Carrickfergus had an embarrassment of abandoned factories that had been set up in the optimistic sixties, closed in the pessimistic seventies and were on the verge of ruin, now that we were in the apocalyptic mid-eighties.
The concierge interposed himself between us, looking miffed. ‘It’s not about convenience, gentlemen. This is one of the best hotels in Northern Ireland. We had the England Football Team here two summers ago, so we did,’ he insisted in a broad, camp West Belfast accent so grating that it could be banned under several of the Geneva Protocols. ‘And may I just add, gents, that the possibility of a wallet being stolen from one of the hotel rooms by one of my staff is very, very unlikely indeed, so it is.’
‘Why is that?’ I asked him.
‘We’re a small establishment, sir. At this time of the morning, it’s just myself and the night porter. Just us. The cleaning and breakfast staff have only just arrived now. And I didn’t take the wallet and Joe has been at the front door the whole night.’
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
‘It’s Kevin, Inspector. Kevin Donnolly. Kev, if you want.’
‘OK, Kevin and you’re the concierge, are you?’
‘I’m the manager!’
‘Are you quite sure that there are no other employees on the premises at this time of the night? What if someone’s hungry or something?’
‘We do it all. There’s only Joe and myself until the breakfast staff come in.’
‘Hmmm. How many rooms are there here in the hotel?’
‘Nine on the first floor and six on the floor above. Mr Laakso’s room was on the first floor. The Castle View Suite.’
‘Who else has the master key to the rooms?’
‘It’s not keys in the suites. We’ve made those very classy, so we have. All the suite rooms have been converted to key cards and the only person with the override card to all the suite rooms is myself.’
‘Was Mr Laakso sleeping alone?’
’Yes.’
‘Could he possibly have had a guest? A young lady perhaps?’
‘Mr Laakso is an, uhm, elderly gentleman. He did not sign in a guest.’
‘And no one was sent up to his room?’
‘Definitely not! That sort of thing doesn’t happen in this establishment.’
‘Does Mr Laakso’s room connect with any other rooms?’
‘Oh yes, there are two rooms on either side of him, both occupied by members of his staff.’
‘So if the wallet wasn’t taken by the hotel staff, it’s either been mislaid or it’s been taken by another member of the delegation?’ I suggested.
‘Almost certainly mislaid, Inspector. Happens all the time. Once or twice a week. Of course not everybody’s so quick to yell “thief !” and call out half the police force at ungodly hours of the day and night,’ Kevin said.
We could see Chief Superintendent John Edward ‘Ed’ McBain coming down the stairs now. He was a twitchy, lanky, stork-like man with a defiant early-seventies-style comb-over. He was the operational Commander over all the police stations in East Antrim and one of the few brass hats that I got on quite well with. I always let him beat me at snooker at the police club and once Sergeant McCrabban and I had actually found his missing pooch before it either got itself run over, or, as his wife, Jo, had predicted, ‘fell into the clutches of those Satan worshippers you read about in the News of the World’. Ever since then, big Ed McBain had been eternally grateful to Carrick CID.
He shook my hand in a sweaty, uncharacteristically hesitant grip. He was pale and looked deeply irritated.
‘Good to see you, Duffy,’ he said.
‘You too, sir.’
‘Heard you met Muhammad Ali, yesterday.’
‘Word gets around doesn’t it, sir?’
‘Overrated. All mouth. A fighter not a boxer.’
‘If you say so, sir.’
‘I do say so, Duffy.’
He stared at me, Lawson, Kevin and the Chief Inspector for a moment.
I very deliberately examined my watch. ‘Maybe I should go up and inspect the crime scene, sir?’
‘Good idea.’ He pointed upstairs and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘They want us to pull out all the stops. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Finns here to save the country’s bacon. You wouldn’t have thought we won the war, eh?’
‘Weren’t they, uhm, on our side, sir?’ I asked.
‘No they weren’t! Not at first, anyway. Come on, let’s go up.’
‘It’s a crime scene, sir,’ I said to McBain, nodding my head towards the Chief Inspector.
