“This is private property and you are trespassing,” he said.
“We’re the police,” I said again.
“So you claim,” he said, and then after a brief pause he added, “and even if you are, you’ll still need a warrant to come onto my land.”
His accent was a little peculiar. Not Islandmagee, not local. It sounded 1930s Anglo-Irish. He’d clearly been educated at an expensive private school, one where they learned you to say “leand” instead of “land”.
“We’re here to see the widow McAlpine,” I said.
“She’s a tenant on my property and this is a private residence. I would prefer it if you would come back stating the precise nature of your business on a warrant.”
I ignored him and turned to Tony. “This is the influence of American TV. Second time this week I’ve been told to get a warrant by some joker. Not like this in the old days.”
Tony cleared his throat. “Listen, mate, you don’t want to mess with us. We’re conducting inquiries into a murder investigation. We can go wherever the hell we like.”
The geezer shook his head. “No, you cannot. It was my younger brother who was murdered and I have seen the efficacy or lack thereof in your procedures. The RUC have not impressed me with their competence these last months.”
“You’re Dougherty’s brother?” I asked.
“Who’s Dougherty? I am speaking of Martin McAlpine, Captain Martin McAlpine. My brother.”
“No, sir, we’re not investigating that murder. Not as such. We’re looking into the death of Detective Inspector Dougherty who was murdered last night in Larne. We wanted to ask Mrs McAlpine a few questions.”
“What on earth for?” the man asked.
“We’d like to speak to her about it, sir,” I insisted.
“I’ll not have Emma disturbed. She’s already had several visits from so-called detectives coming out to see her this week on various wild goose chases. I suppose her name popped up on one of your computers – well, let me tell you something, young man, I am not going to stand for it. She’s been very upset by all this. She’s a strong woman but this nonsense has taken a toll. You fellows are messing with people’s lives.”
“Sir, it’s our duty to investigate Inspector Dougherty’s murder and we know for a fact that he came here recently to see Mrs McAlpine. We need to find out what they were talking about and so we will be questioning Mrs McAlpine and there is nothing, sir, that you can do about it,” I said with authority.
His cheeks reddened and he made a little grunting sound like a sow rooting for truffles. He rummaged in one of the pockets of his shooting jacket and removed a notebook and pencil.
“And what is your name, officer?” he asked me.
“Detective Inspector Sean Duffy, Carrickfergus RUC.”
“And yours?” he asked Tony.
“Detective Chief Inspector Antony McIlroy, Special Branch.”
“Good,” he said, writing the names in his book. “You will both be hearing from my solicitors.”
“I’ll look forward to that,” Tony said, and then went on: “May we inquire as to your name, sir?”
“I am Sir Harry McAlpine,” he announced, as if that was supposed to make us fall to our knees or genuflect or something.
“Fine, now if you’ll kindly move to one side, we’ll be about our business,” Tony said.
He moved. We got back in the BMW.
“Watch your dogs,” I said, and turned the key in the ignition.
“Funny old git,” Tony said.
“I’ll tell you something funny,” I began.
“What?”
“He lets two armed men go to his sister-in-law’s house only a couple of months after her husband, his brother, has been shot by a couple of armed men on a motorbike.”
“We told him we were police,” Tony protested.
“Aye, we told him, but he didn’t actually ask to see our warrant cards and he wasn’t surprised to see us, was he?”
“Which means?”
“He knew we were the police and he knew we were coming.”
“Because of Dougherty?”
“Because of Dougherty.”
“Why fuck with us, then?”
“He wanted to introduce himself, he wanted us to know that Emma McAlpine was the sister-in-law of Sir Harry McAlpine.”
“What good does that do?”
“He wanted to put the fear of God up us.”
“It didn’t work because neither of us have bloody heard of him.”
“I have an ominous feeling that we’re going to though, eh?”
Tony nodded and we drove into the familiar McAlpine farmyard.
Cora was chained up under an overhang, but soon began barking and snapping at us.
“Friendly dog,” Tony said.
“She does that, when she’s not tearing your throat out or watching calmly while two terrorists shoot her master.”
We got out of the car and walked across the muddy farmyard.
The hens were out, pecking at crumbs, and a proprietary rooster gave us the evil eye from a fence post.
There was a note on the front door:
“Gone to get salt. Back soon.”
I took it off and showed it to Tony, who was a little nearsighted.
“You think she means that literally?” Tony asked.
“What else could she mean?”
“I don’t know. Could be a country euphemism for something.”
Tony looked at his watch. This had been fun and all. But he was a man in a hurry and he had things to do. It didn’t matter about my time but his was valuable.
“I suppose we’ll wait for her,” I said.
“Aye,” Tony answered dubiously.
“Speaking of notes … Uhm, in your long and storied career has anyone ever sent you an anonymous note about a case?”
“All the time, mate. Happens all the time. In fact, I’d say that I get more anonymous tips than ones from people who actually come forward to be identified. Why, what did you get? You look worried.”
“Some character left me a note that was a verse from the Bible.”
