Rain Dogs

by Adrian McKinty

  ‘Anything like this before?’

  ‘No, but the caretaker afore me, old Mr Dobbin, he saw Buttoncap by the well.’

  ‘Buttoncap is?’

  ‘A soldier. A red coat. Hanged at the Gallows Green in 1798.’

  ‘Last night no strange sightings or noises?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘No sign this morning that someone had tried to break into your cottage?’

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘And the key was on its usual hook?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At what point this morning did you determine that the deceased was not a supernatural being?’

  ‘Fairly soon thereafter. She didnae speak when I spoke to her and she didnae move and I soon kenned that she was deed. So I went in and called the poliss.’

  ‘Are you sure the castle was empty when you locked up at six o’clock last night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure the castle was completely empty when you did your final inspection at 10 pm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this morning the gate was closed?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘In that case, how on Earth do you think someone could have got into the castle between ten and six this morning?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Mr Underhill, are you sure you didn’t invite the young lady to spend the night with you in the castle last night? Show her the dungeons, secret passages, things like that?’

  ‘My days of entertaining young ladies are long behind me, Inspector Duffy,’ he said, with a steady eye.

  ‘See?’ Lawson said, with a nod, and I had to admit that Mr Underhill was pretty convincing. Still I’d make him do a written statement and then I’d let McCrabban have a few hours with him in Interview Room #1 later on today.

  ‘Is the front gate the only way in and out?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And who has the key to the front gate?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Duplicate?’

  ‘There is a spare key –’

  ‘Aha!’ I said, looking at Lawson.

  ‘In the National Trust head office in London,’ Underhill continued.

  ‘On, er, my own initiative I checked with the night security people in the monuments department at the National Trust HQ, and apparently the key to Carrickfergus Castle is still in the monuments office. Hanging there on its hook. But as Mr Underhill will explain, the key isn’t really an issue anyway,’ Lawson said, proud of himself for following this particular evidentiary rabbit down into its burrow.

  ‘That’s a pretty stupid system, don’t you think? What if you had a heart attack in here at night when it was locked up? How would the emergency services get in to rescue you?’ I asked Underhill.

  ‘They wouldn’t. I’d be deed,’ Underhill said, with grim satisfaction. ‘You couldn’t even get through the gate with fireman’s axes. It’s two-foot-thick oak. Four-hundred-year-old oak. Designed to resist a siege. It would take them half a day to get through that with axes. Not that it would do them any good, anyway. At night I lower the portcullis to keep it in working trim. Lower it every night. Raise it every morning.’

  ‘The portcullis? That iron spiky thing?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what I was going to tell you, sir,’ Lawson said. ‘The portcullis makes the issue of the key and the lock irrelevant.’

  ‘Can you show me, Mr Underhill?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Lawson and I walked back into the gatehouse which was a rectangular structure about fifteen feet by ten. It was walled on two sides with the big oak gate at the front and the portcullis in the rear. The Cumulus-like forensic officer had moved on, giving us a clear picture of the geography.

  ‘Stay there gents!’ Underhill said.

  Underhill lowered the heavy cast-iron portcullis behind us with a long chain that wound round a capstan.

  ‘Christ! How much does that thing weigh?’ I asked, when the enormous portcullis reached the ground.

  ‘Two and a half tons.’

  ‘What’s it made of?’

  ‘Cast iron.’

  ‘You lowered it last night like normal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you can’t lift it up from below?’

  ‘Try it.’

  I tried pushing it up with my hands, but there was no bloody way.

  I turned to Lawson. ‘Well, this is a pretty picture isn’t it?’

  Lawson nodded. ‘You pick the lock or steal the key to the front gate. You get into the gatehouse, but that’s as far as you can get, because there’s a portcullis in the way.’

  ‘A two-and-a-half-ton portcullis.’

  ‘With spikes at the bottom.’

  I examined the portcullis. It had been freshly painted in the last month or two and there were no strange markings where someone had tried to lift it up with a hydraulic jack, or break through with welding gear.