McBain got the drift. He put his hand on McArthur’s shoulder. ‘You’ll have to wait down here, Pete. This is CID business,’ he said.
McArthur looked upset. ‘Oh. Is it? Oh … All right. I’ll just take a seat then, shall I?’
‘That would be best,’ McBain said.
I wasn’t just trying to fuck with the Chief Inspector … upstairs was a de facto crime scene and we didn’t need any well-meaning amateurs poking around in it.
McBain led Lawson and myself up the wide, elegant staircase, past prints, watercolours and various framed cartographic representations of Carrickfergus from the previous eight centuries.
‘No technical ability, Duffy. That’s his problem.’
‘The Chief Inspector, sir?’
‘Ali. A brawler. A puncher. A big puncher.’
‘What about his feet, sir? Surely –’
‘His feet! His feet you say? Well, yes … His feet. Good point, Duffy. Very good point. He could dance couldn’t he?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Must have been quite something to see him in the flesh. And we got him in and out alive, which is more than you can say for the Memphis Police Department with Martin Luther King.’
‘Er, what?’
‘OK, here we are, Duffy. Now, when you’re with the Finns I want no lip from you, OK? What’s past is past.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The wife’s father was on the Murmansk convoys. You just have to bite your tongue, don’t you? Do the full Basil Fawlty, OK?’
‘The Basil –’
‘Don’t mention the war.’
‘Sir, I wouldn’t dream of –’
‘Course you wouldn’t, you’re a professional. Now, you, what’s your name, son?’
‘Lawson.’
’You likewise. I want the pair of you to appear to take this very seriously indeed. Tell them we’ll be turning over every stone, eh?’
We both nodded.
At the top of the stairs we were met by four men and a woman.
The woman was a tiny, bird-like thing, very pretty. She said that she was Miss Jones and explained that she was a liaison official from the Foreign Office. She introduced us to the delegation. A small, stooped, 60-year-old bald man in black pyjamas was Mr Laakso. He was standing next to a tall, trim, hollow-cheeked, grey-faced, blue-eyed man with dyed black hair, also about 60, or perhaps a little older. This apparently was Mr ‘Elk’. The final two men appeared to be identical twins: slim blonde-haired youths of about 19 or 20. One of them was wearing a pink kimono-style silk robe that would have gotten him stoned to death as a ‘poof’ if he’d stepped outside in it.
I shook both the older men’s hands.
‘Mr Laakso, nice to meet you, Mr, uhm, Elk was it?’
‘Ek,’ the grey-faced man corrected me, shaking my hand like he wanted to break it.
‘Ek,’ I said.
‘It means oak in Swedish,’ he said.
‘Swedish? Now I’m confused, I thought you were all Finns,’ I said, cheerfully.
‘We are,’ Ek said, intensely annoyed by what clearly was some kind of faux pas.
He was a geezer, but he had shaken my hand with the grip of an ex-service-man – a shit-kicking drill sergeant perhaps.
‘And may I present Nicolas and Stefan Lennätin?’ Miss Jones said. Close up, the boys were pale, willowy, handsome, with dark brown
rather unintelligent eyes.
‘What can you tell me about the particulars of the incident?’ I asked Mr Laakso.
‘Mr Laakso left his wallet by his bathroom sink last night before he went to bed. This morning it was gone,’ Ek said, before Laakso could open his gob.
‘What time did he go to bed?’ I asked.
‘Mr Laakso went to bed at some time after 11 pm and woke this morning just after five, alerting me,’ Ek replied for his boss.
‘Make a note of that, Lawson,’ I said.
Lawson flipped open his notebook and wrote this information down.
‘I’d like to see the crime scene if I may,’ I said to Mr Laakso.
‘I would expect so,’ Ek said, curtly.
Lawson and I followed Ek past half a dozen guests who had come out of their rooms to see what all the commotion was. We entered Mr Laakso’s bedroom, a large, tastefully decorated suite with a rather impressive view of Carrickfergus Castle to the south and County Down and the Galloway coast of Scotland to the north-east. We were trailed into the room by a worried-looking Chief Super and the rest of the delegation.
