Death on the Line

by Derek Fee

  Irene stood and looked directly at Davidson. ‘I’d like that.’ She ushered them back through the house to the front door.

  Browne removed a business card from his pocket and handed it to her after she had opened the door. ‘I’d be grateful if you would contact me if you can think of anything further.’

  She took the card and slipped it into a pocket in her skirt. When they’d left she went back into the conservatory. Sometimes she could still see Jackie lying back on the couch and looking out at his beloved garden. She picked up the teacups and placed them back on the tray. She had conflicting emotions about the visit from the detectives. She was sure that Jackie had been sent on his way. And she had an idea that it had something to do with his relationship with Sammy Rice. Of course, she would like to see whoever ordered Jackie’s murder pay for it, but she had a feeling that unmasking the person responsible would lead to a re-evaluation of her husband as both a man and a politician. She was never happy with her role as an addendum to her husband and the way those who whispered in Jackie’s ear looked straight through her. As time went by, Jackie behaved that way too. People assumed she was just a dumb housewife. Maybe she would get a chance to prove them wrong. What the hell had Jackie been up to.? She now regretted setting that fire at the end of the garden.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Wilson had been expecting the call from his boss. They needed to talk. He was a little surprised when he entered her office and found that he was being supplied with the coffee and biscuits that were already laid out on the coffee table. He was wondering what the subject of the meeting might be but the coffee and its location in the ‘soft’ visitors’ area of the office bespoke of ‘tough love’.

  They sat across from each other and Yvonne Davis pushed a cup of black coffee in his direction. He sipped it. ‘This didn’t come from the cafeteria.’

  ‘My own private stash.’ She sipped her coffee and smiled appreciatively. Columbian is definitely superior to Brazilian.

  ‘What have I done wrong?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘Who said you’d done anything wrong?’

  Wilson nodded at the table. ‘With Spence it was a glass of whiskey. You’re obviously more sophisticated.’

  ‘I’ve been getting some phone calls about you.’

  ‘Some phone calls? As in more than one.’

  ‘OK, I’ve had a phone call from the chief superintendent in charge of Armagh. He’s had a complaint from his SIO on the Kielty murder that you’re interfering. Apparently, you’ve been giving the SIO instructions as to what he should do.’

  ‘It been more than thirty-six hours since the murder and no incident room has been set up in Aughnacloy. I made some suggestions. I did not give any orders.’ He removed from his inside pocket the paper he had received instructing him to assist in murder investigations province-wide and laid it on the table. ‘Scan it and send it to your colleague in Armagh. Tell him he can take the issue up with the chief constable.’

  She sighed. ‘I was hoping that you’d adopt a more conciliatory approach, but I suppose I should have known better.’

  ‘DS Gibson is an amateur. He’s never investigated a murder and so far he’s not following the protocols that have already been set up. Your colleague in Armagh should dump the incompetent arsehole and put me in charge.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen. We have to respect the fact that the murder took place in Armagh’s bailiwick. Also, there’s the issue of your personal relationship with one of the victims. If the crime had been committed in Belfast, I would probably have excluded you from the investigation.’

  Wilson had been thinking a lot about his relationship with Jock McDevitt. In fact, McDevitt’s brush with death was forcing him to review all his relationships. ‘I can guarantee that if I don’t push the investigation, we’ll never find out who murdered Kielty and tried to murder McDevitt.’ He gave her a briefing on the interview with the Kielty family. ‘I got a bad vibe from the interview. There were definitely unspoken messages passing between the family and Reverend Hunter. Something wasn’t quite right. I can’t put my finger on it, but it was there.’

  ‘In the air perhaps, either that or your paranoia was working overtime.’ She could see that Wilson was edgier than usual, which meant that there could be a lot of breakages in the china shop.

  ‘You’ve seen today’s Chronicle?’

  Davis turned her eyes to her desk where Wilson noticed the newspaper in her ‘out’ tray.

  ‘How do you think that the editor would respond if he knew the investigation was being run by an amateur?’

  Davis winced theatrically. ‘I don’t like the fact that you’re emotionally involved. I think you need to cut Gibson some slack.’ She picked up the chief constable’s letter. ‘I’ll scan this and send it to Armagh. It might stop any further phone calls.’ She started to stand up but saw that Wilson remained sitting.

  He had been mulling over whether to tell her about his theory concerning Carlisle. He decided it would be unfair to leave her in the dark. He had no idea how Carlisle’s widow had reacted to the visit of Browne and Davidson. At that very moment, she could be on the phone to the chief constable’s office.

  ‘Out with it,’ Davis said, retaking her seat.

  Wilson told her of the sudden inspiration he’d had regarding Carlisle’s death. He could see by the look of dismay on her face that she wasn’t totally happy with this development.

  ‘Please tell me that you’re joking, Ian. Please tell me that Browne and Davidson have not gone to interview Carlisle’s widow.’

  He shook his head. ‘Something is wrong there. I should have seen it at the time, but I was too involved with finding Sammy Rice and clearing up the three murders. Anyone with half a brain would have known that an egomaniac like Carlisle would never have plunged a needle into his own arm.’

