The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  ‘End of message?’

  ‘End of message.’

  Cross thought he should leave but sensed McMahon still had something to say.

  ‘Can you imagine what it’s like, your life on a switch?’ McMahon eventually said. ‘Sometimes I think she’ll only wake when this is all over and who can say how long that will be?’

  There was nothing for Cross to say.

  ‘You know, the doctor asked me the other day if I wanted her switched off. What do you say to that? Switch her off?’

  ‘As long as there’s hope,’ Cross said lamely.

  ‘They say there isn’t, but you hope against hope, at least you do in my business. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church forbids me to authorize it, and I suppose there’s enough of the remains of her teaching in me to make me pause.’

  He leaned down and kissed his daughter on the forehead and walked out, followed by Cross. McMahon paused outside for a moment, frowning, then walked off towards the lift.

  They travelled down together in silence. Cross caught some of McMahon’s ill ease.

  Again in the foyer McMahon seemed distracted. Cross was suddenly reluctant to be seen leaving the building with him and used the toilet as an excuse.

  Standing at the urinal he realized what was worrying him. It was the bodyguard’s empty chair upstairs – empty when he’d arrived, empty when they’d left. He was halfway across the foyer when he heard the crackle of gunfire.

  McMahon lay in a pool of blood in the car park. His assailants had fled. An attendant ran past shouting for a doctor. Cross knelt down. Sensing a shadow fall across him, McMahon opened his eyes.

  ‘Cunt,’ he spat.

  McMahon clearly thought he’d been set up.

  ‘I didn’t know, I swear.’

  ‘Cunt,’ he repeated and shut his eyes.

  Cross could not tell if he was still alive by the time the paramedics arrived.

  ‘Well, at least you don’t have far to go,’ said one as they lifted McMahon on to the stretcher. ‘We’ll have you fitted up in no time.’

  He watched McMahon being trundled off and wondered about Blair’s warning. Had Blair been behind the shooting, and used Cross? And what would have happened if he and McMahon had left the hospital together? Would anyone have cared if he’d been caught in the crossfire?

  The car park asphalt was sticky with McMahon’s blood.

  After the murder of McMahon, Cross was carpeted by Moffat, who asked what on earth he had been doing letting himself be seen in public with an IRA man.

  Cross replied that he’d only bumped into him in the foyer and had asked out of politeness about his daughter.

  Cross could not understand why Moffat was so irate. Moffat should have been beside himself at the death of a top IRA man.

  The real source of Moffat’s anger became clear when he produced a magazine and asked Cross if he knew it. Cross shook his head. At first glance it looked like the usual poorly produced radical journal that got peddled to an obscure but tenacious readership. It was called The Limit.

  ‘Turn to the page marked with the paperclip,’ said Moffat brusquely.

  Cross was not sure what he was supposed to be looking for.

  ‘Well?’ said Moffat.

  ‘It’s the same letter that was sent to McCausland.’

  He handed back the magazine to Moffat, who chucked it on the desk with an air of disdain.

  ‘And how did this rag get hold of it, do you suppose?’

  He couldn’t see what Moffat was getting at.

  ‘Oh, come on, man,’ Moffat snapped. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’

  ‘You mean you think—’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘—that I did it?’

  Cross couldn’t believe what he was hearing and asked why he should do anything like that.

  ‘Obvious,’ said Moffat. ‘You resent my being brought in over your head. We disagree radically over a string of murders—’

  ‘And you think I leaked the letter?’

  ‘May have written it for all I know,’ said Moffat casually.

  ‘Can I ask,’ Cross replied equally casually, ‘if you’re taking the letter seriously?’

  ‘I take everything seriously, but—’

  He picked up the copy of The Limit and, holding it fastidiously between thumb and forefinger, dropped it in the bin.

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ he went on, dusting his hands, ‘that it’s rather academic. We’ve arrested Willcox.’

  Cross opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He panicked like a dried actor.

