The Running of the Deer

by Catriona King

  Grace Adeyemi was Des’ new lead CSI and she and Craig had clashed early on, due to her unfortunate habit of ‘tidying up’ dead bodies before he’d had a chance to view them. While Des had instructed her not to do it again the scars had already been left on the detective, so he demurred hastily.

  “No, no, those timings sound fine to me. Let me know when you arrive, and we can meet at the local morgue.”

  He ended the call to see Liam screwing up his face. “What’re we going to do down here till then?”

  As Craig made tracks towards the car, “Copshop, veterinary surgeon, gamekeeper…”, floated back.

  Chapter Four

  The Belfast Chronicle Newspaper. St Anne’s Square, The Cathedral Quarter, Belfast. 1 p.m.

  Maggie Clarke had been chewing so hard on her pen that she wasn’t entirely surprised when one chew became a crunch that furnished her with a mouthful of plastic that she only just managed to extricate before her tongue got coated in green ink. She didn’t use green ink pens as an in-joke, no matter what her colleagues thought; ‘green ink’ being the traditional British journalistic term for the frothing of conspiracy theorists who wrote to newspapers to complain. Rather she used it because, like the Heads of MI6, who had always used the colour when signing major documents, she valued the importance of words, considering them far more powerful than any weapon of violence.

  Or should she say any other weapon? She’d written some pretty brutal editorials since she’d become The Chronicle’s news editor, more so since the muppet show that was the Stormont government had become even more farcical than usual after its collapse the year before.

  But today’s pen chewing wasn’t courtesy of the people laughingly dubbed politicians, but due to the criminal trial commencing in twenty hours’ time. In a sideways step from her career as a jobbing journalist the reporter had decided to write a true crime novel, and the Belfast Murder Squad, or rather its boss Marc Craig, who was the man that she’d had to persuade, had finally, just a few weeks earlier, agreed to let her follow one of their cases through.

  The fact that it was as juicy a case as any writer could possibly wish for, that of a narcissistic psychopath Rowan Drake who had killed eleven people the year before, was just sheer luck. Such luck that Maggie knew that she should be jumping up and down with excitement, instead of chewing her pen and wearing a frown. So why was she adding to the forehead furrows that were making her consider Botox one day soon? Although she would never admit such a thought to her fiancé, Davy, who would consider any such self-mutilation grounds for having her sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

  The journalist lifted a fresh ballpoint and started waving it in the air, as if she was regaling a gathered crowd. That’s the problem with men, she could hear herself proclaiming, they want women gorgeous and wrinkle-free all right, but they want us to be that way naturally. Naturally! She snorted at the unlikeliness of such a thing; she could count the natural beauties that she knew on the fingers of one hand. Between hair dye, makeup, fake tan… the list of cosmetic adjustments available was never-ending, but she didn’t hear Davy objecting to her use of those!

  Satisfied that her future husband had been tried and found guilty of poor judgement, the reporter sentenced him to perpetual ignorance about any cosmetic enhancements she might ever have, not realising that she’d actually been conducting the trial aloud and at a high volume, until she heard the words, “Are you OK in there?”, being called out. The query was followed by a sharp knock on her office door.

  Maggie dropped her pen and rushed to open it, finding her deputy Toby Foster standing there with a sheaf of paper in his hand. It was a quaint image in this world of smart-pads and Wi-Fi and made her beckon the twenty-five-year-old in.

  The recent master’s graduate peered at her over his trendy round glasses. “Is everything all right, Maggie?”

  She returned to her chair and waved him to a seat. “Yes, just ignore me. I’m stressing about this court case.”

  Foster sat forward eagerly, his pristine shirt cuff almost dipping in the dead green pen, until his boss swept it hurriedly into the bin.

  “You must be really excited.”

  The words sounded incongruously sombre when uttered in his unusually deep voice. Maggie had been surprised when she’d first heard it in his interview, emerging as it had from a wiry, swimmer’s frame, but she’d eventually learned to recognise when Toby was thrilled about something from the reddening of his ears. They were cherry-red now and their brightness made her smile.

