Gun Street Girl

by Adrian McKinty

  I lit another ciggie and offered the pack around. Neither of the newbies wanted one. Non-smoking was the fashion. It wouldn’t last too long after their first gun battle or riot duty.

  “Concerns? Well, minor concerns. I’d say the chances are that the boy did it.”

  “Didn’t you have an issue with the wounds on the victims?” Crabbie insisted.

  I took a puff of my Marlboro Red and cleared my throat. “Well, in a similar vein to Constable Lawson, my observation of the scene was that it didn’t look much like a ‘rage killing’ to me. Nice clean shots to the temple and the heart. An angry man doesn’t shoot that accurately. Professional killers do, but college dropout layabout sons who crack up because of constant nagging from the old man don’t.”

  Lawson nodded vigorously. “Don’t rage killers tend to ‘overkill’ too? Multiple stab wounds, multiple gunshots. He’d probably fire the whole clip at the old man, wouldn’t he?” he said.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “And maybe he’d spare the mother. I mean, it’s the father who’s giving him grief and it’s the mum who’s sticking up for him, right?” Fletcher said.

  Crabbie skimmed the statement from Mrs. McCawly and slid it over the desk toward me. “It was the dad who was hassling him,” he said.

  “Once he’s shot the father, it’s in for a penny, in for a pound, isn’t it?” I said.

  “What’s your alternative theory, Constable Lawson?” McCrabban asked.

  “If Mr. Kelly had a firearm for personal protection he must have had enemies?” Lawson suggested.

  “That’s one of the things we are certainly going to find out,” Crabbie insisted.

  “Any forensic info from the shell casings?” I asked.

  “There were no shell casings,” Crabbie said. “He took them with him.”

  “Oh, I assumed when I got there that they’d already been tagged and bagged by the forensic officers. He took them with him?”

  Crabbie nodded.

  “So either a professional doing his job or a panicky son trying to cover his tracks,” I said.

  Silence descended.

  I got to my feet.

  “Well, folks, I can see you have this well in hand. I should go.”

  “Any parting words of wisdom, Inspector Duffy?” Crabbie asked.

  “This professional killing angle is certainly interesting, but if I were you, Sergeant McCrabban, I would stress to our new arrivals that in your bog-standard criminal case in the greater Belfast area they’ll find that Occam’s razor is especially sharp; the simplest and most obvious explanation is almost always the correct one.”

  “Aye, but until we find the son and have a wee chat with him we’ll keep our options open,” McCrabban added.

  I walked to the incident room door and gave Crabbie a little nod to let him know again that this really was his responsibility and I was not going to grab it from him. At least not for the moment. My own caseload wasn’t half so exciting, but he had wanted this and if he solved it and somehow wangled a promotion out of it, good luck to him. Crabbie’s undertakerish nod back was an equivalent of a high five from him.

  I went to the personnel department and looked up the files on our two new detectives just to see if I’d missed anything. I hadn’t, except for one thing; Lawson was Jewish rather than Protestant, which was a bit of a surprise. There were only a couple of hundred Jews left in Belfast. The community had been much larger before the Troubles, but now even Israel during the Intifada was a better bet than Northern Ireland.

  I stuck the files back in the cabinet.

  I read the Sun in the bog.

  Coffee machine, office, feet on desk. Looking out the window, pretending to be interested in a series of unsolved muggings at Carrick train station.

  Eventually the clock got its sorry arse round to five o’clock.

  “Sean?”

  The office door was open, Chief Inspector McArthur was standing there all uniformed up and rosy cheeked. He was wearing a Tyrol hat with a feather in it, and in case you didn’t get the message, the hat had been placed at a jaunty thirty-degree angle on his head. He’d worn this hat before and you could see that he wanted desperately to be asked about it, which is why all the senior officers had made a silent pact never to bring it up.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You want a quick one?”

  “Well, I was on my way out.”

  “Have a seat. I’m buying.”

  We retreated to his office, which he had painted a sort of citrusy yellow. He’d moved in several palms and potted plants, and there were arty black and white photographs of boats on beaches and kids at country fares and so forth.

  “Your photos?” I asked, pointing at the pictures.

  “I dabble,” he said.

  It was my place to be encouraging. “They’re really good,” I said, and in truth they were good. Good enough to make into a calendar for American tourists, not like Diane Arbus good or anything.

  He gave me a glass of whiskey. I sat.

  “What are you working on at the moment, Sean?”

  “Me, nothing much. Crabbie’s got himself a double murder. I’ll be assisting him on that one, no doubt, in due course.”

  “I want to thank you for last night; you were very helpful under the circumstances.”

  “Last night? Oh, that? Yeah.”

  McArthur took a gulp of his whiskey and I did the same. Twelve-year-old Islay. Good stuff if you liked peat, smoke, earth, rain, despair, and the Atlantic Ocean, and who doesn’t like that?

  McArthur smiled. “You’ve had quite a wee career, haven’t you, Sean?”

  “Have I?”

  “Oh yes. You certainly have.”

  His eyes were twinkling. There was something he wasn’t telling me. He looked at me significantly. “What are you not telling me, er, sir?”

