The Grass Tattoo (#2 - The Craig Modern Thriller Series) (10 page)

“Sure.” Craig turned briskly back to business. “What are we going to look at?”

He was puzzled. They were outside the ballistics’ lab, not John’s usual habitat. John smiled at him conspiratorially, back in professional mode and feeling much more comfortable.

“Well, you know that I sent the bullet up to the north-west for typing yesterday?”

“Did they manage it?”

“I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But in Des’ absence I thought I’d have a go at the trajectory myself.”

Craig looked at him, surprised. It wasn’t like John to leave his comfort zone; Natalie was obviously good for him.

“Go on.”

“I’ve watched him do it plenty of times, so I worked-up the bullet’s pathway, using the injuries, angle of entry and wind speed, and ...”

Craig interrupted him kindly. He was enjoying John’s preamble but he had a meeting with Maggie Clarke at ten. She’d caught him on his way back from Limavady, furious after Harrison’s press briefing. He’d wasted all their time by calling them in when he’d nothing to tell them, just as Craig had predicted. Now she was holding Craig to his deal so he’d grudgingly allocated her thirty minutes this morning.

He urged John on. “Can you show me, John? You know I’m better with images than words.”

John startled, looking at his watch. They’d been talking for thirty minutes. “God, is that the time? Sorry.”

Without further delay, he threw open the lab’s heavy white door. The ballistics’ lab was very different to the dissection room, with an area set aside for test-shooting bullets to match barrel markings, and another full room of laptops and screens, winking randomly. John moved quickly to a laptop in the corner.

“I’ll give you a quick run through the simulation. Then tell you about the bullet.”

“Thanks.”

He flicked on a laptop as they spoke and it booted up, to display a simulation of Irene Leighton’s shooting on the wall plasma.

“The simulation allows for the wind-speed recorded at City Airport yesterday morning, so it should be accurate. We’ve also allowed for the victim’s height and weight, and the fact that she dropped forward when she was hit. There was no backward transit of the body on impact that we can determine - that’s confirmed by the lack of blood spatter.”

His words were clinical but the sadness in his eyes wasn’t. Craig nodded him on, thinking.

“I’ve also taken into account the size and shape of the entry wound, which was slightly angled, consistent with her turning to her left just before the impact. It’s common for people to turn to their dominant side and I believe that she was left-handed”

Craig interrupted, nodding. “Her husband confirmed it.”

“Good. There was no exit wound because the bullet embedded in the fifth rib anteriorly, but even if we didn’t have the bullet the type of entry wound made it likely to be a .33 calibre.” He paused and looked at Craig. “It’s likely that it was travelling at over 800 metres per second, Marc.”

“What?”

“It was a sniper round. This was a professional job.”

Both men were quiet for a moment, while John let Craig take the information in. Irene Leighton, housewife and mother had been the victim of a professional hit.

“Using the speed and angle of entry, we know the likely location of the shoot-site.” He flicked on a map of the area surrounding Stormont, and indicated. “I can get it more accurately for you, later.”

Craig stared incredulously at the leafy streets around the Stormont Estate. Someone had shot Irene Leighton from one of them.

Something struck John. “Marc, there’s no way that she would have walked voluntarily into an open space to be shot. She’d been kidnapped and tattooed; she must have known that they weren’t going to let her go. So why would she go without much more of a struggle?”

“But how would she have known, John? They were taking her to Stormont for God’s sake. A public place, somewhere that she was completely familiar with from her husband’s job. They might have told her that they were releasing her.”

“Bastard.”

“Bastards. There was more than one of them.”

“How do you know?”

Craig spoke quietly. “One of them must have taken her to the lawn by the steps and kept her there, long enough for the other to shoot.”

“Do you think that the proximity of Carson’s statue is significant?”

Craig startled, realising that it hadn’t occurred to him. But, even though John had said it, his gut still said no. She’d been deliberately walked past the statue, towards the main steps to assembly buildings.

He shook his head and they fell silent, neither of them wanting to relive Irene Leighton’s final moments. John focussed hard on the screen in front of him, tapping gently at a key, and the simulation started to readjust, displaying a trajectory that curved from the shot’s likely origin.

“For the angle of entry to be correct she had to be facing the steps from the Massey Avenue entrance. The left side of her back would likely have been towards the killer, but for some reason she must also have turned to the left.”

“Do you think she saw something at the last moment?”

“Well, she was looking in the direction of the shooter.”

Craig looked down, sadly. “I think that she turned to plead with the person who brought her there. Then they forced the note into her hand as she was dying.”

“God.”

They sat looking at the screen for a moment, imaging their victim’s helpless pleading and knowing that it had been ignored. Anyone callous enough to kill her like that would never have been moved by her tears. Eventually John broke the silence.

“The bullet is a .338 Lapua Magnum, Marc. In clear weather conditions it can travel at around 800 metres per second.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Neither has anyone else. Lapuas are sniper rounds, usually shot from one of two rifles: SAKOs or A.I.s. SAKOs come from Finland and the one that would fire this round is most likely to be the TR-42 SAKO model. The A.I. is from a British Manufacturer called Accuracy International. Both were used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 338 is the only calibre designed specifically for sniping. Its range is about 1600 meters, and in the right shooting conditions, 2,000.”

Craig interjected. “That means we’ve a range of possible shooter locations. Can you mark the outer limit on the map?”

John adjusted the map’s gray scale to colour and drew an arc outwards from Irene Leighton’s body in the likely direction of the bullet. The farthest point took them over a mile away from Stormont, close to a multi-storey car-park on Vernon Road.

Craig thought for a moment. “We’ll search the area and hope that we can still find something after 24 hours. Particularly in the car-park, the height of its roof would make it a good vantage point.”

