Belfast Noir

by Adrian McKinty

  “Have you checked out the drug dealers Butler was dealing with? They should be your prime suspects.”

  “They are the prime suspects, that’s why we want to be able to eliminate you from our enquiries, so that we can focus entirely on them and not waste time.”

  “Off the record?”

  Chambers nodded. “Off the record.”

  “I detest Butler. He is a cowardly thug who likes to beat up on young girls. Will I lose any sleep if something appalling has happened to him? No. Have I anything to do with his disappearance? Unfortunately not. Satisfied?”

  “For now.” Chambers closed the notepad. “If you remember anything of importance, will you contact me?”

  “My birthday’s in a few days. How’s that for importance?”

  Chambers turned and walked away.

  * * *

  Saturday morning. Early. Too early for some. The doorbell sounded in Karl’s office. Four impatient rings.

  “What the hell . . . ?” Karl moaned from beneath the warmth of the duvet. “Naomi?”

  She turned onto her side, a pillow jammed against her ear.

  “Naomi? Can you get that? My head’s killing me.”

  “Your feet aren’t, so get it yourself. I warned you last night about drinking so much Hennessy.”

  Tamed, Karl proceeded trance-like down the stairs.

  Four more rings.

  “All bloody right! I hear you!”

  Opening the front door, he was greeted by Sean, the postman, holding letters and a small package. “Morning, Karl.”

  “Never mind that oul’ shite, Hans Brinker. Do you like sticking your bloody fingers in holes that don’t belong to you?”

  “Who the hell’s Hans Brinker?”

  “Read a book and find out.”

  “You look rough, like you’ve been boozing and cruising when you should’ve been snoozing—”

  Karl snapped the mail from Sean’s hand before slamming the door in his face. Made his way upstairs. Yawning.

  Once back inside, he sat on the sofa. Checked the senders’ names on the envelopes. Tore up four as junk. The other was from the bank. He wanted to rip that up as well, but thought better of it. Left it on the table. Began opening the package.

  Inside, a small see-through plastic sleeve used for storing stamps and the like. He eased it out. A small opaque shadow could be seen within the sleeve. Holding it to the light, he scrutinised the contents.

  “A double-headed mermaid . . . ?” Then it struck him what it was; more importantly, where he’d seen it. “Oh shit . . .”

  * * *

  “I suspect that at one time it belonged to Graham Butler. His left forearm, if my memory serves me correctly. Someone has peeled it from his skin.”

  “How can you be so certain this is Butler’s skin, Mr. Kane?” Detective Chambers asked, sitting alongside McCormack at Karl’s desk.

  McCormack was studying the tattoo, gripping the tiny envelope with tweezers. He seemed absorbed in the ghastly slice of inky flesh.

  “I don’t want to go into particulars, but you have my word on that.”

  McCormack made a mocking sound with his throat. “Your word?”

  “That’s right. My word, McCormack. Don’t forget, I could easily have thrown the tattoo in the bin. No one would have been any the wiser.”

  The corner of McCormack’s upper lip curled with contempt. “You called it in because you were afraid that down the line, word would eventually get out that you had destroyed evidence. Self-preservation. That’s you in a nutshell. You’re up to your neck in something. I can smell it.”

  “That’s your body odour you smell,” Karl said.

  “Why would someone send it to you?” Chambers asked.

  “How the hell would I know? Ask the people who made him disappear. Butler was probably bringing too much heat down on them with all the bad publicity he received in the media. Perhaps they were telling me case closed. I don’t know.”

  Chambers seemed unconvinced as he walked to the door. “I’m sure we’ll be in contact again, Mr. Kane. Good day.”

  McCormack stood there for a few seconds before moving toward the door, a cynical smile on his overgrown face. “Oh, we will be in contact. Soon, Mr. Kane.”

  * * *

  Two days later, leading drug dealer Nelson Roberts was charged with the abduction and suspected murder of Graham Butler. Yet Karl took scant interest in the arrest, having more pressing matters to contend with . . .

  “Happy birthday, big fella,” Naomi said, kissing Karl while handing him his birthday present.

