The Property

by Catriona King

  He outlined his thoughts and ended with.

  “Aidan, I’d like you and Andy to take the night-watchman on all of those points; his part in turning a blind eye to the cannabis growing and the burying of it, and in so many people accessing the site when there was hoarding up. There’s another question as well; did he let anyone make a copy of his keys to the hoarding?”

  Aidan smirked. “You mean Brian Tanner. If he couldn’t get hold of a set of keys officially did he make a copy of the night-guard’s? And you think the night-guard might have been letting the burglars in? Making a bit of money on the side by allowing them to squat and nick things.”

  Craig shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened in an empty building filled with lots of goodies. Although... Tanner said the guard refused to take a cut of the drug profits, which makes him sound like an honest man, so it doesn’t seem to fit.” He gave another shrug. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  He topped up his coffee and moved on.

  “So, we know the cellar was filled in during the early hours of the third of July. We also know that the bones must have been deposited in the concrete within a three day window, between the third and sixth of that month. Dean Kelly said most likely during the first two days because the cement’s increasing thickness would have made it very difficult for the bones to be pushed down. I’ll return to that in a moment, but first let’s deal with the situation around the bones not being noticed by anyone between two-thousand-and-seven and now.”

  He nodded Liam to take over as he searched around for something to eat, lunch somehow getting missed again.

  “Aye, well, long story short. Billy Bruton says he was at some drinks do for the opening of The HTH in October oh-seven and he noticed a bump on the floor in the corner where we eventually found the bones. It was where a food trolley was located-”

  Annette interjected. “It’s called a hostess trolley. My mum had one.”

  “And very lovely I’m sure it was too, but that’s by the by. The bump was never investigated because even though Bruton peeled back the carpet and underlay to see what was causing the bump and saw the girl’s skull, he never bothered his ass reporting it.”

  It earned him several gawps and a couple of, “I’m not bloody voting for him again!”s, to which Liam pointed out that as Billy-Boy would be in the nick for tax evasion he would hardly be electable. Although with politics in Northern Ireland being what it was who could tell.

  “Right, so Bruton saw the skull back in oh-seven. So we...” He indicated Craig whose mouthful of cake prevented more than a nod of acknowledgment. “...decided to visit the man who laid the carpets back then. They were only laid once in the hotel’s eleven year life, the stingy beggars, and they came from a place called Carpet Life on the Lower Newtownards Road. Great wee shop if anyone’s looking for a bargain.”

  Craig rolled his eyes at the advertising pitch but said nothing, crumbs inhibiting his speech.

  “Anyway, Dodds who owned the shop said he laid the carpet but not the underlay. It was already down when he got there, the Barrs had apparently had some over from another job. Anyway, the thing was, it was three inches thick.”

  Des’ eyes widened and he turned to John. “Three inches would have disguised most of the skull protrusion.”

  “That was probably the aim.”

  Liam nodded. “There was still a bit of a bump though, but when Dodds offered to check what was causing it he was told to back off by Dalir Barr.”

  John frowned. “Definitely Dalir?”

  Craig had regained the use of his mouth. “Yes. We showed him a picture of Kamran and he’d never seen him before, but he ID-ed Dalir immediately.”

  John asked what several of the others were thinking. “Is it possible that Kamran Barr had no knowledge of the killings then?”

  Craig response was equivocal. “We’ll know more when we interview him after this. OK, thanks for that, Liam.” He signalled to take over again. “Right, we’ll come back to the women in a moment but some other things first. Thanks to Aidan and Mary we now have the itineraries on Billy Bruton’s travels in the middle-east and the timings rule him out of meeting our victims there, although as there’s nothing to rule him out of meeting them in Ireland when they moved here he’s not out of the woods on their murders just yet.”

  Ash waved his smart-pad in the air.

  “I know you’ve got something to share, Ash, and we’ll get to that. But before then I’d like to turn to finance.” He smiled at the woman beside Aidan Hughes. “Welcome, Deidre. Most of you will know D.C.I. Deidre Murray from her time assisting us on the Drake case before Christmas. D.C.I. Murray is now head of the Fraud Unit and she’s been helping us with The Barr Group’s finances.”

  He made a “take it away” gesture, so she did.

  “OK, well, thanks to your analysts we had very little to do to answer the first important question. Which was who funded The Barr Group’s first business? To launder or clean dirty money the easiest way is to run it through legitimate businesses, and then any profit generated after paying back the dirty money’s owner can be used to build new businesses to launder more money through, and so on. But having the first business to start everything is crucial, so where did the Barrs, not a wealthy family at the beginning, get the funds for that? The most obvious answer was the third member of their partnership, Farshid Lund, the Saudi resident, and our financial analysts have now confirmed that a large amount of cash, ten million pounds, was deposited in The Barr Group’s accounts the day after the company was incorporated in two-thousand-and-four, and that it traces back to-”

  Craig cut in. “Sorry, Dee, but you said Saudi resident. Are you saying that Lund isn’t actually Saudi?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” She read from a piece of paper she had in front of her. “Farshid Lund was resident in Saudi but was born in Zahedan in Iran, close to the border between Iran and the Baloch region of Pakistan.”

