“The government’s not going to fall. Who calls a miners’ strike in the summer when nobody uses coal and when the power stations have been stockpiling it all year? Thatcher’s manipulated this whole situation. She’s pulling all of our strings.”
“Quite,” she said, and went outside to her car.
On the TV a beardy guy with glasses was blathering on about earthquakes and tidal waves. Mrs. McDowell came over to borrow sugar. I asked her the name of the famous baby-rearing book and she told me that no book was necessary—the slightest wee dash of Irish whiskey in the bottle was all you needed for a good night’s sleep.
I showered, had a quick breakfast, and drove to Carrick police station. I chatted to Matty and McCrabban about their cases and I left my office door open so that they could come in whenever they wanted to talk to me about mine.
I did this every day. I reread Chief Inspector Beggs’s case report and I examined the photographs of the locks on the two doors of the Henry Joy McCracken.
In the Oxfam shop I grabbed a copy of Edward Thomas’s Icknield Way and a brand-new copy of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock. When I paid, the Spock fluttered open, revealing a news story cut out from the Daily Mail that I picked off the floor.
“What’s that?” Margaret asked.
It was a lurid December 1983 account of the suicide of Dr. Spock’s grandson, who had jumped to his death from the roof of Boston’s Children’s Museum. I handed Margaret the clipping.
“He’s not foolproof, then, is he?” Margaret said, tapping Spock’s face.
“Few people are, Peggy.”
“Except for you, Inspector Duffy. There are no flies on you.”
On the Wednesday Crabbie asked me to interrogate an elder who had been accused of stealing money from a Presbyterian kirk because he felt that he would lose his rag with the man. It was a walk in the park. After only forty minutes in Interview Room 1 the poor guy broke down and confessed. Gambling was at the root of it, he said, in tears. It was an ugly business, and to show his gratitude Crabbie offered to drive to Antrim to look over the Henry Joy McCracken and give me his professional opinion.
I took him up on the offer the following Friday.
We drove to Antrim in the Beemer and because of a police action we were diverted into the housing estates and got completely lost. Ballycraigy Estate in particular afforded us an intense, Hogarthian snapshot of human misery before we found the road to Ballykeel.
We called in on the Fitzpatricks: Annie and Mary had gone to Omagh to visit Mary’s mother but Jim Fitzpatrick was home watching a fishing program on Channel 4. It was ten in the morning and the poor sod was half wasted. I asked him for the keys to the pub and he brought them to us without saying a word.
“Was that the dad?” Crabbie asked as we walked into the village.
“Yeah.”
“He’s sixty, is he? He looks ninety.”
“Lizzie’s death has hit him hard.”
“He was half tore. Did you notice that?”
“I noticed.”
“It’s a shame. A crying shame. Strong drink is the curse and ruination of Ireland.”
“That it is.”
We drove to the village and parked the car. We were just getting out of the BMW when we bumped into Harper McCullough and his wife, Jane. I introduced them to McCrabban and a stressed-out Jane informed us that the baby was now officially overdue.
“If she doesn’t start going into labor by the weekend they’re going to have to induce her,” Harper said, with a wild-eyed look of terror in his eyes.
“They did that to my missus. It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Crabbie assured him.
“I want to give birth naturally, that’s why we’re walking round and round the village,” Jane said. “My mother says it might help.”
“Her mother said she should go for a ride on a horse! She said that that would fix her!” Harper said with amazement.
“Me ma was joking,” Jane protested.
Harper rolled his eyes. “The previous generations have some mad notions. I’m surprised any of us are here at all,” he said.
“Here, Harper, me old chum, I got this for you,” I said, and opened the BMW’s boot and gave him the copy of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.
“Oh, this looks great!” he said, clutching it like a lifebelt.
“And I meant to tell you, I saw this Open University program the other morning about earthquakes and tidal waves. This guy with a fantastic beard was talking all about Alexandria and how much of it was under water. You would have liked it. With the new baby you’ll be up all hours of the night. You should look into the Open University, you could take up archeology again,” I said.
Jane gave me a grateful smile. “You really could, you know,” she said to him.
“We’ll see. Let’s get this baby born first. Where are you two gentlemen off to today?” Harper asked.
“I’m going to get Sergeant McCrabban’s professional opinion on the layout of the pub,” I said.
“The locked room problem,” Crabbie muttered darkly.
“The locked room problem, indeed,” I said.
“Of course, if the killer couldn’t possibly have got out of there then there’s no problem,” Crabbie added.
“Because?”
“Because there was no killer.”
“And my two doctors?” I asked.
Crabbie shrugged. “You know why you always have to get a second opinion? Because doctors are often completely wrong.”
“Lizzie had exceptional balance, you know,” Harper said to McCrabban.
“So I’ve been told, but changing a light bulb is a tricky business,” Crabbie said. “Me da fell off his tractor one time in Ballymena. He’d got on and off that tractor every day for forty years. One day he slipped and broke his pelvis.”
“Was he all right?” Jane asked.
“He was in pain for a day or two but then he went to the Lord,” Crabbie said.
