The Grass Tattoo (#2 - The Craig Modern Thriller Series) (3 page)

“I’d say so, Liam. She could have lain down in this position herself I suppose...but the way the grass is clasped in her hand, and torn out from the earth...”

“How do you know it’s torn?”

Craig interjected. “The roots are still on the grass, Liam. The abrasions on her hand could indicate a fight or a struggle. Can you see her nails, John?”

He leaned forward and gently opened the woman’s left hand, finger by finger, carefully removing the strands of torn grass. Her nails were long and oval, painted with a tasteful, beige varnish, and he wondered if she’d deliberately matched it to her blouse, touched by the small detail. Her death had been so obviously unexpected.

The nail on her left index finger was half-torn from the cuticle and he opened her palm to examine it. Then he gasped audibly. Craig leaned forward quickly to see what had caused the reaction. John was very familiar with death, so whatever made him gasp had to be something unusual. It was.

In the woman’s small, hurt hand lay a clear zip-locked bag, like a miniature freezer bag. Inside it lay a square of white paper. Winter held the bag up to the newly-appeared December sun, examining it from every angle. But the view yielded no new information - the paper was folded tight.

He lifted a pair of tweezers and opened the bag slowly, cautiously removing the square. Then he laid it on a sterile glove, unfolding it gently. A tiny figure ‘10’ was written on the white paper, in black ink.

The three men looked at each other, puzzled. Then, with a quick look, Craig asked him to examine the other hand, but there was nothing. No broken nail and no hidden note. Just a few thin blades of grass.

Craig broke the silence. “10? 10 days...10 thousand?”

Liam looked blankly at him and then at the paper, uncharacteristically silent. Finally John interjected. “There’s no rigor and she’s not cold yet, despite the weather. I think she died in the past hour, Marc.”

Craig’s dark eyes narrowed, they’d just missed her murderer. Whoever had called Maggie Clarke had phoned from nearby.

John Winter turned the woman’s body over carefully and the three men saw her face for the first time, making everything more real. She was lightly tanned and blue-eyed, and her shoulder-length fair hair was lightly streaked with grey. A pretty woman; in a mummyish way that made her pleasant, rather than striking. She looked as if she’d been nice.

Craig looked away from her face sadly and noticed a fine gold cross on a chain around her neck. Below it hung a longer chain, holding a tiny, engraved bracelet, identical to one that his sister Lucia had worn as a baby. It was marked clearly with the initial ‘R’. It wasn’t Irene Leighton’s.

He thought for a moment. In his experience there were only three reasons for murder; love, power or money. Everything else was just a combination of those. He wondered which one applied to Irene Leighton. John’s soft baritone broke through his reverie, signalling the woman’s removal to a discretely parked mortuary van, and onwards to his Saintfield Road lab.

Craig looked at his watch, scanning the area quickly. The morning work-crowd was gathering rapidly outside the Estate’s gates, and from the look of some of their suits, it probably included politicians
. Damn.
Then he realised that Liam was talking.

“The Doc says there’s blood on her chest, from a wound. The C. S.I.s will need another hour or so here, but they’d better get their skates on, apparently we’re stopping five thousand civil servants getting to work.” He snorted. “You’d think they’d be grateful.”

Craig half-smiled at the comment, already preoccupied with questions. He waved the investigators on vaguely, thinking. Why would anyone have killed this innocuous looking woman? Was she Irene Leighton? And if so, was her husband involved in her death? The husband always had to be the first suspect. But she’d been left outside the seat of Northern Ireland’s parliament, so could there be some political aspect to her killing? And why tell a journalist to call the police, when you could just call them directly? Unless the murderer wanted publicity for some reason...

John interrupted his thoughts. “I’m going to the lab now, Marc. We’re not busy so I’ll do the post-mortem this morning. If you call down about two, I should have something for you.”

“I’ll find the husband, boss.”

Craig nodded, sighing. “And I’ll call Chief Superintendent Harrison, tell him that an M.P’s wife might be dead, and then listen to him try to find ways to look important.”

