Gun Street Girl

by Adrian McKinty

  “I believe so. Although as far as I know he never told anyone.”

  Not surprising. Michael was from Belfast where the rule was: whatever you say, say nothing.

  I scratched my head and lit another fag.

  Lawson was still reeling. “Let me get this straight, Herr Habsburg. Are you suggesting that the Thames Valley Police told the coroner at the Anastasia Coleman inquest not to ask you or Michael Kelly any direct questions about the ‘third man’s’ name?”

  “I am not claiming anything. I am merely stating what happened. I was not upset about this. This is how things are done in a civilized country. My reputation was damaged as was that of Michael Kelly, but why damage the reputation of someone else?”

  “But couldn’t Mr. Osbourne have provided some insight into Anastasia’s death?” Lawson asked.

  “I doubt it. He must have been asleep when Anna injected herself.”

  “You actually saw her do it?” I asked.

  “No, but as I have attempted to explain no one else was capable of such an action. At that stage of the party everyone had gone but Alan, Michael, and myself. Alan was asleep upstairs. He had drunk quite a bit.”

  “And then she went off to inject herself alone?” I ventured.

  “Not quite.”

  “Please explain.”

  “She was . . . what is the word? An evangelist. An evangelist for the drug. She offered to inject Michael and myself but we declined. Both of us, however, were persuaded into smoking some of the heroin she cooked for us over tinfoil.”

  I flipped through my notebook and read back my careful notes from the last few days.

  “Neither you nor Michael said any of this at the inquest.”

  “We weren’t asked,” Gottfried replied mechanically.

  “So Miss Coleman gave you and Michael heroin before injecting herself?” Lawson asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And Alan was there, but he didn’t take the heroin because he was asleep?”

  “Asleep or passed out.”

  “How did the subject of heroin come up?”

  “Anna told us what she was going to do and Michael and I were curious. The way she described it: she said it was the greatest experience in the world. More beautiful than sex or anything else. She told us that she was going to inject herself with a speedball and offered us the experience, but with the caution that it might be dangerous for the novice. Michael had a fear of needles, and perhaps I was nervous too, so she showed us how to ‘chase the dragon’ off a piece of tinfoil. I tried it. I fell into a beautiful dream. In the morning when I awoke Anna was lying on the living-room sofa, dead.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I called 999 immediately, but it was obvious that Anna was beyond saving. She was cold. She had died some hours before. Relatively peacefully, I hope. I woke Alan and Michael and told them to get out of the house before the police came. Alan pulled on his clothes and left, but Michael said that he would stay and help me deal with the situation,” Gottfried said with emotion.

  “Alan left but Michael stayed,” Lawson said, writing furiously.

  “I told him not to be a bloody fool, but he insisted on ‘facing the music’? Is that the expression?”

  “Yes,” I said absently. “Yes it is. Why would he do that, do you think?”

  “He followed his own code of honor. He was an interesting fellow. He came from some money in Ireland, new money, I think, but he wasn’t embarrassed about that. He did exactly as he pleased. He was very well liked . . .”

  “Was there anyone else in the house that we don’t know about?” I asked.

  “No. That was it. Alan, Michael, and myself.”

  “When did you tell Oxford CID Alan’s name?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid I was not able to keep it a secret for very long. They questioned me for the entire day and night before my father found out what was happening and sent a solicitor from London.”

  “You told them Alan’s name that day?”

  “Not quite. I believe it was the early morning of the next day. I was very tired and quite emotional. I gave them the description first. A description which was all too accurate. The artist’s rendering was uncanny. Have you seen it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was just so tired. And they kept asking the same questions again and again. And then they showed me Alan’s photograph and I confirmed that he was indeed the third person in the house.”

  “So Oxford CID knew Alan’s name from very early on in the investigation?” Lawson asked.

  “Yes.”

  “A decision must have been taken at the highest levels of Oxford CID to protect Alan Osbourne,” Lawson said, thinking aloud.

