by Paul Charles
McCusker left O’Carroll bringing Larkin up to speed with the recent developments on the Brothers O’Neill kidnapping, as the super seemed to have christened the case.
Mrs Sheila Lawson, her famous fresh brewed coffee and Jaffa Cakes were nowhere in sight.
Chapter Eleven
As McCusker was driven down Cyprus Avenue, by the aforementioned DS WJ Barr, he wondered what had happened on this leafy upmarket street that would have troubled a teenage Van Morrison so.
Barr, a much more considerate driver than O’Carroll, carefully parked the unmarked car alongside three yellow-and-blue-chequerboard police patrol cars, one Land Rover, an ambulance, and one large Scene of Crime portable wagon.
They remained in the car for a few minutes while the DS briefed McCusker on what he knew.
At exactly 8:40 a.m. a Miss Julia Whitlock made a 999 call. As a recording of the telephone conversation, courtesy of Police Control at Castlereagh, would later prove, Miss Whitlock was in a hysterical and distraught state. She had apparently, as was her usual Sunday morning habit, gone to collect her brother, Adam.
When she’d arrived that morning she discovered her brother’s front door was already open. She noticed it hadn’t been forced. She claimed she knew she shouldn’t have entered the house but something stronger pulled her, in spite of herself. She thought her brother might have been in danger and she was helpless in trying to resist being there for him, whatever that entailed. She was relieved to find the living room, bathroom, main bedroom, spare bedroom, and makeshift office-cum-gym were all empty, although she did note that her brother’s bedroom had been slept in. She claimed her brother was good at looking after himself, as in being able to make his own bed every day and keep the house relatively tidy.
She sat down in the living room, relieved that nothing untoward appeared to have happened. She admitted to herself that she had feared the worst. Perhaps her brother had been burgled and he had probably gone off to report the incident to the police. Her heart was still pounding and she was surprised by how much the whole incident had exhausted her, so she went to her brother’s kitchen to help herself to a strong, heavily sugared cup of tea to fight off the effects of the shock to her system.
Julia Whitlock’s legs completely buckled under her and she collapsed into his splattered blood when she saw her brother, Adam Whitlock’s, sad remains.
Still panicking – fiercely because her brother’s blood was all over her – she called the police on her mobile. When two uniformed constables arrived to secure the scene she had been screaming so loudly her throat was raw and her voice was totally shot. She filled them in as best she could and was then sedated by members of the ambulance crew who had just turned up.
Barr then checked his notebook.
The deceased was a thirty-three-year-old American, living in Belfast since his university days and working at Mason, Burr & Co., one of the oldest firms of solicitors in the city. His sister claimed she would pick him up every Sunday morning to drive to the Queen’s University Sports Complex in the Botanic Gardens. Rain or shine, they would do a little light training, have a fruit juice, stroll along the Lagan side on the Stranmillis Embankment, have a coffee, collect their Sunday newspapers, and finally she’d drop him back home again by 11.30 a.m., at the latest, whereupon they’d both go about their own business for the remainder of the day.
That was as much as Barr knew. He and McCusker exited the car and simultaneously crunched their way up the gravel drive to the grand red-bricked, Edwardian, detached house, down on Cyprus Avenue.
McCusker disliked the new casual dress code (or lack of it) of modern day detectives. He liked detectives to be smartly turned out, mainly for two important reasons that were lurking in his subconscious. Firstly, their salary was paid by the general public, therefore it seemed only fitting that they would be properly turned out while serving the same public. Secondly, in today’s society it was easier to pick out suited, shirted, and tied people in crowds. However, equally he accepted that there were exceptions to every rule and some detective inspectors and even superintendents thrived on scruffing up in order to blend in better with their foe. DS WJ Barr was not one of those detectives. He was just under five foot, ten inches, slim, in good shape with neatly side-parted brown hair and very well turned out in his white chinos, black blazer, blue shirt and his one token to a laid-back approach: his red Manchester United tie.
McCusker accepted that these thoughts about the collective dress sense of the PSNI served only to delay his first examination of the corpse. He also knew, having been through this seventeen times before, that when he eventually set eyes on the victim for the first time, his tongue would be tied every time he tried to speak.
Nonetheless he was forced to try when he came upon the remains of Adam Whitlock in the deceased’s kitchen. “Oh my Go….” McCusker could not remember a time when “remains” more aptly described a corpse.
Thanks to DS Barr, McCusker was already dressed head to toe in a blue translucent suit with only the skin of his face uncovered. He had to take a step backward and steady himself on the back of one of the six matching white farmhouse-style chairs positioned around a large, rectangular pine table. He was tempted to sit down for a moment or two but was aware he was being discreetly observed by other members of the Custom House CSI team.
One of these was the pathologist Anthony Robertson, a Scot, who was quietly going about his work. McCusker focused on Robertson’s examination as a way of escaping the undeniable pull of the corpse.