  Willcox’s alibi, provided by his mother, was not as watertight as Cross had thought, Moffat said. He pointed to her history of mental illness.

  ‘Basic homework, I’d have thought. To check that.’

  Cross remembered how, when they were first looking for Willcox, the mother had denied even having a son. But when he’d talked to her later she had sounded quite lucid. Still, Moffat was right.

  The crux of the case against Willcox was that the weapon that had killed Mary Ryan had been found. In Willcox’s lock-up.

  Cross was stunned. They’d been over the place thoroughly and apart from blood traces had found nothing.

  ‘What was the weapon?’

  ‘A screwdriver sort of thing, with blood on it.’

  ‘And prints?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. He’s confessed anyway.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Confessed to the murder of Mary Ryan, and he’ll cough up for Mary Elam too, we think.’

  All along Moffat had denied the possibility of linked murders and now he was saying they were on the point of charging Willcox with two of them.

  Cross only gradually saw the gaps in Moffat’s story. What had led him back to the garage? It had already been gone over, so why was the weapon not found then? And without Willcox’s prints there was still nothing to tie him specifically to Mary’s death, so why confess?

  He drove out to the Scientific Support Unit. He had been to the Unit before and knew that outside immediately sensitive areas the security was casual. Most of what was kept out there belonged to the dead and was of no use to anyone.

  Cross showed his card at the main desk and they let him through the barrier without asking any questions. He walked down two flights. With his descent everything became tattier and scuffed.

  The basement security man was not at his desk. Cross called out a couple of times and nobody replied. There were two of them, from what he remembered, fifty-year-old time-servers, officious and dead lazy.

  Under the pretext of looking for them, Cross strolled through the double doors by the desk. There was still no one around. Down a short corridor and through another set of doors lay what he was looking for.

  The victims’ belongings, murder weapons and incidental scene-of-crime material was kept in this huge stack room of the dead in cardboard boxes on metal shelves. Some were no larger than shoe boxes. Others were as big as packing cases. Cross walked down the aisles until he found the Rs. There were several boxes marked Ryan M, and he checked through the dates until he had the right one.

  The box was a standard commercial cardboard one with the vintner’s name stamped on the outside. Inside were Mary’s clothes, each item wrapped in its own plastic bag. There was her one shoe. The other had never been found. The weapon that had killed her wasn’t there. Cross thought it was probably still at the scene-of-crime office. He hadn’t really expected to find it there.

  Ever since Moffat’s description of the weapon, Cross had had an inkling of what was going on. It corresponded exactly to the bradawl Cross had found in Berrigan’s workshop. But what Cross could not understand was why, if such a similar weapon was used on Breen, Moffat didn’t connect Willcox to Breen’s murder.

  He panicked when he could not find Breen’s box. It wasn’t there. He decided Moffat must have it.

  He felt foolish when he remembered that it would still be filed under Berrigan. But when it appeared not to be
there either he started to panic again.

  He found it eventually, out of order, on a top shelf.

  The bradawl should still be there, he told himself. He had sent it over to the SSU himself. There was no reason why it should not be there.

  It wasn’t.

  Cross was still staring at the contents of the box when he heard a shout. It was one of the security men at the end of the aisle. Cross ignored him.

  ‘This is off limits,’ the security man said, his body puffed up with indignation. ‘You don’t just walk in here and help yourself.’

  Cross slowly closed Berrigan’s box. The jobsworth was not one he recognized.

  ‘Have you heard of D3T?’ Cross asked.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ the man said nastily, now standing at the foot of the ladder Cross was on.

  ‘And nor should you have done. We’re so secret no one has. We go where we like, and it has come to our attention that you are slack, inefficient, leave your desk unmanned and can’t even file your boxes properly. What was this doing on the top shelf?’ He thrust it at the man.

  ‘I just wasted forty-five minutes because of you,’ he said and marched off. At the end of the corridor he turned and called back, ‘It’s in my report.’

