by Chris Petit
‘By seven? What kind of pattern is that?’
Cross felt stupid and a little angered, partly at Westerby’s ease with technology, partly at the thought of telling this to Nesbitt.
‘This is not a joke, sir. I’ve analysed the data for any possible combination. Dates of birth. Dates of death. Last known addresses. Death sites. You asked for patterns. Well, here they are.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. Go on.’
‘There’s a further age pattern. Breen, Elam and Ryan were killed in descending order. Breen was forty-nine, Mary Ryan twenty-one. There’s a gap at thirty-five and twenty-eight.’
‘Warren? ’
‘Forty-one. Nearly forty-two.’ She hit the computer keyboard hard enough to register her frustration. ‘Nearly isn’t good enough. I’m sure we’re dealing with something quite precise.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘If this is not just a question of chance, and I’ve seen stranger coincidences, then the killer must have known their ages. Which means he selected them. Very carefully.’
A chill passed over him.
‘How do you explain the absence of victims of thirtyfive and twenty-eight?’
‘I can’t, unless there are deaths we don’t know about.’
‘Do you believe the pattern?’
Westerby shrugged ‘What I believe and what I can prove are two different things, but, yes, I believe there’s something there and it’s deliberate.’
‘But why?’
‘I’m sure there is a logic to these deaths. The more I go through the material the more I have the feeling that someone else has gone through it too: names, addresses, ages, religions.’
Cross decided to give her instinct the benefit of the doubt. She turned to face him.
‘I’m still not sure if the death of Mary Ryan wasn’t the work of a gang, but even if it was, I’m pretty sure that the organization behind the killings is the work of one man. With a plan.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, feeling stupid. Thanks seemed quite inappropriate and inadequate.
‘It’s a start,’ she said. ‘There are a couple of other things, to do with Breen. There’s his teeth.’
‘I assumed he wore dentures and they got lost.’
She told him about Breen’s dentist.
‘Which means someone pulled them out,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how I can say that so calmly. Anyway, Breen was tortured more than we thought.’
‘Which again says sectarian.’
‘Yes, except why go on to kill to some bizarre pattern? Why the elaboration?’
‘I don’t know. You said there were a couple of things.’
‘Breen’s birthday was at the end of January only seven days before his body was found, so technically he was forty-nine by the time he came to be lying in the road. I know this sounds pretty crazy, but if this business of age is crucial, then it could explain keeping the body on ice. If it was vital that Breen was forty-nine not forty-eight.’
36
HARGREAVES found someone who was willing to talk about Willcox, a man named Catterick who bore a grudge over a dud car he’d been sold, with a clocked milometer and mongrel bodywork.
‘Some Taig ought to knock that man’s cunt in and see if I care,’ Catterick had told Hargreaves, who cheerfully mimicked Catterick’s Ballymena accent for Cross. ‘I’ve seen the fucker swanning around with that child.’
Catterick had given Hargreaves a probable address for Willcox off the Newtownards Road, where he lived with a nineteen-year-old. Cross ordered a watch to be put on the house.
Westerby spent the rest of the day on the phone checking unsolved deaths, looking at all victims aged thirty-five or twenty-eight in the period between the deaths of the two Marys. There weren’t any in their area.
She wasted hours talking to clerks in other divisions. The calls were yielding nothing and she was starting to doubt herself.
‘Why thirty-five and twenty-eight?’ asked an unhelpful clerk, a bitter-sounding man she decided was a reservist. Westerby sighed and explained it wasn’t for her to say, she was only following orders. The man grunted and went off. It took fifteen minutes of impatient waiting before he came back empty handed.
The last clerk she spoke to was a woman who sounded bright and efficient for a change. She was gone a much shorter time than the rest.
‘Here’s something,’ she said. ‘Shot twice in the head and dumped in his own boot. No witnesses. No one claimed it, but it looks like a professional job.’
Westerby asked his age and name.
