The Killing Year (The Craig Crime Series Book 17)

by Catriona King

  Liam thrust open the front door of the bookies and bypassed the punters inside with a grunt, striding up to the teller’s window to rap its glass hard with his fist.

  “Tell McCrae I need to see him.”

  The woman behind the barrier gave him a quick up and down. It was enough for her to tell that Liam was a copper without him showing his ID, but, judging by her response, not enough to engender respect.

  “Wadya want, pig?”

  Liam sighed, it being too early in the morning for an all-out verbal assault.

  “A lot less lip from you for a start, so get him out here.” He leaned forward so that his breath misted her window, adding a definitive “NOW”.

  Whether it would have been enough to shift her the DCI would never know, because a second later a door behind her opened and a man that he knew well appeared. Tommy Hill, retired loyalist terrorist, all round scum and sometime murder squad snout. The craggy pensioner sauntered forward, nodding the woman to get out of his way.

  “Well, well, Ghost. Tee wat dee we owe this honer?”

  Ghost was the loyalist’s nickname for Liam, because of his pale skin.

  Liam gestured at the glass between them. “Let me in and I’ll tell you.”

  Curiosity made the ex-UKUF boss comply, but not without a show of reluctance for his troops. Image was everything.

  One minute later the DCI was in a small back room facing Tommy’s successor since twenty-fourteen, UKUF boss Rory McCrae. Tommy’s ex-deputy and by the looks of it still his glove puppet.

  McCrae was doing his master criminal impression in a leather armchair, an impression ruined by him glancing at Tommy before he uttered a word. Liam saved him the embarrassment of questioning and turned to his organ grinder instead.

  “I presume you’re here having morning coffee, Tommy? After all, it couldn’t be any other, criminal reason, could it? You still being on parole. Because we all know that would land you right back inside, don’t we?”

  Hill didn’t rise to the bait, instead pulling across a chair and sitting down, until he realised that it gave the already foot taller Liam even more of a height advantage and clambered to his feet again.

  “Theere’s na law that staps me visitin’ an oul mate, Ghost, so stap takin’ the piss and ask wat ye cum tee ask.”

  Liam ignored the bad grammar and got to it.

  “John McCausland. Tell me about him.” He raised a hand to shut down Tommy’s impending plea of ignorance. “And don’t waste your time saying you don’t know him. I’ve already checked out his connections with Vice.”

  The hard man changed direction swiftly, smelling money. “Wat’s it worth tee yee?”

  He missed the sudden frantic look in McCrae’s eyes.

  Liam had been expecting to pay so he mentally halved the amount of cash in his pocket and commenced the bidding at half of that again.

  “Twenty-five.”

  Tommy’s snort of derision was even louder than he’d expected. “Fuck aff. I wudn’t get out af bed fer that.”

  Whichever supermodel had been originally responsible for that phrase had a lot to answer for, but Liam bit back his retort and added five more pounds.

  “Thirty, and for that I expect his location.”

  “Forty, an’ ye tell us why.”

  Rory McCrae’s eyes had been widening during the horse-trading but now he finally spoke. It was an adenoidal, smoke-strained squeak that would have sounded uninspiring from the boss of anything, much less a paramilitary gang.

  “Ye can’t!”

  Both men turned to look at him, but Liam got in first.

  “Can’t give me McCausland’s location? Why not?”

  The UKUF boss ignored Tommy’s warning shake of the head, insubordination that he knew he’d pay for later.

  “’Cos ye’ll git him killed.”

  Liam stepped towards him, blocking Tommy’s gimlet gaze. “By?”

  “Hughie Bellner.”

  “Who’s Hugh-”

  Tommy cut in. “That fucker! Wat’s Johnnie doin’ wi’ him?”

  McCrae’s sigh of concession was Liam’s signal to take a seat, and in five minutes, what he already knew, that McCausland had been selling Judith Roper information for her drugs documentary, had become a many layered thing. The bottom line was that John McCausland had risked his life to do so.

