I Hear the Sirens in the Street

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 The original, elegantly high, curved windows had been replaced by squat square jobs in brown frames.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 walked through the back door and out into the kitchen garden.

“Here you go,” she said.

I pretended to be fascinated by an ugly yellow smudge of daffodils – the only thing at all growing back here.

Of course I had already seen the greenhouse through the kitchen window.

Mrs Patton said “I’ll leave you to it,” and disappeared back inside. I lit a cigarette. I knew that she’d be spying on me but there was a hedge blocking the rear entrance to the greenhouse from the back windows of the residence. I finished my smoke, inspected more of the flowers and walked behind the hedge. I waited a moment for a cry or footsteps hurrying towards me but I heard nothing. I turned a rusted iron handle and went inside the greenhouse. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find but I was not counting on a completely empty space. No plants, no pots, nothing. I wrote “a clean concrete floor, a few gardening tools”, in my notebook. The gardening tools were one rake and one hoe.

I had got what I came for on this trip.

I wrote “Down at heel scion. Hiding something or just an arse? No rosary pea or anything else in the greenhouse” in my notebook and walked into the house again.

Mrs Patton intercepted me in the gloomy hall.

“Inspector Duffy, is anything amiss?” she asked.

“No, nothing’s amiss, Mrs Patton. However, I’ve just remembered that I have to be somewhere else. I was so taken with your daffodils that I completely forgot. You’ll have to excuse me, ma’am. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Oh … oh, what shall I tell Sir Harry?”

“No message, thank you,” I said.

I walked briskly out of the hall and onto the crunchy gravel drive. I gave the Bentley and the Roller a sympathetic look and I juked under the palm trees.

Thunder rumbled in a grey skin and it began to rain with big heavy, sporadic drops. At the hill’s summit I surveyed the broad wet valley filled with cows and sheep and fields too boggy to accommodate man or beast.

The prospect to the north was of Larne Lough and Magheramorne on the far shore.

The widow McAlpine’s farm was a good mile off on the far side of a hill. You wouldn’t be able to see it even from the third floor of this house. No one inside could possibly have witnessed Martin’s murder. There would be no teenage maids too frightened to testify but who could be broken by the age-old tactics of question after question after question.

I dandered down the hill and in twenty minutes I was back at the farm.

I went round the back of the house and tried the rear door.

It too was locked. Cora was barking herself hoarse now. A side window was open, but it was too small for me to squeeze through. I lit my last ciggy, climbed a style over the stone wall and strode out across the fields in the direction of the tied-up horse.

The pasture was little better than a bog with some tuft grass and sodden heather, and in a few moments my DMs were soaked through. Sheep pellets were everywhere and in a slurry pond there was the carcass of an old ewe, suspended just beneath the surface.

The horse was an old white mare who barely registered my presence as I approached. I stroked her head, but I had no sugar to offer her. I grabbed some moist dandelion leaves and held them under her nose but she turned her head away disdainfully. “Spoiled rotten, so you are,” I said, and gave her a pat on the neck.

I was curious about the shed so I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I opened it and saw a lantern hanging from the ceiling and a ladder leading underground.

“What’s all this?” I muttered, but the mare kept her thoughts to herself.

I looked down into the hole. It was a vertical tunnel lit by a series of incandescent bulbs. The walls were white, chalky and crumbly and I wasn’t encouraged that the rickety metal ladder was bolted to them. There was a slightly unpleasant, sulphurous smell which also boded ill.

I hesitated at the top of the ladder for a moment and then decided to climb down. Twenty rungs to the bottom. A narrow passage lead to a door which said: No Entry Except By Authorised Personnel.

I pushed on the door and entered the chamber. It was like a cave really and everything a cave should be: big, cathedral-like, sonorous, intimidating and impressive.

Two bright arc lamps lit the white, chalky and oddly beautiful walls and cast shadows deep into the back recess of the cavern. To one side there were several metal cupboards and in the middle of the room Emma McAlpine was sitting on a sofa next to a generator which didn’t appear to be running. (How the lights were working was the first of the several mysteries.)

She must have heard me coming down the ladder but she did not look up.

“What are you reading?” I asked. “It’s not the Bible, is it?”

“Inspector Duffy,” she said, and set the book on her lap. It had yellow binding; not many Bibles had yellow covers, not even The Good News.

