I Hear the Sirens in the Street

5: THE WIDOW MCALPINE

We drove through the town of Whitehead and hugged the shore of Larne Lough until we were on Islandmagee. Islandmagee was an odd place. A peninsula about six miles north-east of Carrickfergus with Larne Lough on one side and the Irish Sea on the other. It was near the major metropolitan centre and ferry port of Larne, yet it was a world away. When you drove onto Islandmagee it was like going back to an Ireland of a hundred or even two hundred years before. The people were country people, suspicious of strangers, and for me their accent and dialect were at times difficult to understand. I got it when they used the occasional word in Irish but often I found them speaking a form of lowland Scots straight out of Robert Burns. They almost sounded like Americans from the high country of Kentucky or Tennessee.

I’d been there several times. Always in my civvies, as I’d heard that they didn’t like peelers snooping around. As Matty drove I unfolded the ordnance survey map and found Ballyharry. It was halfway up the lough shore, opposite the old cement works in Magheramorne. On the map it was a small settlement, a dozen houses at the most.

We turned off the Shore Road onto the Ballyharry Road. A bump chewed the New Order tape so I flipped through the radio stations. All the English ones were talking about the Falklands but Irish radio wasn’t interested in Britain’s colonial wars and instead were interviewing a woman who had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary who had told her that the sale of contraceptive devices in Dublin would bring a terrible vengeance from God and his host of Angels.

The Ballyharry Road led to the Mill Bay Road: small farms, whitewashed cottages, stone walls, sheep, rain. I looked for Red Hall but didn’t see it.

Finally there was a small private single-laned track that led into the hills that had a gate and a sign nailed to an old beech tree which said “Red Hall Manor, Private, No Trespassing”, and underneath that another sign which said “No Coursing or Shooting Without Express Permission”.

“You think this is the place?” I asked, looking up the road.

Matty examined the map and shrugged. “We might as well give it a go.”

We drove past a small wood and into a broad valley.

There were farms dotted about the landscape, some little more than ruins.

A sign by one of them said Red Hall Cottage and Matty slammed on the brakes. It was a small farm surrounded by flooded, boggy fields and a couple of dozen miserable sheep. The building itself was a whitewashed single-storey house with a few cement and breeze block buildings in the rear. It looked a right mess. Most of the outbuildings had holes in the exterior walls and the farmhouse could have done with a coat of paint. The roof was thatched and covered with rusting wire. The car out front was a Land Rover Defender circa 1957.

“Well, I don’t think we’re dealing with an international hitman, that’s for sure,” I said.

“Unless he’s got all his money overseas in a Swiss Bank.”

“Aye.”

“Maybe you should go in first, boss, and I’ll stay here by the radio in case there’s any shooting.”

“Get out.”

“All right,” he said, with resignation.

We parked the Rover and walked through the muddy farmyard to the house.

“My shoes are getting ruined,” Matty said, treading gingerly around the muck and potholes. He was wearing expensive Nike gutties and unflared white jeans. Is that what the kids were sporting these days?

An Alsatian snarled at us, struggling desperately at the edge of a long piece of rope.

“Yon bugger wants to rip our throats out,” Matty said.

The chickens pecking all around us seemed unconcerned by the dog but he did look like a nasty brute.

We reached the whitewashed cottage, the postcardy effect somewhat spoiled by a huge rusting oil tank for the central heating plonked right outside. There was no bell or knocker so we rapped on the wooden front door. After a second knock, we heard a radio being turned off and a female voice asked:

“Who is it?”

“It’s the police,” I said. “Carrickfergus RUC.”

“What do you want?” the voice asked.

“We want to talk to Martin McAlpine.”

“Hold on a sec!”

We waited a couple of minutes and a young woman answered the door. She had a towel wrapped round her head and she was wearing an ugly green dressing gown. She’d clearly only just stepped out of the bath or the shower. She was about twenty-two, with grey-blue eyes, red eyebrows, freckles. She was pretty in an unnerving, dreamy, “She Moved Through The Fair”, kind of way.

“Good morning, ma’am. Detective Inspector Duffy, Detective Constable McBride from Carrickfergus RUC. We’re looking for a Martin McAlpine. We believe that this is his address,” I said.