Chapter Four

Joe Watson was knackered and it was only 10am. Last night’s meeting of the Strategic Finance Foundation had been a late one, and he wasn’t young any more.

Added to that, he hadn’t been able to get near his office until ten minutes ago, because the police had locked the whole place down, with no bloody explanation. He threw his briefcase tiredly onto the desk and yelled for his special advisor, ready to shout about something.

Michael Irwin popped his head around the office door warily. His boss was a politician and they were tricky at the best of times. But S.F.F. had gone on until midnight, so tired would be added to tricky today.

He fixed on his best smile and entered quietly. “Good Morning, Minister. May I get you something?”

“A gun would be good, after last night.”

Watson was leaning red-faced over his laptop, and by the way that his fingers were tapping, Michael knew that he wanted a cigar. He’d only quit yesterday. Again.

“Sorry, no guns. Would a white coffee do instead?”

Watson smiled grudgingly. “It’ll have to, I suppose.”

Irwin turned, and had nearly made good his escape, when Watson added to his burden. “Then find me the Commissioner for Public Conduct. We need a little chat...”

***

She smoothed the expensive body lotion down her tanned legs and smiled to herself. He’d been quite good on Monday night, not that it mattered; it wouldn’t make any difference to the outcome. Still, if you had to do something it was always better if it wasn’t repulsive, and he’d certainly been energised about something.

She pulled on her designer lounge-suit and brushed her soft blonde hair, one hundred times, just like her mother had taught her, stopping mid-stroke to remember her. Her worn brown hands, even though she was young, romantically entwined with their father’s. Her soft, kind smile when she looked at them, as if they were everything important in her world. And more than anything, her strength. Never crying, not even when they came.

Kaisa looked at herself in the mirror. Her hands were white and smooth, but when she smiled, it wasn’t soft at all. And just like her mother, she was strong. Always.

***

Bob Leighton, or The Right Honourable Robert Leighton, Member of Parliament, as he preferred to be called, was sitting in his West Antrim constituency office, bored and angry. Bored because his next meeting was on road drainage, and angry because of the previous evening’s Foundation meeting, and the latest threatening phone-call, received four hours earlier. He was getting fed up with them now.

He had plenty of ideas on how he could make his day more tolerable, but only one of them was available now, so he walked speedily to the door, checking that his secretary was busy outside. Then he locked it, reached into his desk drawer for the small tinfoil wrap, and sat down eagerly on the dark-brown sofa in the corner.

He placed the foil on the coffee table, unfolding its edges cautiously, careful not to spill any of its contents. Then he took a credit card and a ten-euro note from his pocket, and began his favourite ritual. He spread and chopped the white powder rhythmically with the card’s edge, then rolled the note into a tight funnel, with one end at his nostril and the other poised to inhale. He’d always known that Euros would prove useful for something.

He inhaled sharply and waited for the chemicals to hit his brain. The buzzing in his ears made him momentarily deaf and his head fell back against the sofa in slow motion. Then the familiar warm, tingling sensation spread first through his arms and fingers, and then flowed like water through his thin thighs, arousing him as it passed.

He closed his eyes in pleasure for a moment, imagining her dancing between his legs, moving sinuously back and forth, up and down, while he slipped high-value notes into her G-string.

A knock on the door pulled him harshly back to reality. He rose slowly and reluctantly, his legs weak, and opened it just a crack. His young secretary’s wary face appeared.

“Your 10 o’clock is here, Mr Leighton”

Shit.

“Oh. Alright, Sarah, I’ll be right out. Give me a minute.”

He closed the door too quickly in her face, and hurriedly scraped the remaining powder back into its wrapper, running a wet finger across the residue and rubbing it into his gums for one quick, final buzz. Then he prepared himself to face the most boring men in Antrim, and talk about the drains.

