The Property

by Catriona King

  Ryan gawped at her. “But that could ruin her career!”

  Annette smiled inwardly; Nicky would bite off more than she could chew if she tried to turn cops against cops. But she knew there was no point appealing to the PA’s sense of self-preservation right now, not while she had her dander up, so she decided to appeal to her maternal feelings instead, but not for Mary, for Craig.

  “Yes... you could tell the chief, and he probably would take your side.” Even as she said the words she wasn’t absolutely sure that he would; Craig had a stubborn streak. “But do you really want to put that burden on him now? When he’s got problems outside work?” Even if no-one knew quite what they were the signs were unmistakable. “Is it fair on him?”

  She saw the tight arms loosen slightly and a flicker of doubt run across the PA’s face, and pushed her advantage.

  “I don’t know what’s going on with him but he’s hardly eating, and those shadows under his eyes say that he’s not sleeping much either.”

  She was laying it on thick and she knew it, but short of speed-learning how to play a sad song on a violin it was all that she had. Ryan saw the plan and joined in.

  “He’s a good boss, Craig, and I’d hate to get blamed for starting a fight in my first week. I’ve really been looking forward to this transfer.”

  The arms unfolded slowly and Nicky retook her seat, casting a soulful glance towards Craig’s office.

  “I suppose…”

  Annette seized on the words. “You won’t regret it, Nicky, I promise. Ryan and I will sort Mary out.”

  She’d just had an idea and the sergeant was essential to its success, so she jumped to her feet before the PA could change her mind and nodded the sergeant to join her in the kitchen. As they walked away Nicky called after them.

  “But if it happens again…”

  Annette turned and smiled. “It won’t, I promise.”

  It had better not, or they would all feel the effect of Craig’s ire.

  Chapter Seven

  Belfast City Centre. 2.45 p.m.

  Kamran Barr was smoother than most of the businessmen in Belfast, but just averagely smooth for the ones that Craig had encountered in London during his years there. It wasn’t that the Belfast business community didn’t know how to dress, they read the same men’s magazines and watched the same slick box-sets as everyone else in the world, or that the local tailors weren’t just as skilled as Jermyn Street’s, because they were. It was rather that the lower level of male sartorial elegance in Northern Ireland was cultural, a fear of looking overdone or someone snidely labelling you “flash”. Within Irish manhood generally there still seemed to exist the macho attitude that all that ‘fussing with your appearance’ was something that women did, although Craig had noticed from the younger male members of his team that things were beginning to change.

  His own suits tended towards the edginess of London, but then he had lived in the Big Smoke for fifteen years, yet, as he glanced sideways at Liam’s unfashionably baggy but undoubtedly comfortable trousers and jacket he doubted that the rest of the province’s middle-aged men would be acquiring that edge anytime soon.

  Which brought him back to the man in front of them: Kamran, ‘Kam’, Barr. Forty-years-old, born in Belfast but with dual Irish-Pakistani nationality; a man whose family had made its fortune in the west. Craig scanned the businessman slowly, taking in his smooth brown skin, his sparkling white cuffs and his unreadable teak-coloured eyes, the perusal time afforded to him without any accusation of rudeness by the secretary pouring out three coffees and then carrying them towards them on a silver tray, a touch more quaint than ostentatious and suiting the elegant demeanour of their host.

  As the cups were passed around the PA excused herself and their host rose slowly from his seat, walking to the window of his twelfth-floor office to gaze down at the street below. The street in which sat the café where the detectives had waited and watched for Barr to arrive, tracking his passage from his tinted-windowed limousine to the building’s glass lift and further up.

  After a full minute of gazing out, the businessman finally spoke.

  “You watched me arrive from your surveillance point, Chief Superintendent.”

  The words emerged in a cut-glass accent, demonstrating the money that his parents had invested during his youth.

  So, Barr had seen them in the café when he’d arrived. The words made Craig smile, while Liam’s pale eyes widened in alarm. He preferred to be the unseen watcher and it disturbed him when his prey appeared to be ahead.

  “We did, although surveillance point is a little grand, don’t you think? It’s a greasy spoon.”

  The business magnate turned to face them, acknowledging Craig’s wit with a forced smile.

  “Not a British culinary approach that I’ve ever appreciated.”

  As he retook his seat the detective swore inwardly at the pinpoint size of his pupils, a product of the sunlight outside. It rendered his responses unreadable and Craig knew they would stay that way, as Barr positioned his chair to face the window. Accident or design? Either way it meant they would have to work harder to find other clues.

  “Now, Officers. How may I assist you?”

  Craig listened carefully to the tycoon’s words. They were too slow and precise, too careful, something that he’d noticed as soon as they’d been greeted onto the floor.

  It wasn’t his imagination or jumping to conclusions, rather that they’d searched the internet over lunch and found a video of their host speaking at a business event, to familiarise them with his norm. There Kamran Barr’s speech had been brisk and energetic, nothing like the cautious, every syllable chosen meticulously, utterances that they were hearing now. The businessman was terrified of being tripped up, or of giving something away inadvertently. Either way it told them that Barr was hiding something.

