As exotic as Lily Bigelow’s death had been, it had been quickly forgotten about. The papers and the TV had moved on to the murder of Chief Superintendent McBain and the murders of two part-time policemen on farms along the border which happened a couple of days later. The media were calling this a new IRA campaign to assassinate vulnerable policemen.
When we drove to Carrick Castle there were no reporters, no TV crews, no police tape. The castle was open for business and Mr Underhill was selling tickets in the ticket booth. I arrived with a small forensic team that I sent down to the dungeons to see if they could gather any evidence. Bit late for that but you never knew …
‘Oh, hello Inspector Duffy, are you here to do more investigating?’ Underhill asked as we approached the ticket office.
‘Clarke Underhill, I am arresting you for the murder of one Lily Bigelow, you have a right to remain silent, but a court or jury may draw an adverse inference if you fail to mention any fact which you later rely upon in your defence, this fact being one which you could reasonably have been expected to mention when being questioned under caution.’
‘What are you talking about? I didnae kill that wee lassie.’
McCrabban produced a set of handcuffs and turned Underhill around.
‘Wait a minute, laddie! At least let me get the patrons out of the castle and lock the place up!’
I nodded to McCrabban ‘Aye, but go with him, we don’t want him doing a runner or jumping off a battlement.’
An hour later and Underhill was safely ensconced in Interview Room #1 at Carrickfergus RUC. He had a jug of water and the tape recorder was running, as per the instructions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (NI Order).
Bog-standard procedure. We took Mr Underhill through his written statement, looking for inconsistencies.
There were none.
We showed him the preliminary autopsy report and explained its meaning to him.
‘Lily Bigelow almost certainly did not commit suicide. She was murdered and the body was moved. She was murdered between 5 pm and 8 pm on the night of the 7th. Therefore, either someone murdered her before 6 am, when you say you found the dead body, or you moved it in front of the keep to make it look like a suicide for reasons of your own. Or you found her alive and hiding, murdered her and then moved her body in front of the keep. The most logical possibilities, Mr Underhill, are that you killed her, or you moved the body, or both. Which is it?’
‘I didnae do any of those things. First of all, I was at the ticket office the whole time, until a few minutes afore six. Dozens of people must have seen me there. Then, at a quarter to six, I made the announcement that the castle was closing and I walked through the building and locked up.’
‘All right so you didn’t kill her between 5 pm and 6 pm. That was always an unlikely scenario because of the lack of opportunity, the possibility of being seen and the noise a murder may have made. But from 6 pm until 8 pm you had the whole place to yourself.’
‘Why would I kill her? That’s ridiculous! And I didnae see the wee lassie until the morning! If I’d seen her alive I would have let her out of the castle. Why in the name of all that’s holy would I have killed her?’
‘You were angry that she was hiding in the castle? You tried to force yourself upon her?’ I suggested.
‘At my age! You’re joking.’
‘I’ve seen you lift up that two-ton portcullis. You’re stronger and more virile than you look. Certainly a match for young Lily.’
Underhill looked incredulously at us.
‘A child could lift that portcullis with the chain and pulley! Everything I have told you is the truth. The first time I set eyes on her was when I saw her dead. I never laid a finger on her!’
‘Did you give her a ticket to go into the castle?’ I asked.
‘Hoots man! Apart from that! Aye, I gave everyone in that group a ticket, but after that I never saw her again.’
I stared at him, got up from the desk, nodded, poured him a glass of water, poured myself a glass of water, sat down again. Slow him down a bit. Gently, now:
‘Clarke, we know it wasn’t anything malicious. She wasn’t interfered with. There was no sexual motive. Here’s what I think happened … You found her hiding in one of the dungeons, she was mentally unbalanced from mixing her medications. She attacked you, she scared the shit out of you. You clobbered her, just once, her head banged against those low dungeon walls. You couldn’t believe it. She was dead. Dead as a doornail. You left her there, went to your office to get a drink. “What have I done?” You went back to look at her, she was still dead. “I didn’t mean to kill her, but they’ll put me away.” Your mind was racing and then you concocted a plan. She jumped off the keep. Who knows why? Women are mysterious. They’re always doing weird things. You dragged the body up to the top of the keep. You put her shoes on the wrong feet and you pushed her off. You didn’t even look at her. Wait until morning. Have a drink. Go to bed. It’ll be all right in the morning … Is that how it went down, Mr Underhill?’
