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

  “Please don’t do this, please. Can’t we talk? If I’ve harmed you in any way, I’m sorry, and I’ll do anything that I can to make amends.”

  He was mustering every skill that he’d acquired through his years of counselling to get sober, trying to get through to the man, and to his surprise it seemed to work. The glowing metal was removed from his arm to be placed on a camping stove that he hadn’t noticed, and his gloved attacker rested back on his heels. When the kidnapper spoke, still mechanically, it was in a calm but almost amused voice.

  “You think I’m doing this because of something that you did to me.”

  Torrance swallowed hard, the ambiguity of the words making him afraid of giving the wrong response. His words emerged hesitantly. Lifelong disfigurement could be the outcome of a mistake.

  “Y…Yes…I mean, why, why else would-”

  He didn’t get to finish, his captor giving a loud tut.

  “That’s the problem with all of you. You only ever think about yourselves.” His voice rose, acquiring an edge. “Poor little me, what can I do to make him stop? Boo bloody hoo. You’re nothing but a bunch of selfish fucks!”

  He lurched forward, his swaddled face now only an inch from Torrance’s own. The sponsor wanted to rip the scarf off with his teeth, but he couldn’t even lift his head. His abductor was still ranting.

  “When will you get it through your thick heads? You aren’t important! THERE ARE BIGGER BLOODY THINGS AT STAKE!”

  The sponsor’s eyes widened in realisation. He had done nothing to this man, and yet he was going to torture him to death. Death. The word was out now. The word he’d been avoiding thinking since he’d found himself on the ground the day before. Torrance struggled not to vomit and began to breathe through his nose, adrenaline making his mind race with fear but his last fragments of courage ordering him to calm down. Courage won and made him speak again.

  “Tell me what those things are then. Surely that’s only fair.”

  He’d almost said, ‘you owe me that much’ but then reconsidered, realising that the man in front of him felt that he was the only person that mattered in life.

  A phrase Torrance had heard often at meetings sprang to mind: needy baby, greedy baby; the all-consuming self-importance and insecurity that led so many people down the road of addiction, and here it was again, right in front of him. A man with an axe to grind whose middle name was ‘me’.

  He waited for a response, and the length of time it took to come allowed his pulse to slow, until he was almost back in full control. It was his only chance of reasoning with the unreasonable man in front of him, and perhaps his only chance of avoiding death.

  The kidnapper turned off his mechanised voice box and Torrance heard his real tones for the first time. Even though they told him nothing more than he had already guessed about his assailant, the concession gave him a faint glimmer of hope.

  “OK, I’ll tell you. It won’t matter because you’ll be dead soon.”

  It made Torrance want to shout, ‘YOU’RE WRONG’ in the man’s masked face, but he bit his lip.

  “It’s about justice. It’s nearly done but I’m not quite finished yet. There’s you and one other to finish off.”

  Panic threatened to overwhelm the sponsor again, but he forced himself on.

  “But this isn’t about something that we’ve done to you, so what right do you have to avenge it?”

  It struck a nerve that could have made his attacker go either way. After a moment of hesitation, the man leapt to his feet and kicked over the stove. No more burning flesh for now it seemed, but that didn’t save Dan Torrance from a prick on the hand that resulted in his lights going out again.

  ****

  The C.C.U. 9 a.m.

  “That was a good catch yesterday, Rhonda.”

  The young constable gave a pleased smile. She admired Annette as well as liking her, so praise from her carried an extra thrill.

  “I was just lucky to notice the ages, although I’m not sure what they mean.”

  As she made a face, Annette nodded.

  “I do. We’re looking at a case that’s thirty years old or maybe a bit less.”

  Rhonda looked puzzled. “Thirty? Why so precise?”

  Annette set her pen down on the desk. “OK, let’s think about it. What’s the age of majority?”

  “Eighteen in the UK, isn’t it?”

  “Precisely. And most people wait till they’re adults to do others harm, yes?”