  Smiling and giving nothing away himself, Craig replied.

  “We’d like to ask you about a property that you sold recently.”

  “I buy and sell properties all the time.”

  Barr’s second mistake. An honest man would have admitted that he’d heard about the body being discovered on a building site the day before; after all, it was all over the press and television news. And even though the location had only been given as a ‘city centre building’, in such a small city if the Murder Squad suddenly comes asking about a property you’ve just sold, it wouldn’t take a genius to work out why.

  But Craig was happy to feign dumbness if that was the game that they were playing, and he nodded Liam to continue the interview so that he could watch the businessman’s face, certain that his deputy had spotted the same errors as him.

  “The property was The Howard Tower Hotel, Mister Barr. We believe that you acquired it in two-thousand-and-seven?”

  The property magnate rested slowly back in his chair, using its arms to ease himself into position and then maintaining a tight grip. The action made Craig smile to himself; it was the businessman’s third error. Please keep your hands just there, Mister Barr. They’ll tell us more than you can ever know.

  The man had just given them a ready-made polygraph, and already the paling of his knuckles said that Liam’s question had caused him stress.

  “Yes.”

  “Who did you buy it from?”

  “DoE.”

  Oh, goody, he was going mono-syllabic. Another clue.

  “When in two-thousand-and-seven?”

  “July.”

  “And you’ve just sold it?”

  “Yes.”

  Liam tutted loudly. It wasn’t that he expected the man to gabble out a confession, but this was like pulling teeth. After a quick glance at Craig, who already had most of what he needed, he decided to jump straight to the point.

  “Do you intend giving one-word answers to all my questions, Mister Barr?”

  This time all Liam got was a nod, so he handed back to Craig, who sat forward smiling slightly.

  “You realise that this
could be construed as obstruction, Mister Barr?”

  The knuckles became almost white.

  “I don’t see how.”

  The fact that Craig had achieved a four-word response made Liam give a sniff.

  “Because yesterday a body was found on that site. You are aware of that, aren’t you?”

  The pursing lips said that he was.

  “And therefore, because you owned the site for eleven years, it’s reasonable that we question you about the find.”

  Barr’s slim jaw tightened in response.

  “I would have thought than an innocent man, especially one who is lauded as a pillar of the community, would wish to assist a police investigation.”

  “I am assisting.”

  Craig made a noise of disgust. “You’re offering the minimum amount of information that you have to, short of telling us to bugger off, Mister Barr.”

  Liam rubbed his hands mentally; that “bugger off” promised entertainment.

  “And unless you’re willing to offer us more, right now, we’ll be moving this interview to a police station.”

  Barr’s large eyes widened.

  “More? I don’t know anything more. Ask the DoE, it must have happened while they were there.”

  “We already know that it didn’t.”

  It was almost true. The burial could have happened while the DoE still owned the site, it had been vacant before the handover so the woman could have been dumped in the cellar then, or...she could have been buried when The Barr Group had first acquired the site, before or just as their workers had been laying the floor.

  Logic and Barr’s demeanour was making Craig lean more towards the latter option, and his increasing certainty must have shown because the businessman seemed to realise suddenly that he was overplaying his hand. Kamran Barr had no desire to spend his evening in a cell, so he released his grip on his chair’s arms abruptly and forced his full lips into a smile.

  “What else would you like to know, Superintendent?”

  Sucking up was mistake number four, but Craig wasn’t going to tell the magnate that.

  “I’d like the exact dates for when work began to clear the site, who laid the reception floor and the names of the people you used as surveyors, agents, builders, etcetera. Are you willing to give us all of that?”

  Some of it they already knew and Davy was on the rest, but if Barr’s versions conflicted at all with what they found it would tell them he was a liar, and if he lied about factual details then why not about the murders as well?

  There was tense silence for a moment as the businessman’s options ran through his mind and across his face, the latter saying not whether he’d had a hand in their victim’s demise or hadn’t but that he was calculating the risks of answering anything right away.

  After a pause Barr spoke again, but only with obfuscation, about the need to check records, consult secretaries and speak to his company solicitors; the usual delaying guff. It was too much for Liam and enough for Craig to motion the man to stand and read him his rights, before they began the short trip to High Street Station where Kamran Barr could crease his expensive suit by sitting on his ass for a few hours, waiting for his brief to appear.

  ****

  Northern Ireland’s Emergency Call Centre. The Titanic Quarter.

  Aidan Hughes was going the auditory version of snow-blindness, whatever that was called. Snow-white-noised or snow-static-ed? If that was even a word. However you described it his admiration for the people who answered nine-nine-nine calls all day every day had gone through the roof. After only two hours of listening to taped playbacks he wanted to scream, so how they managed eight hour shifts at it he had no idea.

  The thing that had shocked him most was the sheer dross that he had heard. People calling an emergency phone line to report their tortoise missing, their pizza delivery being delayed, their husband going out on the booze with his mates and being an hour late home. How, or even more importantly, why the operators didn’t tell them all to sod off beat the hell out of him, but no, the tapes he was listening to now, amazingly retained for eleven years in a digital sound archive, showed the patience, tolerance and almost saintliness of the ordinary people who were asked every day to listen to extraordinary things.