  ‘You think you could wriggle underneath those spikes?’ I asked Lawson but he could tell I was only being rhetorical.

  ‘You see in the old days the enemy army would break down the front gate of the castle, but then they’d be trapped here in the gatehouse and from above – see that little hole in the ceiling – they shoot arrows or fire muskets or drop boiling oil down on them,’ Mr Underhill said.

  ‘Hole in the ceiling?’

  ‘Up there, look. The murder hole.’

  Twenty-five feet above us there was a trapdoor in the ceiling. Lawson raised his eyebrows and gave me a nod. Could be the way our killer and our victim got into the castle. Pick the front lock and bring a ladder and go up through the murder hole.

  ‘Can we take a look at this “murder hole”?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ Mr Underhill said.

  He raised the portcullis again and we walked back into the castle proper.

  ‘This way,’ he said and led us up a spiral staircase to the room above the gatehouse – a dank, cold, stone-walled little cubby.

  ‘If you brought a ladder, maybe you could get up to the murder hole and into the castle this way?’ I asked.

  Underhill shook his head. ‘Well, I suppose in a previous time you could have done that but that trapdoor to the murder hole has been sealed for decades. Welded shut for safety reasons. Kids kept falling through it and breaking their legs.’

  I looked at the welds on the cast-iron hinges and Underhill was right – they were solid and they hadn’t been tampered with recently.

  ‘Could you make it through the arrow slots?’ Lawson asked, pointing out several smaller rectangular holes in the floor for firing crossbow bolts and arrows.

  Underhill shook his head and put his arm through, to show that his shoulder would get stuck. Even an anorexic contortionist couldn’t get through the arrow slots. At their widest they were barely six inches across.

  ‘What do you think of those welds on the murder hole trapdoor, Lawson?’ I asked him.

  He examined the welds and shook his head.

  ‘Secure and not recently messed around with,’ he said.

  ‘Make sure forensics takes a photograph of those welds and the lowered portcullis.’

  ‘Will do, sir,’ Lawson said. ‘It more or less eliminates foul play from the inquiry, doesn’t it, sir?’

  I turned to Underhill. ‘OK, so they didn’t come through the gate. How else could someone get in here?’ I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wouldn’t have the foggiest.’

  ‘Lawson, any suggestions – as bizarre as you’d like.’

  ‘Your plane theory, sir, uhm, hot air balloon? Hang glider? Helicopter? Microlight?’

  ‘One of those pneumatic grappling hooks they used at Pont Du Hoc on D-Day?’ Underhill contributed.

  ‘And our old friend the sixty-foot ladder,’ Lawson said. ‘But all that would show up on the CCTV from the roof of the harbour-master’s hut, wouldn’t it, sir?’

  ‘Or the CCTV at the N
orthern Bank and the copshop.’

  I lit a fag, took two deep puffs and tossed it. ‘No more cigarettes for me this morning, Lawson. Remind me.’

  ‘I will, sir.’

  I rubbed my chin. ‘How do you get your murder victim to get on the hang glider with you?’

  ‘And how would the murderer escape, sir? Getting out’s going to be much more difficult than getting in. You can slip in with the crowd of regular tourists and perhaps hide from Mr Underhill on his nightly inspection, but how do you get out?’

  ‘It all depends on how secure the front gate has been since the portcullis was lifted this morning,’ I said, looking at Underhill and Lawson.

  Lawson saw where I was coming from.

  ‘Mr Underhill, what did you do after you found the body and called the police?’

  ‘I covered her up, of course!’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘I said a wee prayer and I waited by her body until the police came.’

  ‘And how long was that, Mr Underhill?’ Lawson asked.

  ‘Oh, it wasnae too long. Ten minutes?’

  ‘And then when DC Lawson arrived, you opened the gate?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye. I raised the portcullis and opened the front gate to let youse in.’

  ‘You didn’t open the portcullis and the gate before we came, are you sure about that?’ Lawson asked.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘What about getting the milk?’

