The Depths

by Catriona King

She shook her head again, more firmly. “No. I didn’t know it was Pete then, I just saw a big man hunched over Mike.”

  Craig’s eyebrows lifted and he felt a spark of hope. “You definitely didn’t know it was Pete? You didn’t mention that to me when it happened!”

  “I could barely remember my name back then, sir.”

  “And you told the cops who first interviewed you that?”

  She answered him in an exhausted tone.

  “Yes, and I said it at my re-interview as well. I told them everything, but they mustn’t have believed me.”

  “Then tell us now.”

  Her expression said what was the point but both men urged her on, so she told her story again in a resigned voice.

  “Mike woke and must have moved, which woke me, so I turned and I saw the outline of a tall man looming over him. His left arm was slightly raised but I couldn’t see his hand clearly, so I didn’t know if he had anything in it. He could easily have been holding a knife or a gun. I called out for him to show me his hands but he didn’t, so then I thought about jumping across the bed at him but he was too big, and that still would’ve given him time to shoot or stab Mike if he’d had a weapon, so I grabbed my gun and shouted. ‘Stop. Armed police-”

  “And then you shot at his arm.”

  “Yes, his left side was towards me so it was his left upper arm that I shot at. But just as I shot to stop him he turned towards me.” She dropped her eyes to the floor and shook her head. “The bullet went through into his chest and tore his aorta.”

  Craig gazed at her intently. “Look at me, Annette.”

  She did so reluctantly.

  “This is really important. Exactly when did you realise that it was Pete?”

  “When he was on the floor. As Mike jumped out of bed to look after his wound I switched on my bedside lamp and ran around to help. That’s when I saw who it was.”

  Her face crumpled and reddened, and Craig knew that tears and retreating into herself again would come next. He focused on the facts to keep her with them.

  “Every part of this smacks of you acting in self defence. They’re leaning on the fact you were slightly over the drink-drive limit and handling a gun, which as you weren’t drunk, driving or on duty any good barrister should be able to get thrown out. Also that your gun wasn’t locked away as per regs, which yes, you might get disciplined for. But to generate a manslaughter charge it sounds like they’re also implying that you had an enhanced motive to shoot because it was Pete, but you didn’t know it was him until he was on the ground!”

  Annette’s response came in a wretched voice. “But I’ve already told them all this, so why are they doing this to me?”

  Liam gave a disgusted grunt. “Because the bastards are just looking to nail a copper. They’re probably doing a happy dance at the thought!”

  Craig gave him a wary look and shook his head. “Because the Ombudsman and PPS have to be seen to be even-handed and treat the police the same as everyone else, which is right until it tips over into trying too hard to be seen to be equitable or making an example of someone just for the sake of it. You didn’t know it was Pete, he wouldn’t show you his hands when you called out so he could easily have had a weapon, and you assessed that he was too strong for you to overpower, which we all know is right. He was a fit PE teacher, probably even fitter after years working out in a prison gym.”

  He sat up straight with a defiant look on his face. “Basically they’re overcompensating. A strong, fit, man with a history of assaulting you broke into your home in the middle of the night, a home where your child was asleep. And not just into your home but into your bedroom, where you were at your most vulnerable.”

  Just then Liam thought of something and went to interject, but Craig cut him off with a shake of his head and rose to his feet.

  “Leave this with us, Annette.”

  A panicked expression appeared on her face. “You can’t interfere, sir! They’ll penalise me if you do.”

  “We’ll be very careful, I promise. We’re just going to dig around a bit in the background. The PPS and Ombudsman won’t find out about it until or unless we turn something up.”

  Before she could ask what that something could possibly be the two men were out the front door and walking towards the car, with Liam shooting Craig knowing looks.

  “You knew what I was going to say, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe. What were you going to say?”

  “That Pete didn’t care if his prints were found because he wasn’t planning on going back to jail. He was going to do a runner.”

