The Property

by Catriona King

“However, the analysis also shows a considerable period spent in Ireland, perhaps here, perhaps down south, so my guess is that this young woman was brought up both here and in the west of North America, the local component being the more recent one.”

  Craig was about to ask for dates but then realised that such accuracy would be impossible. Still, the fact that the girl had moved to Ireland from elsewhere meant they should get an immigration hit.

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea of the split in terms of years, John?”

  The pathologist sank his now shoeless feet into his carpet and gave a nod.

  “Actually, I do. Her US life ended well before puberty. I can tell because of the bone that was laid down after her growth plates began to fuse, so I’d say given her likely age at death of between sixteen and twenty, that she’d been living in Ireland for at least eight to ten years. Perhaps more than that.”

  Craig could feel a passport search coming on, although it would be a whole lot easier if they had a face to match.

  “That’s great. Any chance we could have a face soon? It would make the immigration checks easier.”

  “I hadn’t instructed the artist to start yet, but I will now. I got something more on the bones from the forensic anthropologist as well.”

  “Fire ahead.”

  “OK, well, she believes that our victim played some sort of racquet sport and to a pretty high level too. There are signs of enhanced musculature on the right radius, indicative of repetitive and energetic use, and also on the right side of the ribcage as well. Also, the ribcage was more developed overall than you’d have expected from her size, which goes with increased lung capacity and aerobic exercise. It means she may have been right-handed as well, but not definitely; some people play sports with both. Also, there was a slight curvature in her spine that’s sometimes found in teenagers and we think she would have had therapy for correction.”

  “Brilliant. You’ll get all of that over to Davy in a search-useful way?”

  It was a gentle reminder not to bury the analyst in medical terminology, and made the pathologist smile.

  “I already passed it to Annette and she understood everything.”

  “Great.”

  Craig decided to update the medic on something as well.

  “Des and the ASU commander think they’ve found something on radar at the site, so you could have more bones to work with soon.”

  “OK, good. I’ll-”

  Craig stopped him with another question.

  “DNA. Do we know if the women were definitely mother-”

  “Yes. The mitochondrial DNA confirmed it. We’re looking at a mother and daughter here, mother definitely strangled, and possibly both. We’ll know when we find the girl’s hyoid. We should be able to get something on their ethnicity soon, although now that we know the girl was raised in…”

  His voice tailed off as he pictured their victim as a carefree child and Craig took it as a good time to go.

  “OK, thanks for the update, John. Get that nationality info over to Davy, please, and I’ll see you at the briefing if you’re free. Bye.”

  As he cut the call he saw Liam looking thoughtful.

  “Something on your mind?”

  The D.C.I. made a face. “I’m just trying to remember a time when a mother and daughter were killed together”

  “Who says it was together? If they were placed in the floor as bones then they could have died ten years apart.”

  Liam snorted his disagreement. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? The mother’s strangled and someone holds onto her bones for years until they kill her daughter? How likely is that?”

  Craig smiled. “Or vice versa, and not likely at all, but I want you to give your reasons for believing that they were killed together, and not just jump to the end. I agree it’s extremely unlikely, but say why.”

  Liam shot him a sceptical look but went along with the suggestion.

  “OK, first, what are the odds of two family members ending up buried in a floor unless there’s been foul play?”

  “Tiny, I agree.”

  “Second, the odds of them being buried in the same floor?”

  “I agree again.”

  “Third, the hyoid fracture proves mum was murdered, so why would we believe they waited God knows how many years for the daughter to die of natural causes before hiding them?”

  “Good point.”

  Liam was surprised to find that he was enjoying the step-by-step breakdown and made up his mind to employ the technique with his kids.

  “OK. Last one. If we manage to stretch our brains to believe that they died years apart, why did they wait to bury the bones together? It was hardly for company, was it?”

  Craig decided to play Devil’s advocate.

  “We can’t rule that out entirely. In China some people believe that men and women should be married and buried with a partner to stop them getting lonely in the next life, and in the west people sometimes have their ashes mingled with their loved one’s before they get spread.”

  Liam greeted the words with the derision that he thought they deserved.

  “Ashes are a bit different from bones, and I’m betting the Chinese don’t choose a hotel floor for their memorials!”

  Craig chuckled at his bluntness. “Fair enough. Anyway, to get back to it, mothers and daughters being murdered... The only occasion I can think of was during a family annihilation in London, but then the husband killed himself as well after he’d wiped out his family. Although, now I think of it, he wasn’t buried with them. The extended family wouldn’t have it.”

  Liam shook his head, recalling another case. “There was a tiger kidnapping in Fermanagh in the eighties. A manager was dragged back to his bank by some thugs one night, to get them cash from the vault, while his wife and kids were held by their mates at home. He decided to play the hero and they killed the whole family.” Sadness filled the D.C.I.’s eyes. “Awful mess. The youngest was only six.”

  A tiger kidnapping or tiger robbery involves two separate crimes. The first crime usually involves an abduction of a person or thing that someone values highly, but instead of demanding ransom money the captors demand that a second crime, such as robbery, is committed on their behalf.

