by LJ Ross
“Or the fish and chips,” Ryan offered.
“I’m contributing to the local economy,” Phillips improvised.
Ryan smiled but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“It doesn’t help to know that you were right, does it?”
“No. I hoped that I was wrong. It would have been so much easier if Healy had been our man. It would be over and we might be one step closer to finding Tanya Robertson. Instead, I’m going to have to put the wheels in motion this evening to begin excavation of all twelve burial sites tomorrow. My only consolation is that I’ll have my loyal sergeant to help me with the paperwork.”
Phillips gave him a beady-eyed glare.
“It’ll give the press something to talk about until next Christmas. Are you sure, now, of who it is?”
There was an infinitesimal pause, then Ryan nodded. Phillips blew out the air in his chest.
“Have you got a plan?”
Ryan smiled slowly and his eyes shone diamond-bright in the moonlight.
“I have an idea, Frank, that’s all. It’ll take some planning to pull it off and I have an important phone call to make before we can begin.”
Phillips stretched out his back and then, to Ryan’s everlasting surprise, doubled over to touch his toes in a move to rival that of any professional dancer.
“Tell me what you need me to do.”
“A couple of things. First, I need you to scour the ANPR footage of the main roads leading out of Newcastle in the direction of the four counties where we will be excavating tomorrow, from around the time Tanya Robertson went missing last night until sunrise this morning. You’re looking for a black Lexus sedan, late model and I’ll get the number plate for you when we’re back at the office. We already know there’s no footage of when these women were taken, thanks to careful planning on the killer’s part. But if he was forced to take Tanya to another cemetery outside the city limits, he’s been forced to show himself.”
“Is the Lexus his car?”
“Nope. If I’m right, I think it’s the car he’s been ‘borrowing’.”
Phillips rubbed his hands together eagerly.
“Consider it done. What was the other thing you needed?”
“Oh, right,” Ryan snapped his fingers, as if he had just remembered. “If you’re not doing anything better on 28th August, I’d like you to be best man at my wedding.”
Phillips’ jowly face went lax and quivered a bit while he pulled himself together. Ryan crossed his arms and looked on with considerable affection.
“My father will be there and a few mates from my uni days but…hell, when it comes down to it, Frank, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
Phillips puffed out his chest.
“It would be an honour.”
Grown men weren’t supposed to hug like bears—especially not outside a crime scene, in the middle of a high-profile murder investigation.
They made an exception, just this once.
“Now, there’s one condition,” Phillips said, sternly.
“Ye gods! What is it?”
“As far as the stag do is concerned, there’ll be no namby-pamby spa weekend in Bath for you, my lad. Same goes for wine-tasting or go-karting. I require a list of invitees and no arguments.” He paused, then asked seriously, “Is your health insurance up to date?”
Ryan gave him a cocky smile and waved it away.
“Scare tactics, eh? You forget, I’ve been stabbed, drugged…I’ve diced with death more times than you’ve had hot dinners.”
Phillips gave him a pitying look.
“Child’s play. You’d best start preparing yourself for the night of your life, son.”
* * *
The headache had returned.
Even when he closed his eyes, the pain remained strong. He clutched at his head, tugging at the hair above his ears and slamming the heel of his hands against his own skull to relieve the terrible, crushing pressure, moaning like a wounded animal.
Despite everything, the police were getting closer. God was supposed to protect him and shield him from harm in exchange for all his good work, but the police had found Healy’s body already. He had barely made it back to the city when the call had come through—the car engine was still warm.
It was too close. Far too close for comfort.
The man wasn’t aware that he had risen from the chair in his bedroom, or that he was pacing.
Back and forth, back and forth.
He muttered unintelligibly as he wandered the room in a trance, pausing now and then as
if to answer a question, like a man possessed. He had been a dutiful messenger, he thought, all these years. He had saved so many souls—so many, now, that he was beginning to forget what they looked like.
It didn’t matter, because there was only one face burned inside his mind. Her face. Her beautiful face.
His hands shook as he thought of what the others had done to her. What they had done to his child.
Evil sinners, every one of them, and they deserved to die.
God could not perform such vengeance himself but the man understood that he was the tool. He was the sword that would deliver justice.
Minutes turned into hours as he shuffled around the room and his mind would not rest until her hand touched his arm. His body shivered and burned at the same time, rapturous at her return and he followed her to bed, curving himself around her lithe body. There he lay, wrapping himself around the bedclothes as if they were human flesh.
He slept deeply and dreamlessly until morning.
CHAPTER 18
Monday, 28th March 2016
Easter Monday
There was ‘late’, Anna thought, and then there was late.
She found herself checking the time on the little carriage clock in her bedroom every half hour until finally she gave up on sleep entirely and threw back the covers. As the clock struck three a.m., Anna headed out into the night, stopping in at the 24-hour pizza place on her way out of Durham. The lights were all blazing on the second floor of CID Headquarters when she arrived forty minutes later, while the rest of the world slept. Even the press had slunk back to their own homes but would no doubt return before sunrise so as not to risk missing any of the action. Anna hefted her goods across the car park and entered the foyer where she was met by a frankly jubilant duty sergeant who recognised her immediately and showed her the way to the incident room in the hopes of pilfering a slice of pizza for himself.