She smiled at me and her eyebrows arched in a well-calibrated display of annoyance and contempt.

“This is why this country is going down the drain,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“I said this is why this country is going down the drain. Nobody cares. Nobody is remotely competent at their jobs.”

Her voice had a distinct Islandmagee country accent tinge to it, but there was something else there too. She spoke well, with a middle-class diction and without hesitation. She’d had a decent education it seemed, or a year or two at uni.

The dog kept barking and two fields over a door opened in another thatched farmhouse and a man smoking a pipe came out to gawk at us. The woman waved to him and he waved back.

I looked at Matty to see if he knew what she was talking about, but he was in the dark too. I took out my warrant card and showed it to her.

“Carrickfergus RUC,” I said again.

“Heard you the first time,” she said.

“Is this Martin McAlpine’s address?” Matty asked.

“What’s this about?” she demanded.

“It’s a murder investigation,” I told her.

“Well, Martin didn’t do it, that’s for sure,” she said, reaching into the dressing-gown pocket and pulling out a packet of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth but she didn’t have a lighter. I got my Zippo, flipped it and lit it for her.

“Ta,” she muttered.

“So can we speak to Mr McAlpine?”

“If you’re a medium.”

“Sorry?”

“My husband’s dead. He was shot not fifty feet from here last December.”

“Oh, shit,” Matty said, sotto voce.

She took a puff on the cigarette and shook her head. “Why don’t the pair of youse come in out of the rain. I’ll make you a cup of tea before you have to drive back to Carrick.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The farmhouse was small, with thick stone walls and cubby windows. It smelled of peat from the fire. We sat down on a brown bean-bag sofa. There were spaces on the mantle and empty frames where photographs had once been. Even Matty could have figured out what the frames had once contained.

She came back with three mugs of strong sweet tea and sat opposite us in an uncomfortable-looking rocking chair.

“So what’s this all about?”

“I’m very sorry about your husband,” I said. “We had no idea. He was shot by terrorists?”

“The IRA killed him because he was in the UDr He was only a part-timer. He was going up the hills to check on the sheep. They must have been waiting behind the gate out there. They shot him in the chest. He never knew a thing about it, or so they say.”

Matty winced.

Yes, we had really ballsed this one up and no mistake.

“I’m very sorry. We should have checked the name before we came out here,” I said pathetically.

The Ulster Defence Regiment was a locally recruited regiment of the British Army. They conducted foot patrols and joint patrols with the police and as such they were a vital part of the British government’s anti-terrorist strategy. There were about five thousand UDR men and women in Northern Ireland. The IRA assassinated between fifty and a hundred of them every year, most in attacks like the one that had killed Mrs McAlpine’s husband: mercury tilt switch bombs under cars, rural ambushes and the like.

As coppers, though, we looked down on UDR men. We saw ourselves as elite professionals and them as, well … fucking wasters for the most part. Sure, they were brave and put their lives on the line, but who didn’t in this day and age?

There was also the fact that many of the hated disbanded B Specials had joined the UDR and that occasionally guns from their depots would find their way into the hands of the paramilitaries. I mean, I’m sure ninety-five per cent of the UDR soldiers were decent, hardworking people, but there were definitely more bad apples in the regiment than in the RUC.

Not that any of that mattered now. We should have known about the death of a security forces comrade and we didn’t.

“Hold on there, that tea’s too wet. I’ll get some biscuits,” Mrs McAlpine said.

When she had gone Matty put up his hands defensively.

“Don’t blame me, this was your responsibility, boss,” he said. “You just asked for an address. You didn’t tell me to check the births and deaths …”

“I know, I know. It can’t be helped.”

“We’ve made right arses of ourselves. In front of a good-looking woman, too,” Matty said.

“I’m surprised the name didn’t ring a bell.”

“December of last year was a bad time, the IRA were killing someone every day, we can’t remember all of them,” Matty protested.

It was true. Last November/December there’d been a lot of IRA murders including the notorious assassination of a fairly moderate Unionist MP, the Reverend Robert Bradford, which had absorbed most of the headlines; for one reason and another the IRA tended not to target local politicians but when they did it got the ink pots flowing.

