Down on Cyprus Avenue

by Paul Charles

  “In your dreams,” McCusker teased, as he silently assumed her date the previous evening mustn’t have gone well.

  “Aye, well it looks like my dreams might be the only place I get to meet Mr Right,” she said, studying McCusker. “So...what age are you?”

  “Sorry?” McCusker responded in disbelief.

  “No, no, you fool, not for me – I was thinking of introducing you to me sister, but on second thoughts you’re right, best not. Mañana, McCusker.”

  “Hopefully,” he replied, as they both walked off in opposite directions.

  As McCusker started to wonder what O’Carroll’s sister looked like – and he’d have to admit that the signs were not great if O’Carroll had to work so hard to fix her up – he suddenly flashed back to the remains of Adam Whitlock. That was more than enough to remove all invasive thoughts from his mind.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I was very, very close to Adam,” Julia Whitlock volunteered the following morning. “I had a brother who died at birth and so when my next brother, Adam, was born I kept asking my mum ‘How old does Adam need to be before we are sure he’s not going to die?’ I was only four or five at the time but I remember willing with all of my might that Adam would not die the way my other brother had. I suppose maybe that fear has never gone away; I’d just buried it in my subconscious.”

  “I’m really sorry to put you through this now,” McCusker offered, visibly moved with her information.

  “Excuse me,” she replied, “I need to take a break; I’ll be back shortly.”

  Actually, she didn’t look that upset to McCusker.

  They were in Julia’s flat, the top floor, right-hand, corner apartment in the number twelve block of The Arc, which was situated in the dramatic Abercorn Basin in the Titanic Quarter of the city. Spring was just around the corner and the sun lit up the waterfront area spectacularly. It was easy to see why so many people had committed to properties in this development. Sadly, by the time the triad of twelve-storey apartment blocks had been completed, the original investors’ enthusiasm was tempered by the 2009 recession, and some buyers turned to the courts in an attempt to avoid their former agreements. Not so for Miss Whitlock – her father had bought her the apartment and he was, according to DS Barr’s internet research, “recession proof.”

  McCusker spent the beginning of the first day of the new week and the first real day of the investigation basking in the glory of the views from Julia’s lounge windows (noting that both the lounge and the windows were very large) and appreciating how the landscape was free from the eyesore electricity-generating windmills now generously peppered around the island of Ireland.

  McCusker was surprised at just how much pleasure he got from being in Belfast. Until his recent separation from his wife he’d considered himself, at fifty-one years of age, a committed Portrush man, and he thought he’d see out his years there. Belfast had always left him cold and as the majority of his infrequent trips to the city concerned various aspects of his police business, he was always happy to get back on the M2 in the direction of Derry and Portrush as quickly as possible. But now that he was living there, in admittedly a more relaxed era in his life – a single man with a lot of time to kill – he was happy to get to know Belfast, slowly, cautiously; maybe even a little similar to how it is getting to know a new friend.

  Belfast was buzzing again. The drab decades worth of engrained dour greyness had given way to loud modern splashes of colour all around the city centre. It was as if David Hockey and Neil Shawcross had challenged each other to a colour infused duel around the streets and buildings of the city. Even the high streets’ apparent preference for the uniform, trade-mark branding of shops and store frontages, which had a tendency to make all city centres look the same, was okay…for now. Later, when troubles and recessions were but a distant, though not forgotten, memory, Belfast’s uniqueness and originality would rise again and surely put an end to the superstore’s world domination plan.

  The same shops and stores plus the hotels, pubs, clubs, and concert venues were heaving with people again. The people who currently couldn’t afford any of those fine establishments were content simply to take to the streets for their entertainment, happiness, and joy. The welcoming smiles and hospitality offered to strangers, such as McCusker himself, were as genuine as they were grand. And this was all from a city that had been in real danger of becoming a ghost town in the not too distant past. McCusker took note of this fact and was heartened by it.

