The Depths

by Catriona King

  Craig shook his head with obvious regret. “I’d love us to take the bastard on, Liam, but we don’t need to. He’s boxed in whichever way he looks at it, so I have to point that out and give him a chance to surrender. However… if he decides to go full Clyde on us and shoot his way out then all bets are off.”

  As he went to make another call Liam retrieved the binoculars and opened his door.

  “I’m going to take a closer look, boss.”

  “OK, but keep your head down, you’re a big target. Davy? It’s me again. We have Westbury in sight. He’s in his car and I think he’s armed, although I can’t see the gun. Liam’s gone to look again. How’s the timing for his check-in?”

  “It’s just closed, and he must know that.”

  “So he guessed that the airport was on alert. He’s boxed himself in so we can’t approach any other way but from the front, so that leaves us either trying to negotiate his surrender or ordering a full-on assault. Does he have a mobile?”

  “The hire-car has a phone so I’ll text you the number now.”

  “Do tha-”

  Just then Liam jumped back into the car. “He has a bloody Heckler and Koch MP5K!”

  A machine pistol holding fifteen to thirty rounds per magazine.

  Craig cut his call. “Shit! He means business. Did he see you?”

  “Can’t have or I’d have a bullet in my ass, but he looks wild stressed so I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran soon.”

  Craig thought fast. They’d both got close to the Mercedes without being seen or they would have been shot at, so now it was time to try the other way.

  “OK. Five minutes then I’ll call him out.” Just then Davy’s text with the car-phone number came through. “But I want to make sure this area’s clear of civilians first. Stay down, I’ll take the right side and you take the left.”

  “And if we find any?”

  “Get them back in their cars, on the floor and quiet.” He opened the passenger door and slipped down. “Back here in five.”

  Pat Goodall’s lock-down had worked. The only person they found was a woman struggling with so much luggage that she must have entered the car park before them but not started towards the terminal yet. A quick flash of Craig’s badge and a hand over her mouth just as she was about to speak and she was lying down in her car’s rear foot-well and quietly saying her prayers.

  By the time they reconvened at Liam’s car, its owner had revised his opinion on their target.

  “I think Westbury might have been about to run, boss. Something about his face.”

  Just then the Mercedes flew past the end of their row proving him right. They jumped into the Ford and Liam threw the car into reverse while his boss hit the siren and lights and called the waiting Gardaí as they gave chase.

  “Westbury’s heading for you if we can’t stop him. Follow only. He has an MP5.”

  He cut the call and turned to his deputy. “If he reaches the motorway in that car we’ll be eating dust. Get as close as you can and I’ll try to shoot his tyres out before he hits full speed.”

  Liam’s boot hit the floor, but the Mercedes’ speed picked up in response until they were racing through the network of short streets, longer thoroughfares and ramps that made up the multi-storey car park, praying to God that no pedestrians from the interlocking car parks appeared taking a short-cut. The last thing they needed was a dead civvie or a hostage situation.

  Craig was hanging so far out of the passenger window now that only his feet hooked around the edge of his seat stopped him falling out and under the Ford’s tyres, and with every turn and ramp up to a higher floor he got shunted, rising and falling as his deputy skidded or lost connection momentarily with the tarmac’s surface and then thudded down hard on it again.

  He ignored the pain and the risk of falling, shutting out everything but the wheels burning rubber just feet front of him and searching for his chance, determined not to waste his limited bullets until he knew that he had the shot.

  It came just as Westbury was rounding a left hand corner. The sharp turn made the Merc decelerate until it was only a car length in front of them, and a slow, smooth squeeze of Craig’s trigger released a missile that found its way home, blowing out the saloon’s offside rear tyre and making its backend flick out and round until it had spun the vehicle three-sixty and impaled its front end on a concrete pillar that all the revving in the world was never going to get it off.

