by Paul Charles
McCusker and Grace had never discussed moving in together. His place was cosy, but certainly not big enough that he’d ever subject her to living with him there. Her place was even “cosier”. He was just getting back on his feet again after his wife and their nest egg disappeared (together). He and Grace certainly weren’t teenagers, so he couldn’t expect her to wait around for him, like teenagers would, until they worked their way up the property ladder. McCusker was 15 years older than Grace O’Carroll, but she wasn’t as conscious of the age difference as McCusker knew her sister, Lily, would be. It felt good to be with Grace, it felt right. He knew that above all else. He shook his head to leave his thoughts behind and concentrated once more on the photograph.
‘What were your dreams, who did you love?’ McCusker whispered.
All he got in reply was Louis Bloom’s still-questioning eyes.
The doorbell rang.
McCusker knew it would not be good news.
Chapter Six
DS WJ Barr was usually the first police officer into the Customs House. He didn’t make a fuss over it; he was just always first in and last to go. Some thought he never left the place. He loved his work as a detective sergeant, and was ambitious. But not in a bad way – not in the way, say, the Customs House resident a-hole DI Jarvis Cage was.
Cage didn’t like hard work – strike that, he didn’t like work full stop. He coveted the glory though. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t very popular with his colleagues. He once went to Superintendent Larkin and quoted a regulation, which stated that members of the PSNI were not allowed to wear anything that could be taken as an offence by a member of the public. Cage claimed that WJ Barr’s Manchester United tie contravened that particular regulation. Larkin’s hands appeared to be tied, but he turned the immature action against Cage by addressing Barr in front of the entire team. He said that he had just received a complaint from a member of the public who claimed that Barr wearing the Man United tie while on duty had offended him. He asked Barr to remove the tie immediately. When Barr took it off (in front of the team) he handed it to Larkin who in turn immediately handed it to Cage saying, ‘You’re a Man United fan, aren’t you?’
‘No not at all, I’m a Liverpool supporter,’ Cage had replied, cagily.
‘Oh, you didn’t make that clear when you made your complaint,’ Larkin had continued, as he took the tie back again from Cage. ‘Your complaint, as a member of the public, is therefore not valid because you have a vested interest.’
He’d handed the tie back to Barr and added, for the benefit of the team, ‘and if you, DI Jarvis Cage, ever waste police time again, I’ll have DS Barr here investigate you for attempting to impersonate a police officer.’
There’d been howls of laughter as Cage was then sent to the basement to measure the sinkage since the last time he’d been down there. DS WJ Barr had worn his Man United tie every single day since.
In fact, he was wearing the now-famous black, red and white tie when he rang the doorbell of Mr and Mrs Louis Bloom’s house that morning.
He advised O’Carroll and McCusker that he’d been at his desk when a call came in from the gate lodge at the historic Friar’s Bush graveyard. The tenant of the lodge – a Miss Emmylou Holmes – had taken Bertie, her brown and white King George Cocker Spaniel. (Barr was a stickler for the details), out for an early morning comfort break. The usually well-behaved dog had scooted down to the overgrown, yet still groomed, pathway leading to the Botanic Gardens’ eight foot high walled border to the graveyard. The pup had taken a quick left up a gentle incline, and there, lying by a chained gate, among ruins that were in danger of being so overgrown that they’d soon disappear from view altogether, Miss Holmes had come across a spread-eagled body. She’d remained very calm, checked for a pulse and on finding none, “only ice cold skin,” had returned to the lodge immediately to call the PSNI.
Barr had been endeavouring to contact DI Lily O’Carroll, his direct senior, to report the discovery when the duty desk sergeant, Matt Devine, advised him that O’Carroll and McCusker were out on a VIP Misper in the same area and perhaps there might be a connection. He directed Barr towards the Bloom residence on Landseer Street.
O’Carroll claimed that she should stay at the Bloom household while Barr and McCusker went off to investigate Friar’s Bush graveyard. McCusker knew that this had a subtext – O’Carroll really didn’t trust Armstrong.