  It was as if Belfast too, like McCusker, was single again and maybe even feeling a wee bit frisky. McCusker found that he was involuntarily giving Belfast’s legendary beautiful women the second and sometimes even third glance, something he couldn’t remember doing since late school or college days.

  McCusker reckoned that he and Belfast had both reached a good time in their life cycle. They were both starting over, and both were happy in doing so. He was thrilled to be getting to know the city; getting to know it in this era.

  McCusker then remembered what he’d committed himself to when he’d left Portrush. He’d promised himself that he would forget the past, ignore the future, and get lost in the present. Looking down over Belfast from Julia’s spectacular flat he hoped he’d make as good a stab at it as Belfast seemed to be doing.

  From the kitchen end of the lounge McCusker could hear Julia Whitlock return.

  “Would you like tea or coffee?” she called out to him, perhaps as a signal that she was back.

  “Coffee would be great.”

  He got up from his ringside seat of one of the greatest views on earth. On the left, the Black Mountains rose gently, just over the arena of the Odyssey Complex. To the right, the water, boats and banks of the Lagan faded into Cave Hill, with Belfast Castle cosily set into the trees just below Napoleon’s Nose, which was framed by the right-hand side of Julia Whitlock’s spectacular vista. Lower down to his right was the silvery, angular, Titanic Exhibition Centre, the new eye-catching six-storey building. McCusker reminded himself that Quasimodo could also have been considered eye-catching. He thought that if there was a local filmmaker who could do justice to these sights say, for instance, the way Woody Allen had managed to capture the magic of Manhattan, then tourists from all over the world really would flock back to the city in their thousands. He reluctantly turned his back on the window and wandered back towards her.

  “I’m sorry about that Inspector,” she started.

  “McCusker will do,” he offered remembering the agency rule of always making it clear he was void of rank. “I’m what is known as an agency man.”

  “What, like freelance?”

  “Kind of,” McCusker said, unsure of where he was going with this.

  “Oh my goodness, you mean like the Pinkertons?” she gasped.

  “Something like that,” McCusker offered, thinking that Grafton Recruitment’s thirty-odd years in business didn’t quite match up to the Pinkertons’ recent 150th anniversary.

  “Oh, that’s absolutely fabulous! I’d no idea you did that over here.”

  “It’s become more popular recently with all the early retirement

  offered at the time of the Patten Report,” McCusker offered, thinking that Julia Whitlock was visibly relaxing a little.

  “I’m sorry about earlier there, it’s just I had spent the morning preparing myself for a more formal type of interview and then you…well, you looked and sounded like you really were sorry that we need to do this now and I felt myself welling up again. But look, here’s the thing: I’ve talked to my father about this and I know it’s vitally important to you that you get as much information as quickly as possible in order that we find the terrible people who did this to poor Adam, so I’ve got myself psyched up and ready for this.”

  “Can I help at all?”

  “An Ulsterman making coffee? I don’t think so!” she laughed. “You should go back over there and enjoy my expensive view a bit more. I’ll bring some proper American coffee ov
er in a minute or two,” she said, betraying the fact that she still had a little more psyching up to do.

  She joined McCusker by the movie-screen window and poured coffee for them both. The smell alone was enough to ensure he would be alert for at least the next twelve hours.

  “Would you like one of these cakes?” she offered. “I just love them. The man in the shop downstairs sells them; they’re rock cakes or something, I believe.”

  “Paris buns,” McCusker offered, as his first gulp of coffee had his eyeballs explore the entire 360 degrees of his sockets.

  “Sorry, so they’re French are they? I thought they were local.”

  “You’re 100 per cent correct, they are from Ulster. They’re called Paris buns because they’re vaguely, supposedly, in the shape of the Eiffel Tower,” McCusker explained, mentally setting up his first question.

  “Of course,” she smiled, studying the cake closely. “How quaint.”

