I’d been inside Carrickfergus Castle briefly once, but that once was enough to get the gist of the place. ‘Yeah I know where that is. How long has she been lying there?’
‘That’s a rather interesting question, sir. The caretaker gets everyone out at five to six and locks the front gate. Then he does a full check of the castle to make sure all the visitors are out and accounted for. Then he does another quick check of the building at ten, before he goes to bed.’
‘And she wasn’t lying there in the courtyard at ten?’
‘No.’
‘He inspects the entire castle before he locks the gate at six?’
‘The timeline is important, sir. He gets all the visitors out, inspecting the castle for stragglers and then he locks the front gate.’
‘And the front gate is locked from when until when?’
‘The front gate is locked from 6 pm until 7 am.’
‘What kind of a gate?’
‘Thick, heavy, medieval.’
‘Is there any other way in?’
‘Over the external walls, but …’
‘But what?’
‘They’re sixty feet high … and six feet thick.’
‘I see.’
‘And the entire castle is illuminated by spotlights all night, so anyone putting up a sixty-foot ladder …’
‘Secret tunnels, secret doors?’
‘No secret tunnels, no secret doors. The castle is built on the bedrock. No one’s tunnelling through that. I’ve checked with the caretaker about that; anyway, the only way in is through the front gate which was locked.’
I buttered my toast and when the kettle decided to boil of its own accord I poured my coffee. My head was beginning to perk up now and I was visualising the situation clearly in my mind’s eye.
‘He calls time, he does an inspection to check that all the visitors have gone and locks the gate. And then he does another lookeyloo before he goes to bed and everything seems fine. Yet when he wakes up this morning, a little over an hour ago, he finds a woman’s body in the central courtyard, in front of the keep, with her skull smashed in.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How does he think she got there?’
‘He has no idea, sir.’
‘He just found her sprawled there in the castle courtyard?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Is he lying?’
‘That would certainly be one explanation.’
‘And what would the others be?’
‘I haven’t thought of any others yet.’
I finished the toast and took another swig of coffee.
I had a sudden and rather unpleasant flashback to the summer of 1984 and the Lizzie Fitzpatrick case. Similar set-up happening to the same CID detective twice?
Never in a million years. This kind of lightning did not strike twice.
‘Can you think of any other explanation, sir?’
‘Uhm, off the top of my head … a stowaway clinging to the undercarriage of a plane falls out when it’s coming in to land at Belfast?’
‘I suppose that’s not impossible, sir.’
‘All right, I’ll admit that you’ve piqued my interest, Lawson. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.’
I hung up.
I showered, shaved, put on a suit and tie and looked out my heavy wool coat. I checked under the Beemer for bombs. There were no bombs but my battery was dead because I’d left the lights on. I phoned the Automobile Association and they said they’d send someone out. I called Carrick Cabs and the taxi arrived a couple of minutes later.
The driver had on Radio 1, which was giving us Kylie Minogue’s ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. Within a few seconds Miss Minogue’s sunny Antipodean vocals and the chirpy lyrics had brought out my dark, misanthropic side. By the song’s second verse I was already longing for an IRA ambush and by the second chorus I was dreaming of a rogue comet strike that would reset the entire evolutionary clock à la the KT boundary extinction event.
Carrickfergus Castle was in front of us now, with the lough on the left-hand side and the lights of Belfast behind. There were a couple of dirty cargo boats out on the water, a big Soviet tanker and two army Gazelle helicopters hovering over West Belfast.
Funny that in my nearly six years in Carrickfergus I’d only been in the castle that one time for fifteen minutes and that had been on my first day here, to satisfy my curiosity. I’d never really thought about it since. It was always just something that was there. A grey-black castle that had been the centre of Anglo-Norman power in Ulster for nearly seven hundred years, until the rise of Belfast in the nineteenth century.
I paid the cabbie and Lawson met me at the car park entrance with one of the trainee detective constables they were always sending to us because Carrick was a relatively safe posting for a trainee and they were unlikely to get killed in the first few weeks on the job – something which was always bad for morale.
The trainees were usually rubbish and I was glad to see the back of them when they rotated them out after a few weeks. Lawson, however, was good. He had passed for Sergeant and if there hadn’t been a glut of RUC detective sergeants, he would have been promoted long ago. Across the water he’d probably be a Detective Inspector already, although perhaps his incorruptibility would have held him back.
He handed me a hot beverage in an insulated paper cup.
‘Thanks. What’s this?’ I asked.
‘Coffee, sir.’
‘You made it?’
He shook his head. ‘The forensics team brought flasks of tea and coffee down from Belfast with them. And doughnuts and buns and Danish pastries.’
‘That’s very well organised and together of them.’
‘They’re a very well organised and together bunch, sir.’
‘Are they? Just because they bring baked goods doesn’t necessarily mean they know what they’re doing. Mr Kipling makes mistakes doesn’t he? Battenberg cake for example. Nobody likes marzipan.’
I looked at the skinny, spotty trainee wearing a suit jacket miles too big for him. ‘And you are?’
‘Detective Constable Young,’ the trainee said and added, ‘Uhm, sir.’
‘Have we met before?’