‘Wheen, Patrick, thirty-five. Married, four children and another on the way.’
Wheen was a Roman Catholic. Westerby felt no elation adding his name to the list.
But she failed to find any victim in the whole of Belfast to fill the gap between Wheen and Mary Ryan. There were three twenty-seven-year-olds and a couple of twenty-nines but none at twenty-eight. Westerby cursed. She supposed she would have to extend her search to outside the city.
She broke off for a coffee, and as she stood watching the machine tip the powder into the plastic cup she realized that there was still one possibility left. She hurried beck to her desk and rang back the friendliest of the clerks and asked if there were any deaths whose files had been passed on to the security services.
‘It’s possible,’ said the clerk, who went off to look.
After finishing with the clerk, Westerby worked swiftly for an hour, making further calls. Then, with mounting excitement, she checked through everything and called Cross at home. His wife answered. Her precise accent left Westerby feeling mildly grubby. Cross sounded cautious when he came to the phone, like she had telephoned in the middle of a row.
‘Is it a bad time to phone?’ she asked.
‘No, no, go ahead.’
She started with Wheen. Cross listened in silence then asked if there were any others.
‘There’s also a twenty-eight-year-old. He didn’t show up at first.’
‘Why not?’ asked Cross.
‘Because Special Branch have the file. He was an off-duty soldier. Arnold, Roger, a sergeant in the Ulster Defence Regiment.’
‘How did you get this if it’s with Special Branch?’
‘Let’s just say I have a friend, sir.’
She did not. It had taken a fair amount of ingenuity. The helpful clerk had come back with the information that an army sergeant had been killed off duty. She knew his name was Arnold and that Special Branch had everything else of relevance.
Westerby did not call Special Branch. Caution advised her against it. Instead she had telephoned the Army Pay Corps. This established some basic information about Arnold – including his full name and regiment. She’d then phoned the army press office at Lisburn and, saying she was Special Branch, asked to check what information had been released about Arnold’s death. Whoever she had spoken to had been bored and chatty and quite happy to while away ten minutes of a dull afternoon gossiping about a dead soldier. Last of all, she’d called his regiment to fit the missing pieces.
Arnold had been beaten to death in an alley and no one was saying very much about it. According to witnesses, he had been seen drinking prior to that in off-limits pubs. Westerby thought it was possible that Arnold had been on some sort of undercover operation. More important to her was his religion. Sergeant Arnold – surprisingly for a member of the heavily Protestant Ulster Defence Regiment – was listed as Roman Catholic.
‘If you add these names to the others,’ Westerby said to Cross, ‘you now have five victims of the same religion, whose ages descend in multiples of seven.’
She took a deep breath before going on. She noticed her coffee, several hours old and untouched.
‘There’s another pattern too now, if you put the first letter of each name together.’
Cross scribbled each name in order:
Berrigan (Breen)
Elam
Wheen
Arnold
Ryan
> ‘Beware? Be warned?’ Westerby said over the phone.
Cross stared at the letters. His brow felt clammy.
‘If we’re right, you know what this means, sir?’
He shook his head, forgetting that she could not see.
‘It means the next one will be fourteen.’
Several hours later, Cross was still brooding on the implications of Westerby’s news while waiting for an armed unit to pick up Willcox, who had been spotted at the address Hargreaves had been given. Cross sat squashed with Hargreaves in the back of an armoured patrol car, listening to an Action Man sergeant rehearse several beefy constables from the Special Support group.
‘Suspect has been in the house since 22.45. Lights out at 23.27. It’s now 23.40. Give him another five minutes to finish his shag and in we’ll go, sir,’ the sergeant said, deferring to Cross.
‘You’re the one who’s done the course, Sergeant,’ he said sourly. Anyone would think the man was organizing the D-Day landings.
The sergeant was on his walkie-talkie, alerting the other men positioned and waiting in the lanes at the back of the house.