“My prayers have finally been answered!” Phillips cried.
Immediately, she was set upon by a pack of hungry police staff who relieved her of the stack of fragrant cardboard boxes she carried. Phillips gave her a tight hug and waggled his thumb towards the main desk, where Ryan was speaking in what sounded like fluent, angry Italian on the phone to an official in the Vatican City State in Rome.
“Non me ne frega niente di che ore sono, vai a buttarlo giù dal letto!”
Ryan caught her eye and flashed one of his lightning-quick smiles before delivering another stream of fast Italian.
“Stupido scribacchino di merda!”
Anna turned to Phillips with a question in her eyes.
“Nope,” he said roundly. “I haven’t got the foggiest idea what he’s saying. Feel sorry for the bloke at the other end, though.”
Eventually, Ryan switched back into English and spoke for around five minutes in quick, urgent tones before replacing the receiver with a look of deep satisfaction. He rose nimbly from his chair and strode across the room to greet Anna properly.
“Ciao bella.”
There were the customary wolf whistles when he leaned in to bestow a brief kiss.
“Pipe down, you animals!” he threw back over his shoulder. “Are you still looking for a job here?”
Anna gave him a haughty look.
“Well, I’ve been involved in your last three big cases so I thought I’d better check in and give you a helping hand.”
“With pizza?”
/>
“You’re damn right.”
“Always was a good ‘un,” Phillips put in. “She’s wasted on you, lad.”
“And you can pipe down, too,” Ryan replied, with a grin.
Anna looked around the incident room and noted the activity which showed no signs of slowing down just because it happened to be the middle of the night.
“I didn’t know you speak Italian,” she remarked.
Ryan’s eyes swept over her face and he was loath to acknowledge that life was just better when she was around. That was the simple, basic truth. They weren’t joined at the hip—she had her own successful career and he supposed that he had his. But the times when he was beside her, touching her, were when he felt most at home.
“I’m full of surprises,” he promised.
The room melted away for a moment, the sounds of tapping keyboards and ringing telephones dimming to a distant buzz in her ears as they stood there cocooned for a moment in the world he had created.
“Don’t say you’re a cunning linguist,” she warned, eliciting a shout of laughter from Phillips.
“I take it your lead didn’t quite work out,” Anna moved things back to business. “But it looks as though you’ve found another?”
Ryan nodded briskly and stepped back, mentally shifting gears again.
“Yes, you could say that. At first light, we’ll begin work excavating four burial sites, then move on to the next four and the next until we find what we’re looking for.”
“Tanya Robertson,” Anna guessed.
Ryan nodded once.
“She doesn’t deserve to be hidden in the ground, beneath somebody else’s coffin as if she had no soul or life of her own,” he muttered.
“As if she didn’t matter?”
“The irony is that each woman mattered, very much so. For a brief moment in time, I believe they mattered a great deal to him.”
* * *
The legality of the emergency exhumation of twelve coffins across four council districts was, to say the least, a grey area. Particularly because the police investigation did not concern the deaths of any of the individuals within those coffins but rather concerned what might, just possibly, lie beneath one of them. And if the families of the recently deceased were upset, then the church was even more so. Chief Constable Morrison spent the greater part of her morning fielding irate threats from the Media Liaison for the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, who accused Northumbria Police Constabulary of inciting a witch hunt against members of the faith.
When Ryan entered her office, Morrison was standing beside the window with her back to him. The sun hadn’t yet risen fully and the overhead lights were blazing in an effort to brighten the room and her mood. There was a weight on her shoulders, he thought. One that he would have been required to share if he had taken up her offer of promotion. Her world was a step removed from the cut and thrust; from interviewing suspects and running an active investigation. She concerned herself with high-level budgets, with policies and procedures and the business of being accountable to the people they served. Normally, she was happy to delegate but in the absence of a superintendent, Morrison was finding herself more and more embroiled in the kind of legwork she hadn’t seen in a long while.
In too long, she admitted to herself.
“Take a seat, Ryan,” she murmured. Though he preferred to stand, he responded to the fatigue in her voice and took a chair.
She turned around and he could see dark circles beneath her eyes. He imagined that he didn’t look much better, since he hadn’t been home at all last night and nor had many of his team.
“How the hell do you manage to look so damn normal?”
Well, that answered that question, Ryan thought.
“Caffeine, ma’am.”
“I need some of the good stuff,” she decided, moving across to a small coffee machine. She dropped two pods in the top and waited for the aromatic liquid to percolate.
Ryan accepted a cup with a touch of surprise. This was turning into a cosy chat, rather than the tense conversation he had anticipated.
Morrison took a long swig from her mug and closed her eyes for one blissful moment.