***

They’d got halfway through the surveyor’s report when Sarah rescued him, or so he thought. Until Marc Craig and Liam Cullen entered, flashing their badges and ensuring that their visit was common knowledge in Antrim by lunchtime. Leighton’s hackles rose angrily. He had enough of the local cops without Belfast’s heavies barging in.

“You should have made an appointment, Chief Inspector, instead of interrupting an important meeting. The Chief Constable will hear of this.”

Craig had intended to deal sensitively with Bob Leighton. After all, the man had just lost his wife, whether he knew it yet or not. And Craig believed firmly in ‘innocent until...’

But he’d just had a ten-minute phone-call listening to Terry Harrison’s unctuous self-promoting, severely straining his courtesy. Plus, the politician’s overly-bright eyes had alerted him to his drug habit on sight, so his natural politeness was already tempered with suspicion.

“Mr Leighton, please sit down. We have some news for you.”

They’d agreed in the car that while Craig told Bob Leighton about his wife, Liam would watch his reaction, so Liam was watching the scrawny M.P. very carefully now. They’d both seen his flushed face and eyes when they’d entered and now Liam could see white powder inside his nostril, knowing that Craig was at the wrong angle to catch it. The man was on coke, and untidily at that, and it was only 10.30 in the morning! Liam had a grudging respect for his stamina.

Leighton was still talking. “What sort of news?” Then alarm crossed his face, and what he said next surprised them both.

“Kaisa? Is Kaisa alright?”

Craig said what they were both thinking. “Who is Kaisa, Mr Leighton?”

“My nanny.” The look on their faces told Bob Leighton that he’d slipped, and he tried to cover it quickly, digging an even deeper hole. “My son Ben’s nanny, he’s three.”

Embarrassment made the M.P. hostile, and his next words were nearly a shout. “She’s new here, OK. Is she all right?”

It told them a lot about the Leighton’s marriage, and made the man in front of them more likely to be a killer than a victim. But he was still innocent, until...

“I don’t know anything about any Kaisa, Mr Leighton. But...we have found the body of a woman...” Leighton’s eyes widened.

“We believe that it may be your wife, Irene.”

Bob Leighton stared at him, uncomprehending. So Craig restarted, softly. “We need you to come with us...to help with the identification.”

The politician didn’t move at all, his expression unchanged. In shock? Then he surprised them both, by laughing, hard.

“Don’t talk rubbish, man. My wife? Load of nonsense, she’s fine. She’s at her mother’s in Fermanagh. Look, I’ll call her now.”

He reached quickly into his jacket for a mobile, and pressed some keys, until Craig could see ‘Irene’ dialling. It rang out with no answer. Leighton just shrugged.

“She’s out shopping somewhere. She’ll be in touch when she sees that I’ve called.”

Then he rose again, angrily. “You should check your facts before you frighten people.”

He really didn’t know what they were talking about, or was pretending that he didn’t. Craig motioned quietly to Liam and he reached into his pocket, withdrawing an envelope full of photographs.

“Please sit down again, Mr Leighton.”

“Now look here, this has gone on long enough.” But the look on Craig’s face told him to sit, so he did, grudgingly.

Liam selected the least gruesome picture from the envelope and placed it slowly on the desk. Leighton looked at the picture in front of him and his mouth opened slowly, then he froze, immobile. The room fell silent and for a moment none of them moved, until Craig finally lifted the photograph gently from the desk, certain that the man had seen enough.

Then, completely without warning, Bob Leighton banged his head hard on the desk, again and again. Until blood started to trickle from his nose and smear across his mouth, and his lower lip ripped open. Liam grabbed him before he knocked himself out, and Leighton emitted a single deafening yell, several seconds long. Then he sat rooted to his chair, staring ahead, the blood dripping freely down his face.

Craig watched him for a moment, puzzled, re-thinking his earlier quick assumption about the nanny. He could spot pretence in a heartbeat, and Leighton wasn’t pretending. He was genuinely bereft, so why the concern for this Kaisa? Maybe it was just kindness.