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

  “So you’re saying he drank the whole time you were close?”

  “Twenty-four-seven if he got the chance.” She gave him a knowing look. “Mind you, I wasn’t exactly Miss Sobriety.”

  She was growing more perfect by the minute; he couldn’t stand women who refused a second glass of wine, although if she was still matching him on his fifth then he might change his mind. The double standard was alive and well and drinking in Northern Ireland.

  He asked another question.

  “Did he ever mention a time when he had given up drinking? In his past?”

  She thought for a moment, chewing her glossy lower lip as she did and making his pulse race. Finally, she shook her head, but there was a caveat.

  “I only met Jay when he was forty and we split up when he was forty-four. The witch might know more.”

  “I take it that’s your pet name for the first Mrs Collier?”

  “It’s better than she deserves, believe me. She made our lives hell.” She rolled her eyes meaningfully. “It wasn’t as if I even stole him off her or anything. They were finished years before we met.”

  Jason Collier’s version of the separation no doubt.

  “Jason said they’d just never bothered getting divorced. So, anyway, of course she blamed me when it eventually happened.” She sniffed derisively. “It’s not my fault that she preferred her cats over finding a new man.”

  Kyle shuddered. Cats. He hated the bloody things. Give him a good dog any day, at least they displayed some loyalty and the semblance of listening to you in return for their food.

  “Where might I find the lady?”

  “Near Cultra. She kept the big house in the divorce and she’s been rattling around in it ever since. Anyway, she met Jay when they were young, so if anyone ever knew him sober it’s bound to be her.”

  She glanced at a wristwatch so tiny that Kyle wondered if she was guessing at the time. Whatever she saw made her stand up.

  “I’ve got my Pilates class in thirty minutes, so I really need to go.”

  Another tick towards her perfection, as physically fit and flexible were added to the merry widow’s list. As soon as the case was over and a decent period had passed, he would be inviting Evie Collier out for a meal.

  If he’d realised that the lady in question never went for men who earned less than a million a year, common sense might have tempered the Intelligence officer’s ego and saved him from getting a big fat no.

  ****

  The Labs. 11 a.m.

  John Winter stared at the two tox-screens on his PC, not altogether surprised by what they said. Mike had been right when he’d guessed their two new victims had been poisoned, but it was by a method that he still found slightly strange. Judith Roper and their John Doe had died of respiratory depression caused by alcohol poisoning just like the others, and it was a nasty way to go: severe confusion, unpredictable behaviour and stupor, followed by coma, respiratory failure and then death, each phase lasting an unpredictable length of time.

  And that was what the pathologist found strange: as a poison alcohol was unreliable in both its required dose and timing, a heavy drinker taking more time to die than a newbie, a large person more than a small, and all taking much longer than with practically any other poison you could buy, so why choose alcohol at all?

  John brightened up slightly, realising something. Alcohol wasn’t only a part of this case, it was an essential component, which meant it must have been a prominent feature of the original crime. His hopes faded as rapidly as they’d appeared; alcohol played a part in forty percent of crimes nowadays and it would only have been marginally less culpable a few decades before. The type of alcohol, MacDonald Whisky, might help them, but only if records were reliable.

  The thought prompted him to lift the phone to Davy.

  “W…What can I help you with, Doctor Winter? I was actually just about to call you.”

  John didn’t ask why.

  “MacDonald Whisky. You were sourcing it, weren’t you? How did you get on?”

  Davy tapped up the relevant screen and read aloud. “Only three sales outlets in Northern Ireland. It’s pretty rare s…stuff.”

  “That’s great. Now, how do you fancy sourcing it two decades ago? Try for three and four decades as well, just to be safe. Someone could have hoarded stocks.”

  Davy frowned. It had taken him hours of ringing around customs and excise, alcohol wholesalers and importers to get this far, but, typically polite, he didn’t let his annoyance show.

