Silent Night: An absolutely gripping crime thriller Read online

  ‘Give me a drowning any day, or even an RTA, but fires,’ Slattery moaned as he opened the door of the Ford. Nine times out of ten, fires were down to faulty wiring, but they still had to come for a look-see to rule out anything more.

  ‘Well, we don’t get to choose,’ Grady said, but they both knew, fires were the worst.

  ‘Neither did they.’ Slattery was thinking about the poor sods that had perished inside. The place was a wreck; hard to imagine what it was like before the blaze, though it hadn’t been exactly plush, he could tell that much. Slattery stood for a moment, taking in his surroundings. The cottage snuggled at the end of a narrow track, everything about it was overgrown, from tall evergreen trees to the grass that licked greedily from all sides. The cottage was old and crumbling, with little beyond wind chimes and a few scattered toys around the door to stake a claim on the present decade. It gasped with a neglected mournful air that had as much to do with the desolate temperament seeping from its very fibre, as it had with the peeling paint and dirty windows. The smell of smoke and death didn’t help the place either, but Slattery had a feeling that the rot had set in long before the cottage caught fire. They made their way up a narrow road, already a couple of locals had gathered. The fire boys confirmed the worst for them and they stood around taking in the debris that remained of three wasted lives.

  ‘You can have a chat with them in a while,’ Grady said to Slattery, and he nodded towards a small band of onlookers drawn to the cottage despite the melancholic circumstances, or maybe because of them. They stood in a shallow semi-circle, their expressions a mixture of grief and morbid curiosity. Perhaps he knew Slattery would prefer to stand and take statements from them than go anywhere near the charred cottage.

  ‘Inspector.’ They both turned to see a tall copper-haired detective making her way along the track behind them. She was attractive, no doubt, but there was an air of independence to her that sat at odds with her soft curves and pink cheeks. This was no shrinking wallflower. Here was a girl, Slattery suspected, who could take care of herself long before she ever had to. ‘Inspector.’ She was out of breath, like a woman who’d just run a marathon. ‘I’m Sergeant Locke.’ She stuck her hand out between Slattery and Grady, perhaps unsure which of them was which.

  ‘Good to have you here,’ Grady said, shaking her hand, and turned towards Slattery. ‘Slattery, you can bring her up to speed.’

  ‘Lovely.’ Slattery managed to curb the irony when he caught a sideward glance from Grady that warned him he was not to create any trouble. ‘Right, we’re going in, you might as well tag along.’

  It was the smell more than anything. It filled up your senses, so you were surrounded by death. There was no getting away from it with a fire. Slattery knew even the most-hardened cops dreaded this kind of case. You never really saw the victim. Of course there would be photographs; smiling, sun-filled days where the person was vibrant and vigorous. But, in Slattery’s mind, most fire victims remained that – just images – with the burnt remains a half-cooked gruesome reminder of the vulnerability of beauty, youth and grace. We are all flesh and bone, he thought, and eventually we rot and when we do, it’s not pretty.

  As they neared the cottage, Slattery spotted two uniforms, staking out crime-scene markers. The forensic boys had begun their work and Slattery heard them cursing the damage done by the fire first, and then the water.

  ‘Inspector, you didn’t take long.’ The fire chief nodded towards the two detectives. He was young, probably his second time overseeing an incident of this nature. He was shorter than most of the fire fighters, but his eyes were keen and Slattery had a feeling that he would work day and night to figure out what had happened here.

  Coleman Grady held out a hand. ‘It’s Grady and,’ he nodded towards his colleagues, ‘Slattery and Locke. Well, what have we got?’

  ‘It’s not good, I’m afraid. Three bodies, two kids and the mother, still in their beds. We have names, Anna Crowe, her son Martin and daughter Sylvie – that’s the baby, but no official ID yet. She was an artist. The place is full of burnt canvases.’

  ‘Shit…’ Slattery said, his hand partly covering his nose and mouth. The gritty air cut into his lungs, this was far worse than he’d imagined, and he cast an eye in Grady’s direction. They needed more manpower; they’d need experienced officers to work this with them alongside the uniforms who could take on the grunt work. Slattery groaned, he hated new people foisted on him, almost as much as he hated fires.