  “Protection which worked and which has lasted a long time,” I echoed.

  Gottfried shrugged solemnly. “I wish I could have kept Michael out of it too. Poor chap. And now he is dead.”

  “Has anyone ever warned you about keeping Alan Osbourne’s identity secret?”

  “No.”

  “An implied threat. A direct threat. A warning?” Lawson asked.

  “No, nothing like that. Ah, the coffee has grown cold. Would you gentlemen care for another pot?”

  “No thank you. Just a few more questions, Herr Habsburg, and then we will need to get going. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us, I feel.”

  Half an hour later we were done. I told Gottfried to be careful and if he saw anything suspicious or felt himself in any danger he was to call the local police.

  Gottfried told us that he had private security guards sent by his father who kept a very good watch on him. We thanked him for his cooperation and walked up the Highgate Road to hail a taxi.

  16: THE THIRD MAN

  Conservative Central Office was only a short twenty-minute taxi ride away from Hampstead Heath.

  “How do you feel about conspiracy theories now, sir?” Lawson said a little too cheekily for my liking. But he was right to be cheeky and I didn’t have an answer for him. Thames Valley had snowed the coroner and had attempted to snow us. Although it posed the obvious question, if Michael Kelly was murdered for what he knew, how come Gottfried had been allowed to live? How come no one had even put the fear of God in him? He’d told us about Alan Osbourne with almost no prompting at all. No rubber hose. No physical pressure.

  “This is you, gov. I can’t take you into Smith Square, proper, cos of the Old Bill,” the taxi driver said. “You’ll have to walk from here.”

  “I’m sure this will be fine.”

  We got out and paid and the taxi drove off.

  I had absolutely no idea which building it was so I had to stop a passing policeman. “Excuse me, sir,” I said, “we’re looking for Conservative Central Office?”

  The peeler looked at Lawson and myself with a jaundiced eye. I gave him the look right back. I noticed from his strange helmet that he was actually City of London Police, not Met.

  “Conservative Central Office?” I asked again.

  “And what would you two gentlemen want with Conservative Central Office?” he said with a suspicious tone.

  It took me a beat or two to realize what his problem was.

  His problem was my Belfast accent.

  The IRA had almost killed Mrs. Thatcher and her cabinet the year before and here were a couple of Micks in a hurry looking for Conservative Central Office.

  I showed him my warrant card but he still wasn’t entirely convinced as he walked us through the security cordon to Smith Square.

  Conservative Central Office was a charming, almost quaint, three-story, Georgian building. There was another bobby standing outside. We showed him our warrants and he let us in.

  A receptionist paged Alan Osbourne for us and we waited in a pastel lobby under twin portraits of Mrs. Thatcher and the Queen.

  Music was bubbling from concealed loudspeakers.

  “Elgar?” Lawson guessed correctly.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s nice.”

/>   I nodded. Elgar’s all very well, but you wouldn’t want to hear the bastard on a loop from nine to five every day.

  “Look at those portraits,” Lawson said. “Do you notice something funny about them?”

  I looked first at the Queen and then Mrs. T. The Queen’s picture was a copy of a portrait presumably done in the early seventies. Mrs. T’s was a recent sitting and looked to be an original, but other than that I couldn’t see anything odd about them.

  “Thatcher’s bigger by about three inches vertically and about six inches horizontally,” Lawson said.

  Observant wee shite.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “He’s keeping us waiting, isn’t he?” Lawson said, looking at his watch.

  My pager started to ring and I went up to the reception desk and asked to use the telephone.

  I called Crabbie at Carrickfergus RUC.

  “Detective Sergeant McCrabban.”

  “It’s me. You paged me.”

  “Sean, where are you?”

  “London.”

  “London? Look, mate, we really need you back here. There’s been a development in the case.”

  “What development?”

  “Remember Deirdre Ferris?”

  “Who?”

