by Chris Petit
‘He went to Donegal more. There’s more of a choice,’ one shopkeeper said. They were in a cheap supermarket whose artless displays reminded him of the first supermarkets of his childhood.
‘Did he come here much?’ Cross asked.
‘Oh, never in here, but so I heard.’
‘Well,’ said Donnelly afterwards. ’Ask five people to describe your man and you come up with five different men.’
Cross pointed out that one of the few things he had learned as a policeman was how unobservant people were, or rather how stubbornly observant and completely wrong.
On the drive back to Belfast he turned off at Newtown-stewart and drove fast along the straight road that crossed the high country in the direction of Maghera and Magherafelt. He suspected Vinnie wouldn’t be waiting and when he got to York Road, only five minutes late, he was proved right.
He arrived home to find that Deidre had already eaten. She’d left him some, she said, turning back to the television. When she came into the kitchen to make a cup of tea she saw he had not touched his supper and asked what was wrong with it. Cross said nothing was and saw she didn’t believe him. He had stared at his plate unable to eat in spite of his empty stomach.
‘How are the children?’ he asked.
‘Fine. Fiona’s maybe got a bit of a cold.’
He tried to think of something to say. The best he could manage was, ‘I was in the Republic today.’
‘I may have to go away soon for a few days,’ said Deidre, sounding bored.
‘Work?’ he asked, giving her the opportunity to lie.
‘Work. Brussels, of all places.’
Cross worked the next Saturday afternoon in an effort to reduce the usual mountain of paperwork, but before he could attack it the phone rang. It was Hargreaves.
‘I wonder if you wouldn’t mind looking at a body.’
‘What happened?’
‘We’re not quite sure, sir. It may be an accident or a suicide. Bloke’s a journalist by the name of Warren. A neighbour was alerted by the smell.’
Cross was familiar with the name. He was a local crime reporter.
He found Niall Warren’s body hanging in a built-in bedroom cupboard, suspended by a leather belt looped around his neck and tied to the clothes rail. The rail had buckled slightly with his weight. It was not high enough to let the body hang freely and the legs were awkwardly bent, the feet dragging on the ground. The stench was overwhelming. Warren had been dead long enough to start turning putrid.
It was the memory of the dead animals rather than the sight of Warren that forced Cross to sit down with his head in his hands. He caught Doody’s sneering look and dragged himself up to confront the grotesque apparition in the cupboard.
They had met a few times. Cross vaguely remembered a short, corpulent man around forty, quite nondescript, with the sort of face not looked at twice. In death he was remarkable. The face was rouged and roughly smeared with lipstick. He wore women’s high heels, black stockings, suspenders, silk knickers, a camisole and elbowlength cocktail gloves. His hands and ankles were bound.
Even the scene-of-crime squad, who were inured to most things, were shocked. Being conventional men, they felt threatened.
‘Sick fuck,’ said Doody. ‘Why couldn’t he have jerked off like any other wanker? Fancy cleaning up after this fellow’s spunk. I don’t suppose he thought of that.’
‘What’s the point?’ asked a constable.
‘The point is,’ went on Doody, ‘to turn your tool as stiff as a crowbar by cutting off oxygen to the brain. The only problem in your case is you’ve got to have a brain in the first place.’
‘You sound very knowledgeable, sarge.’
‘It was once explained to me by a senior officer,’ said Doody with a smirk in Cross’s direction.
‘But what’s the getting kitted up all about?’ asked the persistent constable.
‘You’d have to ask a clever man like DI Cross about that.’
‘Carry on, sergeant,’ said Cross. ‘Why do they get dressed up?’
‘Because they’re perverts, sir.’
Cross left them to it and asked Hargreaves about the neighbours.
‘You should talk to Mr Jobson downstairs.’ Hargreaves rolled his eyes. ‘Wears a wig and only answers to Winston.’
Jobson’s wig was orange and in jaunty but hopeless contradiction to the desiccated face below. Cross put him at around sixty.
