Gun Street Girl

by Adrian McKinty

  “Where were you on the night of November 11, 1985?”

  “What happened then?”

  “That was the night Michael Kelly’s parents were murdered,” I said.

  “Here more than likely. Maybe down the Whitecliff pub for a bit.”

  “Here with a helpful alibi?”

  “Do the dogs count?”

  “No.”

  “No, then.”

  “Where were you on the evening of the twelfth?”

  “The night Michael went off the cliff? Here,” he said dolefully.

  “Where were you on Wednesday of last week?”

  “What happened then?”

  “That was the night Sylvie McNichol was murdered. You know who she is?”

  “Yeah, barmaid down the Whitecliff. Michael’s girlfriend supposedly. But I, uhm, I heard that that was a suicide too.”

  “We’re still investigating the circumstances surrounding her death, Mr. Vardon,” I said. “Where were you?”

  “I was here as well.”

  “So you’ve no alibi for the evening Michael was killed or the night Sylvie was killed.”

  “No.”

  “And the night Michael’s parents were killed?”

  “I was here . . . Look, I’ve been here every night since I got dismissed from Shorts. I can’t afford to go out, can I?”

  “Do you have family around here?”

  “Parents have emigrated to South Africa. Can’t take the winters.”

  “Pretty fancy stereo system. How do you like being part of the CD revolution?” I asked, gazing at the expensive bit of kit.

  “CDs are the future, mate. And if you must know I paid for the stereo system and the CDs out of my own money.”

  “You’ll always stick with vinyl, won’t you, sir, it’s got more character,” Lawson said to butter me up.

  I grinned at him.

  “Character my arse. CDs will last forever,” Vardon said.

  “Was Michael into music? What did you talk about when he called here?” I asked.

  “He was only ever over here a couple of times. We just shat the shit. You know?”

  “He ever talk to you about guns?”

  “Guns?”

  “Guns, firearms, weapons. I heard he was fascinated. Quite the collector, apparently. Dealer too.”

  He thought for a second or two and ran his hand back through his long hair.

  “Guns? Nope, we didn’t talk about guns. Not really. Still he was always, well, he was always one of those wee boys, but he could tell I wasn’t interested.”

  “One of what wee boys?”

  “One of those wee lads fascinated by guns. You know the type. He showed me his dad’s gun more than once. To tell the truth I thought he was going to go in the army. Oxford and Sandhurst, you know? Up that chain.”

  “He ever talk about getting kicked out of Oxford?”

  “I did mention it a couple of times but he didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “So what did you chat about?”

  “Football. Friends. You know.”

  “Girls?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “What girls did he mention?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, just local girls.”

  “Sylvie McNichol?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say about her?”

  “Nothing much. Just, you know. He liked her, I think. He was pretty cagey about that stuff.”

  “Did you know Sylvie?”

  “I told you I knew her from down the Whitecliff.”

  “Did you, she, and Michael ever go out together?”

  “No . . . I think you’re getting the wrong end of the stick here, Inspector.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s the right end of the stick?”

  “After Michael came back from England I only saw him half a dozen times. Chatted on the phone a few times. He’d moved on, you know?”

  “Moved on from what?”

  “From me. From Northern Ireland. He was just getting his bearings here. If he hadn’t gone nuts, he would have moved away.”

  “Where to?”

  “He always talked about America or the Continent . . . If he could have just stuck out his old man’s constant crap for a few more months he would have been OK, I think.”

  “Did you ever talk to Deirdre Ferris?”

  “From the Whitecliff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Look, Mr. Vardon, we have it on good authority that Michael was something of an entrepreneur in the arms dealing business. Do you think it’s possible that that’s how he tried to make his living on his return to Northern Ireland?”

  Vardon shook his head. “Anything’s possible. But he never mentioned anything like that to me.”

  “Is it possible that you and Michael went into business together to conspire to steal missiles from Shorts, Mr. Vardon?” I said.

  All three of us peelers carefully noted his reaction.

  Outrage and annoyance or, perhaps, well-feigned outrage and annoyance.

  “You’re as bad as Special Branch! What the fuck would we do with half a dozen Javelin missiles? Me and Michael! Jesus Christ!”

  “Sell them?” Lawson suggested.

  “Who to?”

  “The IRA?” Crabbie said.

  “I’m a Prod. How do you think I got into Shorts in the first place? Michael’s a Prod too. Neither of us are selling any missiles to the IRA.”

  Crabbie asked if it was OK to smoke.

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  He lit his pipe and I lit a Marlboro. Nigel produced a large ashtray and shoved it in front of me on the coffee table. I took out the photocopy of the artist’s impression based on Deirdre’s description.

  “Ever seen this man?” I asked, handing him the picture.

  “Nope.”

  “Anyone like that in the Whitecliff or hanging around with Michael?”

  “No.”

  “He looks a little bit like you, doesn’t he?” I offered.

  Nigel shook his head. “I don’t think so. What’s this bloke supposed to have done?”

  “He’s someone we’d like to help us with our inquiries into Sylvie’s death.”

  He handed the picture back. “Yeah, well, I never saw him about.”

