Rain Dogs

by Adrian McKinty

  The police station was empty, but for a few reservists minding the store.

  I got a coffee-choc from the machine and went upstairs to the CID evidence room.

  I wheeled the TV in there and looked out the CCTV footage from the morning of Miss Bigelow’s murder.

  Freeze-framing through the tape after the portcullis had been raised, from 6 am onwards.

  I sat in a comfortable leather chair, dimmed the lights.

  Half an hour of this.

  I put on Radio 3, got another coffee.

  I watched the footage.

  I watched the footage.

  I watched the footage.

  I watched the –

  I stood up. I pressed pause.

  I rubbed my eyes. ‘Go raibh maith agat,’ I whispered and went as close to the screen as I possibly could.

  Was I sure?

  I was sure.

  I called Constable Bennett in from tech.

  ‘How do I print this out?’ I asked him.

  He told me a complicated answer that I couldn’t follow.

  ‘Can you print it out for me?’

  ‘Aye. Who is that? Is he RUC? He doesn’t look like one of ours.’

  ‘He’s not.’

  Bennett printed out the still from the video. It was surprisingly good. It would need to be. It would need to stand up in court against the most expensive firm of defence barristers in Northern Ireland. Scrub that. Against the most expensive defence QCs in the whole of the British Isles.

  One picture.

  This.

  I walked to my office and set the picture next to the icon of Mary.

  I called McCrabban.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Sorry, Crabbie, but I had to wake you.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve got Ek.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘CCTV.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I know how he got out of the castle. And I’ve got proof. He’s on the tape.’

  ‘I’ll be right in.’

  I called Chief Inspector McArthur. ‘I think we’ve got him, sir.’

  I told him about the CCTV footage. He was surprisingly pleased. Didn’t care about the politics. Wanted the arrest.

  ‘What’s our next step, Duffy?’ he asked.

  ‘Go to Dublin immediately and get the Garda to arrest the murdering fucker.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  26: LIFTING THE PRIME SUSPECT

  At 3 am Lawson walked into the incident room.

  ‘Good. You’re here. OK, let’s go,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’ Lawson asked, befuddled, bleary-eyed, young.

  ‘Carrick UDR base,’ I explained.

  ‘What?’

  We bundled him outside to the BMW and drove to the army base in Woodburn. Chief Inspector McArthur was waiting for us in his dress uniform. I’d been right: Lennätin was bringing jobs to Ireland, but both the RUC and the Garda loved nicking villains. He grinned at me and shook my hand.

  ‘Good work, Duffy. Very good work.’

  ‘Thanks for arranging the chopper, sir.’

  He patted me on the back. ‘Proud to do it, Sean. This is going to be good for both of us. High profile. Coup for Carrick CID and the station. Win–win.’

  ‘Don’t forget the Garda.’

  ‘Oh yes, the Garda. They’ll steal some of our credit, more than likely, the cheeky bastards.’

  We piled into a big RAF Wessex HC2 troop carrier. We put on headphones and headsets. The pilot turned round to look at us. Moustache, helmet, very big grin. ‘You chaps must be the grand panjandrums. We’ve got a vector cleared all the way to Rathmines army base in Dublin. This never happens. What’s going on?’

  ‘Sorry, that’s classified,’ I said.

  The pilot looked miffed. ‘Oh well, then, I know when to shut up … Last flight check. Air engines go. Vector nine nine. One zero one.’

  ‘All the way to Dublin by RAF helicopter. This is the way to travel, Duffy?’ McArthur said. ‘Garda meeting us on the helipad. Joint arrest. Joint presser. Laurels. TV. The BBC …’

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ McCrabban said, as a hedge against fate.

  ‘Always the pessimist, eh, McCrabban!’ McArthur said with a laugh.

  He was a pessimist but I saw it Crabbie’s way, too. Laurels were a long way away. Ek would fight extradition to Northern Ireland. He could delay the process for years and it would be a tooth-and-nail battle to keep him locked up for all of that time. But it was better than fucking nothing.

  ‘We’re approaching the border,’ the pilot said into our headphones.

  ‘Jesus that was fast!’ Lawson said.