  The DC shrugged hesitantly. “I guess.”

  “So, eighteen plus thirty takes us to forty-eight, your minimum age.”

  It took Rhonda a moment to catch up. “OK…so you’re saying that all the victims-”

  “Except one.”

  The sound of Davy’s voice made both women turn. Annette asked the question first.

  “Only one? I thought your John Doe was young as well.”

  The analyst shook his head. “So did I, but it turns out he was a lot older than he looked. I IDed him last night. Doctor W…Walter Gruber from Austria. Forty-nine.”

  “Doctor of what?”

  “Engineering. He was here on two years’ s…secondment working at a car factory in Bangor.”

  Annette was getting confused. Davy saw it and shook his head.

  “Rhonda’s age theory definitely works, and hopefully it’ll lead us to an original case sometime up to thirty years ago, but maybe the Rick Jarvis exception can produce some extra clues as well.”

  He turned to other things, leaving Annette to refocus on the case.

  “All right, so we definitely need to look into Rick Jarvis further, but back to my point. Most people don’t have the power to really damage others until they’re adults, so taking forty-eight as a clue, that means our Vics were probably eighteen and upwards when they did whatever they did to hack our killer off.”

  Rhonda gazed at the victims’ list, calculating. “If you reckon the original incident was thirty years ago max, then Roger Hardie our oldest victim was thirty-nine back then.”

  “Grand. OK, well, right now there are more people looking at the victims than we can shake a stick at, so we need to focus on the weapons like we were asked.”

  The DI opened a folder by her side, withdrawing two thick handouts.

  “Each of these has the black line outline of a body with their external injuries marked.”

  “Like the ones DCI Hughes worked from.”

  Annette nodded. “The individual bodies not the composites.” She passed across a handout and opened her own at the first sketch.

  “OK. This is Roger Hardie. His external injuries were a deep, jagged laceration to his left cheek and a patch of skin sheared from his right shin.” She stared at the drawing, frowning. “The laceration could have been made by a scalpel, that’s what the P.M. report says, and the skin removal done by drawing any sharp-edged object down the shin with force.”

  Rhonda nodded. “In a lab, maybe, but what could have caused those injuries in real life? The cut could have come from glass, couldn’t it? Like if someone fell through a plate glass window.”

  “Or was pushed. Good. What else could have caused it?” Annette answered her own question in a subdued voice, drawing on her brief, but traumatic enough never to be far from the surface, experience of domestic abuse. “Someone could have thrown something glass at their face and it might have shattered.”

  Rhonda’s mouth opened in horror. “You mean like a vase or something?”

  “Or a beer glass.” Annette gazed at the drawing again, tapping the lacerated cheek. “I’ve seen cuts like this from glassings and bottlings.”

  Glassing or bottling describes an assault where a glass or bottle is broken and used to slash a victim’s face or body. It was unfortunately a common crime when people got drunk and out of control.

  “You must have met some nice people.” Rhonda considered for a moment. “What about a windscreen injury? Like if someone was thrown through a windscreen in a car crash? That
could do it as well.”

  Annette nodded. “Put it on the list.”

  “What list?”

  “The one you’re about to write. Actually, create a table on your computer. It’ll be easier to keep track.”

  Within a minute they had their first row, containing Roger Hardie’s name, sex and age, and alongside it his first injury, facial laceration left cheek, followed by the list of weapons and incidents that could have created it in normal life. They were just moving on to Hardie’s right shin when Liam and Craig walked on to the floor. They’d been having what Craig liked to call a working breakfast, and Liam liked to call a decent bit of scran and a chat.

  Craig wandered over to the two women.

  “Morning. How are you getting on with the weapons?”

  As Annette outlined their approach Liam went to annoy Davy.

  “What’s afoot, young un? The boss said you’ve an Austrian on the list.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Nice country. The Sound of Music was filmed there, you know. Lovely tunes, and that Julie Andrews was a doll.”

