“I’ll go start the Land Rover,” Matty said.
I made a grab at his sleeve as he walked away.
“He was a captain. He wasn’t just a grunt. He was a God-fearing man. An intelligent man. He was going places. And he was snuffed out just like that.”
She looked me square in the face and her expression was accusatory – as if I was somehow responsible for all of this.
Her rage had turned her cheeks as red as her bap.
“He was going to work?” I muttered, for something to say.
“Aye, he was just heading up to the fields to bring the yearlings in, him and Cora. I doubt we would have had a dozen of them.”
“I’m really very sorry,” I said.
She blinked twice and suddenly seemed to notice that I was standing there in front of her.
“Oh,” she said.
She let go of my hand. “Excuse me,” she mumbled.
“It’s okay,” I said, and took a step backwards. “Have a good morning.”
I walked back across the yard towards the Land Rover.
The rain was heavier now.
The Alsatian started snarling and barking at me again.
“That’s enough, Cora!” Mrs McAlpine yelled.
The dog stopped barking but didn’t cease straining at its rope leash.
“That is one mean crattur,” Matty said as I got into the front seat of the Land Rover.
“The dog or the woman?”
“The dog. Hardly the temperament for a sheep dog.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sheep dogs are supposed to like people.”
I looked back at the farmhouse and Mrs McAlpine was still standing there.
“Jesus, she’s still bloody staring at us – get this thing going, Matty.”
He turned on the Land Rover and manoeuvred it in a full circle in the farmyard. The sodden chickens flew and hopped away from us.
We drove out of the gate and began going down the lane.
The man with the pipe across the valley was still there in front of his house looking at us and another man on a tractor one field over on a little hill had stopped his vehicle to get a good gander at us too.
We were the local entertainment for the day.
“Where to now, boss?” Matty asked.
“I don’t know. Carrick Salvation Army, to see if they remember who they sold that suitcase to?”
“And then?”
“And then back to the station to see if Customs have that list of names yet.”
Matty put the heavy, armoured Land Rover in first gear and began driving down the lane keeping it well over on the ridge so that we wouldn’t get stuck in the mud.
He stuck on the radio and looked to see if I would mind Adam and the Ants on Radio One.
I didn’t mind.
I wasn’t really listening.
Something was bothering me.
It was something Matty had said.
The dog.
It was a mean animal. An Alsatian, yes, but trained to be a mean. I’d bet a week’s pay that it was primarily a guard dog. As Matty pointed out, on a sheep farm you’d want a Border Collie, but Martin McAlpine’s herd was so small he didn’t need that much help with the round up and so he’d got himself a good watch dog instead.
“Stop the car,” I said to Matty.
“What?”
“Stop the bloody car!”
He put in the clutch and brake and we squelched to a halt.
“Turn us around, drive us back to the McAlpines.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
“Okay.”
He put the Rover in first gear and drove us back down the lane. When we reached the stone wall, Matty killed the engine and we got out of the Rover and walked across the muddy farmyard again.
I knocked on her door and she opened it promptly.
She had changed into jeans and a mustard-coloured jumper. She had tied her hair back into a pony tail.
“Sorry to bother you again, Mrs McAlpine,” I said.
“No bother, Inspector. What else was I going to do today? Wash the windows a second time?”
“I wanted to ask you a question about Cora? Is that the name of your dog?”
“Yes.”
“And you say your husband was going up to bring the yearlings in, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And did he normally take Cora with him?”
“Yes.”
“So she wasn’t tied up?”
“No.”
“Hmmm,” I said, and rubbed my chin.
“What are you getting at?” she asked.
“Was Cora always this bad-tempered or is this just since your husband was shot?”
“She’s never liked strangers.”
“And you say the gunmen were waiting just behind the stone wall, right out there beyond the farmyard?”
“They must have been, because Martin didn’t see them until it was too late.”
“You say they shot him in the chest?”
“Chest and neck.”
“Did you hear the shot?”
“Oh, yes. I knew what it was immediately. A shotgun. I’ve heard plenty of them in my time.”
“One shot?” Matty asked.
“Both barrels at the same time.”
“And when you came out your husband was down on the ground and the gunmen were riding off on a motorbike?”
“That they were.”
“And you couldn’t ID them?”
“It was a blue motorbike, that’s all I saw. Why all the questions, Detective?”
“Who investigated your husband’s murder?”
“Larne RUC.”
“And they didn’t find anything out of the ordinary?”
“No.”
“And the IRA claimed responsibility?”
“That very night. What’s in your mind, Inspector Duffy?
“Your husband was armed?” I asked.
“He always carried his sidearm with him, but he didn’t even get a chance to get it out of his pocket.”
“And you ran out and found him where?”
“In the yard.”
“Whereabouts? Can you show me?”
“There, where the rooster is,” she said, pointing about half the way across the farmyard, about twenty yards from the house and twenty from the stone wall. Not an impossible shot with a shotgun by any means, but then again, surely you’d want to get a lot closer than twenty yards and if you got closer, wouldn’t that have given Captain McAlpine plenty of time to get his own gun out of his pocket?
