A Limited Justice (#1 - The Craig Modern Thriller Series) (12 page)

Not for the first time Julia marvelled how an attractive woman had married such a slug of a man. Maybe he hadn’t been such a mollusc when they’d said, “I do” but she was sceptical.

She nodded at Gerry and he reached over and pressed the tape machine into action, while she placed her lighter purposefully to one side, lining up the thick sheaf of paper in front of her, sharply. Every sheet but the top one was blank, but Burton would never know that, and the pile’s volume added to its import, which added to his fear.

“For the benefit of the tape, could you please confirm that you are Mr Paul Burton of 35, Minsk Drive, Templepatrick?”

He nodded.

“Please say it for the tape, Mr Burton.”

A high-pitched, “Yes,” squeaked from his fleshy mouth.

“Thank you. Now, do you know why you’re here, Mr Burton?”

“Because Maria’s dead?” The rise in his tone far higher than a question needed.

“Yes. But do you know why we wish to speak to you?”

Her ‘exasperated mother’ tone said he was being a very irritating child, and he immediately looked down in response, probably from years of being one.

He answered her quickly. “To help with your enquiries. That’s what the man said when he came to the house.”

Then he looked up at her, slightly more defiant. “I’d like to help, even though I really hated her.”

The last words were said matter-of-factly, with no hint that he realised how incriminating they were.

“Why did you hate her, Mr Burton?”

Julia’s voice had become calm and almost confiding. You can tell me, you can trust me, I’m your friend.

Gerry had always marvelled at her ability to control her pissed-off, cynical and angry moods when she needed something from a suspect. And to know exactly when to use them to best effect. She would be their new best friend or their angry mother until the case was cracked, if that was what it took. But then she had worked in the oxymoronic Military Intelligence; he worried about what else she’d learned there.

“’Cos you lot have no idea what a bitch she is... was. She was a cow and I couldn’t wait to be rid of her.”

It was said without any hint of irony and Julia leaned forward slightly, narrowing the distance between them amicably. Paul Burton echoed her encouraging movement, warming to his theme.

“She said I watched too much TV.”

His tone was offended, as if she’d accused him of something untrue or criminal. But his swollen torso said it was true, conjuring up a clear image of crisps and beer stored beside a TV chair.

“And she always wanted to go clubbing. For fuck’s sake, that’s what you do before yer married, to catch them, like. You don’t keep going when you’ve got a woman.”

Julia could see exactly why Maria Burton had left him, it had been a match made in the darkness. But she nodded at him understandingly anyway, her true sympathy with Maria not him.

“So would you say that you argued a lot?”

He shrugged. “Nah, I just told her to catch herself on and she went out with her mates. Suited me, until she started to hide my remote.” The sudden indignation in his voice almost made her laugh.

“Well, that was it, I threw her out. No amount of shagging is worth putting up with that.”

What a prince.

But her technique was working. Playing it hard and then soft was making him comfortable and he spoke unprompted now, encouraged by her occasional reassuring nods.

“Anyway, she moved out in April, then I saw her six weeks ago, at the solicitor. For the Nisi. She looked like shit – got fat. I’d a near miss there; she was going to end up like her Ma.”

He looked at Gerry in male solidarity against the swelling sea of female obesity. Gerry nearly choked at the idea that this obese layabout would think that the nine stone Maria Burton was fat, but he nodded in sympathetic agreement instead. He was learning from the boss.

Burton half-lay back in his chair, elbows on the table, indicating just how comfortable he was with his new best friends. Julia mirrored his postures perfectly, leaning backwards and forwards in echo. It was called neuro-linguistic programming, and it worked.

The atmosphere became increasingly amicable as she offered him tea, motioning for the constable to bring it. Her questions meandered in a spiral, gently drawing closer to her target.

So that when she suddenly slipped in. “So, Mr Burton, could you tell me where you were between 8am and 5pm yesterday?”

His response slipped out unhesitatingly, “At home, playing my computer game.”

