by Derek Fee
‘There are documents for several banks, letters from his stockbroker and correspondence with his legal adviser. We’re well set up to formulate a clear picture of his wealth. There’s no sign of a will in the papers, but it’s possible he has one lodged with his lawyer. I should have a better picture by tomorrow.’
‘The last sighting of him was leaving Deanes after his lunch with Heavey,’ Wilson said. ‘We need to look at the CCTV for central Belfast on July 11th and 12th. If he wasn’t killed at his flat, and it seems certain he wasn’t, we need to follow his movements. I don’t just mean CCTV from PSNI cameras. I want every piece of footage that shows Whyte on those dates. That’s down to Rory and Harry.’
There was a collective sigh from the team. Nobody liked to spend hours looking through grainy images.
‘I know, I know,’ Wilson said. ‘But we have to work with what we’ve got until we get something better.’
‘What if it’s not about the money?’ Browne asked.
‘It’s the most obvious motive,’ Moira said.
Wilson stared at Browne. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Nothing, other than that we’re putting all our eggs in one basket.’
‘It’s a working hypothesis until we get something better,’ Wilson said. ‘There’s no evidence that Whyte had any enemies. He appears to have led a quiet life. It’s a puzzle.’
‘What about Whyte’s phone records?’ Moira said.
‘I’m on it,’ O’Neill said. ‘Along with half a million other things.’
‘Lines of inquiry, people,’ Wilson said. ‘We need as many lines of inquiry as we can think of. Get to it.’
The team was dispersing when O’Neill touched Wilson’s arm. He turned and she thrust a book into his hand. ‘It’s his photo album. I already looked at it and I think you should too.’
Wilson took it to his office. He put the book on the desk and opened the cover. There was a title page and written in meticulous calligraphy was the legend ‘Roger and Niran, London 1995–2005’. He opened the first page to a full-sized professionally produced photo of Whyte with his arm around the shoulders of a slight Asian man. He continued flipping the pages and examining the contents. Every photo showed a happy couple or individual. The smiles were always in place. That was the motif until halfway through the book when the smiles faded and the slight Asian man looked even slighter and the skin hung on his narrow face. The remainder of the album depicted the wastage that AIDS can wreak on the human body. The final photo was of a grave. Wilson closed the album and sat back. He wondered whether the person who had taken Whyte’s life had looked at the photo album. Anyone who had would have recognised the pain he had already suffered. But in the killer’s case, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
His feet felt like two lead weights as he climbed the stairs to Davis’s office. He wasn’t sure whether she had been busy all afternoon or whether she preferred to deal with him at the end of her day. He knocked on her door and walked in. She was sitting at her desk poring over a large report. It was Wilson’s vision of hell.
‘I hope you don’t feel as glum as you look.’ She marked her page and put the report aside.
‘I’m feeling my age.’ Wilson fell into the visitor’s chair.
‘Get away with you.’ She opened her desk drawer, removed two glasses and a whiskey bottle, and poured two large shots.
‘Looks like you had a hard day.’ Wilson took the glass that she had slid across the desk.
They touched glasses and drank.
‘Now the world feels better,’ she said.
‘They don’t manufacture enough of this stuff to make the world feel better. If you want to feel better about the world, get out of policing.’
‘Too late. I assume the investigation by Senior Investigating Officer Matthews isn’t going according to plan.’
‘He’s like an aggravating fly that keeps coming back the more you bat it away.’
‘Does he remind you of anyone in particular?’
He smiled for the first time that afternoon. ‘I suppose if he wasn’t investigating me, I’d appreciate him.’
‘Somehow or other I don’t see you two becoming friends.’
‘I don’t like lying.’
‘This is about making sure that it never comes out that a Garda officer was in the warehouse with you and that the assassin was a hitman with a Dublin drug connection. It’s white-lying.’
‘Matthews is discussing the case with the chief investigating officer.’ He sipped his drink. ‘Any word from Jack?’
‘He’s gone dark.’ She laughed. ‘I’m joking. He has a visitor from Quantico and he’s showing him the west of Ireland.’
‘Can I have his life? He gets to swan around with some Yank and I have Matthews climbing all over me. Anyway, that’s not why I came to see you.’
‘And there was I hoping it was just a friendly visit.’
Wilson recited the story of how he had become enmeshed in the disappearance of Roger Whyte.
‘Who approved the use of the forensic team?’
‘I think it was you.’
She opened a file on her desk. ‘This is the latest budget plan for the station.’ She put the report under his nose. ‘Show me where there’s a budget for forensic examinations.’
‘The guy is dead. As soon as you inform HQ we’re leading a murder investigation, there’ll be a budget for forensic.’
‘When will you learn that it’s a new world, the bean counters have taken over. They’re trumpeting in London that austerity is over, but that’s just talk for the press.’ She closed the file and put it away. ‘How do you know that Whyte is dead? If he arrives home tomorrow, HQ will demand an explanation for the expenditure on the forensic examination of his flat.’
