He didn’t wait for the analyst’s response, just hung up and called Aidan back.
“Give me Reggie again.”
The D.C.I. obliged without speaking, too busy stuffing his face with biscuits to stave off his craving for a smoke.
“Sorry about that, Reggie. I needed Davy to check something for me. About that rehab programme a decade ago… can you think of any women that went on it?”
For expedience, he assumed that Dermot Canavan wasn’t gay.
Reggie answered immediately. “There were indeed. I mind four off the top of my head. Two men as well.”
“Do the women still live on the estate?”
“Two do. Mo Turner, she must be in her fifties now, and Ellie Rawlings, she’s a single mum with three kids. Two at school and a new baby.” He tutted, and Craig mouthed the sergeant’s next words as they hit the air. “Does no-one believe in matrimony these days? The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, I can tell you that. Ach, well, at least they’ve both stayed off the drugs.”
Before Craig could comment, Liam’s mobile rang, and he fished it out of his pocket and passed it across.
“I need to put you on hold for a minute, Reggie, there’s another call.”
He swopped phones.
“Yes? It’s Marc Craig. Who’s this?”
“Davy. Your line was engaged. I’ve got s…some info for you.”
“That was fast. Fire ahead.”
“OK. Karl’s been on, and none of his sources know of any big dealers on the Demesne. Not for years apparently.”
“Do they know about anyone running a County Line from there?”
“Only occasional rumours, he said. Also, Ash checked, and Dermot Canavan has been in rehab, but never for drugs, just for alcohol. He was in a place called S…Sky House twice. First in oh-nine and then again in two-thousand-and-eleven. It was one of the rehab units used by the GP drugs drive too. That actually happened nine years ago, not a decade, and s…some addicts from the Demesne went there-”
Craig cut across him. “Ellie Rawlings?” Mo Turner was slightly too old for what he was thinking.
The analyst answered excitedly, despite his huff. “Yes. Eleanor Rawlings, date of birth nineteen-eighty-eight. She was there in two-thousand and nine.”
“Months?”
“June through to August, and Canavan was there in June too.”
“Thanks, Davy. Brilliant work.”
He cut the call and stared straight ahead, until Liam reminded him, “Reggie’s still hanging on.”
Craig un-held his other call hastily.
“Sorry, Reggie, important information. OK, one last thing. Is Ellie Rawlings at home now?”
“I don’t see why she wouldn’t be. I don’t imagine she gets out much at night with three young kids.”
“Good. I want you to go up there now with Aidan and Mary and detain her.”
The sergeant frowned. “On what grounds?”
“On suspicion of drug dealing. Take her to High Street.”
He ended the call before there were any more questions, praying that he was right. There were enough troubled kids in their case, and he didn’t want to mess up three more by arresting their mother on weak grounds.
As it happened he was worrying for nothing; twenty minutes later Aidan called him back.
“She’s not there, Guv. We hammered on the door for ages, then Reggie got the estate manager to let us in and the whole flat looks like the Marie Celeste. All the clothes have gone, and probably most of the kids’ toys. There were a few old teddy bears lying around, but not much else.”
Craig took several deep breaths before responding. “She’s skipped. OK, get the analysts onto the ports and airports to see if she’s scheduled to leave.”
“She’s not likely to have booked the tickets in her own name, is she?”
It was a much-needed dose of common sense.
“Good point. Get Davy to circulate whatever photos of Ellie Rawlings he can find to every airport and port on the island. She’s got three kids, so she shouldn’t be hard to spot. Tell him Dermot Canavan might be with her as well.”
They should know that for sure by the end of the night.