He endured Jobson’s steady drip of complaints – about the police tramping through the building, leaving the front door on the latch – relieved to be away from the fetid smell upstairs. He wondered how much the sound carried and if Jobson had heard anything. From the way he cocked his head, Cross guessed that most of his time was spent monitoring the residents’ movements.
‘Cup of tea? I’m just making one.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘It’s Winston, by the way.’
Jobson fussed around, moving with the deliberation of someone who knows what it is to fill up the slow hours of a day. Cross asked if Warren had many visitors. Jobson thought he recalled hearing his bell some time in the previous week, which was unusual.
‘But you’re not sure?’
‘Winston. I was in the back at the time.’
‘The back?’
‘The bathroom.’
He looked furtive.
‘When was this? Winston.’
‘Some time in the afternoon of the Monday or Tuesday.’
Cross asked if he could be sure the visitor was for Warren and Jobson replied that everyone else was out during the day.
‘Why wasn’t Warren out? He was a reporter.’
Jobson made a drinking motion with his hand. ‘Never the same since Mrs Warren left.’
Cross was surprised there had been a Mrs Warren, given the shabby bachelor air of the flat.
‘When did she leave?’
‘He started drinking some time last autumn, so it would have been then.’
‘What was she like?’
‘I think she might have been a Brit, though sometimes she sounded more like a Yank. Classy bitch, if you don’t mind my saying.’
‘Age?’
‘Hard to say. Well preserved. They were only married a few months. Is it true?’
‘Is what?’
‘That he was found dressed up.’
His eyes shone. Cross ignored him, asking instead if he had noticed anything unusual about Warren’s behaviour.
‘The noise, for a start! Non-stop clatter, banging away on that typewriter, day and night. And then he starts throwing things around, which he does when he’s had a few.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Glasses, by the sound of it. In the end I had to bang on the ceiling.’
‘When was this?’
‘Now that I remember exactly. It was three thirty in the morning on Tuesday night. He stopped after that.’
Whether this was before or after Warren might have had his visitor, Jobson couldn’t say.
‘Do you have any idea how long this visitor stayed?’
‘I’m not saying it was a he,’ said Jobson craftily. ‘But I don’t know how long because I would have been down the shops then.’
Cross suppressed a sigh.
‘I thought you said you were in.’
‘I was. But then I went out.’
Cross was almost relieved to get back upstairs.
He looked around Warren’s living room, listening to the men in the bedroom grunting and cursing as they manhandled the body out of the cupboard and on to a stretcher. Cigarette burns punctuated an over-padded Draylon three-piece suite. A low coffee table was ringed with stains from carelessly placed glasses. There were unemptied ashtrays.
The only personal touch was a framed photograph next to an IBM electric typewriter. It showed a woman, caught by flashlight, at a formal party. She wore cocktail gloves similar to the ones on the corpse. Her hair was up and she stared at the camera with a look
of wild exhilaration. She held a thin-stemmed glass crookedly in one hand. The neckline of her dress was low, revealing a full bosom. She was very beautiful, creamy skinned, indeterminate age.
He watched the covered stretcher being manoeuvred awkwardly out of the bedroom and through the flat, and heard Jobson’s door open as the procession made its way downstairs.
In the bedroom Cross noticed the clothes that Warren must have been wearing before getting dressed up, slung untidily across a hard chair. A balled-up sock lay on the carpet. The shirt had grime on the collar. The trousers were heavy with small change and keys.
These pathetic reminders of Warren’s last moments of ordinariness – undressing like he had done thousands of times with no reason to suspect that this time was any different – almost undid him. He sat on the edge of the bed and counted the change from the dead man’s pockets as a way of distracting himself. He took the keys in case he needed to get back in downstairs. The flat itself would have to be padlocked because the front door had been smashed by his men gaining entry.
A window had been left open and the stink had lessened. The doors to the wardrobe were shut now. Cross was fairly sure the death was the result of an autoerotic experiment gone wrong, but what had led up to it was probably beyond his understanding.
