A Box Full of Darkness (Wilson Book 5) Read online

  Reid finished her drink and stuck her hand in the air. Every male head at the bar looked in their direction.

  Wilson was still smiling at the reaction to Reid’s hand in the air when the door of the bar burst open and Kate McCann entered. Too much of a coincidence, he thought as Kate strode in their direction. Wilson had seen that purposeful stride before, and prepared to reap the wind.

  ‘You bloody bastard,’ Kate said as she stood above them. ‘We’ve been apart a wet week and already you’re getting into someone else’s pants.’

  Wilson could see that every eye in the bar was turned in their direction. ‘Calm down, Kate. Why don’t you sit down and have a drink? Professor Reid and I are discussing the Mallon and Lafferty case. She’s helping me obtain copies of the autopsy report.’

  ‘My God, but you’re quick off the mark,’ Kate said. ‘I find you skulking here in a bar you never frequent, sitting with a woman you’ve been sniffing around since she arrived on the scene. And I’m supposed to believe that this is just business. Don’t insult my intelligence. Helen was right about you. Not only are you an insensitive pig, but you’re also a serial philanderer.’ She turned and looked at Reid. ‘I was in your boots once. I was one of the ones that he cheated on his wife with. I should have known better, but he told me that he was reformed.’ She turned back to Wilson. ‘You make me sick. I curse the day I ever came back to this accursed country.’

  ‘Please sit down, Kate,’ Wilson said. ‘Everyone in the bar is looking at us and I came here for a quiet drink, and not as part of the entertainment. We can discuss this rationally if you would calm down and have a drink.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have a drink with you and your girlfriend if you were the last people on earth.’ Spittle flew from Kate’s lips.

  Wilson could see that she was fighting back tears. He wanted to stand up and hold her but he was afraid that given her emotional state, it would only exacerbate things.

  She leaned forward and picked up his pint of Guinness from the table. ‘You bastard,’ she said and threw the remnants of the Guinness into his face.

  Reid leaned forward and picked up her drink.

  Kate slammed the pint glass back on the table. She turned on her heel and stormed out of the bar. There was a scattering of applause from some of the wags at the bar.

  The barman came to Wilson’s table and proffered a towel. ‘You’ll be needing this,’ he said simply.

  ‘I think my friend will be needing another drink also,’ Reid smiled.

  Wilson took the towel and started to clean himself off. Most of the Guinness had hit him in the face and thankfully his shirt, except for the collar, was relatively untouched.

  ‘Your ex really does know how to puncture the mood,’ Reid said.

  Wilson was wondering how Kate had managed to turn up in McHugh’s. Someone had to have told her about his arrangement with Reid. Kate had arrived loaded with buckshot and ready to shoot. So she not only knew that he was there, she knew the time and that he was with a female companion. There were only two possibilities, either his phone was bugged, or his office in Dunmurry was. He was willing to bet it was the office. But how did the trail lead from there to Kate? It was unimaginable that Sinclair or Jackson had some connection to Kate. Perhaps neither one was involved. He wished Kate had calmed down and he could have discovered who had passed the message to her.

  The barman arrived and laid a pint of Guinness on the table. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said. ‘Best piece of theatre we’ve had in here in many a long day.’ He smiled and departed.

  ‘So,’ Reid picked up the pint and handed it to Wilson. ‘I think you need some of this immediately.’

  He took a large slug and set the glass down gently on the table.

  ‘Hell hath no fury, and all that,’ Reid said before sipping from her glass.

  ‘Totally out of character,’ Wilson said. ‘Kate is the coolest cucumber I’ve come across. Every since the miscarriage, she’s been someone else.’ He thought for a moment of the period when she had left the hospital. She was pretty normal then. It had really started to go haywire when her mother arrived. She must be on something, he thought. She hadn’t mentioned visiting her GP. What the hell was going on?

  ‘Earth to planet Wilson,’ Reid said trying to break him out of what appeared to be a reverie.

