The Depths

by Catriona King

  “He didn’t show you the girl’s photograph again?”

  “Oh yes, yes he did that too, but I still had to say that I hadn’t seen the child because I hadn’t.” She smiled wistfully. “Perhaps he’ll come again someday. If he does then I’ll tell him that you called.”

  They hadn’t the heart to tell her that Stuart Kincaid would never return.

  They’d covered everything that they’d come to ask and it hadn’t been a wasted trip, but the detectives stayed a little while longer in the cosy cottage anyway, almost as much for their own sake as Bridget Evans’.

  Chapter Six

  The Police Intelligence Section. Malone Road, Belfast.

  Craig’s and Liam’s trip to Police Intelligence turned out to be a wasted one, something that they’d realised seconds after they passed the building’s front-line security checks and reached Ray Barrett’s office. The Director, not knowing that they were coming and the world of spying, covert observation and intelligence gathering ticking over nicely, had not unreasonably taken the afternoon off to watch his granddaughter play chess for her school.

  It had made Craig tut slightly, not from annoyance at Barrett but at the knowledge that he couldn’t defer any longer returning to the squad-room to sit behind his desk. It was something that he hated doing because the second his backside hit the chair his PA, be it the demure, ballroom dancing Alice or the bat-eared, no-nonsense Nicky who was only there occasionally at the moment, would swoop in with letters to be signed and reports to be perused, and he loathed paperwork of any sort.

  Unfortunately as you ascended the ladder in the police, as in most jobs, there was more and more of the stuff, which probably explained the spread of most senior officers’ asses and guts, and he preferred his as they were. He wanted to be out on the street where the action was, his dislike of being sedentary so strong that he’d recently turned down the lead in Serious and Organised Crime, an acting Assistant Chief Constable role, and become a member of Sean Flanagan’s Chief Superintendent Trinity for his sins.

  But Craig’s annoyance was nothing compared to that of Róisín Casey, who had been calling her lackey’s mobile constantly for the previous two hours and getting Arthur Norris’ answerphone every time. She expected the people who worked for or even with her to give twenty-four-seven availability, so the first few messages she’d left for him, asking what had happened with Hector McDonagh and the girl’s interview, which she still hadn’t heard amidst the crappy nineties’ pop that the God awful radio hosts in Tyrone had been blasting out most of the day, had ranged from impatient, through irritated, through furious, until finally now a sense of dread had set in.

  Arthur wasn’t brave enough to ignore her calls all afternoon, so that left limited possibilities. Either the idiot had dropped his phone down the toilet or lost the device somewhere and so had a genuine technical reason for not answering her calls; or he was dead, probably because his car had crashed on the way back to Belfast, in which case hopefully his phone had been totalled too erasing her messages; or the last and definitely worst option in her book, he’d encountered the local cops after they’d spoken and his phone was now in their clammy, oversized hands.

  She thanked her lucky stars that she’d had the wit to only call him from her pay-as-you-go mobile and untraceable work extension, and then laughed, chiding herself for being ridiculous. The police wouldn’t be interested enough in boring old Arthur to hold him for hours, even if the girl Reynolds had opened her over-painted mouth. Although... they might be on edge with all strangers; the discovery of a dead man just outside such a hick village couldn’t be an every day event.

  Whatever had happened she couldn’t bear not knowing, so she reached swiftly for her burn mobile and then suddenly stopped her handing mid-air, dropping it to her desk phone instead. Her office extension would be safer this time. Calls from the bank’s several hundred internal extensions were impossible to trackback because everything was routed through a switchboard in Belfast.

  It wasn’t Arthur that she was calling this time but the police enquiry number so she adopted her politest tone, altering it to tooth-achingly sweet when the call was transferred to Rownton Station and she heard it being answered by a man.

  “Good afternoon, Rownton Police. Sergeant O’Hare.”

  “Oh, good afternoon, Officer, I wonder if you could help me?”

