‘I did know him. In fact I was talking to him about a case only yesterday.’
‘Well then, I’m sure they’d be glad of your assistance at the crime scene.’
I hung up and looked at the phone suspiciously. Chief Inspector McArthur popped his head around my office door. ‘Anything new, Duffy?’
‘Yeah. Uhm, I was wrong. Larne RUC say it’s fine if we go down there. Say they need all the help they can get.’
‘Oh, OK, I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind.’
‘… All right. We’ll take my car.’
I told Mabel to fill Lawson in on all the developments, and we drove up the Beltoy Road to Glenoe.
It was a treacherous night with the snow and sleet and none of the roads in the hill country had been gritted. Fortunately, the Beemer kept us on the straight and narrow; I kept the speed down to a steady fifty and we arrived at Glenoe in one piece. Pretty little place, Glenoe, with a steep road up past whitewashed cottages to a small deciduous wood with a famous waterfall.
Not pretty tonight, though.
McBain’s Volvo scattered over half the village. One of McBain’s legs clearly visible on the roof of a house.
Dozens of cops from Larne RUC, the Belfast Forensic Unit and Special Branch. Dozens of media. Ambulance men, even some soldiers from the local UDR base. A perimeter had been set up in front of McBain’s house which was a neat Georgian manor at the top of the hill. The mercury tilt switch had evidently gone off almost immediately after he had pulled out of his driveway.
I parked the Beemer and got out.
I introduced myself and the Chief Inspector to a constable guarding the RUC DO NOT CROSS tape and he let us through. Larne RUC hadn’t done too bad a job. They’d set up spotlights and a generator and they were giving the boiler-suited forensic officers a wide berth to do their business.
I walked past the wreck of the Volvo. The rear of the vehicle was completely gone and the rest was like some kind of abstract sculpture that Ballard might have liked. A headless torso covered with a blanket was in the driver’s seat.
‘Poor bastard,’ I said.
McArthur nodded.
I recalled a dozen little kindnesses that Ed had shown me and his other junior officers. Eccentric, old-fashioned, but such a decent man … I had to take a minute to swallow a sob.
We walked up the gravel path into the house and were immediately intercepted by DCI Kennedy, a red-faced, passed-over, 50-year-old Chief Inspector whom I’d encountered a couple of times before. Each occasion as unpleasant as the one before. ‘What are you doing here, Duffy?’ Kennedy asked.
‘I was told that you might need some help.’
‘Help from you? I’d sooner have Myra Hindley babysit our Kevin.’
‘That’s a bit of–’
‘Who told you we needed your help?’
‘Armstrong, at your station.’
‘He’s new. He doesn’t know anything. You can fuck off, Duffy. You can fuck off back to Carrick where you belong.’
McArthur gave me a wide-eyed look.
‘See here, Kennedy, this is my gaffer, Chief Inspector McArthur,’ I said, pointedly.
Kennedy turned to McArthur and looked him in the eye. ‘You can both fuck off. We don’t need your help.’
I didn’t want to make a scene in front of so many people, so I put my arm around McArthur’s shoulders and led him outside.
‘What was that all about?’ McArthur asked, amazed.
My cheeks were burning. I was angry at myself. ‘I had a feeling they were going to be like this,’ I mumbled.
‘Is there friction between Carrick and Larne CID or something?’ McArthur asked, finally becoming aware of our long-running feud.
‘There have been a few jurisdictional disputes over the years, that’s all. Kennedy is just an ignorant bloody bastard. Everybody knows it.’
We walked past Mrs McBain, still sitting in the back of the ambulance with a blanket around her shoulders, apparently unhurt, holding a mug of tea. She had a cut on her forehead, but it must have been from flying glass from the shattered house windows. There was no way she’d been in that Volvo.
‘Joanne?’
She remembered me from the Police Club and the missing dog.
‘Inspector Duffy,’ she said.
‘I’m so sorry, Jo. We all loved Ed, as you know.’
She nodded, sniffed. ‘I suppose you’ll want a statement, while it’s fresh in my memory, before I forget,’ she said.