  “I’ll do my best. The reason I was about to call you is that I’ve got a name for your male victim. Doctor Walter Gruber, from Vienna. He was an automotive engineer seconded to a firm in Bangor.”

  John was surprised, although he didn’t know why; immigrants weren’t immune to serial killers.

  “How old was he?”

  “Forty-nine.”

  “He didn’t look it. That gives us another one over forty-eight.” He considered for a moment. “Someone’s been contacted to come and ID him?”

  “Yep. I’ve just called the Austrian authorities and his family will be over s…soon.”

  “Hell of a reason to take a trip.” The pathologist considered for a moment and then added. “Davy, can you tell Marc that both our new victims died from alcohol poisoning, please. I’ll have more on its significance by this afternoon.”

  The phone went down at both ends without a goodbye, both men lost in their own plans. John’s ranged through searching his archives for something that explained the current killing spree, which meant that his next few hours would see a computer search running, in parallel with him and Mike getting on their knees to rummage through old files, after his pending conversation with Grace, which he’d rehearsed in his head on his drive in to work that morning to the backing track of last night’s argument with Natalie because she’d signed their nine-month-old daughter up for a baby backpacking class.

  He wasn’t quite sure what one of those was, but he didn’t like the sound of it, visions of his tiny, only just beginning to stumble, daughter struggling up rocky slopes in a pair of boots, with a knapsack of rocks strapped to her little back. He corrected himself quickly, replacing rocks with pebbles, but everything else in the, to him, completely ridiculous scenario remained the same. If he had actually bothered to ask then John would have known the classes consisted of Kit being strapped to Natalie’s back while she went hill walking, and he mightn’t have been so averse, but communication wasn’t what it might have been in the Winter household right now.

  Davy’s plans were much less complicated: coffee, computer archives, more coffee, phone calls and then leaving his searches running over lunch.

  Before John could get down and dirty in his file room he knew he had to fulfil his promise to Des, so he lifted the phone again, this time to the CSI’s room, and asked cheerfully if Grace would mind paying him a call. Two minutes later the white coated investigator knocked on his door and entered, John’s ready prepared tray of coffee and cakes setting the meeting’s tone as he really, really hoped that it would go on.

  “Good morning, Grace.” He waved her to a seat. “Coffee?”

  She nodded, her gaze already focused on the cakes. “Can I take one?”

  “Take two if you like.”

  In John’s experience largesse always generated amiability. He passed across a coffee and lifted his own, sipping deeply at it while watching and waiting for the moment that the CSI had her mouth filled by a particularly sticky bun.

  “Now, you’re probably wondering why I asked to see you, Grace.”

  “Pffh...”

  Her inability to speak struck the pathologist as a very good sign, people who couldn’t speak also being people who couldn’t shout.

  “I wanted to say hello and welcome you to the unit.”

  “Pffh…pffh…”

  “Good. Yes. But I also wanted to say that it would be better if in future you didn’t move the bodies or evidence at crime scenes, unti
l after the investigating detectives had had a look.”

  He had always believed in the direct approach, except where Natalie was concerned.

  Grace’s eyes widened mid-chew and her ‘pffh’s became loud.

  “PFFH…PFFH…PFFH.”

  At that moment John thanked the Labs’ secretary Marcie mentally for her advice; buy fifteens she’d said, so fifteens were what he’d bought. They were a local sticky, chewy, digestive, marshmallow and glacé cherries delicacy, that rendered the eater almost incapable of speaking without opening their mouth so wide that it would display their food.

  He’d gauged Grace as a woman with good manners from the off, and she obviously was, so he was pleased that he’d taken Marcie’s advice and he forged on hurriedly.

  “Yes, I know you’d already photographed and swabbed everything before you moved the bodies, but you see, to the police that it isn’t quite the same. They like to see everything in its original position, otherwise they start to feel insecure.”

  He was sure Craig and Liam would forgive him for portraying them as nervous types. As the glue from the cake appeared to still be holding, John decided to push his luck, despite Grace’s increasingly agitated face.

