The Running of the Deer

by Catriona King

  ****

  Islederg Business Park. Omagh. County Tyrone.

  Andy Angel had uttered the words reluctantly and with not a small amount of shock at himself, but there was no disguising a compliment once it was out, and now Kyle Spence wasn’t quite sure how he should react. Uncertainty was an infrequent sensation for him, almost as infrequent as him being given praise, so with the permanent emotional adolescence of some Northern Irish men, he ignored both the D.C.I.’s words and his own response to them and just kept staring straight ahead.

  Unluckily for him Andy didn’t take the hint, being as Liam often described him, ‘one of those arty sorts’. It was shorthand in Liam-World for a man who understood emotions, and also knew what he himself was feeling most of the time. Liam said that it would never catch on, and would remain restricted to the very odd few, but whether that proved true or not in the future, Kyle was currently stuck in a surveillance car with one of those emotionally literate men.

  Andy glanced across at his companion and repeated his words in case he hadn’t heard.

  “I said, well done on sorting out the surveillance teams so quickly.” He gestured out the car window. “And finding us this place. It would never have occurred to me.”

  This place being a multi-storey carpark whose third floor gave them a perfect line of sight into Niall Canavan’s luxurious office, so perfect that they could almost see into his aquarium, and with the aid of their directional microphone almost hear the bubbles popping out of its occupants’ mouths. What they couldn’t hear yet was Niall Canavan saying anything incriminating.

  Kyle decided to break his embarrassed silence with a deflection. “Any word on the warrants yet?”

  Andy shook his head and reached into the side pocket for his drink. “The chief’s at court trying for them now.”

  Kyle shook his head. “He won’t get the camera ones. We were always getting turned down on those when I worked in Intel. Judges get twitchy about them. They think it’s a step too far, like we’re voyeurs or something.”

  The thought made Andy laugh; as if they’d choose to watch a boring banker at his desk if they were.

  They didn’t know it yet, but Kyle was right. Eugene Standish had signed the phone tapping and audio surveillance warrants for Craig with a flourish of his fountain pen, but he’d screwed its top firmly back on as soon as the detective had set the camera applications down.

  “I’m sorry, Superintendent, but I’ll need far more evidence of the Canavans’ involvement in a crime before I can allow that level of intrusion.” The judge had risen to his full five-feet-eight and straightened his court robes theatrically, in a form of judicial full stop. “I’m convinced that you’ll find some soon, so by all means return when you do.”

  It had knocked Craig back, but only slightly; he’d already known that he was pushing his luck. As he and Liam returned to the Audi he took out his mobile, first to call Nicky to arrange a briefing for six o’clock, and then to touch base with Andy and Kyle.

  Andy’s cheerful voice came down the line. “Hello there. Get the warrants?”

  “Not the camera ones unfortunately, but I knew I was pushing my luck on those.”

  Kyle gave a smug nod as Craig continued.

  “What’s happening there?”

  “Kyle found us a good spot. Third floor of the carpark beside Canavan’s office. We can see his fish from here, but there’s been nothing exciting in his conversations yet.”

  “OK, stay on him. There’s a briefing at six, so bring anything you get with you then. Bye.”

  “Hang on, chief. Just one more thing. Liam, is it ballroom dancing?”

  It was Craig who retorted with, “Danni only comes up to his waist!”, cutting the call before Liam could respond less politely.

  A moment later the D.C.I.’s own phone rang, and Craig was just wondering whether Andy could really be that stupid when Liam’s responses said that it was someone else.

  “He just walked in?... What?... When?... And you’re sure he’s not pulling your leg?...OK, we’ll be there in five minutes. We’re just around the corner at Laganside Courts.”

  Craig waited for clarity.

  “Some wee lad’s turned up at Jack’s place saying he was kidnapped on Monday in Belfast and taken in a truck to County Tyrone on Tuesday. Near Killeter Forest. He managed to get away and now he’s back in town.”

  Craig looked at him hopefully and started the car. “He’s at High Street?”