  ‘Normally this would be an international incident!’ the pilot laughed.

  But there was no incident and in the blackness through the window the countryside looked exactly the same.

  In no time at all we touched down at the army base in Dublin. We were met by an Inspector Burke and behind him a lot of uniformed upper-rank Garda with satisfied looks on their faces.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked.

  ‘Top brass. Here for a kill. If we’re going to destroy a man bringing jobs to Ireland it’s going to be because he’s a wrong ’un. He is a wrong ’un, isn’t he?’

  ‘You’ve seen the photo.’

  ‘That I have.’

  ‘The brass know this is hush-hush, right? We don’t want Ek to get the drop on us.’

  Burke grinned at me. ‘You really think we’re fucking bumpkins, don’t you? Since you called me I’ve had his place under surveillance. He won’t be getting away.’

  Cop car to Merrion Square. Strike that. Convoy of cop cars to Merrion Square. Lights flashing. No sirens.

  ‘Wait in the vehicle, Inspector Duffy. Can’t let his lawyers say that we didn’t follow procedure,’ Burke said.

  Burke and his boys went in.

  Ek came out in his underpants and a jumper between two big detectives.

  Handcuffs on, wild, frightened look to his eyes.

  I got out of the car so that he could see me.

  He was yelling in Finnish, promises, threats –

  He saw me across the street.

  He looked drab, old, ignominious, humiliated.

  I waved at him, grinned.

  ‘You!’ he screamed.

  ‘Me,’ I said.

  They put him in a police car and drove him away.

  We had the bastard.

  27: HOW HE DID IT

  I knew I was in here as a courtesy. This was Burke’s arrest, and until the extradition went through, this was Burke’s case. Just the four of us in the interrogation room. Burke, me, Ek and his lawyer, a Mr FitzGerald (40, thin, tanned, smooth, grey-haired, with a Chris De Burgh accent – you know the type).

  Everyone else on the other side of the glass: Crabbie, Lawson, McArthur, half the peelers in the station.

  The interview room? White stucco ceiling, heavy pine chairs, heavy pine table, ashtrays (both kinds: Liverpool and Man United), big two-way mirror, water jug, glasses, notebooks, HB pencils, spools on an ancient tape deck recording a succession of nows in the lives of the four men whose lives had intersected on this particular spring morning in Dublin’s fair city. An intersection of four disparate journeys, joined for a few hours on our way to the grave.

  Easy to predict the first part of it. Burke will talk. Maybe I will talk. They’ll roll in a TV with video underneath it. They’ll play the video. Burke will say something. Mr FitzGerald will ask us to leave the room.

  What I can’t predict is what Mr Ek will say. I somehow think it’s not going to be the Finnish equivalent of, ‘It’s a fair cop, gov.’

  The first part was pro forma.

  Burke read the arrest warrant and the charge sheet.

  ‘Murder with malice aforethought of Miss Lily Bigelow in Carrickfergus, in the County of Antrim, on February 7th, 1987 …’

  Burke asked Ek if he understood the charge.

  ‘I do,�
�� Ek said serenely. He was fully clothed now. Showered, shaved and calmed by the presence of his lawyer.

  ‘Do you understand that the following interview is being taped and that anything you say may be used against you in a court of law in this jurisdiction, or in the jurisdiction where the crime was committed?’

  ‘I do,’ Ek said.

  Burke explained that I was present at the invitation of An Garda Síochána and that I had no powers of arrest here and that Mr Ek was under no compunction to answer any of my questions. Would Mr Ek have any objection to my presence in the room during questioning?

  FitzGerald opened his mouth to say something, but Ek shook his head and looked at me. He was on the edge of his seat, staring at me in an alien way, the way intelligent birds do, head cocked to one side.

  ‘Why do you think I killed Miss Bigelow, Inspector Duffy?’ he asked me, in that calm, rarefied, almost accentless voice of his.

  ‘Shall we show him?’ I asked Burke.

  Burke nodded. ‘Let’s show him.’

  A constable wheeled in a TV and video recorder. I gave the constable the copy I’d made of the CCTV tape from the Northern Bank. The constable loaded up the video, turned the TV on and gave Burke the remote control. Burke grinned and gave the remote to me. Nice of him. I was going to get to administer the coup de grâce.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said under my breath.

