Crossing The Line

by Catriona King

  It brought an athletic looking man racing into the room who immediately sussed what had happened and glared at McCrae in a warning not to try anything, a compliment of sorts given that the scrawny UKUF boss was still sucking for air.

  McCrae’s temporary business partner smiled coolly.

  “We are leaving now, Rory. I will be in touch later. And remember, we will be watching you and if you put a foot out of place then our little truce will be void.”

  Then he left, not in a rush but elegantly, giving his opponent a clear signal if he had needed another that UKUF’s paramilitaries were astronomically out of their league.

  Chapter Five

  The C.C.U. Murder Squad. 3.45 p.m.

  If Craig had felt any urge to tell his staff about his marriage and impending parenthood then it had disappeared by the time he exited the lift on the tenth floor. In fact the inclination had come and gone several times since his earlier discussion with Liam on the motorway, relegated by more pressing matters like lists and charts. Even on the latter he had vacillated, on whether to pass the wall calendar to Davy to be recorded before he passed its potentially drug soaked stickers to Des for tests or vice versa, finally using alphabetical order to settle on giving the chart to the analyst first.

  To that end he was brandishing it now, sheathed in its cardboard cylinder, which he had a compelling urge to use to tap everyone he passed on the head or to ennoble them with it like a king. He understood the desire now because Liam had greeted his own earlier knighting with, “I used to do that to my sisters with the inside of a tinfoil roll. My mum used to give us them to play with and we’d fence and knight each other all the time.”

  Relieved that his inclination to clout his staff members was perfectly natural Craig did so to everyone he passed, including his senior analyst when he arrived at his desk. Sir Davy took the proffered tube with a smile.

  “What’s this?”

  In answer Craig nodded him towards the back of the squad-room and together they spread the calendar out on the floor. He watched as the analyst’s eyes immediately lit up.

  “They had a code!” He turned to Craig, correcting himself. “Wh...Who had? I mean, where did this come from?”

  “Our dead man’s cell.”

  The words carried to Ash’s ears and he called out, “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

  Craig smiled. “I think that was Dead Man’s Chest, but come and take a look at this.”

  As he did so Craig’s gaze fell momentarily on his deputy, who was standing outside his office and staring down at their PA’s head. Too busy to ask why and quite sure that Liam would soon tell him anyway, he turned back to the chart, which now had both analysts grinning at it in glee.

  Ash jabbed a finger at that week’s stickers.

  “These ones look like they’re in a sequence.”

  Davy stared at them for a moment and then nodded his head. “They are.”

  Craig was impressed. He’d just assumed that the stickers marked different events, which was why analysts should always be shown such things.

  “Liam and I think they mark specific events. And the way that extra week is drawn on at the end of year so neatly would suggest organisation-”

  Davy cut in. “Planning ahead.”

  He ran his eyes over the earlier months of the year, then, spotting the residue that Craig had noticed earlier, he tilted his head sideways for a better look.

  “There’s glue there. S...So that means Smyth removed the stickers after some events had happened, if they w...were events. But why bother?”

  He went to answer his own question but Ash got in first.

  “To stop people seeing the dates and working out retrospectively what actually did happen, and that Smyth had been involved.”

  That had been their theory so Craig smiled. He smiled again when Davy shook his head, always happy to be corrected. It was a slow shake as if the analyst wasn’t yet sure of his ground.

  “Yes... accepted...but if the events were things that happened at Mahon then the only people he would have been afraid of finding out about them would have been the governor and guards.”

  “Or other prisoners.”

  “OK, and those. So we need to check if they know anything particular about the dates where stickers have been removed.” He paused for a moment before going on. “If Smyth hadn’t died we might never have picked up on them.”

  Craig was taken aback. If Derek Smyth had been trying to cover something up by removing the stickers, then killing him and inviting scrutiny of the calendar might have achieved the opposite and brought it to light. Either his killer hadn’t thought things through or they’d actively wanted the discovery. Or maybe they just didn’t care what they found out because it didn’t impact on them.

