The Keeper

by Catriona King

  “It doesn’t seem right Jake not being here.”

  Craig nodded. “I saw him earlier. He’s hard to read at the moment. Putting a brave face on everything, but until he knows if he’ll walk again…”

  Liam swallowed hard. Paralysis was his worse fear and now it had happened to someone half his age. “We need to catch that bastard Aaron.”

  Craig didn’t disagree. “Until we get a new case I want everyone working on it. He hasn’t appeared at any airports or ports and Davy’s got the Gardaí on alert in case he’s spotted in the Republic. Ash has frozen his cards and bank accounts, so he can’t get far.”

  He stopped to drain his pint and order two more then restarted on a different theme. “We’ll be short staffed with Ken and Carmen gone and Jake off for a while.” Not to mention Annette on maternity leave if his guess proved right. “Any suggestions?”

  Liam licked the beer from his lips and grinned. “We could recruit two very pissed off Chief Inspectors and stick it to Teflon while we did.”

  Craig laughed despite himself. “Sticking it to him would give me the greatest of pleasure after our conversation today.”

  Liam’s eyebrows rose questioningly.

  “I’ll tell you some other time. But much as I’d love to poach Geoff and Aidan and save them from Harrison, that would leave us with no constables, no sergeants, one inspector and four D.C.I.s; the budget couldn’t afford it.”

  “So we need a constable and an interim sergeant, just till Jake comes back?”

  “Something like that. Maybe a third person as well; I’ve got used to the flexibility of having Ken around. ” Craig suddenly had an idea. “You find us a new constable and leave the others to me.”

  He crossed his fingers that the Ovaltine drinking sergeant he had in mind would be open to the idea, even though it would definitely mean working more than nine to five for a few months. As far as their third person went; there was a certain Inspector Spence in Intelligence that he’d like to get his hands on.

  Liam lightened the mood by gesturing at Davy. “Our little boy’s all grown up. Who’d have thought it, eh, the lad getting married? Who do you think will be next, Lucia or you?”

  It was a question that he’d thought didn’t need an answer, knowing Craig’s aversion to the married state, but the slow smile that he got in response said that maybe he shouldn’t be so sure.

  THE END

  Core Characters in the Craig Crime Novels

  Superintendent Marc (Marco) Craig: Craig is a sophisticated, single, forty-five-year-old. Born in Northern Ireland, he is of Northern Irish/Italian extraction, from a mixed religious background but agnostic. An ex-grammar schoolboy and Queen’s University Law graduate, he went to London to join The Met (The Metropolitan Police) at 22, rising in rank through its High Potential Development Training Scheme. He returned to Belfast in 2008 after fifteen years away.

  He is a driven, very compassionate, workaholic, with an unfortunate temper that he struggles to control and a tendency to respond with his fists. His girlfriend of one year, Katy Stevens, is a consultant physician at the local St Mary’s Healthcare Trust.

  He lives alone in a modern apartment block in Stranmillis, near the university area of Belfast. His parents, his extrovert mother Mirella (an Italian pianist) and his quiet father Tom (an ex-university lecturer in Physics) live in Holywood town, six miles away. His rebellious ten years younger sister, Lucia, works as the manager of a local charity and also lives in Belfast.

  Craig is now a Superintendent heading up Belfast’s Murder Squad, based in the thirteen storey Co-ordinated Crime Unit (C.C.U.) in Pilot Street, in the Sailortown area of Belfast’s Docklands. He loves the sea, sails when he has the time and is generally very sporty. He loves music by Snow Patrol and follows Manchester United and Northern Ireland’s football team, and Ulster Rugby.

  D.C.I. Liam Cullen: Craig’s Detective Chief Inspector. Liam is a fifty-year-old former RUC officer from Crossgar in Northern Ireland, who transferred into the PSNI in 2001 following the Patton Reforms. He has lived and worked in Northern Ireland all his life and has spent thirty years in the police force, twenty of them policing Belfast, including during The Troubles.

  He is married to the forty-year-old, long suffering Danielle (Danni), a part-time nursery nurse, and they have a four-year-old daughter Erin and a two-year-old son called Rory. Liam is unsophisticated, indiscreet and hopelessly non-PC, but he’s a hard worker with a great knowledge of the streets and has a sense of humour that makes everyone, even the Chief Constable, laugh at times.

  D.I. Annette McElroy: Annette is Craig’s Detective Inspector who has lived and worked in Northern Ireland all her life. She is a forty-seven-year-old ex-nurse who, after her nursing degree, worked as a nurse for thirteen years and then, after a career break, retrained and has now been in the police for an equal length of time. She’s in the process of divorcing her husband Pete, a P.E teacher at a state secondary school, because of his infidelity and violence. They have two children, a boy and a girl (Jordan and Amy), both teenagers. Annette is kind and conscientious with an especially good eye for detail. She also has very good people skills but is a bit of goody-two-shoes. Since her marriage broke down, she’s acquired a newly glamorous image and is seeing Mike Augustus, a pathologist who works with Dr John Winter.