The rain of the previous evening had cleaned the air and McCusker felt more like he was about to head out for one of his favourite walks past the remains of the Strand Ballroom in Portrush and on to the East Strand Beach. The sky was a true blue and the extra early morning sun, though not hot – or even warm, for that matter – was lighting the scene as spectacularly as if it was a David Lean film, or “filum”, as McCusker insisted on pronouncing it.
They arrived four minutes later at the arched gothic, yet cute, gate lodge, which had been built by the Marquis of Donegall in 1828. A uniformed PSNI constable was on guard and opened the gate for Barr and McCusker taking them through the cobble-stoned entrance. There was a ginger cat snoozing on the window ledge on the inside of the arch.
McCusker wondered, as he walked along a grass-covered pathway, if the luscious blues, greens and wonderful sunlight were orchestrated so that all of those visiting graveyards might feel that their dear-departed were perfectly comfortable in their current surroundings.
The feel-good factor disappeared at the top of the slope as McCusker spotted two feet, through the growing and ever-moving limbs of the Crime Scene Investigators – in the graveyard. The soles of the two feet, a half a metre apart, faced McCusker, and he marvelled at just how unused the light tan rubber soles appeared. Unfortunately, the bedroom-slippered soles were attached, via feet and legs, to the remainder of a body, which was lying by the locked, iron gate of the ivy-covered Lennon Family Mausoleum.
McCusker walked carefully up the length of the body, and once he’d confirmed it was the remains of Louis Bloom, he walked on around the ruins, allowing the CSI – Crime Scene Investigators to busy themselves about the corpse. Mentally he still thought of them as SOCO offices but each time McCusker mentioned that particular acronym, O’Carroll glared at him until he corrected himself.
Louis Bloom’s big, brown eyes were as wide open and demanding in death as they had been in the photograph that had so troubled McCusker earlier that morning. That’s why he’d been happy enough to get away and busy himself with a search of the locale.
The Grafton Agency cop reckoned there wasn’t a lot of the original Mausoleum left standing and without the ivy, various trees and bushes, it would either be a public safety hazard (he did notice the sign attached to the gate back at the lodge, which stated that visits were strictly by appointment and always to be accompanied by a member of the dedicated council staff) or it would have collapsed altogether by now. Although the Mausoleum had been built in the 1860s, members of the Lennon family were buried in this particular location since 1760. McCusker wasn’t a history buff specialising in 18th- and 19th-century burial grounds. No, he gleaned the information from one of the several durable information cards helpfully peppered about the graveyard in strategic locations.
He also discovered that a disputed legend had it that St Patrick had built a church on this graveyard site and that Plaguey Hill, a mount to the left of the entrance, contained a mass grave of hundreds (some say thousands) of souls who had lost their lives as a result of cholera ravaging the community in the 1830s and the famine of the 1840s.
McCusker wondered what, if any, significance could be attached to the fact that Bloom’s remains were left by the Lennon Family Mausoleum. He wrote “Lennon” and “1860s” in his notebook. Who were the Lennons? A Belfast family? This modest-sized tomb was certainly no Taj Mahal but, in its day, it would still have been as magnificent if not as majestic as its counterpart in Agra, India. The Lennons would surely have been a family of considerable prosperity, but the structure might not have been a show-p
iece of their wealth (and perhaps even affection) as much as a way to protect the recently buried from the Resurrection Men (aka grave-robbers) intent on an equally lucrative, if not legitimate, profession.
The pathologist was considerately going about his work as McCusker gingerly concluded his circumference of ruins. He paused to acknowledge McCusker’s arrival.
‘Our victim…’ Robertson offered.
‘Mr Louis Bloom,’ McCusker interrupted, in a whisper.
‘Would that be pronounced Louis or Louie?’
‘Pronounced Louie, spelt Louis.’
Oh, you knew the man?’ Robertson said, sounding like Billy Connolly’s older brother but with the patter slowed way down by at least 50 percent.
‘We’ve just come from his house. His wife reported him missing, last evening,’ McCusker advised Robertson, who was writing away as they talked.
