The Sixth Estate (The Craig Crime Series) (5 page)

Craig knocked the door once and then thrust it open, pleased by the shocked expression on Harrison’s sallow face. He looked the same as he had when they’d last met the year before, just after Craig had saved him from being framed in a people trafficking case and just before Harrison had screwed up his and Julia’s relationship for good. He should have let him go to prison.

He’d been a lowly D.C.I. then so Harrison had had the upper hand, but now they were on a level playing field.

Harrison’s eyebrows shot up in indignation and his thin mouth opened, ready with a tirade. Craig got in first. He leaned on the desk, looming over the shorter man, and thrust his face forward until it was just inches from his foe’s.

“You can forget the usual crap about how I don’t have an appointment. I’m not your subordinate now.”

Harrison leapt to his feet, attempting to reinstate the pecking order he felt correct. His high tenor lessened the impact of his words.

“What do you want, Craig? If you’re here to defend your old girlfriend, forget it. She’s working on a burglary and that’s that!”

Craig drew himself up to his full height, eight inches taller than the other man. Harrison was still barking and his face had contorted into a sneer.

“We don’t need your help solving the Bwye case, so you can go straight back to Docklands. I’m sure you’ll have a murder in Belfast soon.”

Craig snapped back. “Yes, you’re making such a good job of solving it that people have been traipsing through your crime scene for days, you have three people missing, blood all over the floor and not a single, sodding clue.” He reached inside his jacket for his phone. “Let’s see what the C.C. has to say. He’ll just love the headline ‘Limavady Police run around like headless chickens!’”

Harrison’s small eyes narrowed, fixing Craig’s. If he thought Craig was going to blink first he was mistaken. After a minute Harrison looked away.

“What do you want, Craig?”

“I want as many men from Derry station as you can spare for the search; we’re widening the perimeter. And I want D.I. McNulty back on the case. She had the wit to see that you needed help, even if you didn’t.”

Harrison set his jaw. “You can have Sergeant Shaw.”

“McNulty, but I’ll take Shaw too. They worked well with us on the Adams’ case.”

The Adams’ case had happened two years before, when a young mother from Limavady had gone on a killing spree. Harrison fixed his gaze again. It reminded Craig of two bulls locking horns and in that analogy he was younger and fitter and bound to win. It only took Harrison seconds to blink this time and resort to the age old defence of indifference. He gestured dismissively towards the door and lifted a file, opening it to read as if he always read standing up.

“Take them both; they’re bloody useless. You won’t solve the case and if you want it to drag your career down, then be my guest.”

He scanned a page rapidly and then flicked to another. If anyone could read that fast Craig would have been very surprised and as displays of indifference went, it sucked. As he turned to leave Harrison raised his eyes again, smiling maliciously.

“But when you fail, and you will, remember that I’ll be here, cheering.”

It sounded like a threat. Craig made a note to watch his back for sabotage and exited the office without a word, leaving the door wide open behind him. As he passed Susan Butler’s desk he caught her hopeful glance and decided to call Geoff Hamill from the car.

****

3 p.m.

“Sorry guys. Better late than never.”

Craig dumped a paper bag full of food on Oliver Bwye’s desk and slumped in a chair, removing the lid of his coffee cup. Andy gawped as Liam grabbed a sausage sandwich; they’d only had lunch an hour before!

Liam patted his paunch. “Waste not, want not.”

“You’ll have no waist at all soon.”

Liam bit off the protruding end of a sausage and laughed with his mouth full. “That’s not bad.”

Craig swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “I take it you’ve already eaten.” He retrieved the bag. “We can have these later on then. What have you got for me?”

Liam waved Andy on, savouring his food.

“We worked out that whoever took the Bwyes had a copy of the back door key, hey.” At Craig’s quizzical look Andy demonstrated, “That makes it more likely it was someone who knew the house well. We were thinking of Ross.”

Craig shrugged. “Annette will get everything there is from her tomorrow. But the key’s interesting. Julia and I discussed the possibility of a copy key for the gun cabinet as well. What else have you got?”

Liam swallowed his last bite and took a slurp of tea. “There are two grounds men, a gardener and a cook. We’ll have to re-interview them all.”

Craig nodded. He’d been intending to anyway. “Get started on that. How are the C.S.I.s getting on next door?”

