The Tribes

by Catriona King

  “So he succumbed to the slurry fumes. It happens all the time.”

  But John’s “Welll...” said not to be so quick. “Maybe… except he was wearing a top of the range slurry suit.”

  Craig sat forward again. “Had it been breached?”

  The pathologist’s shrug was equivocal.

  The detective was growing more interested. “You think it was sabotage?”

  John removed his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve before answering. When he finally did there was reluctance in his words.

  “I really… I don’t know. And I’m loath to raise the possibility of murder until I’m sure.” He shook his head. “The local hospital said they haven’t been able to contact his wife… and apparently they have a six-year-old son.”

  Craig made a face, picturing the widow and child trying to run the farm alone. “Is Des examining the suit?”

  He knew that Des Marsham, Northern Ireland’s Head of Forensics, would find anything that there was to find.

  John nodded. “Started an hour ago. That’s partly what I wanted to talk to you about. Would you mind nipping down to the lab?”

  Mind? Anything that stopped him thinking about Katy right now was like manna from above. If it hadn’t been considered unseemly to celebrate a death he would have been jumping up and down. Instead he nodded and stood up, handing twenty pounds to a nearby waiter before pushing open the bar’s street door. John gulped down his coffee and followed hastily, exiting just as the rest of the squad were coming in. Liam stopped the pathologist mid-flight.

  “Where’s the boss racing off to? Have we got a case?”

  John’s twisted smile said maybe, and his wave goodbye said I’ll let you know when we have. It was enough for now. Liam wasn’t a man to go looking for work until it landed on his desk. He nodded the others into Craig’s newly vacated booth and took their orders. Thirty minutes later, after Andy had embarrassed himself by making cow eyes at Rhonda, the squad’s new constable whom he’d dated and been dumped by weeks before, and it was clear that the hard wooden benches weren’t helping Annette to relax, they got ready to leave. Just then Liam’s mobile rang.

  As the theme from The Musketeers, the new ringtone Ash had downloaded for him, filled the bar, Liam turned his back to avoid his subordinates’ inevitable smiles. A few seconds nodding and ‘un-huh’ing later he cut the call and beckoned Annette to follow him outside.

  “A body’s been found at the Lagan Weir.”

  “We should call the chief.”

  Liam gawped at her. “Are you nuts? That was the happiest I’ve seen him look for weeks. Let him have fun with the Doc for a few hours. We can go check it out.”

  She didn’t argue, secretly pleased that she was getting the chance of real work. The men on the team had started protecting her as soon as she’d said that she was pregnant: not calling her late at night, which although she could do without it was an integral part of the job, and dancing around her like she was made of glass, so this was definite progress. Liam’s automatic summoning of her to a murder scene was proof positive that her china doll treatment was over, or so she thought.

  She seized on the opportunity gratefully. “Great. Shall I call the C.S.I.s?”

  “Check first. They might already be there.”

  As he nodded her to a bench in Barrow Square and walked off saying “Wait here a minute. I’ll go and get the car” Annette’s eyes narrowed to a squint and her feminist antennae began to twitch again. She decided against objecting, reckoning he could have made the suggestion to any of the team and not wanting to overreact, but her radar was well and truly on.

  Five minutes later they were on their way to the scene and the others were on their way back to the ranch to push more paper. From no murder cases for weeks they now had a possible two. They didn’t know it yet but it was the start of something far bigger than both.

  Chapter Two

  The Pathology Lab. Saintfield Road Science Park. 2 p.m.

  Craig peered at the small tear in the slurry suit, wondering if it could have allowed in sufficient fumes to kill a man. His answer was as ambivalent at John’s earlier one had been.

  The tear was irregular, with random threads that protruded from each edge; its partial thickness revealing only the faintest view of his finger as he held it up to the light. The hole could have been the product of normal wear and tear, but why would anyone handling such dangerous material not have had it repaired immediately? It was something they would be looking into.