  Pakistan again. The place kept cropping up in their investigation. But this time the location was very precise, the country’s border with Iran. It suggested a link between Farshid Lund and the Bergers.

  Ash’s lips tightened in a huff. He’d had the same information about Farshid Lund but he hadn’t been allowed to speak.

  Craig waved the D.C.I. to continue, deep in thought.

  “OK, so the question has to be why? Why would Farshid Lund give the Barr Group so much money?”

  Annette answered.

  “For a third of the business, surely. Lots of people supply venture capital in return for a possible profit-”

  Liam cut in jokingly. “Oooohhh. Get Rockefeller. Venture capital.”

  Dee rolled her eyes. “Annette’s absolutely correct and investors do sometimes just invest and take a gamble that a business will work, but what’s striking here is the amount of capital that was invested. Ten million pounds, and this was fourteen years ago. It’s a huge amount by anyone’s standards.”

  Craig roused himself to ask another question. “You think Lund got something else for his money besides a third share?”

  Dee made a face. “Either that, or there was an exchange of a completely different sort.”

  Annette got it instantly. “A dowry! You’re saying some of the money was a bride price!”

  Amidst the group’s quietly dawning reality there came a noisy whine from Ash.

  “I had that, and all the stuff on Lund! And if I’d been allowed to report first I’d have told you.”

  Craig was torn between laughing at his petulance and admiring his hard work, but he displayed neither, instead turning to Dee Murray with a “do you mind?” look. When she smiled, Craig waved his junior analyst to speak, which Ash did with an undisguised huff.

  “I first suspected something when I heard Lund’s name and someone said he came from Saudi. Farshid Lund isn’t a Saudi name. It’s Iranian or Baloch Pakistani. Then as soon as Doctor Winter confirmed the women’s pictures matched with their skul
ls I dug deeper.”

  He pressed a key and the LED screen beside Nicky’s desk lit up suddenly, making her replacement jump. On it was displayed first the photograph of their two victims together, and then it changed to a new image, that of a toddler, a little girl.

  “This is Catherine Berger when she was three; she lived in San Francisco from when she was one year old until she was seven, when her passport shows that she and her mother moved to Belfast-”

  Liam cut in. “That confirms Bruton could only have met them over here.”

  Ash pressed another key and displayed an image of Catherine Berger as a teenager, holding a tennis racquet.

  “Catherine was diagnosed with scoliosis, an s-shaped curvature of the spine, when she was twelve. Medical records show that she had intensive physiotherapy at St Mary’s to correct it, and wore a surgical corset for a while, but as part of her treatment she was advised to take up exercise, which she did. She played both tennis and squash to club level, but was too busy with her academic studies to progress higher than that. As you can see she was right-handed, like Doctor Winter predicted.”

  He tapped again and a third image appeared, of a smiling girl standing outside Queen’s University’s historic Lanyon building.

  “This is Catherine in October oh-six, five months after her eighteenth birthday, just starting her first year of law school. She wanted to be a barrister some day and she’d had several articles published in law journals.”

  A further tap and another image appeared of the girl, this time with a tall young man, his arm draped protectively around her shoulder and her smiling, upturned face saying that they were very much in love.

  “This was taken at the start of June oh-seven with Jason Conroy, another law student that she’d met. Catherine was nineteen and they’d just got engaged. This photograph on FaceChat was accompanied by a post announcing it, and over one hundred people congratulated her online.” All eyes turned to the girl’s upheld left hand, showing off a square-cut diamond ring.

  The screen went dark.

  “One week later on the tenth of June all of her social media posts ceased. After a year of posting almost every day on several different platforms there was nothing. I checked her bank and phone accounts and there were no cash withdrawals, card transactions or phone-calls made after the tenth either.”

  The pattern was familiar to everyone who worked on murder investigations but chilling just the same; it showed a life that had suddenly ceased. The most startling thing was that it had happened a three full weeks before the cellar had been filled in, and only one week after the engagement picture had appeared.

  Craig raised a hand to interrupt. “Was the pattern the same for the mother, Ash?”

  “Identical, but obviously there were differences in her earlier life.”

  “How so?”

  “She was raised in a place called Saindak in the Baloch region of Pakistan, not far from the border with Iran. And Doctor Winter was correct. She played an instrument to a high standard, the sarangi. It’s a stringed and bowed instrument played in India, Pakistan and Nepal. She married at fifteen, or rather she was married off at fifteen to a wealthy older man, and had two children when she was seventeen and twenty. The second of those was Catherine.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes, a son. The marriage was very unhappy, there were reports of abuse but nothing was done about it. Maureen asked for a divorce under Muslim law but it was harder for women to divorce their husbands then and she was denied, so in nineteen-eighty-nine when Catherine was one she fled to America with the help of some relatives she had there. She took Catherine with her, but left her son behind with his father.”

  Craig nodded. “They went to San Francisco.” He turned to John. “Would that fit with the dental and bone analysis?”

  “Better than I’d expected.”

  Craig looked at Des.

  “And the DNA ethnicity?”

