I Hear the Sirens in the Street

by Adrian McKinty

  “The suitcase O’Rourke was buried in had an old address card squeezed into that plastic pocket near the handle. The killer or the person dumping the body hadn’t noticed it. We were able to decipher it as belonging to a Martin McAlpine who was a captain in the UDR until he was murdered last December. December first, I think. So I went to interview the widow McAlpine and she told me about her husband’s murder and the fact that she had left her husband’s old things including that suitcase at the Salvation Army in Carrickfergus just before Christmas.”

  “What’s any of that got to do with Dougherty?”

  “He was the investigating officer on the husband’s murder.”

  “And?”

  “Well … I think he botched it.”

  “How?”

  “I think there’s at least a chance that she killed him. In Dougherty’s theory the gunmen shot at him from behind a wall twenty yards away but he was clearly shot at point blank by someone who knew him.”

  “Why someone who knew him?”

  “He let the killer walk right up to him, he didn’t draw his gun, his vicious guard dog didn’t get involved.”

  “And you went and told Dougherty about these doubts?”

  “Yes.”

  “And left it at that?”

  “And left it at that. It was a tangent. As my youthful sidekick explained to me, it was an SEP: someone else’s problem.”

  Tony nodded and rubbed his sideburns. “So, what? You think you might have shaken Dougherty out of his hammock and the old geezer went to stir some shit?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Mind if I look around?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I walked the length of the driveway and stopped in front of the garage. I peered at the bullet holes. They were wildly far apart. Feet, instead of inches.

  “He was shot three times in the chest?”

  “That’s what they tell me. Three in the chest, three in the garage.”

  “What’s normally the next step in a case like this?”

  “Our next step, Sean, will be to attempt to trace the gun by analysing the slugs. Canvass for witnesses, of which there won’t be any, none that will testify certainly. Put the word out for tips, offer a reward …”

  We had finished our smokes now and Tony fished into his pocket and took out his packet of Player’s.

  He lit me one. “Smoking can cause cancer”, it said on the packet. It was a fine time to bring that up.

  The day had turned cold and fog was rolling down the hill and where it met the electricity pylons little halos of Saint Elmo’s fire were forming, vanishing and reforming again.

  I took a puff of the Player. It was pretty rough.

  “In other words, Chief Inspector, after the condemnation by the politicians and after the church service ends and the TV cameras leave, this case will go nowhere.”

  He was a little ticked at that. “I don’t know how things are done in your manor, mate, but we take every case seriously. It’s not my fucking fault that it’s nearly fucking impossible to break up an IRA cell, is it?”

  I nodded and threw the ciggie away. I walked over to the garage again.

  “Three rounds in the garage.”

  “So.”

  “When does an IRA hit team miss not once, not twice, but three times?”

  “I’d stake my pension that this is an ordinary assassination by an ordinary IRA cell.”

  “Stake something worth a damn. None of us are making old bones, are we? But let’s give it your best-case argument. Let’s say they’ve brought along a newcomer who’s on his first job. They have to blood the newcomers somehow, don’t they? Every killer has a first time.”

  “Aye.”

  “So after the new boy misses and sticks three in the garage door and Dougherty gets his gun out, then his partner can’t take any more of it and shoots him in the chest.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Tony admitted.

  “Two things, Tony. Two things. First, Dougherty is old and fat and drunk and fucking slow! For him to get that gun out of that leather holster, this team must really be shite.”

  Tony nodded. “What’s the second thing?”

  “The second thing is that in this scenario the slugs can’t all have come from the same gun. The ones in the garage will be from a different weapon from the ones in Dougherty … But they’re not, are they?”

