The Property Read online

  Craig nodded reluctantly. “A rape or mugging. OK, if it was random it won’t be good for our hopes of finding the perpetrator because they would have had no connection to the victim, but most rapes are acquaintance attacks. An attack gone wrong and ending with the victim’s death. How could we check that? Anyone?”

  He already had some answers in mind, but he wanted to see what the small group had got.

  Davy didn’t disappoint. “CCTV. The hotel’s in the city centre, so they must have had cameras around there even back in oh-seven, although I doubt that they’ll have kept the tapes.”

  Craig nodded vigorously. “Yes, good. Find out where those cameras were, Davy, and then Liam, get Mary to dig out any possible archive footage there might be. Someone might have been lifted for something else that resulted in CCTV footage being viewed and copied for a court hearing. If so, it should still be in the court’s or our archives.”

  Mary Li was the team’s recently recruited detective constable. She was bright and very sharp, in every way.

  “Also, task Andy and Kyle to go back over the crime database and pull the records of any incidents or arrests that happened near the hotel around the floor-laying dates, once Davy gets them. There may be witnesses listed in the files. A witness to another crime in the same area might remember seeing something happening on The Tower site if we question them again.”

  Kyle was Kyle Spence, the squad’s second D.I., and although now an ex-Intelligence Officer still always a spook. To say that the man could be tricky was like saying that hell could be hot.

  Liam gave a groan. “Ah, hell, boss, we could be looking at dozens of interviews here.”

  “Have you got something else to do?” Before Liam could retort Craig shook his head, dismissing his deputy’s moan. “Besides, we might be lucky and find a relevant witness early on. We’ll never know until we look. OK, what else?”

  Davy had been bouncing in his seat waiting to speak again, so he jumped in. “Nine-nine-nine calls! Even if no-one was arrested or interviewed in those few days, the original emergency calls might give us s...something.”

  Surprising them all, Craig grinned, and Liam realised that he was actually enjoying himself; maybe a murder was what it took to make him forget Katy for a while? Good news for them, if not for the dead person.

  “Good catch, Davy. They keep records of those calls forever. OK, it’s your choice who follows that one up, Aidan or you. Take your pick.”

  Everyone gazed at the computer expert’s face as they waited for his answer, knowing that if there had been twenty-five hours in the day Davy would have done everything himself. Sadly, there weren’t, and so, with a sigh that said he was handing over his baby extremely reluctantly, the analyst muttered, “Aidan”, and shook his head with regret.

  Craig nodded.

  “OK, good. Aidan gets the emergency calls, and he can take any follow-up interviews from those as well. If an ambulance or squad car went out to a nearby call during those few days, we need to know what they saw.”

  The mention of interviews made Davy feel slightly better about handing over his idea; much as in his dreams he was a warrior, he preferred to leave the risks of real life policing to the real live cops.

  Before Craig had time to move on Ash thought of something else.

  “I’ve just realised something! If the murder happened before the hotel opened, which it must have done for the bones to be in the foundations, then we can rule out any guests. And if the government had already handed over the land, which it must have done for a new hotel floor to be laid, then we can rule out the civil servants as well!”

  He was half-right and Craig told him why.

  “Good thought, and yes to the guests, but not necessarily to the civil servants. Our victim was buried by someone who knew that new foundations were being laid, and the civil servants who’d worked in the DoE building would have been far more aware of that and its likely timings, than the general public. As well as the builders etcetera, of course.”

  He had another thought and turned to Davy again. “As well as guards, building sites often have hoardings, and they’re usually put up by outside firms. Find out who erected the hoardings for The Tower site.”

  Liam interjected. “If there were hoardings then that should rule out passers-by seeing the wet concrete from the street.”

  Craig’s eyes widened. He was right; they might be able to rule out passers-by and opportunistic burial of the bones. But it would depend on several things, the presence of guards and hoardings, secure ones, being the most important. Although that still mightn’t rule out a civil servant who’d worked in the DoE building and knew all the site’s access points; building sites were rarely hermetically sealed. But it was something at least.

  He paused for a moment and when he spoke again it was with a list.

  “OK, Davy, you’re already on some of this, but just for clarity, Ash, you’d better take it all down too.”

  The junior analyst bowed his, for once undyed, dark head and started typing.

  “So, we need the details of the architects, surveyors, agents and solicitors for the sale and purchase of the DoE land back in oh-seven. Also, the building contractors for the hotel, including all sub-contractors, the site security-guards, hoarding, site lighting and signage suppliers. I also need the contacts for the civil servants associated with the sale of the land, The Barr Group who bought it, and let’s have more on The Monmouth Consortium who are buying it now as well.”

  He glanced across at his deputy who was now sitting, arms folded, in his chair. “Liam, are you getting this down on the board?”

  It made the D.C.I. jump up and start to scribble furiously; luckily for him Ash was willing to share his notes.

  When Craig had finally finished dictating he stood up.

  “OK, if I think of anything more I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, Liam, when you’ve finished that, allocate the tasks to everyone. I’ll be in my office thinking until we head down to the lab.”