  The driver’s door flew open almost immediately and a dark blond head appeared momentarily as Blaine Westbury rolled out on to the ground and then scuttled away. Craig was out of the car and after him in a second with his deputy in hot pursuit, both of them yelling, “ARMED POLICE. STOP!”

  They followed the bobbing head through the floors and mazes of cars for several minutes, Craig in front and his deputy just inches behind, as Westbury fruitlessly tried every driver’s door that he passed, hoping to steal something else to drive. After a while the head stopped bobbing and their target took up position behind a blue Toyota. Craig waited for several seconds and then shouted out again from where they were now concealed.

  “ARMED POLICE! THERE’S NOWHERE TO RUN TO, WESTBURY. THERE ARE ARMED COPS AT THE EXITS AND IN THE TERMINALS. YOU KNOW WE CAN’T LET YOU GO SO IT’S TIME TO GIVE YOURSELF UP. THERE’S NO POINT SOMEONE DYING.”

  “FUCK OFF!”

  Liam snorted. “Charming. Can we shoot him now?”

  Craig shot him a sceptical look and tried again, with the same expletive-laden response.

  “The bastard’s hoping someone will walk past so he can take a hostage, Liam. There’s still a tiny risk of it but we can’t let it happen.”

  They shuffled closer until they were only a single row away, then Craig lowered his head to look beneath the cars.

  “I’ve a clear shot at his legs.”

  “Just like he has of yours, if he thinks of it first. We need to distract him.”

  The D.C.I. moved quickly to the end of the row.

  “You’re the better shot so I’m going to do it, boss. As soon as you hear me shout, shoot the legs out from under the git.”

  Before Craig could say yes or no his deputy began racing across the road-wide gap between parking rows, taunting the killer as he did.

  “WHAT SORT OF A BASTARD COULD DO WHAT YOU DID TO THOSE KIDS, WESTBURY?”

  “YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT IT! PLENTY OF THEM ARE HAPPY.HAPPIER THAN WITH THEIR OWN PEOPLE I BET.”

  It was Westbury’s anger at his parents playing out but Craig didn’t have the time to listen to his self-indulgent crap. Liam was doing his bit so he had to do his.

  Just then he heard a run of shots and a loud, “OW! FUCK!” from his deputy, but he couldn’t let himself be distracted from what he had to do. He tightened his focus on the hunkered down legs twenty feet in front of him and chose the biggest target; the thigh. A double tap later and there was a loud cry and a groan, and then a clatter as Westbury’s submachine gun hit the ground when he doubled up in pain.

  Craig moved in swiftly before he could retrieve the weapon, speeding between cars and kicking the MP5away just as Westbury’s blood-stained hand was reaching out. A second later Liam appeared holding his arm.

  “Is it bad?”

  “Flesh wound,” he added huffily, “although I could have been dead for all you knew. You didn’t even shout to ask me.”

  “I didn’t get time. Besides, I reckoned you’d be swearing too loudly to hear.”

  The D.C.I. saw the sense of it and turned his attention to their prisoner, kicking cheerfully at the hole in Westbury’s thigh.

  “Here, now, that looks wild painful. You’d better get a doctor to look at that.”

  Craig didn’t know how he could bear to touch the man, not even with his shoe, when he could barely look at Westbury without wanting to shoot him again. Not trusting himself not to the first time had felt so good, he stepped away and made the call to emergency services, gratefully accepting the appearing Gardaí’s offer to
accompany Westbury to the nearest hospital once the ambulance arrived and promising that they would return to interview him after he’d been patched up.

  Twenty minutes later Craig left the ambulance staff and cops to it and loaded his, now neatly bandaged, deputy into his car, then he turned it back towards Dublin and Pat Goodall’s banker houseguest.

  Chapter Nine

  Garda Headquarters.