The widow McAlpine came back in with a tray of biscuits.

She was still wearing the dressing gown but she’d taken the towel off her head. Her hair was chestnut red, curly, long. Somehow it made her look much older. Late twenties, maybe thirty. And she would age fast out here in the boglands on a scrabble sheep farm with no husband and no help.

“This is lovely, thanks,” Matty said, helping himself to a chocolate digestive.

“So what’s this all about?” she asked.

I told her about the body in the suitcase and the name tag that we’d found inside the case.

“I gave that suitcase away just before Christmas with all of Martin’s stuff. I couldn’t bear to have any of his gear around me any more and I thought that somebody might have the use of it.”

“Can you tell us where you left it?” I asked.

“Yes. The Carrickfergus Salvation Army.”

“And this was just before Christmas?”

“About a week before.”

“Okay, we’ll check it out.”

We finished our tea and stared at the peat logs crackling in the fireplace. Matty, the cheeky skitter, finished the entire plate of chocolate digestives.

“Well, we should be heading on,” I said, stood and pulled Matty up before he scoffed the poor woman out of house and home.

“We’re really sorry to have bothered you, Mrs McAlpine.”

“Not at all. It chills the blood thinking that someone used Martin’s old suitcase to get rid of a body.”

“Aye, it does indeed.”

She walked us to the front door.

“Well, thanks again,” I said, and offered her my hand.

She shook it and didn’t let go when I tried to disengage.

“It was just out there where your Land Rover was parked. They must have been hiding behind the stone wall. Two of them, they said. Gave him both barrels of a shotgun and sped off on a motorbike. Point blank range. Dr McCreery said that he wouldn’t have known a thing about it.”

“I’m sure that’s the case,” I said and tried to let go, but still she held on.

“He only joined for the money. This place doesn’t pay anything. We’ve forty sheep on twelve acres of bog.”

“Yes, the—”

She pulled me closer.

“Aye, they say he didn’t know anything but he was still breathing when I got to him, trying to breathe anyway. His mouth was full of blood, he was drowning in it. Drowning on dry land in his own blood.”

Matty was staring at the woman, his eyes wide with horror and I was pretty spooked too. The widow McAlpine had us both, but me literally, in her grip.

“I’ll go start the Land Rover,” Matty said.

I made a grab at his sleeve as he walked away.

“He was a captain. He wasn’t just a grunt. He was a God-fearing man. An intelligent man. He was going places. And he was snuffed out just like that.”

She looked me square in the face and her expression was accusatory – as if I was somehow responsible for all of this.

Her rage had turned her cheeks as red as her bap.

“He was going to work?” I muttered, for something to say.

“Aye, he was just heading up to the fields to bring the yearlings in, him and Cora. I doubt we would have had a dozen of them.”

“I’m really very sorry,” I said.

She blinked twice and suddenly seemed to notice that I was standing there in front of her.

“Oh,” she said.

She let go of my hand. “Excuse me,” she mumbled.

“It’s okay,” I said, and took a step backwards. “Have a good morning.”

I walked back across the yard towards the Land Rover.

The rain was heavier now.

The Alsatian started snarling and barking at me again.

“That’s enough, Cora!” Mrs McAlpine yelled.

The dog stopped barking but didn’t cease straining at its rope leash.

“That is one mean crattur,” Matty said as I got into the front seat of the Land Rover.

“The dog or the woman?”

“The dog. Hardly the temperament for a sheep dog.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sheep dogs are supposed to like people.”

I looked back at the farmhouse and Mrs McAlpine was still standing there.

“Jesus, she’s still bloody staring at us – get this thing going, Matty.”

He turned on the Land Rover and manoeuvred it in a full circle in the farmyard. The sodden chickens flew and hopped away from us.

We drove out of the gate and began going down the lane.

The man with the pipe across the valley was still there in front of his house looking at us and another man on a tractor one field over on a little hill had stopped his vehicle to get a good gander at us too.

We were the local entertainment for the day.

“Where to now, boss?” Matty asked.