  If Liam had suddenly revealed that he went pole dancing at the weekends Davy couldn’t have been more shocked, but before he’d had a chance to abuse him for the kitsch revelation Craig had summoned the DCI into his room.

  Liam was barely in his seat before Craig restarted their breakfast chat.

  “Ten people over forty-eight and only Rick Jarvis under. What are the odds that he’s the key to this whole thing?”

  Liam made a face. “So you’re saying the old case isn’t important now?”

  Craig stared at him as if he was insane. “What? No, of course it’s important, it’s the core of this. But it’s like a locked box. It needs a key to open it and I think Jarvis might be that key.” He swivelled his chair to face the window. “The problem is…how?”

  Liam sighed, he’d only heard ‘The’ before Craig’s voice had faded away.

  “Turn round, boss, I can’t hear you.”

  Craig swivelled back, unapologetic. “I said, what makes Rick Jarvis the key?” A sudden thought made him jump to his feet. “Who’s looking at the victims’ occupations?”

  “No one, specifically. I mean Suz and Dee will be with their overall stuff, but no-one’s doing it separately.”

  “Then we will.”

  He opened the door and disappeared, reappearing a moment later dragging the whiteboard.

  “I’ll write up their current occupations, while you phone round and find what they did twenty and thirty years ago.”

  Liam responded in a warning tone. “We won’t get all of them.”

  But Craig wasn’t to be deterred. “We can make a start.”

  Twenty minutes later they were looking at a table, written in Craig’s thick black scrawl.

  “Man, your handwriting’s shocking. Our Rory can write better than that.”

  It was water off a duck’s back. Craig had been told off for his illegible handwriting since his first year at school.

  “OK, so…looking at this we have eleven victims in total. Thirty years ago, three victims were university students, one was a solicitor, there was a landscape gardener, a social worker, one who stayed at home with her kids, a bar owner, a judge, and two that we still don’t know.”

  Liam didn’t respond, too busy staring at the table with narrowed eyes. Craig knew what it meant.

  “You’ve seen something, haven’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, are you going to share it, or would you like me to beat it out of you?”

  Liam’s sceptical grunt said that he’d like to see Craig try. Mind you, the odd time that the two had grappled on the Rugby pitch, what Craig had conceded in a few inches of height he’d more than made up for in strength and speed.

  The DCI pointed a chunky forefinger at the board.

  “Those three. The ones who were students thirty years back. What else did they do?”

  “Apart from study, you mean? Probably got drunk a lot.”

  Liam rolled his eyes. He’d never gone to university, but it confirmed his suspicion that all students were layabouts.

  “No, I mean did they have part-time jobs? Most students have, haven’t they, if only to keep themselves in booze. And what sort of students were they anyway? I mean, for instance, full-time or part-time? Accountancy students work while they study part-time, so do nurses and so on.” He folded his arms decisively. “We need more info on all this.”

  He was right, they did.

  “Good thinking.” Craig glanced at his watch, “OK, it’s half-nine now. That gives you seven hours before this afternoon’s briefing to sort it out, and there’s still that meeting with Jake.”

  Liam folded his arms tighter. “Oh no, you don’t. I’ve still to catch up with Dee and Richie, and I’m waiting for an important call.”

  “From?”

  Liam outlined his meeting with Tommy and McCrae. It made Craig frown.

  “You fancy this Hugh Bellner as a possible killer?”

  Liam’s screwed up face said that he wasn’t convinced. “If McCausland’s still alive it’ll make it less likely. Bellner would have killed him before he’d have killed Judith Roper, and what would be his motive for killing the other ten? Still…”

  “We can’t rule him out just yet. OK, good call following it through, but we still need to see Jake about our gay victim.” He did a quick rethink. “I’ll do that for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Don’t split hairs, you don’t have the time.” He opened the office door cheerfully and waved the gawping DCI out. “Off you go now, and take this whiteboard with you. It’s clogging up my room.”

