The Sect (The Craig Crime Series)

by Catriona King

  “Ken. Would you mind pairing with Carmen tomorrow on victim one and Andy can accompany Jake on canvassing.”

  Andy’s frown made him raise an eyebrow; instead of bitching about canvassing he should have been grateful for his narrow escape. He’d brought Carmen’s enmity on himself and better that he got bored than was yelled at by her. Ken’s grin was even more disturbing; any man who enjoyed being bossed around by Carmen both on and off duty had to have a screw loose, but then Ken was used to giving the orders in the army so it was probably a relaxing break.

  Craig turned back to Davy before anyone could object to the arrangements. “What have you got for us on background?”

  Davy tapped his central screen, deferring Craig’s interest in the tattoo.

  “OK, as we’ve s…said, only the third victim has been I.D.ed, so that’s ongoing. Sam Beech lived on the Demesne so I’ve asked Sergeant Boyd there to prepare a report. If there was something going on in the home he might know.”

  Reggie Boyd was a fiftyish country man who was almost as tall as Liam; but where Liam had a voice like a fog horn Reggie was so quietly spoken that people strained to hear his words. Add in a lilting Donegal accent and quaint language, and everything he said sounded like a bedtime story; it made his visits to briefings very soothing. But Boyd was also a damn good local bobby who’d know everything there was to know about a Demesne Estate resident like Sam Beech.

  Craig nodded approvingly. Davy wasn’t a cop but he thought like one; which reminded him, they needed to have a chat about his PhD topic soon. He was starting it part-time in September with the force paying, so it was in both their interests if his research focused on something that would be useful to the squad in years to come. Craig motioned him on.

  “We’re still w…waiting for the tox-screens and other forensics but Des may have a partial print from one of the cling-film sheets. It will take another day to come through.”

  Craig’s spirits lifted. He’d forgotten about Des’ fuming cabinet.

  “As far as CCTV goes, w…we’re bang out of luck. There’re no fixed cameras on any of the roads near the three dumpsites and we struck out on the mobile speed cams as well. They obviously stuck to the limit. But Path say that all the victims were discovered soon after death so they can’t have driven far––”

  Liam cut in triumphantly, directing his point at Craig. “I said they could have come from nearby! They could have used a back road, dumped them and gone back to work. We need to canvas houses and offices.”

  His smugness was amusing but Craig wasn’t about to let it last for long. “They might have, but there’s another possibility. I grant that it’s unlikely but they could have carried the bodies cross country on foot.”

  Liam shook his head vehemently. “No man could have carried…” His voice tailed off as he thought of their victims; none of them had weighed over nine stone. A decent sized man could have carried them easily. He added a question to his outrage. “You think the Vics were chosen for their size?”

  Craig shook his head again. “I don’t think anything yet. Young people tend to be lighter anyway and for all we know this might just be one of the killers’ dumping grounds; the one where they leave the smaller bodies. We’re still in the speculation phase.”

  Davy picked up the reins. “They couldn’t have been carried far, Chief; even nine stone gets heavy pretty quick. And it would have taken two men to spread the load ’cos one man carrying that w…weight would have left shoe impressions and none were found. But it gives me something else to search for; overland access paths and nature trails.”

  “OK, good. Get going with that.”

  He tapped the PC screen that Craig had been looking at earlier and transferred the tattoos’ words onto Nicky’s LED screen. “This was tattooed on each victim after death. On the inner arms of the males and the lady’s––”

  Craig saved his embarrassment.

  “Do you know which language is it yet?”

  “An ancient Latin dialect. It took s…some identifying. I had to email some historians.”

  “They understood it?”

  “Nope. Just recognised it. Even they didn’t understand what it meant.”

  Craig was puzzled. “Does it have a name?”

  “Vulgar Latin.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Davy leaned forward so eagerly that he almost fell off his chair. “You wouldn’t have. The version taught in schools is Classical Latin. This version was purely conversational. It was the way the masses, or the vulgus, spoke.”

  “When?”

  “It began when Augustus ruled; from 27 BC to 14 AD, and s…spread as the Roman Empire did. Vulgar also means that it was the common word; colloquial.” He paused for questions but was greeted by blank looks. “Anyway, eventually it became the basis for most of the romance languages.” He nodded at Craig. “Like Italian.”

  “Not the modern version.”

  Craig frowned in thought. Their killer was using the dialect to send some sort of message and his gut said that it was in more than the words themselves. Did the killings have some historical motive? A voice in his head said that it was more than that – Vulgar Latin was the Latin that the first Christians would have heard. Religion again. He wasn’t ready to voice his suspicions so instead he asked a question that Davy answered with a shake of his head.

  “Nope. There are only limited w…written records of it, where someone wrote down what people said. Vulgar Latin was a bit like street slang is today.” He searched for an example. “OK, what if I said swag money or swerve to you, would you know what I meant?”

  Liam raised an eyebrow. “I’ll bite. What do you mean?”

  Davy grinned. “They both mean awesome, but in different ways and contexts, and––”

  Craig finished the thought.