  He peered at the tear again, trying to picture someone creating the breach with a knife. It wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility. A tiny nick followed by some judicious shredding and only a forensic expert could rule deliberate intent in or out.

  Craig held the suit at arm’s length, picturing exactly where the hole would have sat on its wearer when he was alive. Left sleeve, just above the elbow at the back; not a place that normally got worn, and a place that a farmer in a hurry might have missed. It could have been sabotage.

  As the detective perused the garment John was perusing him. He’d been right to involve Craig; even if it turned out that the death was from natural causes it was the liveliest that he’d seen him for a month. He broke the silence with a question.

  “What do you think - accident or incident?”

  Craig shook his head. “Hard to say.” Something occurred to him. “Did he have anything else on him that could have torn it? In his clothes under the suit.”

  “Like what?”

  “Knife. Keys. Anything?”

  John frowned. “Now you mention it. No.”

  Craig set the suit to one side. “The breach is in an unlikely position for wear and tear, but on the other hand it’s not obvious that it was made by a knife.” He perched on a nearby stool. “What does Des think?”

  John rolled his eyes. “That the Matterhorn’s bloody high.”

  “What?”

  The pathologist sighed. “He’s taken up mountain climbing. Personally I think it’s just an excuse to grow his beard even longer. He looks like Grizzly Adams at the moment. It’s a wonder that he can find his mouth to eat.”

  Craig raised an eyebrow. “Fascinating, but I meant what does he think about the hole?”

  “Oh, that. He’s refusing to commit until the electron microscopy results are back. He muttered something about air as well and then wandered off.” He turned towards the door. “Come and see the body.” Only when uttered by a pathologist could such words not sound bizarre.

  Craig squinted as he tried to decide if looking at a man who’d been gassed to death was going to add anything to his day. Eventually he shrugged; all evidence was good evidence or at least that’s what his tutor at The Met had always said. He slid off his stool and meandered into the dissection room, where a quick flourish of a sheet later and they were staring down at a very dead man.

  Death was death of course, but, and he already knew that this was nonsense; some bodies definitely looked deader than others. Time contributed; the long dead making the newly deceased look positively vibrant, but it wasn’t only the length of time dead but the mode of death that played a part. Until that moment Craig would have said that drowning deaths were the deadest dead people that he’d ever seen, but the man on the slab in front of them looked even worse than that. His face looked furious, as if he’d felt cheated of life. It fitted with someone totally shocked by the suddenness of their demise.

  John’s voice broke through his thoughts.

  “Slurry can release methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide. The symptoms vary accordingly to the concentrations of each. Some of the gases are odourless or destroy the sense of smell, so the person doesn’t notice the threat and just falls down dead, or, with the hydrogen sulphide, they can suffer discomfort, disorientation, collapse and then death. Most people die within a couple of breaths.”

  Craig shook his head and walked away. When they were settled back in John’s office holding a brew, the patholo
gist spoke again.

  “For a man who died non-violently; he looks as if he fought very hard.”

  Craig nodded. “I thought he looked angry. Is that common with gassing deaths?”

  A pall came over John’s face. Craig had seen him look like it once before, in the summer of eighty-eight when they were still at university. John had spent his holiday working with a charity in Halabja in Southern Kurdistan, where, as part of the Iran-Iraq war, Kurds had been gassed by Saddam Hussein.

  The detective waited for a moment before prompting his friend with a cough.

  John nodded. “I saw something similar in eighty-eight. People who’d witnessed the chemical attack said some victims dropped in their tracks with the expressions still fixed on their faces; others took much longer to die. You don’t want to know how.”

  Craig moved the discussion along. “So McAllister definitely died of gassing then?”

  “Yes.”

  “So no ambiguity as to cause of death, only as to how the gas got in.”

  John frowned. “I don’t know much about slurry but I assume the gas entered through that hole. The only decision is whether it was made deliberately.”