Craig hung up not holding out much hope of finding the elusive Ms Rawlings, but at least he was beginning to form a picture in his mind. An alcoholic Dermot Canavan, they’d seen the truth of that in the Bazaar’s society pages, had entered rehab nine years earlier trying to get clean and met a drug addicted Ellie Rawlings. What had probably been lust at first group-therapy session looked as if it had stood the test of time, although he was curious about Canavan’s second stint in rehab in twenty-eleven, Maybe all in the lovers’ garden hadn’t been so rosy, or perhaps something else had happened to knock Dermot back? But whatever had happened then, the romance had stayed the course; Rawlings had a new baby and the odds were that it was Dermot Canavan’s child.
The detective frowned, puzzled. So why not move Rawlings and her kids down to the family estate? Why had Dermot allowed his baby and its mother to stay living in the squalor of the Demesne?
He enlisted Liam’s help in answering, outlining all of his thoughts and then waiting for pearls of wisdom to drop from the D.C.I.’s mouth. Eventually they did, with Liam’s usual, “you’re an eejit”, prefacing them.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Is it? Enlighten me then.”
“OK. Well, first, good catch working out the whole Rawlings-Canavan romance thing. You made a few chancy leaps there.”
Craig was tempted to take a bow but knew it would be greeted with derision, so he waited to hear what the D.C.I. said next.
“But there’re two big reasons the wench couldn’t have gone down to live at the castle. One, big brother Niall probably wouldn’t have wanted her there; council estate gold-digger and all that rubbish. And two, if she’d moved down to Tyrone then who would have run the Belfast end of the County Line? Dermot’s only had a place in town for two years and the pregnancy probably explains that move.”
He was right. Dermot Canavan had probably wanted, maybe even needed if things were to be kept secret, to maintain his family’s position in rural society, and that meant being seen around the family’s country seat. He’d probably stretched his freedom as far as was possible without Niall stopping his allowance, by getting an apartment in Belfast, but leaving home completely might have been frowned upon. Also, who would have kept an eye on their teenage mules? Had Ellie Rawlings and Dermot Canavan been running a County Line together, each watching a different end of the chain?
But Niall had to be up to his eyes in it as well, as demonstrated by him asking Jeannie Underwood to remove the deer heads from the murder scene four days before. Could the adult prints on the heads be his? Or was it Dermot who had orchestrated the killings? Time would tell.
Craig glanced out the window to give his brain a rest and noticed a roadside sign. “We’re near Ballygawley. How long to Killeter?”
“Another hour at least. I’ll need to stop to refuel.”
It reminded Craig that they hadn’t eaten in hours. He was shocked that Liam hadn’t moaned about it, until they stopped at the next petrol station and he noticed a handful of chocolate wrappers stuffed down the side of the driver’s seat. Still, they were in Liam’s car, so he could be as untidy as he liked.
As they went in search of a snack Dermot Canavan’s souped-up BMW was only twenty miles behind them on the motorway. If the detectives had had any inkling of what was going to greet its driver when he arrived at Killeter, they would have forgotten all about their stomachs and got straight back on the road.
****
Dublin Airport Hotel. 9.30 p.m.
Ellie Rawlings had never been good at waiting, not in queues, not for her portion to be served at dinner, and not for men. But then she’d never been in love before. Oh, yes, she’d thought that she was, several times when she was in her teens, starting with the popstar in the poster on her wall and muscle-bound TV spor
tsmen, then progressing to a real live wavy-haired boy across the classroom when she’d hit sixteen. But that sort of love had only been romantic fantasy, and then later hormonal teenage lust. Sadly, it had been lust that had got her pregnant the first two times, the fog of infatuation with her layabout ex only clearing when she’d picked up after him once too often.
Then suddenly she’d seen him, really seen him, as clearly as if someone had held a magnifying glass up to his faults. She’d also realised that they weren’t balanced by anything she even liked about him, never mind loved.
So, she’d searched for love elsewhere: in a bottle at first, until the thumping heads and puking had made her fall asleep with her second baby in her arms and almost suffocate him by rolling over. That had sobered her up instantly, and not just then, alcohol had gone by the wayside for good. But she’d still needed a little ‘mother’s helper’ to see her through the grimmest days, or at least that’s what the Demesne’s pound dealer had called cocaine back in the day.