“It isn’t even eight o’clock in the morning and it feels like I’ve had most of the senior members of the Catholic clergy in the North East on the phone, in addition to half the national press.”
Ryan took a drink of his coffee.
“I also heard from an Italian cardinal, who was on the warpath about some sort of heated exchange with one of our officers. Would you know anything about that?”
Ryan’s face didn’t move a muscle.
“You don’t have any smart-alec comments?” She opened her eyes again. “No wisecracks?”
Ryan raised an eyebrow and she held up a finger.
“I retract those comments,” she said, wearily. “I know you’re doing everything you can, it’s just that this thing keeps getting bigger and bigger. We’ve got two dead redheads and another missing, suspected dead. Last night, we thought there was a connection between these women and the deaths of Barbara Hewitt in Rothbury and an old nun by the name of Sister Mary-Frances Creighton, whose body is still missing, presumed dead. The man we thought connected all of them is now lying in the mortuary himself.” Morrison reeled it off like a newscaster. “Now, tell me some good news before I lose my mind.”
Ryan set his cup aside.
“Father Simon Healy was connected, just not in the way we suspected—he was a target, not a killer. As it happens, I believe we will have the real killer in custody within twenty-four hours, ma’am.”
Morrison’s eyes widened.
“Care to tell me who it is, or do you want me to start guessing?”
Ryan’s lips tugged at the corners.
“I believe the man responsible for all of the recent murders, and possibly a great deal more besides, is Father Conor O’Byrne.”
Morrison stared at him.
“The Dean of Central Newcastle, right hand man of the Bishop. A senior cleric with an exemplary track record of charitable work.”
“That’s the one.”
It was Morrison’s turn to smile, slightly hysterically, as the impact of his bald statement hit home.
“If you’re so certain, why isn’t he in custody at this very moment?”
“For the simple reason that we haven’t found a shred of hard evidence against him. Not even enough to request a DNA sample. But I have an idea how we can trap him.”
Ryan checked his watch and then stood up to look out of the window. It was almost nine o’clock and he was gratified to see a healthy gaggle of reporters outside the main building, ready to capture the sight of Father O’Byrne being led into CID Headquarters. Right on cue, MacKenzie and Lowerson turned into the car park with a squad car in tow and the press began to swarm.
From his position beside the window, Ryan watched Father O’Byrne exit the squad car with dignity; a tall, good-looking man in his early-forties who commanded an admirable poise despite having just emerged into a maelstrom of cameras and noise.
He was unsurprised to see an expensive two-seater sports car pull up shortly afterwards, out of which jumped a sharp-suited lawyer he recognised from one of the city’s premier law firms.
“He’s just stepped into the building,” Ryan explained, turning back to the Chief Constable, who waited with a harried expression on her face.
“He…right, okay. How are you going to—”
Her phone began to ring again and she reached for it.
“Look, I’ll keep the bigwigs sweet for now but whatever you’ve got planned make it quick and make it tidy.”
“A few hours, that’s all I need,” he vowed.
She picked up the telephone and he left her to field the latest barrage of questions from the Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner.
CHAPTER 19
Father Conor O’Byrne looked perfectly at ease within the stifling confines of Room C of the interview suite at CID Hea
dquarters. His long, artistic fingers were linked in his lap while he chatted with his lawyer and he neither slouched nor sat on the edge of his chair. His dark hair was brushed away from a strong face dominated by a pair of deep blue eyes that had, ever so briefly, rested with great interest upon DI Denise MacKenzie. Ryan watched him for over ten minutes through the viewing panel, studying his mannerisms and body language. He watched the way his eyes flickered and noted the slight tapping of his right index finger which moved in time with his right foot against the floor.
“Hard to believe that he could kill,” Phillips said, coming to stand beside him.
“Why?” Ryan demanded. “Because he’s wearing a collar?”
“No, because he looks like such a nice guy.”
Ryan huffed out a laugh.
“There’s no such thing. You know that as well as I do.”
“Well if I didn’t before, I certainly do after spending so much time around you,” came the pithy response.
“How do you want to play it?”
“The usual way,” Ryan said. “You can be his best friend and I’ll be his worst nightmare.”
Phillips shuffled his feet.
“I never get to be the bad cop.”
“Diddums.”
“Keep at it, lad, and I’ll keep thinking of new and interesting ways to pay you back on the stag do.”
“Promises, promises,” Ryan jibed, then collected his file and led the way out of the viewing space to begin the next stage of his plan.
* * *
While Ryan and Phillips prepared to interview Father Conor O’Byrne, MacKenzie and Lowerson were given leave to hurry home for a quick shower and change. As Ryan had already observed, DC Lowerson would rather have prostrated himself in front of moving traffic than allow anything to happen to her, so MacKenzie was forced to accept that Lowerson would be with her for a while longer.
“I don’t need a bodyguard, Jack,” she complained, for the umpteenth time, as they exited her red Fiesta and walked towards her front door.
“Yeah, but I would if anything happened to you and Phillips found out that I’d left you alone.”
