“Are you eating OK?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not drinking too much?”
“No more than everybody else.”
“Everybody else drinks too much.”
“Do you blame them?”
“No.”
She was so beautiful when she smiled like that. So beautiful I couldn’t look at her.
“What about you, how are you doing?”
“I’ve never been happier,” she said, and meant it. “When we’re married and settled, I’m going to try and bring my parents out.”
Behind her the North Sea was a cold indigo with whitecaps scudding across the surface. There were tankers and other massive ships leaving the harbor and heading northeast toward the rigs. That’s where the future lay, not west in Ireland, not down the aging mines . . .
“Looks freezing out there. I suppose you never go swimming?” I asked.
“No. Never.”
“What shade of blue would you call that water? Indigo?”
She grinned a little. It was a feeble conversational gambit. “Have you considered moving to Britain, Sean? I’m sure the Metropolitan Police would love someone of your abilities.”
“What abilities? I’m your classic big fish, little pond. Let me ask you something. If you’re changing a light bulb and you’re right handed, don’t you need to have the new light bulb in your left hand? You need your good hand to unscrew the bulb, don’t you?”
Laura considered this for a moment and imagined her own actions. She shook her head. “I don’t know about that. If it were me I would hold the new light bulb in my right hand until I was balanced and ready to unscrew the dead bulb and then I’d transfer the new one to my left and unscrew the dead light bulb with my right.”
“That’s what I said. So you don’t think we can draw an inference from the fact that the new light bulb was in her right hand. The hand she would need to unscrew the old one?”
“No.”
I shook my head. “That seemed pretty thin to me too.”
I stared at the sea again and Laura began stealing glances at her watch.
“This one’s got you baffled, hasn’t it?” she said.
“It has. If it wasn’t for what you and Dr. Kent were telling me I would say that this is a clear-cut case of accidental death. The pub was hermetically sealed from the inside. There was no other way in or out. There were heavy deadbolts on the front and back doors.”
“Could a murderer not have somehow maneuvered the deadbolts into place from the outside?”
“I examined that possibility and eliminated it. They’re just too heavy.”
“And if Dr. Kent and myself are both mistaken, then everything becomes much easier, doesn’t it?”
“It does indeed!”
“Isn’t there a story about a locked room and a murderer who somehow gets in?”
I laughed. “Are you kidding me? There’s an entire literature! An entire genre. I’ve read a dozen of them in the last two weeks alone. The Big Bow Mystery, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of the Yellow Room . . . a couple of different Willkie Collins, Agatha Christie . . .”
“And how does the killer do it in those?”
“Various methods. The secret passage is one technique, a hidden trapdoor, killing the victim from a distance, then there are the magicians’ tricks, the use of animals to do the killing, the supernatural . . . The two I seriously considered were the secret passageway or the possibility that the killer was hiding in the bar when the police arrived and then snuck out through the smashed-in front door sometime in the next day or two.”
“And did he?”
“Sneak out, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“No, he didn’t. The cops who arrived at the bar were pretty sharp. They treated it as a crime scene, wouldn’t let anyone touch the body or let anyone in or out. Detective Inspector Beggs arrived shortly thereafter and he conducted a thorough search of the premises. He assures me that there was no one hiding in the bar and I believe him.”
“A secret passageway?”
“A lot of those old pubs have a secret way in or out, or a creaky old cellar door where you deliver the barrels. But I checked that place from top to bottom and there was no other entrance except for those locked and barred doors.”
“So that leaves what? Ghosts? A lot of those old pubs have them.”
“There are other explanations. In one of the very first locked room stories, The Big Bow Mystery, we find out that the victim wasn’t actually dead until they broke down the door. The killer used misdirection and administered the coup de grâce while no one was looking.”
“That didn’t happen in your pub, surely?”
“No, it didn’t. But if you and Kent are right, something funny happened that night and it wasn’t a ghost.”
She smiled and took my hand. The diamond caught the sunlight and sparkled in my eyes. “It’s an ugly circumstance, but it’s nice to see that you’re wrapped up in something, Sean. I got the feeling that you were fading away for a while there . . .”
I cleared my throat.
“Yeah, I was. I like this job. Finding things out. Restoring order. Putting the world to rights.”
“I’m glad,” she said, and gave my hand a squeeze.
“This case, though. It’s a peach. It goes one, two, three, five. I’ve missed something. I’m not seeing it clearly.”
“You will. You always do, don’t you?”
“No. Not always.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” she said, and smiled patiently. The anodyne of her words just perfect.
“Do you go to mass much?” she asked.
“Mass? No. Never . . . Your fiancé? Is he a Catholic?”
“He’s not. It’s not a big deal over here. None of that matters.”
She smiled.
“Do you think it could have worked? You and me?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Why?”
“Different worlds. Different wants, you know,” she said diffidently.
“That’s not much of an answer.”
She disengaged her hand.
She was in no mood to be pushed or interrogated.
“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Of course not!”
“The truth. I’d tell you,” I persisted.