  ‘Jesus, Ian, what have you done?’ She brushed away the lick of hair on the right side of her head, which was the ‘tell’ that she was more than upset. ‘I’m dead. When Nicholson hears about this, he’s going to think that I knew about it. They’ll fire me for sure. I’ll be in Traffic like a shot.’

  ‘You can blame me. Nicholson would be delighted to show me the door. On the other hand, if it turns out that Carlisle was murdered then you’re going to garner the kudos. You’re never going to make it to assistant chief constable by sitting on your hands.’

  She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. Her concentration on her career had seen her marriage dissolve and her children estranged. She was glad to be rid of her husband, a useless sod, who’d been an albatross around her neck. The kids were another matter. She quickly banished the thought from her mind. She didn’t need the guilt today. Managing Wilson was high risk, but when things worked out the risk was worth it. She’d already received the kudos for the Evans affair. She looked at him. He was smiling as though he was reading her mind. He really was a handsome devil and he was already winding her around his little finger. She wanted to return his smile but that would only encourage him. ‘There is no official investigation. Is that clear?’

  ‘Crystal.’ The appeal to vanity always worked, he thought. They wanted her at Castlereagh but to get her there they needed her to be a superstar. There was no way they were going to shoot her down. If things went south, he would carry the can. Fishing in Jackie Carlisle’s life was going to piss off a lot of important people, but for the moment, he would keep that opinion to himself.

  She stood up again, half-afraid that there was another bomb he was going to toss in her direction. ‘I want to be kept completely in the loop.’

  ‘Understood.’ Wilson rose. She wasn’t like Spence and probably never would be but their relationship was getting there. He had no wish to scupper her career. Nevertheless, there was something rotten going on and he was going to find out what.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Browne and Davidson went straight to Wilson’s office when they returned from Hillsborough. Wilson invited O’Neill to join th
em. They briefed Wilson on their interview with the widow Carlisle.

  ‘You’re sure that she thinks he was murdered?’ Wilson asked when they were finished.

  ‘She never said it, but she intimated it,’ Browne said.

  Wilson looked at Davidson, who nodded.

  The first piece of good news was that the chief constable wouldn’t be receiving a call from the grieving widow. ‘Siobhan, we need to get a whiteboard established, but I don’t want it to look too obvious. Put it away in some corner. Peter will get you a photo of Jackie and we’ll need a photo of the house.’ He turned to Browne. ‘Check with Professor Reid and find out whether there was a post-mortem and whether they did a tox screen. We should also find out whether the morphine found in the body could have come from the hospice. Maybe there’s someone there who likes to send the terminally ill on their way.’ He was on a roll. ‘See have there been any other similar deaths associated with that hospice.’

  Browne was writing notes. He was impressed at how quickly Wilson had moved on to the next steps of the investigation. He supposed it was a question of experience.

  ‘We’ll have a briefing this evening at six,’ Wilson said.

  Browne and Davidson stood, but O’Neill remained seated. As soon as they left, she flipped through her notebook. ‘Reverend Geoffrey Hunter, Presbyterian minister with a parish in Aughnacloy, fifty-two years old, ordained five years ago and has been in two parishes in Tyrone since.’

  ‘Where’s the second parish?’

  She looked through her notes. ‘Moy.’

  ‘OK, continue.’

  ‘Nothing of note, well respected, very big in the Orange Order, lots of photos with the sash and on marches.’

  ‘What about Gibson?’

  ‘Darren Gibson, originally from South Tyrone, promoted to sergeant about a year ago. Ten years in the PSNI. Moved to CID five years ago. Nothing special in the job, annual reports show a steady progression rather than a stellar career.’ She closed the notebook. ‘You want me to go deeper?’

  ‘Not for the moment. Set up the board on Carlisle. I have a feeling you’re going to be in demand on both that investigation and whatever we turn up in Aughnacloy.’

  She stood up. ‘I’ll get on with the board straight away.’

  As soon as Wilson was alone, his thoughts returned to McDevitt. It was good news that Jock was going to survive, but it would be a while before he would be back to himself. Wilson was lucky that he had never been shot, although it might have been better to have been shot than to have received a blast from a bomb. He had given up six months of his life to hospital and the shrapnel in his thigh had ended his rugby career. His computer pinged indicating the arrival of an e-mail. He opened it and saw it was a copy of the autopsy on Tom Kielty. He printed out the report and settled down to read it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Stephanie Reid loved her job. As soon as she had finished her medical studies she immediately opted for a specialisation in pathology, knowing that it wasn’t every doctor’s cup of tea. She didn’t fit into the literary portrayal of the quirky pathologist either. In the fifteen years since she had qualified, she had carried out autopsies on virtually every kind of corpse. She treated each one with the utmost respect and her high level of professionalism was recognised with a professorship in the major teaching hospital in the province. Like many in the medical profession, she had developed what people would call a thick skin in relation to her job, but every now and then a corpse came in that managed to breach that thick skin and test her professional exterior. She was on her second autopsy of the day when her assistant whipped the sheet off the trolley and exposed the milk-white body of a young boy of maybe five years of age. She fiddled with her instruments while her assistant settled the child on the table. The young ones were the most difficult. One look at the child on the table told her that this was going to be a case that she would remember.