  ‘Shall we…?’ Bennett asked, and led the way towards the front door. Inside, it was as black as Slattery had expected, lit only by the raw white of two bulbs running from the fire engine outside. There was still the sound of hissing from the dying fire, still the odd creak of wood, settling into its new form. The cottage was the traditional layout, with the addition of a lean-to kitchen and bathroom at the rear. They walked into what would have been the living room first. Off this room, at either end, were two bedrooms. They would leave those until last. In what Slattery supposed was the children’s bedroom, he could hear Professor Rafiq Ahmed gently advising the photographer which particular angles to take of the victims. The place was filled with the disintegrated vestiges of large canvases and littered throughout the sitting room were the remains of various jars of flowers, all charred now, their water dirty, only ash petals left behind. The kitchen was probably the least damaged, which was unusual in domestic fires. Still, Slattery could make out some of the book spines heaped in a sooty corner, mainly art and travel, not a cookbook in sight. Amazing what could survive.

  ‘We’ve checked the electrics; all seems fine there. Nothing to suggest the fire was electrical,’ Bennett said.

  ‘That’s unusual.’ Locke bent to examine the remains of a mobile phone from beneath the kitchen table.

  ‘Better not to touch anything,’ Slattery barked – his voice so loud it startled Locke.

  ‘This is not my first time out, sergeant.’ Iris’s voice cut across the room icily.

  ‘Anyway, there were no open fires in this grate recently, no chip pans, no signs of cigarette smoking – really, if there was a question…’ Bennett looked around the room, as if it might give up its secrets if he stared long enough at its blackened walls.

  ‘So… what can you tell us?’ Slattery asked.

  ‘From the damage left, I’d say there were two fires. The bedrooms are badly burnt. Here, well, it’s mainly smoke damage. Apart from the lighter stuff, it looks like it was just about to take off, when we arrived.’ He exhaled deeply. ‘My feeling is, someone set those two rooms alight… and that makes it…’ He couldn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Murder,’ Rafiq Ahmed said softly from the doorway. ‘Our victims were shot, one after the other – a clean, probably silenced shot in their sleep. From what I can see, they may not even have known there was an intruder.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Slattery said before he stormed out the door.

  Chapter Two

  The incident room was buzzing by four o’clock. Already the hum of expectation zipped through the place, the odd nervous ripple of laughter, the light banter. It all halted as soon as Grady stood before the group. They were here for one thing only – to get whoever had killed the Crowe family while they slept. Grady nodded across at June Quinn. She was putting up the last of a series of ten by eights taken out at the site. They’d managed to get a decent snap of the family too, all smiling faces. The image made Iris gasp. She knew this woman, Anna, well, she’d met her at least, somewhere, sometime. The intrusion of a ringtone edged past her memories. It was gone – but there was a sliver of familiarity about Anna Crowe, she was sure of it. Iris stepped closer to the case board. Anna had been an attractive blonde woman and her two young kids, a boy Iris would put at about seven, all gap-toothed and freckled, and a small baby, wrapped against the cold Irish summer of last year.

  ‘Settle down now…’ Grady’s voice boomed across the room. ‘Okay, you all know why we’re here. Earlier this morning, the local
fire brigade got a call out when a neighbour raised the alarm. This small cottage,’ he put his hand beneath a photograph of the smouldering ruin, ‘was…’

  ‘Lit up like a bloody Christmas tree,’ Slattery cut in.

  ‘Yes.’ Grady nodded across to June Quinn.

  ‘Three bodies were found in the cottage, each with a gunshot wound. The bodies have been identified as Anna Crowe and her two children, Martin and Sylvie Crowe. Mary Higgins is acting as family liaison officer. She’s with Anna’s husband – Adrian Crowe – now.’

  ‘They were… estranged?’ Iris had nabbed a desk, front and centre.

  ‘Yes. Fairly recently from what Higgins has been able to get from the husband, he’s in a pretty bad way at the moment,’ Slattery answered. The reality was they’d got nothing out of him yet. The FLO, Higgins, had gleaned as much from the family photographs around the walls and the contact numbers in a neat book by the kitchen phone as she had from Adrian Crowe.

  ‘We’ll be going out there a little later to have a chat with Mr Crowe.’ Grady looked down at his notes. He nodded to Slattery.