  “Doctor Marsham did, I know, try to speak to you before, about our officers’ provincial little ways.”

  Now he was calling the detectives hicks. Thankfully they weren’t there to hear.

  “But Doctor Marsham…” He gazed into her eyes meaningfully. “Well… he’s not very good with conflict.”

  Actually, he hadn’t a clue whether Des was good with conflict or not outside his staff management, but whatever worked.

  “Especially with women.”

  He leaned forward conspiratorially, noting that Grace had stopped ‘pffh’ ing and chewing and was now looking completely stunned.

  “Between you and me, he’s scared of women. All women, not just you. Thankfully he has two sons.” He shook his head soulfully. “But his poor wife… do you know, he leaves her notes when he has to ask her anything difficult.”

  Grace gawped at him. “He wrote me an email!”

  John sat back triumphantly. “You see! He wrote you a note as well.” He shook his head. “Brilliant forensic scientist, but a complete wimp of a man.”

  He suddenly pictured the wimp eavesdropping and glanced hastily through his glass door just to be sure. He didn’t fancy a punch.

  Thankfully Des hadn’t heard his masculinity being trashed and John was beginning to detect sympathy in Grace’s eyes. Her next words confirmed it.

  “He’s really scared of us?”

  John nodded solemnly. “Petrified.”

  “And it’s tradition here to leave the bodies where they are for the police to see?”

  “It is. We’re a small backwater here, with old fashioned ways.”

  That bit had really cost him, given that his labs and techniques were some of the most advanced in the world, courtesy of all the deaths and injuries they’d had to deal with during The Troubles.

  John decided to pause there, to let everything embed. Grace said nothing for a moment, but the signs of rumination were written all over her face. When she reached for another cake the pathologist knew that he’d achieved what he’d set out to do, and he rose to make fresh coffee for them both.

  ****

  Near Strangford Lough.

  Sarah Reilly had been luckier than she would ever know. Not only had her captor not returned to check on her the evening before, but he hadn’t returned until after lunchtime that day, by which time she and her companion were much too far away to hear his shouts.

  When the man had approached the clay-walled pit ten minutes before it had been with excitement, his pulse accelerating with each step, in anticipation of what he would find. Would the woman’s body be submerged completely or just partially? And which part would protrude: a hand locked in its last grasp for salvation, mud caked beneath its once pristine nails, or her upturned face, its mouth open in a final gasp for air, or perhaps contorted in a cry for help that would have fallen on absent ears?

  The possibilities had excited him so much that he’d felt the thrill in his chest and then lower down, and as he leaned forward to gaze into the trench he knew that he had found a pastime far more satisfying than sex.

  At first what he saw stunned him and his mind struggled to comprehend; where was the out-stretched hand and contorted visage? Where was the gaping mouth and the ripped, soiled nails? Surely he would have been able to make out something at least: a foot, the edge of her dress, some strands of dark hair floating up? Then he nodded in understanding. It was a large pit and Sarah Reilly had been a small woman, shrinking daily with a lack of food. It was simple. She had sunk beneath the water. A pity that she’d denied him his spectacle, but she was still dead all the same.

  A sensible man should have taken his win and walked away then, but a sadist’s excitement requires sight of the suffering that they’ve caused. A moment passed while he searched the barren landscape for a stick long enough to jab brutally into the water, hoping to make contact with the GP’s corpse and elevate a limb that he could grab, to drag her body up on to solid ground for the next act. It was only after rakes and swirls of the water’s surface and then vicious jabs down to the pit’s base, that the man realised and finally accepted that his bird had flown her coop.

  He clambered to his feet and scanned the horizon, but there was nothing except grass and dead vegetation between him and the distant lough coast, and in that moment he knew that his prisoner had left a long time before. In the GP’s weakened state it would have taken her hours to disappear from view.

