The Property

by Catriona King

  John was still on the chemicals.

  “A strong corrosive can strip flesh off bones within days.”

  Craig nodded thoughtfully. “Which means these women could have died as long ago as two-thousand-and-five, when the dental implant was invented.”

  “Or as little as days before they were buried in the floor.”

  Liam shrugged. “OK, but all that will do is alter the date of death by a year or two, not the fact that someone murdered them.”

  Craig shook his head. “We haven’t proved that definitively yet, Liam.”

  The D.C.I. gave his boss a sceptical look. “Ach, get away with you! No-one buries someone in the floor of a building unless there’s been foul play, and those bones didn’t bury themselves!”

  Craig stuck to his guns. “I agree that it’s a safe bet and I’m sure that they were murdered too, but we need to prove it step by step, not jump to conclusions. The press will do enough of that.”

  As he said it he groaned, realising that the joy of the fourth estate lay ahead. He postponed his rant about the media until later and made a rewind motion with his hand.

  “Let’s go back a bit. Two women, just their bones, are buried in the floor of a building. The cellar below was filled in sometime after the building was vacated in February two-thousand-and-six-”

  Liam shook his head. “Definitely in oh-seven.”

  “Because?”

  “You heard Hardy. There was a caretaker, Tanner, and you can bet he did a final check the day they handed over the keys to the Howard Tower crowd, including the cellar. He’d have had to, just in case they’d left any official documents behind.”

  Craig wasn’t so sure. “I’m glad you’re so sure, but we need to check all of that out. OK, sometime before the hotel opened in October oh-seven the cellar was filled in and a new floor was laid-”

  Liam interrupted again. “Or, that floor was just the top of the already filled in cellar.”

  Craig conceded the point.

  “And depending upon that, we either have one or perhaps two occasions when there would have been wet concrete or whatever substance the women’s bones were set in.” Just then something occurred to him. “John, would bones sink or float in a viscous substance?”

  The reply was pure fact.

  “That depends on the viscosity of the substance and the weight of the bone. Larger bones are heavier, denser bones are heavier and so forth.”His expression brightened, saying that something was beginning to make sense to him. “So… lighter bones, such as a small skull containing a lot of air spaces, might have floated to the top. That could explain why we found it so early; the top was where the rubble at the dump came from as well and where we found the hyoid and some other small bones.” He frowned. “Although...her femur was found with the skull as well, which is surprising; long bones are heavier so they should sink, but I suppose because she was so small her femur was still fairly light.”

  He saw Craig about to interrupt and hurried on. “That should mean that the rest of the long bones and others like the pelvis sank further down.” He turned to his scientific partner. “We need to do some experiments, don’t we?”

  Des nodded eagerly. “We need to identify the chemical composition of the materials in the cellar and floor first, so we can do an exact mock-up. Then we’ll need to make 3D models of the skeletons in resin and adjust each one for possible weight.”

  Liam had been following avidly. “Then you can show which bones would have sunk and which would have floated, and that might tell you what might still be at the dump.”

  Des nodded. “Meanwhile we’ll be identifying where the rest of the real bones are lying in the floor or cellar and digging them up.”

  Liam shook his head. “I won’t be digging anything.” He held up a giant hand. “These babies are made for finer things.”

  Des retorted immediately. “Yeh, like mucking out the pigs.”

  Liam had been raised on a farm.

  Before war broke out Craig intervened.

  “Before we get to that, this could tell us whether there was only one period of wet concrete.”

  Liam frowned. “How?”

  “Because if the bones had been dumped in wet concrete above an already filled in cellar then they couldn’t have travelled any lower than the cellar roof or trap-door opening. They would all have stayed on the surface because the concrete filling the cellar below would have already set. But if we find anything embedded in the cellar’s filling then we’ll know that the period in which the cellar was filled was when the bones went in as well.”

  John smiled slowly. “But we already know that it must have been, because otherwise all of the bones would have been left on the surface and we’d already have found them on the building site or dump.”

  Craig shook his head. “No, we don’t know that. I agree it’s unlikely, but there could still be more bones scattered at the site, at the dump, or embedded in the debris that Grace has downstairs. We can’t assume anything yet.”

  He turned to the forensic scientist. “Des, could you locate the bones in the ground using ultrasound or ground-penetrating radar? To give us an idea where they might be lying?”

  To his dismay the scientist shook his head.

  “I don’t have the equipment, sorry. Your best bet is either some of your guys, whoever normally hunts for buried bodies, or the archaeology department at Queen’s. They might have geophysics equipment that will help. They use it to detect old building foundations under the ground.”

  He gazed at Craig curiously. “What’s your plan? Locate the bones inside the ground in some sort of 3D grid system, and then get the diggers to bring each of them up with the stone still around them, so that they’re not damaged?”

  To be honest Craig’s thoughts hadn’t progressed that far, but it sounded like an excellent plan.

  “Would that work? If you were given a block of stone could you extricate the bones?”

  Des nodded decisively. “I could, given time.”

  Liam adopted a warning tone. “We’d need them intact as evidence.”

  “I know that!” Des pointed to himself. “Me forensic scientist. Get it?”