  “You sound as if you’d like to be there, Toby.”

  The deputy editor nodded enthusiastically. “I really would. But if we were both in court all day then who would be here to run the ship?”

  Maggie focused sharply, sensing ambition in his words. She thought she was fairly safe in her role at the newspaper, the management Board encouraging about both her work and her book, but bright young things would always snap at their seniors’ heels and the thought added another layer to her, as yet undiagnosed, pen-chewing anxiety about the case.

  Her reply was cool, and she knew it.

  “I’ll be here every morning before the case starts, then back at lunchtime and then back again after four. Plenty of time to allocate and supervise work.” Her add-on of, “so don’t you worry”, was deliberately acerbic and Foster’s immediate recoil made her feel bad.

  After a moment’s guilt, wondering if she’d slapped him down too hard, Maggie decided that in their notoriously cutthroat line of work it was better to be safe than let a competitor advance even an inch.

  Foster nodded slowly at the words, not meeting her eyes. “That’s good. I just…what I meant was I wish that I was in court. It sounds like a fascinating case.”

  Maggie felt worse and rushed to make them both feel better. “Perhaps you could come with me one day. I’m sure I can get permission.”

  The deputy raised his hazel eyes and smiled, a tad too enigmatically for her liking but that would have to be this evening’s worry, because his next words provided something far more immediate. He set the pages he was carrying down on her desk and Maggie saw they were photocopies from newspapers elsewhere.

  “I thought you should see this story. It’s in two of the dailies in County Tyrone. A teenager was found dead in strange circumstances in Killeter Forest.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t recognise the name.”

  “It’s a huge place, eight thousand acres of woodland, mostly full of pine trees. Sitka Spruce and Lodgepole Pine. They’re found on the west coast of America as well. My dad used to take us there when we were kids.”

  Maggie leaned in to peer at the pages and then rested back in her chair again.

  “OK. But why would I-”

  The junior cut her off. “Because it says the Belfast Murder Squad’s getting involved, and I thought before we started digging you might like to see what you could get from your other half?”

  Maggie twitched defensively, searching his words for an insinuation that she only got good stories because of nepotism, but finding nothing obvious there. She didn’t feel reassured. Just because she couldn’t detect an insult didn’t mean that there hadn’t been one.

  But Toby was right that she would be contacting Davy, just not for the reason that he thought.

  “Leave that story alone until I find out more about it, please. I’ll get back to you if I do.”

  She had no intention of asking the murder squad about the Tyrone murder, not until Craig called her and said that it was OK to report. Barring major corruption within the police force, which she wouldn’t shy away from investigating the instant that she learned of it, her relationship with the murder team had settled into mutual respect. She knew Craig would update the press the moment it was in the public interest, and most importantly when it couldn’t endanger their case. That didn’t mean that she was soft on them, she wasn’t, and she definitely held them to account when they messed up, but botching up a fresh mur
der hunt wasn’t in anyone’s interest.

  She was about to nod her deputy out when he rose to leave anyway, a concerned look on his youthful face.

  “Try not to stress about the court case. I’m sure your book will be great.”

  Maggie felt instantly ashamed of her suspicions of him and smiled contritely as he left, but if she had observed Toby Foster for a moment longer and seen his smirk as he sat back down at his desk her doubts would have returned.

  As it was the news editor returned almost instantly to her search for the reason she was stressed about the court case, and finally she found it. She was stressed because she was entering unfamiliar territory. Not the courtroom, she’d reported from many of those in her time, but her position there. No longer a notepad-wielding journalist seeking case quotes and a superficial overview to fill columns of print, this time she would be there in an investigative role. One where she would have to listen behind and between the evidence given and examine what made a psychopath tick, and the potential gaze into the abyss that that implied was scaring her half to death.

  ****

  Castlederg Police Station. County Tyrone.

  “These rural places are a bit of all right, aren’t they?”

