The Property

by Catriona King

  Now picture a microcosm of this village, its main hospital, a place where the streets are corridors and the number of hostelries is reduced to one, the staff canteen, its customers limited to personnel who gather in their clinical tribes. How easy would it be to avoid someone from your own tribe? How hard to avoid hearing gossip that they really wanted you to hear?

  And that was how Katy Stevens found out about Craig’s evening of drunken sex in May from Joe Warne, simply because Hanna Reynolds a few miles away in her office had wanted her to.

  ****

  The C.C.U. 6 p.m.

  “OK, settle down. We’ve got a lot to cover and I’m certain you’d all like to get home in time to put your kids to bed.”

  As he uttered the words it dawned on Craig how few of his team were actually parents; only Liam, Annette and Andy, and his seven-year-old son lived with his mum. He didn’t have time right then to ponder whether murder and parenting were incompatible, other people’s murders that was, finding some comfort when the scientists, two more parents, chose that moment to sidle in and take a seat, their attempt at stealth completely destroyed by a clatter as Des dropped his bag on to one of the squad-room’s broken chairs.

  John winced, embarrassed.

  “Sorry, we’re late. Traffic.”

  Craig nodded his understanding; Belfast’s new bus lanes were causing teething snarl-ups across the city, compounded by what seemed to be a perpetual digging of trenches and laying of tarmac which appeared excessive in a place that only occupied forty square miles.

  “No problem. Grab a coffee, you two, and we’ll make a start.”

  Liam pointed to the black liquid and then drew a finger across his throat.

  “Sorry, Liam’s right.” He checked that their temporary secretary, Alice, had gone home before continuing. “It’s not up to Nicky’s standard, sorry, but she had to be elsewhere so we have a temp for a few days.”

  He nipped any questions in the bud by turning to the whiteboard and rapping it hard with his pen.

  “OK, I’ll start by updating everyone on what we know so far, then we’ll take anything relevant in turn-”

  He was interrupted by Mary raising a finger. “Where’s D.I. Spence?”

  “I’ll come to that in a moment. Right.”

  The detective pointed to the sketch of the DoE building that he’d made two days before.

  “This is an outline of what was the DoE building and then became The Howard Tower Hotel, or HTH, in whose floor bones were discovered on Monday.” He indicated the red shaded area. “This area was the basement of the DoE building which was subsequently filled in and therefore never used by The HTH.”

  Davy injected. “Except for car-parking.”

  “Good point. What percentage of the basement was used for that again?”

  “Eighty.”

  “Good. OK, as Davy said, eighty percent of the basement of the DoE building was used for car-parking, and that area was maintained and used by The HTH. However, one fifth of the basement was a traditional cellar, used to house the boiler, electrics etcetera.” He lifted a marker and held it out to Liam. “And Liam’s going to tell us what happened to that.”

  He took his seat as the surprised D.C.I. quit his, surprised that Craig hadn’t wanted to tell everyone about the cannabis farm himself that was, not that he actually had to do some work. Five minutes later, as Craig sat deep in thought, the group had heard all about Brian Tanner’s horticultural enterprise and its detritus, found in Des’ concrete blocks, and exactly how Dean Kelly had been tricked into filling in the cellar through the trap-door’s hole.

  As Liam ended that portion of his presentation, Andy signalled to speak.

  “So that’s what Jessica Chambers’ witnessed that night? The death of a dope factory?”

  “Yep. She saw the midnight cowboys doing their thing and noticed Tanner’s car parked in a street where no-one normally parked, so she called it in.”

  Liam turned back to the board and was just about to launch into the blackmail aspect of the cellar’s concreting when Craig stood up again, his thoughts more ordered.

  “Thanks, Liam, I’ll take this bit.”

  He took back the marker and wrote the name ‘William Bruton’ on the board, provoking a flurry of murmuring that he allowed to run for a few seconds before shutting it down with another hard rap.

  “Yes, OK, we all know who Billy Bruton is. Our extremely vocal-”

  “Mouthy I’d call him.”

  “Mouthy it is then, Aidan, Energy Party MLA for Belfast South. William Bruton, who studied environmental science and was once a SPAD working for the Energy Minister at the DoE.”

  He wrote up the dates of Bruton’s tenure at the Department of Energy.

  “As you can see, Bruton’s tenure as a SPAD there included the period of the DoE building being vacated and sold to become The HTH. To shorten the story, Mister Bruton caught Brian Tanner tending his cannabis plants in the DoE’s cellar and, recognising a financial opportunity, blackmailed Tanner for sixty percent of his profits, something that Mary has verified from cash payments into Bruton’s bank accounts.”

  As he nodded his thanks to the D.C. everyone saw her preen and their reactions ranged from indifference to, in the case of Ash, pissed-off.

  Aidan seized on the short pause to ask a question. “So, Bruton was involved in cementing the basement?”

  “Indirectly, yes. When it became clear they couldn’t continue cannabis farming, Bruton was responsible for the fake call and fax to the purchasing surveyor, Xavier Ross, and it was those that started the flooding rumour and caused Leonards Construction to send Dean Kelly along to fill the cellar in. Kelly never saw the cannabis plants because Tanner had already covered the lowest few feet with concrete before he’d arrived.”