“Mrs McAlpine, if you’ll bear with me for just another moment … Let me get this clear in my mind. Your husband’s walking out to the fields, with Cora beside him, and two guys come out from behind the stone wall and shoot him down from twenty yards away. Cora, who was for taking my head off, doesn’t run at the men, and he can’t get his gun out in time?”
Her eyes were looking at me with a sort of hostility now.
“I’m only telling you what the police told me. I didn’t get there until it was all over.”
“But Cora was definitely loose?”
“Yes, she was.”
“Why didn’t the IRA men shoot her? She must have been all over them.”
“I don’t know … Maybe she was frightened.”
“She doesn’t seem like a dog easily cowed to me.”
Mrs McAlpine shrugged and said nothing.
“And why didn’t your husband pull his gun? They come out from behind the wall with shotguns. He must have seen them.”
“I don’t know, Inspector, I just don’t know,” Mrs McAlpine said in a tired monotone.
“Not if his back was turned,” Matty added.
“But Cora would have smelt them, no? She would have been going bonkers. They’re going to see a slavering Alsatian running at them. Wouldn’t that have given him a second or two to go for his gun?”
“Evidently not,” she
said.
She reached into her jeans, took out a battered packet of Silk Cut and lit one.
She was pale and wan. Not just tired, something else … weary. Aye, that was it.
“They killed him. What difference does it make how they bloody did it?” she said at last.
I nodded. “Yes, of course. I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing important … Anyway, I’ve taken up more than enough of your time.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. These days all I’ve got is time,” she said, looking searchingly into my face, but I was the master of the blank expression – training from all those years of interrogation.
She puffed lightly on her fag.
“Maybe we should be heading, boss, before the rain bogs us down,” Matty said.
“One final question, if you don’t mind, Mrs McAlpine. I noticed some of the farm buildings back there, but I didn’t see a greenhouse. You wouldn’t have one at all, would you?”
“A what?”
“A greenhouse. For plants, fruits, you know.”
She blew out a line of smoke. “Aye, we have a greenhouse.”
“You wouldn’t mind if I took a wee look.”
“What for?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say, but it will only take a minute.”
“If it’s drugs you’re after, you won’t find any.”
“Can I take a look?”
She shrugged. “Be my guest.”
She walked me through the house to the muddy farmyard out the back. A smell of slurry and chicken feed. A few more harassed-looking hens sitting on a rusting Massey Ferguson tractor.
“Over there,” she said, pointing to a squalid little greenhouse near a barn.
I squelched through the mud to the greenhouse and went inside. Several panes had fallen in and rain and cold had turned a neat series of plum bushes into a blighted mess. There was mould on the floor and mushrooms were growing in an otherwise empty trough of black soil. There were no exotic plants or indeed any other plants apart from the withered plums.
I rummaged in the trough where the wild mushrooms now thrived, looking for the roots of a plant that might once have been there, but I came up empty – if Martin had been growing anything interesting here all traces of it had been removed.
I nodded and walked back across the farmyard, cleaned my shoes on the mud rack.
“Did you find what you were after?” she asked.
“Did you ever hear of a plant called rosary pea?”
“What?”
“A plant called the rosary pea? Did you ever hear of it?”
She shook her head.
“It’s also called crab’s eye, Indian liquorice, jumbie bead?”
“Never heard of it in my life.”
I nodded. “Sorry to have taken up so much of your time, thank you very much, Mrs McAlpine. Good morning,” I said and walked to the Rover.
“What was that all about?” Matty asked as we climbed back inside.
“This thing stinks.”
“What stinks? This? It’s a dead end, surely?”
I stared out at the boggy farm and through the rearview mirror I watched her go back inside the house.
“Let’s get out of here. Let’s see if we can’t dig a little deeper into the late Mr McAlpine’s murder.”
“What the hell for?”
“Just get us going, will ya?”
“Okay.”
We got about a hundred yards down the lane but a farmer was blocking the road with his tractor. It had stalled on the edge of the sheugh. He climbed down out of the cab to apologise. He had brown eyes under his flat cap. He was about forty-five. He had a pipe. So far so ordinary, but there was something about him I didn’t like. An unblinking quality to those brown eyes that most people didn’t have towards cops.
“Sorry lads, won’t be a moment,” he said. “I was turning this baste of a thing and I misjudged the size of the road.”
A road he’s driven down and turned his tractor around on a thousand times, I was thinking to myself.
“Oh, that’s okay, we’re in no hurry,” Matty said.
I added nothing.
“Just got to get the front wheel out of the ditch,” the man said, climbing back into the cab and turning the thing on.
The wheel came out easily and the man pulled the tractor over to let us pass.
Matty started the Rover and waved.
“What do you think that was all about?” I asked as I looked at the tractor in the side mirror.
“What?”
“The man with the tractor.”
“What about it?”
