In the Morning I'll Be Gone

by Adrian McKinty

  “Poor Lizzie. All she thought that you had to do was break into the office and get the will and destroy it and everything would be fine.”

  “Go on.”

  “But that wasn’t your plan, was it, Harper? She hadn’t thought things through. Your father was on the mend. Every day he was getting a little bit better. The outpatient visits were working. The physiotherapy was working. He was a tough old bird. He had recovered from one stroke and now he was going to recover from a second one. He still despised you. When the law office eventually found out about the missing will he’d just make a new one, wouldn’t he? You’d be right back to square one. No, no, no. Lizzie hadn’t thought things through, but you had. You knew you’d have to kill him, didn’t you? You had to destroy the will and make sure your father could never make another. But she was the hitch, wasn’t she? She trusted you but you didn’t know if you could trust her. A burglary seemed harmless enough, but would she countenance murder?”

  “I can smell smoke! I’ve told you about smoking in there! Please go outside, gentlemen!” Jane yelled from the kitchen.

  “Sorry, Jane!” I yelled back.

  The rain had stopped now so I opened the French doors and let in the cold, damp night air.

  “After you,” I said, pointing the way out to the balcony.

  He went first and I followed.

  The air was cool. Lough Neagh was the silent, dark vacuum to the west.

  “She trusted me but I couldn’t trust her? Is that your bullshit theory?” Harper said.

  “You had to do three things. Mulvenna was dead but the will was still there sitting in his office like a time bomb. The will, Lizzie, and your father in that order. First the burglary. You needed Lizzie’s help for that. She had to tell you exactly where the will was and how to get in through the dodgy bathroom window. She was the brains. She was the fairy godmother behind this part of the plan.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “You did that on the 23rd.”

  “As if I would know how to do a burglary.”

  “Then poor Lizzie had to go. What happened there, Harper? Did you tell her that you were going to have to kill your own father and she objected to that? Or were you afraid to tell her because you knew that for her burglary was one thing but murder was the line she wouldn’t cross. Maybe you could have killed him and just not told her anything. But she might have been suspicious, and then you would have had that hanging over you for your entire married life. No, the best way was to get rid of her and then wait a month or so to finish the old man.”

  “Rubbish!”

  “When you found out that she was going to be working in the pub alone, that must have got you excited, eh? You knew that you could use that. And you were at the rugby club dinner that night. You had an alibi. Did you ask her to give you the key? Did you make a copy? Or did you already have a copy? Maybe you lifted the key from Lizzie’s purse and got a copy made in Antrim.”

  “This is bollocks, Duffy. Pure speculation.”

  “The key isn’t important anyway. It was an old lock. Easily picked. Easily locked from the outside. I’ll bet you any key from the period would have worked in that lock. Nah, forget the key. The real challenge was the bolts on the door, wasn’t it?”

  “Exactly, Duffy. The doors were locked and bolted from the inside. No one could have got in or out.”

  “It was perfect, Harper. Lizzie was alone in the pub in a locked room. She tried to change the light bulb and she fell and broke her neck. You and her mother were the only people who couldn’t believe it because you were warped by grief.”

  “This is—”

  “Let me tell you how you did it. You gave your speech at the rugby club dinner and you excused yourself to go to the bog and then you drove back to Antrim. Everyone would assume you were still at the dinner but you were already back in Ballykeel. You knocked on the door. Lizzie’s all ‘Oh, Harper, what a surprise, I’m so happy to see you’ and then bam! Broken neck. Light bulbs. Then you make sure the front door is locked and bolted. Then you use your key to go out the back door. You lock the back door from the outside but of course you can’t possibly pull the deadlock over, can you? You don’t need to. You wait until eleven thirty and you call Mary Fitzpatrick from a phone box in Antrim, not from the rugby club dinner. You show up at Mary’s house and you join the search party. The police officer shines his torch into the pub and all of you break down the front door.”

  “Where we found the pub locked and bolted from the inside!” Harper exclaimed with more than a touch of desperation in his voice.

  “You find the body and while Mary screams and the beat cops call it in . . .”

  I flipped open my notebook and read aloud from it: ““Everyone was just milling around waiting for the CID to come.” That’s right, isn’t it? Everyone was just milling around waiting for the CID. Ten minutes of that waiting around, Mr. McCullough.”

  “So?”

  I flipped over the page in my notebook. “Do you remember I asked you this question: “And what about the back door, Mr. McCullough?” This was your answer: “I checked that myself. Locked and bolted.” That’s when you did it, Harper. While the cops were guarding the front door and comforting Mary and telling her not to touch the body and you were staggering around in despair . . . You took ten seconds to go to the back door and slide the deadbolt across. As simple as that.”

  “I just locked the door when no one was looking?”

  “Yeah. That’s all you did. You know why magicians never reveal their tricks?”

  “Why?”

  “’Cos the tricks are all so fucking stupid.”

  Harper shook his head. “That’s not what happened, Duffy. The place was locked.”

  “Tell me the truth, Harper,” I said with a malevolent insistence.