  “I told you I didn’t want any fuss made. Why doesn’t anyone listen to me?” Karl said grinning, quickly unwrapping the box like a kid on Christmas morning. “What the hell . . . ? A bloody phone? I already have a phone.”

  “Not like this you don’t. It’s an iPhone. The latest model.”

  “For God’s sake, Naomi. You know I’m not into all these new gadgets. Too complicated.”

  Well, you’ll just have to get used to it, instead of that ugly brick you call a phone. You’ve got to move with the times.”

  Karl sighed. “All I asked for was some Old Spice aftershave. Something simple, like me.”

  “Would you stop grumbling, and pretending you don’t like—”

  The door opened, revealing Lipstick, smiling. She gave Naomi a hug before walking over to Karl and planting a big kiss on his cheek.

  “Happy birthday, Karl. Hope you like it,” Lipstick said, handing him a small, package covered in birthday paper.

  Before he unwrapped the package, Karl could tell from the shape what it was. He dreaded what he would have to say to Lipstick, refusing to accept a dead man’s stolen watch, no matter how expensive. Her feelings would be hurt, terribly, but that couldn’t be helped.

  “Well? Do you like it?” Lipstick asked, as he slowly brought the watch out of the box, studying it.

  “A Timex . . . ?”

  “You don’t like it?” Lipstick said, disappointment in her voice.

  “No! No, I love it . . .”

  “I thought it perfect for you, especially after reading its wee saying inside the box.”

  Karl tilted the box, read the Timex motto engraved on the inside, grinned, and then read it out loud. “Timex. Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking.”

  DIE LIKE A RAT

  BY GARBHAN DOWNEY

  Malone Road

  For every story a newspaper publishes, there are nine more it will never print. This is one of them . . .

  Spotty John Norway’s weirdly disfigured corpse was found nose-down in the pool of the Oxfordian, a private health club hidden away off one of the Malone Road’s leafy laneways. The burn marks were largely confined to Norway’s face and forehead, though there were also some patches on his neck and upper chest, presenting Inspector Jim Cotton with a problem.

  “It’s strange enough, Rex, that he was a member of that club in the first place,” Cotton said. “A court clerk like him would earn what? Twenty grand a year? And I know he made a bit on the side—say another ten, tops. But a club like this would run you five, easy. Why would a man voluntarily hand over a sixth of his income, particularly when—and I mean no disrespect to the dead here—Spotty John would have needed every red cent he had to pull any colour of a girl?”

  I looked down at the morgue tray and tried hard not to breathe in.

  “Don’t think even John would have argued with you on that score.”

  On his best day, Spotty John would have been too hideous to play the “before” guy in the Blitz Those Zits ad. But this evening, his head looked for all the world like it’d been parboiled then dipped in a deep-fat frier. Smelled like it too.

  And people wonder why I won’t eat bacon.

  Cotton, fair play to him, had called me in to do the identification and spare the Norway family the nightmares. He knew the chances of me getting a decent night’s sleep, after ten years on the crime beat with the Belfast Standard, were slimmer than
my pay packet. Way too many carved-up bodies and scenes like this.

  “The burns,” he said, “are probably from scalding water. Steam, maybe. But he’s clean as a whistle from the chest down, which means that whatever else, he wasn’t fried in the pool. Otherwise we’d be looking at the full lobster effect. Oh, and there’s no scalding in his throat or on the inside of his mouth.”

  “Probably killed somewhere else and then dumped in the pool,” I nodded.

  Cotton shook his head. “So you’d think, Rex,” he said, raising a finger knowingly. “But the strangest thing is that the burning didn’t kill him at all.”

  “How then?”

  He took a beat then grinned. “He drowned. And the forensic guys at the scene are pretty certain it happened at the pool. Preliminary water samples seem to match.”

  “Tortured first, then held under?” I suggested.

  “Possibly. Except there are no restraint marks on his body. And we scrubbed him for any other DNA but found nothing.”

  I couldn’t resist: “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that you’ve no idea why it happened to him.”

