What’s that all about? I asked myself repeatedly for the next two hours and got no answers at all.
13: THE GIRL ON THE BIKE
I was in Ownies getting a pub dinner when the beeper went. I asked Arthur if I could borrow his phone and when I tracked it down it turned out to be a message from central dispatch in Ballymena. They had got my girl! An army patrol had nabbed her on her motorbike heading north out of Carrick and they’d handed her over to the police. She was now at Whitehead Police Station.
“Well, well, well,” I said, and grinned at Arthur.
“Good news?”
“Aye, could be, mate. Could be.”
I ran back to the barracks, jumped in the Beemer, hit a ton on the Bla Hole road and was at Whitehead Cop Shop in eight minutes. It was a small police station, unmanned at the weekends. Four police reservists and an inspector ran the show.
I found the duty officer, a freckly kid called Raglan with a David Soul haircut and a feeble ginger tache.
“I need to interview your prisoner,” I said.
“The prisoner?”
“Aye, presumably you’ve only the one.”
“She’s left already,” Raglan said.
“What?”
“She left.”
“Who the fuck with?”
“A couple of superintendents from Special Branch.”
“You get their names?”
“McClue was one of them, I forget the other. Is there a problem?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll follow up with bloody Special Branch and see.”
“You just missed them by about half an hour.”
“Tell me about her – what did she look like? Was she English?”
“She didn’t talk a lot. She was good-looking. She looked Scottish. Sort of blondy-reddy hair. About thirty, maybe younger, maybe older. Sort of not very interesting. A bit old to be joyriding a stolen motorbike, I thought.”
“Did you take her photograph, her prints?”
“Special Branch called us and told us to hold off on that.”
“Special Branch phoned you up and told you not to fingerprint her?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a bit strange, no?”
“Well, them boys in Special Branch are always a bit strange, aren’t they?”
“You must have searched her.”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“I wrote it down here.”
He looked up a notepad and read: “On her person there were: a set of keys, a pair of gloves, a notepad and a paperback book called Doctor Faustus.”
“And where is all that stuff now?”
“Special Branch took it with them.”
I nodded.
“When was she brought in?” I asked.
“The Army dropped her off around four.”
“You didn’t process her then?”
“No. Not at that time. We took her right to the cells and give her a pillow and a blanket.”
“And she said nothing?”
“Not then.”
“Did you ask her name at least?”
“Aye. Of course!”
“And?”
“Alice Smith.”
“Alice Smith?”
“Alice Smith.”
“Hmmm. And how did Special Branch get involved?”
“About six I brought her a cup of tea and she thanked me and asked if she could make her phone call.”
“And you let her?”
“It’s her right, isn’t it?”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, she made her call and ate a biscuit and I escorted her back to her cell and about five minutes later I get a call saying Special Branch is on their way and not to process her.”
“You didn’t think that was odd? The timing, I mean.”
“No.”
“And they show up when?”
“About half an hour ago, like I said.”
“Were they in uniform?”
“No.”
“They have ID?”
“I didn’t think it was necessary to check. I mean, they said they were on their way and then they showed up.”
“Describe them.”
“Just a couple of blokes. Suits, ties … I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“Did they sign for her? Anything like that?”
“Are they supposed to?”
“You let two strangers come in here and take a suspect out of the cells and you didn’t check their IDs or ask them to sign for her?”
“She was only in for bike theft, wasn’t she?”
I walked down to the cells to see if she’d left anything there.
She hadn’t.
I spent the next hour calling Special Branch.
Of course there was no Superintendent McClue and no officers had been sent to Whitehead Police Station to pick up a suspect. This was as I had expected. I ran the name Alice Smith through the database but nothing of interest came up.
I walked to the nearest Eason’s in Carrick and bought myself a copy of Doctor Faustus. Baroque wasn’t the word. Made Henry James seem like Jackie Collins. Not the kind of book I’d bring on a stakeout, but none of this play was the way I would have done things. It was very much amateur hour which could mean anything from civilians on a jape to the goons on Gower Street who still prided themselves on their “amateur” status.
Bath. Vodka gimlet. King James Bible. No luck on seeing through the glass darkly. Ask Presbyterian church elder McCrabban in the morning and get his take. Probably bollocks. Cryptic messages were for spy films and crazy people. In my experience when people wanted to tell you something they bloody told you. That was the Ulster way. Best to say nothing but when you do speak make sure that you are understood.
I went to bed with Doctor Faustus and its powerful soporific qualities became readily apparent.
14: A VERY ORDINARY ASSASSINATION
The clock radio woke me at 7.06. I’d been fiddling with the alarm for several days now and I had precisely timed it for when the news bulletin ended and BBC Radio One would only be playing music. These days only a madman would want to wake to the actual news. The Beeb could be relied upon to do things on schedule. The talk and the bulletin were indeed over and the song was “Hanging on the Telephone” by Blondie.
