“Which means?”
“Well, to get through this you’d have to take the hex bolts out, all twelve of them, and even with a power tool that’s not going to be easy. And then after the murder you have to stand here at the window and reattach the frame. Ten-minute job at least. Someone would have seen you. But let’s say you did it and no one saw you . . . you’re still screwed because you would have left traces of the power wrench in the bolt-head paint and the brick mortar would have been disturbed. But as you can see, the paint on the bars and the bolts on all the windows is undisturbed. Unless the killer also stood here on the night of the murder and painted every bolt head and every bar in all the windows.”
“Someone would have noticed the smell.”
“Indeed.”
“So no one came in through the windows.”
“No one came in through the windows. That’s for certain. Let’s go round the back and see this rear door.”
At the back of the pub there was a low cinderblock wall and a wooden gate that led into a yard with some pallets and a few empty beer kegs. The wall was easily climbable but the back door itself was a thick oak job with stainless-steel hinges.
I got down on my honkers to examine the lock.
The lock was a Portadown Lock Company tumbler lock from the 1950s. Model No. 13 by the look of it.
“I don’t have the back-door key,” Annie said.
“I don’t think we’ll need it.”
I took my trusty lock-pick kit from my jacket pocket.
“Let me just see now,” I said, examining the mechanism.
“What are you doing?” she asked as I inserted the feeler pick into the lock.
“Gimme a minute,” I said confidently. But in fact it only took forty-five seconds with the tension wrench, an angle pick, and a tiny amount of torque.
The lock clicked. I pushed the handle and, as I knew I would, I came right up against the dead-bolt bar. The door didn’t move a centimeter. If the bolt had been across the night Lizzie was killed the killer certainly didn’t get in this way.
If there was a killer.
“Let’s go to the entrance,” I said.
“All right.”
We made our way to the front of the pub again.
“No cellar doors for delivering kegs and barrels?” I asked Annie.
“Nah. Da rolled the barrels right in the back door.”
“Do you know about any other way in?”
“I don’t. And I played in here as a kid. Kids are always the first to find lost wallets and secret tunnels and things, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, they are,” I agreed. “How long has the pub been closed?”
“More or less since Lizzie died.”
“So what do you do for money?”
“That’s a bit of a rude question,” Annie said.
“I’m a cop, Annie, I get to ask impertinent questions.”
“How is it relevant?”
“Everything’s relevant. How are you getting by? I’m sure Dermot never paid you a penny in alimony. Your mother doesn’t seem to work. The pub’s closed. What do you live on?”
“Da inherited a lot of land from his dad in County Donegal. We’ve been selling it off in dribs and drabs for the last few years. Eventually we’ll have to sell this place too. It’s a good location near the water. I’m sure somebody can make a go of it.”
We had reached the front door now and I could see where it had been ripped off the hinges by the police battering ram. They had reset the same door with different hinges on another part of the brick wall.
“So they knocked this door down?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Were you here that night?”
“No, I was in Derry.”
“Who was here?”
“Mum, a couple of policemen, and I think Harper had made it back from Belfast. Are you going to do your trick with the lock on this one?” she asked.
“Nah, you can get us in.”
The lock was an identical Portadown tumbler lock. A competent locksmith or burglar could easily have picked it, but that didn’t matter much. The two deadbolts were what made this affair a locked room mystery.
Annie put the key in the lock and opened the door. She fumbled for the light switch and after a moment the lights came on.
We walked inside. It was a single room with a long wooden bar at the back. About a dozen tables with wooden chairs stacked on top of them. Hammer-beam ceiling sure enough.
I had a hunch that Chief Inspector Beggs might have been exaggerating his own fastidiousness, so the first thing I did was examine the cellar.
I thought that this might be a key to the whole mystery but when we went down there I discovered no secret trapdoor or tunnel. The brickwork was solid, the floor thick. It was basically just a glorified storage room that you could barely stand up straight in. It would have taken two seconds to ascertain whether someone was in here or not.
“Do you think someone was hiding down here?” Annie asked.
“Beggs and his men searched down here, but I was more interested in the brickwork to see if there was evidence of recent pointing or a false wall or anything like that.”
“And?”
“Nothing like that.”
We went back upstairs and I examined the hammer-beam roof, which was a lovely job: a really nice pastiche of a medieval ceiling in stained pine planking.
The roof was planked and covered with slate tiles and was about twenty feet above the bar. If you’d brought a tall ladder and a hammer, you could have smashed your way out through the roof, but how you would have concealed all the mess was beyond me, and surely the cops would have seen a great big honking hole.
Nah, you couldn’t get out that way.
A dozen or so light bulbs were hanging directly from the ceiling with one of them right above the bar.
“Is this the one she was supposedly trying to change?” I asked.
Annie was too upset to look at it but she nodded her head.
I climbed on top of the bar. I could reach it without much difficulty but then I was five foot eleven.
“How tall was your sister?”
“About five two, five three, something like that?”
“This might have been a bit tricky for her,” I said.