  “Aaahh,” Tony said and shook his head. “Missed that. No, you’re right. Preliminary ballistics suggests that—”

  “Lets say the widow McAlpine comes up here. She’s never fired a hand gun before in her life, she squeezes one off, she misses, he turns, she misses again, he starts fumbling for his gun, she misses again, he’s nearly got the .38 out and she finally hits the fucker and hits him again and again.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s say you wanted to kill a copper. For whatever reason. Maybe he fucked your wife or embezzled you or something. Say anything. Now, if you or someone close to you was in the security forces, it would be pretty easy, wouldn’t it? You get yourself a gun – anywhere – you put on a balaclava, shoot the bugger and then call the Belfast Telegraph with a recognised terrorist code word. Peelers like you and me show up at the crime scene and because the IRA has claimed responsibility we don’t look too hard at it cos we more or less know who did it and we know that we’ll never catch them in a million years.”

  He finished his fag and nodded thoughtfully.

  “Your case hangs on the fact that Dougherty went digging after his wee talk with you.”

  “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Easy to check.”

  “He goes back to the widow, starts throwing accusations around. She goes all panic stations, gets herself a piece, comes here and shoots him? You think that’s more likely than an IRA hit?”

  I laughed and looked at my DMs. “I suppose it’s a bit thin, Tony, but I can’t help thinking that these three holes in the garage mean something.”

  He looked at me, squinted into the sun juking between the clouds over the Antrim Plateau and grinned. “You know what I liked about you when we worked together in the County Armagh?”

  “What?”

  “Even when you were completely wrong about something, the journey into your wrongness was always fucking interesting. Come with me.”

  We walked over to a tall, lean guy with a big Dick Spring moustache.

  “Gerry, take over here, I’m going down to Larne RUC to have a wee look at Dougherty’s current case load. Could be personal, not random, you never know, do you?”

  “Aye,” Gerry agreed.

  Tony had come in a cop Land Rover so we took my car.

  It was a ten-minute run from rural Ballygalley to the grey misery that was Larne. We chatted a little and Radio One played “Ebony and Ivory”, a new song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. The breakfast DJ Mike Read played it two times in a row which was pretty hardcore of him as it was clearly the worst song of the decade so far, perhaps of the entire century.

  Larne RUC.

  With one of their own gunned down, the atmosphere was apocalyptic and doom laden. We paid our respects to the duty sergeant and ostentatiously put a few coppers in the widows and orphans box.

  We met with the Superintendent, expressed our condolences, told him that we wanted to look into Dougherty’s old cases and Tony explained that this was nothing more than Standard Operating Procedure.

  The Super couldn’t have cared less. He was new on the job, had barely interacted with Dougherty and now he had a funeral to suss and with the Chief Constable and half a dozen VIPs coming it was going to be a friggin’ nightmare.

  We left him to his drama and found Dougherty’s office.

  A shining twenty-three-year-old detective constable called Conlon showed us in. I asked him to hang around to answer questions while Tony looked through Dougherty’s files.

  “Was Inspector Dougherty a family man?” I asked conversationally.

  “Wife and a grown daughter. Ex-wife. He was di
vorced.”

  “Where’s she? The wife, I mean.”

  “Wife and daughter are both over the water, I gathered.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “I don’t know. London somewhere?”

  “Was he a social man – did you all go out for drinks come a Friday night?”

  Conlon hesitated, torn between loyalty to the dead man and a desire to tell me how it was.

  “Inspector Dougherty wasn’t exactly a social drinker. When he drank, he drank, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I catch your meaning. Was he the senior detective here?”

  “Detective Chief Inspector Canning is the senior detective here. He’s in court today, I could try and page him?”

  “No, no, you’ll be fine. Tell me more about Inspector Dougherty; what sort of a man was he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Friendly, dour, a practical joker, what?”

  “Well, he was, uh, sort of semi-retired, so he was. Nobody really … I didn’t have much to do with him.”

  “Was he working on anything in particular in the last couple of days?” I asked.

  “I thought this was all a random IRA hit?” Conlon asked suspiciously.

  “It was a random IRA hit,” Tony said, looking up from the filing cabinet.

