The Property

by Catriona King

  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll get past them?”

  “I trust Border Security, and anyway, if they attempt it that will tell us something.”

  The D.C.I. looked confused. “What are we going to do until the briefing then?”

  “I’m just sorting that out now.”

  He turned away in a clear signal to Liam to get on with his part of the job and picked up his call again.

  “OK, Andy. The witness in the three a.m. call, do you have her details?”

  “Yep. She lives somewhere in the Titanic Quarter, but we’re going to see her at work tomorrow.”

  The Titanic Quarter is a waterfront regeneration in Belfast Harbour, comprising historic maritime landmarks, film studios, colleges, homes and a Titanic-themed attraction.

  “Let’s try now. Text me her home address and meet us there in fifteen minutes, but don’t cancel your appointment for tomorrow yet, just in case she’s not home. Ask Kyle to send the file through.”

  He ended the call and waited for the text message. It came through just as Liam finished his call.

  “Right. Nicky’s sorting out the ports and airports. Do you really think one of them will make a run for it?”

  “Maybe not but I want both of them under surveillance from the moment they leave on bail.”

  Liam decided the quickest way to organise that was to re-enter the station, so Craig waited patiently in the car until he reappeared and then they set off.

  “Where are we going, boss?”

  “Andy and Kyle found the records of a three a.m. call about noises and lights on the site in oh-seven, a few weeks before it was handed over to the Barrs. A police check at the time found nothing, but there was a witness. That’s where we’re going now.”

  Ten minutes later they were in the city’s uber-modern Titanic Quarter and Liam gawped out the window like a tourist as they passed the attraction of the Titanic Building and a host of new hotels, until they finally arrived at the futuristic building where their witness apparently now lived. After a quick search for a front door that was doing its best to disguise itself as a window, they were in the lift and four floors up. They found Andy already there, leaning against a white-washed wall with his smart-pad in his hand. As Craig relieved him of it, Liam greeted his fellow D.C.I. with his customary cheek.

  “Here, Biggles. Did you fly here?”

  “No. But I was smart enough not to go all round the one-way system like you did.”

  Craig motioned them to be quiet and scrolled down the screen, gathering the salient details about Ms Jessica Chambers before he lifted his ID to the peep-hole in her pine front door and knocked. To everyone’s surprise, after a few seconds of bare feet pitter-pattering down an interior hall followed by a slight delay, the door was actually answered; normally home visits involved several no-responses and repeated call-backs, unless they warranted booting in someone’s door in the middle of the night.

  Craig had been looking straight ahead of him, but as the door opened inwards he adjusted his eye-line down a foot, to meet the curious stare of a small, round woman of around forty with sky-blue eyes and coal-black hair. Blue eyes and black hair was a combination often seen in Ireland but seldom at such extremes, and yet both looked as if they were completely natural.

  The woman spoke before he could.

  “Can I help you?”

  Her words were wheezed out and Andy recognised the signs of asthma, his mother having been a sufferer all her life. Craig quickly followed the trail from wheeze to chest infection to the reason for the woman being at home during the day and it prompted a sympathetic smile.

  “I’m D.C.S. Craig, and these are D.C.I.’s Cullen and Angel.” He handed over his warrant card so she could take a closer look. “We’re looking for a Ms Jessica Chambers. Would that be you, by any chance?”

  The blue eyes sparked in alarm. “What have I done?”

  Liam gazed down at her sternly. The question always irritated him, as well as being nonsensical. Why would you ask as complete stranger what you’d done? I mean, how the hell would they know? In the D.C.I.’s book, if you didn’t know what you’d done yourself, then you shouldn’t be allowed out.

  His unforgiving approach manifested itself in a quick retort.

  “What do you think you’ve done?”

  Answer a question with a question, it was a time-honoured tactic for getting people to give themselves away, but all Jessica Chambers gave was another wheeze.

  Craig rolled his eyes at his deputy and smiled at the woman again.

  “Ignore that question, it was a feeble joke. I hope. I’m sorry for worrying you by turning up mob-handed like this.” He glanced pointedly at Liam. “If you’d prefer, these two officers could wait outside.”

  Liam considered objecting but wisely kept his mouth shut.

  When Jessica Chambers shook her head generously, Craig carried on.

  “In answer to your question, you haven’t done anything, Ms Chambers, but you were a witness to something in two-thousand-and-seven and I was hoping that we could ask you about it.”

  To his surprise Chambers’ response was to hurry down her small hallway, beckoning them to follow. When she entered a large living-room and grabbed urgently for an asthma inhaler Craig understood her haste. He shot Liam a warning look, its message clear; no hard questioning. The last thing they needed was a witness having an asthma attack because of police questioning techniques.

  When Jessica Chambers had recovered she sat down in an armchair, nodding Craig towards a small kitchen at one end of the room.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m a bit breathless so I need to stay sitting down, but help yourselves to tea if you like.”

  Craig declined for all of them and took the nearest seat, nodding the others to do the same and Andy to pass over his pad.

  “Do you recall the incident in question, Ms Chambers?”

