“Is what French?”
“Your night-class. It’s just that Aidan and I-”
Liam cut the call before the words “have a bet on it” hit the air.
Craig gave a wry smile, knowing that the two D.C.I.s wouldn’t give up until they got their answer.
“Get Davy for me, Liam. I need to have a word.”
The word was about some telecom magic involving mobile phone cloning that he wanted the analyst to perform, and it warmed Davy’s technological little heart. Once Craig was satisfied that he had covered all the bases he changed gears and pulled into the motorway’s fast lane to give his new car a run.
Chapter Fifteen
County Tyrone.
When Joey Parfitt had finally stopped crying the night before, he’d wiped his eyes on the sleeve of the pyjamas that he’d been wearing for twenty-four hours and looked around the bed room where he’d been dumped. It had been comfortable enough for him to fall asleep in, when he’d finally stopped resisting the urge, and he’d eaten the breakfast they’d given him that morning like the starving boy he was. Then they’d thrown a pair of jeans and a jumper at him and brought him to a new room, where the renewed strangeness of his situation had threatened to start him crying again.
It wasn’t that the sitting room he was in wasn’t nice, actually it was like nowhere he’d ever been before; computer games, couches all around the walls, and a cupboard full of seriously nice chocolate and crisps. It was like someone had peeked into his dreams and recreated his idea of heaven, except in heaven there were no bigger boys dragging him out of a truck and tying him up. He corrected himself; tying him up temporarily. As soon as they’d arrived wherever they were now, his ropes had been untied and he’d been left alone.
He was alone again now, although he could hear the boys that had brought him there talking outside the door, and it was keeping him on edge. What were they going to do to him? And would Harry manage to get help and come for him soon? He’d never thought that he could miss The Oaks, but he was missing it now all right.
The teenager’s thoughts were interrupted by the sitting room door opening suddenly, and a tall, black-haired boy that he’d never seen before, entering and closing it again. Joey rushed to crouch behind a sofa, watching the newcomer warily in case he approached, but the boy merely stood with his back pressed against the door’s dark wood. The silent standoff lasted for a good minute and Joey used the time to scrutinise his foe. The boy was older than him, and almost as tall as Mister Rush, the director of the home. He was also really fit looking, built like one of the footballers he’d seen on TV. Joey knew he wouldn’t stand a chance against him in a fight and it spurred tears to fill his eyes again. Where are you, Harry? I need your help. He had never felt so alone in his life.
The dark-haired boy’s repositioning from the door to a couch opposite, made Joey duck down even further. Why was he moving closer? What did he want with him? He got his answer a moment later, when, with a weary sigh, the boy finally began to speak. As he did Joey was surprised to hear the deep but querulous voice of a new adult emerge from his youthful frame.
He must have been seventeen at least! That seemed to be the age the older boys’ voices had changed at the home.
“How long are you going to hide from me, kid? I can see you, you know. I’m not going to hurt you if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Joey screwed up the courage to shout back. “YOU WOULD SAY THAT EVEN IF YOU WERE!”
The logic of it made the older boy smile. “OK, maybe, but I’m not. And anyway, if I was going to hurt you, do you think all that hiding would stop me? I could get at you any time I liked.”
Joey may have been naïve, but he was clever, and he could see the truth of the words. It drew him slowly to his feet, and as he appeared fully his companion gestured to the couch that he’d been hiding behind and said, “Take a seat, kid. We need to talk.”
Joey tried for a defiant attitude; it’s what Harry would have done.
“’Bout what?”
It had almost killed him to drop the ‘a’, but Harry had told him to be more street.
The boy mimicked him. “’Bout your future here. We need to get it straight from the start.”
Joey was curious now. “Where’s here?”
His instructor waved a hand around the space. “Here’s The Lodge, boy. Here’s computers, new trainers, and as much food as you can eat.” He sat forward, staring Joey hard in the eyes. “Here’s paradise, sonny, just as long as you play the game.”
****
The C.C.U. 11.15 a.m.
Davy Walsh, modern man as he was in many ways, was an old-fashioned boy at heart. Behind his twenty-first century high-tech profession and cutting-edge style of pony tail and beard, something that he was currently having a battle about with his grandmother who liked men clean-shaven, suited and booted and preferably wearing a hat, beat the heart of a man who could quite happily see himself resting in a high-backed, winged armchair amidst the dusty quiet of a gentlemen’s club, with the only noises audible the occasional clink of ice against glass and the crackle and swish of a freshly ironed broadsheets’ pages being turned. Walls lined with hard-backed tomes and the satisfying weight of such a bound, thick paged book in his hand would have proved a distinct bonus and made him an even happier man.
Had the analyst lived in some parts of London he would have been called a young fogey, a tribe distinguished by their love of literature and old-world courtesy and language despite their relatively young age, but he didn’t and so he wasn’t even aware of the title, pursuing his own version of the lifestyle instinctively rather than by vogue.