  ‘Sorry, I was running through something in my head.’

  ‘I had great hopes for this evening but I can see that it’s going to be a hot-bath-and a-bottle-of-Chardonnay night. The look of guilt is plastered all over your face. I thought you philanderers had hearts of stone when dealing with your conquests.’

  Wilson smiled. ‘I think my reputation is a little out of line with the reality.’

  ‘Pity, I was actually hoping that you were a philanderer.’ She was more than a little pissed off at Kate’s intervention. She wanted him so much, that sometimes it actually hurt, and that was a strange feeling for Stephanie Reid. She could love them and leave them as easily as any Don Juan. Somehow she thought that things would be different with Wilson, if she ever landed him. She was elated when she heard that McCann and he had broken up. It was the chink in the relationship that she had been hoping for. However, she didn’t like the look on his face. It wasn’t just guilt. He really loved the damn woman. It was going to take more than one evening to wean him off her. ‘Your famous autopsy,’ she said.

  ‘You found something?’

  ‘Back then, there were no computers, so all the records were on paper. I’ve found that autopsies were done, but it’s going to need a bit more digging to come up with the actual record. There’s a storeroom at the morgue and it’s full of boxes. They keep talking about digitising the records but they never seem to find the money. I need to find a student with some time on his or her hands who is willing to wade around in a mountain of paper.’

  ‘I’ll pay,’ Wilson said.

  ‘What’s so important about these two murders?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She laughed. ‘You don’t know and yet you’re willing to pay from your own pocket for evidence that should be freely available.’

  ‘There’s something going on that I’m not exactly up to speed on. Spence and I were cut adrift because HQ was supposedly setting up a serious crimes unit. Except that’s not happened. I’m in some corner in a Mickey Mouse task force that’s located in a sort of Nissen hut in Dunmurry. Both my chief superintendent and sergeant are former Special Branch officers with zero investigating experience. I’m beginning to get the feeling that their only job is to keep an eye on me.’ He put up his hand to preclude a question. ‘Don’t ask me why. It’s just a gut feeling. I’m investigating a very specific crime from the beginning of the 1970s. With Spence gone I have no back up. Perhaps I’m being set up, but for what?’

  ‘It sounds a bit Kafkaesque. Maybe you should think of moving on.’

  ‘It was on my mind, but where would I go. I don’t exactly identify with the job but it’s all I know.’

  ‘Why not become a rugby coach? Try commentating on TV, you have the looks and the background.’

  ‘It’s not me. I’d be suicidal in a few months. This is something I have to work through.’

  Reid finished her drink. ‘What happens next?’

  ‘You’ve got a hot bath and a bottle of Chardonnay waiting at home.’

  ‘There’s room for two in my bath.’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  She stood up and picked up her jacket. ‘I’ll have a student search for the autopsy report. Is £10 an hour OK?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  “We’ll see each other again soon?’

  ‘Aye, very soon.’