  Although not necessarily about the case.

  ****

  Laganside. Katy Stevens’ Apartment.

  Katy held the gossamer-soft baby blanket against her cheek for a moment and allowed its warmth to caress her skin. Its sheer mohair tickled her and she giggled, just as she pictured her child someday doing the same.

  Her child. Her giggle became laughter, picturing what the words meant, and made her decide to repeat them aloud.

  “My child.”

  She listened as the words fell on the air and then adjusted them, the brief sentence sounding almost but not quite right.

  “My baby.”

  That was it. Baby. Its rounded syllables conjured up images of pink curved cheeks, downy hair and open-mouthed toothless smiles. She glanced at herself in the mirror, wondering whether the down would be fair like her hair or almost jet black like Marc’s.

  The thought brought her up short.

  Marc.

  She’d shied away from thinking his name for weeks. Not from any lack of love, that was always there, and far from fading because they were no longer together it seemed to have grown along with their child. No, she’d tried not to think of his name because to think it made it harder to imagine a life where she didn’t get to say it every day.

  She gave into a moment’s impulse and repeated, “Marc, Marc, Marc” aloud, before placing the name symbolically in her trunk along with the baby blanket and firmly shutting the lid.

  She wasn’t sure why she was pushing him away but she knew that she was. Her mother and Natalie had both asked why, without Natalie even being aware of her pregnancy. Judicious dressing and her limited weight gain meant that she’d managed to keep it concealed so far, and although Natalie was a doctor, as a general surgeon who never noticed anything outside her specialty she would have needed a babygro waved in her face for the penny to drop. But the next, final months would put paid to any doubt about her condition and then everyone would ask her the same question about Marc, and s
he wouldn’t be able to answer them either.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to be part of her and their baby’s lives; the moment she’d told him about the pregnancy in June the words, “Marry me” had jumped out of his mouth. But although he’d seemed happy she had seen and felt the fear that had accompanied his proposal, and with it her own fear that only obligation was prompting it had reared. And no matter how often or how solemnly he had repeated the request since, she couldn’t quash the feeling that without the baby he would never have come up with the idea.

  No, it wasn’t just a feeling; she knew that he wouldn’t have. She’d seen him arguing with his father after his sister Lucia’s engagement dinner and known instinctively that it had been about committing to her. If Marc hadn’t wanted commitment before she’d got pregnant then she didn’t want him to suggest it now, regardless of her mother beseeching her to, “Think of the baby not having its father there”.

  She knew that would never be the case; Marc would always be in his child’s life whether they were married or not, but she didn’t want him to marry her just because he thought it was the right thing to do. And as his frustration had grown with her stance over the previous few weeks her heels had dug even further in.

  At that moment Katy heard her own thoughts and realised that how full of stubborn pride they were; because Marc didn’t propose before I got pregnant I’m going to say no to him now, so there!

  That will make him suffer, Mister Independent-No-Ties, that will teach him. But teach him what? That she was putting her own annoyance at his lack of romance before what was best for their child?

  It made her feel ashamed suddenly. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t loved her before, because he had and had told her so every day for years, it was just that he hadn’t done things to the timetable that she had had in her head and had expected him to stick to, and for that he had to pay.

  Except… he wasn’t the only one who was paying, as her soggy pillow each morning proved, and in a few months time their child would be born without the security of two parents there every day and pay as well, and that would all be her fault.

  As she slumped down into an armchair the medic’s mind was already made up, now she just had to find a way to climb down off her high horse in a way that would prevent anyone saying, “I told you so”.

  After all, she might be coming to her senses, but she still had her pride, didn’t she? Whether that pride would be the cause of Katy Stevens losing what she really wanted in life would remain to be seen.

  ****

  The Northern Ireland Science Labs. Saintfield Road, Belfast.

  The Third Floor Forensic Offices.

  Des Marsham let his gaze roam randomly over the pile of plastic evidence bags in front of him, in the way that he always did at the beginning of a case. First a wide, general scan to gain an initial impression of what his CSIs had gathered, followed by the spreading out of the bags on his workbench so that there was a small space between them, allowing for a more intense, more personal gaze at each one. It was his way of saying to the universe, “if there’s anything here that will give me an answer quickly then let it jump out”, before he scrutinised each individual sample and then began his tests.

  It was a fanciful notion and the scientist knew it, but every so often it actually worked; as with the bullet whose end had been so brutally flattened that only contact with several hard surfaces before it had finally embedded itself in their victim’s flesh could have caused it, telling him that the shooter had been so inept that the missile had ricocheted all over the room before it had hit its mark, something that led them to the victim’s wife as his killer instead of their talented marksman of a son.

  But those moments of early glory that saw him home in time for dinner on the first day of a case were rare, and so, after a lengthy perusal of the small mound of bags yielded no revelation, the scientist placed each sample, bag and all, beneath the lens of his high-powered microscope for a closer, even longer look, before finally removing their contents to start his tests.