  “I’m just off the phone talking about you,” he said.

  “You were talking to someone on the phone about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Refill?”

  “Sure.”

  He poured us each another healthy measure.

  “What were you saying about me?” I persisted.

  He laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, it was all good stuff. I told them I’ve hardly had a chance to know you, but even in my limited experience I saw that you were a first-class officer.”

  “Am I getting a promotion or something?”

  “Better than that, I think.”

  “Better than a promotion?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more, Sean. My lips are sealed.”

  “You can’t do that to me, sir,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Nope, sorry, I can’t breathe a word.”

  “Come on, sir,” I protested.

  “Vulpes, vulpes, Duffy,” he said with a wink.

  “The common fox?”

  “Actually, the not so common fox,” he insisted.

  I’d been neutral on McArthur before, but last night’s shenanigans and now this confirmed in my mind that I actively disliked the wee shite. I knew I wasn’t going to get any more out of him so I pushed the chair back, stood, and gave him a nod.

  “I have to get on, sir,” I said.

  “OK. Go if you must.”

  I had a slash and went to see Crabbie, who was typing up his case notes in the incident room. He was smoking his pipe and the blue tobacco smoke and a mug of bergamot tea on his desk gave the room a very pleasant odor.

  He looked up at me. “Sean?”

  “Crabbie, has anyone been asking about me?” I wondered.

  “About you?”

  “Aye.”

  “Asking what?”

  “Questions.”

  “Not to me. Why, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of oblique references from the new Chief Inspector.”

  “You’re not in trouble with the anti-corruption unit, are you?”

 
I gave him a hard look. “No, why would I be?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  I leaned closer. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, Crabbie?”

  “Of course. But you’re not in trouble.”

  “Aye,” I said dubiously.

  “Sean, come on, you’re untouchable with your record.”

  “OK, mate. Look, I can see I’m keeping you from your work, I’ll let you get back to it,” I said, and didn’t move.

  A half-smile crept on to his face. “You’re bored, aren’t you? That’s what it is.”

  “Not I.”

  “You want a piece of this Kelly case, don’t you?”

  “I am not going to interfere.”

  “Look, nothing’s going to break until someone pulls in the son. And since they haven’t, it probably means that he’s already slipped across the water—”

  “Have you alerted—”

  “Yes, yes, but that’s not what I was driving at. I have to type this up, so if you want to do me a favor you could take Lawson and Fletcher down to the crime scene.”

  “You think they’ll be able to help find something?”

  “No.”

  “So why bring them?”

  “It’s our, er, pedagogical duty if nothing else. And you never know, you might come up with something.”

  “You’re taking pity on me, aren’t you?”

  He grinned. “A little.”

  “I appreciate the thought, but I can’t do it, mate. I have a thing at six o’clock. I have to go home and shower.”

  “What thing?”

  “A personal thing.”

  He gave me a slant-eyed, suspicious look.

  Anybody else would have said, “What? You? A date with a real live woman?” but not the Crabman.

  “All right, see you tomorrow,” he said.

  “Ok . . . and listen, mate, if anyone starts asking questions about me, you lemme know, OK?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, Sean, everybody knows you’re a company man now through and through.”

  “Yeah.”

  5: A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING THAT I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN

  Home. The music on the turntable was classic Zep, and I let the plagiarizing bastards take me through a shower and a shave. I tied my tie, brushed my hair. More grey now on the ears and one or two little strands in the middle too. Yeah, in contrast to our fair-faced, behatted Chief Inspector, the smokes and the stress made me look every inch of thirty-five, but still, I was a reasonably presentable wee mucker who had a steady job and owned his house and his car, which presumably counted for something, right?

  I put on a wool raincoat and then rummaged in the cloakroom for the fedora my parents had got me for Christmas. I checked my reflection in the hall mirror.

  I looked ridiculous. I lost the hat. I still didn’t look like me, but that was probably a good thing.

  I went outside. A filthy-looking cloud hanging over Belfast like an evil djinn. The first raindrops.

  I checked under the BMW for bombs and got inside.

  I drove down Coronation Road, past a gaggle of sodden children and an emaciated horse being ridden by Dominic Mulvenna, the malevolent, demon child from the last house on the street.

  The rain had become a biblical scourge.

  On Kennedy Drive the surface was liquid and I slowed to a crawl. Frogs and even small fish were spilling out from the Mill Stream on to the road. The wipers on the BMW were going max but I could still hardly see anything at all.

  I turned left on the North Road, swerving slowly around a band of tinkers going through a skip at the railway bridge and a goat—which may have been with them, or not—happily eating what appeared to be a box of candles.

  Five glum backpackers were standing under the overhang at Carrick train station, no doubt wondering why Lonely Planet had told them to get off the train at this benighted destination.

  I parked the Beemer outside the church hall and sat in the vehicle for a few minutes. The rain pounded off the roof and made a film on the windscreen. It was 6:15 and I was running late.

  “Fuck it,” I said, then opened the door and ran for the entrance.

  Mrs. Beggs was, apparently, delighted to see me. “So glad you could make it, Mr. Duffy. Here’s your badge.”