  “Jessica, and yes, I do. It was when I lived in Wellington Street in the city centre.” She smiled nostalgically. “I loved that apartment, but the traffic pollution was so bad for my chest that we had to move here.”

  “We?”

  “Yes. My husband’s out at work. I’m actually called Jessica Doyle now.”

  “Did your husband witness anything that night?”

  She smiled, realising what he meant. “Ah, no. I wasn’t married then, although he did stay over sometimes, but not that night. I remember specifically. Otherwise I might have asked him to go down and check out what I saw.”

  Craig worried suddenly that they were crowding her; all three of them perched on the edge of their seats like praying mantises. He shifted back slightly in his chair, signalling the others to do the same before going on.

  “Could you take us through the events of that night, please? Just take your time.”

  Liam pointed at the pad, reminding Craig of its recorder.

  “Would you mind if we recorded this chat, Ms Chambers? It could save us bothering you again.”

  She smiled warningly. “Just as long as you don’t want to film me. I haven’t done my hair.”

  A ripple of laughter made everyone relax and after everyone had identified themselves for the tape they got down to business.

  “Right, let’s start. Could you tell me the date of the incident?”

  “Yes. I never forget dates. It was three o’clock in the morning of the third of July two-thousand-and-seven.”

  She was spot on.

  “Was it dark?”

  “Yes, but that not-quite black that you get on summer nights. More a sort of dark grey-black.”

  “And were there street lights on outside?”

  “Yes. I remember them.”

  “Describe where you were when things happened, please.”

  She smiled and her fondness for her old flat shone out.

  “My bedroom faced out onto Wellington Street. It’s the street behind Howard Street, overlooking mostly office buildings, so it was always very quiet after seven o’clock in the evenin
g.” She wrinkled her forehead. “Thinking about it, that’s probably why I woke up. I wasn’t used to hearing noise at night, not like people who live near nightclubs or train stations or things, although my asthma had been playing up because of the high pollen count and that was making me sleep badly as well.” Her mouth turned down. “Summer’s not much fun for people like me.”

  Liam could empathise. He had pale, freckled skin and sandy hair that was just a few shades short of red. With the melanin count of a white rabbit he never tanned no matter how much sun he was exposed to, instead turning a belisha beacon shade of blood-orange and then straight back to white via a whole lot of sunburnt pain, so the universal assumption that sunshine equalled happy and rain equalled sad really pissed him off. He was partial to a nice ‘soft’ Irish day, where any sun was broken by rain pattering down gently in what were known as sun showers.

  The melanin-rich Craig was speaking again.

  “Could you tell me exactly what it was that attracted your attention?”

  “The cement mixer.”

  His eyes widened. “At three in the morning?”

  She nodded vigorously. “That was exactly what I thought. What was some numpty doing turning on a noisy cement mixer at that time of the night? So I went to the window to look out.”

  “What exactly did you see?”

  She paused, trying futilely to recall the tableau for a few seconds and then making a suggestion.

  “I’ll close my eyes to picture it, if that’s OK?”

  The men sat in silence as she did so, the two D.C.I.s glancing at each other quizzically, until her eyes sprang open again and she nodded, pleased.

  “I saw lights on the building site, over in the far corner. In the bit that bordered onto Upper Queen Street, not the front. I couldn’t see the front of the site from where I was because it faced onto Howard Street itself.”

  It was the exact spot where they’d found the bones.

  Craig asked a question that he realised he should have asked before.

  “Why did you believe it was a building site as opposed to just a building?”

  “The hoarding. It was all round it, and there’d been a for-sale sign up for ages, and then it said ‘sold and new hotel opening soon’.”

  He nodded her on with her story.

  “Then I noticed men on the site.”

  Craig couldn’t stop himself leaning forward in excitement.

  “How many?”

  “Two that I saw, but there might have been more elsewhere.”

  “What were they doing? Exactly, please.”

  “One was standing beside the cement mixer and the other had something like a garden rake in his hand.”

  To smooth out the cement?

  Craig made a note to ask Des a question about any matching markings on the concrete and then carried on.

  “Where were the lights coming from? Overhead lamps?”

  She shook her head emphatically.

  “No. These were lights at about their waist height and they weren’t as bright or tall as the overhead spotlight ones. You could see those when you were walking down the street because they stood above the hoarding and were so bright, but I could only see these smaller lights because I was looking down from the twelfth floor. Did I tell you that before? That my apartment was on the twelfth floor? My building was the highest one around there then.”

  She hadn’t told them before, but it made sense. Not only had her vantage point given her an almost aerial view of the building site, but the probability was that the two men had completely forgotten than anyone lived up there at all because all the other buildings around were office blocks. They’d probably thought the whole area would be deserted at that time of night.

  Craig made a note that he needed someone to make him a 3D perspective of the street as it had been eleven years before and was just about to speak again when Liam signalled to ask something.

  Craig nodded him on with a warning look, but the D.C.I. was politeness itself.

  “Ms Chambers, you mentioned some hoarding. Could you describe it for us, please?”

