I put my foot on the accelerator and drove on.
It was stupid, very stupid.
The way a mercury tilt switch works is by establishing an electrical current through the mercury which then sets off a charge in a detonator. The detonator explodes into a pancake-sized wedge of Czech Semtex or Libyan C4 which then reacts and expands in a violent decay of heat and gas that would be powerful enough to eviscerate me and disintegrate the car. I’d seen pics of IRA car bombs that had thrown the vehicle two hundred feet and transformed the occupants inside into offal.
I kept on going.
Dolly Parton came on the radio, singing an old bluegrass song.
My knuckles were white. The downslope was coming up.
The reason the IRA used mercury tilt switches is that they only work when the mercury establishes contact on an incline or decline. While the mercury remains level the bomb is safe, thus it could sit under a car for days or even weeks. As soon as it was driven, however, eventually you’d encounter a hill …
I looked out the window.
This is what death would look like.
Victoria Council Estate, a grim appendage of consumptive Carrickfergus, itself a distension of the dying city of Belfast. Grey, wet, unloved. A ghetto supermarket, a bookies, a derelict house and on the gable terrace a massive mural of crossed AK-47s above the Red Hand of Ulster.
The downslope grew steeper. I held my breath as Dolly made her point:
When I was young and in my prime,
I left my home in Caroline,
Now all I do is sit and pine,
For all the folks I left behind …
I clenched my fists.
Counted. One. Two. Three.
The road flattened out.
The bomb had not gone off.
There was no bomb. The danger had passed.
I pulled into the car park in front of the newsagents.
Reborn.
My whole life ahead of me …
Until the next fuck up.
6: THE LONG BAD SATURDAY
I turned off the engine and sat in my little existential prison before going outside into the bigger existential prison of Northern Ireland.
The car park was empty and I checked under the car just to be on the safe side. Nothing, of course.
I said hi to Oscar McDowell and perused the front pages.
“Liz Taylor Collapses” was the headline in the Sun and the Daily Mirror. “Ripper Trial Final Days” was the offering from the Daily Mail. “Royal Wedding Mix Up” was the lead in the Daily Express. A couple of the Irish papers covered the Frankie Hughes riot and were speculating about which of the hunger strikers would die next, while the others led with the ex-Mrs Burton.
“What happened to Liz Taylor?” I asked Oscar.
“Buy the paper and find out,” he said.
I bought a packet of Marlboro Lights, a Mars bar and a Coke instead.
Oscar gave me a funny look with my change.
“What?” I said.
He examined his shoes, cleared his throat.
“You’re a copper, aren’t you, Sean?”
“Yeah,” I said suspiciously.
“Look, is there … is there nothing you can do about the boys?”
“What boys?”
“I’m fed up with it. We barely scrape by here. No one has any money any more. Magazine subscriptions are off by fifty per cent since ICI closed. And you can’t tell them that … You know what I’m talking about.”
I did. He was talking about the protection money he had to pay every week to the paramilitaries. The money he gave straight out of his till to the local hoods so they wouldn’t burn him out.
Oscar was in his sixties. Everything about him radiated exhaustion. He should have sold up and moved to the sun years ago.
“What’s the going rate these days?” I asked.
“Bobby asks for a hundred pound a week. I can’t do it. Not in this economy. It’s impossible! Can you have a word with them, Sean? Make them see sense? Can you?”
I shook my head.
“There’s nothing I can do, Oscar. If you were willing to testify that would be one thing, but you’re not willing to testify, are you?”
He shook his head. “Not on your life!”
“Well then, like I say, nothing I can do.”
“There must be some kind of back channel, Sean, you know, where you can just talk to them. Just tell them that they are charging far too much for this economy. If I go out of business, everybody loses.”
“I can’t meet them. Internal Affairs would say it was collusion.”
“I don’t mean a formal meeting or anything, I’m only saying that in the course of your duties, if you happen to come across those particular gentlemen, perhaps you can drop a wee hint or two.”
