In the Morning I'll Be Gone

by Adrian McKinty

  I arrived early for my meeting with Mary Fitzpatrick but she had arrived even earlier. As I entered the Rising Sun, a waitress asked me whether I was Mr. Duffy.

  I said that I was and I was escorted to a private dining room at the back of the café where, to my surprise, I found that many of the original Victorian features were still in place.

  Mary was sitting at a table with a silver teapot in front of her.

  The waitress led me to Mary’s table and then excused herself.

  “I didn’t know this room existed,” I said.

  “Few people do. I know Cameron, the owner. It’s a nice quiet place to meet in the center of town without any prying eyes. Neither of us will be running into any old friends.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “I hope you’ve not told anyone about our meeting.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Not even your sergeant?”

  “Not even him,” I said, pouring myself tea from the pot.

  “You knew Dermot personally, didn’t you, Inspector Duffy?” Mary asked.

  There was no point trying to dissemble. “Yes, I knew him.”

  “And you knew Orla too, didn’t you? Orla, Fiona, all the McCanns.”

  “I knew them.”

  “And you even knew my Annie a bit, didn’t you?”

  “I knew Annie a little bit.”

  “After you left I asked Annie about you,” she said, looking at me with her dark piercing eyes.

  “Oh?”

  “She remembers you right enough.”

  “Does she?”

  “She said that you and she and Dermot used to go to concerts in Belfast. Dublin once.”

  “Is that so?”

  “She says that you drove them down from Derry because you had a car.”

  It was probably true—there had been a lot of rock concerts at the tail end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. “It rings a bell. Dermot didn’t drive then so I could well have taken him to a couple of shows.”

  “But of course you were a peeler by the time of the wedding, which is why we never met,” Mary said.

  “I wasn’t one of Dermot’s closest friends anyway. And I certainly didn’t blame him for not inviting me to his wedding. It wouldn’t have been safe.”

  She nodded and took off her coat. She was wearing a black jumper over faded blue jeans and boots.

  She poured me some more tea and remembered to offer me the sugar bowl.

  The waitress came back a moment later with a selection of cakes and pastries that she left on the table.

  “Help yourself,” Mary said.

  “I will, they look lovely.”

  I grabbed a bun and a lemon slice.

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a photocopied document and placed it on the table in front of her. I could see that it was some sort of report or file.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Eat your wee bun and I’ll read it to you.”

  “OK.”

  She opened the file.

  “So you joined the police out of Queen’s University and after two years in Enniskillen and South Tyrone you became a detective in Belfast. You did well there, were promoted to the rank of detective sergeant, and were sent to Carrickfergus RUC. You solved a few cases and were promoted to detective inspector. But then you got yourself mixed up with the FBI DeLorean sting and it all started to go wrong for you, didn’t it?”

  “What exactly are you reading there! Is that my personnel file?”

  “Never you mind. Last year you supposedly ran over some wean in a Land Rover you were driving, only you weren’t driving, were you?”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “You resigned. And you were off the force.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which leads me to the conclusion that it was an external agency that brought you back in. An external agency that could only be MI5 or perhaps some intelligence unit within Scotland Yard. And why would they do that?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I think they brought you back solely for the purpose of finding my errant ex-son-in-law,” she said.

  “I can neither confirm nor deny any of that.”

  “I didn’t expect you to.”

  I sipped the tea. It was too strong now and it tasted bitter even with the sugar.

  “So now we know where we all stand, don’t we?” she said.

  “Well, you know about me but I don’t understand why you’re meeting me.”

  “You’re an interesting fellow, Duffy. You don’t present yourself very well. You sell yourself short. I think you believe the reason MI5 recruited you to look for Dermot was because of this personal angle. Because you had a previous relationship with him. You knew Dermot and his clan and you think that’s what makes you special.”

  “Go on.”

  She smiled again. “But that’s not the only reason they wanted you. MI5 recruited you because you’re good. And that’s what makes you special. You’re good at what you do, Duffy, that’s why they want you. That’s why I want you too.”

  “It’s flattering to hear you say that but MI5—if indeed it was MI5—has more than enough bright people already, trust—”

  She put up her hand to cut me off. “Let’s begin. In your dealings with Annie she never had you to our house in Ballykeel, did she?”

  “No. I don’t believe so.”

  “And you weren’t at the wedding, so you never got to meet Lizzie or Vanessa?”

  “No.”

  “Vanessa’s my eldest. She’s a doctor in Canada. In Montreal. Married to another doctor. They’ve a wee boy, my only grandchild. They’ve called him Pierre. I call him Peter.”

  “Very nice. Do you get out there often?”

  “I’ve been there once. It was enough. Jim doesn’t like to fly.”

  She closed the file she had on me, carefully ripped it up, and put the remains in the nearest swing bin.

  “Montreal’s supposed to be lovely,” I said to keep the conversation going when she sat down at the table again.