She was dressed in jeans, an Aran sweater and a wax jacket. Riding boots, of course, but she had kicked those off. Her hair was tied back in a pony tail. Under the fluorescent lights she looked wan, sickly, not a million miles removed from Elizabeth Siddal in Ophelia.

I walked towards her. “I get the feeling that you were expecting me,” I said.

“Why would I be?”

“Because you heard the news.”

She nodded. “Inspector Dougherty. I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what?”

“Dougherty was a brother officer, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like some tea? I brought a flask. It’s already made up with milk and sugar. Scandalous, I know.”

“Sure.”

“Have a seat.”

I sat next to her on the leather sofa. She smelled of horse and sweat and leather. The sofa was covered in a layer of powdery white shit from the crumbling ceiling; I brushed myself a space with the back of my hand and sat down. She produced a flask with a paisley design on the side, unscrewed the plastic lid and poured a cup of tea into a white plastic mug.

“I also brought a flask of gin, if you want to slip that in there,” she said, as if that would be the most natural thing in the world.

“No, you’re all right, thanks.”

I took the tea, which was weak and very sweet. The way I liked it. The type of tea you were supposed to give to people to stop them going into shock.

“Dougherty came to see you, didn’t he?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What about?”

“I think he may have been drunk. He had certainly been drinking.”

“What did he talk to you about?”

“In an extremely vulgar manner he demanded to know exactly where I had been when Martin got shot.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him that I was in the kitchen.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He said that he didn’t believe me. He said that I wasn’t telling him everything.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I told him that no one could call me a liar in my own home and I asked him to leave.”

“And did he leave?”

“No. He did not. He abused me in the most disgraceful language. At one point I felt that he was going to strike me.”

“And then?”

“Well, then he did leave, but not before melodramatically promising that he would return.”

I rubbed my chin and leaned back into the sofa cushions.

“But he didn’t return, did he?”

“No.”

“Did he call you or have any other communication with you?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t go see him?”

“Of course not.”

She looked at me. Her blue eyes were not entirely pleasant. They radiated an icy quality. Not quite contempt but not far off it. Distance, a lack of concern.

“What are you reading?” I asked in a lower register.

“It isn’t the Bible, since you ask.”

“The Bible was on my mind. Someone called me up and asked me to meet them and when I went there they had left a note,” I explained, leaving out the chase scene.

“That sounds like fun,” she said. “What did the note say?”

“It was a Bible verse.”

“And?”

“‘Now I see through a glass darkly.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

She grinned and slapped her thigh. “Oh, I get it. You thought I was reading the Bible and that maybe I was the person who left you the note, is that it?”

“It was a woman on the phone. But it was an English woman.”

“Maybe I was disguising my voice.”

“Maybe you were.”

“I didn’t call you and I didn’t leave you a note. How would I get your number anyway?”

“I’m in the book.”

“Oh.”

“And I went to see your brother-in-law.”

“Why?”

“Just to be nosey.”

“And what did you find out?”

“His cars are in a bad way.”

“His cars?”

“The Bentley and the Roller. Beautiful machines sadly gone to pot. He should at least keep them in a garage.”

“Are you aware of the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the bitter sweetness of things?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“The Japanese sages say the best way to appreciate beauty is to focus on its transient, fragile and fleeting nature.”

I nodded. “Is that what your brother-in-law’s doing? I thought he was just a careless fucker.”

“And what else did you learn from your visit to Red Hall?” she asked.

“He’s a knight. It’s Sir Harry McAlpine. He’s been to see the Queen. Somebody gave him a knighthood.”

She shook her head. “Nobody gave him a knighthood. He’s a baronet.”

“What’s a baronet when it’s at home?”

“It’s the lowest order of peerage.”

I must have looked blank because she elaborated. “It goes Prince, Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Baronet. It’s hereditary. It goes to the eldest son. Harry is the third Baronet. It means very little.”

“I wouldn’t say that. He’s got a title and he’s got money.”

“Money!” she laughed. “He’s as poor as a church mouse.”

“He’s got that big house, all this land …”

“Heavens, Inspector. This land? Well, yes, he owns everything from here to the sea and I’m a tenant and there are half a dozen farms on the other side of the hill, but none of that matters: it’s all bogland, it’s practically worthless and that big house is a shambles. The top floor is shut up, the walls are crumbling …”

“The house isn’t in great nick, but with all this property he’s hardly a candidate for the poor house, is he?”