  Craig wasn’t convinced. “You think? The hole wasn’t full thickness and if only a little gas got in McAllister might have had time to escape. We’ll need permeability tests as well as microscopy.”

  John’s voice was firm. “He was definitely gassed.”

  The detective raised a hand in peace. “All I’m saying is that neither of us is sure how the gas got to him, and we’ll only know when Des has finished testing the suit.” He stood up. “Meanwhile, you and I are taking a trip to that farm.”

  ****

  The Lagan Weir, Belfast. 3 p.m.

  Liam watched the water gushing over the weir for so long that finally Annette gave his arm a nudge.

  “Wake up. I’d like to get out of here this side of Easter. It’s freezing.”

  The D.C.I. ignored her, his mind on other things than the temperature. He was picturing all of the possible ways the dead youth could have ended up there. He could have jumped in, fallen in or been pushed in, of course; that was how bodies normally ended up in the drink. Either right beside the local wonder of engineering or nearby, then the river’s current would have forced him swiftly onto the manmade barrier. Maybe.

  He lifted his eyes and stared past his shivering companion, beyond the Queen Elizabeth Bridge and towards the Waterfront Hall. Or…the lad could have entered the water much further upstream and been carried there more slowly, meandering towards the weir over an unknown length of time. As he thought it Liam shrugged. Dead was dead. He didn’t need to work out where the youth had met his end right away; forensics would tell them where he’d been and the computer geeks would work out when.

  He made a note to attend the post-mortem then turned to Annette as if she’d just made her comment the second before.

  “Aye, it is cold. ’Course I’ll be feeling it worse than you, given that you’ve a wee radiator on board.”

  Annette suddenly wasn’t so sure that she liked being treated as one of the boys, thinking that she might prefer being cossetted like before. Of course, if she could make up her mind it would help, but before she could Liam had crossed to the covered body and pulled back its sheet, completely oblivious to the gawping of passers-by. Annette stepped in front of him, hissing urgently.

  “For God’s sake cover him up. People are looking.”

  Before she’d finished, adding sadly “he’s just a kid” Liam had entered another trance. He stared hard at the young man’s swollen face, as if enough scrutiny would make him wake and tell them how and why he had died. The D.C.I.’s gaze lingered for another moment and then travelled past the youth’s sodden clothing to his badly frayed hands. Bruised, cut, and by the shape of them, fractured.

  Liam donned a glove and turned over one misshapen appendage and then the other, scrutinising their skinned palms. The injuries spoke of a fight not long before he had passed. The detective shook his head immediately. No, not a fight; the cuts weren’t on the man’s knuckles, they were further back. Someone had stamped hard on their victim’s hands.

  He sprang to his feet, bemoaning the fact that Andy wasn’t there to see him do it. The scrawny D.C.I. had made one too many jokes about his paunch before Christmas, so Liam’s New Year’s resolution had been to get fit and his eight a.m. visits to the gym were starting to pay off. He’d soon be slating the unfeasibly skinny Toblerone addict for not going there himself.

  He signalled the mortuary attendants to remove the body and turned to look for Annette. He found her clutching a coffee supplied by a kindly C.S.I.

  “Definitely murder. My guess is he was chucked in further up river and someone stamped on his hands to make sure he didn’t get out again. It would fit with the bruises, plus some of his fingers are broken and his palms are skinned, like he was trying to grab onto the bank.”

  She sniffed sceptically.

  “Speculation.”

  Liam didn’t take offence. He’d been blessed with an ultra-thick skin at birth. “Informed conjecture, I think you’ll find, Inspector. Anyway, we’ll see when the Docs get at him.”

  She set down her mug and took out a five pound note. “I’ll bet you a fiver that you’re off the mark.”

  He was tempted, but there was something in his DNA that wouldn’t let him take money from a woman several months along.

  “Keep your money. We’ll wait and see.”