“I don’t know. Carrick Salvation Army, to see if they remember who they sold that suitcase to?”

“And then?”

“And then back to the station to see if Customs have that list of names yet.”

Matty put the heavy, armoured Land Rover in first gear and began driving down the lane keeping it well over on the ridge so that we wouldn’t get stuck in the mud.

He stuck on the radio and looked to see if I would mind Adam and the Ants on Radio One.

I didn’t mind.

I wasn’t really listening.

Something was bothering me.

It was something Matty had said.

The dog.

It was a mean animal. An Alsatian, yes, but trained to be a mean. I’d bet a week’s pay that it was primarily a guard dog. As Matty pointed out, on a sheep farm you’d want a Border Collie, but Martin McAlpine’s herd was so small he didn’t need that much help with the round up and so he’d got himself a good watch dog instead.

“Stop the car,” I said to Matty.

“What?”

“Stop the bloody car!”

He put in the clutch and brake and we squelched to a halt.

“Turn us around, drive us back to the McAlpines.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“Okay.”

He put the Rover in first gear and drove us back down the lane. When we reached the stone wall, Matty killed the engine and we got out of the Rover and walked across the muddy farmyard again.

I knocked on her door and she opened it promptly.

She had changed into jeans and a mustard-coloured jumper. She had tied her hair back into a pony tail.

“Sorry to bother you again, Mrs McAlpine,” I said.

“No bother, Inspector. What else was I going to do today? Wash the windows a second time?”

“I wanted to ask you a question about Cora? Is that the name of your dog?”

“Yes.”

“And you say your husband was going up to bring the yearlings in, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And did he normally take Cora with him?”

“Yes.”

“So she wasn’t tied up?”

“No.”

“Hmmm,” I said, and rubbed my chin.

“What are you getting at?” she asked.

“Was Cora always this bad-tempered or is this just since your husband was shot?”

“She’s never liked strangers.”

“And you say the gunmen were waiting just behind the stone wall, right out there beyond the farmyard?”

“They must have been, because Martin didn’t see them until it was too late.”

“You say they shot him in the chest?”

“Chest and neck.”

“Did you hear the shot?”

“Oh, yes. I knew what it was immediately. A shotgun. I’ve heard plenty of them in my time.”

“One shot?” Matty asked.

“Both barrels at the same time.”

“And when you came out your husband was down on the ground and the gunmen were riding off on a motorbike?”

“That they were.”

“And you couldn’t ID them?”

“It was a blue motorbike, that’s all I saw. Why all the questions, Detective?”

“Who investigated your husband’s murder?”

“Larne RUC.”

“And they didn’t find anything out of the ordinary?”

“No.”

“And the IRA claimed responsibility?”

“That very night. What’s in your mind, Inspector Duffy?

“Your husband was armed?” I asked.

“He always carried his sidearm with him, but he didn’t even get a chance to get it out of his pocket.”

“And you ran out and found him where?”

“In the yard.”

“Whereabouts? Can you show me?”

“There, where the rooster is,” she said, pointing about half the way across the farmyard, about twenty yards from the house and twenty from the stone wall. Not an impossible shot with a shotgun by any means, but then again, surely you’d want to get a lot closer than twenty yards and if you got closer, wouldn’t that have given Captain McAlpine plenty of time to get his own gun out of his pocket?

“Mrs McAlpine, if you’ll bear with me for just another moment … Let me get this clear in my mind. Your husband’s walking out to the fields, with Cora beside him, and two guys come out from behind the stone wall and shoot him down from twenty yards away. Cora, who was for taking my head off, doesn’t run at the men, and he can’t get his gun out in time?”

Her eyes were looking at me with a sort of hostility now.

“I’m only telling you what the police told me. I didn’t get there until it was all over.”

“But Cora was definitely loose?”

“Yes, she was.”

“Why didn’t the IRA men shoot her? She must have been all over them.”

“I don’t know … Maybe she was frightened.”

“She doesn’t seem like a dog easily cowed to me.”

Mrs McAlpine shrugged and said nothing.

“And why didn’t your husband pull his gun? They come out from behind the wall with shotguns. He must have seen them.”