  “Did they catch them?”

  “Eventually, but they got their life sentences commuted in ninety-eight under the Good Friday Agreement, because they claimed to be paramilitaries doing it to raise funds.” His hands became fists. “I saw one of the bastards in the city centre last week. He’s got kids of his own now.”

  After a moment’s pause to consider the injustice, Craig picked things up again.

  “So, it’s rare for a parent and child to be killed together.”

  “Rarer still for no-one to report them gone, boss. Unless there’s no living family left.”

  Craig was less charitable. “Or their family was involved.”He rose to his feet suddenly. “Right, we need to get on. Who do you fancy doing first, Barr or Kelly?”

  Liam headed for the door, grinning. “Let old Rockefeller stew for a while. I want to see what our hard hat’s got to say.”

  ****

  The Building Site. Howard Street.

  Des had been as curious as Craig about what might be lying beneath the floor of The HTH, so when they’d got the go-ahead for excavation he’d decided not to delegate the task of gathering whatever findings presented, despite the fact that he had plenty of things to be getting on with at the lab, something which Grace seemed intent on reminding him about.

  When her name appeared on his mobile for the third time in an hour the Head of Forensics decided that it was time for him to start acting like a boss. He’d seen Craig do it, and Liam too at times, and it seemed to consist mainly of hard stares, terse tones and stern words, tactics which while he’d hadn’t employed them often had on occasion proved effective with his kids.

  Reminding himself that he was the lead forensic scientist in the country, so he should be the one
who told people what to do, he answered the phone-call with, “Grace, I don’t want you to call me again unless it’s an emergency, and meanwhile I want you to assist Doctor Winter on the analysis of the two victims’ DNA.”

  The CSI was stunned into silence, partly because that was exactly what she’d just called him about. The first part of the DNA analysis had been completed, confirming that their victims were mother and daughter, but Des was needed to finish the rest. She’d seen advanced DNA analysis performed of course, and had attended classes on it, but she was mainly a scene-of-the-crime, field CSI so she’d never actually completed a full analysis on her own.

  When she said as much Des was uncharacteristically unsympathetic.

  “You’ll never learn unless you practice. You’ve had all the training, so use a small sample of tissue, not all of it mind you, just a tiny portion, and do the analysis yourself. If you get in trouble ask one of the others for help, but don’t call me again this evening unless the building’s burning down. I’m very busy here.”

  He hung up smiling. Because he was chuffed at his new found leadership ability, yes; it turned out there was nothing much to it after all, just a complete absence of humour or kind words and a no-nonsense tone. But he was also smiling because he knew that Grace’s pride in her seniority would mean she would rather stay there all night than ask one of her subordinates for help. No matter how long it took her to complete the task he was confident that she would get a result, and learn something in the process as well.

  Pleased at his newfound assertiveness the forensic lead turned back to the collection of diggers and cutters that Theo Sheridan had brought along, particularly admiring one state-of-the-art machine that could slice through solid concrete generating only a tiny amount of dust. He donned a filter mask anyway, and with his goggles and hard hat on the scientist advanced to the edge of the area that they’d scoped out, watching excitedly as the first one metre by one metre cube of material was brought up out of the ground.

  “That’s the one with the skull in it?”

  Sheridan shook his head.

  “No, that one’s closer to the centre and we’re working from the edges in. This block has something else in it though.” He pointed to the radar printout, and tapped on an area marked A1. Des peered through his goggles at what looked like a femur, and then glanced back at the cube.

  “OK, I’ll need to sample the material to check its composition. I’ve got my kit in the car.”

  Five minutes later they knew they were dealing with bog standard concrete, a simple mixture created from sand, gravel, water and cement. It would be easy enough to dissolve with phosphoric acid in a vat back at the lab, although they’d have to be careful of the bones inside; but there was no point doing it piecemeal, they would be better gathering a large enough quantity to make running the expensive process worth the cost.

  To that end Des found Andy and then both of them found a wall to lean against and spectate, their fascination with the grinding, slicing, banging equipment making both men reminisce about the toy lorries and Meccano sets that they had played with as boys.

  Chapter Eight

  High Street Station.

  Dean Kelly blinked hard; he’d forgotten to bring his glasses and the neon lighting in the interview room was making his eyes water, although he thought that complaining to the two cops he’d met earlier about his hypersensitivity probably wasn’t a good idea. The two plain clothes ’tecs hadn’t looked friendly when they’d stuck their heads around his cell door, especially not the giant one. He looked like a lot of the lads that he’d gone to school with; big, surly, and would rather be watching TV or kicking a football than sitting learning stuff in class.

  He’d been a lot like that himself, and probably because of that familiarity the giant didn’t scare him, no matter how hard he scowled. It wasn’t that he thought his bark was likely to be worse than his bite, because lads like him were noisy and handy with their fists and he would bet that those ham shanks at the ends of his arms could pack a mean punch, but rather that Finn Mac Cool types were usually uncomplicated, and always telegraphed their intentions. They’d look at you like they were going to thump you and then they did. Simple.