  “Those are some vicious dogs you have, Mr. Vardon. What are you afraid of out here in the Irish countryside?”

  “Anything. Burglars . . . you know.”

  “You’re not afraid of anyone in particular?”

  “No.”

  I took a long draw on my cigarette and looked at Crabbie. He shrugged.

  “So in summary you don’t know anything about any missing missiles, you have been wrongfully dismissed from Shorts, and you don’t know anything about the deaths of Michael Kelly’s parents or Michael Kelly or Sylvie McNichol?”

  “That’s about it,” Nigel said.

  I looked over at Lawson but he had nothing more for now either.

  In the Land Rover back to Carrick we digested the convo.

  “I don’t like the lack of alibis,” I said.

  “But there’s also a lack of motive. Why kill Michael and his parents and Sylvie?” Lawson said.

  “Why indeed?” I agreed.

  “There’s something untrustworthy about him, but I don’t see Mr. Vardon as the murdering type,” McCrabban muttered.

  “No. Or the missile-stealing type. But this connection to Michael Kelly is pretty interesting. Michael Kelly, the proto arms dealer, hanging out with Nigel Vardon, who works in a place that has just lost a bunch of missiles.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon circulating Deirdre’s artist’s-impression picture in the Whitecliff pub in Whitehead, on the noticeboard at the post office, on the telegraph pole outside the station, and we even got it on the UTV lunchtime news with the suggestion that “anyone who may have seen this man call the Confidential Telephone.”

  The Confidential Telephone passe
d on a couple of leads, but when Crabbie followed up on them they were dead ends. We got the forensic report back on Sylvie McNichol’s death, and, surprisingly, the chief FO ruled that the “foreign body in Miss McNichol’s mouth may not have been a contribution to her death. The presence of chloroform may have been a false positive due to cross-contamination at the lab.”

  “So maybe it was suicide after all?” Lawson suggested. “Maybe she just forgot about the car window.”

  “You’re the one that got us thinking about murder in the first place!” Crabbie said.

  “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “And the person Deirdre saw lurking outside their gate?” McCrabban countered.

  “Someone walking their dog, dog stops to take a piss, like Inspector Duffy says. It was dark and it was raining.”

  “Or maybe Deirdre made the whole thing up to get off the GBH rap?” I said.

  “Two murders and two suicides would close the case,” Crabbie said reflectively.

  “I can’t believe they were incompetent at the lab,” Lawson groaned.

  “I can’t believe they admitted it,” Crabbie said.

  “Incompetence. Better get used to that, Lawson. Bright lad like you. You should have gone over the water and joined the bloody Met,” I grumbled.

  I went to my office, brought back a bottle of Jura, and poured three glasses of the good stuff. We took a healthy sip each and I lit a ciggie. Marlboro and sixteen-year-old Jura go very well together . . .

  “And Nigel Vardon and his missiles?” I said after a pause.

  “Unrelated to our investigation,” Crabbie replied.

  I sighed. “This false positive bullshit is going to make a conviction almost impossible anyway. Forensics have fucked us if this was a murder.”

  I went home that night, exhausted.

  Bobby Cameron saw me walking up Coronation Road and came out of his garden where he had been trimming the rose bushes.

  “Saw someone messed with your car, Duffy,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I replied sourly.

  “It won’t happen again,” he said. “Trying to murder you is one thing, but fucking with a man’s wheels is quite another.”

  “That’s what I said,” I replied.

  “Well, it won’t happen again. Not on my street.”

  When I got back to the house I saw that the tires had been replaced and I saw Sara’s car parked in front of mine.

  Things were looking up.

  “I was waiting for you,” she said, getting out and kissing me.

  “I should give you a key.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no, I don’t think we’re at the key-giving stage just yet,” she said. “How was England?”

  “It was fine. Nice actually. Safe, you know?”

  “I know,” she said. “Boring in other words. No stories. Whereas here: murder and mayhem every day.”

  “Must keep your editor happy.”

  “It does. What’s the latest on the Kelly case, if you’re allowed to tell me?”

  We went inside and I told her that Sylvie’s death might be a suicide again, but I kept the Vardon angle to myself.

  I made pasta for dinner and Sara thumbed through my record collection looking for something that “wasn’t a million years old.”

  The rain came down and we went to bed.

  I woke up in the middle of the night with her snuggled in beside me. She was cold and fragile and lying innocently in my arms, but I could think only about Kate. Kate—that girl from Gun Street, Kate who had resurrected my RUC career and who was offering me a way out of this lost province, to a place where the newspapers were dull and the world wasn’t quite so violent and black.

  I slipped out from under the covers and lit the paraffin heater to warm the house.

  I put on an Elmore James record and watched the indigo paraffin flame flicker in the draught from the bedroom window.

  I climbed back under the duvet, and eventually the distant sound of “Every Day I Have The Blues” carried me off to a weary, broken, melancholy sleep.

  19: SPECIAL BRANCH MAKE A SCENE

  The next morning at the station we kept chasing down the Confidential Telephone reports on Deirdre’s supposed mystery man, but none of them went anywhere. Even if someone had recognized the picture no one was going to shop their friends and neighbors to the RUC. Omertà held sway. The oldest Belfast rule there was: never ever tell the police anything. And of course, if Deirdre had just invented the man it was a waste of everyone’s time.