“I don’t know, Inspector, I just don’t know,” Mrs McAlpine said in a tired monotone.

“Not if his back was turned,” Matty added.

“But Cora would have smelt them, no? She would have been going bonkers. They’re going to see a slavering Alsatian running at them. Wouldn’t that have given him a second or two to go for his gun?”

“Evidently not,” she said.

She reached into her jeans, took out a battered packet of Silk Cut and lit one.

She was pale and wan. Not just tired, something else … weary. Aye, that was it.

“They killed him. What difference does it make how they bloody did it?” she said at last.

I nodded. “Yes, of course. I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing important … Anyway, I’ve taken up more than enough of your time.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. These days all I’ve got is time,” she said, looking searchingly into my face, but I was the master of the blank expression – training from all those years of interrogation.

She puffed lightly on her fag.

“Maybe we should be heading, boss, before the rain bogs us down,” Matty said.

“One final question, if you don’t mind, Mrs McAlpine. I noticed some of the farm buildings back there, but I didn’t see a greenhouse. You wouldn’t have one at all, would you?”

“A what?”

“A greenhouse. For plants, fruits, you know.”

She blew out a line of smoke. “Aye, we have a greenhouse.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I took a wee look.”

“What for?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say, but it will only take a minute.”

“If it’s drugs you’re after, you won’t find any.”

“Can I take a look?”

She shrugged. “Be my guest.”

She walked me through the house to the muddy farmyard out the back. A smell of slurry and chicken feed. A few more harassed-looking hens sitting on a rusting Massey Ferguson tractor.

“Over there,” she said, pointing to a squalid little greenhouse near a barn.

I squelched through the mud to the greenhouse and went inside. Several panes had fallen in and rain and cold had turned a neat series of plum bushes into a blighted mess. There was mould on the floor and mushrooms were growing in an otherwise empty trough of black soil. There were no exotic plants or indeed any other plants apart from the withered plums.

I rummaged in the trough where the wild mushrooms now thrived, looking for the roots of a plant that might once have been there, but I came up empty – if Martin had been growing anything interesting here all traces of it had been removed.

I nodded and walked back across the farmyard, cleaned my shoes on the mud rack.

“Did you find what you were after?” she asked.

“Did you ever hear of a plant called rosary pea?”

“What?”

“A plant called the rosary pea? Did you ever hear of it?”

She shook her head.

“It’s also called crab’s eye, Indian liquorice, jumbie bead?”

“Never heard of it in my life.”

I nodded. “Sorry to have taken up so much of your time, thank you very much, Mrs McAlpine. Good morning,” I said and walked to the Rover.

“What was that all about?” Matty asked as we climbed back inside.

“This thing stinks.”

“What stinks? This? It’s a dead end, surely?”

I stared out at the boggy farm and through the rearview mirror I watched her go back inside the house.

“Let’s get out of here. Let’s see if we can’t dig a little deeper into the late Mr McAlpine’s murder.”

“What the hell for?”

“Just get us going, will ya?”

“Okay.”

We got about a hundred yards down the lane but a farmer was blocking the road with his tractor. It had stalled on the edge of the sheugh. He climbed down out of the cab to apologise. He had brown eyes under his flat cap. He was about forty-five. He had a pipe. So far so ordinary, but there was something about him I didn’t like. An unblinking quality to those brown eyes that most people didn’t have towards cops.

“Sorry lads, won’t be a moment,” he said. “I was turning this baste of a thing and I misjudged the size of the road.”

A road he’s driven down and turned his tractor around on a thousand times, I was thinking to myself.

“Oh, that’s okay, we’re in no hurry,” Matty said.

I added nothing.

“Just got to get the front wheel out of the ditch,” the man said, climbing back into the cab and turning the thing on.

The wheel came out easily and the man pulled the tractor over to let us pass.

Matty started the Rover and waved.

“What do you think that was all about?” I asked as I looked at the tractor in the side mirror.

“What?”

“The man with the tractor.”

“What about it?”

“Him fucking with us like that.”

Matty stared at me and when I didn’t elaborate he looked back down the road.

“So where to, boss?” he asked.

“Larne RUC,” I insisted.