  He was partly right; Pete McElroy hadn’t been planning on a return to Mahon, but perhaps not for the reasons that Liam thought. But Craig wasn’t ready to say what those reasons might be just yet so he stuck to generalities.

  “If he wasn’t then we need to prove that before we give Annette false hope. By the way, I agree with your opinion on the motivation for the charges, but I didn’t want to encourage her to say something to the PPS she might regret.”

  Liam smiled and climbed into the driver’s seat, leaving his boss in the street for a minute to think.

  They needed to find evidence to support their hunches and be quick about it, or the process would destroy Annette and the team would get a shell of its inspector back, if she ever returned at all.

  ****

  The M1 Motorway

  Aidan and Ryan were on the slow road to Rownton, not intentionally slow you understand, because they were on a motorway, but impeded by a lorry discharging its load of baby wipes all over the westbound carriageway, prompting rubberneckers to slow down as they passed and several amateur movie-makers to exit their vehicles and video the spectacle with the resultant queue of cars stretching back to the last junction but one. Bright yellow packets adorned with a cute infant skittered wildly across the lanes and into the adjacent hedgerows, sent flying there by people innocently driving into the fiasco and becoming pool players potting in a giant rule-free game.

  After twenty static minutes, and bored waiting for the expected patrol car to siren and flash its way up the hard shoulder and sort things, Ryan nodded at the windscreen in a way that suggested they should get out and do the job themselves. The response was a grudging sigh from his senior officer, whose following glance at his dashboard clock said that although he was reluctant to exit the car, it being February, which in Ireland was a month that his late mother had often said ‘would skin a fairy’, such mythical beings obviously being sensitive to extreme cold, and he was only wearing a suit, time was moving on so he knew that the D.S. was probably right.

  A second sigh, accompanied by a frown at the darkening afternoon sky, eloquently conveyed Aidan’s thoughts that with the delay and the list of interviews they had ahead of them they would probably now have to stay in the sticks overnight.

  Without a word he hit his car’s blue lights and sirens and pulled across the middle and outer lanes of the carriageway then they exited his BMW cabriolet, a ten-year-old but spotless vehicle that he prided himself would be a classic someday. They held up their warrant cards as they did so and while Aidan walked ahead to speak to the driver of the lorry, a swarthy, heavily-set man who the D.C.I. imagined lied to his friends about the nature of his load, probably hinting that he only ever carried something macho like booze or heavy machinery and even then just the hardiest versions bound for Siberia, Ryan opened the car’s boot and withdrew a hazard sign and several cones, dodging the skittering wipe packets skilfully to place them in the outer lanes, where he bravely positioned himself to perform the traffic handling drill that he’d learned twenty years before as a probationer.

  He waved his arms and pointed his hands with the grace of a ballerina directing the now crawling traffic into the slow lane, and then motioned brusquely to the budding Spielbergs to get back in their cars. Fifteen minutes later the detectives were rewarded by only a ten-mile tailback and some blue-lighted allies who arrived, took over and waved them on their way, bath
ed in the glow of a good deed done and only fifty minutes behind where they might have been.

  It prompted Aidan to speak for the first time in an hour. “We might be in luck and make up the time. I really don’t fancy staying overnight in a one horse town.”

  Ryan took it as a sign that conversation was being encouraged. “How many farmers are there in Rownton’s hinterland?”

  “Four main ones so we’ll do those first.” He gestured towards the sergeant’s top pocket. “Call the village station and see how the locals are doing with the rest.”

  After five minutes of listening on speaker they knew that every person in the village had been interviewed since the day before, and the only ones warranting their attention were the landlord of the pub and Derek Morrow’s deputy foreman, Jimmy Rushton.

  Aidan shouted into the phone in response. “Line them up for three hours’ time, will you.”

  A rural voice that they hadn’t heard before shouted back. “Here?”

  Ryan said it first. “Who are you?”

  The man replied in an offended tone, “I’m Sergeant O’Hare. And who are you?”