‘God, no, I just wanted to say hello and see if there was anything I could get you,’ I said, a little surprised that Larne RUC hadn’t already taken her statement.
‘He didn’t always check, in answer to your question. His knees were bad. It hurt to bend down and look under the car. Today he didn’t check. He was in a hurry. That phone call.’
‘Phone call?’
‘Someone called very early. After six. Eddie said he had to go straight away and a few moments after he left I heard the bang. We’re at the top of the hill. Any direction you go from here, the mercury will flow and set the bomb off. I knew what had happened immediately. Eddie had described it to me often enough.’
She started to cry and I sat next to her and gave her a hug. I handed McArthur the empty mug. ‘Get her another,’ I whispered. ‘Milk, lots of sugar.’
She sobbed on my shoulder for a full ten minutes.
‘Do you have somewhere to go tonight? You can’t stay here,’ I said.
‘I’ll stay with Mary, she’s on her way over,’ Joanne said.
‘Have they notified Jack, Noel, Richard and Suzanne?’ I asked.
‘Yes. They’re flying back tonight.’
‘They’ll be a comfort.’
She turned to look at me. ‘The Chief Constable’s coming down. I don’t want to have to deal with him, can you tell him that I’d rather be alone with my children and my sister?’
‘Of course. I’ll take care of it.’
McArthur arrived back with a new mug of tea, his raincoat covered in snowflakes.
‘Mrs McBain wants to wait here until her sister arrives to take her away. She doesn’t want to have to deal with the Chief Constable who is on his way down from Belfast. Can you make some calls, sir?’ I asked McArthur.
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, you.’
‘I’ll try,’ he said.
When he’d gone, Mrs McBain took her second mug of tea and sipped it.
‘They’ll never catch them will they, Sean?’
‘You never know, Jo.’
‘Eddie always talked about it. Unless there’s forensic evidence, or you can trace that phone call to a listed number, but they’ll have used gloves and called from a phone box won’t they?’
She knew of which she spake. Unless they’d left a fingerprint somewhere on the device, there was next to no chance of catching the bombers. And no one who was clever enough to build a mercury tilt switch bomb would be stupid enough to leave a fingerprint.
‘We’ll do our best, Jo. We owe him that,’ I said.
We sat with her until her sister arrived and took over.
On the way back down the hill to the Beemer I saw Frank Payne of the forensics unit having a smoke and a sandwich simultaneously.
‘Long day for you, Frank,’ I said.
‘So much for Muhammad Ali’s peace mission, eh, Duffy?’ he said venomously.
‘Maybe James “Bonecrusher” Smith will show up with a peace plan next week,’ I said.
Payne cackled and slapped me on the back. ‘You’re a comedian, Duffy. Well, back to work, we still haven’t found McBain’s head yet.’
‘I saw one of his legs up on –’
‘Yeah we’ve tagged that one. We’re almost completely done now. But the head … you don’t want some wee girl to go out playing in her wendy house and find Eddie McBain’s head grinning at her, eh?’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘Eh, Duffy, ever have sex while camping? It’s fucking intents. Get it? Get it?’
‘Are all forensic officers as disagreeable as that chap?’ McArthur asked me on the road back to Carrick.
‘They can be, sir, but Frank Payne brings being an arsehole to a whole new level.’
9: WIPING THE WHITEBOARD
The funeral was a full-dress affair at a little out-of-the-way church yard on Islandmagee. The Chief Constable came down, as well as the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and, in a surprise move, the Irish foreign minister. All the media saw the Republic of Ireland foreign minister’s presence as an optimistic sign of inter-Irish cooperation or something, but in fact it was because he and McBain had played rugby together at Trinity.
They found Ed McBain’s head, but it was still a closed casket affair. It rained, of course. Apocalyptic, cold cleansing rain from the Irish Sea. The band got soaked, their brass instruments going flat, and the funeral march sounded even more doleful than usual. The honour guard was drenched. Superintendent Strong, a beardy Glaswegian roughneck, gave Ed a fine eulogy and everyone felt that if Strong got promoted to Chief Super he’d probably be an adequate replacement.