  “And we couldn’t translate them unless we had access to someone living, like you, who spoke street slang. Anyone know any ancient Romans––”

  He was interrupted by a loud ‘oh crap’ and everyone turned towards its source. Liam was staring into space and Craig immediately knew why.

  “You’ve heard it spoken, haven’t you?”

  Liam wasn’t listening; he had the look of someone transported in time and place. After a minute during which Davy signalled rudely that he’d lost his mind, Liam finally unfroze and answered Craig.

  “I’ve just realised something, boss.”

  With that he strode across the squad-room and disappeared into the lift. A moment’s gawping followed and then Craig refocused their attention on the case.

  “OK. Liam’s obviously gone to follow a hunch. We’re ten days and three bodies in and so far we only have one I.D. so make that your priority tomorrow morning. I want you out there showing the victims’ photographs to anyone you can think of; you all have your contacts so use them.”

  With that he headed for his office, leaving the group split between those still staring after Liam and those staring after him. When he entered the room he reread the words that had made Liam leave. ‘Gentum est confessio illa veritate’.

  His schoolboy Latin only helped with one word; confessio: confess or confession. It was useless; a language’s challenge lay in words’ meanings altering with context and they’d be guessing what the other words meant. But Liam had recognised the phrase from somewhere, and his abrupt exit had said that it wasn’t from anywhere around there.

  ****

  Danni Cullen smiled at the sight of her huge husband loping up their tarmacked driveway and she smiled again as Liam dashed past her with a hello and a nod, guessing that there was sport of some description on cable and he’d be back once he’d set the TV to record. Her smile changed to puzzle as she heard his footsteps thunder past the lounge where their small children were playing and up the stairs of their three-storeyed Victorian home. The puzzle deepened as the thunder ascended to the attic and she heard the sound of boxes being thrown onto the floor.

  Checking quickly on Erin, the
ir four-year-old, who was transfixed by TV cartoons and ignoring her two-year-old brother throwing toys at her from his pen, she raced up to the landing beneath the loft opening and yelled into the darkness.

  “Liam, what are you doing?”

  A muffled reply made her yell again.

  “What? What’s so important that you couldn’t say hello to your children?”

  At that Liam’s wide, freckled face appeared, flushed from activity, or as flushed as a man with the melanin level of a white rabbit ever got.

  “Have you seen my school stuff? It was in a pile of boxes.”

  Danni shook her head, bemused. “No, I haven’t seen your school stuff. It’s thirty years old – we probably threw it out! Come down and tell me why you want it.”

  “Sorry, can’t.”

  With that he disappeared again, leaving her coming to the boil. She ratcheted up her volume to a roar.

  “Liam Mungo Ignatius Cullen” His mother had known all the saints. “If you don’t get down here this minute and say hello to your family, you’ll…” She searched for something so dreadful that it couldn’t be ignored. “…you’ll be eating salad for a month!”

  The speed of his descent took her aback so much that she’d have fallen against the wall if he hadn’t caught her. Liam gazed down at his petite wife and decided to take advantage of the position they were in, lifting her off the floor and kissing her hard on the lips before she could object. When Danni had recovered she gasped out.

  “What were you searching for?”

  He deposited her on the ground and waved a book above her head. “This.”

  It was a hard-backed notebook, covered in clear plastic to thwart the teenage Liam’s attempts at inscribing ‘Man United’ on its front. Before Danni could grab it he was shooing her down the stairs.

  “What time’s dinner? I have to go out again.”

  He was down the hall and out the front door before she could reply. ‘Seven o’clock’ followed him down the pathway and he muttered the Terminator’s response of “I’ll be back.” Then he was in the car and heading for the city centre, eager to follow up his hunch.

  Chapter Seven

  The Lab. Friday, 11 a.m.

  It was eleven o’clock before anyone phoned Craig with good news and, as it often was, it was Annette. She’d been to social services to find out what she could on Sam Beech’s sad, short life. Her voice echoed down the line as Craig and John stood in the dissection room, gazing down at the face of their female victim.

  “Morning, sir.”

  “Hi, Annette, what have you got for me?”

  John covered the young woman and ushered Craig into the corridor. His dissection room was sacred and it felt wrong to be chatting casually over a body, no matter how relevant to the case it might be. Annette paused, arranging her thoughts. Craig wanted I.D.s so she decided to start with that. She gazed around the chilly social work offices, set in a red-brick building that reminded her of every country hospital where she’d ever trained, and gave him the good news.

  “I’ve I.D.ed the girl, sir.”

  He glanced at the room they’d just left and the victim that would soon have a name.

  “Well done, but how?”

  “Pure accident. I tried canvassing for a while this morning then I came to the social services’ offices to ask about Sam Beech. On the off chance I showed them the photos of our two unknowns and one of the social workers recognised the girl.”

  Craig was puzzled. How had Annette I.D.ed a prostitute from Eastern Europe when Vice had failed to do so? She told him.

  “It turns out that our girl’s family is from Poland, so you were right about the European link. But she wasn’t trafficked; they’ve lived in Belfast for over twenty years.”

  He knew what was coming next.

  “She was recognised by a social worker who works with drug addicts.”