He looked at his watch. They had missed the football results. He was surprised that the scene-of-crime team had not turned on the television for the final score. They were not the types to let death interrupt them.
‘Did you look at the knots on his wrists?’ he asked Hargreaves, who was waiting in the living room, smoking a cigarette. He nodded.
‘Could he have tied them himself?’
‘Perhaps by using his teeth, though he would have had trouble getting himself undone.’
‘What do you think? That he did it by himself?’
‘Or had a partner who panicked when things went wrong,’ said Hargreaves.
‘Or got carried away and accidentally did him in.’
The Warren case was unpopular with his team. Those involving sexual difference always were, and his briefing was accompanied by predictable jeering at Warren’s expense. He noticed Westerby taking dutiful notes which inattentive colleagues would no doubt filch. These meetings sometimes reminded Cross of the classroom.
The autopsy report was as inconclusive as Cross expected. Death was by strangulation. Ricks thought it was possible – at least not impossible – that Warren had tied his own hands. The body showed an extremely high intake of alcohol, enough, in Ricks’ opinion, to cause carelessness.
‘But wouldn’t the body instinctively react if there wasn’t any drop? The rail was hardly five foot high.’
‘People in prison cells manage to hang themselves without any sort of drop.’ Ricks gave Cross an arch look. ‘It becomes strangulation rather than hanging.’
‘Doesn’t the body reject what’s being done to it?’
‘You have to remember that your Mr Warren was probably in pursuit of some sensation that was, shall we say, always just beyond his reach, and he pushed himself until he lost consciousness. Are you all right?’
‘Yes, fine. Why?’
‘You look a bit peaky. Not coming down with anything, I hope.’
Cross, aware of his dream, avoided looking at Ricks’ hands.
He should have closed the case there and then, he supposed, and wondered later why he didn’t: no one would have quarrelled with death by misadventure.
‘How’s your frozen man?’ Ricks asked as they parted.
‘Don’t ask,’ replied Cross.
Back in his office he called Donnelly in Ballybofey.
‘He’s full of interesting blanks, is our Mr Berrigan,’ said Donnelly. ‘I tried turning up the deeds for the farm. The agent who sold him the place is dead. But I did find out that Berrigan paid cash and his previous address is given as his solicitor’s. Unfortunately the solicitor keeps himself amused with the bottle and barely remembers the job.’
Donnelly had also talked to the Inland Revenue. In contrast to Berrigan’s cash purchase of the farm, his income tax returns for the past few years suggested earnings of barely subsistence level.
Cross sent off the mallet from the barn for forensic examination, and the other tool, which he remembered was called a bradawl.
That night he waited in vain again for Vinnie outside York Road station.
Westerby seemed subdued and Cross wondered if she was having trouble fitting in. He was aware of Hargreaves’ dislike of her. Her keenness, ambition and intelligence marked her out, and Cross suspected they would count against her. Westerby was undeniably bright.
To his shame he ended up condoning the movement against her, even taking part in it. He found his reaction inexplicable, beyond putting it down to exhaustion. His temper was often only kept under control by criticizing those least able to defend themselves – such as his children. With Westerby it began with a reluctance to single her out for praise, in case it was seen as favouritism. He then started to take pleasure in catching her out. She had been uncharacteristically forgetful in failing to get the information he had asked for about power cuts around the time of the Berrigan death. When reminded, she had hung her head, biting her lip, fighting back tears.
She’d reported back later by phone, saying that there had been no power cuts in the week before they’d found the body. This eliminated one possible explanation of why the body might have been dumped. Her voice sounded hurt and remote. He thought of apologizing. He disliked himself for his coldness. He would rather it wasn’t directed at her.
He lay awake listening to Deidre’s breathing. His eyes strained in the dark, and he found himself thinking about Jobson being kept awake downstairs by the noise of Warren’s typing. What was it that Warren had been typing? Cross was suddenly alert.