And it had worked a treat. Up her nose or rubbed on to her gums, coke had kept her wide-eyed and fast thinking, and even though she hadn’t always made much sense on it, at least she’d never fallen asleep on her kid again. All’s well that ends well then, until of course it didn’t; when her stash had emptied out she’d got cranky and then desperate, yelled at her kids and considered doing all sorts of dumb things just so she could get money for her drugs.
Then her GP had offered to send her to rehab, the place where she’d finally got clean, not even taking an aspirin for nine years now. It was also the place where she’d fallen in love for the first time. Finally. The real deal. A permanent warm glow even in winter, smiling when she was alone, doodling their names together entwined in a heart, all that corny stuff; the sort of schmaltz that would have made her cynical fifteen-year-old self say it was crap and want to throw up, but they’d been together nearly a decade now and she still felt just the same.
That was why she and Dermot had finally had a baby together, the ultimate sign of commitment till death do they part. Milly Canavan, their daughter, heir to serious money someday. But that wasn’t what Ellie Rawlings was all about now, and because she wasn’t she was sitting in an airport hotel with her older kids playing tag around her, feeding Dermot’s child and praying that she heard from him soon.
He must have told Niall that he was leaving by now, and he’d promised her that he wouldn’t go down to Tyrone, so any minute now her phone would ring and he would arrive to join them, and tomorrow morning they would all leave together on the plane. She closed her eyes tight and murmured the words over and over, “please, Dermot; please, Dermot; please, Dermot”, in the closest thing to a prayer that she had said for years.
She was a good mother and a good partner, but Ellie knew she wasn’t a good person, no-one good had ever dealt drugs. There was no point reasoning that they’d given lots of lost boys a home in the forest, or that she’d acted as their mother at times and Dermot always as their dad, like it had been some perfect Walton Family model of a home. The fact was that the boys had given them what they’d wanted, money, money and more money; the money that she was using to buy her way out now.
She gazed down at her small daughter, attempting to rationalise things; if the boys hadn’t met them then they would still be on the street, starving, dead, or even worse, used by some pimp to satisfy the perverted needs of grown men. At least they’d been spared that, and in the early days when there’d just been a few of them, you could almost say they’d all had fun.
Then Niall had got involved and stepped up recruitment, allowing the boys to organise themselves into a tribe where the strong ruled the weak, and where they were all ultimately subject to him. Her and Dermot’s contacts with them had become less frequent, squeezed out by Niall, until finally they’d retreated to run the Belfast part of the County Line and left big brother to run his rural empire in whatever way he’d seen fit.
She shuddered, remembering the day eight years before when Dermot had told her of another boy’s death, clambering back into a whisky bottle for almost a year to deal with the guilt of it, even though he hadn’t even been there. It had taken a long time to pull him back from the edge, but she’d finally got him dry again, until just a few days before when he’d found out about another one and she’d seen him staring longingly at a bottle again. It was time for them to get out and let Niall run things as he wanted to until he ran himself into the ground, and that was what she intended to do.
No, she wasn’t a good person, and she knew that by her parents’ hellfire and brimstone version of religion she was already damned, but as she laid her daughter down to sleep, Ellie Rawlings prayed fervently that with the man she loved beside her she might still get the chance to change.
****
Babel Rooftop Bar, Bullitt Hotel. Belfast. 10 p.m.
Maggie watched absentmindedly as the chilled champagne began to fill her glass, listening as its bubbles fizzed and pinged, racing each other on their way to the top. It was a celebration of sorts; one tinged with guilt at what she had had to do to warrant it, and discomfort that she had managed it so well.
Toby Foster was no longer her deputy, his future now back in the newsroom with cub-reporters years younger. She could still see the moment that she’d told him in her mind’s eye. His initial disbelief, and then astonishment at what he’d called her ‘overreaction’ to what he’d done, followed by the agonisingly slow dropping of the penny as he’d realised that she had meant what she’d just said. Once the coin had hit the bottom his next words had been furious; “I’ll go and see Greg.” As if she could ever have delivered his demotion without a sanction from the top.
