Gun Street Girl

by Adrian McKinty

  She asked me what I thought of the Church of the Nazarene.

  I told her that I thought that it was an easily won trench religion, completely to be expected in a country with unending civil war and sky-high unemployment.

  She said that I sounded interesting. I told her that she was the most beautiful woman I had talked to this evening, which was a dodgy thing to say, but her mind-set was seventeenth-century colonial America and she lapped up the compliment.

  She asked me if I would be willing to let Christ into my heart.

  “Anything’s possible,” I said, and told her that she had a gorgeous smile.

  She asked what I did for a living.

  I told her I was in the RUC.

  She said that she had to go.

  “No, wait . . .”

  “I have to go.”

  The word went round and none of the other women came close. I didn’t blame them. If you were a single lady, getting on in years, or worse, a widow, the last thing you wanted to do was marry a policeman who could be killed next week. It certainly didn’t help that I was a Catholic. A Catholic in Carrickfergus was bad enough, but a Catholic policeman? My life expectancy could be measured in dog years.

  Someone handed me a program and I saw that after the dancing the orchestrated jollity was to include musical chairs. Must get out before musical chairs, I told myself.

  “I’m Sigourney,” a bubbly, green-eyed, dark-haired girl with round glasses said to my left.

  “I’m Sean,” I said, and offered her my hand.

  We shook nervously. She was pretty, and not pretty-for-a-wet-Tuesday-in-greater-Belfast kind of way, but objectively good looking.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here,” she whispered.

  “So they tell me. I’m sorry, I, uh—”

  “Oh, I don’t mind at all, but if Mrs. Callaghan catches you she’ll sling your hook.”

  “I’d better find this Mrs. Callaghan, then. I need to get out of here.”

  She laughed. “It’s not that bad, is it?”

  I nodded. “It is.”

  “Why’d you come?”

  “Desperation. How do you meet members of the opposite sex in Ireland? The human race is somehow propagating in this island, isn’t it? How are all these people getting together?”

  “Discos.”

  “I can’t do discos. I’m too cynical about the music.”

  “The music’s not important. It’s about the bopping!”

  “I expect you’re right. Hey, anyway, nice meeting you, I gotta run.”

  “Stay. Have some punch at least. They’ve put enough cheap gin in there to stun an elephant.”

  “I thought it was all soft drinks. Where is this punch of which you speak?”

  She led me to the punch, which indeed had been cut with something the Russian soldiers in Afghanistan might have distilled from antifreeze. “Jesus. That is nasty,” I said, putting down my plastic cup.

  “The base is grapefruit juice but you can barely taste it. I emptied my flask of Bacardi in there to give it some body, but the hooch is so strong that it just swallowed it up.”

  “You brought a flask of rum to a church singles event?” I said with admiration.

  “Can you think of better place to bring a flask of rum to?”

  She had me there. She looked me over and smiled. “So you’re the cop.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A couple of people.”

  “Have I been the subject of gossip?”

  “No, just a few ‘Watch out for him. He’s a policeman,’ sort of things.”

  I nodded. “Downtown Carrick is not the place to tease out really quality gossip, is it?”

  “No. Although you see that guy with the hairpiece that looks like porridge?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Wife left him for another woman. You don’t get that much round these parts.”

  “No.”

  “And you see that old geezer with the moustache over there? Divorced twice but still loaded. Owns half the land between here and Ballycarry,” she said, pointing at a doppelganger of the gloomy General Sternwood from The Big Sleep.

  “So, Sean, why does no one want to date a policeman?”

  “There’s the whole death thing. People get touchy about that.”

  “I don’t see why. Isn’t there a big compensation package if you get killed? And a nice widow’s pension on top of that too? And then there’s the black. I look fabulous in black. Brings out my eyes.”

  “Who are you?” I said with a laugh.

  She pointed at her badge. “Sigourney,” I read again.

  She shook her head. “Actually . . .”

  “Actually what?”

  “Actually I wrote a fake name,” she said in a whisper.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I didn’t want these creeps to know my real name. Have you looked at the quality of the men in this room. Yikes.”

  “I was sort of focusing on the women.”

  “Oh, the quality of the women is quite high, considering. And in terms of quantity women win out too. Have you met that alleged millionairess yet?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “A bit of a fraud if you ask me. But the men! What a joke. Half of them are obvious alcoholics and the other half are born again Christians who probably found Jesus at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. I don’t mind if a man drinks. It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.”

  “You’re living on the wrong island, then, love.”

  “Indeed,” she agreed. “I was talking to that tall, good-looking, slightly geeky guy over there, but I think that he could sense that I was faking my interest in his alien abduction stories.”

  “Sounds fascinating to me.”

  “You talk to him, then.”

  “What do you do for a living?” I asked.

  “I’m one of your natural enemies.”

  “You make car bombs?”

  “Worse. I’m a reporter.”

  “Who for?”

  “The Belfast Telegraph.”

  “Ooh, fancy, like,” I said in my Vera Duckworth.