“Jesus,” I muttered under my breath.
“We could walk over to the pub with you. We could help you out,” Harper said keenly.
Jane looked less than enthused at this prospect. A dusty pub, the place her husband’s old girlfriend died . . .
“Uh, no thanks, Mr. McCullough, it’s official police business and we can’t really involve civilians.”
Harper looked disappointed. “Well, if there’s anything we can do to help, give us a ring.”
“And tell Annie I was asking for her, if you see her,” Jane said.
We said goodbye to them, wished Jane luck, and continued on to the Henry Joy McCracken.
I opened the door and turned the lights on. I walked Crabbie through the pub, showed him the bar, the toilets, the light bulb fixtures. I didn’t offer any further information. I let him take it in for himself.
He examined the basement, looked at the roof, and finally the front and back doors.
“Obviously they had to repair the broken-down front door, but the back door is the way it was?”
“Aye.”
He went outside and tested the strength of the bars on all the windows.
“No way anyone’s getting through those,” he said.
“I agree.”
“The paint is consistent too.”
“Yes.”
He inspected the basement, shone a torch at the hammer-beam ceiling, walked inside and outside for ten minutes, and then pulled up a chair.
I sat opposite him.
“Well?”
“If both doors were bolted from the inside the killer must have been inside when the police came. But Beggs searched the pub from top to bottom and no one was hiding here, right?”
“Right.”
“Ergo no killer.”
“That’s your opinion?”
“That’s my opinion . . . However . . .”
“However what?” I asked him with a tremor of excitement.
“Her dad’s in the hospital, her mother’s on the way bac
k from the hospital with a status report on her dad’s health, she’s so keen to get home she kicks the punters out at exactly eleven o’clock . . .”
“Or maybe even a little before.”
“Right. She gives McPhail, Yeats, and Connor the bum’s rush ’cos she wants to get back home. So why on earth does she decide that she has to change the light bulb that’s been annoying her all evening? I mean, think about it. She has to look for a replacement bulb, she has to turn all the lights off so she doesn’t get electrocuted, she has to bolt and lock the front door. She has to get up on the bar and start fiddling with a dusty old light bulb in the dark that she can barely reach ’cos she’s only five foot two. She does all that instead of just leaving, locking the front door, and rushing home to see how her da’s doing.”
“What are you saying, Crabbie?” I asked him.
“I’m saying that now that I’m sitting here thinking about it I’m not buying it.”
“I’m not selling it.”
“I know you’re not. But the killer is, isn’t he?”
“He certainly is. He wants us to think that an accident happened. That a murder is impossible,” I said.
“This isn’t a sex crime. Nothing’s been stolen. Which poses the question . . . why did he do it? It was something about Lizzie. Had to be.”
“What about her, Crabbie?”
“I don’t know. Something she’d done? Something she knew?”
“I like the way you’re cooking here. Look around you. Was there anywhere he could have been hiding that we might have overlooked?” I asked.
Crabbie considered it and shook his head. “No, Sean, he wasn’t hiding in the pub. He was long gone. If he was careful enough to kill her and make it look like an accident he wouldn’t have taken the risk of hiding in the pub,” Crabbie said.
“My way of thinking too.”
Crabbie took out his pipe and I took out me fags. I borrowed his lighter and sucked down a Marlboro Light.
“Do you know why magicians don’t reveal how they do their tricks?” I asked him.
“Why’s that, Sean?”
“Because the way they do it—twins, misdirection, looking at your card while you’re not looking—is usually so stupid they know you’ll have nothing but contempt for them when you find out. I bet we’re missing something here that’s really stupid and obvious.”
“It’s not obvious to me.”
“Or me . . . yet.”
We sat and smoked for twenty minutes, but even though we were at the scene of the crime, we had two good cop brains and we were lubricated by our tobacco of choice, still illumination did not dawn.
We locked up the pub and walked back through the village to the Fitzpatricks’.
Mary and Annie were home now and we gave them the key and said a quick hello. I introduced McCrabban and I explained what we’d been doing.
Mary asked whether we’d made any progress.
“Unfortunately not,” I said. “But we’re still working on it.”
“I’m glad to see that you’re still working on it,” Mary said, looking at me significantly.
“I’ll keep on it until I’m easy in my mind one way or the other,” I said.
“That’s good,” Mary said.
“Well, we should be off. Jane was asking for you,” I told Annie.
Instead of pleasure a look of jagged annoyance sliced across Annie’s face.
“Asking about me, was she?” she said a little testily.
“In a very nice way,” I insisted.
“She’s overdue, isn’t she? I knew she’d pull something like that. She’s quite the drama queen when all is said and done.”
“Annie! Don’t be ridiculous. She can’t force the baby out!” Mary insisted.
Annie looked at me for support but I wasn’t getting involved in this.
“We should go.”
“Aye, we better get back,” McCrabban agreed, and we hurried out to the Beemer.
“Can you tolerate Radio 3?” I asked him.
“It’s your car, mate. Your rules,” he said.
It was Brahms’s Symphony number 3, which wasn’t that objectionable.
