The Killing Year (The Craig Crime Series Book 17) Page 9

  The ex-Director of Police Intelligence glared at Craig through eyes that had seen too much wine, aged and cynical far beyond her forty years by the things that she’d experienced and heard as a spook; things that Joe Public would find incredible even on the silver screen. Susan Richie had been Director when Craig had been given oversight of Intelligence, and when he’d found out just how sharp her practice was, even in the famously cutthroat field of spying, he had kicked her into touch, AKA the world of staff education. He’d been on her hit-list ever since and had spent the previous year expecting an attack from the rear, but the last thing that he had ever expected to see was Susan Richie in a murder team.

  From the moment she entered the room it became a struggle for Craig to say anything without being heckled from the floor, and he felt his temper straining at the leash. He called for a ten-minute comfort break and beckoned Liam to join him in the hallway, taking up position far enough away from the room to prevent them being overheard.

  Liam got in first.

  “What the hell is Richie doing here? You booted her to staff training.”

  Craig raked his dark hair back from his face. “No bloody idea, but I’m going to find out.”

  A call to Donna Scott gave him his answer and Craig relayed it with a sigh.

  “Seems the Chief Constable thought Susan’s abilities were wasted in training, so he transferred her to the Ballymena Murder Squad in June.”

  “Nice of him to tell you, I don’t think.” Liam propped himself against the nearest wall. “Well, at least we’ll only have to deal with her at the updates.” He frowned suddenly, realising something. “Here! That means I’ll be the one having to listen to mouthing off!”

  “Better you than me. She and I would fight non-stop.”

  Before his deputy could disagree, Craig had a shocking thought.

  “What if they nominate her for the secondment? She seemed pretty popular in that room.”

  Liam groaned loudly. “Surely to God they’d have more sense. Anyway, can’t you object?”

  “After taking their cases away from them? I don’t think so.” He thought quickly. “OK, look, if it comes to the worst and they do nominate her, I’ll say we’ll take two secondees and you quickly invite your mate Deidre as well. She seems reasonable and she’s from County Down, so we can say we wanted one from each geographic area.”

  Liam nodded. “Aye, she’s OK, is Dee. She’s always had a crush on me, you know.” He stared wistfully into the distance. “We might have had a thing, if times had been different.”

  Craig didn’t bother to point out that Liam thought half the women in the police force harboured a secret lust for him, and he couldn’t possibly be right about them all.

  He turned back towards the meeting room, girding his loins for the final half-hour.

  “Let’s get this public flogging over with. We’ve got some real work to do.”

  ****

  The Pathology Lab. Dissection Room One. 10 a.m.

  It was the first time that day that John had managed to look up without his head swimming and having to reach for support, which was progress. The whole thing was a salutary lesson on the evils of boozing during the working week and prompted him to start sermonising.

  “My father used to call it ‘The Drink’ you know.”

  Mike wondered if he’d missed some earlier conversation and then realised that it had taken place inside John’s head. He stopped dissecting and turned to face him.

  “Does that mean you were drinking last night?”

  He already knew the answer but thought feigning ignorance was preferable to implying that he’d already guessed. That would be tantamount to calling his boss a drunk. Definitely a career limiting act.

  John nodded carefully, his dehydrated brain still giving him pain, and answered in a simultaneously boastful and guilty voice.

  “I was. A lot.”

  Mike sensed that this was working up to a full conversation, so he looked around for somewhere to sit. John continued talking, waving his scalpel as he did.

  “My dad refused to have alcohol in the house, so I didn’t have my first drink until I went to Queen’s.”

  “Was Marc with you?”

  John smiled at the memory. “Indeed, he was. Both at university and last night, and both times he had to put me to bed.”

  There was that guilty-proud tone again.

  “He always held his drink better than me. The sporty guys always did. Anyway… my father used to blame ‘The Drink’ for most of society’s ills, and the rest he used to blame on a lack of shame.”

  John had been brought up the only child of academic parents, both in their forties when he was born; it had been a strict, solitary and not particularly playful childhood until he’d met the sporty, outgoing Craig at twelve.

  Mike perked up at the possibility of salaciousness.

  “Shame as in…?”

  “Just shame generally.” A smile played at the edge of John’s lips. “Although he did quote this one parable…well, no, not really a parable. They’re from the bible, aren’t they? It was more like a piece of urban advice. It was about this lad who had a one-night stand with some girl and then in the morning he felt-”

  Mike cut in. “Shame?”

  John nodded like a village elder. “The Shame, to be precise. That’s what my dad called it anyway. The moral being that you might well go out and enjoy the sins of the flesh, but you would always feel terrible afterwards.”

  The two men stared at each other for a moment and then burst out laughing.

  “I doubt that, don’t you?”

  It spurred John to turn back to his work. “Wishful thinking on my dad’s part, I think, but it kept me from making too big a mess of my life until I was qualified.”

  He brandished his scalpel with renewed vigour, all guilt and shame now forgotten.

  “OK, ten more minutes on this, Mike, and then we’ll open them both up.”