  She turned and he watched her as she strode from the bar. He saw the admiring looks she drew from the male group and wondered what they would think about him refusing her offer. He already knew. They’d think he was mad.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Jock McDevitt was burning the midnight oil in the Chroni
cle’s newsroom. He seldom worked into the evening, but he was checking into a white-collar crime involving a prominent politician and the sale of assets managed by a state body in the south of Ireland. It wasn’t Jock’s story, but he had an interest in it and he had a feeling it might turn into something big. Politicians trousering large sums of money sold newspapers. He had already filed his piece on the Cummerford trial. He still had the front page, but he could feel that there was a level of legal fatigue in both his editor and the public. What he needed was a nice sex angle? But Cummerford or McComber, or whatever she preferred to call herself, was apparently uninterested in sex. He had questioned the entire staff of the Chronicle and nobody, either male or female, had been involved with her. That was pretty strange. Newspapers were incestuous with journalists generally thrown together and it normally didn’t require a Christmas party for members of staff to try it on with a colleague. He needed some new tag to keep the public’s interest boiling, and to keep his by-line on the front page. He looked around the newsroom. Most of the old hands had filed their copy and were probably ensconced in some watering hole getting a reasonable buzz on before returning to their billets. The majority of the people in the newsroom looked half his age and were being paid buttons in order to gain entrance to the exclusive club that was the National Union of Journalists. That begged the question: what was he doing there? If he were honest, he would have said that he was hiding. McDevitt didn’t consider himself a coward, but he wasn’t fearless either. He had always been slight. Even at school he had been the runt in his class, and the object of a certain amount of bullying. He didn’t partake in any sport, and spent most of his time in the school library. He carried the term “swot” as a badge of distinction not as a term aimed at humiliating him. He intended to use his degree in English to teach, but after a bout of teaching practice involving a certain level of abuse from students, he decided on journalism as his future profession. He thought of himself as a John Simpson or Martin Bell. He was going to be a crusader, taking on causes and exposing them to the public. However, reality took over and he ended up edging his way up the journalistic ladder by writing human interest pieces for the inside pages. His big break came with the explosion of violence in his native land. He didn’t have to travel to Bosnia to see broken bodies, or meet mass murderers. He could do both within easy reach of his home. So, he fell into crime journalism rather than chose it. His one great gift was his ability to listen. His supporters, of whom there were only a few, would say that he could draw blood from a stone simply by listening to what it had to say. He managed to bridge the sectarian divide and had contacts in both camps. He had listened to the murderers describe in detail how they had carried out their callous crimes, and he had returned home to empty his stomach into the toilet. Why then was he hiding in the newsroom of the Chronicle? He had the distinct feeling that he had poked something very dangerous that was now awake and aware of his existence. He spent the previous six months researching the Circle, a group of influential people who were the ones that effectively ran the province. He was sure that this group were responsible for rampant corruption and possibly more heinous crimes. The only person he had told about this research was Ian Wilson. He was extremely careful to avoid direct contact with the Circle and to keep his research at arm’s length. Thus far, he felt he had managed. If it wasn’t the Circle he was hiding from, it had to be the feelers he put out for Wilson in relation to Sinclair and Jackson. He looked at his watch. It was almost ten o’clock. The night shift was already on and it was time for him to leave except he was reluctant. The one and only Mrs McDevitt had flown the coup ten years previously leaving him to warm his own bed, and learn how to use a microwave. He occupied the ground floor of a bay windowed house in Agincourt Avenue. The upper floor was rented long-term to a professor at Queen’s University who happened to be gay. McDevitt loved his space and the thousands of books it contained. He would dearly have loved to meet someone to share the space with him, but despite several abortive attempts, he had been alone for the past five years.

  One of the young sub-editors who McDevitt didn’t really recognise passed by and tossed an envelope onto his desk. ‘That idiot who distributes the mail must have dropped this on my desk by mistake,’ he said and passed on quickly.

  McDevitt looked at the retreating staffer, another young blood in a hurry to get somewhere he might never arrive. He picked up the envelope. It was a standard brown office A4 envelope with no markings apart from his name written in block letters on the front. He laid the envelope on the desk in front of him, and ran his hands over it confirming that there was no bulk within. Anonymous sealed envelopes were apt to leave the recipient blind if opened in haste. He removed a letter opener from a penholder on his desk and slit the top of the envelope. Nothing happened. He turned the opening away from him and prised it open carefully. When it didn’t spit a noxious substance into the air, he turned it around and looked inside. There was a single sheet of paper inside. He tipped it out on the desk and saw that it was a photograph that had been printed on photocopy paper. He picked up the photo and looked at it. It depicted eight men standing in front of three saloon cars. They were aged between twenty and forty and wore clothes that might have been fashionable thirty years previously. The photo was black and white, and grainy. It was difficult to make out the faces exactly. Each man held a weapon of some kind in his hand. Several held Sterling machine guns, while others had pistols and one held what looked like a shotgun. McDevitt took a magnifying glass from the drawer of his desk and looked at the photo again. Even magnified, the faces were still indistinct. He tried to see whether he should recognise one of them but they were complete strangers. He turned the paper over. In one of the bottom corners the letters ‘MRF’ were neatly written in small block capitals. He stood up and went to find the young sub-editor. The man was nowhere to be found. He would have to wait until tomorrow to follow up. His interest was piqued, but his twitchy feeling was intensified. Now he knew that his gut was right to warn him. He had certainly poked some animal to life. He only hoped that it wouldn’t cost him his life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Helen McCann’s private jet landed at Belfast International at exactly 8 a.m. She descended the stairs directly into a 350 Mercedes and was driven straight through VIP passport control. At 8.45, she was sitting in the dining room of Coleville House enjoying breakfast with her host, Philip Latimer. A 42-inch flat screen TV was set up in the corner of the room, and they had just watched a recording shot on a mobile phone of Kate’s entrance into McHugh’s Bar the previous evening.