  Even though ‘Jack’s place’ sounded like a bar, it couldn’t have been anywhere else.

  “Aye.”

  The story of Harry Johnston emerged as Craig drove, and he had the bones of it by the time they pulled into the carpark behind the station. He learned a lot more ten minutes later as they drank coffee with the boy and his aunt.

  “Did they give you any clue why they’d taken you, Harry?”

  The boy shook his mousey head. “I didn’t hang around to ask.”

  “They didn’t say anything when they approached you at Castle Court?”

  The teenager screwed up his face, trying to recall. “Last thing I knew I’d nipped out front fer a ciggie-”

  The sentence was cut short by his aunt’s irate, “What? When did you start smoking? You’re far too-”

  Craig raised a hand gently to halt her. “You’re absolutely right, Ms McCullough, but it would be really helpful to us if that could be left aside for a while. We urgently need Harry’s help.”

  The boy’s glance pledged him lifelong gratitude.

  “Go on. You were standing at the front of Castle Court…”

  Harry answered with one eye still on his aunt. “These lads walked up to me.”

  Liam cut in. “How many and what ages?”

  The boy screwed up his face, trying to recall. “It’s weird, but that bit’s kinda fuzzy.”

  Craig glanced at his deputy. The boy had been drugged, probably with Rohypnol judging by his poor memory, but testing for it now would probably be useless. He’d been given it on Monday and it was now Wednesday, and roofies left the blood twenty-four hours and urine forty-eight hours after they went in.

  “Just give us anything you remember.”

  “OK…well…I think there were three ar four af them there. One was big, tall like. Blond. He looked a few years older than me. The others were younger, an’ one of them had sorta dark skin, like maybe his da came from Africa ar somewhere. The big one saw me with my lighter out an’ he lit my cig fer me… then…I…” The teenager shook his head. “I can’t remember what happened then. I don’t remember nothin’ else till I woke up in the van the next day.”

  “You didn’t accept a drink from them?”

  Harry shook his head firmly. “No chance. We had a film on roofies at school.”

  An injection then, in broad daylight. It was bold.

  “And the van, that’s when you met this other boy, Joey Parfitt?”

  Harry nodded. “Yeh. He was just a kid, younger than me. He said he was thirteen, but he was real small. He’d come from some home. They’d taken him from it on Monday night he said. An’ he was real scared.” He smiled, recalling Joey’s leap at their captors. “Yeh, except at the end. There were six lads then, an’ I kicked two of them in the head. Then Joey jumped an the others real hard, to give me time to get away.” The boy’s face twisted angrily, and his small fists clenched tight. “They’d better not’ve hurt him. I’ll kill them!”

  Liam patted him on the arm. “Not if I get there first, son.”

  Craig raised an eyebrow in warning. It was OK for Liam to say things like that to him privately, but in front of the public was another thing. Just then something occurred to the detective.

  “Harry, you said that when the shutter went up there were boys there that you and Joey fought to escape. Did you know any of them?”

  His chances of remembering those boys would be better than the others as the drug should have worn off.

  The teenager screwed up his face. At fi
rst Craig thought the expression meant that he thought his question was stupid, but then he realised it was something more. Harry was trying to picture the faces that he’d seen, and after a moment he succeeded with one.

  “Yeh… Yeh… One af ’em was there at Castle Court. The blond one. He was one af the lads who crowded me outside.”

  Craig tried to keep the excitement he was feeling out of his voice; he didn’t want to pressure the boy in case he forgot what little he knew.

  “Do you think you might recognise him again?”

  As Harry’s green eyes widened in alarm Craig realised what he was thinking and added hastily.

  “Not in person, just from a photograph. We should be able to get the camera footage from Royal Avenue and the shopping centre.”

  Providing Davy could work his magic.

  He saw Harry’s aunt reach for his hand reassuringly, and it seemed to be the prompt that the boy needed.

  He nodded hesitantly. “Just lookin’ at the TV?”