  ‘I didn’t get the milk this morning. It’s still out there.’

  ‘Can the portcullis be lowered from the gatehouse or outside the castle?’ I asked Underhill.

  He shook his head. ‘No, it can’t.’

  I turned to Lawson. ‘What time did you get here?’

  ‘About six-fifteen, sir.’

  ‘And what did you do exactly?’

  ‘I met Mr Underhill and went to look at the body.’

  ‘And the front gate?’ I asked him.

  He smiled at me and I sighed with relief.

  He hadn’t fucked it up.

  ‘I’ve had WPC Warren on the front gate since the moment we got here. No one has left the building without going past her.’

  I patted him on the shoulder. ‘Well done, son.’

  ‘When Mr Underhill gave me the particulars over the phone I knew we were looking at a weird one, sir. Anyone would have done the same thing,’ Lawson said giving me a significant look.

  Did he know about Lizzie Fitzpatrick? No. It was before his time. McCrabban had helped me on that case, but Crabbie never told anybody anything.

  Lizzie had been murdered in the Henry Joy McCracken pub in Antrim – a pub that was locked and bolted from the inside. Or so we had been led to think. It was a very unusual case anywhere, but especially unusual in Ulster during the Troubles, where murder was never that baroque or complicated.

  I was no expert in the statistical analysis of the type of cases to be expected by a Northern Irish homicide detective, but surely it would be stretching the coincidence limits to suggest that an incident like that could ever occur again to the same peeler. I was not the brilliant but exceptionally statistically unlucky Dr Gideon Fell, nor was I the equally unlucky Hercule Poirot, no I was the plodding, ordinary, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of the humdrum RUC. And we dour-faced RUC men didn’t go in for weird statistical quirks or coincidences, which meant that unless someone was deliberately messing with us, this had to be an ordinary suicide in a rather out-of-the-ordinary location.

  I shook myself from the reverie. ‘Right, Lawson, let’s get moving, we’ll call Sergeant McCrabban at home and tell him to get down here with as many people as possible. Any warm body will do. And if Sergeant Mulvenny isn’t at the station we’ll call him at home too. We’ll need the K9 unit.’

  Mr Underhill was looking at us, perplexed.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘The thing is, Mr Underhill, if this was a murder and not a suicide then the murderer is still inside the building,’ Lawson explained.

  ‘But I searched the place last night,’ Underhill protested.

  ‘Mr Underhill, unless something strange shows up on the external video footage, you obviously missed at least one person on your search. Possibly two,’ I said.

  ‘I had a friend who spent the night with his girlfriend in the Great Pyramid in Giza,’ Lawson said. ‘That’s how they did it. Snuck in, hid from the security guard locking the place down, spent a terrifying night in there, came out in the morning when the place was filling up with tourists again. You bunk off the tour and hide from security. Easy as pie.’

  ‘Is it possible someone did that?’ I asked the caretaker.

  Underhill rubbed his chin. ‘Aye, I suppose …’ he conceded. ‘And since Detective Constable Lawson has had someone watching the front gate since just after you lifted the portcullis, then a murderer can’t possibly have escaped can he?’

  ‘No!’ Mr Underhill agreed excitedly.

  ‘Hence the K9 unit,’ I said. ‘If there is a murderer lurking in here we’ll find him. And if not, well, I’m afraid either you did it or it’s almost certainly a suicide.’

  Mr Underhill nodded sadly. ‘Her ghost will be a troubled spirit, no matter how she died. She’ll haunt the place for decades, maybe centuries.’

  ‘Fortunately for us, troubled spirits, wraiths and banshees are not within the jurisdiction of Carrickfergus CID,’ I said.

  5: THE STRANGE SUICIDE OF LILY BIGELOW

  Lawson and I went outside the castle to question WPC Warren. She was a new recruit and not a detective, but she was not one of those time-serving eejits from the part-time reserve either, so hopefully she had her shit together.

  ‘WPC Warren, I’m Detective Inspector Duffy, I don’t think we’ve formally met, yet,’ I said and gave her what I hoped was a friendly smile.