“Dusting and printing like the devil. They’ll be finished tomorrow. They’ve another team going over this room again tonight; floors, walls, just like you asked.”

“Just in time for us to get the full team together.”

Liam nodded. “Aye, I hear Annette and Davy are coming up.”

Craig smiled. “We’ve got Julia, Gerry Shaw and as many men as we need from Derry Station as well.”

Liam’s eyes widened. “How did you get Harrison to agree to that?”

“Brute force and threats.”

“Works for me every time.”

Chapte
r Four

Monday, 15th December. 10 a.m.

By ten o’clock the full team was assembled and Craig had two whiteboards set up in Oliver Bwye’s study, now their impromptu office. They’d spent a sleepless night in a B&B and he knew they couldn’t do it again and work effectively. It might be better doing the commute; justifying one hundred pounds a night each on a decent hotel was tricky when they could be down the A6 and back in three hours. As he thought of the driving he knew the distance would soon wear. The squad’s budget would just have to bear the strain of a cheap hotel.

When the drinks and donuts had been distributed, Craig rapped his marker against the desk to indicate a start. He was greeted with bleary stares that matched his own from Liam and Andy, and a disturbingly bright-eyed alertness from the rest.

“I’ll summarise quickly and then we’ll allocate the work. At eight-thirty last Thursday morning, Bernadette Ross, Oliver Bwye’s secretary of eight years, arrived for work at the house and found no-one here. She entered this room, Bwye’s study, which was unlocked, and saw the place in disarray. There was furniture turned over, books out of place, the TV damaged and blood all over the floor.” He waved at a pile of photos on the desk. “You can look at the photos afterwards. Actually, Davy, would you mind pinning them to that board?”

Davy nodded, excited at being out of the office and even more excited to be at the scene of a real crime, although he would rather not have had dried blood all over the place.

“There was a lot of blood in here and Mike Augustus is sorting out the DNA.”

Liam stared pointedly at Annette at the mention of Augustus’ name, and watched with satisfaction as a blush crept up her neck.

Craig rapped his pen on the desk. “Pay attention, Liam.” He indicated the doors. “The entrance door was open but the back door was locked, seemingly from the inside. The key was still in the inside lock.” He nodded at Andy. “Through Liam and Andy’s efforts, which they’ll demonstrate in a moment, we’ve established that the assailant must have had a duplicate key which they used to lock the door from the outside as they left.”

Annette signalled to interrupt. “Are we ruling out Oliver Bwye, sir?”

Craig shook his head emphatically. “Definitely not. This could still have been Bwye, deliberately staged to look like someone else. Family annihilation is firmly on the table. OK, Oliver Bwye owns a rifle.” He gestured at the cabinet. “It’s gone but the cabinet is intact. It was unlocked using a key and there are no prints but Bwye’s on the door, although we can’t tell how old they are. Bwye may have removed the rifle himself, either voluntarily or under duress, we don’t yet know, but there’s no blood so my feeling is that our perp opened it wearing gloves. We’re toying with the idea that a duplicate key may have been cut for the cabinet as well. We can’t rule anything in or out yet.”

Davy pinned up the photographs and Annette screwed up her face when she saw the Luminoled images of blood.

Craig nodded. “Not good, I know. No blood was found in the main reception room, but unfortunately the C.S.I.s didn’t go through that room until yesterday, so we may have lost some evidence. Hopefully not.”

It was Julia’s turn to blush.

“The search perimeter has been extended to two miles and we’ve every spare hand from Derry station out there looking for clues. They’ll do their thing and we need to do ours. First, everyone who was interviewed needs to be interviewed again. Annette, you and I will take Bernadette Ross this morning, she may have seen something without realising it and she was the first one in the house.”

Annette interrupted. “Is she a suspect, sir?”

“Yes, but we’re not telling her that. As far as she’s concerned she’s being interviewed as a valuable witness and we’re going to treat her like one.”

Davy retook his seat, trying not to walk on the blood stains.

“Davy, have you brought everything you need?”

“Yeh. I can connect to the databases from here.”

“Good. Make contact with Mike Augustus ASAP please. You and he are basically working the way you do with Des and John. You can call on them for back-up if you need to.”