I listened to the song, had a quick Debbie Harry fantasy, and got of bed.
Stairs. Kitchen.
Doorbell. It was a tinker disguised in drink, offering to pave my driveway for twenty quid. When I told him I didn’t have a driveway he said he’d fix my broken electrical appliances or recite a verse from the Tain for a shilling. I let him recite me some poetry and gave him fifty pence if promised not to tell his mates I was a soft touch.
After toast and two cups of coffee I finally put on the eight o’clock Radio Ulster News. The policeman’s murder was not the headline. It was only the fourth lead after three separate stories about the Task Force’s adventures in the Falkland Islands. Some wars, it seemed, were more important than others.
“In Ballygalley, north of Larne, a full-time RUC officer was shot dead outside his home late last night. Inspector David Dougherty, fifty-nine, was divorced with one child. The Provisional IRA claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to the BBC using a recognised code word. Ian Paisley, the MP for the constituency, called Inspector Dougherty’s murder ‘a reprehensible act of murder in the continuing IRA campaign of genocide against the Protestant people’. The Inspector’s widow could not last night be reached for comment. In other news Harland and Wolff shipyard have laid off a further five hundred welders under a restructuring—”
There could only be one Inspector David Dougherty at Larne RUC.
I switched off the radio, went back upstairs, got dressed in my black polo neck sweater, black jeans, DM shoes, black raincoat. I put my leather shoulder holster under the raincoat, picked up my Smith and Wesson and checked that there were six rounds in the barrel.
“Right,” I said, and slipped outside.
I looked under the car for a mercury tilt bomb, found nothing, opened the door, wound down the windows, put the key in the ignition.
There was a whoosh through the vents which, for a brief unhappy moment, I thought was the percussion wave of an explosion, but it was just a whoosh of cold air.
At that moment the black woman I had seen before came out of the vacant house at the end of Coronation Road. She was wearing a purple dress with a red trim. Carrickfergus women didn’t wear purple dresses. And again, for another half a beat, I wondered if I hadn’t in fact just been killed in an explosion.
The engine turned over and the BMW roared into life.
I let out the hand brake, engaged the clutch and drove past her. She looked at me through the windscreen. I nodded a good morning. She smiled. She was very thin and very good-looking – the women on Coronation Road would no doubt begin spreading rumours about her immediately. Was she a student? A refugee? If so, God help her that she had ended up in Northern Ireland.
I was in the mood for no more news so I put on Radio Three and endured Brahms for ten minutes before switching off the radio and listening to nothing but the German-engineered pistons going about their efficient business.
Ballygalley was fifteen miles up the coast, just beyond Larne.
Nice little place with a castle, a beach, a caravan park and a couple of shops. Dougherty’s house wasn’t hard to find. The one with all the police Land Rovers and the van from the BBC outside.
It was a bungalow on a little rise at the end of a cul-de-sac.
I parked down the street, flashed my warrant card to the reserve constables protecting the crime scene and found the detective in charge, Chief Inspector Tony McIlroy, who was an old mate from my days in Bandit Country on the South Armagh border.
Tony was one of the lead detectives in the RUC Assassination Unit which investigated all police murders in Northern Ireland. The RUCAU looked for similarities, common weapons, common strategies etc. in crimes against coppers. We took it personally when the terrorists killed one of our own and it wasn’t unfair to say that the murder of a peeler attracted more money and resources than other murders in the Province. The miserable clearance rate, of course, was about the same: less than ten per cent. Unless the terrorists made a mistake or someone grassed very few of these murders ever resulted in a prosecution (although quite often we would find out who the trigger man on a particular hit had been).
Tony had a degree in criminology from Birmingham University, a wife who was the daughter of a Conservative English MP, a father who was a prominent Belfast barrister, and he had spent a year on secondment to the Met. He was a high-flyer even back then in South Armagh when he’d been a lowly detective sergeant and I a freshly minted DC. Tony would be a chief superintendent by the age of forty and probably chief constable by fifty (chief constable of a force over the water that is, for Northern Ireland was too small a place to contain his ambitions forever).
He shook my hand. “What’s the good word, Sean, me old mucker?”
“Tony, everybody knows that the bird is the word.”
“They do indeed. What have you been up to, Sean?”
“The usual. I’ve got a play opening in the West End, oh, and fingers crossed, I think I’ve just discovered a tenth planet. Gonna name it after me mum. You look good, Tony, wee bit tubby, but who isn’t,” I said.
“You look as if you’re on the heroin diet. And grey hairs? Must be your guilty conscience, Sean, my lad.”