Nicolas and Stefan had begun to giggle and were whispering confidences to one another. I nudged Lawson so that he would take a note of that, too.
Ek led us into the large bathroom which was luxurious by Northern Ireland standards: marble bath, marble sink, shower, bidet, Italian-tiled floor and walls.
‘This is where the wallet went missing,’ Ek said. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I have more pressing concerns to attend to.’
‘Of course. Observations, Lawson?’ I asked my junior colleague.
‘Water spill on the floor. Soap scuds on the mirror. It doesn’t look like the cleaning lady’s been through, not that they were supposed to be in this early, anyway.’
‘What about the sink? What do you notice about that?’
Lawson peered into the sink.
‘Uhm, there are shaving hairs in the sink. No one has cleaned this sink since yesterday.’
The Chief Super peered into the sink and nodded. ‘I’ll bet you this sink was designed by a woman or a man with a beard. Look how flat the bottom is. You’d be hard pressed to wash your stubble away after shaving. And, uhm, yes, as you say, it hasn’t been cleaned today,’ he muttered.
I turned to Mr Laakso. ‘Where exactly did you leave the wallet?’
He pointed to a little shelf near to the toothbrush holder. Definitely no wallet.
‘And when did you last see the wallet?’ I asked.
‘Last night before I went to bed,’ Mr Laakso said, in perfectly serviceable English.
‘And you didn’t hear any intruders?’
‘I heard nothing.’
‘And the door to your room was locked?’
‘It was locked,’ Mr Laakso agreed.
‘And the adjoining rooms?’ I asked.
‘Locked, I believe.’
‘Who was staying in these rooms?’
‘Nicolas and Stefan.’
Was that another smirk on Nicolas’s face? He was staring at his twin brother, both of them on the verge of giggles. I walked to the first adjoining door. It was unlocked. I walked across the room and tried the second adjoining door. It also was unlocked.
‘I’d like permission to search these rooms, if I may?’ I said to Mr Laakso.
He looked at Nicolas and Stefan. A rapid conversation in Finnish followed between the three men. When it concluded, Mr Laakso said something to Miss Jones who scowled at me. ‘Is there a problem?’ I asked her.
‘Mr Laakso resents greatly the implication that any of the delegation are somehow connected with the theft of Mr Laakso’s wallet. Mr Laakso rejects this idea as preposterous. Mr Laakso wishes you to restrict your investigation to his room, which the thief undoubtedly entered using a passcard,’ she said.
‘Can you tell me who the rooms belong to?’ I asked.
‘The one over there is my room, that one is Nicolas’s room,’ Stefan explained.
I gave him a long look. The smirk was widening on Nicolas’s face.
I had had just about enough of this nonsense.
‘Perhaps, then, if you could all leave and give us space to search Mr Laakso’s room thoroughly?’ I suggested.
‘Ulos!’ Laakso said. When they were gone, I looked under the bed and in the drawers and in the cupboard. When this superficial examination failed to undercover anything Lawson and I divided the room up between us and did a thorough shakedown, but that also failed to turn up the wallet. ‘That settles it then,’ I said.
‘Settles what?’
‘It was Nicolas.’
‘Why? Some kind of practical joke?’
‘Who the fuck knows? Come on, let’s get out of here,’ I said. ‘There’s been enough wasting of police time for one morning.’
We went back outside the room where Mr Laakso was waiting with the two boys, Miss Jones and the Chief Super. Ek had buggered off, but half the landing was out trying to see what was going on. This would be the time to sneak into a room and steal somebody’s wallet, I thought. Hovering nearby was an attractive young woman ominously holding a notebook. She had a black bob, rosy cheeks and lovely green eyes; even though she was wearing a scruffy black T-shirt and unflattering flannel pyjama bottoms you could tell right away that she was a stylish foreigner, not a frumpy Mick.
‘Reporter at six o’clock,’ I muttered to Lawson.
‘Where … oh yes.’
‘Right gentlemen, Miss Jones, I think that concludes the preliminary inquiry. I am going to leave you in the capable hands of Constable Lawson here, who will take statements while I coordinate the rest of this case from the station. You can return to your rooms after the statements have been made and hopefully we’ll get this resolved as soon as possible.’