  Andy’s eyes widened. “Billy Bruton organised all that? He’s brighter than he sounds on TV then.”

  Liam snorted sceptically. “It wouldn’t be hard.”

  Craig cut the debate short by turning back to the board. “OK, so we know that Dean Kelly was innocent-”

  Annette was looking puzzled so she raised a finger to ask a question.

  “That explains what happened in oh-seven, but why was Kelly told not to dig down this time? And who told him?”

  “I was coming to that, but I’ll take it now. Billy Bruton is now a wealthy and powerful man, a politician who also just happens to be on the Board of The Monmouth Consortium, which has just bought The HTH site. His nephew, Philip Michaelson, was the surveyor for the recent purchase and he instructed, on Bruton’s say so, the builders not to dig out the floor. Dean Kelly, who’s also the foreman on this job, was puzzled by that because excavating the cellar would have given Monmouth, the new owners, more space and a better finish to the floor, but he did as he was told.”

  He leant against the nearest desk and continued. “Now, the question is did Bruton order them not to dig down because he feared that the builders would uncover evidence of the cannabis enterprise, or the bones? So whether Bruton’s involved in our murder case we don’t yet know, but Kelly and Tanner are definitely off the hook for the killings.”

  Annette had an add-on query. “But Brian Tanner will go down for the drugs, right?”

  Craig shook his head, both surprising and infuriating her, in the light of what Nicky’s family was currently going through.

  “It’s highly unlikely that we would get a conviction against Tanner after this length of time, Annette, even with the evidence Des turned up, but we also need him to help us catch a bigger fish.”

  The D.I. nodded, understanding although still not pleased. “Bruton.”

  “Bruton. And as Bruton is wealthy and powerful and we don’t yet know what he’s capable of, I’ve got Brian Tanner under guard until any threat to him has passed.”

  Mary interjected. “That’s where D.I. Spence is then.”

  “Correct. He’s guarding Brian Tanner.”

  Craig glanced around to see if there were any more
questions looming, and when he saw that there weren’t he nodded to Des.

  “Could you tell everyone about the excavation, please, Des?”

  The bearded scientist bounded cheerfully to his feet, glad of an audience for his discoveries. His team’s work was mostly silent and often solitary, and short of them organising, ‘Bring Your Own Bottle’ evidence parties, the profession was always likely to be limited on the social side. Because of that he viewed his attendance at Craig’s briefings as a chance for some craic, and ideally a pint at the pub afterwards, something that he and John had already agreed was happening that night.

  He seized Craig’s marker as if he was accepting the baton in a relay, but instead of turning to the whiteboard he nodded Davy to activate a slide show that he had emailed across and used the implement to conduct the group.

  “If you could all just turn to the LED screen.”

  As Liam chuckled at his showmanship Craig tried not to join in, not wanting the forensic lead to think that they were laughing at him. He needn’t have worried, Des was often amused himself by what passed for fun in his day.

  “Now... here you’ll see a series of photographs of The HTH site as we excavated it. We used the Aerial Support Unit’s radar equipment to map it beforehand, to avoid destroying any possible bones when we cut out the stone.”

  He ran through several more slides quickly, displaying the filled cellar as they’d first found it, close up and distant views, the radar images, the blocks as they emerged, and even a still of the ASU’s equipment, culminating in a slide that showed the final empty hole.

  Liam couldn’t control his sarcasm.

  “It’s a hole. Brilliant.”

  Des didn’t lower himself to respond, just giving a loud sniff as he carried on. “The next slides show both the bones within the concrete and the embedded cannabis, but also the bones once they had been released.” He remembered something and turned back to Craig, “We decided not to bother doing the mock-up with resin bones, because we found the real ones so quickly” receiving a nod and a smile.

  As the exterior of the blocks gave way to the bones’ shadowed outlines, and then their visible and undeniably human counterparts appeared, the mood in the room shifted from light-hearted to glum. They were looking at the remains of two human beings who’d been thrown callously into a concrete-filled pit and left there unremarked upon for more than a decade.

  As Des ended his presentation and handed over to John in silence, the pathologist decided to give his report from his seat, nodding Davy to display the next slide which showed two small but complete skeletons.

  “We now have the complete skeletons of two adult women who DNA evidence has revealed to be mother and daughter.” There were gasps from those team members who hadn’t known. “Along with their bones we found some long dark hairs, but unfortunately as they have no roots for DNA we can’t say which woman they belonged to. The bones that we found are still being accurately attributed to each of the bodies, but we’ve laid them out as best we can using the visual cues of size and age.”

  He nodded to change slides and two tiny hyoid bones appeared, each one shot from several angles.

  “These are the women’s hyoid bones, both fractured. There are no other bony injuries on either skeleton to indicate fractures or nicks from bullets or knives, so in absence of anything to contradict us we’re asserting that both women were killed by strangulation, which as everyone here will know is an especially personal mode of murder. The killer has to face his victim and watch as their life drains away.”