  McMahon’s funeral took place at Milltown Cemetery, watched from a distance by a heavy police and military presence. Since the shooting the atmosphere in republican areas had been extremely tense, and coming during the marching season the whole city felt like it was on the brink. One spark was all it would take. The funeral had been organized with great haste to take place before the holiday weekend. The RUC had sent word to the Provisionals that holding it on the volatile weekend of the twelfth – the main date in the Protestant calendar – would be foolhardy and there could be no guarantee of security against loyalist marchers.

  In spite of the short notice a crowd of several thousand mourners turned out to follow the cortège. McMahon was buried with full military honours. It was rumoured that Provisional leaders who had not shown their faces in years were among the crowd.

  McMahon’s killing had gone unclaimed. The loyalists said it wasn’t them, perhaps because they realized that if they had it would lead to reprisals that would far outweigh the publicity coup of claiming McMahon’s death.

  44

  A JOKE was going round the barracks about how Willcox had denied killing Mary Ryan until her gouged-out eyes were presented to him on a plate after being found in his fridge. It had done nothing to improve Cross’s mood.

  Walking through the main office towards the end of the day he was aware of a pocket of hilarity. Several men grouped round a desk were laughing at one of them wearing joke-shop glasses with crazy eyes painted on ping pong balls that dangled on springs. The glasses disappeared when they saw Cross. There were a few suppressed sniggers.

  ‘Sir,’ said one of the group, calling after him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes wants you.’

  He turned and saw Westerby gesturing frantically at him. She was alone in the corner on the telephone. He went over, aware of the sullen silence his presence was imposing on the room. Westerby put her hand over the receiver and mouthed, ‘I think it’s him.’

  Cross gently picked up the telephone on a nearby desk and dialled the switchboard and told them to tell the engineers to trace the call. Westerby was shaking her head, which he took to mean that she was not going to be able to keep him long enough.

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ she was saying into the phone. ‘It’s confidential.’

  She was being too negative, he thought. Westerby’s face was screwed up with concentration.

  ‘No, don’t hang up,’ she blurted, taking a deep breath before going on. ‘Yes, someone is being questioned. I can’t give you his name.’

  She listened intently for several moments, scribbling notes. Cross, who was keeping an open line with the switchboard, quietly urged them to get on with tracing the call. He saw the others in the room watching, aware that something was going on. Suddenly Westerby deflated visibly and looked at her dead receiver.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said dully.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told the switchboard he wanted to talk about the lock-up where Mary Ryan was killed. Then he asked me if we’d questioned anyone and what their name was. When I told him I couldn’t say, he just laughed – Oh, yes, the first thing he’d said was there wouldn’t be time to trace the call and he’d laughed at that too.’ She consulted her notes. ‘He said if it was Willcox we’d got the wrong man, then what he said next was: “I wondered how stupid you were.” Just as he hung up he laughed a third time and said: “Ask Wilco who killed Tommy Herron.”’

  Tommy Herron again, thought Cross.

  ‘What did he sound like?’

  ‘Flat and very in control.’ She paused, considering, and suppressed a shudder. ‘I’ve never heard a voice that gave so little away.’

  ‘Do you think it was him?’

  Westerby appeared reluctant to commit herself. She eventually said, ‘There’s one thing. It’s hard to be sure with him sounding so deadpan, but I’d say that he was a Brit.’

  ‘British!’ That was the last thing Cross had been expecting.

  Nesbitt had agreed to see Cross only reluctantly. His secretary, an expert at blocking his door, had gone for the day, and it was clear that Nesbitt was not doing very much. He fiddled with his cuffs, glanced at the clock on the wall, and reached into a desk drawer and produced a bottle of Scotch and a glass. As an afterthought he offered one to Cross. Cross shook his head.