‘Well, all I can tell you is he didn’t put up a fight. There are no signs of a struggle.’
McCusker moved his attention back to the corpse. The black Barbour jacket that his wife had reported him wearing was open, revealing a red, logo-less, sweatshirt and black chinos. His New York Yankees baseball cap was missing, though. He was dressed in more of a “lounging around, watching TV outfit” than a QUB lecturer on downtime.
‘He didn’t meet his end here,’ Robertson continued, to an audience his eyes avoided.
‘Good to know,’ McCusker offered in acknowledgement of what the pathologist had said, while not admitting he understood.
‘Your Mr Louis Bloom has lost a lot of blood. I’m imaging he was stabbed, and from behind. I bet when we turn him over we’ll find a wound or wounds in his back. You’ll notice there is no blood in the ground around the body. So, my inference is that he was stabbed elsewhere and brought here afterwards.’
‘Okay,’ McCusker said. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
McCusker needed to find the crime scene, and soon. Before they knew it, the local workers and students would be flocking through Botanic Gardens and the surrounding streets, and, unless diverted, would destroy potentially vital evidence. McCusker needed to do too many things and immediately. He requested WJ Barr to take a couple of officers and search the Botanic Gardens everywhere, from the graveyard back to Bloom’s house. It had to be a request, rather than an order because, technically speaking, Barr, as an official member of PSNI, was McCusker’s senior. Barr wasn’t one to stand on ceremony, and he was as good spirited as ever and off like a shot.
‘Keep a lookout for a New York Yankees baseball cap, if you can find it – the scene of the crime won’t be too far away. Please cordon off the area immediately. If you can’t find it in the next half an hour we’re going to have to close the Gardens.’
McCusker needed to delay his examination of the victim. But he also needed to distract himself first. He found it very difficult to deal with what humans are capable of doing to each other. He needed to get beyond that point before he could start to attend to the “who did it, how they did it, and why they did it” section of the investigation. But once it reached the point where he became preoccupied with the mechanics of the mystery of the crime as opposed to the loss of life, he was okay. Totally okay. O’Carroll, on the other hand, would just breeze in there as if she’d just come from the set of The Sound of Music. She managed to separate the two big issues before she even arrived on the scene. McCusker sometimes wondered how she dealt with it. He’d asked her once.
‘Well, it’s very simple, McCusker,’ she’d replied, ‘I can either be preoccupied with that which I cannot change, that is, the loss of life, or I can be preoccupied with that which I can change, that is, finding those with criminal intent and ensuring they are never in a position to repeat their offence, and…’ she’d added when McCusker thought she’d finished, ‘I can spend some of the time I’ve managed to save, chasing for Mr Right.’
‘Okay. And how’s that currently going for you, O’Carroll?’
‘Oh I’ve only recently heard that Jenson Button has retired from F1. Jenson’s fit, but I’d never had him on my A-list. F1 is just too dangerous, but now that he’s retired – well, he’s pretty much shot up to the top of my wish list.’
‘Good luck with that,’ McCusker had replied, while thinking they had both found different ways to deal with what they did for a profession.
McCusker set about studying the remains of Louis Bloom and for the second time that morning he asked an image of Bloom’s former self, ‘What were your dreams? Who did you love?’
McCusker had already registered all of Louis’ clothes but the detective forced himself to go through the procedure once again, just so he could get started in earnest this time. Once again he noted that Louis Bloom was dressed in a black Barbour zip-up jacket, which was currently fully unzipped to reveal his red sweatshirt and black trousers. Louis Bloom looked like his life had been interrupted. His life had been interrupted – McCusker knew that for a fact. He had nipped out of his house to dump some rubbish. He had intended to return, most certainly within minutes, to watch a TV show with his wife.
But someone felt they’d had cause to steal the life from this poor cadaver lying before McCusker.
There was nothing more to be learned from the body and so McCusker agreed to allow Robertson and his assistant to slowly turn the body over.