I picked up my Mars bar, smokes and Coke.
“I suppose the Bobby you’re referring to is Bobby Cameron on Coronation Road?” I asked.
“You heard no names from me.”
“Ach, I’ll see what I can do.”
Oscar sighed with relief.
“Here, you forgot your papers,” he said, giving me The Times and the Guardian for nothing.
I took them as a matter of course.
I put them on the passenger’s seat and looked at myself in the mirror.
“Your first freebie in your new gig, Sean. This is how it starts. Baby steps,” I said to myself.
Another army checkpoint on the Marine Highway. This time the bloody Paras. They looked at my warrant card and sent me through with a sarcastic thumbs up.
Ray was back in the box at the RUC station and gave me a nod as he raised the barrier to let me into the barracks car park.
I got out into a drizzle and decided to leave the smokes. I was down to two or three bummed ciggies a day. Only bought my own for emergencies.
I went upstairs to the CID evidence room.
I reread the postcard through the evidence bag.
I wrote “eternal duellists/labyrinth/queers” in my notebook.
I checked for any faxes from Belfast.
Nothing.
I put my feet on the chair and had a think.
Two victims. Two hands. Symmetry. Mirrors, opposites, duellists, opponents, key and lock. It was all two.
All except the labyrinth.
“We share the path through the labirinth"
There was only one route through the labyrinth.
One true way. The labyrinth. Built by Daedalus the flyer …
Maybe that meant something.
Daedalus, Icarus, Stephen Daedalus, James Joyce, Dublin …
Nothing.
I rubbed my chin and thought and bounced a pencil off the desk.
I called ballistics.
“Preliminary indications were that the two slugs came from the same gun,” I was told.
I grabbed a typewriter and began work on the presentation. I ate the Mars bar and drank the Coke. McCrabban showed up at 8.30. I told him about the postcard.
He read it, asked me if I’d lifted anything from it.
“You think it’s the real deal?” I asked him.
“We get a lot of hoaxes on every case, but this, I don’t know, it seems different.”
“Any ideas about our boy?”
“He hates queers. Which makes me think that John Doe must be one too. Has to be, right?”
“Aye.”
Crabbie typed up a transcript of the note, made photocopies and helped me with my presentation.
At 8.45, Matty called to say he was running late because of a bomb scare on the Larne-Carrick train.
“Where are you calling from?” I asked.
“The train station,” he lied.
“How come I can hear David Frost in the background?”
“Uhm.”
“Get your arse in here, you lazy hallion!” I said and hung up.
“Youth,” McCrabban said.
“What about them?”
“They need mor
e sleep than us,” he said.
“You know, I don’t think we can do this case with just three people.”
McCrabban nodded.
“I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed,” I said.
Crabbie didn’t like to hear that sort of thing (or anything about anyone’s feelings) and he began furiously filling his pipe to cover his embarrassment.
He lit the thing, coughed and blew a blue smoke ring out of his mouth.
“Yes,” he said, which was about as much consolation as I was going to get from that dour visage.
“Do me a favour and find out who sells postcards of the Andrew Jackson cottage in Carrickfergus and Belfast and ask them if they’ve sold any lately and if so do they remember to whom.”
“So basically call up every single newsagent in Carrick and Belfast?” McCrabban asked.
“Yeah.”
“Ok, boss.”
Matty finally came in and I showed him the postcard and he took it away to do more tests. He did fingerprints and the black light and the UV light. All the prints were smudged except for two sets that he suspected were mine and the postman’s. I told him to send a reserve constable round to Carrick post office to print the mail carrier from Coronation Road.
At 9.05 I was done typing my presentation and did a dry run in front of the lads. They felt it was ok, although McCrabban made me cut it shorter because Sergeant McCallister had a poor attention span.