  ****

  By the time Craig and Liam re-entered the squad-room, as predicted with two new female DCIs attached to the team for the duration of their case, the place was a hive of industry. Davy and Ash were hammering away at their keyboards like ninjas and Aidan and Andy were hunkering amidst two separate forests of paper spread out across the floor.

  Craig nodded Liam to organise some drinks and walked across to the ex-Vice DCI, gazing at the ghoulish images encircling him.

  “Post-mortem photos?”

  Aidan Hughes answered without looking up. “Yep. I’m trying to make sense of the wounds.” He jumped to his feet and angled his head sideways, trying for another perspective. “So far, they look pretty random to me. There are two head wounds, five on the legs, three front and back of the abdomen, and eight in total on the hands, arms and chest.”

  Craig screwed up his eyes, as if a pinhole camera view might make everything look clearer. It didn’t.

  He shrugged. “Right well, I’ll leave you in peace then. You’ll sort it out eventually.” He turned towards Andy’s forest and then turned back. “I should probably let you know. There’ll be two DCIs from the Antrim and Down murder teams seconded to us for the rest of the case.”

  He swallowed hard, the piece of information that Liam had imparted during their return lift trip still leaving him slightly shocked. He’d known Aidan Hughes since school and he’d always liked him, so how he could possibly have dated Susan Richie, and not just for a week but for two whole years, just didn’t compute at all. Maybe she had hidden depths that he knew nothing about, although in her case the phrase conjured up images of a dungeon.

  “One of them is Susan Richie, Aidan.”

  Hughes’ pale blue eyes widened in shock and his next word emerged in a squeak. “What?”

  “The others voted for her, probably as the DCI most likely to give us grief.”

  The Vice detective started babbling. “But she was in Intelligence… and… and then in Staff Ed, and there was no way she was ever leaving there, no way in
hell, that’s what everyone said-”

  Craig cut him off with a shake of the head. “What can I say? I was as shocked as you to hear the C.C. had transferred her to the Ballymena Murder Squad in June. It was a hell of a surprise when she walked into the meeting, I can tell you.”

  Liam had walked up behind the men so quietly that they both jumped as his voice boomed out. “Fair threw us both, it did. Old Susan Bitchie will give us hell.”

  Craig tutted. “Keep that nickname to yourself, Liam. I need a complaint from her like another hole in my head.”

  The one he already had from being shot on a case eighteen months’ before still ached every other day.

  “The good news is that we have Deidre Murray joining us as well, so hopefully she’ll keep Susan in check.”

  He glanced apologetically at Aidan’s still stunned face, then crossed quickly to where Andy was now sitting cross-legged amidst his forest with a sketch pad on his lap, marking the angles of the bodies’ disposals on a page.

  To Craig it just looked like a series of random lines and he said so. The DCI nodded up at him.

  “But we have to assume the angles have some relevance to our perp’s motive for killing.”

  Liam joined them, abandoning Aidan to his despair.

  “Motive? How do you work that out? They could just be part of his MO, or maybe his signature, like the alcohol and superglue.”

  Andy rose to his feet and shook his head.

  “Sorry, no they couldn’t.”

  He walked to his desk with the others following and woke up his PC.

  “OK, we know a signature is something the killer needs to do, psychologically, to get them off during each kill. That means it’s pretty fixed e.g. killers who always cut off an ear at each murder, or comb the victim’s hair or wash the body after death. That sort of thing. The modus operandi on the other hand is what the offender must do in order to commit the crime, like have a means of controlling his victims at the crime scene such as tying them up, or a weapon to kill them with. And leaving someone at an angle won’t help get them dead.” He warmed to his theme. “Also, an MO is a learned behaviour that can change, but a signature doesn’t change unless the killer’s spiralling out of control, and that would be someone far less organised than this.”

  Craig perched on a nearby desk. “OK, so we have an organised killer, what’s your point? Each victim was left at an angle, so surely that’s the same signature.”

  Andy shook his head emphatically. “No, it isn’t, because the angle was different in each case.”

  Craig nodded, suddenly understanding, but Liam was still looking blank. Andy elaborated.

  “OK, look. A signature is identical each time, unless or until the killer changes, perhaps spiralling into madness towards the end of a spree. Agreed?”

  He was answered by two nods.

  “So…if the angles were part of a signature we’d expect at least the early victims to be left lying at exactly the same angle, even if maybe some of the later ones altered position slightly, say because the killer was losing control. But right from the start of this case we’ve had different angles of display with each victim.”

  Liam gave a loud groan.

  “Oh, crap. A clever perp. I hate clever perps. What happened to the good old days when the dumb bunnies lifted up their masks for a scratch right in front of the CCTV?”

  Andy disagreed. “Our killer can’t be that smart or they wouldn’t have left us so many clues.”

  Craig shrugged. “You’re assuming the clues will lead back to them, or that they believe they will. All of this could be a diversion, just to throw us off their track.”

  Andy’s eyes widened in surprise, but he moved on.

  “And look at the alcohol…well, yes, it’s consistent in that it’s present in every case, but is it in exactly the same place each time? And used for the same thing? We need more on the alcohol and more background on each Vic’s drinking habits before we can say that. Equally, the superglue-”

  Craig raised a hand, cutting him off. “So, you’re saying that all of these things are telling us something about the killer and/or their motive, rather than being things that they obsessively needed to do to enjoy the killing.”