The Finns seemed happy enough with that.
‘Of course I could call a forensic team down from Belfast and we could take fingerprints of the area around your sink, Mr Laakso. The thief might have inadvertently left a print,’ I said, looking at Nicolas.
Mr Laakso stole a nervous glance at Stefan and Nicolas. Now he, too, understood what had happened with the wallet. He winced. Calling the police had clearly been a mistake. The dynamic was obvious in the little group. Laakso was the head of the delegation, but Stefan and Nicolas were the sons or grandsons of the powers that be back in Finland, and were thus pretty much unassailable. I stifled a yawn. I had seen shit like this before a million times. None of it was remotely interesting.
‘I do not think that will be necessary. I have full faith in your abilities,’ Mr Laakso said.
Of course you do. I nodded to Chief Superintendent McBain. ‘I’ll take my leave, sir,’ I said.
‘Very good,’ McBain said.
The woman in the black T-shirt stopped me at the top of the stairs.
‘I heard all the commotion. What’s going on?’ she asked, in a lovely Home Counties accent reminiscent of Anna Ford off the TV news.
‘Are you a reporter?’ I asked.
‘How can you tell?’ she wondered.
‘The notebook and the pencil are a bit of a giveaway.’
‘Lily Bigelow, the Financial Times,’ she said, offering me her hand.
I shook it. ‘What’s a nice girl from …’ I began.
‘Woking.’
‘Woking, doing in a place like this?’
‘I’m covering the Finnish trade mission to Northern Ireland. I suppose for the week I’m the FT’s Northern Ireland correspondent.’
‘I see.’
‘So what happened?’ she asked, gesturing back down the corridor.
‘Mr Laakso misplaced his wallet. It’ll show up,’ I said.
She bit her pencil. ‘So you’re saying that it’s not a story.’
‘Either that or I’m part of a sinister cover up.’
She folded up her notebook and put her pencil in her pyjama pant pocket, which is what I wanted. This was a non-story and Carrick CID didn’t need to get
a mention in any of the English papers.
‘Unlucky you, eh? Editor comes over and says, “Lily we’ve got a foreign assignment for you,” and you’re thinking Hong Kong, New York, Paris and you end up in bloody Belfast,’ I said.
‘I actually asked for this job. But I’m used to privation. You know what happened to Woking, don’t you?’ she said, with a tragic look on her face.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Totally wiped out by the Martians in the War of the Worlds.’
I grinned. Pretty and funny. I wouldn’t forget Beth in a hurry, but a drink or two with an attractive English journo wouldn’t hurt.
‘And they’ve rebuilt it since then, have they?’ I asked.
‘Partially rebuilt.’
‘Got rid of all that red weed?’
‘They had to pull it all up, the kids were smoking it.’
‘What are you doing later?’ I asked, chancing my arm.
‘Visiting the Courtaulds factory with the delegation.’
‘I’ve been out there. Lovely place. Watch out for the septuagenarian security guard with the shotgun and the itchy trigger finger.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘What are you doing after the factory visit?’
‘Carrickfergus Castle.’
‘That’s exciting, too. And after the castle?’
‘Typing.’
‘And after the typing?’
She shrugged. I gave her one of my cards, scored out the work phone and wrote my home phone number. ‘If you want to go for a drink or something?’
She smiled. ‘Kind of unlikely, I’m on a story.’
‘But if the story doesn’t pan out, or you get it done?’
‘Maybe.’
I’ll take a maybe, I thought and as I was rummaging in my brain for something funny or charming to say as a parting sally, Ed McBain stuck his big face in.
‘Ah, I take it you’re the reporter? Among other duties I’m the senior press liaison officer here, Chief Superintendent McBain,’ he said.
I left them to it and went downstairs feeling depressed. Chief Inspector McArthur was still there sitting glumly on the leather sofa by Reception.
‘Did you find the wallet, Duffy?’ he asked.
‘Not yet, sir,’ I said. ‘Lawson’s taking statements.’
I called Kevin over.
‘Does anyone on your staff have a theft conviction?’ I asked him.
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