Dr Des Marsham was Northern Ireland’s Head of Forensic Science and he worked with John Winter in state of the art pathology facilities on Belfast’s Saintfield Road.

“I want you to dig deep into our victims’ backgrounds, as deep as you can get. It’s too easy just to assume that they were taken because they were rich. I don’t want that to feature in our calculations until we’ve ruled out everything else.” He indicated the phone. “I need a trace on this line, Davy, and on Julia’s, Liam’s, Andy’s and my mobile phones, please, just in case we get a ransom call.”

Liam had been slumped in a chair wondering whether to have another donut, but he jerked upright at Craig’s words.

“Here, why are you tapping my phone? I might have a private call to make.”

“Like what? Phoning the Chinese takeaway? It’s only for a few days, and we’ll just have to moderate our conversations. Keep them clean please; Davy’s an impressionable youth.” He ignored Davy’s sceptical look and carried on. “Any ransom demand will come here or to the lead officers on the case––”

Andy cut in. “Do you think they might contact The Chronicle, hey? Given that Bwye owned it till two years ago.”

Craig hadn’t thought of it. “Good pick-up. If the Bwyes were taken by someone Bwye offended with an article, then that’s exactly where they would call. Davy, we need The Belfast Chronicle’s lines monitored as well. Editor-in-chief’s and news desk.”

Liam gave a low whistle. “You’ve two hopes; Bob Hope and no hope. No newspaper’s going to let us tap their lines; their sources would dry up.”

“Then we’ll have to persuade the editor or a judge to say yes.” Craig turned to Davy. “Who’s the news editor at The Chronicle these days?”

Davy’s girlfriend Maggie Clarke was a reporter at the paper. The analyst’s slim face fell. “You’re not going to like it.”

Craig knew the answer immediately. “Ray Mercer.”

Ray Mercer was the worst gutter journalist that any of them had ever met and some idiot had made him news editor.

Liam gawped at him. “Mercer? Editor! Holy God.”

Craig’s tone was caustic. “I think God was on holiday that week. Mercer will never give us access to his line voluntarily; we might catch him out on his dirty tricks. OK, we’ll have to get a warrant. Andy, you and Julia get onto that. Get legal to make the request watertight and then go to Judge Standish, he’s a good man. If anyone will give us a warrant he will.”

Craig waved Liam on to demonstrate the back door trick while he thought, running through a checklist in his head. Perimeter search ongoing. C.S.I.s almost finished at the house and re-interviewing potential witnesses, yes. Lining up traces for possible ransom calls, and Davy doing deep background on the Bwyes, check.

He interrupted just as Liam got to his ‘voila’ moment with the key, much to his chagrin.

“Davy, add Bernadette Ross and the other estate staff to the deep background checks, please. And don’t forget to check out Oliver Bwye’s rifle and shooting experience. Also, I want you to have a first go at forming a suspect list from people that The Chronicle hacked off.”

Everyone started laughing and Craig was momentarily puzzled, until he noticed Liam’s face. It was a picture of huffy annoyance.

“Could you not have waited? I’d just got to the good bit!”

Craig shrugged. “Sorry. OK, if you’ve finished then let’s all get on with it. Davy, you can have this room as your base. Annette, you and I have to be at Derry station by eleven to see Ms Ross. Liam, sort out the other re-interviews and Gerry, stay here and supervise the searches please. You all know what you’re doing.”

As he went to leave the study by the back door, he turned back to where Davy was arranging his desk and dropped his voice. “I haven’t forgotten what we discussed yesterday. I’ve an appointment to see the C.C. at two o’clock and it’s top of my list.”

He was out of the door before Davy had time to smile.

****

11 a.m.

Davy scanned the large study for a moment, peering into its corners and opening the drawers of the antique desk where he’d set up shop. They were all empty, victims of the savage swoop Craig had ordered that had stripped the room to its bare bones in the search for clues. Whether the search had yielded anything was yet to be determined but at least they’d put the furniture back in place.