  She ignored this. “You’re not supposed to have favorites among your children, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child and I have no kids.”

  She reached into her bag again and gave me a passport photograph of a tall, pensive, attractive girl with ginger hair. She was wearing a field hockey uniform and standing in front of a goal.

  “You can keep that,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Next she passed over a brown folder sealed with two thick rubber bands.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “This is a copy of the RUC report into my daughter Lizzie’s murder. Lizzie was my youngest. The apple of my eye, you could say. Shouldn’t say that, I suppose, but there it is. She was so funny and so sweet. There wasn’t a vile bone in her body. She deserved more than this.”

  “Your daughter was murdered?”

  “It’s all in there. It’s not the complete file but I’m sure you can get that easily enough. I didn’t want to look at all the grisly photographs and the autopsy report, but this should be more than sufficient to give the gist of what happened.”

  I took off the rubber bands and opened the binder.

  “It’s what they call a cold case now,” Mary continued. “They never found out who did it and the detective on the investigation has long since been assigned to other duties. Two years ago I hired a private detective but he didn’t come up with anything either and he advised me to drop it.”

  “What’s this about, Mrs. Fitzpatrick?”

  “Lizzie’s dead, Inspector Duffy. She’s lying in the Arghall graveyard in Toome. My youngest daughter killed, her neck broken, by person or persons unknown.”

  “When was this?”

  “Four years ago this December.”

  “And the RUC had no leads?”

  “Leads? Well, there were three men in the bar, three suspects if you will, but there was n
o proof. No proof at all. I think one of them killed her and the other two are covering up for him. I need to know which one of the three did it. And I need proof. I need to be satisfied. It won’t bring her back. Nothing’ll bring her back, but the law, the old law, the Brehon Law, gives me the choice of penalty. Allows me to settle this score for her.”

  She grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard.

  I stared at her. Her eyes were fierce and her scarlet hair was straining at the clips that were holding it in place. “Do you get me, Inspector?”

  “I don’t know. Are you saying . . . Let me make sure that we’re talking about the same thing, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. If I find your daughter’s killer and give you sufficient proof of this person’s complicity, then you’ll . . . you’ll—”

  “I’ll give you Dermot McCann,” she said with a cold smile.

  Mary reached into her bag and took out a packet of Benson and Hedges. She offered me one but I declined.

  “The story’s all there in the file but I’ll tell you the gist if you want.”

  “Please do.”

  “My husband used to run a wee bar in Ballykeel. Just on the edge of the village there. The Henry Joy McCracken.”

  “Named after the rebel?”

  “Exactly. We still have it but Jim will never open it now. Not since what happened to Lizzie.”

  She took a sip of her tea and lit her cigarette. “Lizzie and all the girls used to serve there now and again to earn some pocket money. And then Lizzie went away to England to study law. She wanted to be a lawyer like she’d seen on TV. Defending the weak, all that, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was at the University of Warwick. Doing very well for herself. She’d come home in the holidays and sometimes work in the bar, but she was also interning at a solicitor’s office in Antrim: Mulvenna and Wright, a top-notch firm, so we didn’t see her much when she was back. Anyway, she was home at Christmas in 1980 and she wasn’t supposed to be working in the pub at all . . .”

  She sniffed and shook her head before continuing.

  “Anyway, it was 27 December.”

  “27 December 1980?”

  “Yes.”

  I wrote that in my book while Mary went on: “Jim was in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, for surgery on his left knee. Arthritis, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “He had the surgery that afternoon and he’d wanted to close the pub but Lizzie said she could handle it. I said OK because I could see she wanted a wee bit of responsibility. I’d been down to Belfast to see Jim and he was good and I came back to Ballykeel around ten thirty. I gave her a wee call in the pub and told her that her dad was doing fine. She was so glad to hear that. I asked her if she needed any help down the pub and she said that it was no bother because there were only three customers in the place. Well, closing time was in half an hour so I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “Were the police able to trace the customers?”

  “Oh yes, the police found them. Very ‘respectable men,’ all of them. They weren’t locals. They were all from Belfast. Come here for the fishing.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “Well, Lizzie didn’t come home. It only takes ten minutes to lock up and walk to our house from the pub, so I was getting a bit anxious from eleven fifteen onwards.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. I just waited. I thought maybe she was having trouble with the locks or something.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then at eleven thirty I got a call from Harper McCullough. He asked about Jim’s operation and then he asked to speak to Lizzie. So I told him that I hadn’t seen her yet. And he was quite concerned because she’d told him that she would be back home by eleven thirty at the latest.”

  “Who’s Harper McCullough?”

  “Harper was her boyfriend at the time. Very nice lad. A Protestant, mind you, but we liked him all the same. Very close friend of the family.”

  “Where was he when Lizzie was killed?”

  “Oh, he was in Belfast at his rugby club’s annual dinner. He was accepting some prize on behalf of his father. He was there from nine until he called me at half past eleven.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “Well, I told Harper I had no idea where she was and he said that I should call the police and that he was going to drive there immediately.”

