“Yes.”
11: THE SUICIDES ARE PILING UP
The Jag slipped away from its mooring and drove round the bend in Coronation Road. I picked up the milk bottles feeling what . . . ? Shell-shocked? Excited? Kate and Kendrick were those rare English bureaucrats who lived in the future not the past, something that no one in Ireland ever did. “But, Jesus, a job with MI5?” I muttered to myself.
I looked at the ever so faint swastika stain on the front door. Kate missed nothing. She was good.
The phone was ringing in the hall. I put down the milk, picked it up. “Yeah?”
“Sean, sorry to bother you on your off day.”
It was Crabbie.
“What’s up, mate?”
“You know that open-and-shut case of mine . . .”
“Not so shut, eh?”
“I could do with your help, Sean. I know it’s my responsibility and all that jazz, but things are starting to spiral away from me a bit.”
“Say no more, mate. Where do you want me? The station?”
“Bannockburn Street, Whitehead.”
“Who lives there?”
“Sylvie McNichol.”
“She’s got new information? I told ya she was holding back.”
“She killed herself, Sean.”
“Killed herself?”
“Aye.”
“Because she couldn’t live without Michael Kelly?”
“That’s what we’re expected to believe.”
“I’m getting chills.”
“Me too.”
“Does it stink?”
“Nothing obvious but . . .”
“I’ll be right over.”
“And can you please tell the Chief Inspector that we can’t possibly do riot duty today with a murder investigation on our hands again.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Boots. Jumper. Raincoat. A quick check under the BMW for bombs. My distorted reflection in a puddle under the car. A tired old man’s eyes staring back at me through the rainbow of petroleum coefficients.
Drizzle on the lonely A2 to Whitehead. I continued my love-hate affair with the Gillette electric razor while I looked out Hex Induction Hour by the Fall. I put it in the tape player and it came on at “Hip Priest.” The Fall on repeat. Joy Division and the Happy Mondays on the sidelines in reserve. A future M60 triptych.
Bannockburn Street, Whitehead. Three Land Rovers and a few neighbors nosying over their fences.
Sergeant McCrabban in a sweater and an orange Peter Storm raincoat. Constable Lawson next to him in a suit and tie and a raincoat like mine. Both of them pale as match factory girls.
McCrabban led me to the garage next to the house.
The door had been jacked open from the outside by boiler-suited FOs who were milling around waiting for the go-ahead from Sergeant McCrabban. They had set up floodlights in the garage so we could see everything, and the lights were so bright one of the FOs was taking photographs without the aid of a flash.
“Will we go in?” Crabbie asked.
“It’s a nasty scene,” a leery old forensic officer said with satisfaction.
I hid my genuine reluctance to look at the girl’s body in a comic pretense of reluctance, but I had no choice, not in front of McCrabban and Lawson.
The car was a blue 1960s-model Volkswagen Beetle. A hosepipe had been run from the exhaust to the front driver’s-side window. The door had been opened so that I could see Sylvie McNichol dead in the driver’s seat. Lips blue, eyes bulging from the sockets, vomit on her chin. No handcuffs, no restraints, no sign of a struggle. A thick blue jumper was lying on the ground next to her, obviously the thing she’d used to stuff in the top of the car window in the gap made by the hosepipe.
Residual carbon monoxide. Urine smell.
I coughed.
“Are you OK?” Crabbie asked.
I nodded and examined her closely. Her hands were in her lap, her nails unbroken. She hadn’t been trying to claw her way out. Her face was blank. Resigned?
Everything was as it should be. What was I missing? And I was missing something, something my two colleagues had seen.
“The first thing we should tell you is that the garage light doesn’t work,” Lawson said. “The bulb’s been out for weeks. Neither girl could be bothered to replace it.”
Why was that important?
“OK,” I replied.
“There’s a suicide note,” Crabbie said, and handed it to me in a plastic bag.
I read it.
“I can’t go on without him,” it said.
“Her handwriting?”
“It’s block capitals but Deirdre Ferris, the housemate, says that sometimes that’s how she wrote,” Lawson said.
“Where is this Deirdre Ferris?”
“Upstairs with a WPC.”
“She find the body?”
“She found the note first. She’d come home from a visit to her mum’s. The note was on the kitchen table and then she heard the engine going in the garage. The garage connects to the house through the washroom,” Crabbie explained.
A suicide note, no sign of a struggle, and a possible motive.
“Apart from the fact that she didn’t seem that cut up when we interviewed her, what makes you think murder rather than suicide?” I asked McCrabban.
“Tell him,” Crabbie said to Lawson.
Ah, so Lawson had spotted it, had he? Got to watch out for that one.
“She ran a hosepipe from the exhaust to the driver’s-side window.”
“I can see that.”
“She wound the window up as tight as she could and then stuffed a jumper into the gap that the hosepipe made at the top of the window,” Lawson explained.
“OK, I’m with you. I’m still not seeing a problem.”
“The problem is the passenger’s-side window.”
“What about it?” I asked.
“It doesn’t wind all the way up,” Lawson explained.
“What?”
“It’s broken.”
I examined the window and he was right about that. It went to about a quarter of an inch from the top and left a gap.