  “Just the TV, I promise.”

  The teenager nodded determinedly. “OK then.”

  Craig smiled at him, then beckoned Liam outside the room and into reception before speaking again.

  “You know what this means.”

  “Partly. Someone’s recruiting kids for something.”

  “Exactly. But a specific type of kid, ones on the fringes of society. Joey was taken from a care home, Harry’s a truant who’d been in the trouble with the police. Both are boys that someone thought nobody would miss.”

  Liam gestured back at the staff-room. “They were wrong there. His aunt really cares about him.”

  “Maybe that’s what gave Harry the strength to fight back and run. OK, so they miscalculated this time, but what are the odds the other kids they took weren’t miscalculations? What if they’ve been successfully gathering kids who feel at odds with the world and making them into some sort of dysfunctional family?”

  Liam snorted. “Pretty bloody dysfunctional if they kill their own.”

  Craig shook his head. “But only two killings in eight years. That sounds pretty restrained for troubled teenagers.”

  He was organising his thoughts as he spoke. “OK, so Harry saw six boys at the van, and he and Joey make eight. How many more boys are out there? Ten? Twenty? That injection they gave Harry was bold, and slick. It says that they’ve done it before.”

  Liam shook his head. “As far as we know.”

  “What?”

  “As far as we know there’ve only been two killings. There could be bodies that we haven’t found yet.”

  Craig conceded the point. “OK, so it’s only as far as we know, but we have to work with what we’ve got. So, let’s say they’ve been gathering kids for at least eight years, given that’s when the first boy died, then that means there could be a sizable number out there somewhere…”

  Liam screwed up his face quizzically. “Doing what? You think they gathered them together just to hide out?”

  “Maybe not so much hiding as living. They weren’t hiding at Castle Court, were they? Maybe because these boys think that no-one’s looking for them, boys without families perhaps, or believing they’ve been forgotten by any family they do have-”

  Liam interrupted. “So. What? They’ve formed themselves into a cult of some sort?”

  “Gang, tribe, maybe even a commune. Whatever it’s called, what are they living on? And where are they living? And why keep recruiting new members, when they must know each new member carries the risk of exposing them? They need them for something.”

  Suddenly Craig shook his head. “No. This definitely isn’t organic growth. No group of young kids, and some of these boys are very young, organises itself this well. So well that it might have stayed hidden for eight years or more. There’s an adult involved here. Maybe more than one.”

  Liam began kicking at the skirting board as he voiced his thoughts. “OK, then it has to be a man. A woman couldn’t control strong boys as well.”

  “Maybe a man and a woman, or men plural. And we don’t know that there are only boys, Liam. They may have taken girls as well. Although, if they have then that could open a whole new can of worms. We could be talking about family units developing, or worse.”

  He shuddered at the image that sprang to mind and then pushed it away; until they had some evidence that teenage girls had been taken as well there was no point in going there.

  Liam was still kicking. “OK, so, we know for sure that there are teenage boys, and we know the older ones are fairly autonomous, wandering around shopping centres alone, so they’re not being held prisoner. And Harry didn’t mention seeing an adult at Castle Court telling them what to do.”

  Craig caveated. “He might not remember, or they could have been at a distance, watching.”

  “OK, maybe… So, what else do we know?”

  “That the kids are well organised and obviously getting money to live on from somewhere. Plus, they must need new recruits to do whatever they’re doing. They’re unlikely to just be replacements for boys murdered over an eight-year period, because they took two boys at once this week. Also, we think there’s an adult or adults leading-” Craig corrected himself. “Know. We know there’s at least one adult. I’ve just realised…someone had to be driving that van, and they wouldn’t have risked it being someone without a driving licence in case they were stopped.”

  Liam was unconvinced. “You can get a licence at seventeen. Harry could have underestimated the older boy’s age.”

  Craig nodded. “Fair point. But I still think there’s at least one adult here. Call it a hunch. We know something else too. Drugs are involved here somehow. Cocaine.”

