She turned to see where it had come from, just as the scrawny figure of Ray Mercer entered the main room. Without anyone touching the music the sounds of Sinatra seemed to fade and Annette knew that she had to reach the reporter before any of the men did. She raced across the floor, slipping awkwardly in her high-heeled shoes, but she wasn’t quick enough to stop Craig seeing the reporter and in two strides he was by her side. She stood between the two men, feeling Craig straining at the leash and watching as Mercer’s face contorted into a sneer.
Her eyes said ‘leave now, for pity’s sake’, but Mercer had come to say something and no amount of pleading was going to shut his mouth before one of the men’s fists did.
“Well, well, it’s party time at the zoo. So this is how cops and doctors play. It’ll make a lovely article, especially now I’ve got a photo.”
Annette could feel Craig’s temper building and she willed him to say nothing. It was a forlorn hope, but his voice was cooler than she could have hoped for and for a moment she thought that things might still be OK.
“Why are you here, Mercer? Don’t you have a hole to crawl into?”
The journalist’s eyes narrowed. “I’m here because you are, Craig, just like I intend to be everywhere you go in future. You cost me my job, so I’m freelance now. That’ll give me plenty of time to make yours and your family’s lives hell.”
John and Natalie heard something was wrong and emerged from the kitchen, just as Mercer added.
“Friends and girlfriends too. I’m going to dig up every dirty little secret that you’re desperate to hide and plaster it all over the press.” He stared at Katy and Natalie in turn. “Every malpractice suit, every bad decision.” His eyes swivelled towards Jake and Ken. “Every one night stand that you don’t want anyone to know about.”
Liam stepped forward and Mercer grinned maliciously. “I’m particularly going to take my time with you, Cullen. I’m going to dig back through all your years on the force and find something to bury you with.”
The only thing holding Craig back was that he was in someone else’s home. John saw there was still a chance to stop things and his voice echoed across the room.
“Get out, Mercer. You’re a sad little man who can’t be happy unless you’re making someone else miserable.”
Mercer replied by closing the distance between them as John moved Natalie quickly out of the way. He brought his face close to John’s and whispered something in his ear. No-one else heard it, but Craig saw his friend blanch and in seconds he’d crossed the room, his fist curled to strike. Katy dashed after him and just as Craig’s arm rose she shouted out his name.
“Marc! No!”
Mercer hadn’t moved and wasn’t defending himself and suddenly Craig saw the blindingly obvious. This was what he’d wanted. Not for John or Liam or Jake to lose it, but him. Mercer wanted him to hit him so he could get him thrown off the force. He knew he had a temper and he also knew he was more likely to use it in defence of someone else.
As Craig’s fist fell the momentum was so strong that he couldn’t halt its progress; the only thing that he could do was turn away. Perhaps he didn’t really want to stop. He was so angry that it had to be satisfied somehow. All his months of guilt and pain had to find somewhere to go.
For a moment he was deaf to everything except the ringing in his ears, and the only things he could see were Mercer’s sneer and Katy’s shocked blue eyes. Then the blood reddening his sleeve and spraying across John’s maple floor and the glittering shards of glass at his feet made things feel surreal. Detached. Nothing to do with him.
He felt nothing as the blood spread and no pain as his knees hit the floor. Nothing except a sudden peace that made the Christmas tree lights fade away.
Chapter T
wenty-One
2nd January 2015
Craig gazed at his bandaged right arm as if it didn’t belong to him. It almost hadn’t; severed arteries were hard to fix and torn tendons a challenge to mend. But the surgeons had managed, just. Five hours in theatre, with Natalie gowned and masked, watching the plastic surgeon like a hawk. That’s what he’d been told anyway; he had no memory of events after Mercer had threatened John.
He’d lost a lot of blood and it had been a stupid thing to do. And yet…
The woman’s voice broke through his thoughts.
“You’re smiling, Superintendent.”
Yes he was. He knew why, and he knew that to say why would land him on a psychiatric hold, and make Katy and his mother cry again. So instead he turned away from the Sycamore tree and buried his dark thoughts, preparing to cooperate.
