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CONTENTS
Epigraph
Prologue
I
THE ALLEY BY THE FIVE ALLS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
II
THE CHURCH IN THE MOOR
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
III
THE MARINE PARADE
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
IV
THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
V
THE JACK AND HAMMER
Chapter Fifteen
VI
THE END OF THE TUNNEL
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
VII
PRETTY MOLLY BRANNIGAN
Chapter Twenty-Eight
To Leon Duke,
who leant a hand
and Mike Mattil,
who helped a poor struggler
Her mind lives tidily, apart
From cold and noise and pain,
And bolts the door against her heart,
Out wailing in the rain.
— Dorothy Parker
O, man, dear, did ya never hear
Of pretty Molly Brannigan?
She’s gone away and left me
And I’ll never be a man again;
Not a spot on me hide
Will the summer sun e’er tan again,
Now that Molly’s gone and left me
Here for to die.
— Irish folk song
PROLOGUE
THE little girl stood in her flannel nightdress holding the telephone receiver. She carefully dialed the numbers her mother always did when she wanted the operator.
A silky-haired cat at her feet arched its back, yawned, and began washing its paw as the little girl waited through several brr-brr’s for the operator to answer. Maybe they didn’t wake up until late, the little girl thought. Her mum always said they were lazy. She looked out the leaded glass window almost lost under its thatch collar to see it just pearling over with early-morning light and the moorland beyond floating in morning mist. There was a spiderweb with beads of dew between the thatch and the window. The brr-brr went on. She counted ten of them and then hung up and picked up the phone again. The cat leapt to the table to sit and watch the spider painstakingly finish its web.
Bloody operators. That was what her mum always said, sitting here at the table, looking out like the cat, over the blank face of the moor that surrounded their hamlet. The phone kept brr-ing. The veil of gray light lifted like a delicate curtain drawn back showing the far horizon where a line of gold spun like the spiderweb.
There was a click, and someone answered. Her voice seemed to come from a great distance, as if she were calling across the moor out there.
The little girl held the black receiver with tight hands and tried to speak very clearly because if they didn’t like you they’d just hang up. That’s what her mother’d always said. The cheek of them. Think they’re the bloody Queen, some of them. Her mother spent a lot of time on the telephone and slammed it down a lot.
“My mum’s dead,” she said.
There was a silence and she was afraid the operator was going to hang up, like the Queen. But she didn’t. The operator asked her to repeat what she’d just said.
“My mum’s dead,” the little girl said patiently, despite her fright. “She never died before.”
Now the operator sounded much closer — not way off across the moor — and was asking her questions in a nice tone of voice. What was her name and where did she live?
“My name’s Tess. We live in the moor.” This bloody moor, her mother had always said. She’d hated where they lived. “My mum’s in the kitchen. She’s dead.”
Last name?
“Mulvanney.”
The cat’s white fur gleamed in the newly risen sun. The spiderweb was spangled with diamond-dew, and as Tess tried to answer the operator’s questions the web broke and the spider — it was a tiny brown spider — hung on a silver thread. The cat’s tail twitched. The operator was saying they must live in a certain place in the moor. A village? And what was their telephone number?
“Clerihew Marsh,” said Tess, looking down at the dial. She told the operator the number there. “She’s in the kitchen and she won’t get up. I thought she was playing. Are you going to call the hospital and will the ambulance come?”
The operator was very nice and said, Yes, of course. She told Tess maybe her mum wasn’t dead at all, just sick, and they’d get the doctor. The operator told her very clearly not to hang up, that she’d call someone and get back to Tess straightaway.
Silence again. The operator was being very nice, but the operator hadn’t been in the kitchen and didn’t understand. The cat wore a halo of light, and the spider was repairing its web with infinite patience.
When Tess heard the operator’s voice again, she tried to explain: “I thought she was playing with my fingerpaints. We have paints at school. I thought she got the red pot.” The operator asked her what she meant. “There’s red all over the kitchen. She’s cut. It’s blood. It’s on her dress and in her hair.”
Quickly, the operator told her again not to hang up, that she had to call someone else. Soon she was back and talking to Tess in a soothing voice about things like school. Yes, said Tess, she went to school. They called it babies’ school, but she wasn’t a baby. She was five years old. She told the operator about her teacher, who looked like a toad. They talked a long time and Tess figured out why the operators hardly ever answered. They were talking to people.
The cat yawned and jumped from the table, and Tess knew it wanted its breakfast and would wander into the kitchen. “I’ve got to hang up. I don’t want Sandy — that’s our cat — to go into the kitchen.” Tess hung up.
• • •
Rose Mulvanney lay beneath the kitchen table, her legs jackknifed, her dress blood-besotted. Blood had splattered the kitchen floor, the white daub walls, and even the low, dark beam of the ceiling.