  Craig smiled at his deputy’s aesthetic summary. “I take it you think it’s picturesque?”

  They were approaching a small white-washed building that looked as if it had come straight out of John Ford’s ‘The Quiet Man’. The station even had a thatched roof and roses around the door, and Craig wouldn’t have been at all surprised if some elderly woman had emerged pulling a shawl down over her head.

  The detectives’ nostalgic image was shattered a moment later, as the building’s green painted front door flew open and a man in his forties landed almost at their feet, to be followed a few seconds later by a rounded, uniformed, younger man in hot pursuit.

  Not hot enough however. By the time the police constable neared his quarry, the older man had leapt up again and was legging it down the rural road at a respectable clip. The officer rested his plump hands on his knees, puffing for breath, something that Liam decided to comment, not so helpfully, on.

  “You’ll need to get a sight fitter if you hope to catch the likes of him, son. Wiry bugger.”

  It was as overt a comment on the policeman’s chubbiness as he could hope to get away with, people’s tendency to complain about the slightest insult being what it was nowadays. If he’d been drunk Liam might have had a rant about what political correctness was doing to Ireland’s sense of humour, but for now he just made do with the jibe.

  Craig raised an eyebrow, first at his D.C.I.’s near-the-knuckle comment, then he raised it even further as he considered the uniformed officer. The man was as wide as he was tall! And he wasn’t even middle-aged yet, so he couldn’t try that one as an excuse. He made up his mind to raise officer fitness with the Chief Constable when they met at a conference in a fortnight, but for now he merely leaned down into the P.C.’s red face and introduced himself.

  “D.C.S. Craig, and this is D.C.I. Cullen. Belfast Murder Squad. Could you tell me who’s in charge?”

  The constable glanced up, still puffing, and then with a considerable effort he returned all of himself to the vertical and nodded towards the door.

  “Inspector Hunter’s inside, sir. I expect you’ve come about the dead boy.”

  “We have. Thank you.”

  Craig made to move off but was stopped in his tracks by the man’s next, almost sneered words.

  “Mind you, I’m not surprised myself. He was a townie, written all over him, so what was he doing here anyway? Asking for trouble and he got it, that’s what.”

  If the next few seconds could have been replayed Craig might have acted differently, but the pity of life is that we can’t live it retrospectively, if we could there’d be far fewer messes made.

  So it was only with hindsight that he realised that the sudden darkness in his peripheral vision wasn’t a sign that he was having a stroke, but in fact Liam lifting his fist to aim a crunching blow at the cold-hearted constable, a blow that they were all lucky only half hit its mark, resulting in the uniformed man just being shoved back down into his bent position and then past it onto the ground, instead of ending up unconscious at Liam’s feet, as had probably been his intent.

  As soon as Craig understood what had happened he turned, just quickly enough to see that the irate father about to follow up his punch with a kick. He knew he couldn’t allow that to happen, not unless he wanted Liam to lose his career and pension, so he ran through his options in a split second: grab Liam’s raised leg in mid-air and send him flying on to his ass; kick his other leg out from under him and achieve the same result; or step between the kick and the prostrate constable and take whatever came. As it happened, it was expediency and not any desire for martyrdom that made the decision for Craig; time being too short to ensure his effectiveness in any but the third scenario.

  With gritted teeth and his hands positioned to protect his future chances of parenthood, Craig gritted his teeth and took two steps. The next full minute was a blur of stomach pain, buckling knees, and red-faced vomiting up of his breakfast before he could speak coherently again. When he did it was to tell the constable to, “Get the hell out of here”, and furiously refuse Liam’s offer of a hand up.

  While his boss gasped repeatedly for breath the deputy decided to throw himself verbally on his sword.

  “Aw, shit, boss, I’m sorry.”

  Apology over, then came the excuse.

  “But what did you go and step in for? I was only going to kick him up the ass. Thank God I’d aimed high and you only got it in the gut.”

  Craig managed to squeeze out two words. “Your pension.”