  “Did Dougherty mention any threats or anything that was troubling him?”

  “Not to me.”

  “To anybody else?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “What was he working on the last few days?”

  “I didn’t know him very well,” he said, hesitated, and looked out the window.

  “You don’t want to speak ill of the dead … is that the vibe I’m catching here?” I asked him.

  DC Conlon reddened, gave a little half nod and said nothing.

  “The Inspector didn’t do much but come in late, sit in his office, drink, leave early, drive home half drunk, is that it?” I wondered.

  DC Conlon nodded again.

  “But what about the last couple of days? Did he seem different? More fired up? Onto anything?”

  “Not so I’d noticed,” Conlon said.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary at all?”

  Conlon shook his head. His hair seemed to move independently of his head when he did that and it made him look particularly stupid.

  “How did he get assigned to the McAlpine murder if he was such a bloody lightweight?” I asked.

  “Chief Inspector Canning was in for his appendix,” Conlon said.

  “And after he came back from his appendix?”

  “Well, that was an open and shut case, wasn’t it?”

  “It’s hardly shut, son, is it? No prosecutions, no convictions?”

  Conlon coughed. “What I mean is, I mean, we know who done it, don’t we?”

  “Do we? Who done it? Gimme their names and I’ll have them fuckers in the cells within the hour,” I said.

  “I mean, we know who done it in the corporate sense. The IRA killed him.”

  “The corporate sense is it now? The IRA did it. Just like they killed Dougherty himself.”

  “Well, didn’t they?” Conlon asked.

  “Yes, they did,” Tony said. He waved a file at me.

  I looked at Conlon. “That’ll be all. And do us a favour, mate, keep your mouth shut.”

  “About what?”

  “Exactly. Now fuck off.”

  He exited the office and I closed the door.

  “What did you find, mate?” I asked Tony.

  “Nothing of interest in any of them. Dougherty has nothing in his ‘active’ file and there’s a layer of dust on everything else.”

  “I take it that’s the McAlpine file?”

  He slid it across the table to me.

  The last notes on it had been made in December. He’d added nothing since my visit.

  I shook my head. Tony squeezed my arm again. “Everybody can’t be as impressed by you as I am, mate. I’m afraid you didn’t wow Dougherty as much as you would have liked.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Tony was almost laughing now. “Maybe you should have worn your medal or told him about that time you met Joey Ramone.”

  “All right, all right. No point in raking me. Let’s skedaddle.”

  We straightened the desk, closed the filing cabinets.

  “And look, if you find a case notebook in the house or the car or anything, I’d be keen to take a look at it,” I said to Tony.

  “You got it, mate,” Tony assured me.

  “And I did see Joey Ramone, he was right across from me in the subway.”

  “Big stars don’t ride the fucking subway.”

  We had almost made it out of the incident room when young Conlon approached us diffidently. “Yes?” Tony wondered.

  “Well, it’s probably nothing.”

  “Go on,” I said encouragingly.

  “There was one thing that was a wee bit of the ordinary,” Conlon began.

  “What was it?” I asked, my heart rate quickening.

  “Well, Dougherty knows that I’m from Islandmagee, doesn’t he? And he knows that I take the ferry over here every morning, instead of driving round through Whitehead. It saves you twenty minutes.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s why he asked me how much it cost.”

  “He asked you how much the ferry cost from Larne to Islandmagee?”

  “Aye.”

  “And that was strange, was it?” Tony asked.

  “A wee bit. Because he hadn’t spoken to me at all this year. You know?”

  I looked at Tony. “He was going to take the ferry over to Islandmagee and he wanted to check the price.”

  Tony nodded.

  “Did he say anything else?” I asked.

  “Nope. I told him it was twenty pence for pedestrians and a quid for cars. And he thanked me and that was that.”

  I looked at Tony. He gave me a half nod.

  “You done good, son,” I told DC Conlon.

