Gun Street Girl

by Adrian McKinty

  “And?”

  “I went there. Seen him before. He was better the last time. Bob Dylan did a surprise encore last time. This time it was just Van. Course neither of them is really my cup of tea . . . that old-man music.”

  “And after the concert?”

  “What do you mean, after the concert?”

  “Did you sleep with him? After the concert?”

  “Don’t be cheeky! That’s my business.”

  “If I can remind you that this is a murder investigation . . .”

  “I’m here cos Sergeant McCrabban asked me to come in. I don’t have to tell you nothing, so I don’t!”

  “I’m just trying to find out how intimately you knew the late Mr. Kelly?” Lawson said.

  Sylvie stood up. “Never been so insulted in my life.”

  Lawson had to spend the next five minutes calming her down.

  “How many times did you see Mr. Kelly?”

  “I don’t know. Half a dozen?”

  “Six in a month doesn’t sound like a lot.”

  “Aye, it wasn’t serious. It was just a bit of laugh, like I said.”

  “When did you hear about his death?”

  “Radio. Next morning. Seen it coming.”

  “Seen it coming, how?”

  “Well, Whitehead was full of the news about what happened with his parents . . .”

  “And you thought he did it?”

  “That’s what all the gossip said anyway.”

  “But you had no inkling at all that his mind was disturbed or that he was in any kind of trouble?”

  “Look, when we went out it was just a geg. He’d plenty of money and he knew how to treat a girl right, you know?”

  “He didn’t seem depressed or unhappy? Anxious?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well what?”

  “Ach, he was fine. Levelheaded you know. That was why it was all so amazing that he lost the rag and topped his ma and da.”

  “Because he wasn’t the type?”

  “Exactly. But people are strange, aren’t they? And I suppose if he did it, he did it.”

  Sylvie lit herself a fag. Lawson looked at the two-way mirror and gave a little shrug.

  “What do you think?” McCrabban said to me between puffs of blue pipe smoke.

  “He’s not as smart as he thinks he is.”

  “And the witness?”

  “She’s not lying but she’s not telling the whole truth. She knows something she’s not being forthcoming about,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. She’s not being forthcoming about it.”

  “You wanna do a tag team and go in there?” Crabbie asked.

  I lit a Marlboro. “Tell me about the forensics.”

  “Forensics came up with very little. A nine-millimeter. The same gun shot both parents but this gun hadn’t been used in the commission of a previous crime.”

  “Mr. Kelly’s business was doing OK? Threatening phone calls, letters . . . ?”

  “I had Lawson and Fletcher canvass the neighbors and go through the phone logs. Nothing unusual.”

  “And no threats on any of his bookie shops?”

  “I talked to a bloke called Derek Cole, Ray Kelly’s business manager. He says that things have been running smoothly.”

  “They must pay protection money.”

  “That’s the point, Sean. They do. They’ve got four bookies in UDA territory and three in IRA territory and they pay through the nose. Five per cent of the gross. Not five per cent of the profit. Five per cent of the gross revenue. Kelly was safe as houses, protected from both sides.”

  “Had he missed any payments or anything like that?”

  “Not a one. He hadn’t a problem in years.”

  “Why did he have that gun?”

  “The gun was a hangover from the dark days of the late seventies when you couldn’t even rely on a decent protection racket.”

  “Dark days indeed.”

  Crabbie relit his pipe. “Young Lawson says to me that foul play makes no sense from a Ciceronian standpoint . . . I didn’t like to ask . . .”

  “In his early career Cicero was a defense lawyer. He was always asking cui bono? Which means who benefits,” I explained.

  “Ah, I see,” Crabbie said, and puffed thoughtfully. “I suppose in the Kelly case no one benefits if the bookie shops are thrown into chaos and the protection racket money gets disrupted. It’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

  “On the face of it nobody profits from the death of the Kellys. Unless there was a will?”

  “Michael Kelly was the sole beneficiary.”