  Annette’s eyes narrowed, her feminist radar pinging again. “You’ll take bets on my due date with the chief but not with me on this? Or is it because I’m pregnant? Eh? You chauvi-”

  But Liam was already walking to the car, thinking of other things. A rumbling in his only slightly shrunken stomach told him it was time for afternoon tea.

  ****

  The C.C.U. 4 p.m.

  By the time Craig arrived back at Docklands, courtesy of a trip to the farm that had been aborted halfway by a call informing him the farmer’s widow was actually somewhere in Belfast, people were piled up outside his office like planes circling over Heathrow. Two of them were Ash, sporting green hair instead of his normal blue or purple, as a patriotic nod to the New Year, and Jake McLean, the squad’s detective sergeant, previously confined to a wheelchair, courtesy of his attempted murder by his partner Aaron Foster, but now getting around on crutches following intensive physio.

  The third man was one that Craig didn’t know and didn’t like the look of; he had a lean and hungry look that would have made Julius Caesar suspicious, and it was having much the same effect on him. He tutted at his quick prejudice; the man couldn’t help how he looked, and besides, if he were being honest, he would admit that his dislike of the visitor was based more on the instantly recognisable Public Prosecution files beneath his arm than anything related to his physique.

  He walked past the three men into his office, collecting Nicky on the way and nodding her to shut the door. Once inside he gave her a baleful look.

  “Why do they all want to see me?”

  She smiled kindly at him, like a mother whose child had been hurt and wanted to make it better. It was an expression she’d worn for most of the previous month, alternating it with loud shushes at anyone who made noise while he was in his office and copious unsolicited espressos. Craig was half expecting her to sing him a lullaby but instead she took a seat.

  “Ash wants to talk to you about Ronan Miskimmon’s computers, Jake wants to know if he can get out on the street more, and the-” She stopped abruptly, noticing that Craig was still on his feet. She waited till he’d sat down before restarting. “The other man is from the Public Prosecution Service. His name is Martin Grant.”

  His sigh was heavy and automatic; she’d confirmed his guess and P.P.S. emissaries were seldom the bearers of good news.

  “He’s here about the Miskimmon and Corneau case?”

  She nodded and then swallowed hard. “And Aaron Foster.”

>   Foster had been Jake’s live-in partner for ten years, and so consumed with jealousy that rather than allow Jake to end their relationship he’d decided to kill him, something he’d almost succeeded in doing the October before.

  Craig’s eyes widened. “How do you know?”

  He doubted the P.P.S. visitor would have given up his tightly held secrets to a P.A. Nicky’s conspiratorial smile confirmed that he was right.

  “My friend Ruby works in the P.P.S.’ office and she told me.”

  He gawped at her. “And I’m just hearing that you have a spy in the P.P.S. now? After how many years of us working together?”

  She shot him a sceptical look.

  “You know fine well that if I’d told you before you would have taken liberties. You’d have been asking me to find out all sorts of things and that would’ve landed Ruby in a mess.”

  She was right. It was a wise secretary who knew her own boss.

  Craig thought for a moment and then made his choice.

  “OK, tell Jake yes to his request to get out there again, and I’ll happily speak to him later if he still wishes. Tell Ash he can have half-an-hour later this afternoon, and diary it, please. And you’d better send the lean and hungry one in.”

  Her look was quizzical but her action decisive. She opened the door and beckoned Martin Grant in; leaving to make coffee so strong that it would assuage Craig’s caffeine pangs for the whole hour she knew the meeting would take. As it happened the discussion didn’t take that long, but what it lacked in length it made up for in noise.

  Martin Grant shook Craig’s offered hand with a grip that was both weak and strong; it was a strange combination. His palm pressed hard against Craig’s while his fingers wiggled limply in the air, making the detective wonder if it was the sign of some secret club. He gave the matter all of five seconds consideration and then nodded the lawyer to a seat.

  “You wanted to see me about two of our cases, Mr Grant.”