  “And did you call the police?”

  She shook her head sadly. “I got on my coat and I went down to the pub to see what was going on. Well, sure enough, it was locked up and the lights were turned off but there was no sign of Lizzie. So I knew something was wrong. At the time I thought that Lizzie had locked up the pub and something had happened to her on the way home.”

  “How far is it from the pub to your house?”

  “About three hundred yards.”

  “Through the village?”

  “You could go through the village, or you could take a short cut along the Love Lane, but she didn’t take either of those.”

  “What did she do?”

  Mary stubbed out her cigarette and took a handkerchief from her purse. She dabbed her eyes and fought to keep the tears away. She resisted the urge to cry. This was Ulster, where even good Catholics like Mary had been infected by the Protestant sickness for repression of emotion.

  “I got home and I called Annie. She was still living in Derry then and she told me to call the police straight away. I was a bit reluctant to do that because we’ve had our wee run-ins with the police, as you may know.”

  I did know. I had done my research and I had found out that the Fitzpatricks of Ballykeel were a prominent Antrim-area Republican family. Maybe not active IRA but certainly moving in high Republican circles. Mary Fitzpatrick had stood as an Independent Republican MP in the 1970 election and knew a lot of players back in the day.

  “Harper arrived back from the rugby club about a quarter to twelve out of his mind with worry and the police came shortly after that from Antrim and we all went looking for Lizzie. After midnight one of the policemen shone his torch into the pub and he thought he saw a body lying in there. We couldn’t get in of course because Lizzie had the key, so they had to break the front door down with a sledgehammer. And that’s where we found her. Lying on the floor, dead. All curled up there with her hair across her face. My God, I’ll never forget that! I wanted to go to her and hug her and make her come alive again, but they wouldn’t let me touch her!”

  Mary lit another cigarette and I put my hand on her arm. She genuflected and I made the sign of the cross with her and together we said “God and Mary and Patrick.”

  She took a sip of her cold tea and continued her account. “At first we all thought it was natural causes because a crime didn’t make any sense. The pub was locked from the inside. The windows had iron bars on them, the bolt was across on the front door and the back door. Both doors were locked and the key was in her pocket.”

  “But it wasn’t natural causes?”

  “No. There was a light bulb out above the bar and there was a new light bulb broken in her hand. For all the world it looked like she had stood on the bar to change the dead bulb, slipped, fallen, and broken her neck. Well, that’s what the eejit police on the scene thought. But the next day the pathologist at Antrim hospital, a Dr. Kent, told the police that he thought it looked very suspicious. He conducted the autopsy and he wasn’t happy with the broken vertebrae in her neck or the wound on her head. And later at the coroner’s inquest Dr. Kent said that her broken neck was not consistent with having fallen off a bar.”

  “What was it consistent with?”

  “He thought that she had been struck on the head and her neck snapped by an unknown person. The police would have none of that but he was so adamant that the coroner had no recourse but to return an open verdict.”

  “Did the police open a murder investigation?”

  “It was half-hearted at best. I could tell tha
t they didn’t believe she was murdered. The place was locked, the broken light bulb was in her hand. Case closed.”

  “They interviewed the men in the bar of course?”

  “Oh yes. It’s all in the report. They all have the same story. They say that Lizzie kicked them out at eleven o’clock sharp. One of them, a man called McPhail, had his car parked in the village. They walked to the car and drove to Belfast.”

  “What did the police make of their story?”

  “The police believed them.”

  I rubbed my chin and considered it all. “There was no one else in the bar?”

  “No.”

  “Is there any other way in?”

  “No. A front door and a back door and they were both locked and bolted.”

  “And the windows?”

  “The windows are covered with cast-iron bars.”

  “Can you take them off?”

  “No. The police checked anyway. They were all intact.”

  “Slip through them?”

  “The gap’s too narrow even for a child.”

  I leaned back in the chair and skimmed through the police report. It was detailed and a nice job of work. The investigating officer, an Inspector Beggs, laid out the evidence in his conclusion. He was not convinced in any way that a crime had been committed. “It’s a tough one,” I said.

  She nodded in agreement and blew out a thin line of blue smoke.

  “You’re certain she was killed?” I asked.

  “I know it in my bones.”

  “I’ll look into it but I can’t promise anything.”

  She nodded and got to her feet. “When you come to my house don’t mention Dermot at all. Tell Annie and Jim that you’re looking into Lizzie’s death. I’ve told them that you came to see me once already. That’s how I was able to bring your name up with Annie. Listen to me now, Inspector Duffy, if you ask about Dermot they will tell you nothing and you will queer the pitch. Do you mind me?”

  “I do.”

  “Do not ask about Dermot!”

  “I won’t.”

  “And when the time comes, if you fulfill your part of the bargain, I’ll fulfill mine.”

  “How will you be able to find out where he is?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that. I have my ways. My contacts.”