  He decided to probe further. “What if the dates refer to things happening outside the prison that Smyth was somehow involved in?”

  The analysts shrugged simultaneously and Ash verbalised their thoughts. “They’ll be easy to find. If they were important events or criminal. Otherwise they won’t have come to anyone’s notice for us to check.”

  It was a distinction that he and Liam hadn’t made.

  Craig rose to his feet. “Right. Copy or photograph the calendar so that you can analyse it, please.”

  “Why can’t we just w...work from this one?”

  “Because this needs to go to Des, and I’ll tell you why in about...” He glanced at the wall clock. “Five minutes, when the briefing starts. OK, I need to speak to Liam now.”

  He walked briskly across the floor.

  Liam, we need to make a plan for tomorrow. We’ll need to organise interviews, plus if the stickers refer to events inside the prison walls we need to do some more digging on-”

  He stopped dead, realising that his deputy wasn’t listening to him, his gaze still locked on Alice’s hair. As Craig went to tell him to stop staring at people, his next realisation was that said hair was bright pink, something that he hadn’t noticed that morning, and he was sure that he would have done.

  Liam, taking his boss’ sudden attention to the secretary as a signal that it was OK to voice his thoughts, did so with his usual size thirteen foot in mouth approach.

  “Here, Alice, why’s your hair gone pink?”

  Craig’s hissed, “Stop making personal remarks” and kick on his shin landed too late to prevent the words reaching everyone’s ears, and the PA suddenly found herself the centre of attention as the whole team turned to look. Just as Craig got ready to stammer an apology to her Alice astounded him by rising to her feet and, instead of stomping off the floor indignantly she turned to Liam, took his hands, and placing one on her waist and one of hers on his shoulder she proceeded to sweep him into a perfect waltz.

  The room fell completely silent as the pair whisked their way between the desks, and when they reached the open floor near the new staffroom Ash had the presence of mind to find and press play on some Strauss. Then the whole squad was treated to a performance that astonished them, not least because they’d suddenly discovered that Liam didn’t have two left feet.

  The pair whirled around the limited space artfully, managing to avoid stacks of files, bags, and jackets hanging over chairs as they lost themselves in the music, and when the final bars of the romantic tune faded the PA fell into a graceful curtsey, to a round of applause from the two scientists who’d been standing by the squad’s entrance doors.

  Des doubled down his appreciation with a two-fingered whistle possibly more suited to football matches than a ballroom dance, but the message was the same, and as Alice was congratulated for still having all of her toes, a now red-faced Liam shuffled his way past his stunned boss.

  “I didn’t know you had it in you, Liam!”

  The D.C.I. muttered a reply, still staring at his feet. “Dance classes. My mum wanted my sisters to go, so one of us had to go as well to walk them home. And...ach, well, we sort of joined in.” His eyes shot up defensively. “It was either that or h
ang around doing nothing for hours.”

  “Well, I’m impressed. You were very good.”

  A slap on the back from John said that he agreed and the pathologist smiled fulsomely as a barely flushed Alice approached.

  “You’re a beautiful dancer, Alice.”

  It earned him a pleased smile. “Thank you. I’ve been doing it since I was ten. My husband and I are in the finals of the Pan-European Ballroom Dancing Championships this weekend. We’re the reigning champions.”She patted her hair, “That’s why I’m pink. It helps to stand out in the group dance.”

  She smiled coyly up at Liam. “You’re good you know. I was expecting to be counting my toes now and I’m not. You should take it up.”

  It sparked another bout of shuffling and muttering, so Craig decided to put his deputy out of his misery and summoned him and the two doctors into his room.

  “We’ll be briefing in five minutes, Alice.”

  By the smirks on the rest of his team members’ faces it was going to take a lot longer than that for Twinkle-Toes Cullen to live things down.