“So?”
“It’s never worked since Sylvie bought the car a year ago. She always complained to Deirdre about how the passenger’s-side seat got wet in the rain.”
I understood it now.
“She didn’t stuff anything in the passenger’s-side window,” I said.
“No. She didn’t.”
“So we’re expected to believe that she meticulously put a jumper in the driver’s-side window but forgot to put something in the passenger’s-side window,” I said.
Crabbie nodded.
“But a killer wouldn’t have known about the tiny gap in the passenger’s-side window, would they?” Crabbie said. “Not in a dark garage through which he was navigating by torch.”
“The fumes killed her, but by not stuffing the passenger’s-side window she gave herself a longer and more lingering death,” I said.
Crabbie shook his head. “It doesn’t add up.”
“Suicide’s not impossible, sir,” Lawson said, covering himself. “But it is very strange that she would carefully block one window and not the other.”
“And then add in the fact of her interview at the police station that we all got to witness,” Crabbie added.
“She didn’t seem the suicidal type to me,” Lawson said.
“Or me,” Crabbie agreed.
“Or me,” I concurred.
We looked at the car and the victim and the cold, concrete garage floor.
“Careless of him, wasn’t it?” Crabbie said.
“Him?” Lawson asked.
“The killer.”
“Or killers,” Lawson said.
“Come on, let’s get out of here and let the forensic boys do their work,” I said.
Crabbie nodded and we went to the mobile incident van where mugs of tea were waiting for us. I ordered out the reservists and closed the va
n door to get some privacy.
“It doesn’t have to be related to the Kelly case, you know. There could be new boyfriend trouble, threats against her, stalkers, something like that. She was a good-looking lass under all that make-up; she could have stirred some passions,” I said.
Crabbie nodded. “We’re checking on that. But the similarities are worth considering, aren’t they?”
“Two suicides. One of which was possibly staged,” I agreed. “What are you Brains of Britain cooking up between you?”
“We’re thinking what you’re thinking, Sean. That Sylvie knew something about the Kelly case and they killed her before she blabbed . . .”
I rubbed my chin. “It’s certainly a possibility.”
“Think she was blackmailing the killer?” Crabbie asked.
“Nah, she’s not the blackmailing type. She was the whatever you say, say nothing type. They probably weren’t going to kill her, originally, but it was gnawing at them. And I suppose last night they just decided better safe than sorry.”
“Crime of opportunity, maybe? With Deirdre away?” McCrabban asked.
“And of course it calls into question Michael Kelly’s suicide too,” Lawson said, stating the bleedin’ obvious.
“It calls into question the whole Kelly case,” Crabbie underlined. “If Michael was abducted and then murdered, the death of his parents would be a lot more explicable with the known facts. The professional nature of the shooting. The fact that both parents were killed within a matter of seconds of one another. The lack of defensive wounds . . .”
“Could be that the parents were simply in the way. They had to be taken care of first before the murderer or murderers went upstairs and grabbed Michael,” Lawson suggested.
“Michael was then abducted and killed and the death made to look like a suicide,” Crabbie said.
“For what motive?” I asked.
Crabbie shrugged. “I have no idea. I thought we’d closed . . . well, you know what I thought. Should have known it was too good to be true. My first murder . . .”
“Someone wants to kill Michael. They abduct him from his home, killing his parents in the process. They kill him by throwing him off a cliff. Then, a week later, they murder his girlfriend because they think she might know too much.”
“Maybe she was a witness; maybe Michael told her something,” Lawson said.
“Or it could be unrelated. We’ll have to rule that out. As well as suicide, obviously,” Crabbie said.
“If, Crabbie, if we rule out your actual lovesick suicide or a non-related murder, then yes, it all comes back to Michael Kelly. What was he doing? What enemies had that wee lad made in his twenty-odd years on planet Earth?”
Lawson cleared his throat and looked around cautiously as if the van might be bugged or something.
“Yes, Constable Lawson? Do you have something to contribute?”
“There’s something I’ve been working on in my own time . . . It’s probably nothing . . .”
I gazed at Crabbie. This was news to him too.
“In your free time between riots?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, that thing you said, Inspector, about Michael leaving college just before his graduation. About how he only had a few weeks left and he quit . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Well, it got me thinking. I looked into Michael’s university history and something very interesting cropped up.”
“What?”
“Do you remember when Anastasia Coleman died?”
“No.”
“It was in the Daily Mail, the News of the World, the tabs were all over it.”
“I rarely read the News of the World,” I lied.
“I never get the chance,” Crabbie added. “Missus won’t have it in the house.”
Lawson sighed. “Anastasia Coleman was the daughter of the minister for agriculture. Five months ago she took a heroin overdose at a house in Oxford. She was a student there studying English. It was at a big party being held by the Round Table Club.”
“The what club?” Crabbie wondered.
“The Round Table is an exclusive Oxford University student club. Only the rich and connected are invited to join. They’re famous for their parties. Apparently they eat at restaurants, drink all the most expensive wines, smash the place up, and then leave a huge bag of money to hush the owners up.”
“Charming bunch of kids,” Crabbie said.
