll go around the group. But first, John, you hinted to Davy that you might have something further on the DNA?”

  The pathologist nodded, setting down his cake and gesturing at the LED screen. “Do you mind?”

  “Fire ahead.”

  A click from Davy and a photograph of a small piece of yellow kitchen sponge appeared, generating puzzled looks all around.

  “OK, you’re obviously confused by this image, but the next one should make things clearer.”

  Davy clicked again, displaying the red imprint of a pair of lips on a white sheet. John walked over and tapped the screen.

  “Let me explain. This imprint was made by the piece of sponge you saw just a moment ago, and it is obviously the outline of a pair of lips. Specifically, lips puckered into a kiss.”

  Annette grinned. “That’s what I said yesterday.”

  “Indeed you did.”

  As everyone stared at the screen, the pathologist was rewarded by a series of slow nods.

  “Good. Right, now, as mentioned before, the significance of this shape is that an identical one was found on the forehead of ten of our eleven victims-”

  Liam got in first.

  “You said there was no sexual assault!”

  “And there wasn’t.”

  As John pulled over his chair and sat, Craig cut in.

  “Ten? Not eleven?”

  John nodded. “I’ll get to that. Let me elaborate. I’d mentioned before that DNA had been found on each of the nine earlier victims’ foreheads, under systematic surface swabbing, which if anyone doesn’t know is a technique I began two yea
rs ago. It involves swabbing every murder victim’s skin at a number of defined points head to toe, to see if the killer has left any DNA behind that’s not obvious.”

  Craig nodded. “Good call.”

  The pathologist gestured at the screen. “One of the areas always swabbed is the forehead, and that was where, on each victim of the first nine, the examining pathologists found DNA that wasn’t theirs.”

  Something in his tone made Craig pay special attention.

  “To cut a long story short, on viewing the foreheads with different lights we discovered that the DNA had been left in a distinctive shape. A kiss, as Annette suspected, but a very regular and identical kiss, so-”

  Liam cut in again. “That means we have the killer’s DNA! Must have, if they kissed the Vics.” His face screwed up. “Sicko.”

  John smiled. “I can’t argue with the last comment, but no, the DNA couldn’t have been our killer’s because it was different at each scene. Also, the kiss mark was identical-”

  Annette leaned forward to interrupt. “But if it’s one person kissing, surely it would be identical?”

  John shook his head. “Not so. Mike and I experimented, and each time we kissed it was slightly different.”

  Craig laughed. “Are you sure you meant to say that?”

  The pathologist rolled his eyes. “Don’t you start! We’ve already had Des going on about us wearing lipstick…” He realised what he’d said just as the laughter deepened. “No, no! We were just wearing it to kiss the paper and check if each kiss mark was different!”

  Craig waited for the chuckles to die down before he spoke, saving the ribbing that John was definitely going to get for another time.

  “So, you’re saying that to get identically shaped kisses they would have had to use a template.”

  “Exactly. Hence the sponge.”

  “OK, so tell us about the DNAs. Did you get a match?”

  John nodded glumly. “Nine matches.”

  “What?”