  ****

  Mahon Prison.

  The prison was a strangely lonely place, despite being full of men. It was like nowhere that he’d ever been before and he’d been in some very unforgiving places in his life. Perhaps it was because of the grey blocks of granite that formed its structure, still visible in places inside where the MDF fascia had been joined ineptly, but announcing themselves loudly and proudly on the building’s outer walls. Look at me; I’m a prison. Grey, forbidding, hard; a physical proxy for the way that your life inside me is going to go, so stay away. I’m a Victorian construction for Victorian standards of morality: the wicked shall be punished, and so on and so forth.

  Not that he disagreed with that; punishment definitely had its place, otherwise what of the victims’ suffering? What would give them justice and peace?

  The prison guard moved slowly past the cells on his usual landing, looking around each door of the open ones and through the peepholes of those that weren’t, wondering as he did so when white wood had replaced the grey steel slabs that had once been there.

  So what would be fitting punishment for Mahon’s worst inmates? Starvation; freezing; being locked in a darkened room? Or more active tortures like the rack, thumbscrews, and their modern equivalents like waterboarding?

  He shook his head to himself as he descended the iron steps from his walkway; no, society had done away with most of that stuff centuries before and the Human Rights people had put the kibosh on the others post Iraq. So what was left as punishment nowadays, when prisoners had heat, food, light and legal protection from their captor’s assaults? Or was just feeling trapped considered enough of a suffering for what Mahon’s inmates had done, and if so by whom? Certainly not by him.

  Not when he saw healthy young men living in more luxury than pensioners and the homeless who froze to death every year. He understood now why some people committed crimes to get off the streets; a spell in prison was infinitely preferable to freezing to death.

  And if he was disillusioned with the system then others were bound to be too. Was that why Derek Smyth had been killed? Had one of Smyth’s victims shared his disgust at easy punishments?

  The guard shook his head again and walked towards the staff-room for a cup of tea. There would be plenty of time to consider such things when he was out of there for good, and until that time his job was just to hide in plain sight and observe.

  ****

  The C.C.U. Murder Squad.

  They were five minutes past the briefing time; getting refreshments, finding chairs and lifting the white board to the front of the room before they really got down to business, and when Craig looked like starting with a case summary and not the announcement about his love-life that his deputy had recommended, Liam stared at him pointedly and lifted his brows. He was dismissed with a shake of the head so slight that only the two men would have noticed the exchange, had not John glanced up from adjusting his seat just at that very time.

  It left the medic needing to make a fast decision: pull Craig now on whatever his obvious “not now, Liam” gesture had meant, or wait until they were in the pub later on. He opted for second because if Craig wanted him not to push for an explanation there then he would have to bribe him with a pint.

  Just as well, because the moment had already passed and Liam had returned to avoiding Alice’s gaze by staring at his shoes, while Craig was rapping the board hard for attention.

  “Right, here’s where we are.” He wrote up the dead man’s name. “Derek Smyth, fifty, deceased. Found dead on his bed in a cell in Mahon Prison early on Sunday morning.” He turned to the pathologist, holding out a marker. “Tell us about that, please.”

  John took his place by the board and wrote up ‘8.10 a.m.’

  “OK, that’s the time the ambulance crew certified Derek Smyth dead on Sunday morning. However, when I first saw Mister Smyth at nine it was clear that he’d been dead for more than a few hours. Without boring you with the details of body temperature and rigour, I now believe that death occurred before midnight the night before, but as Mister Smyth was alone in his cell he wasn’t discovered until an officer opened his door at seven a.m. for breakfast and then the ambulance was-”

  Craig stopped him there. “Just a moment, John.” He turned to the others. “OK, comments anyone?”

  Ryan went to raise a hand but Liam held it down. “You’re not at school, mate. Just catch his eye and say it.”

  Craig chuckled. “Thanks for that lesson in etiquette, Liam. But he’s right, Ryan. What was it that you wanted to say?”

