“See if there’s anything on Kyle’s road traffic case.”
John nodded. “We’ll go back and check after this. Kyle, could you text the victim’s name to Mike?”
Augustus shot Annette a regretful glance; it looked like she would be spending their quiet night in watching television on her own.
Craig had already moved on.
“OK, you all know what you’re working on, so let’s hope something breaks soon.” He sighed heavily. “Unfortunately, we’re likely to be looking at another dead body when Sarah Reilly turns up.” He glanced at the clock. “Davy, what time are the Grubers arriving?”
“They’ll be at the airport just before seven.”
“OK, I’ll see them here.”
To his surprise John shook his head. “Send a car for them and I’ll meet them at the labs, Marc. You go home. One of us might as well have the evening off and you looked wrecked.”
Craig didn’t get a chance to point out it was because he’d been nurse-maiding a drunk earlier in the week as the pathologist continued. “Mike and I will be at the labs looking at cases anyway, so we can do it.”
Before Craig could respond they were interrupted by Nicky’s phone ringing so loudly that it almost rattled off its perch. Liam screwed up his face.
“Turn that thing down. It’s vibrating my teeth!”
The PA walked back to her desk deliberately slowly. “I only turned it up in the first place because you’re all so noisy.” She held her hand above the offending object for two more rings before picking it up. “Belfast Murder Squad. How may I help you?”
Liam shot her a warning squint. The PA ignored it daintily, but her poise collapsed at her caller’s next words, and she clamped her hand across the phone’s ear piece, turning to Craig in shock.
“That GP… she’s alive!”
Craig moved faster than he’d thought he was capable of at that moment, seizing the phone from her hand.
“DCS Craig here. Who is this?”
Ryan Hendron, to whom Sarah Reilly being alive was no longer a shock, smiled at the woman by his side and just managed to get out “DS Hendron, Strangford” before the line went dead.
He turned to his companion.
“I think we’re getting a visitor.”
Sarah smiled. “How long will they be?”
“I’d say at least an hour in traffic at this time of night. Plenty of time for a pizza, I think.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Glens of Antrim.
He’d been racing through the patch of woodland for well over an hour, tripping and clambering over tree roots and wading through a carpet of mulch, slippery and slick with the afternoon’s rain. As he’d torn through the undergrowth in panic, the man had been muttering and swearing beneath his breath, until, when he eventually returned to the burnt-out fire with its blackened steel poker, the dam of his restraint burst and he gave a frustrated roar.
“THIS CAN’T HAPPEN NOW! NOT SO NEAR THE END!”
The indignant plea fell on no ears but his, his fury at being thwarted expressed by the poker being seized and hurled up into a tree, only to fall again with a thud just inches from his feet.
He began to pace back and forth, back and forth, the embers of the dead fire his mid-point, as he tried to make sense of that day and how both of his prizes had escaped. There could be only one reason for it, he’d got sloppy. His confidence had outgrown his caution and he’d made mistakes.
He stopped dead in his tracks, forcing his panic down and focusing. He had forty hours until the endgame and he only needed one of them, one would still be enough to make his point. But which of his guilty captives was more important? Which one should be hunted down to finish it all?
A moment’s thought was all it took for him to decide, then, calm again, the hunter gathered up all signs that he had ever been there, buried the ashes of the fire beneath dead leaves and then headed home to finalise his plan.
****
Strangford Police Station.
Liam propped himself against the interview room’s back wall and watched as Craig positioned his chair at an angle to the door. Not facing it, that would be too confrontational and might frighten their interviewee, even if she hadn’t been through such an ordeal. Angling the chair would soften the sting of their presence, and Liam knew that when the woman appeared, Craig’s body language would ease it even more. If there was one thing he could convey well it was compassion; because it was something that he always felt.
Liam’s thoughts were cut short by the sound of footsteps in the hall. He listened like a Navajo tracker and had recognised them as belonging to a medium built man and a fit woman before Ryan Hendron had even opened the door.
Craig was on his feet as the handle went down and smiling kindly as the door swung inwards. He left it to the local to make the introductions, although for some reason they couldn’t know yet Hendron stumbled over Liam’s second name. Craig clarified with a smile.
“Cullen. Liam Cullen. Won’t you take a seat?”
The question was directed towards Sarah Reilly and she moved to the chair that he’d set out. Craig reached out a hand to her and then to Hendron, who perched on a desk near her right-hand side. He was just clearing his throat to speak when the Strangford detective got in first.
“Doctor Reilly’s happy to cooperate fully, but she’s had a hell of a few days, sir.”
Hendron’s protectiveness and colourful description would have made Craig smile had the scenario been different, but for now he merely acknowledged it with a nod and began.
“Doctor Reilly.”
“Please call me Sarah.”
“Thank you. Sarah, I’m sorry to make you go through everything again, but it will help bring us up to speed.”
The GP nodded and pushed back her shoulder length hair, un-straightened after a shower and released from its usual professional ponytail. Craig checked her age again; forty-eight. He was surprised, if he’d been asked he would have put the woman in front of him at around thirty-five.
“Just in your own time.”
