I Hear the Sirens in the Street

6: SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM

We took the shore road past Magheramorne quarry, where the slag heaps ran next to the road and where the fields were a strange John Deere green.

Radio One decided to torture us by heavily rotating “Making Your Mind Up” to commemorate Bucks Fizz’s triumph in the previous year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Even Matty couldn’t take it and after hunting in vain for another station we rummaged in the Land Rover’s cassette stash and found Joan Armatrading’s Walk Under Ladders.

“You didn’t really think she’d be growing rosary pea in that greenhouse, did you?” Matty asked.

“You never know, mate, you have to follow up everything.”

“I could have told you it was a waste of time … Sort of like this little journey.”

“You’re quite the lippy wee character aren’t you, Matthew?”

“I’m on an emotional rollercoaster, mate, someone fired a machine gun at me this morning, not to mention being harassed by a vicious dog.”

“Tell Kenny Dalziel you’re putting in for emotional hardship money. That’ll make the bastard’s head explode.”

Larne RUC station was a massive concrete bunker near the harbour. It was known to be one of the safest cop postings in all of Northern Ireland because the town was small with a population that was over ninety per cent Protestant. The IRA would have few, if any, safe houses in the community and an IRA cell from Belfast could not easily make an escape to a nearby haven. In general the worst the Larne peelers had to deal with was drunkenness on Friday and Saturday nights and the occasional fracas between rival gangs of football supporters heading over or back from the ferry to Scotland. As a result of all this, Larne was known as a place where they dumped lazy, old and problem officers who could cause real difficulties elsewhere.

The McAlpine murder had been investigated by an Inspector Dougherty, a red-nosed, white-haired old stager with a tremble in his left hand that to the uneducated eye could be Parkinson’s disease or MS or some other malady but which was actually the eleven o’clock shakes. At lunch time he’d slip out to the nearest pub and after a couple of triple vodkas he’d be right as rain again.

We met him in a large book-lined office overlooking the harbour and ferry terminal. The books were mostly thrillers and detective fiction which I found encouraging, but they were all from the ’60s and early ’70s, which wasn’t such a good sign. At some juncture in the last decade he’d lost interest in reading – had lost interest in everything probably. There was no wedding ring on his left hand, but many Presbyterians didn’t wear a ring because they considered it a Papist affectation. Even so, the room stank of divorce, failure and alcoholism – the standard troika for many a career RUC officer.

We were both the same rank, detective inspector, but he’d been on the force twenty years longer than me, which made me wonder what the hell he had been doing all that time, and whether I was destined to go the same route.

The rain was still pelting the windows and Scotland was a blue smudge to the east.

“Gentlemen, have a seat,” he said. “Cup of tea or coffee?”

“Thanks but no, we’re all tea’d out this morning,” I replied, with as decent an apologetic smile as I could muster.

Dougherty folded his hands across his ample belly. He was wearing a white shirt and a brown suit that he’d obviously had for quite a few years, which, as he sat down, bunched at the sleeves and gave him an unfortunate comic air. A peeler could be a lot of things: a drunk, a thug, an idiot, a sociopath, but as long as you looked the part it was usually fine. Even in Larne Dougherty would have a hard time currying respect.

“So what brings you gentlemen down from Carrick?” he asked.

“I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the McAlpine murder,” I said, all business.

“The what?”

“Martin McAlpine. He was a part-time UDR captain who was shot at his farm on Islandmagee last December.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. What’s this pertaining to?”

I explained about the suitcase and the John Doe and how we had traced the suitcase back to Martin McAlpine.

“And what did his wife say happened to his suitcase?” Dougherty asked.

“She says she left it in at the Carrickfergus Salvation Army before Christmas,” Matty said.

Dougherty looked puzzled.

“She left it at the Salvation Army before Christmas?” he asked.

“Yup,” Matty said.

“So, what’s his murder got to do with anything? The murderer of your John Doe obviously just bought the suitcase for a pound from the Sally Army and used it to dump a body, right?”

“Almost certainly,” I agreed.

“So, why bother dredging up the McAlpine case? Your killer could have grabbed any random suitcase, couldn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And the timeline … She leaves the suitcase in just before Christmas. McAlpine is murdered back in early December. Your body is discovered this week? In April?”