She spoke quickly now, firing back another question after each of his replies, all of them seemingly innocuous, but each providing her with useful information.

“Oh, that’s interesting, which game are you on? My nephew’s got the new time-travel one.”

“Oh yeah, I did that one last year. I just got a zombie one. It’s awesome.”

“Was that what you were playing yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“What sort of car do you drive?”

“Volkswagen, why?”

“Lovely cars. They have satellite navigation don’t they? I’m always getting lost, so I need to get a new car with sat-nav.”

“Yeh, they’re cool. Sat-nav’s OK if you need it. Mine’s always on but I never use it. I don’t get lost.” He smiled at her patronisingly. “Aye, but you’re a woman; you’re always crap at directions.”

He looked almost obscenely proud of his basic skill and Julia smiled. He’d just given her what she needed. It was always on.

Suddenly she pulled herself bolt upright, fixing him directly in the eyes. He hadn’t even noticed her triumphant look, until her sudden shift of posture surprised him into sitting hastily upright to match.

“Mr Burton, you’ve been most helpful. May we check your car and your computer game, to help eliminate you from our enquiries? And we need a blood sample for D.N.A. Is that OK?”

She was speaking so quickly that Gerry could see Paul Burton struggling to catch up; from her relaxed conversational style two minutes earlier, to the confrontational abruptness now.

“What enquiries?”

“Your wife’s death, Mr Burton. It wasn’t an accident. She was murdered.”

“What? Murdered? I thought she was killed at work.”

His small eyes widened for a moment in some type of emotion, and then almost as quickly they narrowed again, into a hard squint.

“Anyway, so what? Even if she was, what does it have to do with me? I didn’t shoot her.”

Interesting. He assumed she’d been shot: true or bluff.

“She wasn’t shot, Mr Burton. She was raped and beaten to death.”

Julia pushed past his open-mouthed shock without taking a breath, continuing and accelerating.

“So if we check your computer’s timing, and your car and your D.N.A. then we’ll be able to rule you out. Shall we proceed with that? You’re fully entitled to legal counsel, but of course, you’re innocent, so why would you want it?”

They watched the emotions flitting across Paul Burton’s face: shock, competing with suspicion and denial. He was either a good actor or telling the truth, the D.N.A. would tell them which. The room fell completely silent except for the whirring of the tape and Julia held her breath, willing him to agree to the test. She could feel her body leaning forward in encouragement. Say it, say it, say it.

Burton screwed up his invisible eyes in thought, his face folding into a wet pillow of flesh. His short, fat fingers spread palm-down on the table, leaving their sweaty likeness on its shiny surface. He breathed in and out heavily through his mouth, wordless in what passed for deep thought. Until finally he opened his eyes and looked dully at Gerry, nodding acquiescence. Julia breathed out softly, only then realising that she’d been holding her breath for the whole time.

She kept her voice steady, retrieving the friendly tone of five minutes earlier. “Could you say it please Mr Burton, for the tape?”

He shrugged, in a ‘couldn’t care less’ way now. “OK, I’ve nothing to hide, I’ll give you blood.” He was either stupid or honest, and her money was on both.

She nodded sharply to the constable as she clicked the tape off, and Paul Burton was led out to the medical examiner for his D.N.A. test. Much good it would do them. Julia was convinced that the D.N.A. would only confirm what she already knew – Burton was innocent.

Slugs like him didn’t kill, not unless pressing the key on a computer would do it. All the D.N.A. would do was swop their best lead for a countywide murder hunt, and leave her with a very grumpy D.C.S.

***

Craig knew that the twelfth floor of the C.C.U. was very different to the tenth, but it still surprised him every time. It had a plushly carpeted centre framed by the outer offices of five Chief Superintendents, and an air of hush that said ‘we’re very important,’ echoed by high-level fittings and soft-toned lighting. The spacious offices were set far apart, as if anything said in them should never be overheard by their rivals, or worse, by the mere mortals in the waiting area.