Liam lifted the file that he’d set to one side on the windowsill, and as the medic began he checked her words against the details they had in print, impressed to see how close to her original statement Reilly kept; but then, he imagined that she’d written police statements many times during her career, most doctors had.
The GP spoke in a soft, modulated voice, its accent neither north nor south but an educated neutral, common to many professionals in the province. Liam had tried to adopt the accent once but had ended up sounded like a pantomime dame.
While the DCI checked each point that Sarah Reilly made against her statement, Craig was listening between the GP’s words, trying to find the smallest clue that might point them to her assailant.
When she’d finished the medic rested back in her chair, the strength of her voice at the end convincing Craig that she’d gained some comfort from being listened to a second time. Her first telling of the story had probably been a much more fragile thing, and it would have been that earlier fragility that Ryan Hendron had seen.
Craig could tell that the detective was attracted to his victim and that the GP reciprocated, and he hoped for their sakes that the feeling survived the ordeal of any forthcoming court case to grow into something more. Sadly, that hadn’t been his experience of such relationships. The damsel in distress and her brave rescuer was a fantasy that rarely translated into real life, although maybe this time he would be wrong.
He decided that now was the moment to tell the medic more about the wider scenario of which she was a part, so he laid out the nine and then eleven dead victims over the previous year, pausing so that Ryan Hendron thought he’d reached an end.
“Eleven victims. Do you think Sarah was to be the last, sir?”
Craig would love to have said yes so as not to frighten the woman further, but honesty made him shake his head.
“There was another man who escaped, just today. He
’d been held in some woodland since yesterday, we’re not sure exactly where yet, and given a paralytic drug. It wore off and he escaped, but…”
He hesitated. Did he tell Sarah Reilly that the only reason Dan Torrance had survived was that his attacker had left to go and kill her, or not? It wasn’t a real question. He had to tell her, she deserved to know.
“The man was only able to escape because his attacker left him to kill someone else-”
Her gasp cut him off. “Me? He was coming to kill me?”
Craig swallowed hard before continuing. “To be honest, I think he thought that you were already dead, and he was just coming to collect your body. I’m sorry.”
Her response surprised him. Instead of crying or crumbling the GP merely nodded, the necessary pragmatism of her career seeming to apply throughout her life.
“I would have been dead if it hadn’t rained so heavily. I’ll never complain about Ireland’s terrible weather again.” She thought for a moment and then asked another question. “What do you think he was intending to do with my body?”
Liam’s eyebrows shot up; how the hell was the boss going to answer that one? Craig did it by outlining their suspicion that all of the deaths had been vengeance for some historical case they hadn’t yet discovered, and sticking to the facts about angles, alcohol and saliva; in the process Sarah Reilly volunteered that she’d had a sore mouth for days.
Craig wrapped up by turning to Ryan Hendron.
“He’s unlikely to come near Doctor Reilly again, but I don’t want to take any risks, so we’d like to place her under armed guard.”
A firm “No” from the GP said that was off the cards. “He doesn’t have my home address or he’d have used it.”
“He can easily find it, and he might try again!”
“You just said it was unlikely.”
Craig’s voice tightened, and Liam smirked as he saw his diplomacy legging it out the door.
“It’s still a possibility. And not one that we’d like to see happen!”
Ryan Hendron decided to break the tit for tat before it got loud.
“How would this do? I could guard Doctor Reilly personally, if you would clear it with my boss?”
Before Craig agreed he needed details. “Where?”
Sarah Reilly got in first. “My place. I need my clothes, books, computer…”
The things that people thought were more important than their lives…
“We’ll have to check that the venue’s suitable first. Liam, can you ask Annette to check out the access points early tomorrow?”
The GP was intent on having her way. “It’s a second-floor apartment with codes and locks and-”
“It will still need to be checked before I agree, and that will be tomorrow morning at the earliest.”
Craig’s tone said there would be no further argument, but if the place checked out then the damsel could be guarded by her brave rescuer in the comfort of her own home.
****
The C.C.U. 7 p.m.
The squad-room had almost cleared at the end of the briefing, with only Aidan Hughes still there, arguing on the phone about whisky warrants, and Deidre Murray sitting behind her wall, staring at a list of names on a whiteboard. She abandoned them in favour of a fresh challenge just as Aidan came off the line.
“Bugger me, it’s hard work getting warrants these days. You’d swear the judges had to pay for them or something!”
His companion appeared in the main squad-room, smiling. “Thank your lucky stars Doctor Winter didn’t need any bodies exhumed. The paperwork involved there would make you weep.”
They descended into amiable silence until she spoke again. “Susan being difficult with you?”
Aidan gave a loud grunt. “Susan being Susan more like. I don’t mean to be unchivalrous, but I can’t believe I dated her for two years. What the heck was I thinking?”
Deidre shrugged. “She’s an attractive woman, so I don’t suppose thinking played much of a part.”
It made them both laugh. When they’d stopped Aidan gestured at the cardboard wall.
“What were you doing in there with the chief’s whiteboard?”
They walked back to her desk and stared at the board the secondee had dragged there thirty minutes before. What he saw there made Aidan raise an eyebrow.