  By midnight yet more pieces had slotted into place, courtesy of Róisín Casey’s desperate efforts to save her designer ass. In the deluded hope of negotiating some sort of leniency, and despite Craig’s clear warning that no such indulgence would be forthcoming and that she and her lover would probably spend the rest of their lives fending off attempts by various countries to plug them into the mains, the banker obligingly filled in some gaps.

  The names she gave them went on and on like some depraved roll-call in Hell. Middle-men abductors like Galvet, staff in private adoption agencies across the globe, passport forgers, airport staff who’d colluded in smuggling the children in and out of countries, IT specialists who’d set up their finance and communications networks plus the crypto-library of children that Ash had uncovered; the list was seemingly endless. The Bonny and Clyde team had had more people in their employ than most multinationals.

  And of course, Róisín had explained that everything had been Blaine Westbury’s idea. She was just a helpless woman who’d fallen in love and been trapped by her man’s threats of violence if she’d refused to assist him; or that was the complete tripe she was proposing to trot out in court anyway.

  In Blaine Westbury’s case, he was reclining in his hospital bed not even trying to lie about what he’d done, revealing the details of Stuart Kincaid’s murder almost gloatingly and citing as justification that Kincaid had been, “Snooping around my village and quarry asking questions about me”, the drowning itself easily managed because Kincaid had been a much smaller man.

  When Craig had asked curiously why he had turned Kincaid away as he’d killed him, the answer, “He reminded me of Nicola and I liked her even though she married Edgar”, confirmed the semi-personal element to the killing that he had speculated about. The murderer didn’t hold back on his hatred for his big brother, and the answer as to why he’d begun watching Bella in March twenty-fifteen was given with a shrug.

  “I saw her at my folks’ funeral and decided to take her a week later when I found out that Edgar had been left practically everything in the Will. I wanted to hit him where it hurt.”

  Pathetic bastard. Westbury had torn a child away from her family simply because he’d thought that his own hadn’t been fair.

  As much as uncovering such tragedy could ever be, it was a satisfactory end to the case. They’d solved Stuart Kincaid’s murder, arrested some unspeakable bastards, and were without a doubt going to arrest more. They’d also sparked something far bigger that would hopefully unite hundreds of stolen children with their real families.

  In another few days they would uncover even more on the specifics of their case. That Arthur Norris had just been a clueless land agent and gofer who they would eventually release without charge, although with a warning of what would happen if he ever paid someone to slander a person again. But they were resigned to the fact that the elderly businessman would probably never believe evil of Róisín, the woman he was infatuated with, no matter how long he lived.

  They would also learn that Derek Morrow, while legitimately inspecting the quarry the winter before, had witnessed Blaine Westbury murdering Stuart Kincaid, and instead of calling the police had thought he’d found himself a Golden Goose. It had been a short road from witnessing the killing to blackmailing Westbury and getting pay-offs into an account in the Caymans, giving Morrow the nest-egg that he’d never had at last, although how he’d planned for that money to reach his family after death without leaving them the password to access it would take Davy a while to work out. Morrow had played no part in the child abductions but his access to the blockchain was a sure sign that he’d been well aware of them, so he was as guilty as sin. His only redeeming act had been pointing them obliquely towards the venture in his suicide note, but his cryptocurrency link had been the key that had really opened the door.

  In a few more days the squad’s analysts would find another key when they cracked Morrow’s WatsUp group and linked him definitively with Blaine Westbury, Róisín Casey, and several other high-level players in the abduction ring that they so far knew nothing about; players who had so carelessly chatted about their revolting business venture in the group believing that they were safe. Some of their names were also on Stuart Kincaid’s quarry investors list but there were others that were new, and they would all be hunted down no matter where in the world they lived.

  But acting on all of that information would have to wait for its discovery and tonight Craig just wanted to get the hell back to Belfast and find out what was happening in his personal life.

  Chapter Ten

  The C.C.U. Monday, 8 a.m.