  I had rewound the tape to the point where the sun was just coming up over Scotland and the street lights were being switched off along the shore of Belfast Lough.

  I pressed play on the remote.

  ‘This is CCTV from the Northern Bank in High Street, Carrickfergus, on the morning of the murder. This camera was placed at the rear of the bank and within its field of view we can see the Marine Highway and the entrance to Carrickfergus Castle. Miss Bigelow was killed in the castle sometime between 5 pm and 8 pm on the night of the 7th, according to the autopsy report. We know that because Mr Underhill locked the building up at 6 pm and then lowered the castle portcullis – which weighs two and a half tons and can only be raised and lowered from the inside. The castle was essentially sealed from 6 pm until 6 am the next morning. Miss Bigelow was murdered in the castle dungeon by someone who entered with her on the evening of the 7th. We know that she entered the building with her murderer because the castle has sixty-foot high walls and no one climbed over those walls during the night, which we know for certain because there are CCTV cameras pointing at the castle from the harbour and the Marine Highway and the Northern Bank. We have reviewed those tapes and will certainly make them available to you, Mr FitzGerald.’

  ‘Thank you,’ FitzGerald said cautiously, sensing that something bad was coming.

  ‘Just to make clear, someone could not have entered the main gate of the castle because the portcullis had been lowered from the inside. Furthermore, the main gate of the castle is also covered by a CCTV camera.’

  ‘This is Inspector Burke speaking and for the record, I, too, have reviewed the CCTV camera footage and I am confident that no one entered or left the castle between the hours of 6 pm and just before 6 am, when the body was found.’

  ‘That’s all very well, but you’ve said nothing about my client,’ Mr FitzGerald interjected.

  I nodded and pointed at the TV screen. ‘I beg your patience for a few more minutes …’

  I pressed play on the VCR. I fast-forwarded at double speed.

  Crisp, oddly beautiful black and white videotape. Dramatic early morning sun throwing giant shadows over the castle gate. A white-coated milkman delivering two bottles and a block of cheese. Starlings flitting in towards the bottles. The sun rising over County Down. The shadows changing … Nothing for a long time, then two constables, WPC Warren and Detective Constable Lawson, approaching the gate. Lawson bangs on the gate. It opens. Lawson leaves WPC Warren outside to secure the crime scene. Smart lad, I think, every time. A dozen forensic officers show up from Belfast, clad in white boiler suits. They nod to WPC Warren and go inside the castle. Lawson leaves and goes down to the car park to meet me. Lawson and I walk up the steps and go inside the castle. Nothing for a long time and then …

  Well then, the whole case …

  A forensic officer in a white boiler suit carrying a bag walks past WPC Warren and out of shot. The hood of the boiler suit is up, but his face is visible from this angle. WPC Warren doesn’t bat an eye.

  I stopped the tape.

  ‘You may have noticed the forensic officer leaving the castle,’ I said.

  Ek’s lips puckered ever so slightly.

  ‘Let me show you a close-up of that forensic officer.’

  Burke handed me a folder and I took out the 8x10 glossy that I’d had printed up last night.

  It was Ek in the white forensic officer-style boiler suit walking straight past WPC Warren who didn’t even look at him. Didn’t even register him. Ek examined the photograph and passed it to FitzGerald.

  ‘You thought you’d committed the perfect crime, didn’t you? You thought it would be seen as a suicide, or, if not a suicide, then the only possible killer was the only man in the castle at the time: Mr Underhill,’ I said, with some small measure of satisfaction creeping into my voice.

  Ek smiled and shook his head sadly. ‘There is no such thing as perfection.’

  FitzGerald put a hand on his client’s arm and looked at Burke. ‘You are not to take that as an admission of guilt, no such admission was implied or offered.’

  I unclicked the pause and played and rewound Ek leaving the castle on the morning of the murder.