“It obviously was.”
I climbed down and went to check the deadbolts on the front and back door of the premises. They were heavy, sturdy iron bars that ran along the back of the door and hooked into a thick loop in the brickwork. The bar and the loop were held in place with two-inch Phillips-head stainless-steel screws. Even after the cops had used the battering ram on the front door these screws and the bolt had remained in place.
I ran the deadbolt back and forth a few times and locked it into place. It was heavy and just as solid as it looked. The door fitted tightly against the wall and there was only a negligible gap underneath it. The deadbolt was so heavy that attaching a wire to it and trying to somehow close it from the outside was the least likely of all the possibilities here.
“Well?” Annie said.
I shook my head.
“If these bolts were across then there was no way anyone could have got in here to murder her like Dr. Kent suggests,” she said.
“The bolts were across, weren’t they?”
“Unless you believe in the supernatural, it must have been an accident. A tragic accident.”
We took two of the upturned chairs off one of the tables and sat down.
“Tell me about the boyfriend, Harper,” I asked.
“She was a great girl and of course Harper was mad for her,” she said.
“Harper loved her?”
“Oh yes.”
“And she him.”
“Yeah.”
“Talk of marriage?”
“I think so. Yes. Definitely. They would have made a lovely couple.”
There was something a little stilted about her remarks and I wondered whether Annie had been as close to Lizzie as
she might have liked. But there was no percentage to be had in bringing something like that up . . .
I looked at the smooth bar covered with a thick coating of dust, dead moths, and my footprints.
“It would be so easy to slip from here and break your neck,” I said.
Annie pulled out a packet of Rothmans Special Mild and offered me one. I took it and she grabbed a packet of matches from an ashtray on one of the tables. We lit our cigarettes and sat there for a while.
“You ever hear from your sister in Canada?” I asked, completely blanking on the name.
“Nah. Hardly ever. She wants to forget Ireland ever existed.”
“I don’t blame her.”
“I don’t blame her either. It’s probably the right move. This country is fucked,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe if your English friends would piss off and leave us alone we could work it out,” she said.
She wasn’t going to suck me in. “Politics? Really, Annie? I mean, who cares?” I said.
“You used to.”
“Me? I never gave a shite about politics. I still don’t. Certainly not bloody Irish politics. No, your sis has the right idea. Did you ever meet any of Dermot’s brothers? I’ll bet you didn’t. They’re all in Australia or America or somewhere. That’s the play. Go to America. Sing a few songs about the Old Country from time to time, donate a few pennies to the cause now and again, but don’t ever go back.”
“Why do you stay?” Annie asked.
“Why indeed?”
The vile Rothmans Special Mild was burning down to the filter unsmoked. Annie took it from me and stamped it on the floor. She wiped the ash from the back of my hand and gave my fingertips a little squeeze.
“Will you stay for tea, Sean?” she asked.
“Is that an invitation?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like that.”
We locked up the Henry Joy McCracken and walked back through the village to the Fitzpatricks’ house. We didn’t talk, but I noticed that she sometimes stole glances at me when she thought I wasn’t looking.
Still sizing me up, was Annie.
And me her, come to that. Feeling a little guilty now too. How could I not be?
I stayed with the Fitzpatricks for tea.
Jim Fitzpatrick came home from his fishing at five o’clock, stinking of mud and whisky. He was a big scary bastard, six foot two, bald, seventeen stone. An old-school Republican but the sort who grumbles about the “men of violence” and moves to a small town and opens a pub, not the sort who nurses grievances across the decades. And he came from money, which distinguished him from most of the guys who ended up in the H Blocks with nothing to lose.
He had in fact caught a fish. A massive brown trout that he had already gutted and beheaded.
Mary made us champ to go with the skillet-fried trout and onions and we talked about the weather and this and that.
I never mentioned the case and Lizzie’s name did not come up. Lizzie’s pictures had been removed from the walls and it was clear that the wound was still raw with the man. In fact it was a wound that was going to kill him. He was putting away at least a bottle a day and probably more.
I took my leave at six and drove back to Carrickfergus.
I debated whether I should keep this confidential or not but I knew it was just delaying the inevitable so I called up Kate and told her the whole story.
She wasn’t sure about it and told me that she felt that I shouldn’t spend all my time investigating Lizzie Fitzpatrick’s death because there was no guarantee that Mary Fitzpatrick could deliver Dermot.
I told her that she was right about that and that I would pursue all our other leads.
I laughed when I hung up. There were no other leads. There were not going to be any other leads. When Dermot finally activated his cell and started blowing people up, perhaps he’d make a mistake and leave a forensic trace, but no one in Ireland was ever going to give him up. Not without a very good reason.
The following Tuesday I drove to Aldergrove Airport and caught the 10 a.m. flight to Aberdeen. I hadn’t been to Aberdeen before but I felt I knew it because Telly Savalas was always telling us what a great city it was in a cheesy film that ran before every movie I’d seen for the last five years. Sometimes you’d only get to see TV’s Kojak talking about Aberdeen for five minutes before there would be a bomb scare and the cinema would be evacuated.