  Andy signalled to cut in.

  “Couldn’t they have been garrotted? That’s done from behind so it would have been less personal. Not face to face.”

  John shook his head. “It is less personal, yes, but if you look at the hyoids the ends aren’t splayed as you would expect with pressure exerted from behind. Also the details of the midline fractures don’t support garrotting, they support pressure from the front. These women were strangled up close.”

  It brought a murmur of disgust from the group.

  “Someone hated them, John.”

  The pathologist turned to Craig.

  “Or wanted rid of them and took pleasure in their passing.” As he turned back to Davy for the next slide Aidan signalled to speak, a quizzical look on his face.

  “I get that the anatomical detail shows face-on strangulation, but garrotting would fit better with a hit, as does being buried in concrete.”

  John’s mouth fell open. Of course...

  “That’s brilliant, Aidan! You mean someone might have wanted us to believe that these were professional killings...”

  Craig finished his sentence. “To throw us off the track. The killer knew that if these women were ever found they would lead back to him, so they did everything they could to insure that never happened. That not only could they not be found if they were buried under a floor, but if by some fluke they were then the police would believe it had been a hit.”

  Aidan smiled. “They reckoned without the Doc here knowing the difference between strangulation and garrotting.”

  Craig let John look proud for a moment then returned to the obvious point.

  “If the killer thought the bodies would lead straight back to him, then why don’t we have a name yet? What are we missing?”

  They all knew it was a rhetorical question and that Craig was really thinking “I” instead of “we”, so John left him to beat himself up and continued his report, again indicating the hyoid bones.

  “You can see how clean the bones are; there’s no tissue debris left at all. However, Des’ team tested them and found...” He turned to the forensic lead. “Would you like to say?”

  Des nodded eagerly. “Davy, could you skip to my slide twelve, please?”

  A chemical formula appeared.

  “OK, this is the formula for Sodium Hydroxide, or Lye as it was once commonly known, and this is the substance that we found on both women’s bones. It’s more evident on those that were inside the concrete than the first ones found by the builders, so I suspect exposure had removed some of the hydroxide there.”

  He nodded for his next side.

  “This is the skeleton of a chicken that was soaked in that same concentration of hydroxide for two hours, and you can see how quickly the carcass was stripped. There’s no tissue left anywhere.”

  He paused before making his most important point, giving John the chance to interject.

  ”But we’re lucky they weren’t smart enough to leave them in the hydroxide for longer or we would only have found calcified shells, that would probably have crumbled when we’d brought them out. Acid would have been even worse; it would have destroyed the bones completely, the teeth as well.”

  Des rolled his eyes at having his report appropriated and carried on.

  “The point is, the women’s bodies could have been stripped completely clean within forty-eight hours-”

  Craig cut in. “So you’re saying they could have been buried in the concrete only two days after they were killed?”

  “Exactly. Although, remember, we can’t know that they were, or that they were even killed at the same time. The first woman could have been killed and stored for quite a while, either intact or as bones, until the second was murdered. And then they could have been stored together as bones for a further period, impossible to say how long.”

  Craig turned to his deputy in alarm. “Liam, how long did Kelly say that concrete would have been liquid for?”

  “Two days max, wasn’t it?” He suddenly realised what Craig was implying. “Here, are you thinking that someone saw the concrete wet and used that window to kill and dissolve the women…”

  Annette looked as if she was going to be sick.

  “Can you please not say dissolve.”

  Liam was unmoved.“Well, what else would you call it? Anyway, boss, you’re thinking someone saw the cement wet and took their chance to kill and dump them before it dried?”

&n
bsp; Craig frowned, not quite sure what he was saying, but he was certain that it wasn’t that. People rarely saw a potential grave and timed their killings coldly to fill it. He turned to John in the hope of some clarity.

  “The chances of someone just deciding to kill two women in that narrow time frame must be miniscule, but if the women were already dead and they’d been wondering how to dispose of them, then that might have worked?”

  John nodded. “I’d say it’s far more likely. But they must have had enough knowledge to know that if they’d put the bodies into the cement whole they would have mummified and still been recognisable if found, so they decided to reduce them to bone. Des?”

  The forensic expert stroked his beard, thinking as he spoke.

  “It sounds logical that they were already dead... but then you’d have to ask, where had they been hiding them until then? The bodies would have started to decompose after a couple of days, so to avoid someone complaining of the smell or finding them, you’re talking about hiding them somewhere very private and isolated, or maybe even freezing them.” He shook his head. “No, I think they’d probably taken them down to bone already, soon after they killed them, and they were just wondering what to do with the bones next when they saw the cement and took their chance.”

  Craig made a face. “OK, that’s something to think about in the hunt for the killer, but let’s get back to the hydroxide.”

  “OK, yes.” Des nodded for the next slide and a second chemical formula appeared. “This is a chemical taggant. It’s basically a marker or tag, and this particular one shows that the hydroxide used came from a chemical manufacturing company in Omagh that supplies plastics factories, and some other businesses in Ireland, GB and abroad.”