The Depths

by Catriona King

  “Hence murder and the reason you called us down.” Craig nodded. “OK. It’ll do as a working theory anyway.” He turned to his deputy. “There couldn’t have been any guarantee of death just by pushing him in from the top, so those bruises must have come from someone holding him under water until he was dead. He was small but muscled, so we’re talking about someone strong. Definitely a man.”

  John shook his head in warning. “That all depends on whether I’m right.”

  Liam gazed at him like a groupie. “I believe in you, Doc. You’re my hero.”

  That earned him a derisive snort as the pathologist climbed out of the car. “I’ll do the PM early, so if you drop down late morning I should know for sure. Oh, by the way, look out for gold when you’re nosing around.”

  “What?”

  “This place might look like a quarry now, but there was a gold mine sunk here for a few years. One of the local cops told me. So, you might find a lump or two of the stuff lying around if you’re lucky. Who knows?”

  The door closed behind him to snorts of scepticism, and the detectives were left staring out through the windscreen in silence until Liam spoke again.

  “OK, so, the nearest village is called Rownton, about five miles from here. I’ve asked the sergeant there to get reinforcements from Omagh and start questioning the locals on what they know.”

  “Good.”

  “That leaves us with three choices, boss. We can sit here and speculate why someone wanted our floater dead, we can get out and ask those kids what they saw, or we can do both of those after we talk about Annette.”

  It was a neat synopsis and Craig couldn’t have put it any better. Annette Eakin, the Murder Squad’s long serving detective inspector, had been involved in a fatal shooting just before Christmas. Her ex-husband Pete McElroy, who’d been imprisoned for assaulting her and then had his stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure extended and moved to a high-security nick for shivving another inmate, had been released on a short pre-release leave just before Christmas and had immediately broken into the home that Annette shared with her new partner Mike Augustus and their two-year-old child.

  Unfortunately, the shock of seeing Pete standing over their bed in the middle of the night had made Annette reach for her Glock, a personal protection weapon that she should have locked away as soon as she’d come home that evening after the squad’s Christmas party but hadn’t because it was late, and a weapon that she’d then shot him dead with after having consumed alcohol at said party, something that had unfortunately shown up in her blood results.

  The upshot was that an investigation had been launched by the Police Ombudsman, and Annette had been suspended pending investigation. She was at home now on the euphemistically nicknamed ‘gardening leave’ until everything was, hopefully, sorted out.

  The less hopeful part was covered by Liam’s next words.

  “What if she goes down, boss?”

  Craig’s head whipped round as fast as his answer snapped out. “For what?”

  “For not locking her gun away as per the licensing terms, for being in charge of a weapon while under the influence of alcohol, for discharging that weapon, for-”

  Craig cut across him angrily. “For shooting an intruder? A burglar, a man with a history of violence not just against her but against other people, against other men in prison? A man who’d almost killed another inmate with a shiv? And for coming home late and exhausted after the end of a major case?”

  He sucked in a mouthful of air and continued. “OK, yes, so she had alcohol on board, but she was only one percent over the drink-drive limit, so still within the margin of error, and I’m surprised that she was even that! You know how little Annette drinks. Anyway, she wasn’t driving that night and she wasn’t drunk. They’d have to prove she was and it would never stick. And you and I both know how careful she is with firearms. She’s only ever shot someone once before, and that was because he was about to kill you! And me-”

  Liam stepped up to his role as Devil’s Advocate.

  “Pete’s dead though!”

  “She can’t be penalised for being a crack shot!”

  The D.C.I. allowed himself a small smile that made his boss scowl.

  “What are you smirking about?”

  “I’m not smirking, I’m smiling, and it’s because I was just messing with you to see what you’d say. After that defence I just hope that you’re in my corner when my time comes.”

  Craig managed a chuckle. “Planning on shooting someone are you?”

  “That woman in the staff canteen if she burns my sausages one more time. No, but seriously, boss, we’ll both be called to testify if there’s a hearing, seeing as we were with Annette just hours before.”

  Craig opened the car door to climb out. “Then we tell the truth.”

  And the truth will set Annette free. Hopefully.

  ****

  The Rocking Chair Pub. Rownton Village. 5 p.m.

  The Rocking Chair Pub was a vision of kitsch and cosiness; the sort of hostelry you see in brochures for Irish Tourism, with polished mahogany beams, well-shone brasses and sparkling glasses, all lit by the flickering red-orange flames of an open fire.

  In the brochure all of this would be set against the background of a tune singing out from a fiddler’s strings and a dark-haired colleen in the corner beating out a leaping rhythm with her feet, but even without those additions the pub was a cliché, yet its customers loved it no less for that. It was their retreat when their hard day’s work ended at the farms, shops and small factories nearby, and a place to meet neighbours, romantic partners and perhaps even the odd vicar or priest.

  Such places are the hearts of villages not deemed fashionable enough to have chi-chi restaurants that attract the country’s gourmets and those so small that their pulse, the village post-office, has long ago been stopped. But anthropomorphically a pub isn’t just the heart or pulse but the ears and eyes of a village; the place where every local’s secrets become common discourse, and every stranger runs a gauntlet of curious looks or stories trotted out for a new audience because the old ones are either disinterested or dead.