Punching the glass had been a stupid thing to do and yet… In that moment he’d felt a freedom that he’d never felt before. Free of guilt for the first time in months, free of the murderers they locked away, free of the problems the whole world faced.
It was indulgence and it was selfish and he would have to wait till it was his time to go to feel it again, that or make the people that he loved cry. He stole a last glance into the abyss before it closed for another few years then he smiled again and answered the woman’s unvoiced question.
“I think that I’m ready to talk.”
THE END
C
ore Characters in the Craig Crime Novels
Superintendent Marc (Marco) Craig: Craig is a sophisticated, single, forty-four-year-old. Born in Northern Ireland, he is of Northern Irish/Italian extraction, from a mixed religious background but agnostic. An ex-grammar schoolboy and Queen’s University Law graduate, he went to London to join The Met (The Metropolitan Police) at 22, rising in rank through its High Potential Development Training Scheme. He returned to Belfast in 2008 after fifteen years away.
He is a driven, very compassionate, workaholic, with an unfortunate temper that he struggles to control and a tendency to respond with his fists. His girlfriend of one year, Katy Stevens, is a consultant physician at the local St Mary’s Healthcare Trust.
He lives alone in a modern apartment block in Stranmillis, near the university area of Belfast. His parents, his extrovert mother Mirella (an Italian pianist) and his quiet father Tom (an ex-university lecturer in Physics) live in Holywood town, six miles away. His rebellious ten years younger sister, Lucia, works as the manager of a local charity and also lives in Belfast.
Craig is now a Superintendent heading up Belfast’s Murder Squad, based in the thirteen storey Co-ordinated Crime Unit (C.C.U.) in Pilot Street, in the Sailortown area of Belfast’s Docklands. He loves the sea, sails when he has the time and is generally very sporty. He loves music by Snow Patrol and follows Manchester United and Northern Ireland’s football team, and Ulster Rugby.
D.C.I. Liam Cullen: Craig’s Detective Chief Inspector. Liam is a forty-nine-year-old former RUC officer from Crossgar in Northern Ireland, who transferred into the PSNI in 2001 following the Patton Reforms. He has lived and worked in Northern Ireland all his life and has spent thirty years in the police force, twenty of them policing Belfast, including during The Troubles.
He is married to the forty-year-old, long suffering Danielle (Danni), a part-time nursery nurse, and they have a four-year-old daughter Erin and a two-year-old son called Rory. Liam is unsophisticated, indiscreet and hopelessly non-PC, but he’s a hard worker with a great knowledge of the streets and has a sense of humour that makes everyone, even the Chief Constable, laugh at times.
D.I. Annette McElroy: Annette is Craig’s Detective Inspector who has lived and worked in Northern Ireland all her life. She is a forty-seven-year-old ex-nurse who, after her nursing degree, worked as a nurse for thirteen years and then, after a career break, retrained and has now been in the police for an equal length of time. She’s in the process of divorcing her husband Pete, a P.E teacher at a state secondary school, because of his infidelity and violence. They have two children, a boy and a girl (Jordan and Amy), both teenagers. Annette is kind and conscientious with an especially good eye for detail. She also has very good people skills but i
s a bit of goody-two-shoes. Since her marriage broke down, she’s acquired a newly glamorous image and is seeing Mike Augustus, a pathologist who works with Dr John Winter.
Nicky Morris: Nicky Morris is Craig’s thirty-nine-year-old personal assistant. She used to be PA to Detective Chief Superintendent (D.C.S.) Terry ‘Teflon’ Harrison. Nicky is a glamorous Belfast mum, married to Gary, who owns a small garage, and is the mother of a teenage son, Jonny. She comes from a solidly working class area in East Belfast, just ten minutes’ drive from Docklands.
She is bossy, motherly and street-wise and manages to organise a reluctantly-organised Craig very effectively. She has a very eclectic fashion sense, and there is an ongoing innocent office flirtation between her and Liam.
Davy Walsh: The Murder Squad’s twenty-seven-year-old computer analyst. A brilliant but shy EMO, Davy’s confidence has grown during his time on the team, making his lifelong stutter on ‘s’ and ‘w’ diminish, unless he’s under stress.