I saw Tony McIlroy at the wake. He came over and bought me a drink.
‘You know we were among the last coppers to have seen Ed McBain alive,’ he said. ‘That theft nonsense at the Coast Road Hotel.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ I said.
‘Poor Ed. He was so worried about not letting everyone down. Showing Northern Ireland in its best possible light to that bloody delegation. Poor bastard. See the newspapers? Publishing that photograph of his torso in the car? Jackals, the lot of them.’
‘Aye,’ I agreed.
Tony sighed and sipped his Guinness. ‘You’re not on the McBain case, are you?’
‘Me? No. Larne RUC. They’ll balls it up, of course.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because they always do.’
Tony laughed. ‘What are you working on now?’
‘The Lily Bigelow suicide.’
‘Christ, that was something, wasn’t it? Quite the ill-starred trip for our Finnish friends. Or to use the parlance of the civil service, “an utter fucking debacle”. That nonsense with the wallet, the shitty condition of the factory site, a suicide. And after they got back to Helsinki they’re bound to have heard about Ed McBain’s death, too. I’m no fortune teller, but somehow I don’t think Lennätin will be setting up a mobile phone factory in Carrickfergus any time soon.’
‘I think you’re right about that one, Tony,’ I said.
‘And between you, me and the gatepost, it was always going to be Dublin rather than Belfast because the Corporation Tax is that much lower down there. That’s what Laakso told me. To quote a great Irishman, “there’s no future, there’s no future for us”.’
‘So why did you come back here?’ I asked.
‘I was made to feel very unwelcome in England, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘There’s no future for you in the RUC either, mate. Look at you, stuck at Carrick all these years. They don’t appreciate you. Why don’t you quit and come and work for me? Or set up on your own?’
I shook my head ruefully. ‘You know how many times I’ve written my letter of resignation? You know many times I’ve actually tendered it? I’m a joke. Even to myself now. No, I won’t be quitting any more. I’ll be staying until I get my pension.’
‘Or until they blow you up like poor Ed.’
‘Yeah, or until they blow me up like poor Ed.’
‘Well, you have my card, let’s go out for a proper drink, OK?’
‘OK, Tony.’
After an obligatory hour at the wake I picked up McCrabban and Lawson and we all drove back to Carrickfergus in the Beemer.
We changed out of our dress uniforms and back into our ordinary clothes. Slow day at the office. We refused to charge an old lady shoplifter and that just left a kid, all of 13 or 14, waiting for us in the cells who’d been lifted driving a stolen car. After further investigation we discovered that this was his nineteenth car-theft offence in the United Kingdom. He was a gypsy who moved with a clan of travellers all over Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, England and Europe, so it was highly likely that in all he had stolen hundreds of vehicles.
‘We have to dispose of this case today, Sean. Social services say that if we keep him in the cells any longer they’ll take it to a higher authority,’ Crabbie explained.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Habeas corpus?’
‘I don’t know, Sean.’
‘All right, let’s go and see the little shit.’
Downstairs to the cells. The little shit was not so little. Six-footer. Ginger bap, sleekit look to him, but not unintelligent. Killian, he called himself. He spoke Irish better than English, so we conversed in both languages.
‘You were stopped in a stolen car, Killian, not for the first time,’ I said.
‘I was given that car in exchange for a horse, I wasn’t to know it was stolen,’ he said.
‘And the other eighteen times you’ve been charged with car theft?’
‘Eighteen times charged, but only one conviction.’
‘And for that you got two months in an English borstal,’ I said.
‘Which I escaped from the second night I was there.’
‘Did you? That wasn’t in the file.’
‘No, they were probably too embarrassed to put it in the file. But it’s true enough. You can check into it.’
‘I believe you,’ I said. I passed him over my cigarettes and lighter. He lit himself a cig, expertly palmed four others, and passed the box and lighter back.
I sighed. ‘What are we going to do with you, Killian?’
‘You can’t hold me. Social services are going to put me in this place called Kinkaid. Heard of it?’
‘No.’