At 9.15 I called up Mike Kernoghan in Special Branch, told him about my anonymous letter writer and asked him if his boy could put a tap on my phone just in case the killer decided to get more intimate.
Mike thought this was a good idea and said that he’d send a couple of boys round this afternoon “to fix my TV”.
I told him that I kept the spare key under the cactus plant and he said that his boys didn’t need no key, a rusty nail could get you into a Northern Ireland Housing Executive terraced house — a fact that did not fill me with confidence about my home security.
I checked again for any faxes from Belfast and I called up the forensics lab just to make sure they were working their arses off ID’ing my John Doe. They claimed that they were and that they had a promising line of inquiry.
“Really? You’re not just messing with me, are you?”
“We wouldn’t do that, sir.”
“When do I get the good word?”
“We like to confirm these things first, Sergeant Duffy, but I’m reasonably sure that we’ll have a positive hit by the end of the day.”
“Positive hit?”
“Yes.”
“So you know who he is?”
“We’re fairly certain. We’re in the confirmation process at this moment.”
“Can you give me a clue? It’s not Lord Lucan, is it? DB Cooper? Lady Di?”
The forensics guy hung up on me. I called around for a next of kin on Andrew Young but his work colleagues were the best we could come up with.
When Matty was done with the prints I asked him to start running down any sexual abuse allegations against Young. An enraged former pupil would be a nice go-to guy in a case like this.
At 9.30 I assembled my team in the CID room, set them up in chairs next to me and put three chairs in front of the white board.
At 9.35 Sergeants McCallister and Burke came in. Burke was another old-school peeler about fifty-five years old. No nonsense bloke. He was ex-army and military police. He had served in Palestine, Cyprus, Kenya, all over the shop. He looked like someone’s scary father. He didn’t talk much, did Burke, but what he did say was usually the wisdom acquired from a long and interesting life … either that or total bollocks.
Chief Inspector Brennan came in last. He was wearing a top hat and tails.
“Hurry up, Duffy, I don’t have long,” he said.
“Aye, you don’t want to be late for the play Mr Lincoln,” Sergeant McCallister said and everyone roared.
“Maybe he does a magic act on the side,” Sergeant Burke said.
“I’m off to my niece’s wedding. Get on with it, Duffy!” Brennan snapped.
I read them the presentation. There were seven main points:
1. The as yet unidentified victim in Barn Field had been shot execution-style by a 9mm.
2. He had had a recent homosexual encounter and a piece of music had been inserted in his anus.
3. His right hand had been replaced with the hand of Andrew Young, a known homosexual who had also been murdered in his house in Boneybefore also by a 9mm.
4. The musical score was La Boheme and contained the lines “your tiny hand is frozen” sung by Rudolfo to Mimi.
5. Andrew Young was a music teacher at Carrick Grammar School and ran the Carrick festival. No, he had never done La Boheme at either the school or the festival.
6. The killer had apparently called up Carrick Police Station, found out who the lead detective was and sent me a bizarre postcard (photocopies of which I passed around) that might contain clues or might be a complete distraction.
7. The 9mm slugs from both victims matched.
Brennan and the two sergeants listened to the whole thing without interruption.
“What is your current working hypothesis, Sergeant Duffy?” Brennan asked when I was done.
“Obviously the two murders are linked. Dr Cathcart feels there was a two- or perhaps three-hour delay between the two deaths. She’ll know more precisely when she’s performed an autopsy on Mr Young. Therefore I feel that we have a potential serial murderer on our hands. At this stage I do not see any evidence of a paramilitary link, which would make this the first non-sectarian serial killer in Northern Ireland’s history,” I said.
“Why would he come out of the woodwork now?” McCallister asked.
“I don’t know. Jealousy, perhaps? He’s been watching all the publicity the Yorkshire Ripper trial has been generating and it’s been getting his goat?” I ventured.
“Maybe the chaos of the hunger strikes has given him the cover and opportunity he needs,” McCrabban said.