  “Sylvie McNichol’s roommate.”

  “Oh, her. Oh God. Let me guess, now she’s turned up dead, too.”

  “No. She’s fine.”

  “What, then?”

  “She got herself arrested for assault.”

  “Who’d she hit?”

  “She went after some wee girl in Lavery’s in Belfast. Glassed her in the face because the wee girl was supposedly flirting with her boyfriend. The girl’s messed up. Plastic surgery, broken jaw, the whole bowling match.”

  “All very seedy, I’m sure, but what’s this got to do with us?”

  “So the cops at Queen Street RUC are telling her that she’s looking at four years in prison and she says she doesn’t want to do four years in prison. She says that she can help solve a murder and she asks to speak to detectives from Carrick RUC.”

  “This is getting interesting.”

  “It gets better. So they call me and I go up there and she says if I can grant her immunity she’ll give me an important lead in the investigation. So I tell her to give me the lead first and I’ll see what I can do . . .”

  “Wise move. And? Come on, Crabbie, I’m on the edge of my seat here . . .”

  “She tells me that she ‘might have eyewitness testimony that could help the investigation.’”

  “Very interesting.”

  “I didn’t have the authority to offer her any kind of immunity deal, Sean, but I’m arranging to have her transferred here to Carrick RUC tonight, so you can question her and see if it’s legit.”

  “Good work. We’ll be back this evening. Make sure this young lady is not granted a bail hearing and is kept under your beady eye in your protective custody, OK?”

  “OK. Any progress at your end?”

  “A few things. I’ll fill you in tonight.”

  “OK, Sean.”

  “See you later, mate.”

  I put down the phone and in a whisper told Lawson everything that McCrabban had told me.

  Deirdre Ferris seemed to be on the verge of breaking the sacred Belfast code of silence, and if you were gonna sing, the only reason to sing was to save your own skin. Thank you, Deirdre Ferris’s cheating boyfriend.

  “So what do we do now?” Lawson asked.

  “Well, we’ll brace Mr. Osbourne for all we’re worth. If there’s no play here, we go back to Oxford, get our stuff, get back up to Birmingham International, and fly home.”

  “What do you think Osbourne will tell us?”

  “I think we’re about to find out.”

  A breathless, grinning, slightly chubby young man with longish black hair came confidently down the stairs. He was in his shirtsleeves, a blue tie, and black suit trousers. Future PM? Future foreign secretary? Future day trader who destroys an entire city bank and causes a mini-recession because of bad investments? Maybe all three.

  He offered us his hand. “Alan Osbourne,” he said. “Are you the gents from the Mail on Sunday?”

  “No, we’re not. We’re detectives from the Royal Ulster Constabulary. I’m Detective Inspector Duffy and this is Detective Constable Lawson.”

  Alan looked confused.

  He let his hand drop to his side.

  “What’s this about?” he asked.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

  “Uhm. Sure. Yah. Conference room. Follow me. Sheena, will you bring us in some coffee?” he said to the receptionist in a very posh voice.

  We sat down and showed him our warrant cards. He inspected them gravely and gave them back.

  “So how I can help?” he asked.

  “We’re investigating the death under suspicious circumstances of one Michael Kelly. I believe he’s known to you?”

  Osbourne shook his head. “Michael Kelly, uhm, the . . . the, uhm, name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  The tips of his ears were turning red as he spoke and he was sweating bullets. Osbourne was not an accomplished liar.

  “He was at Oxford with you.”

  “Michael Kelly? Uhm, was he at my college?”

  “He wasn’t. But you were with him on at least one occasion. The night Anastasia Coleman died. On Fyfield Road in North Oxford at Gottfried Habsburg’s rented home. There was a party there for the Round Table Club. Apparently most of the partygoers went back to their own digs and colleges, so only you and Gottfried Habsburg and Michael Kelly were left in the house that morning. All three of you found Anastasia Coleman’s body, apparently with a needle still in her arm. Gottfried called the authorities and he and Michael decided to stay there and, quote, ‘face the music,’ unquote, but you thought that discretion was the better part of valor and hightailed it home. Is that an accurate depiction of events?”