  While Liam made a rude gesture, Craig summed up.

  “OK, so we have two women, one strangled and the other probably as well, but yet to be proven, their bones buried together in either the filled-in cellar of the Department of Energy building or the new floor of The Howard Tower Hotel, but I favour the former. The plan is for Des and John to identify the filling material used and do a mock-up, and while you get on with simulating the bones’ likely path through that, assuming that they were just tipped in, we get the court orders to survey and excavate the actual site.”

  John added. “And meanwhile I’ll continue with the analysis and reconstructing the skull we already have.” Just then he remembered something. “Did Davy find any missing persons who matched our younger victim, Marc?”

  Craig shook his head. “Not over the past eighteen years, sorry. I’ll get him to look again for the other woman once you’ve estimated an age for her. There were some women over thirty unaccounted for. But we might have to extend the search period further back. We still can’t assume the women died together.”

  He stood up to leave and then remembered something, sitting down again and immediately turning to John.

  “Almost?”

  The pathologist gazed at him, puzzled. “Sorry, what?”

  “You said earlier that the second woman was slightly larger, but that was almost all that you could say about her so far. So, what else is there?”

  John’s instantly averted gaze wasn’t enough to put him off.

  “What else did you find?”

  The pathologist sighed. “You know I don’t like to give you things until I’m certain.”

  “I promise not to hold you to it.”

  “You will, you know you will.” The medic shook his head. “It’s not that I’m being difficult, Marc, but until I’m o
ne hundred percent-”

  Liam couldn’t stand having to coax people, so he cut to the chase.

  “What percentage are you sure of?”

  John’s eyes widened. “It doesn’t work like that! I’m a scientist-”

  The D.C.I. jerked a thumb at Craig. “Aye, and he’s a cop who won’t even admit bones don’t bury themselves in the floor until he’s one hundred percent, so just give us your best shot, Doc.”

  The blunt logic made the pathologist laugh, so with the caveat that if it turned out to be wrong they couldn’t blame him, he answered.

  “What I meant by almost, was that I’m almost certain, but I want to re-run the tests one more time just to be sure… that… the younger woman was the older one’s child.”

  Craig’s jaw dropped in shock. The incidence of joint parent and child killings other than in arson, terrorist attack or family annihilation was tiny, and he’d personally only encountered the situation once in his career.

  Liam was equally surprised.

  “Mother and daughter! What sort of nutcase are we dealing with here?”

  Craig shook his head. “The clue was in the burial site. Anyone who shows that level of disrespect for someone’s remains is a special sort of cold. But a mother and daughter…” He shook his head. “I’ve only heard of those in terrorist attacks, fires or family…” His voice tailed off wearily and when he spoke again it was with a plea.

  “Tell me they couldn’t have been burnt or blown up, John.”

  “Until I see all the bones I’ll have to reserve judgement, but I’m leaning heavily towards no. There’s none of the fracturing or fragmentation of the bone that you see in explosions, and there’s none of the charring that you see in severe fires. But either way, where did their flesh go afterwards? Someone removed that cleanly.”

  “Family annihilation then?”

  “You already know my answer to that, Marc. Until we know who these women were in life we can’t rule it out.”

  Craig nodded and rose to his feet again. “Don’t worry. If you turn out to be wrong on the victims’ relationship this time I’ll be very happy. Just let me know once you’ve re-run the tests, and as soon as you get an idea of the older woman’s age tell Davy, please.”

  “Will do.”

  The detectives turned towards the door.

  “Liam and I are off to the building site. Keep us up to date.” He was halfway to the car-park when he remembered something else and had to go back. “I forgot, we’re briefing at six if either of you can make it. No problem if you can’t.”

  Then the policemen were gone, off to make more phone-calls and take another meeting before they finally managed to snatch lunch.

  Chapter Six

  Waring Street, The Cathedral Quarter, Belfast. 2.30 p.m.

  After a quick trip to the building site, which turned out to be deserted apart from a bored looking security-guard watching football replays on his phone, the detectives went for a late lunch, over which Craig decided to delegate obtaining the court orders to Annette, put Ash onto the radar issue, and asked Nicky to get Dean Kelly to High Street for a formal interview later that afternoon, as a punishment for his rudeness at not meeting them at the site.

  He could have interviewed Kelly at his building firm’s offices, but he wanted the man uncomfortable. The change in approach had been prompted not so much by Kelly’s bad manners, something that they were all too used to unfortunately, not everyone loving the police, but by Davy calling to inform them that not only was the construction firm that Dean Kelly worked for doing the current building project on the site, but they had also led the work back in oh-seven when the original Howard Tower Hotel had been built, something that the foreman had conveniently omitted to tell them when they’d first met. But then, as Liam had pointed out, Kelly was hardly about to look at the girl’s bones and say, “Oh, yes, I meant to tell you... I was working here when those were dumped.”

  Craig was just finishing his sandwich when Liam pointed through the glass window of the city centre café where they were eating at a man climbing out of a black, tinted-windowed limousine.

  “What is it with rich people always having tinted windows?”

  Craig shrugged. “They think fewer people will recognise and hassle them, I suppose.”