  The DCI gave a low whistle.

  “So, this Bellner’s the big drug man nowadays?”

  McCrae gave a heavy nod.

  “And you’re certain he’d kill McCausland to stop information on his business leaking?”

  “He’s dun it before.” McCrae shook his head immediately. “Nah, dun’t ask me who, ’cos I wunt tell ye. Jest be sure that if ye pigs even go near Johnnie McCausland, Bellner’ll find out an he’ll be a dead man.”

  Liam considered for a moment. John McCausland, a loyalist with a small ‘l’ but a petty crook with a big ‘P’ had decided to supplement his income by becoming a grass for their dead newsreader. It was a move that by the sounds of it could prove fatal for McCausland if the local drug kingpin found out, but if he hadn’t known, then Bellner would have had no reason to kill Judith Roper.

  His next question took the loyalists by surprise. “Tell me what Bellner looks like, and McCausland as well.”

  McCrae lifted down a photograph that Liam hadn’t noticed from the wall, tapping on the image of a man playing cards.

  “That’s Johnnie.”

  McCausland was scrawny and rat-like, and barely out of his teens. Liam dismissed him as their killer instantly; the youth couldn’t have lifted the card table he was playing at never mind moved the bodies of the dead.

  “OK. Pass him a message. I need to speak to him, just speak. Tommy’s got my number. Now, show me Bellner.”

  McCrae shook his head. “He dun’t like photos.” He turned to his old boss, in what Liam knew was an attempt to avoid the ear-bashing that was coming the moment he left. “Ye met him once, boss. Didn’t ye?”

  Tommy puffed out his chest, top dog once again. He held out his open hand before he answered.

  “Forty.”

  It wasn’t worth arguing and it was less than half what Liam had been prepared to pay, so the detective coughed up, smug in that knowledge.

  “Go on.”

  “Bellner’s abyte McCrae’s height.” Five-eleven or thereabouts. “An’ bulky, but nat fat. Muscly like.”

  A strong man then. One who could move a corpse?

  “Age?”

  Hill gestured to Liam and then himself. “Ar age.”

  Liam gave the comment the snort that it deserved. “Well, as I’m fifty-two and you’re pushing seventy, that’s a big range. Narrow it down.”

  Tommy was unimpressed; he was only sixty-five.

  “Ach, OK then. Bellner’s fifty. I heerd it wus his birthday a while back.”

  They wouldn’t know if that age fitted until they were further into the case, but all information was good.

  Liam was standing up to leave when the loyalist added cockily.

  “It’s nat Bellner, ye knaw.”

  Liam narrowed his eyes. “What’s not him? I didn’t say what I was looking for him for.”

  Tommy gave an unobstructed yawn, then responded with perfect logic.

  “Yeer’re murder squad, Ghost, so yeer’re lukkin’ fer sumwan fer murder, an’ I’ can tell ye nye, yes, if Hughie Bellner wants sumwun dead then they get dead, but he wud never ever dee it wi’ his own hands.”

  ****

  The Labs.

  “Swab her forehead and I’ll do the man’s, Mike. Carefully. We need to retain the shape.”

  Mike Augustus shot his boss a sceptical look and moved across to the black-light lamp.

  “Let’s check the shapes first then and take some photographs, before we do the swabs.”

  John halted abruptly, his cotton bud hovering an inch above his victim’s face, wondering why he hadn’t thought of that first. He re-sheathed his swab hurriedly and w
aved his junior on, determining never again to pollute his body with alcohol when he had to work the next day, and mentally blaming Natalie for his near mistake.

  Five minutes later the men were staring at two images, both unmistakably the shape of pursed lips, the same pair in each case.

  John gave an uncharacteristic whistle. “Annette was right! The bastard kissed them when they were dead.”

  Mike cast a meaningful glance at their charges.

  “You hope they were dead.”

  The image the words conjured made John wince, so the junior pathologist hurried on.

  “We have to assume he did the same to the other nine victims too, and if so it begs the reason why.”