  ****

  Strangford Lough.

  Sarah had had a long night of only fitful sleep, with one eye fixed on the beach hut’s small door, especially its flimsy lock, only slightly strengthened by an old packing case that she’d pushed in front of it and the shovel wedged beneath. The GP’s other eye had been alternately focused on her aged companion, whom she thought was probably harmless but you could never be sure, and closed sporadically in her brain’s search for sleep, only to jerk open again whenever she heard a noise.

  By now her kidnapper must have discovered that she was gone and was probably searching for her. It wouldn’t take them long to scout the local terrain, if they hadn’t previously done so in preparation for her abduction, and the hut stuck out on the deserted landscape like a sore thumb. She had to leave it soon, but she knew she couldn’t leave the vulnerable pensioner there alone.

  In fact, the medic was safer for the moment than she knew. Her assailant’s preoccupation with his other captive, Dan Torrance, and his belief that she’d been so close to death when he’d last left her that all he had to do was retrieve her corpse at his leisure, were keeping her safe for now.

  But Sarah Reilly couldn’t possibly have known that, so her fear of his arrival served to spur her on. She pressed herself against the hut’s rough walls and edged fearfully towards the door, peering through the cracks between its boards to the outside. There was no-one visible; nothing but the grassy beach lay in front of them with a rock-strewn promontory just beyond. She turned to her silent companion, glancing down at the woman’s old-fashioned wedding ring.

  “We need to go now, Mother Hut.”

  She’d given the woman the pet name the night before and it seemed right somehow. Her companion had been someone’s wife and probably someone’s mother as well, judging by her nurturing of her.

  The pensioner smiled at her new title, and, once Sarah had removed the barriers and tentatively opened the door, scanning the beach right and left to find no sign of life, she placed her warm, worn hand in Sarah’s cool one and accompanied her trustingly down the shore.

  ****

  11 a.m.

  It was two hours of Kyle Spence’s life that he would never get back, and all he’d got for it was knowing far more about Nathan Richards’ existence that he had ever wanted to. There was no doubt about it
, the man had been as vanilla as ice-cream with his wife just a different flavour of the sweet.

  There seemed to have been nothing at all irregular about Richards’ life, nothing that wouldn’t have passed inspection by the morals police, either in the past few years or decades back. He’d been a total straight then and a total straight when he’d died a few months before: no drink, drugs, cigs, gambling or philandering, not even the odd bit of internet porn.

  Now, normally such unsullied goodness would have made the jaded spy start to twitch and go digging for the dirt that was bound to be hiding beneath the squeaky-clean façade, but Kyle trusted his instincts, and nothing in them was saying that Nathan Richards had been hiding a thing.

  Time to move on, so he did, and his next few hours proved much more entertaining, not least because Jason Collier had been a reprobate after his own heart, but mostly because the second ex-Mrs Collier was a complete babe. When it turned out that her face and body were as perfect as her chocolate voice had sounded on the phone, Spence thought he might just be in love, and he only said might because he’d never suffered from that particular illness, so he couldn’t be certain that that was what was making him sweat.

  Evie Collier, she’d kept the name along with the money, uncrossed her slim legs and then crossed them again with a deliberate flourish that raised the ex-spook’s temperature another degree.

  “Jason wasn’t what you would have called husband material. He drank too much, liked far too many women-”

  Kyle was reluctant to stop her speaking, her voice soft and half-whispering in a way that he knew had to be rehearsed but strangely he didn’t care; the effect on him just the same whether on the first take or the last. But sadly, he needed to interrupt, to query something that she’d just said.

  “He was still drinking? I’d understood that he’d given up when he was younger.”

  She shot him a sceptical glance. “Jason? You’re kidding, aren’t you? The night we met he was drinking champagne from some girl’s shoe.”

  The DI made a face; he regarded himself as sexually liberal, but the attractions of that particularly unhygienic habit had always passed him by.