The twelfth floor P.A.s wore their bosses rank, in clothes and shoes that said, ‘remember, I’m important as well,’ and Craig found it hard to imagine that Nicky’s radical fashion sense had ever fitted in here, even with her one hundred words per minute.

But she’d been Terry Harrison’s P.A. for five years before his post split between Belfast and Limavady. He’d tried very hard to keep her, her 10-year-old son the perfect excuse for staying in Belfast. She’d told Craig she’d been glad to get away, and she’d found him the perfect replacement in Susan Butler.

Susan Butler was a suitably groomed grey-haired, fifty-something woman, maternally plump with grown children. Her beige Jaeger suit toned perfectly with the carpeted background. She’d been Mrs Harrison’s choice for P.A. as well, the perfect antidote to office sexual tension. Mrs Harrison knew her husband’s proclivities very well.

If Nicky was a sparky Mazda, then Susan Butler was a sedate Bentley of a woman. She was sitting now outside a door bearing the name ‘D.C.S. Terence Harrison’ bowed over a shiny desk angled across the door like a barrier. Craig imagined her dying rather than allow an unauthorised entrant. She split her time equally between Limavady and Belfast, travelling with the D.C.S., willingly living the devoted split-time existence it caused, hinting at a back-story of loneliness at home.

She was looking busily through some files on her desk as Craig approached, and she looked up at him with cool friendliness. “Ah, Detective Chief Inspector Craig. Good morning.” She enunciated each syllable of his rank perfectly, as if it gave her pleasure.

“Good morning, Mrs Butler.”

“Detective Chief Superintendent Harrison will see you in one moment.” adding importantly but irrelevantly. “He’s on a call with the Metropolitan Commissioner. Please take a seat”.

He was gestured to a small coffee area of low leather armchairs and a central marble slab. A perfect fan of ‘Ulster Bazaars’ lay on the table, as if someone had nothing better to do but set them out, and Craig thought that it would take a very brave man to disturb the design.

“May I get you a coffee? Black with sugar, yes?” God, she even remembered what he drank; he needed one just like her at home.

“Yes, perfect. Thank you.”

He perched on the edge of a chair, knowing that leaning back would sink him into a dip from which he’d never emerge, and took the proffered coffee gratefully. Then he lifted a magazine defiantly, less interested in the content than in the disruption she’d feel. He was rewarded by an immediate arch of her eyebrow.

Her large phone consul was showing a red ‘call-engaged’ light, with another yellow one flashing ‘call waiting’. So eventually, Craig gave in and sank back into the leather, resigning himself to a long wait. She finally lifted the receiver twenty minutes later, said ‘yes’ into it quietly and then nodded at him regally, indicating that he should go in.

D.C.S. Terry ‘Teflon’ Harrison was so named because he was one of the smoothest political operators in the police, with the hair to match. Craig hadn’t had many problems with him so far, although his predecessors had warned him that it was only a matter of time. They’d also warned him never to let Harrison meet Lucia. He had an eye for pretty women twenty years his junior and once he saw them, his pursuit was relentless. If that happened, Craig’s protective urges would do Harrison serious damage, boss or no boss. It would be career ending, and he’d do it anyway.

Harrison was relaxing in an identical coffee area in one corner of his office, and Craig groaned inwardly, certain that the low-slung chairs were for the short D.C.S.’s deliberate inconvenience of taller men. He beckoned Craig over to sit.

“Ah Marc, good morning. Have a seat. Coffee?”

He indicated a silver sputnik already gurgling, so Craig accepted, grateful after his heavy night’s drinking with John. Harrison talked as he poured, pushing the milk and sugar towards him, his uniform buttons glistening and flashing, like the maître D’ of a high-end Milan cafe.

“Well now – two things. First, the case you caught yesterday, I need you to brief me on that. And then this.” He reached over to the desk behind him, lifted a sheet with the familiar header of ‘press release’ and pushed it towards Craig. He scanned it while sugaring his cup heavily.