  McCusker figured Julia Whitlock was in her mid-thirties. She was not beautiful in a classic way, but there was something about her that McCusker found attractive. He wondered if perhaps it was her physical confidence. Today, as a mark of respect to her brother, she was wearing a classy sober black dress with a black woollen cardigan. Her make-up didn’t exactly enhance her features as much as have her look like she was wearing make-up. Her long, thick, dark brown hair looked like it benefited from having recently been blow-dried.

  “How long have you and your brother lived in Belfast?”

  “Let’s see now...” she began slicing off a quarter of her Paris bun, “Adam, encouraged by our father who’d also spent some time in the city, moved here when he was eighteen; that would have been in 1999. I was a late bloomer; I arrived in 2001 when I was twenty-five. He finished at Queen’s in 2005 and flew home to Boston for the rest of that year and all of 2006. Then he returned here to Belfast again early in 2007 to start his job with Mason, Burr & Co. I finished at Queen’s in 2007 and started work with the City Hall information department the same year.”

  At the end of her answer she started nibbling on her Paris bun, using a napkin to catch the crumbs.

  McCusker had, by this stage, already devoured a quarter of his bun. He felt he desperately needed something to soak up the triple-A strong coffee in order to save his insides for another day. He jotted the dates in his notebook and appeared to consider them before saying: “So what did youse both study?”

  “Adam always wanted to be a lawyer like our father so he’d already decided on the law course. That’s why he came to Belfast; he and my father did their research and discovered that an old and respected colleague from my father’s time in Belfast was in charge of the course at Queen’s. I, on the other hand, only really came to Belfast because Adam was here. I did Social Studies and Media. I was quite lucky, getting a job so quickly at the City Hall. They had their refurb planned and they wanted to have a new team in place when they re-opened to the public last year.”

  “Do you know much about what Adam does?”

  “He wasn’t allowed to discuss his work,” she replied.

  “Where is Mason, Burr & Co. located?” McCusker asked, and then finished off the last of the fresh bun.

  “It’s that old bank building on Royal Avenue.”

  “Do you know who he reports to?” McCusker asked, his fountain pen at the ready.

  “He heads his own department, Inspector,” she said proudly.

  “Sorry...just plain McCusker,” he corrected her again.

  She shot him a quizzical glance, looking slightly confused, but didn’t voice the question in her eyes, even managing to force a smile.

  “Adam’s apartment didn’t look very lived in,” McCusker began awkwardly.

  “You’re trying to ask me if he was dating?” she offered, playfully and helping him out.

  There were times in their conversation when it was clear that she had...forgotten would be too strong a word, maybe more like it had slipped her mind...that her brother had died. Since her brother’s death was a very recent event, McCusker knew that she hadn’t come to terms with it yet. Equally he knew that, in fits and starts, the horrific circumstances of his death would creep into her consciousness until there’d be nothing left but the sense of loss. It would totally overwhelm her life from then on for a time and perhaps, partially at least, forever.

  “Well, yes?” he answered.

  “Adam is…” she started and then McCusker noticed the powerful effect of one of his predicted gunks hitting her. This one was clearly massive and smashed straight bang into her like a full speed train “…sorry, sorry, Adam was…preoccupied with his work. He trained a bit, he worked a lot and we hung out together for the rest of the time.”

  “So, no girlfriends or…partners?”

  “No girlfriends or boyfriends, McCusker,” she said, pronouncing his name without his title like she was trying it out for the first time.

  “And yourself?”

  “Currently no boyfriends,” she admitted easily. “Nor girlfriends.”

  “Okay.”

  She studied McCusker like she was trying really hard to ascertain his thoughts.

  “Sorry,” she offered, “I don’t mean that we’d both forsaken boys and girls because we had each other. Of course I went out on dates and Adam sometimes took colleagues, or friends of colleagues, or friends visiting from America, out to dinner, but neither of us was in what you would call a serious relationship.”

  Again, she appeared to sense McCusker’s uneasiness. He felt she was too physically confident, without even a hint of flirting with him, for her not to be a veteran in the troubled fields of romance.