  We were in the middle of a case conference when the door burst open and two detectives burst in.

  They were mightily pissed off about something, and initially I thought it was that blowback from Larne RUC I’d been expecting for weeks, but it wasn’t that at all.

  DI Billy Spencer was a short, skinny, ginger bap, with a little, pointy, elven beard I quite liked as it made him resemble Richard Stillgoe from off the telly. DCI Martin McCreen was a lean, sleekit-looking, bald guy with dark eyes and a menacing robotic grey tinge to his skin.

  “Which one of you is Duffy?” McCreen said.

  “I’m Duffy. What’s your problem?”

  “The problem is Carrick CID poaching on our case. The problem is you, Duffy. You’ve got a reputation for poaching other people’s cases. You want to solve every crime in Ulster? Is that it? You want to be Chief Constable by the time you’re forty? First Fenian Chief Constable, eh?”

  McCrabban got between McCreen and me. “How about ex­­plain­­ing yourselves, gents.”

  McCreen explained that they were detectives from Special Branch who had been assigned to the case of the missing missiles from the Shorts factory. Apparently they had been conducting a surveillance operation on Nigel Vardon and we’d blundered into it.

  “We’ve got Vardon nice and quiet. Thinks we’re off his case, and then you lads show up and get him all riled up again. Asking him questions about a murder inquiry, which everybody knows is really a murder-suicide, with the suicide at the bottom of a fucking cliff,” McCreen snarled.

  “How were we supposed to know Special Branch was surveilling Nigel Vardon?” I asked.

  “You could have asked somebody, couldn’t you, Duffy? Use your fucking common sense, if you’ve got any. If a bunch of missiles really have disappeared it would be a pretty fucking big deal, wouldn’t it? Special Branch, Customs, the MoD, Military Intelligence . . . you know? Use your fucking head! Fucking yokel PC fucking plod. Typical,” Billy Spencer said, poking me in the left front shoulder of my sports jacket.

  I was seething at the pair of them. Bursting in here, screaming at us, saying the word “Fenian,” poking me . . . and doing all this in front of Lawson. Who did they think they were?

  I pushed Billy violently backward. He tripped over himself and went down on to the incident room floor. “Touch me again and I’ll put you in the fucking hospital,” I snarled.

  I turned my attention to McCreen.

  “And you. Call me a Fenian again. I fucking dare you. I fucking dare you!”

  McCreen saw that I was right on the verge of knocking seven bells out of him. He took a step away from me.

  Crabbie put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Easy, Sean, easy does it.”

  “Tell them to take it fucking easy.”

  “I think an apology is in order, gents,” McCrabban rumbled.

  McCreen nodded and attempted a smile. “No offense meant, I’m sure,” he said.

  He offered me his hand.

  I looked at Crabbie. Come on, Sean, his eyes were pleading.

  I breathed out, nodded at him, took the proffered hand.

  “Why don’t we discuss this at the pub? Was that a pub next door I saw? Special Branch will be buying,” McCreen said.

  “Pub. Yeah. OK,” I agreed.

  McCrabban pulled Spencer off the floor. “No hard feelings,” he said.

  Half an hour and a couple of pints later things were better. We weren’t exactly all pals now, but if I c
arried a vendetta against every bastard who had called me a Fenian in Northern Ireland there would be a lot of gits out there who were looking a hiding . . .

  McCreen and Spencer explained the whole missile situation to us.

  Short Brothers were the last engineering film left in Belfast, which had once been the greatest shipbuilding and heavy engineering city in the British Empire. The Troubles and a lack of government support had put paid to the shipbuilding, but Shorts had managed to survive various crises by building nippy little cargo planes and diversifying into missile manufacture.

  Shorts was now virtually the only employer left in East Belfast, and although they were subsidized by the British government, they were so good at what they did they very nearly turned a profit, something of a minor miracle in the Northern Ireland of 1985.

  “All the current problems occurred in the Missile Division. Half a dozen completed Blowpipe replacement missile systems—known as the Javelin Mark 1—had disappeared from the factory’s inventory,” McCreen said.

  “But not necessarily stolen?”

  “Shorts aren’t sure whether it’s an inventory failure and the missiles have in fact been legitimately shipped out to various customers, or whether the missiles are in a different part of the factory complex, or whether the missile systems have in fact been stolen.”

  “Quite the world-class cock up. Heads had to roll, I suppose?”

  “One of the first to go was Nigel Vardon, who had been the manager in charge of site security. I think the head of inventory also got sacked, and the vice-president of the Missile Division has been put on unpaid leave.”

  “And they called in you guys.”

  “Not just us. Internal inquiry and an MoD Procurement Office inquiry,” McCreen said.

  He was a lot calmer than I’d be if I thought that the IRA might just have got its greedy paws on a half-dozen anti-tank or anti-aircraft missiles. Police and army Land Rovers got hit by petrol bombs all the time without much effect, but rocket-propelled grenades could do serious damage, and a Javelin missile? That would just about kill everyone inside, wouldn’t it?