“Now, Mrs Parker… I know you’re shocked, but we need to talk to you as fast as we can to kick off proceedings.”
“Kick off what proceedings?” Michelle directs the question towards the peelers, despite still looking at her mum’s hollow face.
No one answers her.
“What proceedings?” she huffs, becoming more perturbed.
The detectives don’t take their eyes off her mum. Finally, after what seems like hours, her mum squeezes her hands and looks up at her.
“It’s your da… Sweetheart, they’ve found him.”
Michelle’s heart sticks in her throat. She gasps and is just about to break into a smile when she sees the hurt in her mum’s eyes.
“It’s not good news, honey… He’s dead.”
Chapter Eight:
When the last slice of pepperoni pizza remains, McNally nods towards DC Fleming, who had been eyeballing it, and stands to clear his throat. The excited gossip disperses, leaving only the occasional loud chew and sip of a coke can.
“Right, guys,” McNally steps over to the giant board which takes up the majority of the back wall in the incident room. The only thing on it is a large picture of Aaron Parker’s professional political shot, one used in papers and social media when he went missing, as well as his campaign posters on lampposts throughout the city. “Now that we’re all fed and watered, can I start by asking if anyone here worked this case three years ago?”
Half a dozen hands shoot up, including Ferguson’s.
“Okay, Ferguson, would you like to lead on this one?”
Smacking his lips and drying his hands on a greasy napkin, Ferguson stands and fidgets with his collar.
“Well, DI Quigley took charge of the investigation when Parker’s wife, Nuala, called it in. It was the 19th of June 2016. Parker had been out the night before at some political charity do in the Waterfoot Hotel. He never made it home. CCTV from outside the hotel sees him leaving on foot, but no other camera in a two-mile radius of either the hotel or his home picks him up. That includes busy roads like the Crescent Link or Limavady Road, depending on which direction he went in. His phone was switched off whilst still in the immediate area of the hotel, and was found by the hotel’s gardener two weeks later in a surrounding bush.
“We interviewed all guests at the hotel, both for the function and those just staying, but no one even saw him leave. CCTV sees him leaving at five minutes after midnight, two minutes after his phone stopped giving off signals. The rest of the party started dribbling out shortly before 1am, but he was, presumably, long gone.”
“Did he have any known enemies?”
McNally knows the answer to this question, but doesn’t want to sound incompetent by deliberately leaving it out in front of his new team. The room fills with dry sniggers, even Ferguson snorts.
“’Enemies’ isn’t how he would put it, sir. Sure you can’t get that far in politics without… Er… Ruffling a few feathers, should we say?”
“But he never really got any threats, did he?” Fleming says, the sides of his lips still stained with tomato sauce.
“Aye, he did. Sure, the Jacks threw a stone through his living room window a few months before he went missing, the ol’ doll tol’ us,” chips in O’Connor.
McNally nods, he hadn’t heard that in England.
“Awk that was years before, and sure we spoke to the underground organisation over in the Waterside and they said they had no idea what we were talking about,” Fleming bites the top of his pen.
“Of course they would, ye dick,” O’Connor rolls his eyes, “they’re hardly going to plead guilty to the whole thing.”
“So,” McNally stands before there’s a full altercation between O’Connor and Fleming, “were Ardóimid questioned?”
“Yes, sir, of course,” Ferguson resumes his seat, “but, again, feigned innocence.”
“And were there any known… Problems,” McNally closes one eye as if he flinched, choosing his words carefully, “between either party and Parker?”
“Well, we know that Parker publicly criticised Darrell Boyle, current leader of the Ardóimid party, for wanting a United Ireland, despite previously being health minister,” Ferguson sighs, “but Boyle has never admitted being part of the underground organisation. Parker always talked about how detrimental he would be to the NHS if things were to escalate. But, then again, he was against privatising the NHS, which is what Billy Taylor’s Ulster Jacks party are campaigning for. And we all know that man has no problem with the rumours that he’s high up in the underground scene.”
Everyone in the room nods reminiscently, even McNally. Billy Taylor is someone they’ve been trying to catch red handed for years, but it always seems to only be his cronies they bang up. Their loyalties to him as hard as nails, with potential lighter sentences or immunities ignored when they’re dangled in front of them to spill who the brains behind the operations were. He’s the reason for so many of his men being housed up in Magilligan Prison, but they’re not in short supply. Every time the PSNI seem to lock one down, another three pop up.
“Well, that’s just a single part of his manifesto,” McNally shakes his head, “were all avenues checked?”
“Not to sound disrespectful, sir,” Ferguson looks around the room, giving McNally the impression that he drew the short straw and has to supply this message, “but you never met DI Quigley. He was a hard nut, nothing got past him. We interviewed everyone we could think of, it still bothers him that this case was one he couldn’t crack.”
“And where is he now?” McNally had heard about the famous DI Quigley, silently thanking him for leaving his job behind for McNally.
“He’s up in Belfast, sir.”
“Has he heard about this?”
Ferguson looks around the room, but all faces look back at him blankly.
“Well, we’ll speak to him first thing in the morning. Hopefully by then we’ll have a few more answers from forensics. In the