  The dark-haired officer shrugged. “Just that Smyth obviously wasn’t on any special measures, or he’d have been found long before breakfast.”

  Craig nodded. Stick to the basics; it was a good rule.

  “Good.”

  He wrote ‘no special measures/ suicide risk’ and then ‘no cell-mate’ up on the board.

  The sergeant hadn’t finished.

  “Also, Smyth mustn’t have screamed or cried out for help or he’d have been heard. Sound carries on prison landings. They’re designed that way so that even a guard who’s on duty alone can pick things up. It’s a bit like the old nightingale hospital wards.”

  Nightingale wards were long rectangular wards with no subdivisions, so that every patient could be seen at all times for safety. A single nurse stationed at one end could have observed them all.

  Craig added ‘no scream/cry for help’ and turned back to the pathologist.

  “John, does that tell you anything?”

  The medic frowned in thought. “About Smyth’s moment of death you mean?”

  “Yes. Would the tablet have had a sedative effect that kept him quiet before the poison killed him?”

  The pathologist gave a nod. “Yes, and that was most likely Smyth’s reason for taking it, but we’ll come on to that in a minute.” He gestured to the LED screen by Alice’s desk. “In fact, should I start now?”

  “Might as well, while we’re on the death itself.”

  John removed a memory stick from his pocket and passed it across to Davy, continuing his report while they waited for the screen to come to life.

  “OK, as I said, Derek Smyth died many hours before he was found, and when he was found by the guard at seven, the emergency services were called and an attempt at resuscitation was made, the detritus of which was still in his cell when I arrived. Forensics and Marc were called to do their work and then the body was brought to the labs here.”

  Seeing a smile from Davy he turned towards the screen and nodded for his first slide to be shown. It held a face and shoulder image of a very dead Derek Smyth.

  “Right, the post-mortem revealed Mister Smyth’s cause of death as asphyxia, from the Greek asphuxia, from a meaning ‘without’ and sphuxis meaning ‘pulse’, although in modern times we’ve come to associate it more specifically with death from an absence of oxygen.”

  He po
inted with his board marker as he talked. “When he was first discovered the mouth was wide open and the face stretched in appearance. His jaw had partially dislocated and all were signs of someone struggling desperately for air.” He moved across to the screen to indicate. “You can see, here, the corded appearance of the neck muscles. That’s because they and the upper chest muscles are what are known as accessory muscles of respiration-”

  Liam butted in. “Accessory? Like a handbag?”

  The pathologist was aghast. “Good grief, Liam, have some respect! The man’s dead.”

  A knowing look from Craig said it was the D.C.I.’s way of trying to reinstate his hard man image after his dance display, so John sighed and moved on.

  “Accessory in this case means that the neck muscles, which aren’t normally used for that purpose, were enlisted to help him breathe. Sadly in this case that didn’t work and Mister Smyth asphyxiated. Examination of the body revealed no possible cause for this other than poisoning and we found a semi-dissolved tablet in his stomach which we believe was the source.” He glanced at Craig. “Do you want me to go into that now?”

  “Fire ahead.”

  John passed the marker over to his forensic partner and retook his seat, adding as he did, “I’ll come back to the rest of my slides when Des is done. There are things that you should see.”

  Des found the screen distracting, looking at dead bodies not really being his thing, so he nodded Davy to darken it and then removed the bag of tablets that Craig had given him from his pocket, holding it up in a show and tell.

  “Anyone care to guess at what these are?”

  There came boring shouts of, “Tablets”, the inevitable jokey, “Viagra” from Liam, and from Aidan at the back of the group, “Diazepam”.

  Des turned towards him. “Give that man a cuddly toy.”

  It brought some sniggers, including from Craig who was wondering why his briefings became more like light entertainment every week, although on balance that was probably a good thing given the heavy subject manner they dealt with every day.