  John didn’t respond. He was too busy staring at Judith Roper, his eyes running from her forehead down to her neck. It prompted him to fold back her sheet to the top of her breasts and seize the lamp again.

  “Damn, damn, damn.”

  Mike’s eyes widened. “What? What can you see?” He stared at the newsreader’s pale skin for inspiration but could see nothing new.

  John lifted a magnifying glass, then they both saw the faint set of fingertip bruises, set in a linear pattern down the side of the woman’s cheeks.

  “They wouldn’t have been visible until a few days post-mortem, so they would normally have been missed. But the black light has picked them out.”

  John went in search of a mirror, finding a small one in his desk drawer. He returned to the dissection room and handed it to his junior.

  “Hold that in front of me, please.”

  Mike did so, watching as his boss placed one of his hands on either side of his own face in what looked like a curiously romantic gesture, his fingers’ positions exactly matching the locations of the bruises. Augustus screwed up his face in disgust.

  “He held her face in his hands as he kissed her forehead! That’s just creepy.”

  John was too focused to comment. “Check the man’s face.”

  It soon became clear that the murderer’s act hadn’t been limited to their female corpse.

  “OK, check the rest of their bodies for bruising. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  That was all the time it took him to check the other nine files and realise than neither of the earlier examining pathologists had thought to use the black light. Not only had they missed the lip print shapes on the first nine victims’ foreheads, but now they would never know if their faces had been bruised unless their bodies were exhumed!

  When he returned, deflated, to the dissection room, Mike was shaking his head.

  “No other bruises anywhere on their bodies.”

  John gave a sigh of relief. “That’s something at least.”

  But it was a small comfort against the likelihood that Craig would ask for the other victims to be exhumed, with all the court warrants and family trauma that implied. Why the hell hadn’t he P.M.ed them all himself? He already knew the answer, because he couldn’t do every pathologist in the country’s job. It was no consolation when they might have lost valuable evidence.

  He was preparing to call Craig when Mike’s voice broke through his thoughts.

  “OK, so this weirdo holds their faces in his hands and kisses them like he’s a lover, so how come the DNA profile was different in each case?”

  John glanced at him, confused. “What?”

  “We know the swabs from the first nine victims’ foreheads all revealed DNA that didn’t belong to the victim it was left on. Nine different foreign DNAs. But surely if the same killer made all the kiss marks they should all have had the same foreign DNA? The killer’s.”

  John groped behind him for a stool, his mind racing. They had a killer who held the faces of his victims and left a patch the shape of a kiss on their foreheads, but the DNA in the patch wasn’t his. How was he making the kiss shape then? Using something placed over his own lips?

  Suddenly he slapped the workbench.

  “My God! Why didn’t I see this before?” He headed for the door. “Cover the bodies and follow me.”

  A minute later they were sitting at his desk with post-mortem files spread across every surface, and John was calling out victims’ names.

  “OK, Jason Cornell. The DNA on his forehead; call it up on the computer.”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Now call up Cornell’s own DNA.”

  Five minutes later they were looking at two columns of nine DNA profiles and John beckoned Mike around to his side of the desk.

  “Look at them.”

  Mike frowned quizzically. “What am I looking for?”

  John smiled to himself, pleased that he hadn’t lost his touch. “OK, I’ll do the first one.” He clicked on a profile at the top of the first column and dragged it to the middle of the second. They were a perfect match.

  Mike gawped at the screen. “Anne Morrison’s DNA was found on Jason Cornell’s forehead!”

  The Head Pathologist nodded. “OK, now you do one.”

  As if they were playing Patience, they clicked and dragged nine of the forehead profiles on to nine different victims. As John gawped at the ghoulish symmetry Mike returned to his seat, shaking his head.

  “What about the two new victims?”

  John frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that if the first nine victims have each other’s DNAs swopped around on their foreheads, whose DNA are we going to find on the new two?”

  John gave a heavy sigh.

  “There could be even more victims out there and he’s used their DNA.”