  But the slimmer, sleeker, dark one who’d been with him, now he was the one that he was frightened of. There was everything going on behind his eyes: brains, calculation and turmoil, with flashes of violence shooting through. He was the sort of man who would always win because he could be five moves ahead of you in a chess game, but if it suited him better would be capable of saying “Fuck it” and up-ending the board.

  Dean Kelly was a student of human nature and he’d just summed up Liam and Craig exactly, the foreman’s ability to assess people honed during his years at the university of life. So while Liam stood in the viewing room champing at the bit to get in and harass Kelly, just as the foreman had predicted, Craig was staring through the glass so hard that he could have bored a hole in it, carefully working out his play.

  As it happened that play involved sending Jack Harris in to ask a question first, so the detectives watched as the uniformed sergeant appeared on the other side of the glass and said, “Are you going to speak without a solicitor, Mister Kelly?”

  Craig’s full lips twisted as the answer that he’d expected came.

  “No.”

  Jack made the follow-up offer that he always made.

  “If you have a number I can phone them for you. Otherwise I can call the duty brief.”

  Kelly gazed up at him, his green eyes shielded with a heavily calloused hand, and Craig could see the man doing his sums. It was almost five o’clock, so his regular solicitor, if he had one, would either be busy with booked appointments or wending his way home in traffic, which meant that he was unlikely to get to High Street before they had to leave for the briefing or, as Kelly might have believed, clocked-off for the day, probably thinking that cops worked nine-to-five. If only. The solicitor was also unlikely to attend for longer than the ten minutes it took him to request bail and spring his client, all of which would suit Kelly fine.

  Whereas, an on-call brief would probably get there in fifteen minutes and they would have a full interview carried out before they had to get back to the C.C.U.

  Aware as he was of Liam’s growing urge to bash heads it actually suited Craig if Dean Kelly called his own brief. They had caught the foreman in omissions, having volunteered nothing either about working on the site twice, in oh-seven and now, or filling in the cellar eleven years before. But in order to find out whether Kelly was involved in their murders, something the foreman was unlikely to just answer yes to, or if he had been up to something else, he needed, no, he wanted a little more background information before he grilled the man, and he was more likely to have that tomorrow morning than within the next hour.

  So the sleeker, darker detective crossed his fingers that Dean Kelly preferred his usual solicitor, while his bigger brasher companion stood muttering agitatedly by his side.

  “I wish he’d hurry up and answer.”

  “He’s going to ask for his own brief.”

  Liam swung to face him. “Why are you saying that? You can’t know that.”

  At that exact moment Kelly confirmed Craig’s thoughts, and they watched as Jack led him out of the room and back to his cell before going to make the call.

  Liam’s next question, “How did you know he’d want his own solicitor?” fell on deaf ears, as Craig was already heading for the exit on his way back to the car.

  “Where are you going? What about Barr?”

  “He can wait” drifted back to the D.C.I., so he followed, grumbling even more noisily than before.

  “What was the point of us just standing there watching Kelly for ten minutes?”

  Craig shrugged. “I wanted to see what he did.” He took out his phone. “And now I want to make a call, so stop moaning.”

  There was no diminution of Liam’s noise until Craig’s call was answered.

  �
�Andy. Good. Where are you?”

  “Just leaving the building site.”

  Craig was surprised. “They’ve finished already?”

  “Just the first layer down, but they’re losing the light and the site’s not flood-lit, so they’re restarting at dawn.”

  Craig tutted. He worked all night when necessary so why couldn’t everyone else? When he’d decided it wasn’t Andy’s fault he got to the point of his phone-call.

  “The files that you and Kyle were checking. Where did you get to?”

  “We narrowed it to two worth exploring in a square mile radius of the site.”

  “Run me through them.”

  The D.C.I. furrowed his brow, straining to remember the cases without the papers in front of him, and surprised himself by managing the detail of each one. He was on the three a.m. noise call when Craig called a halt.

  “It was just a call-out for noise?”

  “And lights, yes. The uniforms checked but found nothing.”

  “Reported by a neighbour?”

  “Yes. A woman called Jessica Chambers.”

  There was silence for a moment while Craig considered. Dean Kelly was waiting for his solicitor, who would apply for bail, and if Kamran Barr had any sense he would do the same. That suited him fine; if the men were on bail it wouldn’t eat into their PACE questioning time, and they could lift them both again for interview at nine a.m.

  The Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) is a legislative framework for the powers of police officers to combat crime, and provides codes of practice for the exercise of those powers, including limitations on the time available to interview suspects without charging them twenty-four hours, unless legally extended.

  “Hold on a moment, Andy.”

  Craig covered the receiver and turned to his deputy.

  “Liam, call Annette and get her to circulate Kelly’s and Barr’s descriptions to the ports and airports, including the private ones. They’ll get sprung by their solicitors in the next couple of hours, so if either of them try to skip the country before we re-interview them tomorrow I want security ready to pick them up.”