  “I’m not telling you anything, Duffy! I’ve had enough of this! I think you should be leaving now. From now on any further communication between us should be conducted through and in the presence of my solicitors.”

  I stood there looking out at the black water.

  I wondered whether my word and my theory would be good enough for Mary?

  Almost certainly not.

  She’d probably had suspicions about Harper herself. But suspicions weren’t bloody good enough, were they?

  I tossed the fag, unbuttoned my sports jacket, reached into my shoulder holster, and pulled out the .38.

  “What the f—” he began before I cocked the revolver and pointed it at his face.

  “No sudden moves, Harper. This thing has a hair trigger. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he said. His eyes were wide, terrified. He didn’t know me. Maybe I was one of those bent peelers you were always reading about in the papers. One of those coppers who was capable of anything.

  “All I have is guesswork, Harper. You’ve got a decent alibi and there’s no will, which means there’s no motive. So not only will I never be able to prove any of this in court in front of a jury but I’ll never even be able to convince the Director of Public Prosecutions to take up the case. You will not be sent up for this, I guarantee you that.”

  “What?”

  “As you so rightly point out, Harper, I have nothing but speculation and circumstantial evidence. Not a shred of proof. I give you my word that you will not be arrested for this crime, much less sent to trial.”

  “So . . . so . . . so what do you want from me?” he said.

  “I want you to tell me your side of it, Harper. How the whole thing was an accident that night. How you just came to talk to her. You didn’t mean to kill her. You got in a fight. One thing led to another . . . I want to know your version of events.”

  “If . . . if . . . I say I killed her it won’t be the end of it. You’ll kill me. Here and now!”

  “If you tell me the truth, Harper, I’ll leave you alone. You’ll never hear from me again.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “As simple as that. I know I can never prove t
his, not in a million years, but I want to know! I want the intellectual satisfaction of knowing that I was right.”

  “And if I don’t speak?”

  I grabbed Harper by the throat and shoved the gun against his cheek.

  “I’ll shoot you in the fucking head and I’ll tell Jane and everybody else that after I confronted you about Lizzie’s death you went for me and we fought and you grabbed my gun and turned it on yourself.”

  “You w-w-wouldn’t,” he stammered.

  “You want to take that chance?”

  He thought about it for a few seconds.

  Sweat was pouring down his face.

  “Speak!” I ordered.

  “I . . . I . . . I . . .”

  “Tell me, you motherfucker! Tell me or I’ll fucking blow your brains out!”

  “You were right! It was her idea! It was all her idea!” he sobbed.

  “Elaborate.”

  “She’d heard about Jim Mulvenna’s death when she was still at Warwick and when I picked her up at the airport she was bursting to tell me. She knew my dad had had his stroke and was in no condition to make a new will. She knew we could do it.”

  “Do what? Tell me, Harper!”

  “Like you said. To get the will and destroy it.”

  “What was in the will?”

  “Dad must have been out of his fucking mind. I mean, I knew he didn’t like me but what she told me was evil. She said that I was getting next to nothing. The house was going to the National Trust. His firm was going to be sold and the assets were going to be divided between the RSPB, Oxfam, and the rugby club. James Mulvenna had known that I might sue so he made the will fucking ironclad. I’d get a pittance. Me and Lizzie would get a pittance!”

  “How much money would you stand to lose?”

  “The house and the firm? Jesus! Three million.”

  “So what was Lizzie’s plan?”

  “That we’d break into James Mulvenna’s office and steal the will and destroy it and then when my father died intestate I’d get everything. The house, the firm, the bank accounts.”

  “But your dad was the wild card, wasn’t he? He was getting better.”

  “Euthanizing the old man was never part of her plan. She wanted me to wait until he died from natural causes. How long would that be? Five years? And you were right. He was on the mend. I knew he’d be speaking soon. Within six months the old bastard would have been fully recovered . . .”

  The words were spilling out now. Everybody, I supposed, needed a confessor. I released my hand from his throat and took a step away from him. The night was perfect for it. I could smell peat burning in fires up and the down the lough shore and there was a sea mist moving in from the water.

  “So you wanted to kill your own father but you knew you couldn’t trust her not to turn you in? That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “She was a good girl, was Lizzie. How could I trust her with something like that? But it didn’t matter. That was only part of it. There was something else . . .”

  “What else?”

  “She was away at university. I mean, I’d loved her once, but . . . They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it’s not true, is it?”

  “You didn’t want to marry her?”

  “I already knew Jane. We’d gone out for a drink a couple of times. You can’t blame me what with Lizzie across the water half the year.”

  “Lizzie didn’t know about Jane?”

  “Of course not!”

  “But if she found out the whole deal would be off.”

  “Exactly.”

  He fumbled for his smokes and I lit him a second fag.

  “Ta,” he said, almost as if we were mates now.

  If the tape hadn’t been rolling I’d have told him what I knew about Annie too. But Mary didn’t need to hear about that.

  The conversation had momentum now. I kept the gun on him but I took another step back to give him some breathing room. He was relieved at that.