  She took the cigarette packet out of my jacket pocket and lit herself one.

  “So are you at Carrick police station?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fascinating work?”

  “It has its moments.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m a detective.”

  “A detective?” she said, almost sounding impressed. “Solving murder cases and missing diamonds and all that stuff?”

  “Yup . . . Well, not so many missing diamonds.”

  “That’s Nancy Drew’s influence.”

  “What sort of things do you write about?”

  She groaned. “I’m on the Wednesday Woman’s Page. It’s all ‘Are You Wearing the Right Bra Size for You,’ ‘Are Stockings and Suspenders Making a Comeback’ kind of thing.”

  My head was suddenly packed with lascivious images that I had to expunge before I could reply. “Not fun?” I managed.

  “No, not fun. Our crack staff of two spend the week ripping off hot issues from women’s mags and making them palatable for the Bel Tel.”

  “That sounds all right, reading magazines all week.”

  “Nah, it does your head in.”

  My beeper started going like the clappers. “Sorry about that,” I said, and turned it off.

  “Shouldn’t you get to a phone or something?” she asked.

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  We stood there in silence for an awkward ten seconds.

  “You want to get to a phone, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “This way. I saw one as I came in through the vestry.”

  She grabbed her coat from a chair and I followed her to the vestry. She turned the light on and out of the dimly lit hall. I could see that she was indeed very attractive. No trouble finding men, I would have thought. Her coat was
a wool duffel she’d clearly had since schooldays, which weren’t that long ago. She was maybe twenty-four or twenty-five?

  I called the station. “Duffy.”

  “Hold for Sergeant McCrabban.”

  “Sean, is that you?”

  “Aye.”

  “I’m sorry to call you when you’re off, but I thought you’d want to know that we found the son.”

  “The sun at last! So the blight of perpetual rain has finally been lifted from this cursèd island, then, has it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Kelly.”

  The penny dropped.

  “The murder case. The boy who offed his parents,” McCrabban said.

  “Yeah, I get it. He’s confessed, has he?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I’m intrigued . . .”

  “He left a suicide note in his car and, apparently, jumped off the cliff at Blackhead.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Aye.”

  “Are you there now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want me to come down?”

  “If you want to.”

  I looked at “Sigourney” and smiled. “In fact, Crabbie, I’m sort of talking to a charming young lady at the moment. I mean, mate, it’s your case, the training wheels are off, you know?”

  Crabbie sighed. Clearly he was still a bit nervous about running a high-profile investigation like this. But you had to get stuck in sooner or later. “All right, Sean, I just thought you might want to know. I’ll fill you in tomorrow.”

  “Cheers, mate. See ya.”

  I hung up.

  “What was that all about?” “Sigourney” asked, putting on her coat.

  “A double murder. A kid killed his parents last night and felt bad about it and did a Wiley Coyote off Blackhead cliff.”

  “A double murder?”

  “Yup.”

  “And they want you to investigate it?”

  “No, my colleague, Detective Sergeant McCrabban, is investigating it. He just wanted my input . . . but it’s a pretty straightforward one.”

  “And not a terrorist-related thing?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “I couldn’t, uh—” she began and her voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t possibly beg you to go and take me with you, could I?”

  “Why?”

  “A scoop’s a scoop, isn’t it? One day assistant editor on the women’s page, next day front-page leader writer.”

  “Steady on, Lady Macbeth, what do I get out of this arrangement?”

  “I’ll tell you my real name.”

  “I already know your real name.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sara,” I said. “Sara Prentice.”

  “How did you do that?” she asked, astonished.

  “Maybe I read the Belfast Telegraph and because of my brilliant photographic memory I recalled your byline.”

  “Is that what you did?” she asked, her almond-green eyes still wide with amazement.

  “No. It’s written on the inside of your duffel coat.”

  “Ah. Yes. Embarrassing.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, you know, still using the same coat you got in sixth form. Not cool for a fashion-conscious women’s page reporter.”

  “I’m wearing an old trench coat.”

  “That is cool.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah. So I can come with you?”

  “Uhm, OK, if you want to.”

  “How about I cook you dinner or something?”

  “I already said yes.”

  We went outside and ran through the rain to the Beemer. She put on her seat belt and smiled at me. “This is exciting.”

  “Ah, speaking of exciting . . . hold on a minute.”

  I got out of the car and looked underneath it for mercury tilt bombs.

  I got back inside.

  “What was that all about?” she asked naively.

  “Nothing. Can you really cook? I mean, this is in return for a scoop on a murder-suicide,” I said to distract her from the fact that there had been a possibility—slim, yes, but still a possibility—that we could have been blown up if I’d driven off without checking.

  “You won’t regret it. I did domestic science to O-level.”

  “So did I and I can’t open a tin of beans.”

  “Well, I can.”

  I turned on the engine and my newly installed police radio.

  I called the station.

  “This is Detective Inspector Duffy, can you tell Detective Sergeant McCrabban that I’ll meet him at the crime scene?” I said.