“That’s where you’re wrong again. Red Hall is entailed. He can’t touch the freehold or sell it or lease it out. It’s all going to his eldest son.”

“He has kids?”

“Two.”

“One of each?”

“Two boys. They live with their mother. Actually they’re both at Harrow.”

“Harrow over the water?” I asked stupidly.

“Do you know any other Harrow?”

“He’s divorced, then.”

“You really are a detective. A regular Poirot,” she said, with a sweet teasing smile that got her back into my good books. She snugged her legs up underneath her body. Riding horses had given her powerful thighs and done wonders for her complexion.

“I’ll take that,” she said, holding my wrist and removing the empty tea cup. I’ve known judo instructors with a less impressive grip. And that assurance, too. This was no blushing, weeping widow. Not now.

“What about you? How are you doing for money?” I asked.

“Since my husband’s murder, you mean? Is this also part of your investigation? Could I be compelled to answer?”

“Perhaps.”

“Don’t you find question and answer a rather tedious form of discourse? Wouldn’t you rather have a conversation?”

“When time is a factor there’s really no other way, I’m afraid.”

“Is time a factor here? My husband was killed in December. It’s April.”

“Time is always a factor in police work, Mrs McAlpine.”

She sighed. “I live on Martin’s army pension of seventy-five pounds a week. I pay twenty-five pounds of that to Harry. For rent.”

I nodded. “And how much does the land bring in?”

She laughed. “Are you serious?”

“Aye.”

“I have forty sheep. Shorn, I’ll get perhaps three pounds a fleece; come lambing season, perhaps another five pounds a lamb. This year I may make two hundred pounds from the entire acreage.”

“Can’t you grow something? I’m always hearing things about the high cost of wheat.”

“No arable crops will grow here. It’s a marsh. This whole part of Islandmagee is one enormous swamp.”

“Where were you last night, Mrs McAlpine?” I asked, abruptly changing tack.

“When Dougherty was killed, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I was at home. Reading. In other words, I have no alibi.”

“What were you reading?”

“Middlemarch.”

“I see.”

“George Eliot.”

“I know … Is that what you’re reading now?”

“Yes.”

She passed me the book. I flipped through it and gave it back.

“Why would I kill poor Inspector Dougherty?” she asked while I was thinking of my next question.

“Why indeed?”

“No, let’s not play that game. Why do you think I may have done it? What possible motive could I have had?”

I was looking for a little more outrage from her: How dare you accuse me of such a terrible thing! Not that that would have had much probative value one way or the other. Maybe she just wasn’t the demonstrative type.

“Because I got him all riled up about your husband’s murder. Because I put a seed of doubt in his head that maybe you weren’t telling everything you knew and because he came barging down there to ask you a whole bunch of questions,” I said.

She smiled. “Then I got a gun from heaven knows where, found out where he lived and shot him?”

And then dumped the weapon, drove to a phone box and claimed the hit on behalf of the IRA using a recognised IRA code word.

“The assumption, naturally, is that I killed my husband for whatever reason and I was worried that Dougherty was getting close to discovering that I had done it and so he had to go too. Is that it?”

“I suppose so,” I agreed.

“Let me dissect this theory of yours a little … if I may.”

“Be my guest.”

“First of all, I didn’t kill Martin. Everything I’ve told you about his murder is completely true. I loved him. He loved me. We rarely argued. And what possible motive could I have had to do it? Fiduciary? For the pathetic lump sum I’ll get years from now from the compensation board? For the army pension? We had no life insurance—”

“Why didn’t he take out life insurance?”

“The weekly rates for a serving army officer are astronomical.”

“Of course.”

“Let me continue … So, no life insurance, a pathetic pension and then there’s the farm. What’s to stop Harry from kicking me out once Martin’s dead? I lose my husband, his income and my house? For what?”

“There are other motives.”

“Like what?”

“Like the oldest motive in the world.”

“Martin wasn’t having an affair.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Quite sure, he wasn’t the type.”

“All women think that about their husbands right up to the moment when they receive undeniable proof and quite often after they receive undeniable proof.”

“Even if he had been having an affair I wouldn’t have shot him.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not the type, Inspector.”

I felt a crick in my neck and I was getting a stress headache in this uncomfortable sofa. I got to my feet and stretched. “What is this place, anyway? Some kind of salt mine?” I asked.

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“Do you come down here often?”