  Aidan shook his head as a sign not to rise to the bait and intervened.

  “It’s D.C.I. Hughes here, Sergeant, and D.S. Hendron. We’ve been tasked to take over the interviews. We’ll have the two men mentioned at your station then, please. Thanks for that.” He signalled Ryan to end the call before the, now no-doubt doubly offended, village bobby could retort.

  “He won’t have liked that.”

  “Tough.”

  To underline his assertiveness Aidan put his foot down and thirty minutes later the sat-nav narrator informed them that they were approaching their destination in such a seductive tone that it sounded like she was suggesting a ménage a trois.

  Ryan raised an eyebrow. “Did she come like that?”

  Aidan cracked a smile, a rare enough occurrence that week because his nicotine addiction was giving him gip and he absolutely refused to vape, believing that the contraptions looked like old-fashioned cigarette holders and with his gangly appearance he would look like an escapee from a Noel Coward play.

  “No. One of my mates at the gym programmed it in for me. The usual voice was giving me a headache. She sounded just like our English teacher at school.”

  A debate on the merits of sexy voices would have to wait, because the seductress had directed them down a narrow lane that deteriorated into such a mud-filled shuck the BMW’s windscreen was splattered with the material, and the absence of any visible footpath said that they’d be knocking on their first interviewee’s front door covered in a solid coating of the same.

  ****

  Belfast City Centre.

  Craig was openly vacillating between asking Liam to drive to Mahon Prison to see what they could uncover about Pete, to the Ombudsman’s office so he could march in and give the old duffer a piece of his mind, or to the PPS’ offices to see what, if any, pressure he could exert. In the end it was his deputy who made the decision to drive to the fourth and currently only sensible option, because handily enough they’d taken his car to Annette’s.

  “Which one are we going to first, Liam? Ombudsman or PPS?”

  It was a genuine query by Craig as the route to both led them down Belfast’s Victoria Street and they’d just hit that very road. His deputy didn’t even make a pretence of answering, reckoning that in around thirty seconds his boss would have worked things out for himself.

  Craig thought that he had when the PPS offices flew past them, but a different answer was hammered home thirty seconds later as the Ombudsman’s office went the same way.

  “Why are we heading back to the squad-room?”

  Liam stared straight ahead and gave a long-suffering sigh before he responded. “I’m saving you from yourself.”

  Craig sat up sharply in the passenger seat, an irritated look on his face. “When I need you to save me from myself I’ll tell you!”

  The comment elicited a loud tut.

  “Ach now, you see that’s not even logical, is it? If you’d known you needed saving then you would’ve told me to go straight back to the ranch yourself, wouldn’t you.”

  The D.C.I. nodded firmly to himself; convinced that he was right.

  “Anyway, never mind about saving you, I’m saving Annette. Look, I’m with you on this. We definitely need to look into things, because there was a lot more to Pete turning up that night than meets the eye, but the last thing that lassie needs is you going in there shouting your big mouth off and putting your foot in things, prejudicing her case!”

  Given that Craig wasn’t known either for having a big mouth or putting his foot in anything, Liam had the decency to end the sentence with a laugh. Although his boss didn’t quite join in, he did, after a moment’s thought, give a desultory nod that said the D.C.I. was probably right.

  “I’m still going to see them, Liam, but OK, we need to check things out first. And in this mood I could have made things worse, couldn’t I?”

  “Would, not could. You know lawyers; they’re even more up their own asses than we are. Try telling them what to do and they’ll throw the book at her, and it won’t be one she’d like, like Fifty Shades of Grey.”

  That did make Craig laugh and by the time the two men reached the squad-room they still were, so it was with reluctance that Davy greeted them with, “I’ve more on the girl’s abduction for you. Do you w...want to take it in your room?”