  Andy nodded. “Yes. Well, maybe not all, and I don’t know which ones yet, but generally yes.”

  Liam scoffed. “That’s as clear as mud.”

  Andy ignored him, pointing to his PC screen. “These are the angles that the bodies were left at, the same as in my sketch.”

  A series of thick black lines and blue dotted ones appeared on the screen.

  “The black ones are male victims and the women are blue dots.”

  The three detectives stared at the screen for a full minute, each deep in their own thoughts. Finally, Andy spoke again.

  “OK. Liam, say the first thing that comes into your head. To describe what you’re seeing.”

  “A barcode.”

  Andy turned to Craig. “Chief?”

  “They might form a shape of some sort, in 3-D.”

  Andy smiled. “They’re both on my list, as is that the lines might form a symbol. I was going to try asking the rest of the team for suggestions and then look into each one in detail.”

  Craig smiled at his approach. “Go for it, but don’t forget Davy’s pattern recognition programmes as well. The computer can run those angles through thousands of options.”

  The artistic DCI smiled. “Already doing it, but…”

  “But you think this is going to turn out to be something personal to the killer.”

  “Yes. And there’s something more. Does anyone else think this feels theatrical? Like the killer’s putting on some sort of show?”

  Craig was inclined to agree.

  ****

  Near Strangford Lough. 11.30 a.m.

  Sarah Reilly was shocked that she was still alive, but even more shocked that no-one had come to her rescue. When a health visitor had disappeared from a local practice two years’ earlier, a manhunt had been launched. She’d been found eventually, after four days spent locked in a patient’s cellar; the victim of his unheralded psychotic break. It had prompted the introduction of new safety measures and checks on professionals after six hours out of contact, and she more than qualified for that label now.

  The GP pictured the scene at her surgery: Mrs Passmore flapping around reception in hour seven, frantically calling her mobile, her home, and then the home visit number, all unsuccessfully, before finally knocking on the senior partner’s door, timidly, for fear of having her head bitten off. Roger was acerbic and difficult to approach, but if she’d ever needed someone in a crisis the GP was the man that she would choose. He would have done the right thing as soon as he’d known she was missing, called the police, and because of the circumstances they would have started a search.

  The medic shivered suddenly but this time not from the cold. The light overhead said that it was mid-morning and she had survived a freezing cold night; that was the good news. The bad was that implied they would have been searching for her now for hours and yet still no-one had come, which meant that her abductor had her hidden somewhere well out of the way.

  She slid down her prison’s muddy wall into a propped position, her bottom hovering just above the water level, regretting again her choice of a thin jumper dress the day before. At least she’d had the sense to wear leggings and a coat, which thankfully her captor hadn’t relieved her of; she doubted that she would have survived until now without both.

  Suddenly she felt a flicker of hope; her warder must have known that! He would have known that he could have killed her rapidly just by leaving her without a covering, so that must mean he didn’t really want her dead. Perhaps some part of him intended to let her go eventually? Common sense and an inherent mistrust of optimism made her reject the idea instantly. Whatever plans her captor had for her she doubted that they included her going home.

  The GP’s thoughts returned immediately to the police sea
rch. Where could she be if she hadn’t been found in so many hours? Belfast was a small city without a lot of wasteland that hadn’t been turned into either makeshift football pitches or fly-tipping grounds, yet she’d seen and heard nobody the whole time she’d been there, and she couldn’t even hear traffic noise. Was she even still close to the city? The presence of the cows didn’t immediately rule that out; there were after all small farms on parts of its perimeter.

  She nodded firmly to herself, she had to believe that she was and that search parties were out looking. They were bound to find her soon. The choice was either that belief or start to despair and pray for a quick death.

  Sarah wasn’t sure which frightened her more, her killer returning and doing their worst, or him not returning at all. As her medical training forced her to face the facts of death from cold and starvation, the medic began to pray that he would come back soon.

  ****

  UKUF Headquarters: Garvan’s Bookmakers. East Belfast.

  Liam respected his boss as a man as much as he respected any member of his own sex, which generally speaking wasn’t a lot. In his experience men were only as good as they needed to be most of the time, whether they got there via a fear of God upbringing like him, peer pressure, or a terror of jail. But where Craig rose above most of the others was his copper’s instinct and his brain, which usually combined to make him right where others were wrong, and enabled him to spot the least likely candidate for a murder as the one who had actually done the deed. All while the rest of them were still searching for a bogey man.

  So it was without much hope of being right that Liam went to chase down his drugs lead, having dragged the name of Judith Roper’s informant, John McCausland, out of her PA. It had led him, not unexpectedly, to Belfast’s netherworld; that frontier between the world of kittens and puppies that his kids inhabited and the city’s really hard-core scum. The location of this particular boundary was in a place that he knew well; the bookies headquarters of his old adversary Tommy Hill’s loyalist gang, now headed by one of Hill’s acolytes, Rory McCrae.