I shook my head. “The body had been frozen for an indeterminate amount of time, but aye, I’m with you, Dougherty, I agree, it’s weak beer; but you see it’s not us, it’s our Chief; he’s going to want us to have pursued every lead out there and as soon as he finds out that the suitcase belonged to a UDR captain who was assassinated by the IRA, he’s going to be firing a million questions at me.”

Dougherty breathed a sigh of relief. I was not an internal affairs spook come to investigate his work, I was just another working stiff dealing with an arsehole boss.

“I’ll get the file,” he said.

He opened a metal cabinet and flipped out a thin – very thin – cardboard file.

He spread it on the desk between us and very slowly he sat down again with one hand on the desk and one hand to balance him. Jesus, how far gone was this eejit?

“Okay, let me see … Ah yes, Martin McAlpine shot in the chest with a shotgun, at approximately nine twenty in the morning of December first. He died instantly, assailants fled on a blue motorcycle which has not been recovered. IRA claimed responsibility with a recognised code word that evening with a call to the Belfast Telegraph… We didn’t find the murder weapon, or the bike, and we’ve had no tips.”

He put the file down.

That’s it? I was thinking. A man gets blown away and that’s bloody it?

“Can I take a look?”

He passed the file across. His report was one paragraph and they had tossed all the crime-scene photographs except for one which showed Martin McAlpine face up on the ground. The shotgun pellets had ripped apart his chest and throat and a couple had buried themselves in his temple. His dead face seemed to register surprise more than fear or panic but that didn’t mean anything. The interesting thing about the picture was the tightness of the grouping on his torso. There was no way this had been done at twenty yards. Twenty feet perhaps, but not twenty yards. The assailants had definitely gotten a lot closer to McAlpine than the wall. How had they done this carrying shotguns without alerting Cora or giving McAlpine a chance to draw his sidearm?

I passed the photograph to Matty.

“Did you take photographs of the bootprints near the body?” I asked.

Dougherty shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“It was December, it must have been muddy, you could have gotten casts of the killers’ shoes.”

Dougherty raised an eyebrow at me. “No, you’re not getting it, Inspector Duffy. They shot him from behind the wall. They didn’t come into the farmyard. They were in the field. There were no bootprints.”

“It seems to me that they must have been a good bit closer than that.”

“They shot him at the wall.”

“Is that where you recovered the shotgun shells? The wall?”

“We didn’t recover any shells.”

“They shot him and then they stopped to take the shotgun shells before running off to their motorbike?”

“Apparently they did,” Dougherty said, bristling a little. He was now sitting on his left hand to stop the DTs from becoming obvious.

Matty looked at me and raised his eyebrows a fraction but I didn’t mind Dougherty. He was close to retirement and when he’d joined up the RUC must have seemed like an easy life. He couldn’t have predicted that come the ’70s and ’80s it would be the most stressful police job in Europe. Nah, I didn’t mind him, but boy he was an indolent fuck, like all them old characters.

“What was the murder weapon? Did your forensic boys get a bead?”

“A shotgun.”

“What type?”

Dougherty shrugged.

“Twelve-bore, over/under, single-trigger, double-barrel, what?” I asked.

He shrugged again.

“Pigeon shot, buck shot, deer shot?”

He shrugged a third time.

And this time it made me angry.

They hadn’t even spent time doing a basic ballistic inquest?

He could see it in my eyes. He went defensive. “The IRA killed him with a stolen or an unregistered shotgun, what difference does it make what type it was?”

I said nothing.

Silence did my talking for me.

It worked him some more.

“… Look, if you’re really interested I’m sure we kept some of the fucking pellets in the evidence room just in case we ever recovered the gun. If you go down there Sergeant Dalway will let you see.”

I nodded and wrote “Dalway” in my notebook.

“Were there any other witnesses apart from the wife?” I asked.

“No, and she wasn’t really a witness. She heard the shooting but when she ran out McAlpine was dead and the gunmen were already making a break for it on the motorbike.”

“And you say you never recovered the gun?”

“No.”

“Did you not find that strange at all?”

“Why?”

“Two guys on a motorbike carry a murder weapon with them all the way back to Belfast?”

“Don’t be fucking silly! They probably threw it in a sheugh or the Lough. We did look for it but we didn’t find it,” Dougherty said.

“Why do you think he didn’t pull his sidearm on them? He was walking out to the fields and if they were at the wall they were a good twenty yards from him,” I asked.