  ‘No, sir, I don’t think so,’ she said, in a pleasing South Belfast accent.

  She was very young, with a pert blonde bob under her kepi. She seemed alert enough.

  ‘Are you cold?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m fine, sir, I’ve got my gloves and scarf. I’ve heard it’s going to snow again later.’

  I looked at the darkening sky. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. Now listen to me, Warren, you’ve been on duty here since 6.15 this morning?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Right here at the entrance to the castle?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You haven’t slipped away for a toilet break, or a cup of coffee or a wee smoke or anything? I won’t be cross with you if you did any of those things, I just need to know.’

  ‘I’ve been right there, sir, I haven’t moved!’ she said, indignantly.

  ‘Good. Now has anyone come out of the castle in the time you’ve been standing here?’

  ‘No, sir … Well, apart from you and DC Lawson, sir. And two men from the forensic team.’

  ‘Apart from police officers has anyone else entered or left the castle?’ I reiterated.

  ‘No, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’

  ‘That’s very good, Warren. Now we’re going to conduct a thorough search of the building with sniffer dogs and until that search is over, no one is to leave the castle without my express permission. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good work, Warren, keep it up.’

  Lawson and I walked down to the police Land Rover in the castle car park.

  ‘Was I sufficiently encouraging with her, Lawson? I take my pedagogical role seriously, at least I do after I’ve had my coffee.’

  ‘You were very encouraging, sir. I’m sure Warren was inspired,’ Lawson replied. I looked for satirical intent behind those blonde eyebrows, but he was stony-faced, the cheeky bastard.

  We called the barracks and ordered in the K9 unit and as many PCs as the Duty Sergeant would let us have without endangering the station’s security. Then I got Sandra on the desk to
call McCrabban and tell him to get down here pronto. It was well after seven now, so he’d be done milking the pigs, or plucking the cows, or shagging the sheep, or whatever it was one did on a farm.

  Within the hour McCrabban appeared, along with Sergeant Mulvenny and his dogs and a dozen PCs who’d had nothing to do back at the station. I split us into three teams, with a detective leading each team. We went back into the castle, found Mr Underhill and told him our plan of conducting an exhaustive search of every conceivable nook and cranny in the place.

  He produced an archaeological map and explained the layout of the place in detail. It was not a particularly large structure: a courtyard, a ruined ‘curtain’ wall, two sets of dungeons, cannon emplacements complete with half a dozen large nineteenth-century cannons. The main building was the twelfth-century Norman castle keep from which presumably our Jane Doe had fallen or jumped. We went through all the floors in the keep, the spiral staircase and its flat roof. The keep was packed full of local history stuff: Carrickfergus’s first fire engine, prehistoric pottery found in the area, medieval tapestries and so on. There was a military museum on the top floor which had uniforms and weapons from across the centuries. An old well on the lower level would have been a terrific place for a psychopath to hide, but the well was covered with thick impenetrable Perspex that hadn’t been tampered with.

  ‘What about secret tunnels? Priests’ holes? Hidden rooms? You’re always hearing about secret tunnels in places like this,’ I asked Mr Underhill.

  ‘As I was telling Detective Lawson, there are no secret tunnels in this castle. We’re built over black basalt. No one’s tunnelling through that. No one was able to tunnel through that in eight centuries of sieges. I doubt very much someone managed to do it last night,’ he said definitively.

  ‘Secret rooms that someone with insider knowledge might know about?’

  ‘There are no secret rooms. There have been half a dozen archaeological digs in the castle and nothing like that has ever been found.’

  Sergeant Mulvenny and his dogs discovered no one hiding anywhere in the castle: not in the dungeons, not the keep, not the courtyard, not the gatehouse.

  ‘Sorry Duffy. There’s no killer in this place. We’ve looked all over. She must have done herself in,’ Mulvenny said, in a Scouse accent so dense and incomprehensible that I made a mental note to suggest him for the post of Media Relations and Civilian Liaison Officer.