The pathologist had already sealed the victim’s hands in plastic bags to protect the potential evidence the perfectly manicured fingernails might be hiding. He was focusing on the corpse’s head, which was slumped away from McCusker. It appeared that someone had made an attempt at severing it completely.
Robertson’s progress distracted him just long enough for his delaying tactic to be effective and the shock of the scene started to ebb away. It was at this point that McCusker felt strong enough to address the corpse as the primary source of evidence, rather than a victim. He clicked into gear; his motive to find who did this to Adam Whitlock and prevent it from happening to anyone else.
Whitlock’s matching royal blue sweats, trainer bottoms and shoeless white socks were totally drenched in blood. It was hard to tell the original colour of his blood-matted hair, which looked like it had been spiked by a cricketer’s barber.
McCusker knelt down beside the corpse on his hunkers. Through the mass of cuts, welts, and blood McCusker thought he could make out a face; thought he got a glimpse of the man the corpse had once been.
When he looked into the eyes of a stranger, McCusker often wondered whether it was possible to deduce the physical battles their body had been through, just by reading their face. Did that person smoke, eat bad food, drink too much – would these indulgences manifest themselves physically? He always found it funny that unhealthy people compensated with a bit of yoghurt or honey in their diet, like this would somehow balance out their junk food diet. What could the lines on a face tell you? What could an observer detect from the purity in the whites of the eyes? Would it be possible to tell how much time the stranger had left? He sighed loudly and accepted that no matter how much of this was possible, nobody could ever have accurately predicted Adam Whitlock’s demise; what had he done in his life that had resulted in his body being destroyed in such a gruesome way?
On first glance the only distinguishing feature on the corpse was that his fair, sun-deprived skin looked like it had never once been subjected to a shaving blade.
Before McCusker stood up again he silently muttered the two questions he always found himself asking the corpse: “Who did you love? What were your dreams?”
At a suitable break in the proceedings Barr introduced McCusker to Robertson.
“Bloody frenzied attack,” Robertson started off in his broad dialect. “It’s impossible to say which, if any, of these slashes killed him.”
“Surely it must
have been more than one of them?” McCusker offered, thankful to be back on solid ground again.
“Well on first examination all of the cuts look somewhat superficial,” Robertson said. He sounded like Billy Connolly on a half dose of Valium. The only characteristic missing from the comedian’s repertoire was the frequent “Aye.”
“Hatchet?” McCusker guessed, if only from the amount of spilt blood.
“Nah, much smaller, I’m pretty sure it was more like a knife,” Robertson assessed, “and I’d have to say we’re looking at the work of someone who didn’t know what they were doing with the weapon, whatever it was.”
“Male or female?” McCusker asked, happy to have met a pathologist who seemed happy to entertain thoughts this early.
“I’ll be able to take a better stab, oops sorry…I meant…I will be able to take a better guess at that when I get him on the slab, that’ll be first thing in the morning.”
McCusker kept looking at Robertson.
“At least you have the decency not to ask me the question in your eyes, but I will, at the very least, hazard a guess for you, if you’d don’t hold me to it?” Robertson responded.
“But of course,” McCusker agreed.
“Okay, if you work in the midnight to 3 a.m. window, I don’t think you’ll be far wrong.”
Barr duly noted this down in his notebook.
“Aye,” Robertson said, when he noticed Barr’s diligence, “and could you also laddie note down there in your wee book that I said I didn’t want to be held to it.”
“I already had, sir,” Barr confirmed, as he hit a full stop somewhere on his page as if to emphasise the fact.
* * *
The house wasn’t as large as it appeared from the outside. The décor was too modern, the colour selection too bland, the lighting trying too hard to be hip and cool. The overall result was much too disrespectful to the integrity of the house for McCusker’s taste. It was clean and tidy though.
The fingerprint girl reported she was finding several good examples at the scene. There were no traces of blood outside of the kitchen. There had not appeared to be a robbery. There were no broken windows. The CSI team couldn’t find a safe, a stash of cash, or any drugs or pills.
The house down on Cyprus Avenue could have been anyone’s house really. Well, anyone who could afford the £500,000 to £600,000 it would take to secure a house in that area, that was.
As Robertson supervised the removal of the body, McCusker and Barr quickly examined the living room with its hi-tech entertainment centre, antique drinks cabinet, three large comfortable and expensive-looking matching leather chairs, and quite a few pieces of modern art, both sculptures and paintings.
Next stop for McCusker and Barr was Adam Whitlock’s bedroom and en suite bathroom. They discovered nothing untoward there either. The only medication was Strepsils (several packets) and Aconite dispensers (a few) in the medicine chest above the bathroom sink, along with his wet-shave gear, toothpaste, toothbrushes (two, one unused) and some Armani body spray. His largish wardrobe housed clean shirts, mostly white with a few blue; expensive looking jeans and trousers; one silvery blue two-piece suit; several jackets; one leather jacket; drawers with fresh underclothes and socks; and maybe half a dozen loud ties.
“Let’s hope there are more pickings in the office-cum-gym,” McCusker muttered, as Barr led him in that direction.