  “Will do, Inspector,” one of the constables said back at the barracks.

  I turned off the radio and slipped in the clutch.

  “A detective inspector,” Sara said, sounding impressed. “Do you have a gun and everything?”

  “Yup,” I said as I turned right on to the Albert Road.

  “Ever kill anyone?”

  “On purpose, you mean? Who can keep track?”

  “How do you know I’m not one of those IRA honey traps I’m always seeing ads for on late-night TV?” she asked with a charming little smile.

  I had seen those ads too. An off-duty policeman or soldier meets a girl and goes off with her only to be kidnapped, interrogated, tortured, and shot by a terrorist group. The honey-trap girl in the ads was always a glamorous blonde, not a mousy little thing with brown hair.

  “A honey-trap girl wouldn’t actually bring up those honey-trap ads, would she?”

  “It could be a clever double bluff.”

  “I’ll have to keep my eye on you, then, won’t I?”

  “Always a good policy in this day and age.”

  At the bottom of the Albert Road I turned left at the four-way junction. We drove out past the rain-slicked lights of the Marine Highway. Herring buses were chugging away from the little stone harbor, and behind us in the rear-view mirror the castle lurked grey and black in the gathering dark. And ahead of us? Who knew what lay ahead of us, waiting at the bottom of a cliff up the Antrim coast.

  6: TIDE BURIAL

  We parked the Beemer in Whitehead car park, where a glum young constable standing next to a damp police dog headed us in the right direction. We walked along the seafront path to Blackhead cliff.

  “Over there . . . that used to be Sting’s house,” Sara said, pointing to one of the big houses on the seafront.

  “Sting from the Police?” I asked skeptically.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought he was a Geordie.”

  “He was married to a local girl when he was still a teacher. Divorced her now. Seriously, they lived over there. Everybody knows that.”

  “My ignorance of local knowledge has been widely remarked on.”

  “And I’m a mine of useless information.”

  We reached the crime scene, which lay rather dramatically on the rocky path a hundred feet below Blackhead Lighthouse.

  Quite a few peelers, ambulance men, and lookie-loos there, already getting soaked by the drizzle and sea spray.

  I raised the POLICE CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape to let myself and Sara into the inner cordon (not exactly professionalism at its finest there, but the lass was growing on me).

  DC Lawson saw me and came over with his hands up to stop me approaching the crumpled mass that was presumably the corpse.

  “The forensic officers are at their task, sir, they’ve asked us to keep clear,” he warned.

  Lawson was wearing a dark blue suit and a cream raincoat, which was fine, but he had gelled his hair into spiky blond tips like a member of a boy band or a football player newly in the money. He saw that I wasn’t pleased and assumed it was some sort of impatience with the FOs going about their slow, methodical business in their latex gloves and white boiler suits. “I’m sure they’ll be done soon
, sir, I—”

  I cut him off. “What’s that on your hair, Lawson?”

  “My hair? Gel, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Uhm, because it looks good, sir?”

  “Do you think it’s an appropriate look for a trainee detective constable in the RUC?”

  “It’s what people are doing, sir.”

  “Well, I don’t like it. Peelers aren’t supposed to be trendy. Peelers are supposed to be old fashioned and conservative and behind the times. It’s reassuring for the general public to see coppers with bad haircuts and cheap suits.”

  Lawson nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said meekly, avoiding the obvious “so that’s why you dress the way you do, is it?”

  “Now, what’s the situation here?” I asked.

  “Detective Sergeant McCrabban is up there on the top of the cliff at the lighthouse car park with DC Fletcher. Apparently that’s where the boy jumped and, uh, landed in the rocks. He left a note, in his car, sir. Apologizing.”

  “A suicide note?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did it say?”

  Lawson flipped open his notebook and read: “‘I lost my head. I’m really sorry.’”

  “Any signs that he was coerced or pushed?”

  “None.”

  “What does Sergeant McCrabban think?”

  “Suicide.”

  “Hmmmm. All right, very good, Constable, go about your business.”

  Lawson nodded again and went back to whatever it was he had been doing before I showed up.

  “You were pretty hard on him, no?” Sara said.

  “About the hair?”

  “Well, we’re here to replace you and that’s bound to annoy you on some level.”

  “Who’s we? Alien clones?”

  “The younger generation.”

  “Jesus, how old do you think I am, love?”

  “Forty?”

  Shit, did I look forty?

  “Maybe I was too rough on him,” I conceded.

  “Do you mind if I take some photographs?” Sara asked.

  “No! No photographs. You can make notes, but definitely no snaps.”

  “We’ve probably got a stock photograph of the lighthouse anyway.”

  “Wait here for a second,” I said, and went over to the place where the FOs were examining the body.

  I knew the lead guy, an old stager called Jim McMurtry.

  “Hey, Jim,” I said.

  “I was wondering if you’d show up, Duffy,” Jim replied. “Where’s that thirty quid you owe me for the Derby?”