He put his head in his hands.
Crabbie gave me a look. I think you nailed him, Sean.
A tap on the glass through the two-way mirror.
I went outside to see what it was. Forensic team.
Blood on one of the dungeon walls. A tiny speck of blood that they’d sent off for analysis, but no hair, or any other physical evidence that Lily had been down there. We’d need that confession, or a clever barrister might sway the court …
Back into Interview Room #1.
‘Well, Clarke? Manslaughter not murder. The DPP will offer you four years if you plead guilty and save the Crown the expense of a trial. Four years? The prison service will let you out after two and a half. He could even take it to a jury, couldn’t he, Sergeant McCrabban?’
‘Aye, Inspector Duffy, he could. Self-defence. He was being attacked,’ Crabbie said.
‘Self-defence? A jury might buy that, who knows? Not guilty. Zero jail time. But tell us the truth, now, Clarke. Lying will make you look guilty. Make you look like there’s something to hide. The truth! Come on. Out with it, man.’
He lifted his head from the table and stared at me through tears. Blue-eyed, old man, bleary, sea-dog tears.
‘I didnae kill her. I didnae lay a finger on her!’ he said, defiantly, and banged the table so hard the tape recorder jumped.
An hour of this.
Tag team.
Me and Crabbie out. Lawson in. Me back in again.
A couple of trainee detectives in, just to mix things up.
Night fell on Belfast Lough.
The snow flurries turned to cold, hard rain.
The regular cops went home to their beds.
‘Take him down the cells and let him stew. Suicide watch. He’s the type,’ I said to the duty Sergeant, and Carrick CID went home to their beds, too.
Next morning.
Take in the milk. Out to the car after no breakfast. Check underneath for bombs. None. Straight to the station. Wake up Underhill. Interview Room #1. The same questions over and over. Tell us the truth, tell us the goddamn truth, you lying bastard.
‘Only you could have killed her. Only you could have moved the body. There is no other explanation. And don’t mention the fucking ghost.’
‘I didnae do it. I didnae do it.’
Water jug. Rolling tape. Cigarette smoke drifting up to the acoustic baffle ceiling panels.
Lawson and McCrabban in. Duffy out.
Morning bleeding into afternoon.
Rain and fog.
Football scores on the TV news. What day is this? Saturday?
‘Can I see you in my office, Inspector Duffy?’
Swivel round in the office chair. The Chief Inspector. He was in a bristly, confident mood that I didn’t like. He’d obviously been reading one of those books on people management.
‘Have a seat.’
‘Come with me to my office, Duffy.’
‘OK.’
The Ch
ief Inspector’s office. Only a little bit nicer than mine. Sea view, black and white photographs, some kind of ancient walking stick that he, no doubt, was dying to be asked about …
‘Guess what Superintendent Strong sent me?’ the Chief Inspector said.
‘Oh no, not one of his wife’s Dundee cakes?’
‘No. Look!’ he said, and took a pair of boxing gloves from a drawer. They were cheap red training gloves with a squiggle written on them.
‘Ali was autographing gloves before he left. People were just buying gloves out of the Athletic Stores and he was autographing them with a felt tip pen. You know how much a signed Muhammad Ali set of boxing gloves goes for?’
‘No.’
‘About 300 quid. You buy a 30 quid pair of boxing gloves, Ali signs them, there you go, you’ve made 1,000 per cent profit, just like that.’
‘I see.’
‘Strong sent me these. He’s pleased with the work we’re doing over here. It’s a reward for all of us, you know.’
‘Is it?’