  She took my coat and hat and gave me a stick-on badge which declared: “Hello, my name is Sean!”

  I put it on the lapel of my jacket. I could hear music coming from inside the hall and it sounded disconcertingly like Glenn Miller.

  “The crowd’s not all over forty, is it?”

  Mrs. Beggs shook her head. “No, no. Have no fear, there are plenty of women your age, Mr. Duffy, and . . .” she lowered her voice “there are even a few Catholics.”

  “That’s not important, as long as there—”

  “You didn’t come to chit-chat with me. Get in there, Mr. Duffy,” she said, taking me by the arm and leading me into the hall.

  “I think I left my cigarette lighter in the car, I have to go—”

  “No you don’t,” she said, opening the door and frog-marching me into the room.

  The church hall had been cleared of chairs and the lights dimmed to suggest intrigue. A table had been set up at one end of the room for soft drinks, and at the other end, a rather elderly DJ was spinning records on a twin deck. The music was indeed Glenn Miller, but I could foresee Acker Bilk and Benny Goodman in the immediate future.

  The crowd was pretty substantial for a wet weeknight. About sixty all together with women representing a hefty majority. It was true that it skewed to an older demographic, but there were at least a dozen women my age or younger. Some people were dancing in a grim Northern Irish way, and off the dance floor there were several intense one-on-one conversations taking place. A large mixed-gender group had gathered at the drinks table, and a party of forlorn single men was pressed against the west wall, huddling in the shadows for their own protection.

  “How does this work?” I hissed at Mrs. Beggs.

  “Everyone has a name and everyone’s here for the same reason. You just go and introduce yourself.”

  “I really need to get my lighter, I—”

  “Say hello to Orla O’Neill. She’d love you. Thirty. Red hair. Divorced. Gorgeous. Worth a fortune. That’s her in the green miniskirt.”

  “What? Where? Which one is—”

  She gave me another little shove and closed the door behind me.

  “In The Mood” ended and “Moonlight Serenade” began in waltz time. The men and women began pairing off.

  Before I had the opportunity to register the full measure of my panic a tall, brightly dressed woman offered me her hand. Her fingers were powerful, with nails like those of an itinerant sheet metal worker. Her hair was red and her dress had a greenish tinge. Surely this couldn’t be Ms. O’Neill?

  “Aren’t you going to ask me to dance?” she said.

  “I don’t really know how to dance. Not as such. Not formal—”

  “A gentleman should know how to dance,” she replied indignantly.

  “I never really got around to it.”

  “What do you do for a living, Sean?” she asked, reading my name badge.

  “I’m a policeman.”

  She pursed her lips. “Ah, well, please excuse me, Sean, I really must find a partner.”

  “Christ,” I muttered under my breath, and got a fag lit with my emergency matches.

  Unfriendly eyeballs. Strange homeopathic smells. The vast indeterminate space dominated by an ancient swaying chandelier that seemed to have homicidal intent.

  A generously hipped woman with a reindeer-motifed cardigan made a beeline for me. I inhaled the wrong way, and, prompted by my coughing fit, she slapped me heartily on the back. She turned out to be a widow who ran a dairy farm.

  “And you?” she asked.

  “I’m in the police,” I told her.

  She nodded, looked into the middle distance, made an excuse, and went to meet someone/anyone else.

>   I fought a strong urge to flee and introduced myself to a girl called Sandra who looked a bit like Janice from The Muppet Show band. She was an estate agent who sold houses all over East Antrim.

  “We’ve got something in common. I’m a peeler,” I said.

  “What do we have in common?”

  “Well, uh, both of us are at home to a certain amount of moral ambiguity in our work.”

  No hesitant buyer ever got up Sandra’s nose the way I instantly did, and she told me coldly that she had to mingle. Later I saw her dancing with a very tall man whose face was like a Landsat image of the Mojave.

  I retreated to the west wall, joining the group of terrified blokes there who were avoiding all eye contact and presumably wondering why they had agreed to come here in the first place.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke,” a jealous fellow victim hissed at me as I lit another. I ignored him and inhaled deep.

  Occasionally a bold woman or a pair of bold women would make a foray into these wallflowers and sometimes our herd would be reduced by one. The quarry dragged off to the dance floor or the drinks table.

  “That was the late great Glenn Miller and now for your entertainment the swinging tunes of Mr. Acker Bilk,” the DJ said.

  A man with a comb-over who appeared to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown begged me for a cigarette. I lit him one.

  “You’re the peeler, right?” he asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “You wouldn’t consider lending me your revolver for a minute, would you?” he said, miming putting the gun in his mouth.

  “Sorry, mate.”

  A very pretty brown-haired woman with huge, radiant blue eyes began making her way through the wallflowers like an assassin in a Bruce Lee flick.

  When she got to me she asked whether Jesus Christ was my personal savior in a Derry accent that sounded like a cement mixer with gearbox issues.

  I told her that he wasn’t.

  She asked me whether I had heard of the Church of the Nazarene.

  I told her that I had. A dozen of the massive American evangelical churches had sprung up in the greater Belfast area in the last year, their complicated blueprints and speedy construction bamboozling many a local planning officer into abject submission.