Tony laughed. “Ach, shite, is that all? You should see the bollocks we get in Special Branch. Bible verses, tips about who may or not be a Soviet agent or the Antichrist … you name it, Sean. Last week we had a boy who got passed up to us from Cliftonville RUC, who had convinced them that he was ‘the real Yorkshire Ripper’. The cops in Cliftonville actually thought we might want to interview him.”
“‘Now I see through a glass darkly’ was the verse.”
“I remember that one. That’s popular with the nuts. Is that from the Book of Revelation?”
“Corinthians. It was a woman who left me the note. English accent maybe. She left me a note at Victoria Cemetery and then she went off on a motorbike.”
Tony pulled out his smokes and offered me one. We went over to the stone wall and sat down on it. Two fields over a horse was tied up against a tumbledown shed. Three fields the other way there was chimney smoke coming from the big house at the top of a hill – almost certainly the home of the lord of the manor. The rain, thank God, had taken a momentary breather in its relentless guerrilla war against Ireland.
“Go on,” Tony said.
“I called it in and they found the girl and arrested her and took her to Whitehead RUC. She spent a few hours in the cells and then she was supposedly taken away by a couple of goons from Special Branch. One of them was a guy called McClue – a fake name if ever I heard it – and of course when I called up Special Branch there was no McClue and no one had been sent to get her in Whitehead.”
Tony frowned. “Several things occur to me. First, if you had found her, what would you have charged her with? Leaving you a strange message and riding away on her motorbike? What crime is that? You’d be looking at a bloody lawsuit, mate. Secondly, who is she? Certainly not a lone nut if she had a couple of friends who were willing to pose as Special Branch agents to come get her.”
“So, not a nutter.”
“Or maybe she could be a very persuasive nutter. It’s the sort of thing a student would do, or a bored paramilitary or …”
“Or what?”
“You know what. A ghost. A fucking spook. Northern Ireland is thick with them.”
“MI5?”
“MI5, Army Intel, MI6. Or, like I say, a nutter, a student, one of your no doubt many dissatisfied lovers, a bored paramilitary playing you for a sap or a very bored spook also playing you for a sap.”
Tony’s pager went. He picked it up and examined the red flashing light.
“They’re looking for me. You think I could break into the widow McAlpine’s house and use her phone?”
“What would Sir Harry think? He’s probably watching us through a set of field glasses.”
“I doubt that. I’ll bet he’s furiously writing a letter to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland who, no doubt, is a second cousin twice removed.”
I nodded and blew a double smoke ring. Tony’s pager went again.
“Fucksake!” Tony said. “I should never have left the bloody crime scene. The fuck was I thinking?”
“Tony mate, go back in the BMW, tell them you were following a lead and send some reservist back here with the car. I’ll wait until the widow McAlpine shows up.”
“I can take your wheels?” Tony asked.
“Sure.”
“I wouldn’t normally, but I am lead and maybe we shouldn’t be buggering off round the countryside like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.”
“Hope and Crosby? Christ, Tony, you need new material, mate. Have you heard about this rock and roll phenomenon that’s sweeping the land?”
“You’re sure I can take the car?”
“Aye!”
“You’re a star. And you’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
The deal was done. Tony pumped my hand and got in the Beemer.
He wound the window down. “Stay away from trouble,” he said.
“You should warn trouble to stay away from me.”
“Young widows in lonely farmhouses …” he said with a sigh, revved the Beemer and forced the clutch into an ugly second gear start.
16: SALT
I was glad that he was gone. I wanted to talk to Mrs McAlpine alone and to follow up with Sir Harry alone. Tony was too much of an equal. It required weight to deal with him and I needed the emotional space to think.
I walked to the farmhouse again and tried the door.
She’d locked it.
What country person locks their door?
“Maybe one who’s just had her husband gunned down by strangers,” I said to myself.
Cora barked at me.
The rooster gave me the eye.
I looked at the horse tied up across the fields and I looked at the track up to the manor.
The latter was less muddy than the former.
“The big house first, I think,” I said.
The slope was on a one in seven gradient that was a little taxing and I had to catch my breath at the top of it when I reached the stone wall around the house and the estate. There was an old lodge that had been boarded up but no actual gate itself.
There were assorted farm buildings along the wall and a short drive to the house lined with palm trees. Coconut palms, by the look of them, always an odd sight in Ireland but not uncommon: sailors had been bringing them back in pots for centuries.
A brisk walk underneath them brought me to the house. There were two cars parked outside: an Irish racing green Bentley S2 Continental and a black Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Both vehicles were about twenty years old and had certainly not been designed for country living. They were the worse for wear, particularly the Bentley, which was rusted almost to scrap. I wondered if the engine still turned over, but if it did the best you could have done with it was drive it to the junk yard. The Roller was in better nick but not much: the rear suspension was gone, the fenders were dinged and the original paint job had been touched up with what looked like house paint. Both vehicles were caked with mud and bird shit. I loved cars and this was a crying shame.