“Anyway, at this party there was a lot of heroin and cocaine and booze. Everyone passed out, and when they woke up next morning Anastasia was dead. The house was owned by this guy called Gottfried Habsburg, so he’s the fall guy. Obviously Habsburg has to leave the university because it happened in his home. But here’s the interesting part. A certain Michael Kelly, our Michael Kelly, is in the house with Habsburg the next morning and he’s caught up in the scandal too.”
“Shit.”
Lawson flipped open his notebook. “Some of the tabloids make the suggestion that Kelly is the one who supplied her with the drugs or that he was her boyfriend. It’s all just speculation. But they make Michael’s life miserable, so he quits the university too before he gets thrown out.”
“Michael Kelly and this Habsburg guy are the only ones left in the house with the dead girl?”
“There’s another guy there that neither of them know. He scarpers after they find the body and call the cops.”
“Sensible chap. Maybe he was the dealer?”
“Maybe.”
“They never find out who this third guy is?” Crabbie asked.
“Nope. The papers look for him. The Oxford police look for him, but they don’t find him and obviously he doesn’t testify at the inquest.”
“So the focus is on Kelly and Habsburg?”
“Yeah. But from what I’ve read Michael Kelly gets off pretty easily. By leaving when he does and going back to Northern Ireland, most of the heat falls on this Gottfried Habsburg guy. He’s the perfect fall guy for the tabs: rich, gay, German.”
“That’s the trifecta,” I said.
“Yeah. They really go after him too. Front page of the News of the World. Front page of the Sunday People.”
“Michael must have been dragged through the mud over here to some extent. The Sunday World?”
“Not as much as you’d think. Habsburg’s eccentric lifestyle and notorious reputation captured most of the ink even here. It was his party. His house.”
“Were there criminal charges against Michael or this Habsburg bloke?” Crabbie asked.
“No criminal charges in the end, but Habsburg was rusticated and his reputation was destroyed. By leaving quietly and going home Kelly got the heat off himself. It was the smart move. Michael became a footnote. It was Habsburg the tabloids wanted,” Lawson explained.
“Michael must have had to go back for the inquest,” I said.
“Yes. But he testified the same day as Count Habsburg, so again the next day’s papers were devoted to the German.”
Crabbie had grown silent and reflective. “It sounds like quite the scandal, but I don’t see how it has anything to do with all of this,” he said at last.
“I looked through Michael’s effects and sure enough he had a Round Table Club tie and membership card,” Lawson said.
“So?”
“Maybe he knew the identity of the mystery man? Maybe he knew who supplied Anastasia with the heroin?”
“But he was a good boy. He was quiet. Why kill him now?” I asked.
Lawson shrugged. “Because he knew too much? Because he was blackmailing someone? We’re dealing with the elite here. The Round Table Club is the future establishment. Future prime ministers. Future foreign secretaries . . .”
I looked at Crabbie, but he seemed dubious. “There’s no evidence of a conspiracy,” he said.
“The complete lack of evidence is the sure sign that the conspiracy is working,” I offered.
“That’s what
the nutters say,” Crabbie said.
“Sometimes the nutters can be right.”
“I suppose it’s not impossible,” Crabbie conceded.
12: OVER THE WATER
Lawson, McCrabban, and myself attended Sylvie McNichol’s autopsy in Belfast where the ME found a tiny piece of cotton wool in Sylvie’s throat. He admitted that he might have missed it if he hadn’t been looking for it. The cotton wool had been dipped in chloroform. Ergo Sylvie McNichol had been murdered, and murdered by a professional who had attempted to make it look like a suicide, but who had just got a little unlucky with the passengers’-side car window.
The next job at hand was to interview Deirdre Ferris, Sylvie’s flatmate.
Deirdre was also a barmaid at the Whitecliff: twenty, fake tan, dyed black hair, five foot nothing, and not quite as sharp or as pretty as Sylvie. Deirdre was adamant that she knew zilch about Michael Kelly’s death or what had happened to her flatmate.
We canvassed Sylvie’s friends and neighbors. Sylvie had no debts, had not pissed off the paramilitaries, and had no suspicious ex-boyfriends. No stalkers, nothing in the RUC files.
Under further interrogation at the station Deirdre admitted that Sylvie had acted a little strangely after Michael Kelly’s death. She’d made a couple of phone calls from random call boxes, she’d double-checked that the doors were locked at night.
I explained the whole situation to Chief Inspector McArthur and got Carrick CID excused from further riot duty until we had got to the bottom of the Michael Kelly/Sylvie McNichol case.
McCrabban didn’t want to travel in “cattle round-up” season so I left him to pursue any local developments while Lawson and I travelled to Oxford to see whether there really could be some kind of conspiracy.
I picked up Lawson at his home and drove to Belfast Harbor Airport. I left the Beemer in the long-term car park and we got the British Midland flight to Birmingham International.
When we got through Arrivals a constable from Thames Valley Police CID was standing there holding up a sign that said “Daffy.”
“That’ll be me,” I said.
“Constable Atkins. Thomas Atkins, Thames Valley Constabulary,” he replied.
Gun Street Girl Page 11