‘They’ll probably promote him to Chief Super and give him Eddie McBain’s job.’
‘Fascinating.’
‘Do you see what I’m saying, Duffy?’
‘I think perhaps you could be a tiny bit less opaque, sir.’
‘It’s about Mr Underhill …’
‘What about him?’
‘See, I had to talk to Superintendent Strong about it and I couldn’t really explain the case to him. First of all you tell me that this is a straightforward suicide, now you’re telling me it’s a murder. You’ve got an elderly suspect down there who denies everything and doesn’t look like a murderer to me.’
‘It is probably a murder. We were – I was wrong about the suicide.’
‘Has Underhill confessed?’
‘No. As you say he’s been strenuously denying his guilt.’
‘It’s been twenty-four hours and he –’
‘He hasn’t asked for a lawyer yet.’
‘No, he hasn’t asked for a lawyer … But we’re going to play this one by the book, Duffy. It’s been twenty-four hours. You’re either going to have to release him or charge him.’
‘If that’s what you want, we’ll charge him, then. Why are you so concerned, sir? Clarke Underhill’s a nobody. No one’s going to give a shit if I keep him here all week.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong, Duffy. Until it was transferred to the National Trust, Carrickfergus Castle was owned by the Ministry of Defence. Mr Underhill is still technically employed by the Royal Navy, and not two hours ago, Superintendent Strong had an enquiry about him. A phone call from the Admiralty. In London.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m not joking. The Navy Legal Services office are sending a solicitor down from Belfast to represent Mr Underhill and they want to know if you are going to charge him or release him.’
‘Like I say, sir, we’re going to charge him.’
‘They are demanding that all questioning cease until his legal representative arrives.’
‘We can wait.’
McArthur shook his head. Coping with pressure from upstairs wasn’t his forte. Coping wasn’t his forte. ‘So you don’t have a confession?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you have any actual evidence that he killed the girl?’
‘Forensics was a bust, sir. No fluids, hair or clothes belonging to Lily Bigelow in Mr Underhill’s cottage. Nothing of Mr Underhill’s on the body. There was one blood speck on a wall in one of the dungeons that is still off for analysis.’
‘Do you have a motive?’
‘No.’
The Chief Inspector looked irritated. ‘So what do you have?’
‘We have the CCTV footage and the preliminary autopsy report. Mr Underhill was alone in the castle and he either killed Lily, or he moved the body, or he’s lying about being alone in the castle.’
‘You’ve no murder weapon, no motive, no confession, no forensic evidence linking him to the girl’s death.’
‘But we have logic. We have the autopsy report about the time of death and we have the fact that the body was moved and that no one else could possibly have killed her.’
‘You think that’s enough to bring this to the DPP’s office?’
‘I do. It’s our job to arrest the suspects. It’s their job to prosecute and it’s a jury’s job to determine their guilt or innocence. And as a non-terrorist murder, this case is going to a jury.’
He looked at me closely, his dark eyes for once flashing a kind of animal intelligence.
‘So you’re confident that Underhill killed her?’
‘I’m not confident. But I can’t see any other explanation. When his solicitor arrives, we will charge Mr Underhill with murder.’
The solicitor arrived.
A trim, dark-haired clever-looking woman wearing a Royal Navy uniform. Lieutenant Commander Long, she called herself.
She blustered about his lack of legal representation, the lack of evidence, the fact that her client denied his guilt. She demanded that we release him immediately and apologise for the inconvenience we’d put him through. Instead of doing any of that, we charged him with murder.
The DPP, Sir Barry Shaw, was notified and he sent down his goons, who took Mr Underhill into their custody, photocopied all our case files and transferred him out of our jurisdiction.
And that was that.
We heard later that Commander Long had immediately applied for bail for Mr Underhill and her request had been granted by a sympathetic judge. By nightfall, Underhill was back in his cottage at Carrickfergus Castle.
That was a surprise but we had done all we could. It was out of our hands now.
The boys weren’t happy.