She’d watched him leave with her eyes tearing up, for all the reasons listed and a couple more; what might have happened to her career if Davy hadn’t alerted her? And more importantly, what might have happened to Craig’s murder case?
The rationalisation had helped enough to enable her to phone a girlfriend and hit the nearest cocktail bar, but the journalist sincerely hoped that her newfound skill at axe dropping would never need to be used again.
****
The M1 Motorway West.
The trip to Tyrone thus far had been punctuated by Craig taking phone calls, and the universe saw no reason to halt that trend just yet. No sooner had Liam’s Ford swung out of the rural café and back on to the motorway than Craig’s mobile began to buzz. In light of the call-free thirty minutes they’d had whilst eating dinner Liam speculated that someone upstairs might have deliberately given them peace to eat. If so, he wasn’t convinced that it was necessarily a good sign; it suggested that they were soon going to need their energy for some serious shit.
The call that Craig was taking neither added to that feeling nor assuaged it, but it did suggest that something hinky was afoot. Liam could only hear one side of the conversation but Craig’s, “What time at?”, and, “They managed it despite the alarms?”, followed by, “Send the CCTV across to Davy ASAP”, said that something irregular had just occurred.
Liam asked who’d called as soon as the exchange ended and was startled by Craig’s reply.
“It was Des. Someone’s stolen the deer heads from the lab. He was called in ninety minutes ago because the alarms went off.”
“And he’s only telling us now?”
Craig shrugged. “He wanted to do a full search before he bothered us, in case it was a prank.”
“Which it wasn’t.” Liam had a sudden thought. “Are they still radioactive?”
“Probably, but I don’t think that will bother the people that took them, if they even know. They’re too busy gearing up for something.”
The D.C.I. gave a low, “Ohhh…” and followed up with, “you think they’re planning another killing.”
Craig nodded. “I’m just wondering who their victim is likely to be.” He frowned, concerned. “As far as we know the only new boy they’ve got is Joey Parfitt. Perhaps he’s already defied them in some way.”<
br />
Liam arched an eyebrow. “You’re assuming it will be another kid. Remember that this Ellie woman has disappeared as well, and we don’t know where to.”
A woman or a teenage boy, size-wise there wasn’t much in it. Still, Craig wasn’t convinced.
“There’s no point speculating, but stealing those heads says they’re definitely planning something. Step on it, Liam. I’m going to make some more calls.”
The D.C.I. took it as permission to put on the blue lights and sirens, dropping the latter again when Craig pointed meaningfully to his phone. The first call he made was to Miranda Hunter to check the status of the search teams. He wasn’t disappointed when she said that even the civilian volunteers had refused to go home, and everyone was waiting at the station now.
“What do you want me to do with them, sir?”
Craig thought fast. Whoever had stolen the heads would still be on the road back to Tyrone, so he could ask for them to be stopped before they entered the forest or the Canavans’ estate. But would a simple lack of props stop any planned ceremony? He doubted it. But what stopping the thief would do would be alert the boys and Niall Canavan that the police were on their way, and he definitely didn’t want that.
His mind made up he answered the inspector’s question.
“I want you to post your men in a wide circle.”
“Around the forest again?”
“No, a bigger area. I need you to cover the whole circumference of Killeter Forest, especially any entry road or tracks, and also every entrance to the Canavan estate. Do you have enough men to do that effectively?”
“If I don’t I’ll call every off-duty officer back in. In fact, I’ll do that now. When everyone’s in position, do you want them to stop people or just observe?”
“Just watch and note their descriptions, and if you get anything, send it through. But no stops and no photographs. It’s almost dark so a flash would be seen. Your team needs to be invisible: no noise, no chat and no lights. OK?”
The Running of the Deer Page 35