“I do. I read down here. It’s so quiet. No planes, no cars, nothing. Not even wind. They could have a nuclear war out there and I wouldn’t know about it.”

“I was wondering how you power the lights.”

“We steal electricity from the grid. Harry rigged it up.” She patted the generator. “This thing is only to pump out water.”

“I suppose if I’m to buy into this theory of family poverty then I can only assume that the seams are worked out.”

“They are. For all commercial purposes anyway. The mines incidentally are what got Sir Harry his ‘Sir’. His grandfather supplied salt for the Empire. It’s also why Harry couldn’t sell this land even if he wanted to. You can’t build on it.”

I smiled and she looked at me strangely.

“What are you thinking right now, Inspector?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“I’m thinking, Mrs McAlpine, that most people would be keeking their whips if they were being questioned about a murder for which they had no alibi and a possible motive. But not you. You’re as cool as a cucumber.”

“Because I didn’t do it. I’ve nothing to be worried about. Why do you think I did it? Is it one of those policemen’s hunches I’m always hearing about?”

“Hunches are overrated.”

“How does one solve crimes, Inspector?”

“Most criminals aren’t that bright. They screw up and we find the screw up pretty quickly and we can usually go to trial, except if the screw up involves eyewitness testimony.”

“What happens if it’s eyewitness testimony?”

“The eyewitnesses are intimidated into not testifying. Those cases usually collapse.”

“And what about the hard cases? Like your body in the suitcase? That’s still your case, isn’t it? Or have you turned your attention to me and Inspector Dougherty now?”

“No, that’s still my case. My only case. A colleague of mine is looking into the death of Inspector Dougherty, and your husband’s murder, I’m sorry to say, is probably never going to be solved.”

“I see,” she said and pursed her lips.

“Have you ever fired a pistol before, Mrs McAlpine?”

“A pistol, no. A shotgun many times.”

I looked at my watch. I had been at this for twenty minutes and I wasn’t really getting anywhere. If this was my case, maybe Crabbie and me would make more progress down the station in a windowless interview room. But it wasn’t my concern, was it? I looked at her for a beat or two. “Well, I suppose I must be going. Thank you for the tea,” I said.

“That’s it, you’re not going to cuff me and drag me off?”

“No.”

“Why not? Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know. But you’re tangential to my investigation. Chief Inspector McIlroy may want to interview you about Dougherty, but I’m done here.”

“I’ll walk you out, if you like,” she said.

I’d been hoping for some sign of relief from her – a blush or a sigh or anything, but grief had washed everything out of Mrs McAlpine already.

I climbed the ladder and she followed me up. Out into sunlight. Or more exactly into the ambient light and rain. The horse whinnied excitedly when he saw Emma and she gave him a sugar lump.

There were several dirty-looking gulls in the fields taking shelter from the wind.

“Do you think those are fulmars?” I said absently.

“Fulmars?”

“Ful from the Norse meaning foul, mar meaning gull.”

She grinned at me. “A man of many interests.”

“Not really.”

We walked the horse back across the bog to the farm. We didn’t speak because half a dozen Army Gazelle helicopters were flying south east, at a low ceiling, in a tight menacing formation.

When the choppers had gone she asked me if I’d always wanted to be a policeman. I told her no. I’d been studying psychology at Queens.

She told me that she had done a degree in history.

We talked a little about the university. We’d had no mutual friends and our paths hadn’t crossed in the Students’ Union. It wasn’t surprising. She was seven or eight years younger than me.

“Is Queen’s where you met Martin?”

“Well, I’m a local Islandmagee girl so I already knew Martin, but that’s where we started going out. He was doing law but he dropped out when he joined the UDr I stayed on for a bit, and then, well … we got married.”

She was blushing. There was a story there, too. A pregnancy? A miscarriage? We reached the farmhouse. My car was there and next to it a shining female constable in a dark green uniform and a dark green Kepi.

“Your chauffeur?” Emma asked.

“Indeed.”

She offered me her hand. “I assume this is where we take our leave?” she said.

“I expect so,” I said, shaking her hand.

She looked into my eyes. “You’re disappointed, aren’t you? You think I’ve gotten away with something.”

I said nothing.

“I promise you, Inspector Duffy, I did not kill my husband, and I had nothing to do with the killing of Inspector Dougherty.”

“Okay,” I said, “how about we just leave it there.”