  ‘Our man was sitting at a table fifteen feet away,’ Latimer said. ‘It’s amazing what you can record these days. The picture and sound are so clear.’

  She hadn’t particularly enjoyed seeing her daughter’s distress. Kate was brought up to be strong. The video showed that she had a weakness. It was necessary to eliminate that weakness. The Reid woman impressed her. She had remained calm throughout the altercation. She was almost as beautiful as Kate. And it was apparent that she was interested in picking up where Kate had left off as far as Wilson was concerned. Helen McCann was becoming worried about her daughter. Yes, she was probably instrumental in making Kate break off with Wilson. But she hadn’t been happy when she had discovered a tube of Lorcet in Kate’s bedside cabinet. It wasn’t her idea to have her daughter on painkillers. She was aware that the aftermath of a miscarriage could involve some pain especially when you were as far gone as Kate was. However, Kate’s doctor assured her that paracetamol would have been sufficient to control the pain. Lorcet was intended for a larger scale of pain. She was beginning to feel guilty at passing on the information concerning Wilson and Reid’s meeting to Kate. ‘No one had any idea that they were being filmed?’

  Lattimer smiled. ‘Apparently they were so caught up in their own little drama to take any notice of those around them. I have half a mind to upload the clip onto Youtube. I’m sure it would go viral.’

  ‘That�
��s not our objective,’ McCann said sharply and forked a piece of smoked salmon into her mouth. ‘And anyone who puts my daughter on YouTube or any other tube without my knowledge or approval, will answer to me.’

  Latimer crunched a piece of toast noisily between an ample set of teeth. ‘I’m rather unclear as to what our objective actually is.’ Crumbs of toast sprayed from his mouth. ‘And I’m not the only one. We have established a rather complicated project aimed at one person, and our colleagues don’t really see why we should bother. You’ve neatly cleared up after the Rice screw-up. People are beginning to wonder if you have something personal against this Wilson fellow.’

  ‘Ian Wilson poses an existential threat to our organisation, take my word for it. I have never allowed my personal feelings to interfere with my business dealings, and I never will. We have been involved in crimes that would ensure that we spend the remainder of our lives in prison. We have built fortunes that must be protected. Wilson is the kind of interfering toad that might succeed in putting us there.’ Like any good spider she was adept at feeling and stirrings on the periphery of her web. For some months now she had been aware that someone had been feeling around carefully on the borders of their operations. She was sure that that somebody was Ian Wilson.

  Latimer leaned forwards. ‘I think the idea of one policeman putting at risk an organisation that has existed in some form or another for almost a century is quite honestly ridiculous. Wilson is an insignificant nobody. We can crush him at will.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’ McCann sat back in her seat. She didn’t like Latimer and she didn’t want to have him directly in her face. Her husband had taught her that one didn’t have to like the people one did business with. But it certainly helped. ‘Grant was supposed to be a fly that could be swatted at will. How did that work out for us? I haven’t seen our infrastructure arm bringing in much cash since that particular fiasco.’