  “Yes. It’s almost spot on. The mother may have been a mix of Iranian and Pakistani, and judging by the daughter’s slightly different skull structure that Iranian aspect may have come through more in her, or perhaps been reinforced by her father’s genes, whoever he was. But the girl had some dental work done in The UAE, and after hearing their story I’m surprised that they ever went anywhere near the middle-east again.”

  Ash raised a finger. “I can answer that too. There were comments on both women’s accounts from a Pakistani woman called Babra Talpur who lived in Abu Dhabi. She seems to have been a close friend of the mother’s from when they were young, so perhaps they travelled to stay with her? The UAE’s pretty westernised so they might have thought they were safe.”

  “Check her out, Ash.”

  Craig frowned. The answer to his next question might throw his developing theory out, but he had to ask it anyway.

  “Ash, what was Catherine’s father’s name?”

  The analyst gave a small smile. “You already have it. He was Farshid Lund, the Saudi resident who formed The Barr Group with the Barr brothers. Maureen and Catherine Berger were originally Sameen and Dorry Lund. They changed their names officially when they ran. Lund was a strict Muslim who’d had an arranged marriage to Maureen Berger and they had moved to Saudi for his work. But I’ll keep calling the women Berger if that’s OK, otherwise I’ll get confused.”

  As Craig nodded, pleased that his theory hadn’t been destroyed, the feeling was tinged with disgust at what he knew was coming next.

  The junior analyst turned to Annette. “You were right. The cash injection was more than just start-up funding, it must have been a dowry. Lund must have promised to marry his daughter Catherine to Dalir or Kamran Barr as part of the business deal.”

  Annette nodded sadly. “Lund thought she was his property to do whatever he wanted with, but she was already in love with someone else. Jason Conroy.”

  Craig was feeling a little burnt by romance right now so he focused on the practicalities.

  “That’s all conjecture and we need facts. Is there anything more solid, Ash? I’m guessing that wasn’t something Catherine posted on social media.”

  He had deliberately avoided entering the social media scrum years before when even his middle-aged friends were signing up, preferring the pain of a root canal without anaesthetic or having his nails pulled out to the fleeting release of informing everyone, no matter how geographically distant, what he’d just had for lunch. He didn’t even like sharing his feelings with his relatives, never mind with hundreds of strangers that he would never meet, although he supposed that he could see the value of the platform for people who wanted to connect. Even though it seemed to him like the virtual equivalent of standing on a mountain and shouting out your thoughts and troubles, he accepted that it might offer others a catharsis of sorts.

  The detective’s analysis of the multibillion internet phenomenon was interrupted by Ash’s reply.

  “No, I don’t think she could have known anything for a fact until Lund actually took her and her mother, and her internet access stopped then. But she did confide in her best friend about Lund’s constant contacts before then in her emails.”

  Craig’s eyes widened, visions of hacked emails being hurled out of court flashing through his mind. The analyst saw his panic and grinned.

  “Don’t worry. Davy asked Ryan to get a warrant for them.”

  Craig’s eyes swept the room until he came to a hand waving above Annette’s head.

  “Ryan?”

  The new sergeant stood up sheepishly. “I didn’t want to bother you with something trivial, and I was at the courthouse anyway watching the Drake case, so I just went ahead and did it. I hope that’s OK?”

  “More than OK. Top of the class. Well done.”

  Craig turned back to his junior analyst, who was busily passing around photocopies of Catherine Berger’s emails, and after a quick scan everyone knew exactly how the girl had felt. She had been desperate. She was in love with Jason Conroy but Farshid Lund had been haras
sing her with phone-calls and e-mails, pleading to see her and begging her to come to Saudi for a holiday, citing fatherly feeling, family, obedience and respect.

  When she had refused to go, no doubt guided by her mother, Lund had resorted to threats, telling her exactly what a ‘westernised whore’ like her should expect if she disobeyed. Apparently Catherine wasn’t behaving like the perfect respectful daughter that Lund had wished to marry off to seal his business deal, although there’d been no mention of that in his emails. It raised a lot of questions.

  Did Catherine’s supposed disrespect mean that she and her mother, who Lund blamed for her disrespectful upbringing, had actually had to die? And which one of the Barr brothers had Farshid Lund wanted her to marry, Dalir or Kamran? Had Kamran Barr known about the women’s deaths? If not, who had killed and buried them? Dalir Barr’s handling of the carpet laying pointed to his knowledge, yes, but had he actually been involved in the murders or just the disposal, and had his brother or even father helped him? Even a strong young man would have found it difficult to kill two adult women alone, and Dalir had looked on the small side in his photograph.

  There were still too many things to be cleared up, but at least they were further along. Catherine Berger’s estranged father had wanted to trade her like a commodity and on her refusal he had judged her as being at fault.

  “That’s brilliant work, Ash, but I need to know if Farshid Lund left Saudi and travelled here around the time of the women’s disappearances, and I’ll need both Barr brothers’ and their father’s movements around then. We’re pretty confident that Dalir Barr knew there was something beneath the carpet, but he could have found that out after the event. Also… what happened to Catherine’s brother? Is he still alive and safe in Saudi? And could he have been involved as well as the Barrs?”