  The color had drained from his cheeks, his grin had become fixed and his eyes were glassy, almost teary.

  “Mr. Osbourne?” I said softly.

  He put his face in his hands.

  “I’ll be ruined! Father will be ruined.”

  “Oh no, Lawson, Father will be ruined,” I said.

  Osbourne looked at us like a hunted animal. “Oh my God! Gottfried, he must have . . . The Reform Club . . . I should have . . . I’ll need a solicitor, won’t I?”

  “Sir, if you could just calm down and—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute! I’m not under arrest! You haven’t arrested me. I don’t have to tell you anything, do I?”

  “Mr. Osbourne, you are not under arrest. You are under no legal obligation to tell us anything. However, your cooperation in this matter would greatly benefit our inquiries. At the moment you are tangential to the Michael Kelly murder investigation. But, depending upon your level of cooperation in the next few minutes, you could instead become a major focus of our investigation. It would not at all be difficult to come back here this afternoon with several detectives from the Metropolitan Police and maybe even a few reporters from the Mail on Sunday or the News of the World,” I said.

  Osbourne was sweating now and he took out a large polka-dot handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

  “My name won’t necessarily have to come up at all, will it? If I tell you everything I know.”

  “If you tell us everything you know,” I insisted.

  “Whew. Well, then I suppose . . . well, I suppose I should say first of all how sorry I am to hear about Michael’s death. I had no idea. I’ve been very busy.”

  “I’ll be sure and tell Michael’s next of kin how moved you were. Oh, wait, his next of kin got murdered too,” I said.

  “You were the ‘third man’ in the house on Fyfield Road that morning, then?” Lawson said.

  “Yes . . . I was there. It was a Round Table Club—sanctioned event so I had to go.”

  “And Anastasia, she was your gir
lfriend?” I asked.

  “Christ, no! Who told you that? She was trouble! Everybody knew that. She asked me to take her and I knew it would be less hassle to take her than to leave her, so I brought her along.”

  “How did you know her?”

  “Her father and my father are friends. Known her since forever.”

  “What does your father do?”

  “He’s a banker. But . . . he’s also a wheel in the party. Behind the scenes. Chairman of the constituency groups. You wouldn’t have heard of him.”

  “Did he get you your present job here?” Lawson asked.

  “I got a first in PPE. That’s a pretty strong recommendation,” Osbourne said defensively.

  “If I could bring you back to the night of Anastasia Coleman’s death. Tell me in your own words what happened,” I said.

  “I don’t know what happened. I went to the party. It was up in North Oxford. I had a lot to drink. I didn’t want to walk all the way back to Brasenose. Char— uhm, a friend of mine offered to drive me home but he was so plastered I thought it was safer to just crash at Habby’s . . . Gottfried’s, I mean.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I fell asleep. Next thing I know Habby’s waking me up and telling me that Anastasia is dead. I told him to call an ambulance but he’d already done that. He told me and Michael to make ourselves scarce. I took his advice and got out of there.”

  “And then what?”

  “I left. Michael stayed to help Gottfried deal with everything. I don’t know why he did that. I assumed it was some kind of Irish thing.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, then . . . nothing.”

  “Did you ever get contacted by the Thames Valley Police?”

  “No.”

  “The coroner’s office? Reporters?”

  “Couple of tabloid hacks were sniffing around the Round Table Club looking for gossip, but no one told them anything.”

  “You must have seen the artist’s impression of yourself in the papers?”

  “Yeah, all that third man stuff. I was shitting myself for a week or two.”

  “Did you have any contact with Michael or Gottfried after the party?”

  “I never saw Michael again. I saw Gottfried at the Reform Club a couple of months ago. We didn’t talk. I sort of avoided him.”