  Good catch.

  Jessica Chambers screwed up her soft, round face as she thought.

  “It was high, I’d say around twelve feet, although it might have been less, everything looks high to me. And it was made of compressed wood, I think. You know, like the stuff they make kitchen worktops from, although it didn’t have any laminate on it of course. It was very heavy looking, a couple of inches thick at least.”

  Craig nodded. “That’s helpful, thank-you.”

  It was and it wasn’t; how the hell had anyone managed to get into the site through that? He parked the point and returned to the events of eleven years before.

  “So you heard the noise and saw the men and the cement mixer. Did you notice anything else? In the street perhaps? People or-”

  She cut him off.

  “There was a car parked on Wellington Street. A white four-door one. I noticed it because there were normally none around there at night, well, not outside the garages. Our building had a garage and so did most of them around there, so the locals all parked inside. And it’s not like there were shops or cinemas where strangers might have wanted to park nearby, especially not at that time of night.”

  Liam signalled to cut in again.

  “There were never any cars parked around there?”

  She shook her head firmly.

  “Not overnight. During the day sometimes... maybe, but, no, there were never any cars on the streets around there overnight. This was eleven years ago, remember, and it was much quieter in the city centre at night. Very different to now.”

  The deputy gave her his most winning smile. “I don’t suppose…”

  “I got its registration number? Yes, of course. I gave it to the constable who came round that night.”

  Craig scanned the smart-pad quickly and found the number tucked away at the bottom of a page in the file, with no indication that it had ever been checked out.

  Could one of the men really have been stupid enough to drive their own car to a site where they were burying a body? He flashed the Reg number at Andy, nodding him to go outside and check it, and then turned back to their witness.

  “Ms Chambers, take us through what happened when you called the police, please.”

  The words brought an immediate frown to her face.

  “I watched the cement men for a while, until about three-twenty, and then I called nine-nine-nine, telling the woman who answered that there was a disturbance and giving her the address. I kept watch for another hour and the men were still there, but no-one arrived to check on them. Then I must have fallen asleep, because about five-thirty I was woken by a knock on the door and it was this constable in uniform saying he’d checked the site and there was nothing there.” Her eyes widened in indignation. “Of course there was nothing there at five-thirty! The men must have left ages before.”

  “Had the car gone too?”

  “Yes. I looked out and there was no car, no men and no lights, and the noise had stopped as well.” She shook her head, puzzled. “I still don’t know to this day what they were up to. Could they really just have been working on site? At that time of night?”

  Craig rose to his feet and was joined by his deputy.

  “We’re going to find out, and I promise that we’ll let you know.”

  As their hostess walked them to the door Craig saw that she had a question.

  “Is there something you’d like to ask us, Ms Chambers?”

  She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment and then nodded.

  “Could what I saw have anything to do with the body that was found yesterday?”

  Craig gave a brisk nod. “Didn’t I mention that we were from the Murder Squad?”

  He didn’t wait to hear her response, and the three men were halfway down the stairs when Andy’s mobile beeped with a message. He read it aloud, punching the air.

  “The car belonged to Brian
Tanner, the DoE’s caretaker!” His face fell suddenly. “Oh, no, hang on. That means he was entitled to be there.”

  Craig reached the ground floor first and shook his head as he walked towards the car.

  “Unlikely. He was the day-time guard, remember, not the night-time one. It warrants an interview with him, and with whoever the official night-guard was.”

  Liam had been deep in thought all the way down the stairs and now he decided to share them.

  “So…we know that Leonards Construction sent Dean Kelly to fill in the flooded cellar, at the request of God only knows whoever sent that fax to Xavier Ross. And now we have a cement mixer in the middle of the night on that part of the site in the same time period, with Tanner’s car there as well.” He furrowed his brow. “What are we looking at here, boss? Did Kelly and Tanner kill the two women and bury their bones there together eleven years ago?”

  It was the obvious conclusion, but that didn’t mean it was the right one. Craig stopped walking to gather his thoughts.

  “OK, look, we can all make the simple leap here, that Tanner and Kelly killed the women and buried them that night. And my guess is that when we find out who sent that fax about the cellar needing filled in those two will be involved somewhere, but…”

  Andy finished his thought with a series of questions. “But why do it? Who were the women? And if they were linked with Tanner and Kelly why didn’t someone spot them missing?”

  Liam jumped in, not to be outdone. “And why wouldn’t Tanner and Kelly have skipped the country afterwards? And why didn’t Kelly supervise his builders better this week and insure that they didn’t dig down and find those bones? If he’d buried the women there then he must have known exactly where not to dig.”

  Craig had been nodding throughout the points.

  “Yes to all of those, but in particular to Liam’s last point. If Dean Kelly had known that there were two bodies buried down there because he’d buried them eleven years ago, then I can see him taking the foreman’s post now to keep an eye on the new dig, but if you were him wouldn’t you have insisted on looking after that corner yourself? Or at least have been watching the engineering student who was picking about there like a hawk? Instead of which he just told his men not to dig down and left them to it.”