We drove back to Carrickfergus in rare August sunshine. I took us in along the Tongue Loanen through the sheep fields and cow pasture.
We drove to the station along Taylor’s Avenue and the bridge over the railway lines. There was a grubby man standing there next to a Toyota Hilux. He was wearing a green and white Glasgow Celtic bobble hat. There was a lankness about his features. A measured insolence. Something about him that made Crabbie and me both take notice. There was a driver in the Hilux with a ginger beard and in the back of the pick-up something that resembled building materials under a tarp.
A few hours later Crabbie and I were able to give them a description of the two men and the vehicle.
But they never caught them.
They never do.
I went through the checkpoint and parked the Beemer at the rear of the police station in the space near the wall reserved for CID personnel.
The sun was shining. The birds were singing. There hadn’t been a riot for days but Northern Ireland’s stuttering journey to normalcy abruptly came to an end that afternoon with a series of bomb attacks on police stations.
Carrickfergus was an out-of-the-way police barracks. And it was this that had probably saved it from the worst of the Troubles. Everywhere, however, has their time. The reason the USAAF targeted Hiroshima was because it had, up until that point, got off lightly . . .
Crabbie was out of tobacco so we walked down to Sandy Walker’s newsagents. He went inside and I waited for him. There was a nice view of the lough and the castle, and it could have been lovely but for the fact that the tide was out and Downshire beach was littered with its usual modern-art ensemble of plastic bags, shopping trolleys, tires, sewage, and the odd dead sea creature.
Crabbie paid, we walked back to the barracks and went upstairs.
Matty was at the coffee machine talking to a pretty, pale, dark-haired reserve constable I didn’t know. I felt a minor spasm of guilt that I hadn’t got to his letter of recommendation yet, but he hadn’t hassled me about it so maybe he’d had a change of plan.
Matty asked McCrabban and me whether either of us wanted a cup of tea.
“I think we’re all right, mate. And it looks like you’re busy enough,” I said, and winked at Crabbie. “I’ll get on with that letter you wanted, mate.”
“Ta very much,” Matty said.
I went into my office and booted up the Apple, but instead of writing the letter of recommendation I played Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, determined this time to get to the level where I could kill Hitler.
Time ticked.
Death made his way along the lough . . .
I closed my eyes for a moment.
There was an enormous bang and a crash and then two more bangs.
The last mortar landed very close, the percussion wave smashing the windows in my office and throwing me out of my chair into the wall.
Dust was everywhere. Blood in my mouth.
Bomb, I thought. No . . . gas explosion. No . . . bomb.
I rubbed my eyes and looked at the wrecked room. My chair was on top of the filing cabinet. My desk had been overturned. The window had imploded.
Being in a bombing inside a building is like no experience one has ever had before. The only thing to compare it to is an earthquake. All your certainties have gone. The solid world has collapsed and what is left is fear and awe and the momentary exhilaration of being alive.
Time slows.
Adrenalin spikes.
Hysteria and shock, even among us hardened professionals.
I heard screaming. The ringing of a fire alarm. I got to my feet, steadied myself, and opened my office door. I was surprised at how little damage there had been. Later we learned that only two of the mortars had hit their target and the rest had missed and arced harmlessly into the sea.
The roof
had caved in and there was smoke and debris, but there was no fire, and the walls of the station were intact.
“Are you OK?” a man asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Over here,” he said.
Two uniformed officers were trying to lift a concrete slab off a woman’s smashed legs. I felt absurdly strong and I tried to help, but twenty men wouldn’t have been enough. And it was too late anyway. A girder from the roof had impaled her through the abdomen and she was losing blood by the mugful.
She was crying and someone took her hand.
I sat down for a moment.
Breathed in dust, coughed.
“You’re bleeding,” someone said.
I touched my scalp. It was only a scratch.
“We have to evacuate. Here, let me help you up, sir.”
Outside into the August sun.
Ambulance men came. Firemen came. There was even a helicopter.
A blanket went around my shoulders and sweet tea was pressed into my hands. A girl with blond hair wiped my face. “Drink your tea,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”
I drank it and it did make me feel a little better.
I was triaged into a low-priority group and it wasn’t until an hour later that I was taken to the Moyle Hospital in Larne where I got half a dozen stitches in my scalp and a splint on a sprained wrist.
It was in the recovery room of the Moyle surgical ward that I learned that six police stations and four army bases had been targeted that afternoon in a simultaneous assault. The mortars they’d launched at Carrick police station had only ten-pound shells whereas in a similar attack Newry police station had been hit by half a dozen fifty-pounders, just one of which had killed nine policemen and injured thirty-seven.
Carrick police station had suffered only two fatalities. Reserve Constable Heather McClusky and the person she had been talking to at the coffee machine: Detective Constable Matty McBride.
After two days the doctors still didn’t like the swelling on my head and refused to give me permission to attend Matty’s funeral, which meant that I had to sign myself out between nurses’ shifts and get Crabbie to meet me in the hospital car park and drive me to the small churchyard in Magheramorne.
In the Morning I'll Be Gone Page 20