  But that afternoon there were no strangers amongst The Rocking Chair’s occupants, its public bar quiet and sparsely filled. An elderly couple, the village’s oldest inhabitants, had taken up prime position by the fire and were sipping quietly at the two half-pints that their pensions allowed them, while a pair of weather worn, middle-aged men drinking Guinness stood propping up its long wooden bar.

  So quiet was it that when the oil-starved street door screamed open, every occupant turned to see who was entering, their gazes lasting only long enough to welcome the newcomer as someone familiar before they turned to their drinks again, all except for Finbar Brolly, the pub landlord, who broke the silence to ask the question that he asked scores of times each day.

  “What’ll you be having,” the name of the prospective drinker inserted almost as an afterthought, “Derek?”

  The anxious looking man walked straight to the unoccupied end of the bar, answering, “Lager” as he did, and as the honey-coloured liquid appeared in front of him he beckoned his host closer and lowered his voice. “Have the police been in yet, Finbar?”

  Brolly took a step back and lifted an empty glass to polish as he answered the question with another.

  “How’d you hear about them, Derek? Tucked away in that office of yours.”

  The aging builder responded irritably. “Word travels around here, you know that! People saw the cars. Now, have they been in or not?”

  His tone made Brolly raise a greying eyebrow, and on another day and with a different customer the landlord might have turned and walked away. But Derek Morrow was no ordinary local, he was the boss of the only construction firm for one hundred miles, and if Derek gave the word all his workmen would stop spending their pay packets in the pub.

  So Finbar Brolly bit his tongue and shook his head obligingly, although spite made him add a predictive, “
Not yet”, and experience a frisson of pleasure when he saw a flash of sweat appear on the builder’s top lip.

  “When did they arrive?”

  Morrow’s tone was even more intense than before.

  “No idea why they’re here, but they turned up around an hour ago. All the commotion they made too, with their nee-naw nee-naws and flashing lights.” The landlord shook his balding head. “I don’t know why people can’t just do things quietly, instead of running around disturbing the peace like that.”

  The construction boss wasn’t about to be drawn into a debate on noise pollution and focused instead on what mattered to him, his next question an insistent hiss.

  “Does anyone know why they were called?”

  It earned him another elevated eyebrow from his host, who was now rubbing so hard at the glass that he was holding to prevent himself punching the builder that it was a wonder that his tea-towel didn’t pass right through.

  After he’d deemed enough time had passed to convey his feelings Brolly stopped rubbing and gave his customer a look of implied knowing, that reflected nothing so well as his confusion about why Morrow was asking such a thing plus a growing desire to find out.

  In view of the businessman’s obviously taut state of mind Brolly decided to meander as he did so to wind him up.

  “I hear there are Belfast cops here too.”

  It brought a satisfying tightening of Morrow’s sagging jaw so he pressed the advantage.

  “Sergeant O’Hare was in ten minutes ago saying they want to interview everyone local, but he doesn’t know why. Everyone, mind you.”

  As the tightening became a clench the pub landlord stared hard at his customer. “Do you know why, Derek?”

  The builder jumped back as if the bar had just been electrified and his response this time was loud.

  “I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING! THAT’S WHY I’M ASKING!”

  It earned him glances from the bar’s other occupants and a quiet tut from the old woman, who had never in her life liked loud people, or her peace and quiet being disturbed.

  Brolly gave a twisted smile, the bill for Morrow’s earlier bad temper now well and truly paid.

  “If you shout like that people will think you know exactly why the cops are here, Derek. People will think you’ve been up to no good.”

  The taunt earned him a fiver slapped down on the bar and a view of Morrow’s back as he exited, and it left The Rocking Chair’s regulars a lot more curious about life than they’d been ten minutes earlier, and with plenty to tell the folks at home that night.

  ****

  The West Mountain Quarry. 6 p.m.

  By six o’clock the detectives had heard three versions of that afternoon’s happenings from the teenagers, in various shades of breaking voice but all of them adding up to the same thing; the quarry was their favoured venue for an afternoon spent bunking off school. Whether they used it for exploring, swimming, skating or fishing depended on the solidity of the water’s surface and the weather, but all three agreed that today’s was the biggest adventure they had ever had.

  When asked if they’d ever actually caught a fish, Craig had stifled a smile as the one called Ricky had held his hands two feet apart and described the one that had got away. But further probing had confirmed John’s hypothesis; the only aquatic creatures the boys had ever seen were fronds of vegetation beneath the water’s surface and the only catch they’d ever made was the unwelcome human whale that they had landed that day. A whale that none of the three had ever seen when he was alive. There was only one version on that.

  Craig beckoned his deputy to one side and dropped his voice. “What do you think? Can we trust them not to tell everyone what they found?”

  Liam snorted in derision. “Not a hope in hell! They’ll be down to the nearest street corner or youth club, or wherever the kids hang out around here, bigging up their psychological trauma at finding a corpse for all it’s worth.”