  The white body was covered with dark blue bruises and the face had obviously been badly beaten. She noticed immediately that the right tibia had been badly set, as had the right forearm. She took a deep breath as she switched on the microphone and picked up her scalpel. An hour later she walked away from the table and left her assistant to close up. She went immediately to the ladies’ room and started crying. She looked at her face in the mirror as the tears streamed down her cheeks. This wasn’t her. There had to be something hormonal going on. She had seen the battered bodies of children before. Her time in the Kivus had left her unshockable and yet here she was in the ladies’ room of the mortuary at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast crying her eyes out over the battered body of a five-year-old Irish child. It was the wanton destruction of a vulnerable child that bothered her.

  When the tears stopped flowing, the sadness she had felt was replaced with a cold fury. Although she had been perilously close, she had never taken a life. It wasn’t anything to do with the Hippocratic oath. For her, taking the life of another human was unimaginable. And yet, as she recognised the flood of revulsion that coursed through her body, she knew that she could, in that moment, remove the monster who had killed that child from this planet. By the time she had dried her eyes and returned to the autopsy room, the table had been sluiced and the child’s body had been stored in one of the chilled cabinets. She put on her cloak of professionalism but noticed that her male assistant’s eyes were glassier than usual. She made a promise to herself that someone was going to pay for beating that child to death and she knew someone who was going to feel exactly the same.

  Reid thought back to the first time she had seen Ian Wilson in Gallery One. She recognised something in him that was later confirmed by working with him. Wilson was like a combination of Don Quixote and a boy scout. She smiled, as she often did these days when she thought of him. She slipped into her new scrubs and watched her assistant manhandle the body of an old woman onto the table. She switched on the microphone and began her description of the outward condition of the body. In the back of her mind she could still see the broken body of the young boy, and her resolve to give him justice hardened.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Wilson had finished reviewing the post-mortem report on Tom Kielty. The dead man had been in excellent health for a seventy-year-old. The pathologist was not able to comment on the possibility of Kielty having early dementia. That was beyond his art. But in his opinion the brain showed no sign of abnormality. While reading the report, Wilson’s thoughts strayed continually to the man lying in the ICU of Craigavon Hospital. He glanced at his watch. It was two o’clock and he realised that he had skipped lunch again. There were four hours to kill before he could get a sight of McDevitt. The clock was crawling and there was nothing he could do about it. Perhaps he should have taken over the Jackie Carlisle investigation himself. Visiting the hospice would keep him busy. But that wouldn’t be fair to Rory Browne. The so far unsuccessful search for Sammy Rice had put a dent in his new sergeant’s enthusiasm. Peter Davidson was more phlegmatic, but then again he was an old hand and realised that results can take months or even years to materialise. He was pondering a very slow afternoon when the phone rang.

  ‘Are you busy?’

  He broke into a smile at the sound of Reid’s voice. ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘Certainly not what you have in mind,’ she laughed. I was wondering whether you’d have time to come down to the mortuary? There’s something I’d like to show you.’

  ‘I hope you’re not making work for me again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think it was important.’

  He was aware that she hadn’t answered his question, which probably meant that she was about to make work for him again. ‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’

  ‘Thanks, I really mean it.’

  The line went dead. He was left wondering what Reid was up to. Her closing comment wasn’t like her. He put on his jacket and left his office. Harry Graham was in the squad room looking up something on the computer.

/>   ‘With me, Harry?’ he called to Graham. ‘We’re off to your favourite spot.’

  Graham grabbed his jacket and followed Wilson.

  The mortuary at the Royal Victoria Hospital is a compact red-bricked building at the rear of the site. Graham drove past the parking lots and parked directly outside the building. He removed the card bearing the words ‘POLICE VEHICLE’ from the side pocket of the car door and put it on the dashboard. The clampers employed by the hospital had a vicious reputation. They entered the building and made their way along the corridor that led to Reid’s office and the pathology suite.

  Reid rose from her chair and greeted the two police officers, ‘Ian, Harry.’

  Graham smiled when he saw the way she touched Wilson’s arm as he came close. At one time he’d thought that Wilson and Kate McCann had been made for each other but somehow that relationship had gone south. Professor Reid was a better fit. She was feisty and tough, the perfect counterpoint to his thoughtful boss.

  Wilson would have loved to touch her, but he was aware of Graham’s eyes on them. ‘What was so urgent that you pulled me away from a couple of hours of extremely important and interesting administrative work?’

  ‘Come with me.’

  Wilson immediately fell into step, but Graham did so reluctantly. Graham hated mortuaries and particularly autopsies. He knew that Reid was about to show them something particularly horrible or she wouldn’t have invited them to her domain. They walked back down the corridor to the area where the corpses were stored. Reid’s assistant’s office was in the storage area and he left his desk when he saw Wilson and Graham enter. He knew which corpse his boss wanted to display. He moved to the wall housing the cabinets and stood waiting. Reid nodded and he opened the door and pulled out the rack on which the body of the boy was laid. A sheet covered the corpse. The assistant stood back.