I flew into the gleaming new airport and caught a taxi.
Aberdeen was a strange place to be in the summer of 1984. It was about the only place in Britain that wasn’t in the crapper. After her brave boys had retaken the Falkland Islands, Mrs. Thatcher had handily won the 1983 election. In early ’84 a buoyant Mrs. T had decided to end government subsidies to the coal industry. As she knew they would, the National Union of Mineworkers had come out on strike. The NUM had brought down the previous Tory administration and Mrs. Thatcher was determined to get revenge for that and to end the union’s power forever. She had stockpiled years’ worth of coal at power stations and had guaranteed to keep the pits open for any workers who wanted to defy the picket lines. Every day the English newspapers were full of pictures of battles between cops and picketers outside collieries in Wales and the north of England. But Aberdeen was above all this. It relied on a quite different fossil fuel. It was an oil boom town. House prices were skyrocketing, wages were soaring—a house cleaner in the Bridge of Don made more than a detective inspector in the RUC.
My ex-girlfriend Laura had come here because she’d been offered a professorship in pathology at cash-rich Aberdeen University.
It was a chance to build a new life and she’d taken it.
I didn’t blame her. Maybe I was even a little envious. She’d been able to cut through the guilt and the loyalties and the emotions and go.
Of course I missed her, but I don’t think it went deeper than that. At least I hoped not.
We’d arranged to meet at the Student Union Bar, which she thought would be a nice neutral space. Of course, at lunchtime it was chaotic and it took me a while to spot her. She’d cut her hair short and it didn’t suit her. She was wearing a subdued red dress, low-heeled black shoes, and a diamond engagement ring.
She kissed me on the cheek and told me I looked great.
I said the same about her.
We were both lying already and that made me a little sad.
“Let’s get out of here! It’s more packed than normal,” she said.
We moved to a café adjoining a golf course overlooking the North Sea.
“Life’s treating you OK?” I asked.
“It’s treating me well,” she said.
“You’re back as a detective, then, I see,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That meant a lot to you, didn’t it? What was it you told me . . . the classic peeler schism is between detective and beat cop.”
It pleased me that she’d remembered that. “That’s right,” I said.
A waiter came. I asked what was good and Laura said that it had to be the grilled haddock. We ordered two and a bottle of wine that she picked out.
“You’re getting married,” I said.
“Did you run into my mother?”
“Is he nice?”
“You’d like him. He is a diver. A professional diver. A real guy’s guy. He’d be right up your alley.”
I told her that he sounded great to pre-empt further discussion but she thought I really wanted to know and gave me the full treatment: his family history, his childhood, how they’d met. I listened politely and took none of it in.
Our food arrived and when we’d eaten I asked her about the case.
“Did you get a chance to look at those documents I sent you?”
“Yes, yes I did.”
“And?”
“Your Dr. Kent seems to be a little . . .”
“What? Eccentric? Mad?”
“Old fashioned in his terminology and techniq
ue.”
“He’s in his seventies. Late seventies, I think.”
“That would explain it.”
“So is he off base?”
She opened her bag and removed the file I’d sent her by express mail.
“Do you want the details, or just a summary?” she asked.
“Oh, I’ll take the details. You know me. Details Duffy.”
“There are seven cervical vertebrae. In his autopsy Dr. Kent found that all seven had suffered trauma and the upper three vertebrae had suffered severe trauma. Dr. Kent insists that the stress fractures on these vertebrae are primarily latitudinal, not longitudinal, and this convinced him that the trauma your victim suffered was a violent twisting motion, not an impact from a fall or blow.”
“What do you say?”
“I’d say that the evidence tends to bear out Dr. Kent’s thesis, although it’s a shame he didn’t think to take an X-ray photograph of the victim’s neck. He includes drawings of his pathological study . . .”
“I asked him about that. I suppose in his day it was all drawings. But he said we could exhume the body if we needed to.”
“Yes, he’s quite right. The bones won’t have decayed. You could still take a good photograph.”
“Can you rule out a fall as a cause of Lizzie’s injuries?”
She shook her head. “Rule it out? No. In effect the human body is a massive spring, and when you drop a spring from a height . . . well, pretty much anything can happen.”
“I know it’s not what you do, Laura, but if you were going to assign probabilities to the two scenarios: Lizzie fell off the bar while putting in a light bulb or Lizzie was hit on the head and someone snapped her neck and made it look like an accident . . .”
She thought about it for a while.
“Sixty/forty—murder/accident.”
“Jesus, that’s not very convincing. I thought you were going to say eighty/twenty.”
“No. Like I say, it could have been a fall. I think your Dr. Kent’s hunch is the right one, but I wouldn’t want to take it to court.”
I nodded and made a quick scribble in my notebook.
When I was done I found that she had crossed her hands on the table and she was smiling at me.
“How are you doing, Sean?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
In the Morning I'll Be Gone Page 13