  “Except that would tell their parents that they’d been mitching school and they definitely don’t want that. They’re still refusing to give their surnames and they screamed blue murder earlier when the uniforms said they’d have to call their folks. The one that I was just questioning is still saying he’s twenty-five, just small for his age.”

  Liam wasn’t persuaded.

  “Nah. By tomorrow morning they won’t care about any of that, they’ll just be busting to tell their mates. Anyway, my bet is that their folks won’t be that surprised. This won’t be the first time bunking school for any of them.”

  Craig sighed, knowing that he was right. Kids were always kids.

  The D.C.I. hadn’t finished.

  “And another thing, boss. My bet is they’ll call the papers and try to flog their stories as well. That’s what kids do these days.”

  Newspapers or no newspapers, Craig knew the discovery might be all over social media in a few hours, if it wasn’t already. Only the rural nature of their location might have slowed things down.

  As soon as the thought occurred to him he strode back to the car where the three boys were now play-fighting in the back seat and motioned them to get out. They emerged warily, Craig’s expression telling them unambiguously not to mess about.

  “Phones.”

  He held out a hand, and as the ubiquitous smart-phones appeared, variously adorned with football, rugby and zombie stickers, he passed them to his deputy to inspect while he went on.

  “Did any of you boys photograph the body after you found it?”

  Averted eyes and shuffling feet said that the answer was yes.

  “Right. Which of you?”

  A tightening of each smooth face in turn said that all three had, prompting Craig to give a disgusted tut.

  “For God’s sake, were none of you brought up to respect the dead?”

  Perhaps a stupid question of a generation whose computer games mostly revolved around killing and maiming to achieve a goal.

  A roar from his deputy put paid to Craig’s follow-up question.

  “WHOSE PHONE IS THIS?”

  The detective turned to see Liam brandishing the zombie phone in the air and walked across to take a look. He saw a photograph of their victim’s face, bloated and macerated but still potentially recognisable by someone who’d loved him, with a banner beneath it saying, ‘Found a real zombie at the quarry today. Ace!’

  Craig swung back to see the smallest of the three amigos staring at the ground so hard he looked like he was trying to bore through to Australia, so he leant down to glare right into the teenager’s face.

  “This is your phone?”

  A weak nod from Paul Rontgen said yes.

  Craig stepped back, fighting an urge to shake the adolescent like some public school master in a black and white movie.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  The boy’s closely shorn head rose sharply and to Craig’s fury he caught a glimpse of defiance in his eyes. The teenager made the mistake of giving it voice.

  “It’s a free country! I can post anything I want!”

  Liam closed his eyes and waited for the explosion. It didn’t take long.

  “AND I CAN HAVE YOU ARRESTED FOR INTERFERING WITH A POLICE INVESTIGATION!”

  Craig swung round to face the other two, whose faces had turned a sickly grey.

  “Will we find similar posts on your phones?”

  He was almost blown over by the breeze from the teenagers’ shaking heads.

  But the haste of their garbled, “No way. Just photos”, and already having been bitten once meant that he didn’t trust them, so he looked to his deputy for confirmation and eventually received a weary nod.

  “There are photos of our man on all three, but that’s the only thing I found that looked like an actual post. We’ll need them to sign in to all their media and emails so we can check if they’ve written about their find too.”

  Five minutes later they knew that Shamus Wright had done nothing but take and save the photograp
h and Ricky Murphy had emailed his pen pal in New Zealand about the find, but thankfully with no image attached so the squad’s senior analyst, Davy Walsh, could easily do damage limitation on that.

  That just left Paul Rontgen’s zombie post.

  Craig turned back to the short teenager. “Show me where you posted this.” At the boy’s hesitation he added, “Now” in such a stern tone that Liam mused he might have been practicing for his impending fatherhood in front of the mirror.

  It brought a grunt from Rontgen and a lackadaisical stabbing at his mobile but soon they were in his email account.

  “What about any others accounts, like FaceChat? Did you post it on any of those?”

  It was Murphy who answered. “We didn’t get time, honest. Your lot turned up too fast.”

  Evidently only the local cops’ rapid response to the boys’ nine-nine-nine call had prevented a full-on social media fest, meaning that lack of time and not morality had saved the day.

  The fact depressed both detectives more than they could say.

  Craig turned back to Paul Rontgen.

  “The banner underneath suggests this is an internet post, so where has it been posted?”

  “Nowhere. I emailed it.”

  “To?”

  The response was mumbled. “My mum.”

  It could have been worse he supposed, but given the behaviour of her offspring the woman’s own common sense had to be seriously in doubt.

  “Liam, get her name, work and home addresses and send a uniform to each to get it deleted before she passes it on.”

  The boy’s mouth opened immediately to protest, but a warning glance clamped it shut again.

  “I’ll see what Davy can do from his end.”

  Two minutes later Davy Walsh the squad’s senior analyst, who’d just been packing up for the night and planning what he was going to steam for dinner, going through as he had been since his trip to Iceland at Christmas a healthy eating phase involving a lot of rice and fish, knew that whatever meal he’d been planning on having that night was going to be delayed for at least an hour.