  Mickey O’Hare twitched to attention, but only in small part because of his caller’s seductive voice. He was intrigued that not only wasn’t the woman’s accent local but it was so polite that she sounded like an Irish version of the Queen.

  “Yes, Madam. In what way?”

  Cue tremulous, anxious tone.

  “Well, my elderly uncle was visiting your area earlier and can’t seem to get in touch with him. I’m a little worried. He tends to get lost and become easily confused, bless him.”

  Bless him? Talk about overkill.

  Even if O’Hare hadn’t been on alert already that would have made him straighten up.

  “Name?”

  Róisín thought fast, failing to register that the policeman’s tone seemed less sympathetic than she’d have expected with a caring niece.

  “Arthur Norris.”

  Even though the sergeant had been expecting to hear the name he still gave a startled twitch. The woman was lying, not about looking for Norris but about her reason for the same. Whatever her motive really was, O’Hare’s spidey sense said that it wasn’t good.

  Mickey O’Hare knew that because he was a good copper, one that was only still a sergeant at forty-five because like many of his peers he had stayed at that rank to suit his way of life. Promotion to inspector would have taken him away from Rownton, the village too small to warrant more than a sergeant’s presence, and that would have taken away his comfortable, know everyone and their kids and grandkids personally, friendly with the locals and home at five on the dot way of life.

  But just because O’Hare hadn’t wanted rank and wasn’t au fait with every whizzy new investigation technique didn’t mean that he wasn’t very good at his job, and every police inch of him was tingling now.

  He asked a holding question while his brain raced ahead.

  “And your name, Madam?”

  There was no hesitation in Róisín’s reply of, “Jessica Thwaite,” but O’Hare took that as a sign of the woman’s preparedness to lie rather than of anything good.

  He was right. Jessica Thwaite was the alias that Róisín always employed when she lied, whatever her motive. Right now it was to obtain information about Arthur in any way that she could.

  O’Hare was steps ahead, deciding exactly how much she would get from him and how to avoid landing the hapless Norris in the shit when she did. He didn’t know Arthur Norris personally and from their brief acquaintance he’d thought the man was an eejit, but compared to this woman Norris was a minnow and as a general rule he preferred to focus his energy on the sharks of this world.

  So the sergeant did what all good public servants did when faced with any difficulty, he obfuscated; he’d done it so often in his career that he practically had a degree.

  “Norris you say... Norris...Norris...” He set the phone close to his custody ledger and rifled noisily through its pages before speaking again. “No, no, I can’t see that name here, Madam, but if he’s likely to have got lost then perhaps he’s ended up at one of the other local stations instead? I can have a ring around and call you back.”

  Damn.

  Róisín knew that Arthur had reached Rownton because they’d spoken after he’d arrived, so either he hadn’t come in contact with the police at all or this village plod wasn’t as stupid as she’d thought and he was calling her bluff.

  She thought fast and decided to play her story through.

  “Oh, that would be wonderful. Thank you, Officer. You have my name already, but my number is zero zero three five three one...” A completely fictitious number followed, which like all fictions gives away more than the storytel
ler thinks it has.

  When the call ended Mickey O’Hare tried the number immediately, and then made second call to Aidan, who was staring out the car window at the passing countryside thinking, while Ryan drove his precious BMW to Belfast from Armagh.

  “D.C.I. Hughes.”

  “Hello, sir, it’s Sergeant O’ Hare here. Can you talk? It concerns Arthur Norris, so you might want to move away from him first.”

  “Give me a minute.” Aidan covered the handset quickly. “Pull over. I need to take this.”

  His glance at the man in the back seat removed the need for Ryan’s looming question, and a moment later they were parked on the hard shoulder with their blue lights flashing, which had an unintentional but beneficial slowing effect on all the passing motorists who were driving too fast.

  Aidan clambered out of the car and walked several metres ahead before he spoke again.

  “OK, fire ahead.”