I gave the house a butcher’s: mid-century Georgian, red sandstone, three floors, a steep slate roof and a large wooden door that once had been painted a garish bright blue but which now had faded into a pleasing mottled indigo. The original, elegantly high, curved windows had been replaced by squat square jobs in brown frames. A black, sinister ivy was growing over two thirds of the house and all the third-floor windows were a suffocated tenebrous jungle. At least the ivy helped conceal the house’s shambolic condition, but if you looked closely you could see the unrepaired cracks in the walls, the missing tiles in the roof and the strange lean of the entire structure a good ten degrees off the verticle.
I was vibing a classic case of the aristo fallen on hard times: big empty rooms, mad woman in the attic, eldest daughter marrying some garish Yank with money.
I crunched on the gravel and walked up moss-covered granite steps to the porch.
I rang an ancient-looking push bell and contemplated a sour-looking cat who was sleeping on a heap of old newspapers. At least, I assumed he was sleeping, as he didn’t seem to breathe once.
A middle-aged woman came to the door. She was wearing an apron and looked annoyed. “He’s not in, so he’s not,” she said in a pissed-off West Belfast accent.
“Where is he?”
“Out with the dogs, so he is.”
I showed her my warrant card.
“Poliss, is it? Is there anything wrong? Will I get Betty?”
“Who’s Betty?”
“The housekeeper, Mrs Patton.”
“And who are you?”
“Cook. Aileen.”
“Who is else is in the house?”
“No one else. Ned will be with the horses.”
“Is that everyone?”
“Yes.”
I wrote the names in my notebook.
“Is there a wife, girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Can I come in?” I asked.
“I suppose so,” Aileen said.
I followed into her a rather gloomy looking hall with dark wood panelling and a staircase curving to the upper floors. There were hunting trophies on the wall, something I had not seen before anywhere in Ireland. Huge stags but also lions, leopards, a cheetah – all from another age.
The place was dusty and it smelled of mildew. The smell was so bad, in fact, that I gagged, and to cover my embarrassment I pointed at the beheaded animals.
“Do they not give you the willies, love? All them eyes looking down at you,” I said in the demotic.
She laughed. “Aye, they’re desperate so they are.”
“Is it from himself?” I asked.
I could tell now that Aileen was a Catholic. It was hard to say how I could tell but I could. Accent, body language, who knew? Sir Harry wasn’t a raging bigot then.
“No, no. From his da or his grand da more than likely,” she said.
“What does he do for fun?”
“When he’s not in his office in Belfast he just likes the quiet time. Potters around the garden, reads in his library.”
“Terrible about his brother, the captain in the army.”
“Shocking, so it was. Shocking.”
“I suppose you didn’t hear the killing from here?”
“Oh, no. It’s too far away. We didn’t hear anything.”
“And there were no witnesses?”
“From up here? No.”
“Was Sir Harry at home that day?”
“He was out in the garden, I think. He went over straight away. Of course there was nothing he could do.”
“No. Martin was his younger brother?”
“Yes. Eight or nine years between them, I think.”
I shook my head. “Must have been awful that morning.”
“Oh yes, I’ll never forget that day. Shocking, so it was. Such a cowardly act. They’
re vermin. Vermin shooting a man in the back.”
“He was shot in chest,”
Her eyes scolded me. “What does it matter! What does that matter? What are you here for, anyway? I told you Sir Harry was out. Wait here.”
Before I could call her back she vanished through a door and a rather different woman appeared in blue suit, white pearls and a black bouffant. She was about forty, thin, thin-lipped, and there was a touch of old Hollywood in her heavy lidded eyes and defiant unfeminine chin.
She walked towards me, all systems bristling. “May I see your identification?” she asked.
I showed her the warrant card.
“I take it that you’re Mrs Patton?” I asked.
She nodded. She was from Derry, by the sound of it. Brisk and business-like. I dug the whole Rebecca scene, but if she was Mrs Danvers and Sir Harry was Max de Winter, what did that make me – Joan fucking Fontaine?
I took out my fags.
“Oh, there’s no smoking in here,” Mrs Patton said.
I put the cigarettes back in my pocket with a mumbled “Excuse me”.
A little victory for the home team, there.
“And how can we be of service today?” she asked.
“I need to see Sir Harry. I was wondering if I could, uh, if I could wait for him in your lovely garden,” I said, putting on a bit of my Glens accent.
“The garden? Why?” she said, both disarmed and suspicious.
“I’m a bit of flower nut and I thought I could spend some time there until Sir Harry comes back. I’ve heard wonders about his garden.”
“You wish to wait for Sir Harry in his garden?”
“If it doesn’t put anyone out.”
“No … I, uh, I don’t expect that it would.”
She looked at me and nodded curtly. “Follow me,” she said.
We went through a spotless kitchen, all gleaming surfaces and pots on hooks. The appliances had all been brand new in about 1975. Sir Harry didn’t seem like the sort of man who would let his cars rot but get expensive kitchen gear. It must be a feminine influence. His wife had bought that kit, a wife who was, now, where exactly?
I Hear the Sirens in the Street Page 15