  He was formulating a theory, but he decided to keep it to himself for the moment.

  Liam ran over the points again mentally and nodded in final agreement. “OK. So, next steps.”

  He stopped speaking and folded his arms, but Craig immediately shook his head.

  “Don’t look to me for the next steps. Outline them yourself.”

  He was determined to prod Liam into leadership, in preparation for the day, probably in the distant future given that his children were still so young, that he decided to sit his Super’s exams. The D.C.I. groaned reluctantly, dragging himself out of his second-in-command comfort zone.

  “Ach, all right then. OK… first we get Harry looking at the CCTV. Meanwhile, check out Joey Parfitt’s care home and the staff who were on when he disappeared, plus the list of anyone with access to the building. We contact Drugs and see what the word is on coke at the moment: who’s dealing, who’s smuggling and so on, and once we know the quality from the trace Mike found, maybe even what country it came from. Aidan’s already working on the dead deer and Appside, the Canavans are both under surveillance, and Davy and the Smurf are doing their thing with phones, IDs and whatever.”

  He paused for a moment, then nodded when he realised that was all he had.

  Craig smiled approvingly. It was a good approach, but there were still a few things missing.

  “Also, ask Harry if he noticed any adults when he was taken or at the van, and whether the boy who approached him could perhaps have been seventeen. And ask him what he remembers about the van itself and then get the details to Davy. Also, what about organising a search party in Tyrone? Joey Parfitt is missing, and we need him found. We need to call an alert.”

  It was a long list to clear in a short time, but nothing could be left off it; a thirteen-year-old boy could be fighting for his life.

  ****

  County Tyrone. 3 p.m.

  Joey Parfitt was stunned by what he’d seen and heard, and seeing his shock, his black-haired host had dumped him back into the bedroom to think. He was sitting on its single bed now, wondering what everything meant and gazing longingly up at the room’s only window, a rectangle one foot from the ceiling, too small for even him to squeeze through and almost too high for him to look out.

  But he wasn’t, as the boy had tho
ught, shocked only at what he’d seen and heard, but also at his own feelings about it. The result was a maelstrom of thoughts in the teenager’s mind, that after a good twenty minutes struggle he finally managed to straighten out.

  OK, so he was somewhere in County Tyrone, they’d learned that much from the road signs. But not in a town; the plentiful leaves he’d glimpsed through the window when he’d stood on a chair five minutes before said that they were definitely in the countryside. Joey closed his eyes tight and tried to picture the map of Northern Ireland, and when he’d got the basic outline clear he dug deeper until he’d recalled most of what they’d been taught in geography class. County Tyrone was farming country, dairy farms mostly with a bit of arable land. But there were no cows or fields visible from the window, so what other part of the county could they be in?

  He stood on the chair again, this time rising on his toes until he managed to rest his elbows on a shelf and lever himself up a little more. It added several feet to his view all around, enough to see the high-sided white van that had brought them there and a dense wall of high pine trees. After a few seconds effort the slight boy sank down again, his new view of the world telling him he was in a wood.

  He sat on the bed and tried to remember the rest of his lessons, and slowly his geography teacher Miss Brewster’s high voice filled his ears. “County Tyrone has thirty forests, with the largest collection of conifers in Killeter.”

  Maybe that’s where he was? Realising that there was no possible way of knowing, he turned his thoughts to other things.

  The dark boy had mentioned him ‘playing the game’. What game? Joey knew with heart-sinking certainty that it wouldn’t have anything to do with a bat or ball, and the boy’s tone had hinted it wasn’t anything good. What could it be? Had he meant boys fighting each other for money? If that was the case he was lost - he wouldn’t last five minutes in a ring. Or was the game about stealing stuff, or hurting people, or…he swallowed hard, praying that it wasn’t so… something to do with sex? Fear sent rivulets of sweat racing down his back, and he was struggling to catch his breath when the bedroom door opened again and a different boy, nearer his own age, came in.