  “Could you have offered her money? Would she have taken a million, say?” I asked.

  “I didn’t even consider it. She was besotted with me. She wanted it all. The house, the money, the lifestyle. She wasn’t like her sisters. She wasn’t interested in the fucking cause. She just wanted a bit of comfort. And she thought she could have that with me. And she thought that her knowledge of the will would be something she could keep in her back pocket so I’d never leave her or have an affair. It was a kind of blackmail.”

  Poor girl. She had no idea who she was dealing with.

  “So when you heard that she was working alone in the pub the same night you’d be in Belfast you concocted a plan . . .”

  “Concocted is the wrong word, Duffy. It all just came to me the day before.”

  “Tell me about the key.”

  “Are you joking? That was the easiest part. I asked her if I could borrow some change from her purse. I told her I had to run to the supermarket. I drove into Antrim, got the key cut, and was back in fifteen minutes.”

  “You needed to lock the back door after you left just in case someone came by.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you didn’t get a chance to pull the deadbolt over after you and the cops had broken the front door down, you knew that, at the very least, the back door would be locked.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s why you needed the pub key. As insurance. But it didn’t really matter in the end. No one saw you slip off to push the deadbolt over.”

  “No.”

  “And hey presto: the back door and the front door were locked and bolted.”

  He nodded. I closed my eyes and let out a long sigh. “Where did you get the idea for a locked room mystery?”

  He pointed behind him at the books. “Da has hundreds of the bloody things.”

  I nodded. I wondered whether Mary needed the details about the actual killing itself. Do parents want to know exactly how their children died? Did Harper talk to her? Was there a struggle? Were there last words?

  I didn’t want to hear the details. You got enough stuff like that in my line of work. “Did she know you were going to kill her?” I asked.

  “She never knew a thing about it. I hit her from behind and then I did it quick. I read that SAS book about how to break someone’s neck. I hate to say it but it was easy.”

  “The weapon?”

  “A rolling pin.”

  “Dr. Kent was right. Where is it now?”

  “Long gone.”

  “No qualms about any of this?”

  “Do you think I’m a monster? Of course there were qualms. Of course! But what choice did I have? What would you have done?”

  I wasn’t going to get on my high horse. “All right, Harper,” I said, and walked off the balcony back into the library. I uncocked the revolver and returned it to my shoulder holster. He followed me inside. “That’s it? You’re done?” he asked.

  “I’m done.”

  “No charges? No nothing?”

  I shook my head. “No proof, so no charges, no nothing.”

  He grinned and breathed a sigh of relief. “You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that what it’s like going to the priest?”

  “Usually the priest doesn’t need to resort to firearms.”

  I walked back into the hall. Harper followed me. “And this is really it? You’re going and you won’t be coming back?” he said, unable to believe his luck.

  “I gave you my word, Harper. You’re never going to see me again.”

  “Inspector Duffy, where are you off to? Are you not staying?” Jane yelled from the parlor.

  “No, I’m not, I better go,” I said.

  “The rain is supposed to get worse before it gets better. Stay! A wee bite to warm you up,” she insisted.

  “Aye, stay for dinner,” Harper said.

  He thought we were friends now. His grinning face was inviting a right hook.

  “N
o. I better go. I’m late for another appointment,” I said, and left the house for the last time.

  As Jane had predicted the drizzle had become a hard rain. I walked down the Fitzpatricks’ drive and stopped outside the living-room window. I could see the family illuminated by the blue light of the TV screen.

  I stepped onto the porch, hesitated, and rang the doorbell.

  Annie answered it. She was wearing a green sweater and a long corduroy skirt. She was barefoot. Her hair was tied back Mary Tyler Moore–style. She looked pretty.

  “Hello,” she said, pleased to see me.

  “I’ve got something for you,” I said. I undid the elastic band from my notebook and took the free luncheon vouchers Barry Connor had given me for his restaurant.

  “Take these,” I said. “You’ve got to get used to that French food if you’re moving to Montreal.”

  “Wow! I’ve heard about this place. Thank you!” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “What are you doing here, Sean?”

  “I’m here to talk to your mother.”

  “Oh, is it about Lizzie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any news?”

  “No. No news. In fact, I think we’re going to have to shut down the case.”

  “A waste of precious resources, eh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So I won’t be seeing you again, Sean?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “OK,” she said. She frowned and wanted to say something, but didn’t have the words.

  “You’ll do great in Canada, I’m sure,” I said.

  “It’s better than here anyway.”

  She sniffed and touched me on the cheek and then she turned and ran into the back kitchen.

  I’ll tell Dermot that you’re doing well, Annie, I said to myself.

  “Ma! Somebody at the door for you!” Annie yelled.

  Mary appeared in the hallway.

  “Who is it?” Jim asked from inside.

  “I’ll talk to the policeman, Jim,” Mary said.

  “Maybe we should talk outside,” I said.

  I stepped backward onto the porch and Mary closed the front door. We stood there with the rain bouncing three feet back off the granite steps.