‘Only briefly, sir.’
‘How long are you here for?’
‘I’m here until Friday, sir.’
I looked at Lawson. ‘What’s the point of that? He won’t have time to pick up anything.’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
‘Do you like Battenberg cake?’
‘No, sir.’
‘See, Lawson?’
‘He’s probably just agreeing with you, sir. I’ll bet if you’d said you didn’t like Bakewell tart he would have said he didn’t like that, either.’
I looked into Young’s naïve, baleful, trusting face. ‘Do you like Bakewell tart?’
‘Oh yes, sir! It’s one of my favourites,’ he said.
‘Everyone likes Bakewell tart, Lawson. Well, Trainee Detective Constable Young, why don’t you tell me about the crime scene as we walk over there?’
‘What about it, sir?’
‘Your thoughts, observations?’
‘The victim is in her, uhm, twenties. Or thirties. Maybe forties. Maybe fifties? Cause of death seems to be the fall from the roof of the big bit in the middle.’
‘Anything else occur to you, Constable Young?’
Young shook his nervy face from side to side.
‘Lawson?’
‘Well, sir, if your aeroplane theory doesn’t work, I think the central puzzle here, sir, is how she got into the castle to kill herself, if indeed it was a suicide. And if it was murder you have to ask yourself how the murderer managed to escape. So I looked for a ladder leaning up against the castle walls or perhaps concealed nearby.’
‘And did you find one?’
‘No.’
‘We’ll have to canvass for witnesses to discover if anyone saw anything untoward,’ I said. ‘Young, there’s a big cargo boat tied up
in the harbour. Get on board and see if anyone saw anything last night. They usually have someone on watch all night in those boats.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And when you’re done with that, go to every shop and flat along the seafront and ask them if they saw anything unusual. Write everything down in your notebook. Legibly.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and stood there.
‘Run along!’
Young jogged off in the direction of the harbour.
I yawned. ‘Most of that will be a waste of time, but it’ll keep him out of our hair,’ I said. ‘Now tell me about the CCTV footage. The castle must have some and there’s definitely a camera overlooking the harbour.’
Because of the Troubles, CCTV cameras had become commonplace in Northern Ireland over the last few years. It was a boon for the RUC: one of our few advantages over forces from other parts of Britain.
‘The castle does not have CCTV. It’s a listed building and they weren’t allowed to put any up. There is a CCTV camera on the roof of the harbour-master’s office that faces the harbour and, crucially for us, the castle. I already have a constable over there looking at the footage. Nothing so far, I’m afraid.’
‘No one tumbling out of the sky?’
‘No, sir.’
‘If someone did put a ladder up against the walls it’ll be on the tape.’
‘Yes, sir. The harbour-master says that the camera covers the entire south side of the castle.’
‘And the north side?’
‘Well the castle is roughly oval shaped and the entire north side juts into the sea …’
‘So not only would you need a sixty-foot ladder, but you’d need a sixty-foot ladder on a boat.’
‘In the full glare of the spotlights and exposed to the traffic on the Marine Highway and anyone walking along the seafront.’
‘I wonder if the cameras at the police station and those at the Northern Bank would cover the north side of the castle?’ I mused.
‘I’ll have someone check it out, sir.’
‘But the easiest way is still through the front gate. Pick the front gate lock and there’s no need for a ladder at all. The Northern Bank camera would cover that, too, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir. But as, uhm, you’ll see, that wouldn’t really help.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Better to show you, sir, when we get there.’
‘Mysterious. What else, Lawson?’
‘No sign of a sexual assault on a cursory look at the victim.’
‘Forensics wouldn’t let you have more than a cursory look?’
‘No, sir.’
‘So what makes you think that she wasn’t sexually assaulted?’
‘She was fully clothed, sir.’
‘Wearing?’
‘Stylishly dressed. As far as I’m able to judge. Black skirt, black tights, wool sweater, pricey-looking shoes, nice green scarf, very expensive-looking leather bomber jacket, black with red piping.’
‘Too stylishly dressed for these parts?’
‘Could be, sir.’
‘Tarty?’
‘I don’t think she’s a working girl, sir. Although you can never tell.’
‘ID?’
‘There’s a handbag, but it was partially under the victim’s stomach and forensics wouldn’t let me move her to get a look inside.’
‘She jumped holding her handbag? Why would she do that, do you think?’
‘So that we could identify her? It’s not uncommon for jumpers to jump with their suicide note and their ID on hand. Or maybe she threw the handbag down first and then jumped and landed on it.’
‘Was there a suicide note?’
‘No.’
I looked at Lawson thoughtfully. ‘You seem pretty convinced that she jumped, then.’
‘Yes, I think so, sir.’
‘On the phone you said that if you were pushed you would say that we were looking at a suicide rather than an accident. Why?’
‘It must have caused her a lot of trouble to get into the castle. If she didn’t go in over the walls somehow, she must have slipped off a tour yesterday and hidden when Mr Underhill was doing his rounds. She goes to all that trouble, goes to the top of the keep and then accidentally falls off the roof? Unlikely.’
‘And why not a murder?’
‘Where’s the killer?’