“Him fucking with us like that.”
Matty stared at me and when I didn’t elaborate he looked back down the road.
“So where to, boss?” he asked.
“Larne RUC,” I insisted.
6: SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM
We took the shore road past Magheramorne quarry, where the slag heaps ran next to the road and where the fields were a strange John Deere green.
Radio One decided to torture us by heavily rotating “Making Your Mind Up” to commemorate Bucks Fizz’s triumph in the previous year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Even Matty couldn’t take it and after hunting in vain for another station we rummaged in the Land Rover’s cassette stash and found Joan Armatrading’s Walk Under Ladders.
“You didn’t really think she’d be growing rosary pea in that greenhouse, did you?” Matty asked.
“You never know, mate, you have to follow up everything.”
“I could have told you it was a waste of time … Sort of like this little journey.”
“You’re quite the lippy wee character aren’t you, Matthew?”
“I’m on an emotional rollercoaster, mate, someone fired a machine gun at me this morning, not to mention being harassed by a vicious dog.”
“Tell Kenny Dalziel you’re putting in for emotional hardship money. That’ll make the bastard’s head explode.”
Larne RUC station was a massive concrete bunker near the harbour. It was known to be one of the safest cop postings in all of Northern Ireland because the town was small with a population that was over ninety per cent Protestant. The IRA would have few, if any, safe houses in the community and an IRA cell from Belfast could not easily make an escape to a nearby haven. In general the worst the Larne peelers had to deal with was drunkenness on Friday and Saturday nights and the occasional fracas between rival gangs of football supporters heading over or back from the ferry to Scotland. As a result of all this, Larne was known as a place where they dumped lazy, old and problem officers who could cause real difficulties elsewhere.
The McAlpine murder had been investigated by an Inspector Dougherty, a red-nosed, white-haired old stager with a tremble in his left hand that to the uneducated eye could be Parkinson’s disease or MS or some other malady but which was actually the eleven o’clock shakes. At lunch time he’d slip out to the nearest pub and after a couple of triple vodkas he’d be right as rain again.
We met him in a large book-lined office overlooking the harbour and ferry terminal. The books were mostly thrillers and detective fiction which I found encouraging, but they were all from the ’60s and early ’70s, which wasn’t such a good sign. At some juncture in the last decade he’d lost interest in reading – had lost interest in everything probably. There was no wedding ring on his left hand, but many Presbyterians didn’t wear a ring because they considered it a Papist affectation. Even so, the room stank of divorce, failure and alcoholism – the standard troika for many a career RUC officer.
We were both the same rank, detective inspector, but he’d been on the force twenty years longer than me, which made me wonder what the hell he had been doing all that time, and whether I was destined to go the same route.
The rain was still pelting the windows and Scotland was a blue smudge to the east.
“Gentlemen, have a seat,” he said. “Cup of tea or coffee?”
“Thanks but no, we�
�re all tea’d out this morning,” I replied, with as decent an apologetic smile as I could muster.
Dougherty folded his hands across his ample belly. He was wearing a white shirt and a brown suit that he’d obviously had for quite a few years, which, as he sat down, bunched at the sleeves and gave him an unfortunate comic air. A peeler could be a lot of things: a drunk, a thug, an idiot, a sociopath, but as long as you looked the part it was usually fine. Even in Larne Dougherty would have a hard time currying respect.
“So what brings you gentlemen down from Carrick?” he asked.
“I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the McAlpine murder,” I said, all business.
“The what?”
“Martin McAlpine. He was a part-time UDR captain who was shot at his farm on Islandmagee last December.”
“Ah, yes, I remember. What’s this pertaining to?”
I explained about the suitcase and the John Doe and how we had traced the suitcase back to Martin McAlpine.
“And what did his wife say happened to his suitcase?” Dougherty asked.
“She says she left it in at the Carrickfergus Salvation Army before Christmas,” Matty said.
Dougherty looked puzzled.
“She left it at the Salvation Army before Christmas?” he asked.
“Yup,” Matty said.
“So, what’s his murder got to do with anything? The murderer of your John Doe obviously just bought the suitcase for a pound from the Sally Army and used it to dump a body, right?”
“Almost certainly,” I agreed.
“So, why bother dredging up the McAlpine case? Your killer could have grabbed any random suitcase, couldn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And the timeline … She leaves the suitcase in just before Christmas. McAlpine is murdered back in early December. Your body is discovered this week? In April?”
I shook my head. “The body had been frozen for an indeterminate amount of time, but aye, I’m with you, Dougherty, I agree, it’s weak beer; but you see it’s not us, it’s our Chief; he’s going to want us to have pursued every lead out there and as soon as he finds out that the suitcase belonged to a UDR captain who was assassinated by the IRA, he’s going to be firing a million questions at me.”
Dougherty breathed a sigh of relief. I was not an internal affairs spook come to investigate his work, I was just another working stiff dealing with an arsehole boss.
I Hear the Sirens in the Street Page 6