  A minute later they were in Craig’s office with three hot drinks and some biscuits in front of them courtesy of Alice, who was feeling better disposed towards the world because her daughter had just given birth to her first child, a photograph of whom was whipped out to be admired immediately, something that made Craig wonder how he’d be behaving in a few weeks time.

  When the PA paused for breath he passed her a note asking her to set up a call with the governor of Mahon Prison around six, earning him a suspicious look from his deputy.

  “What was that?”

  Craig ignored him and waved the analyst on.

  “What do you have for us, Davy?”

  The computer expert woke up his smart-pad and turned it so that both detectives could see what he then recited from memory.

  “Bella Mary Westbury, daughter of Edgar and Nicola Westbury, née Kincaid-”

  Liam cut him off. “Kincaid? So-”

  Davy returned the favour. “Yep. The girl’s mother was Stuart Kincaid’s s...sister.”

  Craig frowned. “Was?”

  The analyst nodded glumly. “Nicola Kincaid killed herself in twenty-seventeen, chief. The file s...said she blamed herself for her daughter’s abduction because she’d left her in the garden to get her some juice, and when she came back, no more than a minute later she was adamant about that, the girl w...was gone.”

  Liam shook his head slowly. “Damn. Poor woman. How do you ever get past that? And it’s something that you’d do without thinking too. I know that I have with my two.”

  “That’s how killers w...win, isn’t it? They kill the whole family as well as their victim.”

  Craig shook his head briskly, pushing away the fury that he knew he’d feel if it was his child, and returning them to the point.

  “We don’t yet know that Bella Westbury is dead, but we do know that the chances of this being an opportunistic kidnapping have just dropped considerably. If the mother was correct, and I’m sure she was, that the girl had been left alone for less than a minute, then the likelihood is that someone had been watching her and just waiting for a chance to abduct.”

  He asked another question.

  “Were there any other children, Davy?”

  “Yes, a boy. He’s thirteen now and lives with his dad in Monaghan. They moved back to Ireland after the mother died.”

  “What was the family doing in Nice?”

  “The father, Edgar, was the manager of a luxury country hotel there. I checked it out online and it looks ace.”

  “Did t
he family live on site?”

  “In a house in the grounds, owned by the hotel. Around a mile from the main building.”

  Craig gave a weary sigh.

  “Damn... with all the hotel guests and staff there would have been hundreds of potential suspects for the abduction. Any CCTV covering the house?”

  The analyst pulled a face. “I’m still trying to find out. There definitely w...was inside the main hotel and in its immediate grounds. The police checked every room and facility and interviewed all the staff and guests there at the time, but no-one jumped out.”

  Craig turned to his deputy. “I need you to go back over the witness statements and the French investigation file, Liam. You know what to look for.”

  Any guest or staff member, male or female, with sex convictions or even suspicions of strange behaviour with children, actually, make that any convictions at all. Plus anyone who’d left the country after the girl’s disappearance in an uncomfortably hasty way.

  “Ash can do any cross-checks that you need.” He turned back to the younger man. “Did they search all their vehicles as well, Davy?”

  The analyst hesitated for a moment before shaking his head. “I...I’m sure they must have, but I don’t know for sure, chief, s...sorry. I’ll go back and check. I should have done it immediately.”

  Craig smiled. “Your head’s in Switzerland already.”

  Davy wasn’t as easy on himself. “Well, it shouldn’t be. I’ll chase that for you now.”

  He made to stand up but Craig waved him down again. “Let’s carry on for a minute. I’ll need you to check if the searches were extended to nearby airports and ports too.”

  “I know France has an Amber Alert system like here, but I’ll confirm exactly what they do.”

  “Good.” The detective frowned suddenly. “The sooner they implement an EU-wide alert system the better. Within the Schengen Zone her abductor could have moved the girl freely across twenty-six countries.”

  The geo-political diatribe was disturbed by a frown from his D.C.I.

  “How soon after the mum’s suicide did the Westburys leave France? I’d never move house if one of my kids disappeared, just in case they came back looking for me someday.”