  ‘You entered Carrick Castle with Miss Bigelow. Tony McIlroy had acquired an RUC forensic officer uniform which you brought with you in a bag. While you killed Miss Bigelow, McIlroy was going to make or get a bomb to kill Chief Superintendent Ed McBain. At some point in Carrickfergus Castle you must have lured Miss Bigelow to the dungeons, perhaps telling her that you had a story for her about Mr Laakso. She did not suspect foul play. You killed her in the dungeon with a blow to the head –’

  ‘Mr Ek is an elderly man,’ FitzGerald interrupted. I ignored him and continued.

  ‘At that point you had a choice, Ek. You could have left the castle with everyone else. No doubt the body would have been found and you and your party would have been suspects in Miss Bigelow’s murder as well as everyone else who was in the castle at the time. But you and Tony both knew that if Lily’s body was found before Ed McBain died, Ed would know you killed her. She’d talked to Ed about her suspicions and you knew it. Ed had to die before he knew about Lily’s death, before he could set the alarm bells ringing. So you carried out a much more audacious plan. You hid in the dungeon with Miss Bigelow, concealing yourself and concealing her body from Underhill’s torch. Maybe you watched him and moved the body to a place he’d already searched. Maybe you just stuck it out in a shady corner. Wouldn’t matter, anyway, if Underhill found you. You’d just kill him, too, and make it look like a murder-suicide. The crucial thing was that Underhill couldn’t report the death until you knew Ed McBain couldn’t do anything about it. So you hid there until you were sure that Underhill had gone to bed for the night, then you carried her body up to the roof of the keep, removed her notebook, hooked her bag round her arm, put her shoes on the wrong feet and then threw her off the roof. Then you went back to the dungeon to wait until morning. Tony had told you that forensic officers from the RUC forensic would soon be on the scene. He was correct. With a dozen boiler-suited forensic officers milling about the castle courtyard, it was easy for you to simply walk out of the front gate.’

  A little groan came from Ek’s lips.

  ‘My client admits nothing,’ FitzGerald said. He patted Ek on the back and whispered something in his ear. Ek nodded, took a deep breath and regained his composure. He leaned back and looked at me and Burke.

  ‘That is not me leaving the castle. I was in the Coast Road Hotel at the time.’

  ‘I think we’ll let a jury decide that,’ I said.

&nbs
p; ‘My client will vigorously oppose extradition to Northern Ireland, where his safety may be in jeopardy, and a fair trial cannot be guaranteed in the current terrible circumstances,’ FitzGerald said.

  I nodded and passed the TV remote to Burke.

  I leaned into Ek’s face. ‘What was that expression you used in the Go game? Kami no itte – the divine move, was that it?’ I asked.

  ‘Kami no itte,’ he agreed and gave a little half-smile.

  I nodded at Burke and walked out of the office.

  An old-school police bar, three hours later:

  Guinnesses. Smokes. All the cops. North and South.

  Convo:

  ‘See his face?’

  ‘FitzGerald was furious. Red as a beetroot.’

  ‘Cross border co-op. This is the way it should be.’

  ‘Drinks on me.’

  I took Burke to one side. ‘You can’t allow him to have bail. He’s a flight risk.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Duffy. This is a very high-profile case for us, now. We’ll keep him safe and sound. We’re not all messers down here.’

  ‘You’re wasted in the Garda,’ I said getting him a whisky.

  ‘You’re wasted in the RUC.’

  ‘If we’d been serious about police careers we both should have nipped across the sheugh and joined the NYPD a decade ago.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  Many drinks later we hit the helipad.

  28: THE OAKMAN SURPRISES EVERYONE

  Subdued on the helicopter ride back to Carrick.

  Let down, somehow. Hadn’t everything turned out the way we were expecting? What were we expecting? Fireworks? A teary confession? Not us. We were old stagers. You leave that stuff for the flicks and the telly. But still … That little half-smile of his. As if this was all part of the plan when it couldn’t have been. The plan had been to do it and get away with it.

  Even so, it niggled.

  The idea that possibly he was still one move ahead, when he wasn’t.

  We had nailed him.

  Sure he’d fight the extradition and apply for bail, but the Garda weren’t idiots, they’d oppose bail, and if it was granted there would be conditions and he’d be watched. They wouldn’t want to lose him.