His father is deceased and Davy lives at home in Belfast with his mother and grandmother. He has an older sister, Emmie, who studied English at university. His girlfriend of two years, Maggie Clarke, is a journalist at The Belfast Chronicle.
Dr John Winter: John is the forty-four-year-old Director of Pathology for Northern Ireland, one of the youngest ever appointed. He’s brilliant, eccentric, gentlemanly and really likes the ladies, but he met his match in Natalie Winter, a surgeon at St Mary’s Trust, and has now been happily married for seven months.
He was Craig’s best friend at school and university and remained in Northern Ireland to build his medical career. He is now internationally respected in his field. John persuaded Craig that the newly peaceful Northern Ireland was a good place to return to and assists Craig’s team with cases whenever he can. He is obsessed with crime in general and US police shows in particular.
D.C.S. Terry (Teflon) Harrison: Craig’s old boss. The fifty-six-year-old Detective Chief Superintendent is based at the Headquarters building in Limavady in the northwest Irish countryside. He lives in a converted farm house at Toomebridge with his homemaker wife Mandy and their thirty-year-old daughter Sian, a marketing consultant. He has also had a trail of mistresses, often younger than his daughter.
Harrison is tolerable as a boss as long as everything’s going well, but he is acutely politically aware and a bit of a snob, and very quick to pass on any blame to his subordinates (hence the Teflon nickname). He sees Craig as a rival and resents his friendship with John Winter, who wields a great deal of power in Northern Ireland.
Key B
ackground Locations
The majority of locations referenced in the book are real, with some exceptions.
Northern Ireland (real): Set in the northeast of the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland was created in 1921 by an act of British parliament. It forms part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and shares a border to the south and west with the Republic of Ireland. The Northern Ireland Assembly holds responsibility for a range of devolved policy matters. It was established by the Northern Ireland Act 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement.
Belfast (real): Belfast is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, set on the flood plain of the River Lagan. The seventeenth largest city in the United Kingdom and the second largest in Ireland, it is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
The Dockland’s Co-ordinated Crime Unit (The C.C.U. - fictitious): The modern thirteen storey headquarters building is situated in Pilot Street in Sailortown, a section of Belfast between the M1 and M2 undergoing massive investment and re-development. The C.C.U. hosts the police murder, gang crimes, vice and drug squad offices, amongst others.
Sailortown (real): An historic area of Belfast on the River Lagan that was a thriving area between the 16th -20th centuries. Many large businesses grew in the area, ships docked for loading and unloading and their crews from far flung places such as China and Russia mixed with a local Belfast population of ship’s captains, chandlers, seamen and their families.
Sailortown was a lively area where churches and bars fought for the souls and attendance of the residents and where many languages were spoken each day. The basement of the Rotterdam Bar, at the bottom of Clarendon Dock, acted as the overnight lock-up to prisoners being deported to the Antipodes on boats the next morning, and the stocks which held the prisoners could still be seen until the 1990s.
During the years of World War Two the area was the most bombed area of the UK outside Central London, as the Germans tried to destroy Belfast’s ship building capacity. Sadly the area fell into disrepair in the 1970s/1980s when the motorway extension led to compulsory purchases of many homes and businesses, and decimated the Sailortown community. The rebuilding of the community has now begun, with new families moving into starter homes and professionals into expensive dockside flats.
The Pathology Labs (fictitious): The labs, set on Belfast’s Saintfield Road as part of a large Science Park, are where Dr John Winter, Northern Ireland’s Head of Pathology, and his co-worker, Dr Des Marsham, Head of Forensic Science, carry out the post-mortem and forensic examinations that help Craig’s team solve their cases.
St Mary’s Healthcare Trust (fictitious): St Mary’s is one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK. It is spread over hospital sites across Belfast, including the main Royal St Mary’s Hospital site and the Maternity, Paediatric and Endocrine (M.P.E.) unit, a stand- alone site on Belfast’s Lisburn Road, in the University sector of the city.
The Sixth Estate (The Craig Crime Series) Page 32