  Liam’s always pale skin paled even further. “What? You thought I’d lose-”

  “Didn’t think, knew.”

  As Craig’s breath returned he reached for a nearby bin and hauled himself slowly to his feet. “You still might.”

  Liam snorted sceptically. “For what? For teaching that wee scrote what for? No way. You heard what he said about the boy. Cruel bastard.”

  As the D.C.I.’s eyes narrowed again Craig grabbed his arm, his power of speech now fully restored.

  “At the moment we can cover your punch by saying he just slipped and hit his face, but if you’d followed it up with a kick then all bets would have been off. He’d have had good grounds to complain and you’d have been out.”

  Liam shot a disgusted glance at the station. “Fat culchie. He’d have deserved it.”

  Craig nodded wearily. “I’m not saying I disagree, and I’ll have a word with his boss about his attitude, but trust me, he’s not worth you losing your job.”

  As Liam’s twitching fists said that he was still in two minds about that, Craig took a seat on a nearby wall and gazed at him solemnly.

  “Can you cope with this case, Liam? With it involving a dead child?”

  The D.C.I. didn’t answer, just stared at the ground instead.

  “There’s no disgrace in admitting it, you know. I’m not sure that I could cope with this one if I had kids.” It was one of the reasons that he feared fatherhood. If he couldn’t cope then he couldn’t be a cop, and what else would he be good for? “If you want to go back to base and focus on the Drake court case, I can get Aidan or Andy to come down.”

  Liam’s head jerked up indignantly. “Oh, aye, that’d be great! Next thing one of them would be your deputy and I’d be an also ran.”

  It was Craig’s turn to be indignant. “You can’t possibly believe that! How many years have we worked together? And you think I could just replace you with any D.C.I.? Get a bloody grip!”

  A faint blush lit Liam’s cheek. “Ach, get away with you. Next thing you’ll be going all continental and giving me a hug.”

  Craig stood up briskly. “Now don’t get carried away, we’re not getting married. All I’m saying is that you can sit this one out and your position will still
be safe. But I need an answer now, before we go any further.” His voice hardened. “And if you decide to stay then you have to keep your fists…” He glanced down meaningfully at Liam’s size thirteens. “And your feet to yourself. Understand?”

  He was answered by a contrite nod.

  “So, what’ll it be then?”

  The fact that Liam didn’t respond immediately told Craig just how difficult he was already finding the case, but when his reply finally did come it was definite.

  “I’ll stay. I want to get these bastards. And I’ll try not to hit anyone.”

  Craig shook his head. “You’ll do more than try, Liam. I need your word.”

  “Ach, OK, you’ve got it.” He glanced towards the station again. “But keep that little shit away from me.”

  ****

  Annadale Embankment. The Home of John and Natalie Winter.

  Katy Stevens turned the key in the Winters’ maple-wood front door and pushed it open, wedging it with her foot as she lifted the shopping bags and car seat inside, and then smiling down into the face of the seat’s tiny occupant to be rewarded by a gurgle in return. By the time they were in the converted chapel’s bright kitchen and the kettle had been switched on, the gurgling had become giggling and Kit Winter was struggling to escape her bonds.

  Katy obliged, lifting the one-year-old high into the air as she freed her, and then hugging her close to smell her red-gold hair. The scent was a mixture of baby shampoo and lilac, and the medic thought that she had never smelt, or felt, anything as good.

  Five minutes later, as they sat on the rugged floor of the house’s Scandinavian style living room, Katy realised that the lingering feeling worried her, and was heightening an agitation that she’d noticed in herself for weeks. As she watched her small charge babbling happily to her toys she let herself consider the reasons why, something that she normally worked hard to avoid.

  She was in her late thirties, and yes, she had a wonderful career as a doctor and a partner that she adored in Marc, but recently she’d been feeling niggles of anxiety that were growing harder to ignore. She’d already run through the possible causes many times. Was it Marc? No, she loved him more than anything. Although… perhaps…