  “Now I will admit to you,” she began, looking like she hoped to clear up this matter, “that if Adam wa…hadn’t been around and I hadn’t been around in his life so much then perhaps we would have been forced to try, shall we say, more diligently in the dating stakes.”

  That seemed to do it for McCusker, so she moved on. “When my dad bought this apartment for me Adam loved it and he preferred to spend time over here rather than at his own house. You know, what can I tell you – we were brother and sister, we were close, we…we enjoyed each other’s company and were 100 per cent content in each other’s company.”

  The words registered effectively with McCusker – he found it interesting that the last person to have made that claim was Susanna Homes in reference to her friends, the missing brothers O’Neill.

  “So, tell me something about these dinner dates, these visiting friends of his, and yours?” McCusker asked.

  “Okay, I suppose one of his closest friends would have been Ross Wallace, another ex-Queen’s student from the same year as Adam. He works for Ulsterbus…” she paused for the effect of someone setting up an often used punchline “…no, not as a driver, but as an important part of their management team.”

  “Anyone else?” McCusker pushed.

  “Adam also got on well with Angela Robinson – they were also at Queen’s together - and Craig Husbands. We’d regularly have dinner together and the answers to your next two questions are: no, Angela is married and no, Craig is not my type, but our dinners together were always entertaining.”

  “Are you aware of anyone, anyone at all, who would have a grudge against Adam, you know, maybe as a result of some dealings which went wrong?”

  Julia Whitlock looked like she was trawling through the memory banks of her brain. But on closer examination McCusker reckoned she looked like she could be considering whether or not to tell him something she’d rested upon.

  “Well it…nothing really…I mean…”

  “It’s okay Julia – why don’t you tell me and let me be the judge on whether it’s important or not? Like your father advised you, this part of the process is vitally important,” McCusker offered, feeling she needed a little encouragement.

  “Okay. Well, back home in America our father had a house on Martha’s Vineyard, just outside of Vineyard Haven on the way up to the library,”
she said as if McCusker would know either Martha’s Vineyard, Vineyard Haven, or the road to the library in Vineyard Haven. “When we were younger we used to summer there as a family. That would have been my mother, who’s been dead now just over ten years; my father; Adam and our younger brother Jaime. As we got a bit older we felt we were a too old to hang out with our parents in the summer and so eventually we were allowed to go there by ourselves with some friends. In 1998 we went there – Adam, Jaime, and I and five other friends, there were three girls and five boys and…”

  Julia Whitlock paused, as though recalling something from her past was too much for her in her present state.

  McCusker didn’t push her; he topped up her coffee cup to fill the space between them in her vast apartment.

  “Goodness, I’d forgotten all about this, or maybe even pushed it out of my mind,” she admitted, taking a large breath. “Okay, this is for Adam, get on with it Julia,” she chastised herself before continuing. “One night we all went to Carly Simon’s Hot Tin Roof, a club out by the airport. It’s now known as Outerland. John Hiatt was playing and Adam’s mate, Bing Scott, was a big fan of Hiatt. Bing’s sister, Cindy, was younger than the rest of us but she hung out with us, a) because she was Bing’s sister and b) because she had the hots for Adam.”

  Julia took another sip of her coffee and a few more crumbs from her Paris bun.

  “So Hiatt plays. Bing is disappointed that Hiatt didn’t have his band with him, but anyway we all sang along with him when he performed ‘Have A Little Faith In Me’ – a totally beautiful song. Eventually, it’s time to go home. Somehow Cindy's had a bit too much to drink and is still totally flying when we get back to the house. We all go out into the garden, it’s a really beautiful garden that goes right down to the water’s edge. Bing goes to make a pot of coffee, mainly for his sister, who’s over on the swing under the tree. She’d been calling Adam over to push her. Adam felt she was trying to get him under the cloak of the low lying branches for something other than pushing her on the swing, and so he pretended to ignore her.”