  Nicky Morris: Nicky Morris is Craig’s thirty-nine-year-old personal assistant. She used to be PA to Detective Chief Superintendent (D.C.S.) Terry ‘Teflon’ Harrison. Nicky is a glamorous Belfast mum, married to Gary, who owns a small garage, and is the mother of a teenage son, Jonny. She comes from a solidly working class area in East Belfast, just ten minutes’ drive from Docklands.

  She is bossy, motherly and street-wise and manages to organise a reluctantly-organised Craig very effectively. She has a very eclectic fashion sense, and there is an ongoing innocent office flirtation between her and Liam.

  Davy Walsh: The Murder Squad’s twenty-eight-year-old computer analyst. A brilliant but shy EMO, Davy’s confidence has grown during his time on the team, making his lifelong stutter on ‘s’ and ‘w’ diminish, unless he’s under stress.

  His father is deceased and Davy lives at home in Belfast with his mother and grandmother. He has an older sister, Emmie, who studied English at university. His girlfriend of almost three years, Maggie Clarke, is a journalist at The Belfast Chronicle.

  Dr John Winter: John is the forty-five-year-old Director of Pathology for Northern Ireland, one of the youngest ever appointed. He’s brilliant, eccentric, gentlemanly, and really likes the ladies, but he met his match in Natalie Winter, a surgeon at St Mary’s Trust, and has now been happily married for seven months.

  He was Craig’s best friend at school and university and remained in Northern Ireland to build his medical career. He is now internationally respected in his field. John persuaded Craig that the newly peaceful Northern Ireland was a good place to return to and assists Craig’s team with cases whenever he can. He is obsessed with crime in general and US police shows in particular.

  D.C.S. Terry (Teflon) Harrison: Craig’s old boss. The fifty-seven-year-old Detective Chief Superintendent is based at the Headquarters building in Limavady in the northwest Irish countryside. He lives in a converted farm house at Toomebridge with his homemaker wife Mandy and their thirty-year-old daughter Sian, a marketing consultant. He has also had a trail of mistresses, often younger than his daughter.

  Harrison is tolerable as a boss as long as everything’s going well, but he is acutely politically aware and a bit of a snob, and very quick to pass on any blame to his subordinates (hence the Teflon nickname). He sees Craig as a rival and resents his friendship with John Winter, who wields a great deal of power in Northern Ireland.

  Key Background Locations

  The majority of locations referenced in the book are real, with some exceptions.

  Northern Ireland (real): Set in the northeast of the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland was created in 1921 by an act of British parliament.
It forms part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and shares a border to the south and west with the Republic of Ireland. The Northern Ireland Assembly holds responsibility for a range of devolved policy matters. It was established by the Northern Ireland Act 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

  Belfast (real): Belfast is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, set on the flood plain of the River Lagan. The seventeenth largest city in the United Kingdom and the second largest in Ireland, it is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

  The Dockland’s Co-ordinated Crime Unit (The C.C.U. - fictitious): The modern thirteen storey headquarters building is situated in Pilot Street in Sailortown, a section of Belfast between the M1 and M2 undergoing massive investment and re-development. The C.C.U. hosts the police murder, gang crimes, vice and drug squad offices, amongst others.

  Sailortown (real): An historic area of Belfast on the River Lagan that was a thriving area between the 16th -20th centuries. Many large businesses grew in the area, ships docked for loading and unloading and their crews from far flung places such as China and Russia mixed with a local Belfast population of ship’s captains, chandlers, seamen and their families.

  Sailortown was a lively area where churches and bars fought for the souls and attendance of the residents and where many languages were spoken each day. The basement of the Rotterdam Bar, at the bottom of Clarendon Dock, acted as the overnight lock-up to prisoners being deported to the Antipodes on boats the next morning, and the stocks which held the prisoners could still be seen until the 1990s.

  During the years of World War Two the area was the most bombed area of the UK outside Central London, as the Germans tried to destroy Belfast’s ship building capacity. Sadly the area fell into disrepair in the 1970s/1980s when the motorway extension led to compulsory purchases of many homes and businesses, and decimated the Sailortown community. The rebuilding of the community has now begun, with new families moving into starter homes and professionals into expensive dockside flats.

  The Pathology Labs (fictitious): The labs, set on Belfast’s Saintfield Road as part of a large Science Park, are where Dr John Winter, Northern Ireland’s Head of Pathology, and his co-worker, Dr Des Marsham, Head of Forensic Science, carry out the post-mortem and forensic examinations that help Craig’s team solve their cases.

  St Mary’s Healthcare Trust (fictitious): St Mary’s is one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK. It is spread over hospital sites across Belfast, including the main Royal St Mary’s Hospital site and the Maternity, Paediatric and Endocrine (M.P.E.) unit, a stand- alone site on Belfast’s Lisburn Road, in the University sector of the city.