  The D.C.I. gave a sceptical snort, gesturing at the man again. “Would you recognise Kamran Barr? I wouldn’t know who he was if he jumped up and bit me in the face!”

  The expression made Craig smile. He’d heard it many times before, especially from family on his Belfast father’s side, so he understood that it implied a complete lack of recognition of someone; but he had often wondered what an overseas visitor would make of the words. Meet the Irish, a people who greet each other with a bite on the nose!

  He conceded his deputy’s point.

  “I agree with you there. I’d never heard of Kamran Barr before this week, never mind seen a picture of him, but perhaps that’s the whole point. Darkened windows stop people from photographing you, and anonymity probably has a value in the business world.”

  “Aye, well, Barr had just better hope that he didn’t kill those women. Having his face plastered all over The Chronicle would put a hell of a crimp in his Greta Garbo act!”

  The D.C.I. had risen to his feet as he’d said the words, but Craig nodded him to sit again, leaning in and dropping his voice.

  “I want this meeting handled diplomatically, Liam.”

  “Why? Because Barr’s rich?”

  Craig gave a loud tut. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. You know I don’t give a sod about things like that.”

  Liam had the grace to look sheepish. “Aye, fair enough. I was out of order there. But why do we have to handle him diplomatically?”

  Craig sat back in his chair and began reciting a list.

  “First of all, that should be the norm. But... we also have no proof that Barr did anything, we have no names for the victims yet, Barr’s got dual nationality even though he resides here, so a foreign embassy might get involved and that could impede the investigation… need I go on?”

  The D.C.I. gave a grudging nod. “Ach, all right then. So how do you want to play it?”

  Craig motioned to the waiter for the bill before he answered.

  “As if he’s one recent past owner of a property where we found human remains and we’ve already interviewed the other, the civil service. And as if he’s a concerned citizen that we’re assuming will wish to do his civic duty and assist the police.”

  “And while you’re buttering him up I’m watching him like a hawk?”

  “Exactly. But be subtle about it, please. I don’t want any of your gimlet stares making him run for his solicitor, or worse, skip the country. Right now, we’re just information gathering. Understand?”

  Liam stood up again, this time with a sycophantic grin plastered on his face. “Yes, Mister Barr, no, Mister Barr, three bags full, Mister Barr. Will that do you?”

  Craig rolled his eyes. “Do I have a choice?”

  ****

  The C.C.U. 2.30 p.m.

  Nicky was just hunkering down to place the cake box that she’d nipped out thirty minutes earlier to collect beneath her desk, being careful not to smudge the ‘Happy Birthday Jonathan’ iced on the confection’s top, when she became aware of someone approaching. On her return to the vertical she saw that it was a man, a slim and swarthy one, wearing a decent suit and a pleasant smile, which were two definite pluses in her book. The PA went straight into hostess mode and moved from behind her desk to greet him. Meanwhile at her desk, Mary, although still suffering from her navel exploit, went on high alert.

  The stranger was a detective, she could spot one of her own a mile away, and not from a big city, judging by the cut of his suit. Forty something, the man’s amiable and relaxed demeanour said that he was either a sergeant or an inspector; she’d noticed that ranks higher than that tended to wear a perpetually stressed-out look, a sort of dark-grey wallpaper for the
face, even those from the chilled-out star-signs of Pisces, Cancer and Virgo. Liam, who was never stressed about anything, didn’t, but then he was an aberrant Leo who probably had Libra as his rising sign calming him down. If Liam had heard the assessment he would have called it New Age drivel and his boot would probably have risen to the constable’s ass.

  There was also something familiar to Mary about the stranger, and everything together led her to conclude that she must have met him somewhere before, which she had of course, nine months earlier when she was working in the Traffic Division and he had asked her for a vehicle search. But like most self-absorbed people, including one who for the previous twenty-four hours had literally been staring at her own navel, unless they were getting something from someone that person needed to be in their face every day before they paid any heed.

  The D.C. was actually looking at Detective Sergeant Ryan Hendron, the newest member of Craig’s team who was joining them from Strangford in County Down, aka ‘the sticks’, a not always but often uncomplimentary term for the countryside, applied by people from Belfast to anywhere outside a perimeter of ten miles, usually to underline their own supposed city sophistication, just in case it wasn’t obvious. The London equivalent was ‘anywhere outside the M25’.

  Mary watched as Nicky gathered all of the information she’d just strained her brain to work out by asking a single question.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man smiled. “You can, surely. I’m D.S. Ryan Hendron. I’m joining the squad today, from Strangford.”

  The elaboration was unnecessary as the PA remembered the sergeant from working with them on the Rowan Drake investigation before Christmas, plus she’d had his file on her desk for weeks and knew everything about the new recruit, from his birthday and family background to his hobby of deep sea diving, it occurring to her that as Craig was an avid sailor maybe they could share the same boat.

  Nicky believed that being forearmed and forewarned was an integral part of her job, but she’d also liked the sergeant when she’d met him in December so she was interested in him. And now that she met him again the positive opinion solidified in her mind, so she graced him with what Hendron would come to learn was a rare unsarcastic smile.