As part of this, Davy had a daily ritual, work and weather allowing, that he pursued. He rose from his desk at eleven, went to the kitchen to make his special coffee, and then retired to Barrow Square for thirty blissfully peaceful minutes with several of the newspapers of the day. And so it was now. The analyst was sitting peacefully, swishing pages and sipping at his turmeric latte as he did so, when, finished with the nationals he lifted the only local paper he ever read, out of loyalty to his intended. But as he scanned the front page of that morning’s Belfast Chronicle Davy got such a shock that his aromatic coffee went down completely the wrong way.
The ensuing bout of coughing was so violent it caused him to spill his hot drink all over his trousers, where it soaked through to his thighs and made him leap to his feet and dance around to get cool. There were no spectators but had there been it would have made an interesting spectacle, especially as he then potted his cup six feet into the bin, grabbed his papers and raced, still coughing, back to the C.C.U.
Two minutes later Davy arrived on the tenth floor and hurtled across to his desk, grabbing his phone and dialling with a horrified look on his face. Nicky saw his expression and walked over straight away.
“Is everything OK?”
Her answer was Davy ending his call after it dialled out and dashing off the floor again immediately, shouting to anyone who would listen, “I’m taking an early lunch.”
****
The Labs.
John Winter was trekking up the stairs to forensics and thinking grim thoughts as he did. He’d just finished examining the records of the two-thousand-and-ten death and it had made for a very dark read. The teenage boy involved had been found dead in the same place as their new victim, and his post-mortem had listed crush asphyxia as his secondary cause of death; the primary being cerebral haemorrhage from a blow to his head. On first sight it seemed the deaths were identical but crush asphyxia could be caused by many things, from being run over by a tractor to a heavy weight landing on you, and there were plenty of large, heavy trees in Erb’s Clearing, so John knew he needed to look deeper before assuming that the first boy’s injuries had also been caused by stones.
The pathologist was doing his best not to jump to that conclusion and label the death as one of two from the same unusual cause, but to be certain either way he knew he probably needed to exhum
e the long dead boy. As he admitted it to himself reluctantly, he pushed open the door to Des’ realm and entered, finding the forensic scientist peering down a microscope.
“Hello.”
Des looked up to see the pathologist taking a seat.
“Hello yourself. What can I do for you?”
“First, I’m looking for some updates on my swabs.”
“And second?”
“I want to talk to you about the old case.”
Des swivelled his stool around to face him, reaching into a drawer and withdrawing a file as he did.
“Swabs from the boy who died on Sunday.” He shook his head. “We really need to give him a name, poor kid.”
He handed the folder across, and John nodded as he withdrew several sheets of results. He read for a moment, muttering to himself, and then returned them to the file before he spoke again.
“OK, so we now have a definite result for latex, which tells us the cocaine Mike found was probably wrapped in a condom.”
Des nodded. “Yes. And the question of whether it was inserted anally, or swallowed and had transited the gut…”
“That was answered by swab two, which showed the absence of any upper GI tract bacteria around the anus, which there would have been if the condom had travelled through. There were no packed condoms visible on his abdominal X-rays either.”
“Agreed.”
The pathologist was satisfied that they had more clarity. The boy had inserted, or someone else had, a condom packed with cocaine into his anus, but he hadn’t swallowed any. It told them a few things: the boy had probably only been starting out as a drugs mule, so he hadn’t been trusted to swallow a full load, although in a child that size it couldn’t have been huge anyway; and the plugged package had been removed after he had died. There’d been no sign of trauma that suggested forcible removal and as the anal sphincter relaxed on death it made sense.
“So, this boy was murdered for something to do with drugs?”
Des nodded. “Possibly, but that’s Marc’s bit.” He removed a second file from the drawer. “Would you like to hear about my deer heads?”
“Fire away.”
“Well, we were right about the basic stuff, their ages, slow deaths, the heat sealing on the necks etcetera, and I also got several sets of prints. Mostly small.”
John arched an eyebrow. “Children’s?”
“All I can say so far is that most were small, so they could equally have belonged to women. I’m trying urea tests to sex them, but they weren’t great quality.” He gave a smile that told John that there was something more. “A couple of the prints were larger. Probably an adult male. I’ve sent everything across for Davy to run, so fingers crossed that we get a hit.”
“You would make Marc’s week if you did.”
The forensic expert nodded. “Sadly, there’s nothing else new. Not even any signs of fire or wax to support Liam’s devil worshipping-”
John laughed. “That will hack him off.”
“The only upside unfortunately. There aren’t even any spores to help us with locations, none except the ones indigenous to the forest.”
John moved on to his second point. “I’m going to need to look at the twenty-ten victim. The death certificate gives his COD as similar overall, but the headings are so broad that his asphyxia could have been caused by very different things.”
“Are you going to look for him now?”
“Yes, and I’ll probably need to exhume him. I hate doing that.”
Des shook his head. “Then you’re in luck. He’s downstairs in the morgue. Didn’t you notice in the records? It said he wasn’t buried, at some distant relatives’ request. They were obviously still hopeful that his case could be solved.”
As John cheered up palpably the forensic scientist slid down off his stool.
“I’ll come down with you. I need his evidence, and if he’s in the basement it’s likely that will be too. I was going to do it last night before all hell broke loose.”
They were just about to leave the office when Des’ desk-phone rang, and he signalled the pathologist to wait while he answered it. It was Andy.