“They had the element of surprise. They jumped up and shot him. Poor devil didn’t have a chance.”

“And why do you think Cora didn’t go for them?” I asked.

“Who’s Cora?”

“The dog, a really nasty Alsatian,” Matty said. “The dog that didn’t bark in the daytime. It’s a classic.”

“Oh aye, the dog, I don’t know. The gunshots probably scared the shite out of it,” he muttered.

“Did you find any motorcycle tracks? Were you able to identify the tyre or make of the bike?” I asked.

“No.”

“No you didn’t ID the bike or no you didn’t find any tracks?”

“I don’t like your tone, Inspector Duffy,” he said.

There hadn’t been any tone. I’d been careful about that. He was just getting ticked off at the holes I was poking in the case.

“Please, I didn’t mean to imply—” I said.

“We didn’t find any motorcycle tracks, Inspector, because they drove off on the road. It’s tarmac – it’s not going to leave any fucking tracks, is it?”

“If they’re behind the wall surely they’re going to start the bike there, not push it to the road and kick start it there?” Matty said. “There should be tracks.”

“Well, we didn’t find any.”

I frowned. “Look, Inspector, I’m going to ask a question and please don’t take it the wrong way …”

“Go on,” he said, steam practically coming out of his ears.

“Did you look for the tracks or were they just not there?”

His fist clenched and unclenched, but then he closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he smiled at us.

“I’m not going to bullshit you, Duffy, I honestly don’t remember. Hold on a minute and I’ll get my notes.”

“Thank you, I appreciate that,” I said.

He opened a drawer and flicked through a green jotter. He slid it across to me, but I couldn’t decipher the handwriting. I did notice that under “McAlpine” there was less than half a page of text. All in pencil. With a few doodles on the side. When I conducted a murder investigation, sometimes I filled two or even three ring-bound reporters’ notebooks.

I passed the notebook to Matty, who had been sufficiently pedagogically indoctrinated by me to frown and shake his head. He skimmed the notebook back across the table. Dougherty took it and smiled a little smile of satisfaction as if he was saying – see, I’m not a fuck up, I even kept my notes.

“No tracks. But I can’t tell if we looked behind the wall or not,” he admitted.

I turned to Matty. “Do me a favour, go down to the evidence room and see if you can bag me one of the shotgun pellets. We’ll see what they can find out up at the lab in Belfast? If that’s okay with you, Inspector Dougherty?”

“I don’t see what this has to do with your investigation?”

“Do you object?”

“No. If you want to go around wasting everyone’s time, go ahead, be my guest.”

Matty got up and left the office.

Dougherty looked at me. “I take it you’re not happy with the wife’s story then, is that it?” he asked.

So he wasn’t a complete fool. At least he saw my angle.

I shook my head. “I don’t know about that. She seemed fairly credible to me. I just want to eliminate all the other possible contingencies.”

“She came from a good family. Islandmagee locals. Her father was a Justice of Peace and of course she married into the McAlpines.”

“What’s special about the McAlpines?”

“Harry, the elder brother, is a big wheel. His grandfather did

something for the Empire. They gave him a gong for it.”

The clock on the wall reached twelve and with that he breathed an audible sigh of relief and reached in his desk drawer for a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

“A wee one before lunch?” he asked.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I replied.

He produced two mugs and poured us each a healthy measure.

When he had drunk and topped up his own mug he grinned.

“You like the wife for it?” he asked. “How do you explain the IRA code word? And I still don’t see what this’s got to do with your suitcase?”

“I’m not saying it was her. But the grouping on that wound is so tight it looks point blank to me. And if a couple of terrorists were marching up to him so close as to do that kind of point blank damage surely the dog would have been on them and he would have had his sidearm out,” I said.

“Aye,” Dougherty said thoughtfully.

“And besides the IRA don’t use shotguns anymore. Not since the early ’70s. Not since our Boston friends and Colonel Gaddafi started sending boatloads of proper ordnance. They’ve got M16 rifles and Uzis and Glock pistols now,” I said.

“I suppose,” he said, refilling his mug.

“And then there’s the lack of witnesses. And no trace of a gun, no shells, no motorbike,” I continued.

“But what about the code word?” Dougherty asked.

“Jesus, those things leak like a sieve. Her own husband might have told her the IRA-responsibility code word for late last year.”

“Why would she do it? There was no insurance policy. We checked that. And the army pension is pathetic.”