‘Easiest nick in Ireland to get out of. You just walk through the gate. I’ll escape from there, steal a car and be back with my Pavee by tomorrow.’
‘We could charge you with conspiracy, I suggest to Special Branch that you’re part of a car-theft ring that aids the paramilitaries, I get you sent to an adult prison. Special Branch will keep social services out of it.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘To teach you a lesson and stop you stealing cars,’ I said, switching back to English.
‘That seems a bit of a disproportionate response,’ Killian said.
‘Maybe I’m the disproportionate response type.’
‘You don’t seem the disproportionate response type,’ Killian said, blowing a smoke ring up towards the ceiling.
‘Why’s that?’
‘You speak Irish and you’re Catholic, I’d say that you’ve had your fair degree of shite from the RUC and are probably on the side of the underdog, which, in this analogy, would be me.’
I bit down a grin and thought about it. Not a completely unlikeable kid.
‘You know, is minic a gheibhean beal oscailt diog dunta,’ I said, which made him laugh.
‘You’re not allowed to do that any more, are you?’
‘Nope. We’re not. Listen, son, if Sergeant McCrabban lets you go with a caution could you at least promise me not to steal any more cars in my jurisdiction? In Carrickfergus?’
He stubbed out his cigarette, stood up and offered me his hand.
‘On my solemn word of honour,’ he said. ‘We’re going over to England next week anyway, and we’ll probably be there for a bit.’
He shook my hand and then Sergeant McCrabban’s hand. I made him give Sergeant McCrabban his watch back and we let him go with a caution.
We walked back up to the incident room.
‘Another case resolved,’ I said. ‘If only his name was up on the whiteboard.’
‘What was that thing you said to him in Irish that made him laugh?’ Crabbie asked. ‘Is minic som
ething?’
‘Is minic a gheibhean beal oscailt diog dunta. It means “an open mouth often invites a closed fist”.’
‘That it does,’ McCrabban agreed. ‘That it does.’
I went home to the empty house on Coronation Road for lunch and made myself a pint glass vodka gimlet. Vodka, lime juice, soda, ice – four simple ingredients that conspired together to make most of the world’s problems go away. Certainly after two of them, easy on the soda.
I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which Beth had got me for my birthday, along with an original 1953 pressing of Tosca from EMI – the one with Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi and Giuseppe Di Stefano. One of the few birthday presents from anybody that I’d actually wanted.
Back to the station in the pouring rain, with the Maria Callas under my arm.
Lawson came into my office with a sheet of fax paper. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Stomach contents report from the pathologist.’
‘Stomach contents? Where’s the full autopsy report?’
‘Hasn’t arrived yet,’ Lawson said.
‘What’s the hold-up?’
‘Uhm, I don’t know. I did call them, sir. Apparently there’s some kind of problem. The pathologist is carrying out more tests.’
‘Why?’
‘They wouldn’t tell me.’
‘How long until the preliminary autopsy report?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Well find out, Lawson. You can’t let these people run roughshod over you. You’re a policeman.’
‘I’ll try to find out, sir.’
‘Bet the lazy bastards haven’t written it yet. Never heard the like of it. Stomach contents, indeed,’ I grumbled. ‘Let me take a look at that.’
I called Crabbie in and all three of us read the report together. Lily Bigelow’s stomach contained the usual food and drink, plus white wine, gin, Aspirin, Nembutal and Valium.
‘Nembutal and Valium. Just like we thought. Did you ever dig up the facts on Nembutal?’
‘I did. It’s a prescription anti-anxiety medication, also sometimes used as a sleep aid,’ Lawson said.
‘What happens if you mix Valium and Nembutal?’
Lawson flipped open his notebook. ‘Well, typical applications for pentobarbital (Nembutal) are as a sedative, a hypnotic, a pre-anaesthetic, and it’s also used for control of convulsions in emergencies. In the UK there’s widespread use of it as a veterinary anaesthetic agent. Pentobarbital-induced coma is sometimes used in Casualty in patients with acute liver failure. Lily presumably used it as a sleep aid.’
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