  “And now that Michael Kelly’s dead?”

  “Relatives in Australia. Who, you won’t be surprised to learn, have pretty good alibis.”

  “Which are?”

  “They were in Australia at the time of the killing.”

  “All right. Let’s talk to young Sylvie.”

  Tag team. Fletcher and Lawson out. Ageing Wunderkind and the Crabman in.

  Crabbie sucked on the end of his pipe. “Miss McNichol, can you account for your whereabouts the night Michael Kelly’s parents were murdered?”

  “I certainly can. Double shift at the Whitecliff until midnight and then home to me bed, exhausted. Me housemate Deirdre was waiting up for me. She made me toast.”

  “And what time did you go to bed, exactly?”

  “Don’t know about exactly but maybe about one o’clock.”

  “And you didn’t get any phone calls at all that night?”

  “Not one.”

  “And when did you hear the news about the murders at the Kelly house?”

  “The next morning. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone was saying Michael did it.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “Everyone! Deirdre. All the people in the street, all the people down the newsagent’s, everyone down the pub.”

  “Everyone was saying your boyfriend killed his parents and you didn’t think to go to the police.”

  “The peelers? What do you take me for? I’m no grass.”

  Crabbie looked. Yup, there was something she was hiding, but I couldn’t figure out what that something was.

  “Miss McNichol, where did you think Michael had gone after the murder of his parents?” I asked.

  “Scotland.”

  “Why Scotland?”

  “Well, he’s not going to be stupid enough to go to the airport, is he? But he can just hop on one of the ferries to Scotland, can’t he?” she said, and stubbed the remains of her cigarette out in the big, black, glass ashtray.

  “Did he ever talk to you about going to Scotland?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did he have an affinity for Scotland?”

  “Well, he liked shortbread.”

  McCrabban looked away. I stifled a grin.

  “Did you meet Michael’s parents?”

  “Met his ma, briefly, while Michael was looking for his car keys.”

  “You talked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about?”

  “She asked me if I was a Pisces.”

  “What?”

  “She said that I looked like a Pisces. But I’m not. I’m a Virgo.”

  “And you told her that?”

  “Aye.”

  “And what did she say to that?”

  “She said that that would have been her second guess. But it’s easy to say that after I told her, you know? She said she was a Leo but she didn’t look like a Leo to me. She was an older lady, though. Maybe her hormones were playing up. Speaking of hormones, do youse want to hear a joke?”

  “No. We don’t. Do you have anything to add to your statement that can help us get to the bottom of this case?” McCrabban asked.

  “And please remember that Michael has passed on, you can’t grass up a dead man. The only thing you’ll be doing is helping us close this sorry chapter and let the Kellys’ kin move on with their lives
,” I added.

  “I understand all that. I’m not an eejit. But Michael didn’t tell me nothing and he certainly didn’t call me after he topped his ma and da.”

  “Any jealous boyfriends in your past we should know about?”

  She shook her head. “Me? Nah, I only get the love-’em-and-leave-’em type, don’t I?” she said with a cynical little laugh. Hard as nails was Sylvie, but there was a vulnerability behind those heavily made-up eyes.

  “Parents alive?” I asked her.

  “Me ma, yeah.”

  “And your dad?”

  She shook her head. “They done him in,” she said after a pause.

  “Who did?”

  “The usual.” She sniffed.

  “Who’s the usual?”

  “They said he was an informer . . . Maybe he was an informer. I don’t know. I was only a wee bairn.”

  She sniffed again, took a hanky from her bag, and dabbed her eyes.

  “I’m really sorry, Sylvie,” I said, and, reaching across the desk, gave her arm a little squeeze.

  “It’s all right, it was a long time ago. A very long time ago,” she said, recovering herself.

  I tried a couple more questions, but the barriers that briefly had come down had firmly gone back up. After another fifteen minutes Crabbie gave me his I think this is getting us nowhere look.

  I nodded.