The analyst ran his finger along a shelf of hard-backed books, selecting one; ‘Moby Dick’, a classic. He slipped it back and took another, then another, until finally he’d checked the titles of every book on the shelf; they were identical! Oliver Bwye had ten copies of ‘Moby Dick’, but why? He scrutinised the line then he played a hunch and lifted them again, one by one. He was right, one of the books felt heavier. He flipped open the cover in excitement, only to be disappointed by its normality. There was the title page and contents and then Melville’s famous opening line. ‘Call me Ishmael…’

So why did the book feel heavier than the rest? Davy flicked through the pages until, a third of the way through, the words ceased and a steel plate took their place. He recognised what it was immediately, a pressure lock; all he needed was the right amount of weight and it would spring open. Thirty seconds of experimenting brought success and the plate sprang back to reveal what he’d guessed it would, a half empty bottle of whisky. Bushmills; a good local make.

He placed it on the desk for forensics to check and turned back to the wall. Twenty minutes later every bookshelf had been checked and he’d found a similar story; each shelf was filled with identical volumes by different authors. Volumes of Beckett, Shaw and other luminaries piled up alongside enough whisky to keep a brewery solvent for a year.

The Generation Y-er whistled to himself. Someone had a serious drink problem and they were so keen to hide it that they’d spent a fortune on camouflage books. It was Bwye’s study so it made sense that it was Bwye’s secret to hide, but who was he hiding it from? His wife, possible but unlikely; Diana Bwye must have known all about her husband’s proclivities. His daughter? By the sounds of it she was a wild child herself. Bernadette Ross or the other staff? Perhaps, or perhaps Bwye was simply hiding it from himself, deluding himself that he had control of the booze and not the other way round. Maybe that’s why the books on each shelf were identical; Bwye had hoped that searching for the one that held the whisky would take him so long that the urge would have passed.

Whatever the reason, if Oliver Bwye had got to the stage of hiding booze he was in trouble, and alcohol and a rifle definitely wasn’t a good mix. Davy made up his mind to tell Craig then he sat back down at the desk and began to work. After an hour of setting up bank, phone and criminal searches on the family and staff he yawned and reached into his bag for an energy bar, then he lifted his smartphone and made a call.

Maggie Clarke answered in three rings and he smiled. She always had her phone beside her; you never knew when someone might call with the Pulitzer Prize.

Her tone was crisp and professional. “Maggie Clarke, Belfast Chronicle.”

“Hi, pet. W…What’re you up to?”

Maggie smiled at the sound of her boyfriend’s voice. It still made her heart leap after two years. She twirled a strand of hair round her finger and softened her tone.

“I’m just editing. What about you?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say: “I’m in a mansion in Derry, helping with a case where three people might be dead” but it was more than his job was worth. Craig trusted him and Maggie to never cross the line. More importantly he didn’t fancy going to jail for breach of confidentiality, so instead of giving into the urge to look cool he said, “the boss says he’ll s…speak to the Chief Constable about my doctorate.”

“That’s awesome. What do you think he’ll ask for?”

Davy smiled at her excitement; she was always supportive, whatever he wanted to do. If he hadn’t been only twenty-seven he might have asked her to marry him. The thought stopped him in his tracks.
Only
twenty-seven; he’d thought it automatically, like he was still a child. He wasn’t, even though his mother and grandmother babied him and he still lived at home.

Twenty-seven was a grown man. He could have joined the army at eighteen and if society collapsed now he’d be expected to help maintain the peace, standing alongside Craig and Liam to build houses and defend the weak. When had society become so infantilised that a twenty-seven-year-old could possibly think that he was still a kid?

And what about the second part of his thought, that he loved Maggie enough to marry her. Did he? The answer came immediately, yes, he did, but he didn’t have the building blocks in place. He earned a good wage and he had savings, but if he left to do his doctorate all of that would disappear. The fees would swallow up his savings and his wages would evaporate. He knew that if he asked her to marry him she would say yes, or at least he hoped that she would. She would also say that she was earning enough to keep them both and that it didn’t matter if he worked.

Davy pictured himself studying and having fun at Uni while she trudged to work every day to keep a roof over their heads. His revulsion at the image shocked him; it was followed by a blush of embarrassment at what his late father would have thought of such an arrangement. In the second since the idea had occurred to him, he’d had an epiphany. He was a fully grown man not a child, and he loved the woman on the other end of the phone. A fledgling plan formed in his head and he parked it for a private moment, then he returned to his conversation and outlined the deal he thought Craig might get for him from the C.C.