As the pathologist had predicted, there was a single stab wound, mid-back and south of the shoulder blades. The lack of blood around the cut in the Barbour and sweatshirt was a testimony to just how effective and lethal the assailant had been. Robertson drew attention once more to the fact that there was no blood visible around the flattened grass.
‘I can’t tell you much more until I get him into the lab,’ Robertson said quietly.
McCusker hung on to the much from Robertson’s statement in the hope that there would at least be some more right away.
Robertson quickly picked up on this.
‘I’d say he was killed around,’ and he paused here to physically count off some hours on the fingers of his right hand, ‘no earlier than 9.00 and no later than 11.00, yesterday evening.’
Without even knowing that Superintendent Niall Larkin was on scene, let alone directly behind him, McCusker heard: ‘Everything under control Mr McCusker?’
Larkin acknowledged in front of the team how he understood the team seniority to be in O’Carroll’s absence.
‘All good, Sir,’ McCusker said, self-consciously. ‘You knew Louis Bloom?’
‘Yes, he’d be my brother-in-law,’ Larkin replied, taking the afforded opportunity to turn away from the remains of Bloom, ‘his wife Elizabeth is a sister to my wife Angela.’
‘Tell me this, Sir,’ McCusker replied, preparing to take advantage of his superior’s insider knowledge, ‘do you know this Al Armstrong character?’
‘Not a lot I’m afraid,’ Larkin replied, stroking his moustache as was his wont when he was keen to move on from where he currently was. ‘He’s a friend of Elizabeth’s, although I can’t for a minute see a reason why he would be.’
‘Would Mrs Larkin know Armstrong?’ McCusker asked.
Larkin looked at McCusker as though he was overstepping PSNI boundaries of decorum. ‘No more than I, McCusker, no more than I. But let me do a bit of checking for you and see what I can find out from my contacts.’
‘I’m on my way round to join DI O’Carroll at Mrs Bloom’s and break the news to her. Do you want to be there?’
‘She might get more emotional with me around,’ Larkin said, putting on his brown fedora. ‘On top of which, I’ve got to get back home and break the news to Angela, so she’s prepared when she gets the call from Elizabeth.’
Superintendent Larkin tipped the rim of his fedora as a goodbye and started to walk away. A few steps later he turned on his brilliantly polished black leather shoes and walked back towards McCusker.
‘I just wanted to say, McCusker, that Elizabeth rang Angela, a short while after you and DI O’Carroll arrived in
Landseer Street,’ he said, stroking his moustache again. ‘She said you were both extremely nice to her and were treating her seriously. Thank you both for that. I appreciate that.’
‘No problem, Sir.’
‘On top of which, you don’t know how happy I am that I didn’t follow my initial instincts when we got the call and (8 changed order of words) just turn over instead and to go back to sleep.’
McCusker grimaced slightly.
‘But believe you me, I’ve an even bigger nightmare than that,’ Larkin continued, ‘my first instinct was a budgetary-biased one, which had been to wake DI Jarvis Cage and put him on the case.’
McCusker unconsciously grimaced even more.
‘Aye, you’re correct, McCusker,’ Larkin continued, pulling energetically on his moustache, ‘you and O’Carroll and I most certainly would be up to our necks in the smelly stuff by this stage if I’d gone for that option.’
Larkin casually sauntered back towards the exit at the gate lodge, looking like he was Colonel Custer and had just managed to rewrite the history of Little Big Horn and escape with his scalp intact.
Chapter Seven
‘Was it my Louis?’ Mrs Louis Bloom, nee Elizabeth Kavanagh, exclaimed, the very second McCusker walked through the door.
She was flanked to the left by Al Armstrong and to the right and forward three feet (because she’d opened the door) by DI Lily O’Carroll. A phone continuously rang somewhere in the background.
‘I’m afraid…’ was as far as McCusker managed with his reply.
Mrs Bloom reacted like someone who had wished with all their might that something they dreaded might not happen. But now that she knew her wish was not about to be granted she seemed… she actually seemed to have been resigned to the fact she had seen the last of “her Louis” at five minutes to nine on the previous evening.