  “Aye, OK, so I’ve just had a call from a woman asking about Arthur Norris’ whereabouts. She said she was his niece and gave the name of Jessica Thwaite.”

  “You sound like you didn’t believe her.”

  “I didn’t. Something about her was wrong. She had an Irish accent that was so posh she sounded like royalty, and she said Norris tended to get lost and confused, which I saw no sign of at all, did you?”

  “Quiet but not confused.”

  “Right, so she was definitely trying to make him sound like some stray sheep that she was worried about, but I sensed something else. Something that made me worried for the man. Anyway, I made a bit of a show of checking for his name and then said that I hadn’t encountered him but would ask around the nearby nicks and call her back. But I’ve just tried the contact number she gave me and it’s fake, or at least it won’t connect for me anyway, so maybe your lads could check it and her name? It was a southern mobile.”

  “They’ll trace her call to you too if they can. Good work, Sergeant. Right, I obviously can’t speak with Norris in the car so if I give you a number to call now, could you ask for Davy Walsh and tell him what you’ve just told me?”

  “Surely. So I should give him her name and the number she gave me?”

  “And the exact time of her call to your station. All calls are routed through the police switchboard now so they should be able to locate where she phoned from. Hopefully we’ll find her with all that.”

  As Aidan ended the call and climbed back into the car, he found himself wondering whether Arthur Norris was someone more to be pitied than blamed.

  ****

  Belfast. 4.50p.m.

  As it happened, Craig was saved from returning to ‘burial by paperwork’ in his office by an instant message on his phone, an innovation introduced just weeks before by the Chief Constable to do away with the unnecessarily long phone calls it often took to inform someone of a simple fact such as lab results being ready or an arrest having been made. His message was more cryptic and informed him that he had a ‘delivery at High Street’ that he knew could only be his prisoner from Armagh.

  He signalled Liam to divert to the station, expecting to be shown one prisoner when he entered but instead finding Jack Harris bent over his custody desk muttering about, “Being dumped with two.”

  Craig greeted the disgruntled sergeant cheerfully. “Hello, Jack. I’m here to see my delivery.”

  When the sergeant lifted his eyes far too slowly from his registration book both detectives knew that he wasn’t amused.

  “I was told there’d only be one prisoner.”

  “There is. Ben Frampton from Mahon Prison.”

  “No, there isn’t, there are two! Some bloke called Arthur Norris has just been brought in by your lot as well, and it would have been polite if someone had let me know. I’ve rooms to clean and meals to sort out you know.”

  He sounded like a boarding house landlady; all that was missing was a lament about his ‘housewife’s hands’.

  But the detectives were genuinely confused about the second guest so Liam took a peek at the sergeant’s book.

  “Who’s the heck’s Arthur Norris?”

  Jack sniffed as he replied. “I’m damned if I know. Ask your boy Aidan, he brought him in from some place called Rownton.”

  The penny dropped on the others at once.

  “Hughesy’s found something for us, boss.”

  “Norris must be the man who paid the girl to lie. Aidan mentioned something about him when he called earlier.”

  Craig turned back to the custody sergeant. “What time did the prisoners arrive, Jack?”

  “About ten minutes ago. I’m just booking them in.”

  “Are Aidan and Ryan still here?”

  A jerked thumb indicated the staff-room, so they’d showed themselves through to the back where the other two detectives were finally getting to eat their sandwiches in peace. A peace that was shattered by Liam storming in.

  “Hello, hello, hello, what’s all this slacking then?”

  As Ryan went to retort Craig shook his head. “Ignore him, he’s just winding you up. Stick the kettle on, Liam. Mine’s a black coffee.”

  He stared at his D.S. curiously. “Who gave you the shiner, Ryan?”

  The answer came in an embarrassed mutter, “Rio Rey-” that was cut off by Liam’s guffaw.

  “A girl! You got a black eye from a girl?”

  “Yeh, well, she was a real wildcat!”