  The D.C.I. pressed pause and pushed his old-fashioned earphones down around his neck, rubbing his ears vigorously for a moment, both to calm the itch from the heat and the ’phones’ leather and to symbolically erase the rubbish that he’d just heard. The elderly man at the next desk smiled as he did it and held up his coffee cup in suggestion. Aidan accepted gratefully, tugging out his earphone jack and following him into a small kitchen area at the back of the room.

  “How do you listen to those idiots all day?”

  The call monitor smiled and shrugged.

  “I suppose we just get used to it, and there are always the real cases that we get to help.”

  The man handed him a mug of coffee with a decal of a woman screaming on its side; perhaps an indication of how the callers and the listeners sometimes felt.

  “Maybe it’s a bit like your job? Lots of stupid and some bad people, but you get to help the victims.”

  The D.C.I. took a sip of the hot drink and then shook his head. “Unfortunately, in murder our victims are already dead when we get to them.”

  “Their families then. You get them answers.”

  There was always that.

  The man gestured back towards the desk where Aidan had been sitting.

  “You’re listening to archive footage, aren’t you?”

  He smiled. “I can’t tell you about it, sorry.”

  “Not to worry. We’d already guessed it was about the bones that were found yesterday.” He gazed past the detective wistfully. “I had my wedding reception at The Howard Tower Hotel.”

  “How many years have you been married then?”

  The grey-haired man glanced down at his unadorned left hand and then shook his head, quickly correcting the impression.

  “I’m not, I mean I was, but now I’m not. We divorced after five years.” Embarrassment made his tone suddenly flippant, “Footloose, that’s me”, and then it made his cheeks red.

  “Anyway, I’d better get back to work now, those emergencies won’t sort themselves.”

  Even the bluff D.C.I. could spot loneliness when it presented itself, and it made up his mind to ask his gym buddy out on a date.

  ****

  The C.C.U.

  Annette’s plan was simple, and she was hopeful that it would work quickly enough to prevent Craig ever becoming aware that there had been a fracas in his squad-room. After calming, or rather guilting Nicky into some small degree of tolerance, she had headed for the kitchen where Ash was still acting as a human barricade to prevent Mary returning to the floor to stir the pot. Mind you, had the analyst known that the duty would involve the D.C. hurling insults about his hair, clothes and overall manhood, then he might never have agreed to help.

  Annette’s winning smile when she arrived would have to suffice as gratitude until they were next in the pub, so Ash left her to it, never so grateful to return to work. Work which, as he passed Davy’s desk, was increased by requests for searches of passport and immigration registers, hospital orthopaedic and therapy appointments and local racquet clubs.

  Annette was painfully aware that Davy was still down two helpers, so her impetus was to get Mary sorted out ASAP. To that end she and Ryan were now in the kitchen, where the young constable had now backed herself into a corner as if she was under siege. Annette nodded the squad’s new sergeant to close the door and began.

  “OK, you two. We need to get this sorted out before the briefing, and preferably sooner. Davy needs our help with work.” She turned to the besieged constable. “Mary, I know Nicky can be difficult, and she isn’t always rational in who she decides to like or not. But... you really can’t call her out like that in front of everyone.”

  The D.C. opened her mouth to object, but
Annette shook her head.

  “She’s been with the chief for years and he won’t lose her. He can’t lose her at the moment especially, because he’s under a lot of stress. So, let’s just for a minute accept that Nicky’s staying put and she doesn’t like you.” The mouth opened again but Annette forged on. “Rightly or wrongly, let’s just accept those facts, and work from where we are.”

  She turned towards Ryan. “That’s where you come in, Ryan. I know this is a lot to ask as you’re new and Nicky’s being nice to you, but if you allow her to play you off against Mary, and she’ll try it, believe me, then ultimately we’ll all lose. The chief will eventually notice what’s happening and there’ll be an explosion, with both of you and Nicky caught in the fallout.”

  The sergeant could see her logic and he could also see the strain the attempt at diplomacy was putting on her.

  “So, you’d like me to stop Nicky dividing and conquering between Mary and me?”

  Annette nodded gratefully. “I really would. Once she sees that she can’t manage it she’ll get bored and move on to something else. So, will you do it?”

  He glanced at Mary, still in her corner, and smiled. “Sure. How?”

  “Just be supportive of Mary.” She turned back to the D.C. “And you of him, Mary. You’re both newcomers but you’ve been here for a few months now, so you could show Ryan where everything is, walk him through all the procedures and so on.”

  Mary chewed her lower lip in a way that said she was considering it, until Annette’s repeat of the request in a tighter voice said that it really wasn’t a choice. The young detective nodded reluctantly, and this time when she opened her mouth Annette allowed her to speak.

  “But she has been rough on me, because of my piercings.”

  “Yes, she has. But it is also regulations to remove them for health and safety, and I did warn you what she would do. You chose to ignore both me and Nicky and that’s why she involved the chief.”

  Mary didn’t give up. “The fact she doesn’t like piercings and tattoos had something to do with it as well. She’s old-fashioned and judgey.”