  “Give us a minute, will you, Sylvie?” I asked. Crabbie and I retreated to the CID incident room and I looked up the case file on Kevin McNichol. Shot in the head on the Antrim Road, North Belfast, 1974. Suspected police informer. No clues. No suspects. A case that would never be solved, like so many cases from that time. I showed the file to Crabbie.

  “Even if she knows something, unlikely that she would tell us with that family history,” I said.

  “But I don’t think she knows anything,” Crabbie said.

  I sighed. “Might as well finish it, then.”

  Back into Interview Room 1.

  “OK, Sylvie, what’s your hormone joke?” I asked.

  “Hormone joke? Oh yeah: how do you make a hormone?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know, Sylvie, how do you make a hormone?”

  “You kick her in the cunt.”

  I heard Lawson laugh behind the two-way mirror, but I was getting fed up with all this now. “OK, Miss McNichol, let me ask you just one more question and I want you to think very carefully about the answer,” I said.

  “OK.”

  “Do you really think, in your heart of hearts, that Michael, the boy you knew, killed his parents, in cold blood, the way everyone is saying that he did?”

  It was tiny.

  A blink.

  That’s all.

  A momentary look away.

  A flutter in her eyelids.

  “How am I supposed to know? You’re the police!”

  “He was your boyfriend.”

  “Well, look, I wouldn’t be shocked. He said that his da was always winding him up and I suppose it’s like everyone says . . . he just snapped.”

  “He was a levelheaded kid who just snapped?”

  “He just snapped.”

  We tried several more lines of attack but she wasn’t giving us anything else. We went out.

  “She is a Leo,” Lawson said.

  “What?”

  “Mrs. Kelly. She wasn’t lying about that.”

  I nodded. “Good work,” I said, and rolled my eyes at McCrabban.

  We tag-teamed Fletcher and Lawson back in again while Crabbie and I went down to my office.

  I poured Crabbie a whiskey and told him about the eyelid flutter.

  He hadn’t seen it.

  He didn’t believe it.

  “I think she knows something,” I insisted. “And not just about Michael’s love of shortbread.”

  “As you say, Sean, even if she does, she’ll never cooperate with the police.”

  “That’s what makes this such a fun job.”

  Crabbie sighed, tipped out his pipe. He looked at me. I looked at him. We sipped the Jura sixteen-year-old single malt. Outside, through the rain and wind, the afternoon was withering like a piece of fruit in an Ulster pantry.

  “We serve shortbread at communion, sometimes,” Crabbie said dolefully.

  I was not going to have a conversation with him about shortbread’s Eucharistic qualities. I drained my glass and got to my feet.

  “It’s still your case, mate, but before I went and told Chief Inspector McArthur that you were closing it, I’d let it sit for a bit. Maybe bring the wee lassie in again, next week. A second time can’t hurt and we might get some inconsistencies in her story.”

  “Let it sit. Bring her in in a few days or a week or so,” he repeated dutifully, but I could tell he didn’t like it.

  “Sound good?”

  “Can I at least tell the Chief Inspector that we’re close to closing the book on this one?”

  “Tell him that when you hand in the written progress report.”

  “And Lawson and Fletcher?”

  “Tell Lawson to dial it down, tell Fletcher to dial it up. She’s a police officer not a bloody secretary.”

  “OK, cheers, Sean.”

  “Cheers, Crabbie, and well done. Case number one nearly under your belt. And it’s a murder. Whew. I see Chief Constable in your future.”

  And he touched wood to ward off a jinx that might possibly have been impressed by my oracular abilities.

  8: POLICE STATION BLUES

  Rain and cold. Boredom. And then . . . 180. The pancake flipped. The pancake fell on the fucking floor.

  Thatcher. Thatcher, like Stalin, was making a Five Year Plan . . .

  Northern Ireland had been too quiet. This is the mid-eighties, love. Time to get your handbag swinging and shake things up.

  Sara Prentice gave me the news.