“Hi, there. What can I do for you?”
“Do you have anywhere there that I can hold someone securely?”
Des’ eyes widened. “What, you mean like a cell?”
John’s ears pricked up.
“Yes. Well, no, not exactly a cell, just somewhere he won’t be able to communicate with the outside world for a while. So, I suppose, now I think of it, yes, it is a cell.”
Des gawped. “No, of course we don’t have a bloody cell! We’re a lab, and apart from the fact it’s illegal to keep someone…”
John was only half-listening, his mind racing ahead. He signalled Des to pass him the phone.
“Andy, I take it this is someone that Marc wants kept out of contact because of the case?”
“Exactly. It’s one of the two brothers who owns the forest clearing. The chief interviewed the older one a while ago, and he thinks that he, they, might know something, although he doesn’t know what so everything’s a bit vague right now. Anyway, he’s trying to stop them speaking to each other and concocting a story before he gets to interview the younger brother himself, so I’ve fed him a line about possible radioactivity and how he needs to come to you and be checked out. His phones and stuff as well. Anyway, I’m about to bring him to you, but I need to know that you’ve got somewhere to keep him first.”
John could see Craig’s plan and he was happy to help. “OK. Bring him straight to pathology. Dissection room three is rarely used so we can keep him in there until Marc arrives. How long will you be?”
“Twenty minutes. We’re in the centre of town. The chief’s coming from Omagh, so I’d say he’ll be about another hour.”
“We’ll be waiting for you at the entrance.”
He cut the call and turned back to the scientist with a grin.
“The mortuary will have to wait. Right now, you and I need hazmat suits and a Geiger Counter. We’re about to put on a show.”
****
Killeter Forest. County Tyrone.
Nature has many effects, hostile and benevolent. On the land, rain causes plants to grow and insects to flourish, while a flood can sweep them away in the blink of an eye. The wind can serenade or devastate depending upon its strength, and the sun can give life, or death by creating a drought. Nature’s effects on human beings can be similarly dangerous, or at the lower end of the scale it can merely leave its mark. The man that Aidan Hughes was staring at was testament to that.
As the small, wiry gamekeeper approached him, the first thing the detective wondered about was the man’s age, the deep folds and myriad of lines etched into his gnarled walnut of a face rendering it Methuselah like, and yet the D.C.I. was fairly sure that no-one outside the bible had ever lived to be over nine hundred years old.
As his gaze ran slowly over the keeper’s forehead, cheeks and neck and then back to his lips and eyes, all his mother’s remonstrations of, “don’t stare, it’s rude”, fell by the wayside, so mesmerised was he by the weathered effect. He had never seen anything like this skin, not in his parents who spent half the year in Spain and roasted themselves on the beach every day until they’d turned a mole dotted brown, nor on the oldest person that he’d ever known, his grandmother, who had lived to be one hundred and one.
Strangely, the overall effect wasn’t unpleasant, but combined with his short stature it did make the gamekeeper look like a scrawny garden gnome. The D.C.I. hoped fervently that the man had a voice that fitted with his looks; the wrong quality or accent could completely ruin the effect.
He wasn’t disappointed when a moment later the keeper rumbled, “I’oim Dan Russell. Please te meet ye”, in a rounded west coast Irish brogue.
The detective shook the man’s hand carefully, seeing that it was as aged as his face, then he showed his warrant card.
“I’m D.C.I. Hughes from Belfast. Is th
ere somewhere we could sit and talk?”
“We can surely. I ’spect ye’ve come to tak about thon poor wee boy.”
Russell turned back the way he’d come without waiting for an answer, leading the way down a pathway that Aidan hadn’t seen. At the end of it sat a neat bungalow with a beautifully tended garden full of daffodils and crocuses, but without a single gnome.
“My wife’s oyt right noyw, but I reckon I can rustle us up some tae.”
He was as good as his word and five minutes later they were drinking mugs of it and eating some very good homemade cake.
“I need to ask you some questions, Mister Russell, if that’s all right?”
The D.C.I. asked the question with one eye on the keeper and the other on his house phone, which he’d detached from the wall while Russell had been making the tea. Despite what Craig had said he was loath to ask the man for his mobile without a good reason, especially not while he was being so cooperative, so he would just have to deal with the situation if it rang.
“Awl roight. I niver sa the boy, but an ye go.”
“How long have you been the keeper here, Mister Russell?”
The gamekeeper thought for a moment and Aidan could see him counting inside his head. Eventually he nodded, satisfied at his calculations.
“I’oim sixty-eight now.”
The detective had to clench his jaw to stop it from dropping. The man was only a year older than his father, who even with all his years of sunbathing could have passed for Russell’s son! The keeper continued, thankfully oblivious to Aidan’s thoughts.
“An’ I come ’ere when I were eighteen. So…thaat’d be nigh an fifty year noyw.”
Nineteen sixty-eight. So Russell had been around when the music and lights were first reported.
Aidan formulated his next question carefully, deliberately keeping his voice casual.
“So, you’ll probably have heard all the foolish rumours of ghosts and what not in the forest.”
The Running of the Deer Page 24