‘He won’t arrive home tomorrow.’ He offered his glass for a refill. ‘Make it a |small one. I was sceptical myself, and I suppose I mainly took an interest to distract myself from Matthews, but now I’m a true believer. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t know who killed him, but he’s dead and someone murdered him. I intend to find out the how and the who.’
She poured them both a small measure. ‘I have to work late tonight.’
‘No overtime?’
‘I worked sixty hours last week and no overtime payment. It’s our duty.’
‘McDevitt will have a small piece on Whyte’s disappearance in the Chronicle tomorrow so we need to crank up the PSNI machine. I have the team looking at the CCTV footage, but the uniforms will have to do the house-to-house and we need to do a press briefing. We have to put this out to the public.’
‘I’ll pass the word along. I don’t want you in the DCC’s office for the foreseeable future. He’s already hauled me over the coals for the warehouse caper. I’m sure he’d love to shop you, but leaking what happened in Ballymacarrett could end his career.’
Wilson emptied his glass and stood. ‘Whyte was a decent man who by and large kept himself to himself. I want to get the bastard who took his life.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Reid tossed her surgical gown into the wicker basket in the corner of the autopsy room. It had been a long day. Sometimes she tired of her daily life of blood-spattered corpses, formalin-soaked dissections, anguished relatives and scornful barristers. As she plopped into her chair to write up her notes, she wondered how many dead bodies she had cut up. She remembered the Congo, dozens of bloodied and bruised bodies, heaps of cadavers. She hadn’t been sleeping well. It had something to do with the threat to Ian’s life, but it was also about her life. She’d spoken to older colleagues at conferences. They were all living on the edge of PTSD occasioned by years of confronting violence and the grave, and the steady emotional damage from dissecting thousands of bodies. The medical profession inevitably involves blood and gore, but she could have avoided much of that by joining a general medical practice. Except that one day she picked up a copy of Simpson’s Forensic Medicine and
her life changed forever. She found herself fascinated by the gallery of stranglings, knifings, shootings and electrocutions that the book contained. That small act of picking up a book had influenced the direction of her life. Her chosen profession made her a dispassionate observer of other people’s deaths. Each post-mortem was like another piece being chipped off the rock of her life. Having been so dispassionate about other deaths, she had been completely unprepared for the grief she felt at her mother’s death. She’d hardly known the woman and had hated her for most of her life, but a part of her disappeared along with her mother.
She finished her notes and went across to the mirror. There were dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there when she returned from California. She knew it would be difficult to get Ian to leave Belfast. She would have to edge him towards the door marked ‘Exit’. But it would have to happen, for both their sakes
Wilson looked up from the bench in the snug as the door opened and Reid entered. Her smile hit him like a bolt of sunshine and warmed his body. She looked beautiful but tired. He didn’t know how she could do her job. He could only imagine the amount of scrubbing she had to do just to remove the smell of death.
‘Double gin and tonic,’ she said bending to kiss him.
‘Tough day?’ He ordered the drinks.
‘Ever hear of Bora Bora?’ She sat beside him.
‘Somewhere in the Pacific.’
‘Can we go there?’
‘We’ve just had a holiday.’
‘I’m not talking about a holiday.’
He saw through her smile that there was a tinge of seriousness. He knew the various stages of grief and assumed that Reid was going through them. She appeared to be in stage four: depression. They would have to work their way out. The drinks arrived and he handed hers across. ‘What do you say about dinner in Holohan’s followed up with some jazz at Bert’s?’
She looked at him. ‘Sometimes I love you to pieces.’
He leaned forward and kissed her. ‘A good blast will do the both of us good.’
‘How’s your case?’
‘I’m certain Roger Whyte is dead. There’s no corpse so we won’t have the benefit of your skill with the scalpel. We have no forensic and aside from the fact that Whyte was a wealthy man we have no motive. The guy’s life is without a blemish. I don’t think he even had a parking violation.’
‘Maybe he died of natural causes. He might be in a ditch somewhere. Or maybe he was drunk and fell off a bridge into the Lagan.’ She saw the scepticism in his face. ‘It has happened. But you’re like a gun dog, someone disappears and right away it’s murder.’
‘I hope Whyte turns up. He has an eighty-odd-year-old mother in a home in Bangor who’s worried sick about him. I promised that I’d go back to see her when the investigation is over. I’d like to be standing beside her son when I do it.’
‘Finish up that drink and let’s go dancing. We’re becoming too sedate.’ She smiled. They had a history of clubbing and there was still a lot of the rugby player in Ian. Thankfully her schedule for tomorrow was light.
Browne woke up with a start. In his dream, a bruised and bloodied Vincent Carmody was reaching out to him, and he was trying to run away. He switched on the light beside his bed and looked at his watch. It was three-fifteen and he had never felt so awake. He slipped from the bed and put on his dressing gown. He had moved to a two-bed apartment on Malone Avenue. The second bedroom should accommodate his parents, but they never visited and they probably never would. He padded into the open-plan living room and made a cup of camomile tea. He contemplated watching some late-night TV but instead sat staring out the window at the deserted street below. It was dark outside and he felt the blackness surrounding him. He turned on all the lights in the room, but it didn’t dispel the gloom.