  Brriinng. Brriinng.

  Office phone. The direct line.

  “Hello, Sean Duffy, Carrickfergus CID.”

  “I love hearing you say that. You sound so sexy and official.”

  “Sara? What’s up? You’re not canceling dinner for tonight, are you?”

  “No way. I’m cooking. That’s a rarity. That’s Halley’s Comet. And besides we have to go out tonight. We’re both going to be busy in the coming weeks.”

  “Oh God. What have you heard?”

  “It’s going to be called the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Cross-border cooperation, devolved powers going back to the Province, groundwork for a new Assembly. Thatcher has cooked it up with the Irish prime minister.”

  “Jesus! When is this going to happen?”

  “Belfast Telegraph sources say tomorrow afternoon.”

  “No consultation with the Unionists?”

  “No consultation with anyone. It’s just going to be announced as a fait accompli by the Secretary of State . . . so you know . . .”

  “It’s going to be trouble.”

  “Yup. A lot of work for both of us.”

  “Thanks, Sara, I’ll see you later.”

  She gave me a kiss down the phone and I hung up.

  I closed the office door, found an emergency joint, rummaged in the bottom-drawer cassette box, stuck in “Police Station Blues” by Peetie Wheatstraw. It didn’t quite take, so I fast forwarded the tape to “Stack O’ Lee” by Mississippi John Hurt, which worked a little better.

  Emotionally righted, I went to see the Chief Inspector. He was white faced, shaking, and he’d already broken out the Black Label.

  “Have a drink with me, Duffy.”

  Didn’t need to be told twice. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, sir.”

  “I was at a pow-wow in Belfast.”

  “What have the Brits cooked up for us now?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “New Assembly, devolved powers, the Irish government to have a say in Northern Irish affairs.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “It’s complet
ely reasonable. In a normal society all the political parties would welcome this.”

  I poured myself a modest measure of the Black Label. He opened his filing cabinet and gave me a folder marked “Secret.”

  “All the station chiefs got a copy a day early. Read it here. In my office. Don’t make any notes, just read it. I’ll go get some grub and come back in ten minutes.”

  He exited and left me with the whiskey and a photocopy of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

  I read it.

  It was a deal between the Thatcher and FitzGerald governments aimed at generating political progress in Ulster. McArthur was right. It was harmless stuff. A benign, innocuous series of cross-border panels and task forces, and an attempt to get a regional assembly off the ground. In theory, Nationalists would like it because of the cross-border dimensions and the nuanced notion that the views of the Irish government had to be taken into account when discussing Northern Irish affairs. Unionists would like it (the civil servants must have thought) because it guaranteed the union of Northern Ireland with the rest of the UK until a majority of its population wanted a change in its sovereign status.

  McArthur came back in with a packet of Mr. Kipling’s French Fancies.

  I took one of the pink ones.

  “Your assessment, Duffy?”

  “You’re right, sir. In a normal country this bold attempt to seize the middle ground would be met with polite agreement by all sides of the political divide.”

  “But not here.”

  “Here the politics are centrifugal not centrist. Extreme Nationalists and extreme Unionists will condemn the Agreement as a sell-out of their principles, and the moderates in the middle who support it will look like fools.”

  “Special Branch reckons the Unionists will give us the most trouble.”

  “I expect so, sir.”

  For seventy-five years, ever since Winston Churchill’s promise to send Dreadnoughts to bombard Belfast during the Third Home Rule Crisis, the Unionists had suspected some sort of treachery from Albion Perfide. It was obvious to everyone that Britain’s political class wanted to get out of Northern Ireland just as they had got out of India, Malaya, Aden, Rhodesia, and all the other nasty post-imperial trouble spots. Few Unionist politicians had the ability to parse the subtleties of Whitehall’s actions—yes, the Brits were leaving, but they were going to take fifty years to do it, and they weren’t going to run out with their tail between their legs as they did in, say, Palestine. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was not Albion Perfide.