  ‘The house itself, as you can see from the photographs, wasn’t in great condition to start with. Forensics are going through the place still, but with the fire damage and what have you, we’re not expecting a whole lot.’ Slattery took up the chipped mug before him, examined its contents, seemed to think better of actually drinking from it and set it down again.

  Next up, Grady went through the site. It was so far off the beaten track, it hardly seemed worthwhile to check out Traffic, but this was a murder investigation, so they couldn’t leave any stone unturned. Grady put a big burly guard called Westmont onto all of the approach roads to Kilgee. ‘Sergeant Locke, you and Slattery will go and see Mr Crowe this afternoon.’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘June, I want you to check up on who’s around the area with form. The rest of you, I want you out there, split between Kilgee and Anna Crowe’s former neighbourhood. Mary Higgins found Anna Crowe’s old diary. It has a few contact numbers – June, maybe you can take that on as well. Put addresses to the numbers and Slattery, you can dole them out. If anyone needs anything, I’ll be in my office, putting together notes for our new superintendent.’

  Iris couldn’t be sure, but she had a feeling that she’d never met anyone who got on her nerves as much as Ben Slattery. She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel, willing herself not to make a comment about the fumes of alcohol that settled into any space he filled. Everything about him set her on edge, from his lazy gait to his bitter retorts. Too long on the job. He was a man eaten up by simmering cynicism and it didn’t take a genius to see that he was trouble on a road to nowhere. They were going in opposite directions and she hoped with equal speed. She decided she would not let him see he had rattled her. She put her mind, as forcefully as she could, to considering everything she’d heard about the victim’s husband. There wasn’t much, but surely they would learn more when they met him.

  On their way into the estate, they’d passed by a couple of uniforms doing the rounds. So far, they were picking up very little. The victim had kept herself to herself. Adrian Crowe lived in the semi-detached house he’d bought with his wife some ten years earlier. The house faced onto a fair-sized green where kids could play football or mess about on their bikes. It was all nice kids here, Iris thought.

  ‘Amazing what a couple of thousand can buy. An entire childhood, when you think about the kids who live in the Cloisters,’ she said to Slattery as they pulled up outside the Crowe family home.

  ‘Yeah, well, people do what they can,’ he said flatly. ‘We can’t all be born with a silver spoon in our mouths and have doors opened for us because of who our father is,’ he grumbled.

  ‘That’s not…’ Iris had felt the tension in Slattery from the moment they met. There was no point arguing with him, the only way to deal with relics like Slattery was to show them she was here on merit. It bristled all the same, this old certainty.

  ‘Let’s just get this done,’ she settled on instead and banged her door a little too loudly, cursing when she saw the satisfied look in his eyes.

  The house inside was understated, in various shades of cream and off white. The walls here weren’t big enough to carry canvases as large as the ones found in the cottage. It felt somehow sanitised, as if Adrian Crowe had cleaned out every scrap of his wife and children as soon as they’d left the house. There was a tidiness about the place that bordered on compulsive and which was completely at odds with the ramshackle little cottage captured in grey photographs and included in their case packs. The only thing out of place was a small cream business card that sat propped on the hall table, as though left for the specific attention of someone who might call. Iris picked it up as she passed and slipped it into her pocket.

  Mary Higgins led them into a small sitting room. She explained that they’d just had tea and Mr Crowe had received medication from his local GP to try to calm him down. The tablets remained sealed on the low coffee table in front of him. Iris knew, when Crowe held out his hand that he did so mechanically; he was weirdly composed, his eyes dead as a taxidermy salmon, glassy and empty.

  ‘Can you tell me, Mr Crowe, how did you find out about the fire this morning?’ Slattery asked, taking out a battered notebook that looked as worn out as its owner. Iris watched Crowe – she couldn’t help but feel he was a bit of a weasel of a man. He was in shock. Still, she couldn’t help but feel as if somewhere between how he looked and who he was there was a disconnect and the man would never be fully at peace with himself.

  ‘One of the men in the village, John Kiernan, I think, he was the first to spot it and he rang the fire brigade, then he rang me.’