“You want me to tell you if I think there’s something wrong with you?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, you know, just the . . . you know.”
“What, for heaven’s sake?”
“You want a medical opinion?” she asked.
“Fire away!”
“Both barrels?”
“There’s two barrels full? OK, I can take it.”
“All right. You’ve got manic depressive tendencies. You have alcohol dependency issues. You don’t eat properly or exercise. You smoke too much. And working for the police has institutionalized you and, uhm, robbed you of some of your spark and personality.”
“That’s a little harsh.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that—”
“No. Don’t be sorry, if that’s what you think.”
She shook her head. “It’s not what I think. It just came tumbling out. You shouldn’t have put me on the spot like that.”
“I shouldn’t have. Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
We sat there embarrassed, with neither of us able to think of anything to say.
Laura looked at her watch again.
I stood up. “Well, I have a plane to catch. I’m grateful for your time.”
I offered her my hand. She pulled me in for a kiss on the cheek instead.
“I’m happy to help, Sean. You be careful now, OK?”
“I will be.”
“Check under your car for bombs.”
“I always do.”
“There’s a taxi ra
nk just outside, let me walk you over.”
“OK.”
She walked me to the taxi rank and kissed me again and the cabby drove me through white granite Aberdeen, which was glistening and brilliant and lovely in the summer sun. Kojak would have been happy.
I showered, shaved, put on a shirt, tie, black jeans, and leather jacket. I checked under the BMW for bombs and drove to Carrickfergus police station. I found Detective Sergeant McCrabban pretending to work in the CID incident room overlooking the railway embankment.
“Nothing pressing?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It’s been quiet. As they say in the pictures, too quiet.”
I nodded. The big IRA bombing campaign still hadn’t started but they had the resources, the training, the targets, and the men. It wasn’t a matter of if but when it was going to happen. It was July in Northern Ireland, so of course there’d been boring old riots, but public disorder was a job for regular peelers, not detectives.
“You want to take a look at my case?” I asked him.
He stroked the moustache he’d been growing—with very limited success—for the last few months.
“Aye, OK.”
I gave him the file and my typed notes and made two cups of tea while he read it.
When he’d drunk the tea and eaten a couple of biscuits, he handed the binder back to me.
“Are you sure about this whole locked room scenario?”
“Yes.”
“No secret tunnels, anything like that?”
“No secret tunnels. I checked the floor. Solid concrete, and it wasn’t built in the era of priest’s holes and the like.”
“You don’t think it was an accident.”
“No.”
He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know, then, Sean.”
“I was going to take a run to Belfast and interview the patrons who were in the Henry Joy McCracken that night. Supposedly they were the last people to see her alive and—”
Crabbie got to his feet. “Of course I’ll come. I’ll leave a note for Matt and tell him to mind the shop.”
We booked out a police Land Rover and drove up the M5 into town. It was raining and sea spray was blowing over the lagoons onto the road. A man had crashed his Hillman Hunter and we had to pull in to help the eejit. His engine was on fire and he was standing next to the vehicle, sobbing. When the traffic cops showed up we bolted. Not so much as a thank-you.
“I did some research on ‘locked room problems,’” Crabbie said from the passenger’s seat.
“Aye?”
“Quite the literature.”
“Indeed.”
“You’ve read the one about the killer monkey?”
“Rue Morgue. Yes.”
“The one about the ice bullet?”
“Yup, and there’s a Charlie Chan film with a frozen blood bullet which is even better.”
“None of them seems to quite apply to our set of circumstances.”
“No.”
“Who’s on our list of suspects today?” Crabbie asked.
“Arnold Yeats. He’s the one at Queen’s.”
“Won’t he be away?”
“Nah, he has to run a summer school, the poor bastard.”
“Unlucky for him and lucky for us,” Crabbie concurred.
Belfast in the summer was one big tinderbox, and anyone who could get out of town usually did—one of the perks of being a school teacher or a university professor.
And this year the marching season had been worse than normal; my theory was that this was because the miners’ strike in England was getting all the media attention: Belfast was the plain girl at the dance who was having to make a scene just to get noticed.
We saw the aftermath of rioting (overturned bins, smashed bus stops, burnt-out cars) as we arrived at Queen’s University’s Gothic façade. We parked in a tow-away zone and found Professor Yeats in a massive lecture theatre giving a talk on what he had titled “Weird History.”
Crabbie and I slipped in at the back and sat down.
The lecture theatre was packed with a mostly older crowd and a few young East Asians.
Yeats was a small man with a black beard and bushy black hair. He looked about thirty, but, in fact, was closer to forty. He was wearing jeans and Converse high-tops and a black T-shirt. He was giving his lecture sitting cross-legged on top of his desk.
“One of the most unusual courts established in this period was the Court of Love. Has anyone heard of that?” Professor Yeats asked in a Home Counties accent.
No one in the lecture theatre had heard of the Court of Love.