We all knew something was very wrong with the case.
I took them down to Ownies for dinner and a pint or two of the black stuff. I found a nook in an upstairs snug overlooking the Scotch Quarter.
Another cold, rainy night. Low cloud ceiling. No stars. Ships on the lough sounding fog horns every few minutes …
Dinner of lamb chops and mashed potatoes.
Bushmills whisky and Guinness.
Talk of football and music and the flicks.
Lawson the first to broach the case. ‘Now, I don’t think he did it.’
Silence. A look from Crabbie.
‘Sean, do you think we should have a wee talk about the Lizzie Fitzpatrick case?’ McCrabban said.
I finished my pint and nodded. ‘Maybe you’re right, mate.’
I turned to Lawson. ‘Sergeant McCrabban knows some of it and he’s probably guessed the rest. What I’m going to tell you doesn’t go further than this room. Is that understood?’
They both nodded.
And I told them everything. The approach by Annie Fitzpatrick. My investigation into the locked-room mystery surrounding Lizzie’s death. How through a process of luck and deduction I had determined that she had been murdered and who had done it. I even told them what happened next, even though I’d signed the Official Secrets Act regarding that portion of the episode. The Brighton Bombing. Poor misguided Dermot McCann … And the epilogue: Annie Fitzpatrick taking revenge on the person I identified as her daughter’s murderer.
Lawson’s eyes were big when the story ended.
Crabbie said nothing. He merely nodded. Clearly, the deep old file had put most of it together already.
‘So you see, gentlemen, policemen in Northern Ireland do not get two locked-room mysteries in one career. The odds would be astronomical …’
‘Aye, you’re right there, Sean. It’s always the simplest explanation, isn’t it?’ Crabbie said.
‘Amen to that,’ I agreed. ‘One murder like that in a police officer’s case book is all right. But two? Two is de trop, as Maigret would say. Two is coincidence piled on top of coincidence. I’m an RUC detective, not Miss Marple or Gideon Fell. No, Lawson, Underhill is a very convincing liar, but he’s a liar nonetheless.’
‘Well …’ he said, and his voice trailed away.
‘Well what, son?’
‘You know my dad is a mathematician, right? And I did a couple of A-levels in maths.’
‘So?’
‘Well, it’s not necessarily about you, sir, but on the other hand, it could be all about you, in which case Bayes’s Theorem is worth considering. Either of you, uhm, know about Bayes’s Theorem?’
‘New one on me. Crabbie?’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Bayesian mathematics shows the relation between two conditional probabilities which are related to one another. Uhm, should I go on?’
‘Continue.’
‘Well, uhm, Bayes’s Theorem expresses the conditional probability, or posterior probability, of a hypothesis H – its probability after evidence E is observed – in terms of the prior probability of H, the prior probability of E, and the conditional probability of E given H. It implies that evidence has a stronger confirming effect if it was more unlikely before being observed. Am I, er, making any sense at all?’
‘I’m not sure I’m quite hanging in there,’ I said, and I could see he’d lost Crabbie.
‘Well according to Bayes’s Theorem, the fact that you dealt with a locked-room mystery once before might, in fact, be relevant in deciding whether this particular crime – the murder of Lily Bigelow – is also a locked-room mystery.’
‘How so?’
‘Let’s assume that Mr Underhill is not the real killer.’
‘OK.’
‘And let’s assume that the real killer knew that you were likely to be lead detective in any case of homicide to occur in Carrickfergus. If he knew your case history, including the Lizzie Fitzpatrick case, he could formulate an elaborate murder plot with the knowledge that you and Sergeant McCrabban would not think it possible for any one RUC policeman to encounter two locked-room mysteries in the course of his career. You are not, as you say, Gideon Fell.’
I took a sip of Bushmills. ‘That would be pretty diabolical,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ McCrabban agreed. ‘And that’s Bayesian mathematics, is it?’
‘I’ve given you the gist,’ Lawson said, not wanting to explain that he’d given us the ‘idiot’s version’.
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