  Cotton laughed mordantly and at long last pulled the sheet back over the corpse. “No mystery there, I’m afraid. Little weasel had it coming.”

  Spotty John was a small-time blackmailer and had become quite renowned for it. His job at the magistrates’ court, while undoubtedly menial, gave him licence to put the bite on all manner of petty criminals. For a small fee, he’d make sure a defendant’s name and address would be withheld from reporters, thus sparing the client considerable public embarrassment and community retribution. But should a chosen client decide not to divest himself of this small fee, you could guarantee that the juicier insides of the file would be leaked to a willing hack and distributed to tens of thousands of homes across the North before you could say punishment shooting.

  John had given me dozens of stories in my years with the Standard—and held back hundreds more.

  “He obviously put the squeeze on the wrong guy,” said Cotton.

  “Either that, or this is the worst-thought-out suicide ever.”

  * * *

  Despite being a cop, Cotton sometimes found it difficult to suppress his inner decency, and the following evening he rang me at my flat, midgame, to give me a headstart on the pack.

  “Kiddie-fiddlers,” he said, by way of hello.

  “Excuse me?” I replied.

  “Spotty John. He was trying to shake down a couple of child abusers. Their names were being withheld from the papers by order of the judge. Until the trial ends at least. And there’s a good chance they’re going to beat the rap. But you know yourself, when the names get out, the public assume the worst, and you’re ruined anyway. These particular gentlemen have a big amount to lose and that’s even before the concerned vigilantes come a-calling.”

  “Off the record . . .” I said. But there was no need for wheedling. Cotton didn’t do foreplay. It was all duck or no dinner with him.

  “Billy Black and Sami Zucker,” he went on.

  “Not the Billy Black?”

  He laughed. “Billy Hairless, one and the same, and yes, the Sami Zucker as well.”

  Jesus. Sami Zucker was one of the five richest men in Cherry Valley. The current chairman of Belfast Chamber of Commerce, he’d risen from nowhere over the past decade to own hotels right across Europe. Billy Hairless, on the other hand, was a ten-bob hood, who ran tarts and protection at the roughest outreach of the Golden Mile.

  “What the hell are those two doing together?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Cotton chuckled. “It’s like Cliff Richard in bed with the Pussycat Dolls. Apparently Mr. Zucker has been feeling a bit lonely since trophy wife number two left the nest, and Billy’s been finding him other chicks to keep him company. Except one of the chicks was under the bar.”

  I whistled quietly. “Much under?”

  “A month or so—not that it matters. Zucker said he was certain she was twenty-one, as Billy had told him. Billy says Zucker knew all along.”

  “Charges gonna stick?”

  “Fifty-fifty,” he sighed. “You know yourself, big money has a way of buying its way out of trouble.”

  “But you have the girl and Billy Hairless’s statement.”

  “Yeah. A teenage prostitute and an unconvicted serial killer, against a man who has four different judges on speed dial. Though in saying that . . .” He paused knowingly, to let me salivate a little.

  “You have something else?” I ventured.

  “You could say that,” he laughed, ending the tease. “According to his bank, Zucker withdrew two hundred thou, in cash, a week ago. And from what we can see, he hasn’t deposited it anywhere else. But you’ll never guess, coincidentally, who bought himself a new car, two days before he swallowed the bath.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Nope. We figure, though, that Spotty John had been a bit more discreet this time—and set up the whole scam anonymously. Insisted on the hush money being delivered to a PO box somewhere—maybe even got a third party to lift it. Zucker probably had his suspicions. He hears every blade of grass that bends. And when Spotty John drove past in his new Mercedes coupe, Sami added two and two together and made one thieving rat.”

  * * *

  My editor, Mike Mortimer, was, as per usual, caught halfway between ecstasy and a bad pill when I filled him in.