“Sounds like this old fruit, Young, got someone riled up and that someone went mental and decided to kill some more fruits,” Burke said.
“Matty’s checking to see if there are any allegations against him,” I said.
“And I don’t like this music angle. It’s bloody weird,” Burke said.
“I don’t like it either. There something about it that stinks to high heaven. I’ve read the libretto to La Boheme but nothing jumped out at me,” I said.
“Jesus, what will we do if this Young fella has something up his arse too?” Brennan muttered.
“Keep our cheeks squeezed together?” McCallister offered and everybody laughed again.
“We’re waiting on the autopsy report on that, sir,” I added when the tittering had died down.
Silence descended, punctuated by a distant rumbling in Belfast that could be anything from a ship unloading in the docks to a coordinated series of bombings.
“What’s your next step, Sergeant Duffy?” Brennan asked.
I told him about the various angles we were chasing down and the fact that we were supposed to finally get the prints on John Doe today.
“And if our letter writer gets in touch again?” Sergeant Burke asked.
I told them about my call to Special Branch.
I could tell Brennan wasn’t too happy about that but he didn’t say anything. And besides he was getting worried about the time and he had one other fish to fry.
“Have you thought about the press?” he asked.
“Uh, obviously, we’ll need to brief the press at some point,” I said. “But we can probably put it off for a bit. It’s not exactly a slow news week.”
Brennan sighed. “This is going to blow up in our faces, Sergeant Duffy. If we don’t go to the papers you can be sure that our anonymous note writer, or one of Mr Young’s neighbours, or someone will. Do you have a media strategy?”
“Uh, no, not as such, not a, uh-” I stammered. I looked a
t Matty and McCrabban who had both discovered something fascinating about the wall-to-wall carpet.
Brennan looked at McCallister. “What about you, Alan? It’s a bloody thankless task but we need someone and DS Duffy has quite a full plate by the looks of it. You could do a good defensive briefing to a couple of the local hacks. Seen you do it before. “
McCallister smiled at me and shook his head. “No, no, fellas, that’s not the way to handle this at all. No defensiveness. We present this as a triumph. Through clever police work we have linked two murders. We talk about modern forensic techniques and how even during these difficult times we hard-working honest peelers are able to spend due care and attention on every single case.”
Brennan nodded. “I like it.”
“We won’t get TV because of all the other nonsense going on but we can call in some of our pals from the Belfast Telegraph, the Carrickfergus Advertiser, the Irish News and the Newsletter and let them have it. Maybe your woman Saoirse Neeson from Crime Beat on Downtown Radio.”
Brennan looked at me. I shrugged. When I’d thought this was a nothing case I was keen for the telly but now it had got more complicated there was, at the very least, an element of stage fright; however, if big Alan McCallister wanted to help out. “If Alan wants to do it, that’s great,” I said.
“Ok, we’ll defer everything to Sergeant McCallister,” Brennan said.
Hold the phone. Defer everything? What did he mean by that?
Fortunately Alan saw my face and did his best Uri Geller: “Nope. I’m not CID. This is not my case, it’s Duffy’s. Run everything through Sergeant Duffy. I’ll only be his press officer. He tells me what to say and I’ll say it and that’s that.”
“Well said, Alan. These CID boys are flighty, sensitive creatures who don’t like their toes stepped on,” Brennan said. He got up and put his arm around me. “What kind of a loony are we dealing with here, son?”
“We’re dealing with a type none of us have encountered before in an Ulster context. A careful, intelligent, non-sectarian, serial murderer.”
“A total freak psycho,” Burke said.
“Not in the way you think. Sociopaths tend to have no regard or empathy for the feelings of others but they may in fact be personally charming with considerable charisma. I expect that our boy (and I’m pretty sure he’s a boy) will challenge us, but we’ll get the bastard, I’m confident of that,” I said and looked Brennan in the eye.
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