The vehicle braked to a halt and the sergeant and his three constables were out at the double and taking a sledgehammer to the front door. Judging by how long it was taking them they were having trouble.
‘Cowboys,’ Cross remarked to Hargreaves as they got out.
They walked through the splintered front door, which was backed by some kind of steel reinforcement, in time to see the constables clattering up the stairs and shoving aside Willcox’s screaming girlfriend, who hissed at them, ‘Shite-faced bastards!’
Cross ignored her. As he turned the bend in the stairs he saw the constables banging in and out of doors, while the squawk of the sergeant’s walkie-talkie told him that there was no sign of Willcox at the back.
Typical balls-up, he thought, looking in the bedroom. The bed was still warm, and there were indentations in both pillows. Out on the landing a constable was standing on a ladder, sweeping the attic with a torch.
‘Not up here, Sarge,’ he called down.
Everyone stood around getting in each other’s way, still pumped up with surplus adrenalin. One constable started accusing those outside of not doing their job.
‘Cunt got out the back,’ he said.
‘How about a cup of tea, love,’ said another to the girlfriend, who was trying to hide in the bathroom. The sergeant shouted at her in exasperation, asking where Willcox was.
‘I was asleep, I’m tellin’ you, until you noisy bastards woke me up!’
Cross asked for a torch and looked in the loft. He hauled himself up into the dusty space and swept the area with the beam. He missed it the first time – a hole in the brickwork giving access to next door. He trained the torch through the gap. The pattern was repeated for several houses along, allowing a crawl path of escape.
‘Right, let’s go,’ said the sergeant when Cross told him and they all clattered downstairs and into the street, where Cross watched the bully-boys vent their frustration on the neighbours of adjoining houses, rousing them from their beds and noisily searching rooms for the missing man.
They did not find him, nor did Cross expect them to. It was easy enough for Willcox to have slipped away. Even at that time of night enough of a crowd had gathered to have hidden his disappearance.
Cross took his temper out on Hargreaves.
‘Why did the whole thing have to be conducted like some half-assed military operation? Why not just pick the fucker up? Instead we wake up half the street and lose our man. Go and talk to the girlfriend.’
Cross went off to find the sergeant to tell him to call the operation off. The sergeant, he was glad to see, was shifty in defeat. Cross, as much as he wanted to, failed to come up with a crushing remark.
Hargreaves returned and announced, ‘She knows fuck all about him, or says she does.’
‘She must know what Willcox does.’
Hargreaves shrugged. Willcox never said where he was going. Whatever he did he kept to himself.
‘Is there any evidence he has a job?’ asked Cross.
‘Only in that he isn’t in much. The girl’s as thick as shit. Her curiosity doesn’t extend beyond getting a shag and a bit of money for herself.’
Cross thought that she was probably playing dumb, knowing what Willcox would do if he found out that she had been talking to the police. Given what he was capable of, Cross could hardly blame her.
‘The fucking man was in and you missed him!’
Cross endured Nesbitt’s rant in silence, putting up with the flying spittle and counting the broken veins in the other man’s cheeks. Like a lot of officers, Nesbitt was a big drinker. At some senior functions Cross had been to everyone had ended up too paralytic to speak. Most of them had their ways of keeping going, either drink or Dexedrine or caffeine pills. You needed something to get through fourteen hours at a stretch. There were even rooms in the barracks unofficially designated for sleeping off binges. They invariably smelled of vomit.
‘Well, what’s your excuse?’ Nesbitt finally asked.
‘None, sir.’
Nesbitt grunted.
Cross took a deep breath. ‘I still think the Mary Ryan murder is connected to several others, sir.’
Cross caught Nesbitt’s look of sceptical anger, a familiar trick of his. His brusque dismissal of any connection between the deaths was entirely predictable.
‘For a start, Military Intelligence and Special Branch would know from their informers if there’s a sectarian killer working on this scale.’