“Grey hairs from hard work, mate.”
He leaned in. “Hey, seriously, congratulations on the medal and the promotion,” he said, with genuine affection.
“Cheers, mate,” I replied with equal amounts of fondness.
He was pale-skinned, and some of that famous shock of red hair was also greying at the temple, but he looked fit, focused, professional. He had acquired rectangular glasses that gave him a professorial air.
“What brings you out here, Sean?”
“I knew Dougherty a little bit. What can you tell me about this business?”
Tony shook his head and took a cigarette from my packet of Marlboros.
“Standard stuff, Sean.”
“Nothing special about it?”
“Nah. Your common or garden IRA hit. Two shooters probably. Or one shooter, one driver. Parked outside his house, a little ways down the street, waited until our boy got home. Popped him as soon as he exited his car. Pretty soft target living here at the end of the cul-de-sac.”
“A bead on the shooters?”
“If I had to guess I’d say it was the West Belfast Brigade, probably a team under Jimmy Doogan Reilly.”
“Pretty adventurous for them to come way up here, no?”
“Nah, they’re always looking to expanding their op zones and if you hoofed it you could be back in Belfast in half an hour.”
“Definitely IRA then?”
“Well, not definitely, but almost certainly.”
Almost every peeler who was murdered in Northern Ireland was murdered by the IRA, usually in one of three methods: a mercury tilt bomb under their car, an ambush by an IRA assassination cell, or in a mass bomb attack on a police station.
“If you’ve got the time, you couldn’t lead me through the physical evidence?”
Tony looked at me askance. “Was this a really good mate of yours or something?”
“Not really, I only knew him through a case of my own.”
Tony opened his mouth, closed it again, perhaps thinking that when the time was right, I’d tell him.
“Okay,” he said, “Over here.”
We walked to the top of the driveway where Dougherty’s Ford Granada was still parked. There was dried blood on the gravel but the body of course was long since gone to the morgue in Larne.
“They shot him at point blank range. Poor bastard managed to get his sidearm out but it was too late. He was done for. Didn’t even get a round off.”
The Ford Granada’s door was closed, which meant they’d waited until he was fully out of the car and was walking towards the house.
“He got his sidearm out?” I asked, surprised.
“Aye.”
“He was shot in the front or the back?”
“The front, why?” he asked, his eyes, narrow, sensing an angle like a stoat on a rat.
“Why didn’t they just shoot him in the back? Bang, bang, bang, you’re dead, John Lennon style.”
“Nah, nah, there’s nothing untoward, mate. They did try and shoot him from behind but the fuckers missed. Our pal Dougherty turns to confront them, half draws his piece and they plug the poor unfortunate sod in the ticker.”
“How do you know they missed?”
“Three bullets in the garage door, look.”
Sure enough three bullets in the garage door.
But didn’t that make things even stranger?
“Okay, so they missed him and he turns to face them and he almost draws his piece and then they plug him. Right?”
“Right.”
“But that raises an additional question.”
“Which is?”
“The question of why they missed?”
“What? Why they missed?”
“Aye. This is a professional hit team, isn’t it?”
“It’s a bloody gun battle, Sean, a couple of bullets are bound to go a bit wild, aren’t they? Even Lee Harvey Oswald missed with his first shot, didn’t he?”
“Did they find the murder weapon?”
“No. And we won’t. It’ll be at the bottom of the Irish Sea by now.”
“The IRA called it in?”
“They did. Admitted responsibility with a recognised code word.”
“What were their exact words?”
Tony took a notebook out of his sports jacket pocket and flipped it open. He read the IRA statement. “They said, they regretted that this killing was necessary but that the cause of it was the Brit
ish occupation of Ireland.”
“What was the IRA code word?”
“Wolfhound.”
“Which has been current since?”
“January.”
“January of this year?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s authentic?”
“Oh, aye.”
I nodded.
Tony squeezed my arm. “What’s this all about?” he asked. “Tell me.” Tony was slightly taller than me and he was certainly bigger framed. When he squeezed you it hurt.
I sighed and shook my head. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Go on. Spill,” he said.
“I was talking to Dougherty about one of his old cases. It was a loose end. Nothing really to do with me at all. I’m working on something else.”
“What?”
I filled him in on the body in the suitcase and Mr O’Rourke from Massachusetts.
“And how does it tie to Dougherty?”
“It doesn’t. Not really.”
He squeezed me again. “No secrets, Sean.”
“It’s not a secret. It’s just a bit of a wild goose chase that I’m slightly embarrassed to bring up in front of such an august detective as yourself.”
He laughed at that but he kept staring at me in a way which made me see that I wasn’t going to get away with anything less than the whole story.
“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.”
I Hear the Sirens in the Street t-2 Page 13