  Aidan’s quick snort of derision was a betrayal worthy of Brutus, but Craig decided to prevent what looked like it was about to be a noisy exchange by taking the seat opposite the D.C.I.

  “Right, Aidan. This Arthur Norris. He’s the man who paid the Reynolds girl to lie?”

  Aidan could only nod, his mouth now full of tuna and onion, so Ryan gave the answer.

  “Norris turned up at the local solicitor stroke newspaper editor’s office while we were there seeing him, chief, and we worked it out from there. I interviewed Norris and he wasn’t giving anything away, but he was definitely trying to conceal his mobile so it’s at the lab now and we decided to bring him in.”

  Aidan gulped down his mouthful of food and added, “Some woman called Rownton’s nick after we’d left, looking for Norris, but the sergeant there didn’t like the sound of her so we’re following up on that too. Davy’s working on everything now.”

  Craig took the coffee his deputy was holding out and nodded. “Good work, both of you. We’ll see what Davy has on all that at the briefing. What’s your general sense of things?”

  Aidan motioned Ryan to answer and took another bite of his doorstep sandwich.

  “I think Norris is a gofer or fixer of some sort, chief-”

  Aidan interrupted with a full mouth, making Craig wince and Liam feel hungry.

  “McDonagh said he’s a land agent, Guv. He knows Norris from negotiating the quarry purchase.”

  Craig raised an eyebrow at the links that were developing and waved his sergeant to pick things up.

  “Norris is low level, chief. I’m pretty sure someone ordered him to get the Reynolds girl to lie and now they want to make sure that he’s keeping quiet about it. It’ll either be the woman who phoned the station or someone she’s working for, and the way Norris was hiding his phone I think it might give us something good.”

  “Excellent. OK, you two keep on that, but let’s see what everyone else has before we plan our next steps. Right. Change of topic. Did Ben Frampton give you any trouble?”

  Aidan shook his shock of blond hair. “Good as gold, although the Governor looked like his nose was out of joint.”

  Liam guffawed. “That’ll be ’cos he was ordered to send Frampton up. Doesn’t like being told what to do, like the rest of us.”

  Craig rose and turned for the door. “Right, we’ll leave you to finish your food in peace and see you back at the office. Liam, bring your drink and let’s go see what Mister Frampton has to say.”

  On first encounter Ben Frampton didn’t appear to want to say anything except,
“Bastard cops!” and “I missed my five-a-side match today because of you!”

  Without meaning to the burglar had given Craig an idea.

  “Put our guest back in his cell, please, Liam. I need to make a call.”

  He headed out the station’s rear exit to the car park, and ten minutes and another fractious conversation with George Royston later the prison governor had agreed to send through Frampton’s activity schedule by the next morning, and Craig had grovelled to Jack and persuaded him to keep at least one of his prisoners overnight.

  The length of his other prisoner’s stopover would depend on what Arthur Norris had to say, but finding that out would have to wait until after the briefing; so Craig gathered his troops, told the custody sergeant that Aidan and Ryan would return around eight o’clock, and cheekily requested that he should have the kettle on the boil.

  ****

  The Forensic Department.5.20 p.m.

  Lead crime scene investigator Grace Adeyemi was working alone on the third floor of the pathology building but she wasn’t doing so in silence; the background musak of beeping chemical analysers and whirring centrifuges was counterpointed by the constant electrical hum and throb of the sprawling lab’s neon lights and its sleeping but never shut down PCs.

  The cacophony always got on the CSI’s nerves, so as soon as the last person waved her good-night and pulled the department’s heavy glass door closed behind them, Grace added a soundtrack of her own; a mix-tape of the gospel music that she sang at church every Sunday interspersed with a selection of Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin tracks that she was trying to learn for her occasional singing gigs, the next of which was the following night at The James Bar in Pilot Street, a place of drink and therefore sin, yes, but as long as she didn’t drink alcohol she could manage to reconcile herself with that. After all, she reasoned, who had given her a love of all kinds of music but God?