  The man’s throat tightened in anger and then he began to howl, howls would have been heard for miles if there had been anyone there to hear. Howls of fury and frustration, but increasingly tinged with an edge of fear. She was gone, and there was only one place she was heading! Soon the authorities would know all about her abduction, and him. The last thought made him pause for a moment; what could she actually tell them? They might locate the pit eventually from her description, but what did she actually know about him? She had never ever seen his face.

  He exhaled heavily and relaxed, until a moment later a second wave of panic filled his chest. His plan! It would all be destroyed now, unless the marks that he’d intended to leave on the woman could be left on someone else. They must be. He had to complete them perfectly or the whole thing would have been for nothing. He turned around swiftly and ran, his mind screaming at him to go now and finish off Dan Torrance, but his last shreds of sanity urging him to go home. Compromise won. Torrance had been immobilised and would stay so for hours yet, so a brief check on him would suffice, then he needed to return and show his face at work for a while or questions would start to be asked.

  ****

  The Police Hate Crimes Unit. The H.C.U.

  Liam gazed around him curiously. The steel and glass colossus had looked space age enough from the outside, but now he was inside one of its offices he was certain the architect had read too much Asimov. He was so busy gawping that he failed to see Jake McLean leaning, arms folded, against an almost transparent door jamb, wearing a smile on his lean face. The sergeant watched his old boss for a moment longer and then interrupted Liam’s thoughts with a cheery, “Hello.”

  It made the DCI jump.

  “God, man, don’t sneak up on people like that! I might have hit you.”

  Anyone else would have said ‘you frightened me to death’ but the fear word wasn’t in Liam’s lexicon. He waved a hand around the room.

  “What kind of place is this? I can’t see a single brick wall.”

  Jake slipped past him to take a seat behind his desk. “There aren’t any. No brick or wood. The glass is held up by steel columns.”

  “In the name of God, why? Doesn’t anyone around here value privacy?” Liam had a sudden thought. “No wood? Not even in the bogs? You mean everyone can see you doing your business?”

  It made Jake
laugh. “No, there’s definitely wood in there, but that’s the only place.” He gestured to a steel and plastic chair. “Take a seat.”

  Liam sat down, still talking. “Why? I mean what’s the point?”

  Jake shrugged. “Something to do with removing barriers, because we’re in hate crimes, I guess. They wanted the surroundings to mimic the unit’s ethos, but I think the architect took it a bit too literally.” He folded his hands on the desk. “Anyway, you didn’t come here to look at the décor, so what can I do for the murder squad? And wasn’t the chief supposed to be coming instead?”

  It hadn’t taken Craig long to reinstate his deputy’s trip to the H.C.U., after a phone call from Sean Flanagan had handed him an extra list of tasks. Liam omitted the explanation and instead gave a smirk that implied he’d talked Craig out of the trip.

  Jake shrugged and went to move on, his brisk demeanour making Liam smile. When the sergeant had joined the murder squad in twenty-thirteen he’d been as excited as a dog with two tails, but the following few years had knocked the stuffing out of him, between his partner Aaron trying to kill him and him developing a determination to bulk up and defend himself with the attendant steroid addiction that he’d developed along the way. Thankfully Aaron was now in jail so all that was behind Jake, and the DCI was cheered to see he’d returned to his former enthusiastic self.

  Liam got to the point.

  “We’re working a yearlong case, eleven murder victims so far and one of them was gay. We don’t think that’s got anything to do with her death, but we just need to be sure.”

  Jake’s eyes widened. “Eleven? Since when?”

  He’d only left the squad in February and there’d been no sign of the murders then.

  Liam realised what he meant. “Ah, you think we caught the case while you were still there, and you missed it. No, that’s not it. We were only brought in on Tuesday, on the last two murders. The first nine Vics were under the Antrim and Down murder squads but, understandably, the C.C. was getting a bit pissed off with the bodies piling up around him and no arrests, so now he’s passed the whole shebang to the boss.”