Teresa Mulvanney wondered how it had got up there. She shook and shook her head, forgetting everything as her mind drifted and filmed over. She closed her eyes and scratched her elbows. What must be happening was that she was having one of her “bad” nights; she was dreaming. It must all be paint, after all, or tomato ketchup. Her mother, Rose, had said that in films they used that. Tess, with her eyes still closed, told her mother it was all right and she could get up now. It was a game and it was all a dream anyway. Even the brr-ing of the telephone and the far-off double note that made her think of ambulances came as dark figures in fog. She began to hum a song that Rose Mulvanney used to sing when Teresa was a baby.
She forgot to feed the cat.
• • •
When Detective Inspector Nicholson and Sergean
t Brian Macalvie of the Devon-Cornwall constabulary got to the small cottage in Clerihew Marsh, Teresa Mulvanney was humming and writing her name on the white wall in her mother’s blood.
• • •
Brian Macalvie had never seen anything like it and he never forgot it. At this time he was twenty-three years old and was generally thought to be the best CID man in the whole Devon-Cornwall constabulary. It was an opinion held by practically everyone, even Macalvie’s enemies — also practically everyone. He was not fond of taking orders; he was always talking about his Scots-Irish-American ancestry and dying to get out of England; he was always getting promoted.
He worked on the murder of Rose Mulvanney even after the file had been officially closed. Three months after the Mulvanney murder, they’d arrested (according to Macalvie) the wrong man — a young medical student who lived in Clerihew Marsh and went to Exeter University. He’d been arrested on flimsy, circumstantial evidence — he’d had a heavy crush on Rose Mulvanney, fifteen years older, and, being a medical student, he knew how to use a knife. The motive was unrequited love; the evidence (said Macalvie), Nil.
During the same period, he moved in on six other cases that he felt the department was snailing along on and solved those, so that it was difficult for the divisional commander to tell him to get off the Mulvanney case. Macalvie was his own police force. When he walked into the lab, the pathologists and technicians clung to their microscopes. It was Macalvie’s contention their fingerprint expert couldn’t find a bootprint on a hospital sheet. If it came down to it, the whole department couldn’t find a Rolls-Royce if it was parked in front of the Moorcombe headquarters on Christmas Day.
Thus when the divisional commander told him to get off the Mulvanney case, that the case was closed, Macalvie dropped his ID on the table and said, “Macalvie, six; Devon-Cornwall, Nil.” He wasn’t halfway across the room before his superior’s tone changed. As long as Macalvie didn’t let the Mulvanney business interfere with his other duties . . .
“Tell that to Sam Waterhouse,” said Macalvie, and walked out.
• • •
Sam Waterhouse was the medical student who had been sent to Dartmoor prison. It was a life sentence with the possibility of parole, since there were no prior convictions and the murder of Rose Mulvanney was judged a crime passionel.
Macalvie had not hesitated to let the Devon-Cornwall constabulary feel the full weight of his personal displeasure. They had ruined the kid’s life and, possibly, a brilliant career.
And if there was one person who knew about brilliant careers, it was Brian Macalvie.
• • •
The tiny hamlet of Clerihew Marsh was nothing more than a few fat cottages huddled on either side of a curving road, giving the distorted image of dwellings reflected in a pier glass or a fun-house mirror. After the first clump of houses, so stuck together they looked as if they shared the same thatched roof, the cottages straggled a little, like a sleeve unraveling. The Mulvanney cottage was the last in the fringe. It sat by itself, windows on every side, quite visible to anyone passing.
But apparently no one had been when Rose Mulvanney was being cut with a knife. No one had seen anyone go in or out. No one had seen any strangers about. No one had heard anything. No one who knew him believed Sam Waterhouse could do such a thing.
Macalvie followed every conceivable lead — there were few enough — down to the milk-float man, and had the little wren of a woman who ran the sub-post office chirping nearly daily about the way Rose bought her food. Macalvie had browbeaten the teacher of the Infant’s School into delivering up her small quota of information about Teresa Mulvanney. Nor was he beyond using the same tactics with the odd school chum if he could collar one. The headmistress finally complained to the Devon-Cornwall police.
• • •
One of the most important persons in the case, one he had not questioned initially, was Rose’s older daughter. She’d been away on a school trip when the little sister had made the awful discovery.
She’d come bursting into Macalvie’s office, a lanky kid of fifteen with toothpick arms and no breasts and long hair. She’d stood there with fire in her eyes and yelling at him, spattering obscenities like blood on his office walls. Her baby sister, Teresa, had been taken to hospital. Teresa was catatonic. All she did was lie on her cot, curled up like a baby, sucking her thumb.
It was as though Macalvie had been sitting in a warm bath of his own infallibility (it never occurred to him he wouldn’t come up with the answers), and this kid had come along and pulled the plug. She got so hysterical she slammed her arm across the stuff on his desk, sending papers, pens, and sour coffee cups all over the floor.