“On Valentine’s Day 1400 Charles VI of France established a Court of Love, a Cour Amoureuse, to regulate the rules of love and to hear disputes between lovers,” Professor Yeats went on. “The Court’s judges were selected by a panel of women on the basis of oral recitation or written samples of poetry. One of the first cases was of a man who had made wedding vows, but when he came into property after his father’s death had renounced his vow and pledged himself to a woman of a higher station. The judges of the Cour Amoureuse decided that he could not be compelled to marry his former sweetheart since no law could force love upon a man who does not wish it. However, for his breach of the rules of courtesy he was made to compensate his former mistress to the tune of fifty pounds of gold, a sum tidy enough to help heal any wounded heart.”
Professor Yeats went on to talk about the penalties for pages who had stolen their mistress’s billets-doux, for boastful lovers gossiping about their conquests and then, as a climax to all this, he segued into the story of Abelard and Heloise, giving plenty of eye-watering details on Abelard’s fate.
When the lecture was over we walked to the front of the lecture hall and I introduced us.
“Detective Inspector Duffy of Special Branch, Detective Sergeant McCrabban of Carrickfergus RUC.”
“Is it about my car?” Yeats said excitedly.
“Someone stole your car?”
“I was hijacked last week by joyriders. Have you found it? It’s a TR7, it’s a bit of a classic.”
The chances of recovering a vehicle that had been taken by joyriders were close to zero. I hadn’t heard of a case yet where the joyriders didn’t run the car until the gearbox or transmission gave out, whereupon they would invariably set it on fire.
“No, we’re here on a different matter. We’re from the, uh, the Cold Case Unit, we’re looking into the death of Lizzie Fitzpatrick.”
“Oh, I see,” he said, and looked grave.
Crabbie nodded at me and I nodded back. There had been no “who’s Lizzie Fitzpatrick?” bullshit from him.
“Shall we go to my office?” he said.
His book-lined, attractive office was on the fifth floor of a tower block on Stranmillis Road, overlooking the botanic gardens and the River Lagan. Now that last night’s fires were out, from up here Belfast seemed like any other dull red-brick Victorian British city.
Professor Yeats caught me admiring the view.
“You wouldn’t know there was a war on, would you?” he said.
“Just thinking that. You wouldn’t,” I agreed.
He got behind his desk and Crabbie and I sat down in two comfortable leather chairs.
“That was an interesting talk today. Is that your specialty?” I asked.
He laughed. “Heavens, no. I do British industrial history. But the purpose of the summer school is to pack in as many paying punters as we can, so it’s all plagues, wars, chaos, and castrations.”
“Sounds like Sandy Row on a Friday night,” Crabbie said. Yeats laughed at the jest.
“You’re from England, Professor Yeats?” I asked.
“And everyone told me I’d lost my accent.”
“Nope. It’s still going strong.”
“I’m from Hendon . . . near London.”
“And how long have you been at Queen’s?”
“I came here in 1965, so it’s nearly twenty years.”
“Ah, so they sucked you in before the Troubles kicked off, then, did they?”
He smiled. “Yes, they did.”
“Married man?”
“Married, divorced.”
“Kids?”
“No.”
“Do you happen to remember what were you doing all the way over in Antrim the night Lizzie Fitzpatrick had her accident?” I asked.
“Yes, I remember it vividly. The three of us were fishing on Lough Neagh. Barry, Lee, and myself.”
“That’s you and Lee McPhail and Barry Connor?”
“Yes.”
“Fishing for what?” Crabbie asked.
“Dollaghan trout. Lee had been raving about the trout fishing on Lough Neagh for years and we finally decided to go and give it a shot.”
“Was it not a bit cold in December?”
“That was the perfect time to go. The trout had been feeding all summer so they would be heavy and by December flies would be few and far between so they’d go for an attractive lure. After dark we brought out the lights, the fishing was so sweet.”
“Anyone catch anything?” I asked.
“Oh yes. It was a great day. That’s why we went for a drink before the run back to Belfast. I caught a nine-pounder, Barry caught two eight-pounders, and Lee threw back everything he caught until he brought in a beautiful twelve-pounder.”
“So you had a good day’s fishing and you went to the pub for a few pints . . .”
“No, we went to an Indian restaurant in Antrim first, which wasn’t that great, and then Lee told us about this little pub he knew, the Henry Joy McCracken, and we went in for a few drinks.”
“The pub was empty?” Crabbie asked.
“No, initially there were a few farmers and old-timers, locals, I imagine, but by closing time everyone had gone but us.”
“The three of you and Lizzie Fitzpatrick?”
“Yes, although we didn’t know her name then, of course.”
“So what happened then?” I asked.
“Nothing happened. It came to eleven o’clock and Lizzie rang the bell and told us that it was last orders, but none of us wanted any last orders because we’d all had a round each and Lee had to drive us home.”
“So what did you do?” Crabbie asked.
“We left. We walked through the village to where the car was parked.”
“Where was that?” I asked.
In the Morning I'll Be Gone Page 14