19
Belfast, May 1972
VIOLENCE grew as the drunken summer nights lengthened. Candlestick watched the so-called hardmen adjourn to upstairs rooms where the boozing carried on. These long nights of drinking drew to a climax with a baying for blood, but once the peak of intensity had passed, inferiority reasserted itself. For all their hatred of Catholics – ‘We should feckin’ get ourselves a Fenian fucker’ – Candlestick saw that they were too scared to act upon their drunken bravado. He found the loyalists a sorry bunch, sloppy and unfocused, ill-disciplined compared to the IRA, and too drunk to do anything except turn their need for violence inward. They moaned that they were both discriminated against and neglected. Their only response was reaction. Candlestick bided his time, waiting to channel this aggression into something more than empty threats.
One night he slipped out of the bar, taking Baker. Baker was in one of his quiet moods. He had days now when he said little.
Candlestick drove nowhere in particular, with his window down, letting the warm night air in. They crossed the Lagan and skirted south-west Catholic Belfast before taking the Springfield Road up into Woodvale. At the top end of the Crumlin Road, where it butts into Catholic Ardoyne, they stopped for Baker to go to a chip shop. Candlestick stayed in the car. A cab turned out of the Ardoyne into the Crumlin Road. Candlestick was struck by the fact that its passenger and driver would be Catholic, simply because of where they were coming from.
While Baker ate his chips, Candlestick explained what he had in mind. Baker, his mouth full, grunted his appreciation, then crunched his chip bag into a ball and lobbed it into the gutter.
They waited until after midnight when the streets were empty. First they looked on the Antrim Road and Clifton Street, but in the end they found their quarry in one of the darkened streets closer to the centre. He was walking with the weaving lurch of the very drunk and spun round startled when Candlestick called out from behind him and announced that there was a bomb down the street, and he was an off-duty member of the bomb squad waiting for the security forces to arrive. The man stood blinking, trying to focus.
‘Is that right?’
‘What’s
your name, pal?’
‘Sheehan,’ he said without thinking, so sealing his fate. Candlestick chopped him across the neck and Baker helped stick him in the boot.
They held Sheehan at the rear of the bar until only the paramilitary men were left. Candlestick hit him a few times, to get himself in the mood, but Sheehan’s girlish squeals irritated him. He was unhappy with his choice and wanted to return him to the street like you did damaged goods to a shop. Then, seeing the decision was his, he told Baker that Sheehan did not feel right.
‘He’s too easy.’
Baker was still in a sulk and said little beyond asking why. Candlestick said he was going to dump Sheehan and get someone else. Baker was concerned that Sheehan could identify them. Candlestick told him not to worry.
He left Baker and drove around with Sheehan unconscious again in the boot. But he saw no one he fancied and decided Sheehan was fine after all. What he had needed, he realized, was time alone to psych himself up. If he didn’t feel right before he’d feel flat afterwards.
It was odd, he thought, how little he – or Baker come to that – were in the mood for what had to be done. His irritation towards Baker grew. Baker was too crude – he thought of him lobbing his greasy chip bag into the street – not the sort to appreciate the subtlety of violence. No finesse.
Candlestick had no respect for the loyalists. They could be dropped to a man into the Irish Sea. Their mottled boozy flesh revolted him. Yet for all his contempt, he was nervous at performing in front of them. Violence had a sacred momentum, like going with a woman. To appreciate both you needed time and privacy. Acting out some charade in front of a drunken crowd was like being asked to do sex in public. He doubted if there would be any pleasure in it.
If Baker was surprised to see Sheehan again he said nothing, and together they dragged him upstairs. A silence fell as Candlestick booted Sheehan to the floor and announced to the assembled drinkers that there was the Fenian fucker they had been talking about.
The crowd stood in stunned disbelief, as gormless as a roomful of idiots at the start of a party. Candlestick saw the extent of their hopelessness. They would have to be shown each step of the way.