  “Best ever,” he declared, and slapped his fake-wood desk with a vengeance. “We’ll nail sleazy Sami to the front page.” But within five seconds, Mike had his manager’s hat back on and was frowning like his numbers had come up a week too early. He looked at me slowly, picking his words. “Got to be very careful with this one, though, Rex. We print one wrong syllable and he’ll close us down. He’d love nothing better too. He took a quarter mil off one of our sister papers across the water, few years back, when they claimed he’d stolen the patent for the Asshole Chip. Last thing the bosses here want is to hand him another big payday. Before you write a single word, you’d want to make sure everything is tighter than a row of teeth.”

  “He was the man behind the Asshole Chip?”

  “Yeah.” Mike swung his feet up on the desk, smiling like a smug chipmunk. “That’s how he made his first mil. Surprised you didn’t know that.”

  The controversial Asshole Chip for cars had been withdrawn from sale not six months previously after being cited in two separate road-rage killings in Britain. A beautifully simple device—little more than a transmitter and receiver—it allowed you to send text messages to any other car thus equipped, using just its plate number. It had originally been piloted as the “D-Mate,” a fun device which was supposedly a safe alternative to mobile phones. But despite its phenomenal popularity, research showed that within its first year, a third of the messages from driver to driver had consisted of the solitary word asshole, so the Asshole Chip it had remained ever since. And then you had the pitched battles on the motorway bottlenecks, the two tyre iron–related deaths—and the ban.

  I remember reading somewhere that the D-Mate’s owners had taken a serious bath. Though obviously not as serious as the one Spotty John had taken.

  “Sami had long since sold it on,” said Mike, reading my thoughts. “He had to stay one step ahead of the patent police. No doubt he stole it, though. The other guy had the blueprints—and was about to produce them for the court.”

  “So how did Sami wind up keeping it then?”

  “You’ll appreciate this,” said Mike. “The other guy was beaten to death with a baseball bat in a suspected road-rage attack in Cultra. Ironically, his own car wasn’t fitted with the chip.”

  “Could Mr. Zucker have had anything to do with it?” I asked.

  He smirked again. “Could Dolly Parton hold a pencil with no hands? Nothing could be proved, though. And as soon as the water was clear, Sami sold on the patent for a mil and a bit and bought his first hotel.”

  We sat silently in the cluttered little room fo
r a minute—paperless office my hairy hole, as Mike was wont to say—gazing out through the glass wall at the maze of reporters’ desks in the newsroom.

  “We’re dealing with an exceptionally cunning animal here,” said Mike, scratching his beard. “Might be best to go in with some sugar first, rather than the stick.”

  He pulled his feet back off the desk and assumed his business face. He’d thought of an in. This is why he was the boss.

  “We’ll get him to turn on Billy Hairless,” he said. “Tell him we know it’s a setup. That we’ve a picture of Billy collecting the girl at school. That two other businessmen have been caught in the same scam.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll put a hidden wire on you—round the rim of your boxers probably best—and get Sami to incriminate himself on the girl. Then we’ll take it from there—see if we can squeeze the rest of it out of him at a second run. The way it is in this town, most people would be happier to cough to a murder than a sex offence. Even if it is just a matter of a month too early.”

  “Angry mobs rarely stop to ask,” I agreed.

  “Indeed and they don’t. Listen, I know Zucker slightly. I’ll set up a meeting at the Berkshire Hotel for tomorrow lunchtime. Wear your good suit—and see if you can persuade that poor girl of yours to run an iron over the rest of you.”

  * * *

  It is not every day you get to call on eighty million dollars, so the next morning I made the supreme effort and bought a new shirt. The suit had been cleaned just two weeks before, for a wedding I had managed to duck out of at the last minute, so it was still crease sharp and minty fresh.

  Before I’d left the Standard the previous night, Mike had pointed out to the empty news editor’s desk right outside his door and told me that if I brought this one home, the seat would be mine. Five grand a year more in the bank, and no late nights or mangled bodies.

  I have to say I was tempted. The downside was that the extra dough could put ideas into other people’s heads—marital ideas, that is. And I’d been getting enough of that lately, without any extra help. Also, the company would get to own you body and soul. Like they owned Mike. Still, I was flattered with the offer. But I also knew he was warning me not to upset the big money.