  ‘I can understand your beef,’ he said, after holding an appreciative mouthful of whisky. ‘Listen, Mr Moffat is an expert in counter-terrorism. He was brought in over my head. Do you think I’m any happier than you with the idea of Brits coming in and running our show? We’ve got Willcox, be happy with that. Don’t worry, your contribution will be recognized.’

  ‘I need permission to speak to Willcox, sir.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  Now for the difficult part, thought Cross, keeping Moffat out of it.

  ‘We’re still trying to find Francis Breen’s killer.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nesbitt cautiously, stretching the word. ‘I thought I told you to stop wasting your time there. What’s he to do with Willcox?’

  ‘Breen goes back to the beginning and he was cutting deals with the loyalists when Willcox was around. He might know if there was anyone particular that Breen dealt with.’

  Nesbitt rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘You’d better talk to Moffat.’

  ‘I can’t find him, sir.’

  ‘Then it’ll have to wait.’

  Cross waited, but only until Nesbitt had gone for the day. He went down to the cells and told one of the constables to bring Willcox to an interview room once everyone was settled for the night. The less chance of being seen the better, he hoped. He was risking a reprimand but he could not think of any other way.

  He went to the canteen to sit out the wait and was surprised to see Hargreaves there, reading a newspaper. His shift should have ended. Hargreaves said he’d had too many drinks in the bar and was trying to sober up by eating something.

  ‘What do you think of Moffat?’ Cross wondered why he was asking, though he suspected a glimmer of a plan was forming in his head.

  Hargreaves belched, politely putting his hand over his mouth. ‘Well, who is he, for a start? Besides being a Brit.’

  Quite, thought Cross. Moffat belonged in the shadows to one of those string-pulling groups behind the scenes, the ones with the give-nothing-away names – E4A, 141NT, Resources Development, Field Obs.

  Cross could see why men like Hargreaves loathed the British, for their effortless sense of superiority, accumulated through centuries of careful breeding, blood sports and defensive irony. Most Brits in the North displayed a complete ignorance about the country and exacerbated the situation b
y showing no guilt at not improving that ignorance. No wonder they were despised.

  ‘I thought they stitched us up pretty badly,’ Hargreaves said. ‘Bringing him in. We would have worked it out for ourselves.’

  ‘Do we trust each other?’

  The fact that Hargreaves thought before answering reassured him.

  ‘Anything you want to say, sir, between us is fine by me.’

  Hargreaves knew how the barracks worked much better than himself, knew all the tricks and dodges. Like any large system, the barracks accommodated deviant behaviour. It was the oil that greased the machine. Asking Hargreaves to accompany him to interview Willcox made him feel better. It would ensure that anyone who saw them would be more likely to keep quiet. His only remaining worry was whether he could trust Hargreaves to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Off the record.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Says us.’

  Willcox sat slouched on the other side of the table, chain smoking.

  ‘I’ve got to say, it’s all been said to the Brit.’

  ‘I’m not interested in that. I want to talk to you about Tommy Herron.’

  Willcox gave him a quizzical look. ‘Fuck off. I only talk to the Brit.’

  Only now, faced by Willcox, was Cross aware of a potential flaw to his plan. There was no guarantee that Willcox would not report their conversation to Moffat.

  Paralysed by the thought of that, Cross knew he was losing it. Hargreaves seemed to sense as much and indicated that he wanted a word outside.

  ‘How important is this to you, sir?’ Hargreaves asked in the corridor.

  ‘It’s important.’

  ‘And how off the record are we?’

  ‘None of this is happening.’

  Hargreaves laughed. ‘Permission to carry on?’

  Cross knew he was at the point of no return.

  ‘Permission to carry on.’

  They went back and Hargreaves told Willcox to stand up and when he refused he yanked him up by the hair and threw two swift punches into his gut. Willcox collapsed to the floor where he lay squirming with pain. Cross found himself torn between watching and looking away. He enjoyed seeing the sullen fear in Willcox’s eyes.