  Tony and I did the rounds, said hello to a couple of sergeants and left the station. We got in the Beemer and headed out into the street.

  “When he investigated McAlpine’s murder he would have had a driver. He would have gone over there in a police Land Rover the long way round through Whitehead. But he was going over himself in his own car,” Tony said.

  “Going to question Mrs McAlpine,” I said.

  “Possibly. What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch. “Nine thirty.”

  “I feel like that ad for the army: ‘We do more things before breakfast than you’ll do all day.’”

  “Aye, more stupid things.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shall we go do one more stupid thing?”

  “Aye.”

  I drove the Land Rover down into Larne and easily found the ferry over the Lough to Islandmagee. We paid the money and drove on. It left on the half hour and five minutes later we docked in Ballylumford, Islandmagee. “Let’s go see what alibi this bint of yours has cooked up for her whereabouts last night,” Tony said.

  15: SIR HARRY

  I drove the car over the cattle grid and up the lane marked “Private Road No Entry”.

  “What’s all this?” Tony asked, pointing out the window.

  “It’s a private road on private land.”

  “The IRA drove all the way up here on private land just to murder this woman’s husband?” Tony asked.

  “That’s what we’re supposed to believe.”

  “Well, I’ve seen stranger things.”

  “Me too.”

  The trail wound on, over a hill and down into the boggy valley.

  Tony sighed. “So, what about you, Sean? I haven’t really seen you since the hospital.”

  “I’m okay. What about you? How’s the missus? Any kids on the way?”

  “Nah, not yet. She’s keen as mustard but I’d rather wait until, uh, we’re more settled. You can’t b
ring kids up in a place like this…What about you and yon nurse lady?”

  “Doctor lady. She’s gone. Over the water.”

  “Over the water? Well, you can’t blame her, can you?”

  “No. You can’t.”

  “Hopefully that’ll be me in about a year. Then we can do kids, mortgage, the whole shebang.”

  “You’ve actually put in for a transfer?”

  “The Met. Keep it between us for now. There’s no future here, Sean. Bright young lad like yourself should consider it too. How tall are you?”

  “Five ten.”

  “You’d be fine. I think.”

  “What if I stood on tip toes.”

  “What’s keeping you here, Sean?” he asked, ignoring my facetiousness.

  “I wanna stay and be part of the solution.”

  “Jesus. They must be putting something in the water or planting subliminal messages in those health and safety films.”

  I laughed and we were about to turn into the McAlpines’ farm when a man with a shotgun came hurrying towards us.

  I put the Beemer in neutral and wound the window down.

  Tony put his hand on his service revolver.

  “Oi, youse! This is a private road,” the man yelled.

  “Put the gun down!” I yelled at him.

  “I will not!” he yelled back.

  “We’re police! Break open that gun this instant!” I howled at the fucker.

  He hesitated for a moment, but didn’t break open the shotgun and kept coming towards us at a jog. He was in green Wellington boots, khaki trousers, a white shirt, tweed shooting jacket and a flat cap. He was dressed in a previous generation’s get up but he was only about forty if he was a day.

  We got out of the Beemer, drew our weapons and put the car between him and us.

  “First time I’ve drawn my gun in two years,” Tony said.

  “A man shot at me with a shotgun just the other week,” I said.

  “I’ve been on the job eight years and I’ve never had anyone shoot at me.”

  “I’ve been shot at half a dozen times.”

  “What does that tell you about yourself?”

  “What does it tell you?”

  “It tells me that people don’t like you. You rub them the wrong way.”

  “Thanks, mate.”

  The man jogged along the track towards us. He had a couple of beagles with him. Beagles I noted, not border collies, so he wasn’t a farmer, or at least he wasn’t farming today. He arrived at the Beemer slightly out of breath but not in too bad nick considering his little run down the hill. He had a grey thatch, a long angular face and ruddy cheeks. His eyes were blue and squinty as if he spent all his down-time reading and rereading Country Life.