  Iris knew that this man would feel many different emotions over the next few months, but today’s emotions and Crowe’s reactions were vital to the investigation. In far too many murders, the victim is killed by the person closest to them, that’s murder 101 – every green officer knows that much. Even if he wasn’t the killer, being the person closest, Adrian Crowe could reveal more from his reactions today than he’d ever realise he was giving away.

  ‘So you drove immediately out to Kilgee?’ Iris leaned forward in her seat. Her hands were spread out across her lap, her body language completely open and relaxed, inviting Adrian Crowe to share his worries, share his thoughts. Slattery had hardly spoken to her on the journey out. He reeked of booze and fags and she wondered how on earth a dinosaur like him still took up valuable space on a murder squad. All the same, she had a feeling that he knew his stuff; and he seemed a little too chummy with the DI to make an enemy of him yet.

  ‘As soon as I got the message.’ Adrian’s voice was flat. He had no use for words now.

  ‘We’ll need to talk to your work colleagues,’ Iris kept her voice soft, ‘just to get a timeline up and running. It’s standard procedure. Can you give us someone we can contact, a number, anything?’

  ‘Sure.’ Crowe took his phone from the pocket of his jeans. The clothes he’d been wearing earlier had already been taken for forensic analysis. His wardrobes had been searched. They all knew the score. Wouldn’t make it any easier for Adrian Crowe, especially if he was innocent. Crowe passed the mobile across to Iris. ‘It’s a work phone, I won’t be needing it for the next while. Maybe you could drop it in to them when you’re there?’

  ‘Of course,’ Iris said. It’d give them not only a list of calls, but also a location for Crowe’s movements over the time frame they were interested in. ‘When did Anna move out to Kilgee?’ Iris asked gently. In the coldness of the room the words almost sounded like a lament.

  ‘She’s been gone a couple of weeks now. Started out as a creative thing. She wanted to be surrounded by nature, said she couldn’t work here any more, the traffic, the airport, too many kids playing outside, what have you.’ He waved his hand about, as though the sounds were rushing through the quiet room. ‘We converted the attic into a studio; you can see it if you want. But she said it wa
sn’t what she needed.’

  ‘Was it what you wanted?’ Iris asked, gentle again.

  ‘Is it what any man wants? I love my wife very much, detective. I wanted her and my family here with me. The last place I wanted them was back there in the middle of nowhere, with God knows who or what lurking about the place.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Slattery cut in.

  ‘Look at what happened to them. I told her this could happen.’ Crowe’s body began to shake once more, sobs overtaking his torso so his head and neck seemed to wobble maniacally out of sync with the rest of him. ‘Some weirdo has been sending her flowers since she moved out there, been watching the place too, I think, but I couldn’t get through to her.’

  They had seen the jars and jars of flowers, still left intact in the sitting room of the cottage. ‘Wildflowers?’ Slattery checked, to be sure they were not just a haul from days trawling through the woods and fields that surrounded the little house.

  ‘Yes, wildflowers, bunches and bunches of them,’ Crowe said wearily.

  ‘Do you know who this guy was?’

  ‘Of course I knew who he was; she was convinced he was watching over her, protecting her somehow, like her guardian angel.’ He sighed, a hollow empty sound that said far more than any words could. ‘She’d give him food and cups of tea, encouraging him. I warned her. Too late now. Too late for all of us.’

  It seemed colder tonight than any night before this week. The ground was damp here, the leaves heavy and black, winter wet; there’d be no drying them back to the crisp autumn carpet of only days ago. Soon darkness would be upon them and he looked forward to this – it was where he belonged, in the half-light; maybe she’d known that too. He crouched down low, waited while they did what they needed to do. They’d taken her away earlier in the day, on a stretcher, her face covered now, the only sound a protesting wheel, which screeched even as it tried to negotiate the rough ground about the cottage. He tried hard not to think of what was beneath that cover. The kids came after, but he hardly noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the ambulance that stood waiting. This was goodbye to Anna, he knew that now. He should have left then. Gone home, for a time at least. He hadn’t eaten since early morning – now his stomach rumbled, but that was nothing to the ache that had overtaken his whole body. Was it loneliness or guilt? He wasn’t sure. He’d have plenty of time to figure that out now. A lifetime, a lifetime more than Anna and her kids were left with.