“A domestic, maybe? I don’t know,” I said.

“And your fucking suitcase?”

“Probably unrelated, but you never know, do you?”

He nodded, poured himself a third generous measure of Scotch.

“I’ve heard of you, Duffy. You were the hot shot in Carrickfergus who got himself the Queen’s Police Medal. Are you looking to make a big fucking splash in Larne, too?”

He was getting punchy now.

It was time to leave.

“No. I’m not. This isn’t my case. I’m done and unless Mrs McAlpine is involved in my murder somehow you probably won’t be hearing from me again.”

“Aye, pal, don’t forget this is my manor, not yours.”

“I won’t forget.”

I got to my feet and offered him my hand and he reluctantly shook it.

I saw myself out.

I waited for Matty by the desk sergeant’s desk.

He came back from the evidence room empty-handed.

“What happened, they wouldn’t let you in?”

“They let me in all right but the locker’s empty boss. Nothing there at all.”

“They’ve moved it?”

“Lost it. A few weeks ago they moved the McAlpine evidence to the Cold Case Storage Room but when I went there the box was empty. The duty sergeant looked through the log and has no idea where the stuff went. He told me shite like this happens all the time.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. All right, I better go myself.”

We went to the evidence room and searched high and low for half an hour but it was gone. Either lost in a spring cleaning or deliberately thrown out. Incompetence or cover up – both were equally likely. I liked the former better because asking who was covering up for whom raised all sorts of difficult questions.

It was drizzling when we got back outside.

Matty lit me one of his Benson and Hedges and we smoked under the overhang and watched the potholes fill up with water for a couple of minutes.

“I’m not saying that these lads are the worst cops in Ireland …” Matty began and then hesitated, unsure if I was going to countenance this level of perfidy.

“Yes?”

“If there’s a shittier station than this lot I hope to God I’m never posted there,” he concluded.

“Oh, there’s worse. I was at a station in Fermanagh where they dressed up as witches for Halloween. Big beefy sergeant called McCrae dolled up as Elizabeth Montgomery was the stuff of nightmares … Larne would be okay, you’d be the superstar of the department if you got the bloody days of the week right.”

We nailed another couple of smokes and got back in the Land Rover. Matty drove us out of the car park and the Constables at the gate gave us the thumbs up as they raised the barrier to let us out.

Matty drove through Larne past a massive UVF mural of two terrorists riding dragons and carrying AK 47s.

We turned up onto the A2 coast road.

“Where to now, Sean?”

“Carrickfergus Salvation Army,” I said. “It’s a long shot but maybe they’ll remember what happened to that suitcase, if she really did bring it in there.”

“Why would she lie about that?”

“Why does anybody lie about anything?”

Matty nodded and accelerated up onto the dual carriageway. The Land Rover was heavily armour plated and bullet-proofed, but the juiced engine still did zero to sixty in about eight seconds.

We put on Irish radio again. It was the same programme as before; this time the interviewee, a man called O’Cannagh, from the County Mayo, was talking about the mysterious behaviour of his cattle which baffled the local vets but which he felt was something to do with flying saucers. The man was explaining this fascinating hypothesis in Irish, a language Matty didn’t speak, so I had to turn it off. Neither of us could stand the constant jabber about the Falklands on news radio so we went for Ms Armatrading again.

Matty drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. “I know what you’re thinking, Sean, you’re thinking we should stick our noses in here, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Listen, Sean, what if she’s telling the truth about the suitcase but she was, for whatever reason, lying about her husband’s murder?”

“What about it?”

“Then it’s not our case, mate, is it?” he said.

“And if she killed the poor bastard?”

“If she killed the poor bastard, it becomes, in the coinage of Douglas Adams, an SEP.”

“Who’s Douglas Adams? And what’s an SEP?” I asked.

“If you were down with the kids, Sean, you’d know that Douglas Adams has written this very popular radio series called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I listen to it when I’m fishing.”

“I’m not down with the kids, though, am I? And you still haven’t answered my question. What’s an SEP?”

“Someone else’s problem, Sean,” Matty said, with a heavy and significant sigh.

I nodded ruefully. Ruefully, for it was the sorry day indeed when my junior colleague felt the need to remind me that in Ireland you swam near the shore and you kept your mouth shut and you never made waves if you knew what was good for you.

“SEP. I like it. I’ll bear it in mind,” I said.