  So far the case had produced an unsatisfactory mishmash of evidence, apart from the victim’s bones which were John’s domain and currently situated three floors down. Undeterred, the forensic lead began scribbling notes, as a collection of hairs, fibres and metal found close to the body fell beneath his lens, trying to form first an impression of what sort of woman their victim might have been, and then an image of how she might have looked.

  Des had just decided that she had had long dark hair and had been wearing or carrying something red, when John Winter in his dissection room below removed the woman’s skull, already dusted and printed, from the bag that it was in. He set it on the sterile covering in front of him and started to study the angles and dents that might give him clues to their victim’s history and appearance, and even more usefully to her cause of death.

  It’s a strange thing about human beings, but their first gaze at others is almost always at the face; which isn’t merely conjecture but has been proved by scientific mapping of the movements of observers’ eyes. And of that gaze at a person’s face we are normally drawn first to their eyes and then their lips, before finally casting a glance at the overall shape, the summary telling us everything that we need to know about their sex, age and attractiveness for reproduction’s sake.

  John Winter knew that he was no different to anyone else in his observation patterns, but he added another point to the list, which was that when someone is newly dead we still look first at their face, yet not at their eyes so much as they are mostly closed. However, once all the business of flesh and muscle has been done with and we are reduced to nothing but bones, the skull itself still draws our gaze inexorably to where the eyes had once been, and that was where the pathologist was looking now.

  What he saw was a woman with larger than average eyes, set in a finely boned face. A woman whose dentition revealed she was unlikely to have been more than twenty, something that he would confirm later by examining her other bones and a forensic dentist her teeth. But for now, the woman’s skull held John’s interest, and he examined its foramen, sutures and sinuses with the eye of a connoisseur, his knowledge of bones sadly expanded by his periods spent working internationally, where mass graves after genocides had shown him far too many skeletal dead.

  The pathologist ran his gloved fingers slowly across each smooth prominence and traced each suture that held the skull’s component sections in place, finally conceding that there was no obvious injury present that could have contributed to their victim’s death. Eventually he set the skull to one side and began examining the other bones found so far; only the ribcage, part of the vertebral column and a femur had been discovered and none of them yielded any new clues that he could see.

  But he wasn’t a forensic anthropologist or dentist and he didn’t want to miss something vital, so John stripped off his gloves and made the relevant calls. If there was evidence of enhanced bone prominence where muscles had been attached that showed some had been more developed in life than others, or material in her teeth that could reveal where she had lived, then they needed to know and understand what it meant.

  Meanwhile, he would take some scrapings of the bones for a chemical breakdown that might reveal what nutrients had entered her body in life, in case they could learn something about her travels. But before he did that, John gazed at the skull again, suddenly feeling an urge to see the young woman’s face. So he made another request that he knew would eat a large hole in his budget, and then got on quietly with his other work until Craig and Liam arrived.

  ****

  The C.C.U.

  Craig had only been in his office for five minutes when a knock came on its door. The sojourn had been long enough for him to think about phoning Katy, but not enough for him to screw up the guts to actually perform the act. To be honest, he was getting a bit fed-up with his every suggestion to her being answered with a “no”, so, although he knew that he still loved her and would keep on trying
, well, frankly, he would have done that anyway for the sake of their child whether he’d still cared for her or not, he was glad of the interruption, if only to limit the time that he had available to beat himself up for being a coward.

  When no-one entered he knew that the knocker had to be one of the shyer or more polite members of his team, which limited it either an analyst or Annette, so he gave them a prompt.

  “Come in.”

  He was proved right when Davy entered, with a large roll of paper in his arms.

  “Sorry to bother you, chief, but these have just arrived.”

  Knowing immediately that they were floor-plans, Craig rose excitedly to his feet, glancing around for a free surface large enough to roll them out. There wasn’t one, so he ushered the analyst back out on to the floor and specifically to the usually unused area of the open-plan office to the rear of everyone’s desks.

  Hunkering down, he nodded Davy to help him roll out the paper and within a minute they were looking at all ten of The Howard Tower Hotel’s now half-demolished floors. Floors one to nine were identically laid out with bedrooms, their ensuite bathrooms and corridors, with the ground or entrance floor where the bones had been discovered containing a reception area, a gym and a spa.

  Liam strolled across to join them and stood over the men like a colossus surveying his empire. After a moment’s gazing at the plans, he asked two questions that Craig wished he had thought of himself.

  “Was there no basement? I thought hotels usually had basements, for boilers and storage and stuff. And did they definitely lay new foundations for the hotel? ’Cos they could’ve just built up from the DoE building’s original floor.”

  Craig glanced up at his deputy approvingly. Liam was almost ready to take the superintendent’s exam, or board as it was known, the only caveat being that he needed to control his tendency to put his foot in his mouth, diplomacy being one of the tedious requirements of rank. But the D.C.I. had a young family and kept insisting that he didn’t want a superintendent’s responsibility just yet thankfully, so hopefully they wouldn’t be breaking up their winning combo just yet.