His Presbyterian parents would stand up in chapel on Sunday and beat their breasts about being their brother’s keeper. Well, I am not my brother’s keeper, he thought. I have no responsibility for Vincent Carmody. In fact, he couldn’t count the number of times he had wished Vinny out of his life. Despite that, he knew that he could never sleep well again until he did right by him. However, the minute he told the boss about his connection to Carmody, he would be off the case. Keeping that connection secret was a fanciful delusion. Forensics would dust Carmody’s hovel and his prints would turn up all over the place. Someone would find the young woman he had given the twenty pounds to and she would describe him. O’Neill would find Carmody’s phone number and read his texts including the ones they had exchanged. He put his head in his hands. They would drag him into the investigation. At twenty-nine years old, he was alone, friendless and in a job he sometimes felt unsuited for. He needed to make changes. But first, he would have to work up the courage to mention Carmody to Wilson. Or maybe there was another way out.
CHAPTER FORTY
Moira wasn’t easy to impress, but she was more than impressed with DC Siobhan O’Neill. She didn’t know what time her colleague had arrived that morning, but considering the amount of work she had gotten through, it must have been in the early hours. Moira stood before the whiteboard and read through the additions made since the previous evening.
‘I thought my computer skills were good, but you’re in a class of your own,’ Moira said.
‘The result of a misspent youth,’ O’Neill shot back. ‘I should have been out playing hockey in a little skirt and having the local lads running after me. Instead, I was in my room learning code, wolfing down chocolate biscuits and turning myself into a blimp.’
All Moira could see was an attractive curvy blond that would set many a heart racing. ‘So what the hell are you doing in the PSNI? You could use your skills to go into business for yourself.’
‘Why does everybody ask me that? I’ll tell you why, because none of the questioners have ever worked in a start-up. And few of them would have survived the experience. It’s no fun waking up in the morning afraid that you won’t have the price of a coffee at the end of the week. We sold our little company and pocketed the money, but two of my partners have already lost that money and more on new ventures. They’re broke, they’ve lost their houses, one of them has ruined his marriage and they now have no jobs. I’m not broke and I have a job. Does that answer your question?’
Moira hastily changed the subject. ‘How’s your mother?’
‘Not good. Dementia is like another planet where the woman who was my mother now lives. And there’s no way back from planet dementia. I still believe that she’s in there somewhere, but another part of me knows that she’s gone forever’ She handed Moira a sheaf of papers. ‘These are Whyte’s financial records. Can you go through them? I’m not an accountant.’
Moira took the papers. ‘Neither am I. But I’ll look.’ She went back to her desk and pulled out her chair. O’Neill might be a computer whiz but she’s also a strange wee girl. Moira picked up a yellow highlighter and started on the first sheet.
Wilson’s mouth felt like the bottom of a parrot’s cage and that’s what it resembled when he looked at it in the mirror. He climbed into the shower and gave himself alternating blasts of scalding hot and freezing cold water. He couldn’t remember who had recommended the hot/cold treatment, but it didn’t work on his headache. From what he could remember, they had had a great time last night and he was prepared to take the pain.
The smell coming from the kitchen seemed to write the phrase ‘Ulster Fry’ in the air above his head as he dressed and went to the kitchen. Reid looked sensational in a cream ensemble that was more in keeping with a night out than the autopsy room. Wilson took one look at the plate containing eggs, bacon and sausage and his stomach heaved.
‘Drink this before you eat.’ Reid handed him a glass of a clear bubbling liquid.
‘I hope it’s poison.’ He gulped it down in one swallow.
‘You’ll be a new man in five minutes.’
‘Don’t make empty promises.’
‘Trust me, I’m a doctor.’
They both laughed. ‘You’re in better humour today.’
She gave him a hug and kissed him. ‘That was a great night. I haven’t had so much fun in a long time.’
It was good to see her so happy. She was right. They had been preoccupied since returning from the US. Then again, it was only natural to be preoccupied by the possibility that someone might kill you at any moment.
It was a beautiful summer’s day outside and Wilson wished they could play truant. ‘We’ll head off to Rathlin this weekend, if this weather lasts.’
She looked at the kitchen clock. ‘The five minutes are up. How do you feel?’
He grabbed her and held her tight. ‘Like a new man.’
She felt his erection pressing against her. ‘Feels like the old man to me.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Wilson stood at the whiteboard. ‘The chief super has done us proud. HQ will give us uniforms for the door-to-door. Siobhan, we need to run off photos of Whyte for them. Get them done on a proper machine. There’ll be a press conference at midday so it’ll be on the evening news that we’re concerned for his safety and all that guff. They won’t say outright that we think he’s dead because he might walk into a police station this afternoon with a case of amnesia. By the way, that’s not about to happen.’
Browne stared at the board in shock. One name jumped out: Vincent Carmody. Heavey was playing silly buggers. He realised that his mouth was open and he closed it. The longer he kept his secret, the more it would fester within him. Wilson was looking at the money as a motive. He might be right, but Browne knew that two gay men were missing and one of them was penniless.