He never solved the case; he never forgave himself; he never saw the kid again.
Her name was Mary Mulvanney.
Twenty Years Later . . .
I
The Alley by the Five Alls
ONE
SIMON Riley never knew what hit him.
That was, at least, the opinion of the medical examiner called to the scene by the Dorset police. The wound in the boy’s back had been administered very quickly and very efficiently by a knife honed to razor sharpness. The pathologist agreed and added that, given the angle of the downward thrust, the knife had been wielded by someone considerably taller than Simon. That didn’t help the Dorset police greatly, since Simon had been a twelve-year-old schoolboy and was wearing, at the time of his death, the black jacket and tie which constituted the school uniform. That the killer was at least a foot taller would not be particularly helpful in establishing identity.
The boy lay face downward in the alley by the Five Alls pub, crumpled in fetal position against the blind wall which was the pub’s side facing the alley. Scattered around the body were a ten-packet of John Players Specials and a copy of Playboy. Simon had been indulging in every schoolboy’s twin sins — smoking fags and looking at naked women — when the killer had come up behind him. This was the construction of Detective Inspector Neal of the Dorset police, and there was no reason to think it inaccurate.
It was the kitchen girl at the pub, opening the side door of the Five Alls to toss a bag in the dustbin, who had been unlucky enough to find him on that awful evening of February tenth. She had come in for some stiff questioning and had had to be sedated.
The Five Alls was a tucked-away place on a Dorchester side street. The squinty little alley where the boy had been found dead-ended on a blank wall. For Simon Riley’s secretive pastimes, it was well located. Unfortunately for Simon, it was just as well located for murder.
TWO
RILEY’S. Fine Meat and Game. Superintendent Richard Jury and Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins looked through the shop window at their own reflections superimposed over the hanging pheasants. The shop was (a sign announced) licensed to sell game. A young man and an older one were serving a queue of women who were armed with wicker baskets and string bags. From the description given Jury, he took the older man to be Albert Riley himself, the boy’s father. It was two days after Simon’s body had been found and one day before his funeral. Jury was a little surprised to see the boy’s father working.
Apparently, best British beef was in strong demand and short supply, given the way the drill-sergeant eyes of the line of women followed Jury’s and Wiggins’s progress to the front of the queue. There were mutterings and one or two astringent voices telling these two interlopers where the end of the line was just in case they were blind.
When Jury produced his identification, the young man’s face went as white as that part of his apron which was still unblotched. Then he turned to the master-butcher, who was defatting some pork chops with swift and measured strokes. It was an unpleasant reminder of the autopsy performed on his son. Riley’s knife stopped in midair when his underling turned him toward the Scotland Yard policemen.
Riley handed over the pork chops to the youth as the women behind Jury and Wiggins passed the information along like buckets of water in a
fire brigade. Scotland Yard. Jury realized that Riley’s fine meat and game might be even more popular today; murder usually had that effect.
• • •
Simon’s father wiped his hands on a cloth and removed his apron. His thick spectacles magnified his small eyes and made his round face rounder. He was soft-spoken and apologetic, clearly embarrassed at being caught working in such dreadful circumstances. The authority with which he’d used the knife was completely lost when he put it down.
“Shop was closed yesterday,” he said. “But I thought I’d go mad, what with pacing up and down and the wife — that’s Simon’s stepmother — yelling her head off.” While saying this, he was leading them to a door at the rear of the shop. “Suppose you think it’s cold-blooded, me working —”
Wiggins, seldom given to irony, said, “Not our business to wonder whether it’s hot or cold, sir. Just that it’s blood.”
Riley winced as he led them up a twisting staircase. “Scotland Yard. I told the wife to leave off with that Queen’s Counsel person of hers. Told her Dorset police could handle —” Then, seeming to feel he’d made a blunder, he quickly added, “Expect they need all the help they can get. We keep this flat over the shop. Have another house, but this is handy. The wife’ll make a cuppa. I could do with something stronger myself.”
• • •
The “something stronger” was Jameson’s and the wife was not at all inclined to make a cuppa. Although it was lunchtime, she was more interested in whiskey than in lunch or tea. Her own hand didn’t shake as she downed her drop, but her husband’s did, as if he had palsy. When Riley took off his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose, Jury saw the eyes were red-rimmed — from tears, probably. Mrs. Riley’s were red, too, but Jury supposed that was owing more to the bottle than to bereavement. Since she was not the natural mother, she might have thought that released her from weepy demonstrations.
Beth Riley was a big, brassy woman; her face would have done better with a simple hairstyle than with the florid waves, red-rinsed, that framed the head. She was better-spoken than her husband, even given her lubricated voice. The Jameson’s had already got a workout.
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