  Mike’s eyes widened. “You mean two more dead that haven’t been discovered yet?”

  “It’s not outside the bounds of possibility.”

  The lead pathologist stood up, pushing back his chair. “We need to run our new victims’ DNA and their forehead swabs to find out, ASAP.”

  Chapter Six

  The C.C.U.

  “Tell me about our victims, Liam.”

  The DCI raised an eyebrow sceptically. “I hope that was a trick question, ’cos you’ve got the same files in front of you as me.”

  Craig shook his head, crossing to his office window to look out. “I don’t mean the obvious things, we already know those, I mean the in-between-the-lines stuff. That’s what we really need.”

  Liam decided to humour him and lifted the page containing the table from their first briefing, scanning the victims’ list of occupations. After a moment he spoke.

  “OK, this is just a punt, but here goes. You can group them by job, loosely. Law and order has a judge - here, did you know him? John McClelland.”

  Craig didn’t turn around. “No. He worked in traffic court, didn’t he? Gabe Ronson might know something.”

  Ronson was an inspector in the Traffic Section.

  Liam scribbled a note to find out as Craig made a ‘move it along’ gesture. “Keep going.”

  Liam scanned the table again. “OK, then there’s health and social care: we’ve got a social worker, a nurse…”

  Craig sat back down at his desk, his interest growing. “Law and order and care. You might just have something here.”

  “Except now we’re looking at the Vics as having done something to get themselves killed, and that won’t be popular.”

  “Maybe not, but we both know it’s always the victims that lead us to their killer. Anyway, they hadn’t necessarily done something wrong, well, except maybe in our killer’s mind.”

  Liam shrugged. “Aye well, then here’s where it all falls apart. We’ve got a newsreader, a market gardener, a supermarket worker and a banker. Nothing to do with law and order or care.”

  Craig had to admit that it wasn’t the most connected list, but the more Liam had said the more he’d become convinced that there was something there, even if it wasn’t obvious.

  Liam was still talking.

  “It might be nothing to do with their jobs, of course. It could just be some tiny detail of their lives. Maybe they were all stamp collectors or som
ething and our perp hates stamps?”

  Craig nodded briskly. “We’ll just have to dig and find out, won’t we. OK, ask Ash to excavate all eleven victims’ lives. I want everything: work, family, finances, criminal records, any hobbies, pets, etcetera. Set some uniforms to re-interviewing their neighbours, and we need their schools, universities, social media and email accounts. Some of this will have been done already, but some-”

  Just then the desk phone rang, cutting him off. He answered it in an impatient voice.

  “What?”

  Nicky’s sniff said he wasn’t going to like her answer, but she really didn’t care now seeing as he’d just snapped at her.

  “There are two women out here saying they’re joining our team.”

  Too late Craig realised that he hadn’t given her the new DCIs’ details.

  The PA hadn’t finished.

  “Only it would be nice for me to be told when someone new was coming, considering I have to get them desks, passes, parking-”

  Craig cut her diatribe short, losing him even more points. “Sorry. Just find them a seat and we’ll be out in a moment.” He cut the call, rolling his eyes. “Susan and Deidre are here. I’d almost forgotten about them. Wishful thinking.”

  Liam rubbed his hands together cheerfully. “Nil desperandum, boss. I’ll soon put them to work.” He tapped his page meaningfully. “Five Vics to Richie and five to Dee, until we ID number eleven. Nicky can stick them behind her wall where they’ll be out of everyone’s way, and they can dig away to their heart’s content.”

  Nicky had built an artificial dividing wall the year before from filing cabinets and cardboard boxes, to give some privacy to officers viewing CCTV on a case. She had intended the structure to be temporary but the privacy it afforded in an open-plan world had proved popular, so it appeared to have taken root.

  Craig opened his office door, his heart immediately sinking at the sight that greeted him. Susan Richie had spotted her old lover and was making a beeline Aidan Hughes’ way. Luckily Liam moved quickly enough to head her off and steer her back towards Craig.