The office was obviously where Adam Whitlock spent the majority of his time. The gym section was nothing more than a bench with weights, a rowing machine and a cycling machine, all tidily placed in the far corner of the room, next to a large window overlooking his back garden.
By contrast his desk was placed just behind the stripped pine door (the only such door in the house) into the room closest to the top of the stairs. The desk was tidy with a Dell computer set up in the centre, a printer to the left, and a radio (tuned to Radio Ulster); a pen and pencil pot and a notepad to the right. The drawers contained files, blank paper and designer stationary. Each of the three non-window walls were decorated with photos: on the wall to the left of the entrance door hung a large Getty print of Paul Newman, cigarette at the draw. Next wall to the right had a large eye-catching colour photograph of Belfast’s city lights, then the window wall, and then on the fourth wall a group of three identically sized and framed photos. The central one showed Whitlock posing for the camera with a distinctive-looking woman Barr confirmed as Whitlock’s sister, Julia. The photo to the right was another of Julia by herself, wearing the same outfit, and the third showed Whitlock solo. All three photos looked like they were from the same session. Underneath them was a large bookcase neatly packed with paperback editions of airport thrillers and crime fiction titles.
To McCusker’s eye this room – the whole house in fact – looked more like an expensive hotel set-up, rather than a home. He left Barr to give the drawers a thorough check and supervise the CSI team packing away the computer for closer examination. He went off in search of a basement and found a den space, with a gigantic television screen and, quite literally, thousands of DVDs.
He wandered out into the overgrown back garden as darkness fell. He hadn’t admitted it to even himself but he secretly hoped that he would discover a garden shed that would contain all the clues he needed on the victim’s life.
His hungry stomach groaned. Where had the day gone? DS Barr wandered across to him.
“Apparently Julia Whitlock is still too heavily sedated to be interviewed. Tomorrow morning would be best, the doctor reckons.”
“Other family members?” McCusker asked.
“None here in the city,” the DS reported. “Father, Wesley, and brother, Jaime, are booked on a flight out of Boston this afternoon their time and will be here in the morning.”
“The mother?”
“She died several years ago.”
“Okay, in the meantime let’s get back to the Custom House and see what we can dig up on Adam Whitlock. Let’s also see what the team can pull from the computer. And you know what,” McCusker ordered, as what sounded like an afterthought but wasn’t, “let’s get every constable we can muster out knocking on all the doors on a thorough house-to-house around here. Someone must have seen or heard something.”
His biggest fear was they were about to enter the hurry-up-and-wait phase of the investigation just a wee bit too quick for comfort.
Chapter Twelve
As McCusker entered the Custom House just after 6 p.m. he met O’Carroll in the reception area. She hadn’t turned up any additional information on the Brothers O’Neill case. By now they’d reviewed as much CCTV footage as their eyes could manage and there hadn’t been a single sighting anywhere in the city.
McCusker brought her up to speed on his case and they discussed when she was going to take her days in lieu off. As a DI, O’Carroll wasn’t entitled to overtime, but rather time off for each official hour she worked over and above. McCusker was happy to work all the hours God sent him. As a member of Grafton Agency staff he got overtime for everything over thirty-seven and a half hours each week. It wasn’t just that the agency took a third of his income – he didn’t bill anywhere near the hours he worked. No, mostly he was happy for the complete distraction his work brought, due entirely to the sad fact that he did not have a life outside of it.
McCusker, like a lot of men, went into denial when his wife up and left him. His other truth was his acceptance that at least some, if not the majority, of the fault was his. He knew he wasn’t a particularly good husband. He’d also recently admitted to himself that he wasn’t in love with his wife and accepted that he never had been. His real love, the one and only love of his life, was his love for the art of detection. Pure and simple, he loved the art of solving the puzzle of the crime. He conceded that the addiction for his fix came not from catching and incarcerating criminals, or even ensuring that the innocent went free, no, not at all in fact. It really was all about the solving of the puzzle. His study of why humans might wish to har
m one another was undertaken only as being a useful aid in his endeavours to seek the solution of the crime.
He was prepared to put up with anything as long as he put himself in a position to be able to follow his passion. Yes, even to the extent that he was prepared to return to student style accommodation in an area of Belfast densely populated by students. In point of fact he neither minded his apartment nor its location. Students were always going somewhere, doing something or conversing with each other as though their lives depended on it. Their collective energy was truly infectious. And now here he was barely a month after leaving Portrush, and a couple of months on from losing his wife, and he was in the middle of a case he could really get his teeth into. McCusker would never admit, even to himself, to taking actual enjoyment from his cases (as in taking enjoyment from other people’s misfortune), but it was something he just had to do, and enjoyment was never really a consideration. McCusker was more than satisfied to block everything else in his life out in order to best serve, and hopefully solve, the case.
O’Carroll hoped her case might be wrapped up by the following weekend mainly because she was hoping to head down to Dublin on Thursday night with her sister, for a long weekend. “A better class of men down there, McCusker,” she claimed.