  The squad-room was deserted and silent and Craig stood in its centre relishing the peace after the weekend he’d just had. Not the excitement of childbirth, that had turned out to be a false alarm so Katy was back home in waiting mode, but the noise of two mothers, his dad, and Lucia and her fiancée all talking at once in their small apartment had made him want to run for the hills.

  He’d finally kicked everyone out the evening before, the mothers clutching the final shortlist in the great house hunt and instructed to take a further look, with his father along as a fresh pair of eyes, and then he and Katy had fallen asleep together on the sofa like a couple of old married folk.

  He’d left her still asleep in bed an hour before because he’d wanted to be first in to inspect his newly, and covertly, renovated kingdom, and as Craig stood gazing around him and smiling he wondered what his team would make of the work, one member in particular.

  He didn’t have to wait long to find out, because a run of thudding footsteps that shook the floor and a hard slap on the back that made him cough informed Craig that his deputy had arrived.

  “Congratulations! What was it, boy or girl?”

  Craig turned towards the D.C.I., shaking his head. “False alarm. Katy was home in hours. I told you it was too early.”

  Liam seemed unsurprised. “Aye, well, that happened three times with our first. Just the wee bugger winding you up. Fairly shakes you up though, doesn’t it.”

  The sweary title for his offspring sounded strangely affectionate in Liam’s country accent and made Craig laugh; meanwhile the D.C.I. had already moved on, striding towards the back of the open-plan office, his gaze narrowing quizzically as he did.

  He jabbed his forefinger at a door just ahead of them.

  “That door wasn’t there last week.”

  Craig walked ahead of him to stand in front of it. “I had some work done at the weekend.”

  He threw the new door open dramatically and waved his deputy into a twelve by twelve foot office, complete with external window, desk and chair.

  “What do you think?”

  Liam snuffled his way around the space suspiciously, like a bloodhound. When he stopped he was wearing a bemused look.

  “It’s an office.”

  Craig tried for shock. “No, really?”

  “Ha ha. Funny man. So I take it you’re shifting office into this one. But why? You can’t see the river from here and you know you’re obsessed with the bloody water.” He craned his neck to look out of the window. “Mind you, there’s a great view of The James from this one. You’ll be able to see as soon as it opens.”

  “Tempting as that sounds, this isn’t my office, Liam.”

  It earned him an unexpectedly angry squint.

  “I knew it! You’re bringing in someone above me! All those times you suggested I should go for promotion, and now you’ve got fed up waiting and brought in a new Super!”

  Craig smiled kindly and shook his head. “If you became
a superintendent it would be great, but a new one on the squad? No, thank you. God, Ash was right when he called you D.C.I. Dumbo, wasn’t he-”

  “Here now, there’s no need for that.”

  Craig reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a nameplate for the door, sliding it into its holder and watching his deputy’s face as he read out the name incredulously.

  “D.C.I. Liam Cullen. Deputy. That’s me!”

  “Not so Dumbo then.”

  Liam’s small eyes widened. “This is my office?”

  “Yep. I got fed up tripping over those files piled beside your desk.”

  “You did this for me?”

  “Yes. Well, that and I was trying not to break a leg.”

  The Banbridge man’s jaw dropped and Craig was sure that he could see tears in his eyes.

  “Oh, God, you’re not going to cry on me are you?”

  It was payback for every ‘big girl’ crack Liam had made at him when he’d gone ‘all Italian’ over the years.

  The response was a swift punch to the shoulder that Craig really felt.

  He rubbed it hard. “Next time just say thanks, will you. I value my limbs. Now, I know you won’t want to use the room all the time because you’re a nosey bugger who likes being out on the floor, but you can lend it to others for meetings, viewing CCTV tapes, writing reports in peace, whatever you choose as long as it’s for work.”

  Liam plonked himself down behind his new desk. “Over my dead body they’ll use it.”

  “Fine. Whatever. I’ll be moving Alice to a desk outside it at the start of March because Nicky’s coming back part-time, so you might need to moderate your language or negotiate a truce with her.”