  Which had come first, the chicken or the egg; the girl’s prostitution or drugs? They’d assumed that she’d been purposely addicted to Heroin to make her prostitute herself, but maybe it had actually been the other way around; she’d turned tricks to earn the money to feed her addiction.

  He vocalised his thoughts. “So she was an addict who turned to prostitution to get the money for drugs. We all know drugs are at the heart of the trade.”

  “No and yes. She’d been using drugs since she was fourteen and social services first got involved when she was lifted on a shoplifting charge. Looks like she stole to raise money for drugs long before she sold herself.”

  “If she was lifted then why weren’t her prints on file?”

  He and John had been walking towards the office. John entered to make the coffee while Craig stayed outside, continuing the call.

  Annette shrugged. “Probably some kind cop who didn’t want to put a kid in the system.”

  Officer discretion; they’d all used it in their time. Craig nodded to himself.

  “So he took her to social services instead and they got her into rehab.”

  “Exactly, except that the rehab didn’t take and she started using again. She attended the clinics on and off, until she finally stopped going about two years ago. I don’t have the details yet but I imagine that’s when she decided that prostitution paid better than theft.”

  “They’d seen no sign of it before then?”

  “None, although that doesn’t mean she wasn’t doing it. But as far as they were concerned she’d always funded her habit through theft.”

  John popped his head around the door, holding a bubbling percolator. Craig signalled he would join him soon.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Elena Boraks. Nineteen years old, born in Belfast. She has a father living locally. I was going to follow up on him as well as find out what they have on Sam, if that’s OK?”

  Craig shook his head. “It’s too much for one person and you’re leaving for London tonight. Get Carmen and Ken to take the father. If the girl was working then she was working out of somewhere; John and I had another look and there are no signs of the skin weathering she would have got from walking the streets. I’m sure she was working from a house; it might have been home.”

  Annette gave a disgruntled, “Hmmm.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I agree about the house but I don’t agree that I should give her up. Can’t Carmen and Ken take Sam Beech instead?”

  Craig smiled to himself. He would prefer it if Annette followed up both victims but he’d already tasked Carmen to work on the girl. He decided to meet her halfway.

  “OK, how’s this for a compromise? You’re the inspector, so you keep oversight on all three cases from London with Liam, and Carmen and Ken act as support. How’s that?”

  He hoped that she’d say yes quickly; he could smell the coffee wafting through John’s door. Thankfully she agreed.

  “That’ll work. I’ll gather everything social services has on both and call a meeting with the A-Team before I leave.”

  ****

  Liam had barely been in a library since he’d left school, except to change Erin’s library books when Danni didn’t have the time. Now he was defying the laws of probability by being in one twice in two days; his return that morning necessitated by the first trip being cut short by his rumbling tum.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like reading, just that library seats and choking on dust mites weren’t his thing. As soon as he’d passed his A-Levels he’d chucked his books into the loft and put on a different uniform, only to discover that police promotion required more hours studying than he had ever done at school. Still, at least he did them in an armchair at home now instead of sitting on a hard seat.

  But he was definitely in a library now, Belfast’s Central Library to be exact; a masterpiece of Victorian architecture opened in 1888, with a sweeping three-storey staircase that would have done Fred Astaire proud. He’d been there for hours poring over leather bound tomes, the like of which he’d last seen on the shelves of his ol
d parish priest, Father McGinn.

  Catholic boys in Crossgar were brought up the old-fashioned way, their prayers first taught at their mother’s knee and then seared onto their souls by the Christian Brothers at school. All sorts of prayers: to their guardian angels, to the Sacred Heart, to all the saints and to God himself. Add in the rosary they said every morning in class and serving as an altar boy at weekends, and Liam had been steeped in religion since he’d been born. He’d enjoyed his upbringing, which made it all the more surprising that he was such a heathen now. Or maybe he wasn’t; even he would admit that his veneer of agnosticism shattered as soon as he was up to his ears in shit; then every prayer he’d been taught as a kid suddenly came roaring out.

  But religious or not he remembered everything that he’d seen and heard, and amongst the things he remembered were the words in the notebook that he’d dug out the evening before. His first call when he’d left Danni had been to an old friend from school, his second to the library that he was sitting in now.

  As he pulled down another hide bound volume and flicked through its dusty sheets he wished he’d paid more attention in Latin class. He been good enough to get a B without studying, but an A grade would have proved useful now. He’d have got one too, if all that ‘amo, amas amatting’ hadn’t given him such a headache.

  After ten minutes more research he was on the verge of leaving, when Craig’s name appeared on his mobile and the decision was made. His ring tone, the roar of the football crowd at Old Trafford, plus the librarian gazing pointedly at the ‘no phones’ sign on the wall, made him drop the book he was holding into her hand and make his way through the pillared foyer and out the library’s front door.

  “Yes, boss.”

  It was said as quietly as he could manage and Craig noticed the attempt.

  “Are you in a church?”

  It was about as likely as him going shopping with Danni and far less likely than him being in the pub.

  Liam snorted. “Aye, that’s right. Mind you, you’re not a million miles from the truth. I’m at Central Library and I’m heading for another one now.”