‘With respect, sir, I still think—’
‘Bollocks. Come back and convince me of the connections between – what? – an old Sticky, a single mother, a taxi driver, an army sergeant and a wee girl who worked in a photographic lab, and I’ll believe you all you want.’
‘The connections are age and religion.’
‘Why? Why?’ shouted Nesbitt. ‘Tell me that.’
Cross tried explaining that their killer might be a resurfaced survivor of the old Shankill gang.
‘Willcox, you mean?’ asked Nesbitt, grudgingly.
‘Forensic says Mary Ryan was almost certainly murdered in a garage belonging to Willcox.’
‘Find Willcox, then!’
They did, after Cross had the bright idea of phoning Willcox’s mother. To his astonishment, she announced that her son was staying there but was out.
Cross took Hargreaves and a couple of reliable constables. Willcox seemed quite unperturbed and put up no resistance when they picked him up, shambling back from the shops laden with plastic bags of groceries. He had merely asked for the shopping to be taken inside, kissed his mother goodbye and told her that he would be back soon.
Willcox in the flesh had a Slavic appearance not apparent from his photograph. His left eye was lazy, which also didn’t show in his mug shot.
Once they were settled in the interview room Cross asked him why there had been all the bother the other night.
‘There’s a banging on my door, how am I to know it’s not the Rah?’
‘Do you have a reason to fear the IRA?’
‘Is my name Paddy or Seamus?’
‘But when you saw it was the police why didn’t you go back, if you’ve nothing to hide?’
‘I’m not a pillock and I didn’t like what you did to my front door.’
Cross led Willcox on to his ownership of the garage. Willcox looked puzzled.
‘I haven’t been there in years.’
‘When was the last time?’
Willcox made a show of frowning and lit a cigarette.
‘A year or more.’
‘What does the name Mary Ryan mean to you?’
‘It’s a common enough name.’
He vaguely knew of the murder, he said, when Cross told him about it, but hadn’t known the girl’s name. As it dawned on him that Cross was trying to connect him with Mary Ryan’s murder, he stayed unconcerned a
nd denied any knowledge of it. But he did have trouble remembering where he had been around the time of her death.
‘Not at the garage, that’s for sure,’ he said with a laugh. He scratched his head and smoked his cigarette and looked at Cross with profound indifference. Cross caught his gaze and held it. He tried to picture him pouring a kettle of boiling water on his wife. Anyone capable of that would be capable of pretty much anything.
Cross was the first to look away. He was uneasy. Part of him understood only too well Willcox’s violence. It was probably only a combination of upbringing and cowardice that prevented him from taking his fists to those weaker than himself. How tempted he was sometimes to thump the more miserable specimens dragged in for interrogation.
Cross tried to organize his thoughts. He pushed cautiously back into the past, to establish how well Willcox had known the men convicted of the Shankill killings. Willcox took on an air of superiority, as though to say Cross couldn’t touch him.
‘If you’re trying to fit me into the killing of this Taig bitch you’re barking up the wrong tree. I’ve remembered, I was at me mam’s all week.’
At the mention of his mother, Cross realized that Willcox idolized her, like so many of his kind.
‘Daytime too?’
‘Too right. She was ill.’
The octogenarian Mrs Willcox duly confirmed that her dutiful son had indeed been with her during the entire week of Mary Ryan’s murder and left the house only long enough to go to the shops to fetch her food and medicine.
Cross remembered that the woman’s memory was faulty and pressed her on the dates of her son’s stay.
‘I remember it quite well, thank you, because it was the week of my birthday, and Johnny was here for that.’
‘Shit,’ said Cross, after hanging up. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’
Willcox’s mother had effectively blown his hopes. Even allowing Willcox a certain amount of clandestine leeway, there was no proof of his responsibility for Mary Ryan’s death beyond the circumstantial connection to his old garage.
Cross fumed as he watched Willcox stroll out of the cell unconcerned.
‘Abyssinia, I don’t think,’ said Willcox with a big smirk to Cross, who was then forced to crawl to Nesbitt.