“You’re looking at the Vics’ occupations? I thought Annette and Rhonda were going to do that.”
Deidre shrugged. “I thought I noticed something when the Guv was talking about them earlier on.”
Aidan perched on Susan Richie’s desk in an obvious act of defiance, angling his head to get a different view.
“Nope. Can’t see anything.”
His companion lifted a pair of red and blue markers and started to scan the occupations listed from two and three decades before, tentatively marking Sarah Reilly’s and Roger Hardie’s names with red crosses.
“Any better now?”
Aidan narrowed his eyes and for a moment he thought that it just might be, but he hesitated to put his thoughts into words. Deidre urged him on.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong. Richie’s not here to laugh.”
It was the kick the ex-Vice DCI needed, so he slid off the desk and lifted a black pen.
“OK…so…everyone but Rick Jarvis is, was, forty-eight years plus when they died.” He tapped the list. “These are their occupations now, but they’re not relevant, whereas their jobs twenty or thirty years ago might be.”
He ran the marker down until he came to Jason Collier.
“Kyle said Jason Collier knocked down a kid in ninety-two, that’s twenty-five years ago. Let’s say for a moment that that is our historical case, the one the killer’s getting revenge for, then we need to look at all our victim’s occupations at that time-”
Deidre jumped in. “And maybe a while before. What if our killer blamed Collier for the child’s actual death, but blames other people for not stopping Collier before he did it?”
Aidan’s brow furrowed. “OK, let’s say that you’re right. This is all just speculation. Yes?”
“Mmm...”
Deidre lifted another list she’d been working on earlier.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve been making a list of anyone who might contribute to a drunk getting behind the wheel.” She began to read aloud. “OK, so…you could blame Collier’s upbringing and make his parents responsible, if they were still alive.”
She motioned him to check in the files.
“They’re both dead. In the noughties.”
“OK, so our perp couldn’t have murdered them, and Collier didn’t have any siblings, but he did have a wife back in the nineties, Lucinda Collier, so why hasn’t she been killed?”
“Yet?”
“Maybe, except I would have thought she’d have been one of the first to go.”
It was an interesting point.
“OK, next. What if there were warning signs of Collier’s drinking?”
“Like what?”
“Maybe he’d been taken to hospital drunk, or maybe even arrested by the cops for drunk and disorderly.”
Aidan scanned the list and then swooped towards Sarah Reilly’s red mark. “That’s why you marked Reilly’s name! She’d have been twenty-two/twenty-three back then. That’s junior doctor age. Did she ever see Collier as a patient? Maybe in an emergency department?”
“I don’t know, but we could check.” She tapped the mark against Roger Hardie’s name. “He used to be a copper.”
“That’s not in his case file from Antrim!”
“No, but I thought his name rang a bell, so I checked. He was in the job for five years, back in the nineties. What are the odds that he brought Collier in on a drunk and disorderly sometime before the accident but didn’t charge him?”
Aidan’s jaw dropped. “Shit!” He perched on the desk again, thinking. “How about that bloke Torrance, the one the chief saw?”
“What about him?”
“Well, he was a reformed drinker, wasn’t he? What are the odds that he wasn’t quite so reformed twenty-five years ago? I bet he was one of Collier’s drinking cronies, so our killer sees him as having colluded in Collier’s drinking.”
“That’s another thing to check.”
“OK then, we’d better divvy up the work.”
They divided the victim list and each took half, checking the computer for any possible leads to their occupations twenty-five years before. Censuses, electoral rolls, tax and national insurance details, anything that could help.
Eventually, at almost nine o’clock, Aidan’s rumbling stomach made him look up from his work.
“My God, look at the time! I’m starving. Do you fancy a takeaway?”
Deidre didn’t deviate from her task, just nodding. “Anything you fancy.”
Twenty minutes later they finally took a break, still theorising between mouthfuls of Chow Mein.
“I’ve almost finished my list.”
Aidan nodded. “Me too, and it’s starting to make sense. But let’s leave it for ten minutes until we’ve eaten and I’ve had a ciggie, then I promise we’ll have a complete run through.”
He was true to his word and soon they were standing in front of Nicky’s screen, their findings now typed up in a table dated nineteen-ninety to ninety-two, twenty-seven to twenty-five years before. It gave them a two-year run up to Jason Collier’s fateful night.
Aidan gave a low whistle as a picture began to reveal itself. Two of their victims’ student selves had worked in low-paid bar jobs near the Colliers’ home and might have served Jason too much booze, another had worked in a nearby off-licence and another two, older victims, had owned pubs close by. Another victim, Judge McClelland, had been a barrister in the nineties and might have taken part in Collier’s court case, and a further victim, now retired, had been a judge in ninety-two and was the right age to have been the actual judge in the case.
As well as Sarah Reilly, a junior doctor back in the day, they also had an addiction counsellor who’d just retired, an ex-cop and a social worker. The list went on and on, and all with one theme; any or all of their victims could have played a role, either passive or active, in Jason Collier’s fatally drunken night in nineteen-ninety-two.
The Killing Year (The Craig Crime Series Book 17) Page 25