“The bullet’s markings don’t match anything that we have on file, but we’re linking up with the Irish and UK forces and Interpol.”

Craig looked at the screen incredulously. Could there be a Finnish hit-man in Northern Ireland? He was even more convinced now that Irene Leighton’s death was linked with her husband’s political career.

He moved quickly, heading for the door. “Thanks, John. Get the ballistics to Davy please. I’ve a few leads to follow up and then we’ve a full briefing at five if you can make it.” Before John could answer yes or no, he was gone.

***

The door of the luxurious modern office swung open and Joanne Greer looked up from her phone-call, irritated. She waved her husband away angrily, putting her hand over the receiver when he ignored her.

“Can’t you see I’m on a conference call?”

“I don’t care. Cut out of it for five minutes. I need to talk to you.”

He was in one of his stubborn moods and she knew that there was no arguing with him. She interrupted the speaker at the other end and excused herself out of the four-way call, turning on him furiously.

“For God’s sake, Declan, that was Buruli in New York. I’m trying to bring a huge land deal here. It looks terrible you interrupting me like that. Anyway, what’s so damn important that it couldn’t have waited until tonight?” Then she looked at him horrified. “God, tell me you haven’t crashed the car?”

“It’s not about your stupid car.” He enjoyed saying it, just to see her outrage. She loved that car so much he thought she’d like to sleep with it. Unpleasant images entered his head and he shook them out vigorously.

“It’s about that dickhead, Joe Watson. Apparently, he’s going to pull the Horizon project. I’ve just found out from my mole at Stormont.”

“He can’t - the Approval in Principle’s already through.”

“He can, and he doesn’t care. The exact quote was ‘Minister Watson knows that the A.I.P.’s through, but he’s looked at the project’s return and doesn’t think that it’s the best use of public money’, end quote. I told you that this would happen, Joanne. You should have pushed it through before Burgess retired. He was much more pleasant.”

She looked at her husband, astounded by his naiveté. Thank God, one of them knew which end was up.

“Only because he was OK with taking backhanders. Watson is too bloody honest. Damn.”

Declan Greer had been prowling around the office as she spoke, but her last sentence made him stop still. He turned towards her urgently. “What do you mean backhanders? What did he need to be paid for? And who paid him?”

She looked at him pityingly. He was worse than a trophy wife and even more useless; at least one of those would cook the dinner.

“To cover up the dummy companies I’ve put in place. And I paid him of course. Don’t be dim, Declan.”

He stared at her astounded, as if some alien inhabited his wife’s designer body.

“What do you mean dummy companies? What for?”

“To make money of course.” She slowed her speech down patronisingly, as if speaking to an infant. “We needed the dummy companies to siphon off the funds.”

“What?”

She watched, bored, as realisation finally dawned on him.

“You’re stealing public money! You’ll be caught. And why? We have all this already.” He gestured around her carpeted office, aghast.

“Because as Wallis Simpson once said, you can never be too rich or too thin. You’re being tedious now and I’ve work to do. We’ll talk about this later.”

“No we bloody won’t. What about Horizon? When is the building due to start?”

Joanne shrugged and laughed, sarcastically. “It isn’t. Don’t you understand? There is no Horizon, darling. It only exists on paper. The money has been going into accounts that I’ve set up. And now Watson is interfering.

Bob Leighton’s been worse than useless; he was supposed to be handling Watson. That’s what I paid him for. Damn, damn, damn.”

Her anger grew with each expletive, and her husband stayed quiet as her outrage overtook his by miles. He knew that she’d need someone to blame now, even though it was all her own fault. And he would do. So he sat down and waited.

Joanna and Declan Greer had always been a golden couple, even by Northern Irish standards, where there were a lot of high-income families floating around. Mostly floating around Belfast 9, aptly nicknamed Belfast’s ‘Golden Mile’.

They’d met in London in the eighties, when she was a trainee barrister doing her pupillage, already tipped for the top someday, and he was studying accountancy at one of the ‘big six’. Joanne had assessed him like a portfolio investment and decided that it was a suitable match. She had no illusions about marrying for love, this was business, and Declan would make a very suitable escort for a rising barrister. But he’d actually loved her.

They’d done the shacking-up thing for a while, in the little flat in Chelsea that her father had bought for her twenty-first. Until her parents had pushed for the ‘big day’, expressing a sudden urgent desire to see their daughter floating towards the altar wearing a meringue, or they’d disinherit her.

They’d done the deed at her parent’s home church near Bangor, squeezed out a couple of puppies and then moved to the London Toast-Rack, the meshwork of parallel Victorian terraces off Wandsworth Common, costing a few million each. They’d both missed Chelsea but particularly Joanne, she was a true ‘sonly’, the London slang for Toast-Rackers excusing their child-burdened geography by saying it was ‘sonly’ five minutes from Chelsea.

The kids had been farmed out to a string of nannies with names like Felicity and Jemima until Declan opted to work from home, unable to bear their small sad faces any longer. Then Joanne had set about the much
more important business of making millions, and she’d been good at it too. But her career as a criminal barrister had its drawbacks, a few too many gangsters on speed-dial for one thing, and Declan eventually used the excuse of the children to relocate them to Belfast.

God, but she’d moaned. She’d spent the first few years racking up her gold status on the Belfast-Heathrow run. It had cost them dearly for her to meet her friends and have facials in Brompton Cross, but it had been worth it for the sake of peace. Until eventually, she’d worked out that there was big money to be made in Northern Ireland, and Belfast became her new best friend. He had always appreciated Northern Ireland’s rural beauty, and the fact that the grammar schools had saved them a fortune in school fees.