‘Presumably you’ve searched?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘And has anyone left since you arrived?’
‘Absolutely not. And I’ve had someone on the gate since we got here.’
‘And the caretaker?’
‘Doesn’t seem like the murdering type.’
‘They never do.’
We had reached the massive castle gatehouse now. A WPC was standing there behind a POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape. I finished the coffee and threw it in the rubbish bin near the entrance. I straightened my collar and ran a hand through my hair.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and check out this crime scene, shall we?’
4: MR UNDERHILL
We couldn’t get through the gate because a big forensic officer was dusting the lock for fingerprints. He was wearing a white boiler suit and he was so bloody enormous that he was like a cloud with feet. But before I could hit Lawson with this cloud-with-feet observation, the kid had taken out a map and was shoving it in my face.
‘Sir, we’re here. As you can see, this is the front entrance of the castle and the only way in and out,’ Lawson said.
‘Yes, I see,’ I replied and tapped the big forensic officer on the shoulder.
‘DI Duffy, Carrick RUC, can we just take a look at this lock for a second?’ I asked him.
The big forensic officer nodded. ‘Be my guest, pal, but don’t touch anything.’
‘Any prints on the gate so far?’
‘Oh, only about a million.’
Lawson and I examined the lock on the front gate of the castle. It was an enormous, old-fashioned cast-iron job that you couldn’t pick with conventional tools as the tumblers were just too big; but like every lock in the world, with the right equipment, it could be opened.
‘Give me a couple of days to think about it and I reckon I could make a skeleton key to turn this,’ I said.
Lawson looked at the lock. ‘But it would be easier just to steal the real key and make a clay impression of it.’
‘Where does the caretaker keep his key?’
‘On a hook in the ticket office.’
‘And he can’t be in there all the time, can he?’
‘Nope.’
‘So maybe we don’t need those sixty-foot ladders after all.’
‘Well –’
‘Or maybe the caretaker’s just a liar. Not necessarily a murderer. How about this: he has some girl over, is showing off the roof of the castle, there’s an accident, invents this “mystery” to cover his tracks.’
‘He seems pretty credible to me, sir, but obviously a full interrogation is warranted,’ Lawson said.
We walked through the castle gatehouse and under the spiked iron portcullis into the castle proper.
‘Sir, this is what I was talking about, the portcullis,’ Lawson said.
I looked up. ‘Fascinating.’
In front of us, I could see half a dozen white-boiler-suited forensic officers going about their business deeper in the courtyard.
‘About the portcullis, sir –’
‘Who’s the lead FO today?’ I asked.
‘A Chief Inspector Payne, sir?’
‘Jesus! Frank Payne. As fine an example of nominative determinism as you’ll ever get, Lawson.’
Lawson smiled. ‘I get it,’ he said. Yeah of course he got it but I wouldn’t have thrown the nominative determinism crack to Crabbie, or anyone else in Carrick RUC.
‘He’s one of the good guys, Lawson, but, uhm, a bit prickly. Best not poach on Payne’s turf, or go asking him stupid questions. I’ll interview the caretaker while we let
them finish their job.’
We went inside the caretaker’s cottage which lay just behind the castle’s ticket booth. Cosy little one-bedroom bungalow with all mod cons.
The caretaker’s name was Clarke Underhill – a sprightly enough old chap in his late sixties. Ex-Royal Navy. Scottish. Grey hair. Slight frame. Unmarried. Been in this job for a decade. I introduced myself and ran all of Lawson’s questions by him again.
‘When did you find the victim?’
‘The first thing this morning when I went for a walk around the castle.’
‘What’s your usual morning routine, Mr Underhill?’ I asked.
‘I usually wake up at 5.30, or a wee bit later, and make a cup of tea. Normally I go for a wee walk around the courtyard and the battlements. Then I open the gate, bring in the milk, lock the gate, get the ticket booth ready and then open up properly at 7.00.’
‘Very early for tourists.’
‘It’s the way we’ve always done it. Sometimes a coach will stop at 7.30 on its way up to the Giant’s Causeway.’
‘And this morning? Anything strange? Any noises during the night?’
‘No. My alarm clock woke me up and I listened to the World Service while I made my tea and I went for my wee walk and then I saw her.’
‘The victim.’
‘Aye. Lying there by the keep.’
‘Dead?’
‘Aye. Deed as a doornail.’
‘Did you touch her?’
‘Why would I do that for?’
‘To see if she was still alive?’
‘No. I didnae go near her. To be honest I thought that maybe …’
His voice trailed away.
I looked at Lawson. He shrugged.
‘You thought what, exactly, Mr Underhill?’ I asked.
‘Well I wasnae sure if she wasn’t maybe, you know … a wraith.’
‘A what?’
‘A wraith.’
‘What’s a wraith?’
‘A spectre. A banshee.’
‘You thought the dead girl might be a ghost?’
‘Aye. I did.’
‘A ghost in a leather jacket?’ Lawson asked.
‘This building’s been here for eight centuries and the well was a site of pilgrimage for eight afore that. I’ve seen and heard of some very strange things here in my time,’ he said, his voice assuming a kind of defensive John Laurie cadence.
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