I Hear the Sirens in the Street

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 British 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.”

“Why someone who knew him?”

“He let the killer walk right up to him, he didn’t draw his gun, his vicious guard dog didn’t get involved.”

“And you went and told Dougherty about these doubts?”

“Yes.”

“And left it at that?”

“And left it at that. It was a tangent. As my youthful sidekick explained to me, it was an SEP: someone else’s problem.”

Tony nodded and rubbed his sideburns. “So, what? You think you might have shaken Dougherty out of his hammock and the old geezer went to stir some shit?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Mind if I look around?”

“Be my guest.”

I walked the length of the driveway and stopped in front of the garage. I peered at the bullet holes. They were wildly far apart. Feet, instead of inches.

“He was shot three times in the chest?”

“That’s what they tell me. Three in the chest, three in the garage.”

“What’s normally the next step in a case like this?”

“Our next step, Sean, will be to attempt to trace the gun by analysing the slugs. Canvass for witnesses, of which there won’t be any, none that will testify certainly. Put the word out for tips, offer a reward …”

We had finished our smokes now and Tony fished into his pocket and took out his packet of Player’s.

He lit me one. “Smoking can cause cancer”, it said on the packet. It was a fine time to bring that up.

The day had turned cold and fog was rolling down the hill and where it met the electricity pylons little halos of Saint Elmo’s fire were forming, vanishing and reforming again.

I took a puff of the Player. It was pretty rough.

“In other words, Chief Inspector, after the condemnation by the politicians and after the church service ends and the TV cameras leave, this case will go nowhere.”

He was a little ticked at that. “I don’t know how things are done in your manor, mate, but we take every case seriously. It’s not my fucking fault that it’s nearly fucking impossible to break up an IRA cell, is it?”

I nodded and threw the ciggie away. I walked over to the garage again.

“Three rounds in the garage.”

“So.”

“When does an IRA hit team miss not once, not twice, but three times?”

“I’d stake my pension that this is an ordinary assassination by an ordinary IRA cell.”

“Stake something worth a damn. None of us are making old bones, are we? But let’s give it your best-case argument. Let’s say they’ve brought along a newcomer who’s on his first job. They have to blood the newcomers somehow, don’t they? Every killer has a first time.”

“Aye.”

“So after the new boy misses and sticks three in the garage door and Dougherty gets his gun out, then his partner can’t take any more of it and shoots him in the chest.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Tony admitted.

“Two things, Tony. Two things. First, Dougherty is old and fat and drunk and fucking slow! For him to get that gun out of that leather holster, this team must really be shite.”

Tony nodded. “What’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is that in this scenario the slugs can’t all have come from the same gun. The ones in the garage will be from a different weapon from the ones in Dougherty … But they’re not, are they?”

“Aaahh,” Tony said and shook his head. “Missed that. No, you’re right. Preliminary ballistics suggests that—”

“Lets say the widow McAlpine comes up here. She’s never fired a hand gun before in her life, she squeezes one off, she misses, he turns, she misses again, he starts fumbling for his gun, she misses again, he’s nearly got the .38 out and she finally hits the fucker and hits him again and again.”

“Why?”

“Let’s say you wanted to kill a copper. For whatever reason. Maybe he fucked your wife or embezzled you or something. Say anything. Now, if you or someone close to you was in the security forces, it would be pretty easy, wouldn’t it? You get yourself a gun – anywhere – you put on a balaclava, shoot the bugger and then call the Belfast Telegraph with a recognised terrorist code word. Peelers like you and me show up at the crime scene and because the IRA has claimed responsibility we don’t look too hard at it cos we more or less know who did it and we know that we’ll never catch them in a million years.”

He finished his fag and nodded thoughtfully.

“Your case hangs on the fact that Dougherty went digging after his wee talk with you.”

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Easy to check.”

“He goes back to the widow, starts throwing accusations around. She goes all panic stations, gets herself a piece, comes here and shoots him? You think that’s more likely than an IRA hit?”

I laughed and looked at my DMs. “I suppose it’s a bit thin, Tony, but I can’t help thinking that these three holes in the garage mean something.”

He looked at me, squinted into the sun juking between the clouds over the Antrim Plateau and grinned. “You know what I liked about you when we worked together in the County Armagh?”

“What?”

“Even when you were completely wrong about something, the journey into your wrongness was always fucking interesting. Come with me.”

We walked over to a tall, lean guy with a big Dick Spring moustache.

“Gerry, take over here, I’m going down to Larne RUC to have a wee look at Dougherty’s current case load. Could be personal, not random, you never know, do you?”

“Aye,” Gerry agreed.

Tony had come in a cop Land Rover so we took my car.

It was a ten-minute run from rural Ballygalley to the grey misery that was Larne. We chatted a little and Radio One played “Ebony and Ivory”, a new song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. The breakfast DJ Mike Read played it two times in a row which was pretty hardcore of him as it was clearly the worst song of the decade so far, perhaps of the entire century.

Larne RUC.

With one of their own gunned down, the atmosphere was apocalyptic and doom laden. We paid our respects to the duty sergeant and ostentatiously put a few coppers in the widows and orphans box.

We met with the Superintendent, expressed our condolences, told him that we wanted to look into Dougherty’s old cases and Tony explained that this was nothing more than Standard Operating Procedure.

The Super couldn’t have cared less. He was new on the job, had barely interacted with Dougherty and now he had a funeral to suss and with the Chief Constable and half a dozen VIPs coming it was going to be a friggin’ nightmare.

We left him to his drama and found Dougherty’s office.

A shining twenty-three-year-old detective constable called Conlon showed us in. I asked him to hang around to answer questions while Tony looked through Dougherty’s files.

“Was Inspector Dougherty a family man?” I asked conversationally.

“Wife and a grown daughter. Ex-wife. He was divorced.”

“Where’s she? The wife, I mean.”

“Wife and daughter are both over the water, I gathered.”

“Whereabouts?”

“I don’t know. London somewhere?”

“Was he a social man – did you all go out for drinks come a Friday night?”

Conlon hesitated, torn between loyalty to the dead man and a desire to tell me how it was.

“Inspector Dougherty wasn’t exactly a social drinker. When he drank, he drank, if you catch my meaning.”

“I catch your meaning. Was he the senior detective here?”

“Detective Chief Inspector Canning is the senior detective here. He’s in court today, I could try and page him?”

“No, no, you’ll be fine. Tell me more about Inspector Dougherty; what sort of a man was he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Friendly, dour, a practical joker, what?”

“Well, he was, uh, sort of semi-retired, so he was. Nobody really … I didn’t have much to do with him.”

“Was he working on anything in particular in the last couple of days?” I asked.

“I thought this was all a random IRA hit?” Conlon asked suspiciously.

“It was a random IRA hit,” Tony said, looking up from the filing cabinet.

“Did Dougherty mention any threats or anything that was troubling him?”

“Not to me.”

“To anybody else?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“What was he working on the last few days?”

“I didn’t know him very well,” he said, hesitated, and looked out the window.

“You don’t want to speak ill of the dead … is that the vibe I’m catching here?” I asked him.

DC Conlon reddened, gave a little half nod and said nothing.

“The Inspector didn’t do much but come in late, sit in his office, drink, leave early, drive home half drunk, is that it?” I wondered.

DC Conlon nodded again.

“But what about the last couple of days? Did he seem different? More fired up? Onto anything?”

“Not so I’d noticed,” Conlon said.

“Nothing out of the ordinary at all?”

Conlon shook his head. His hair seemed to move independently of his head when he did that and it made him look particularly stupid.

“How did he get assigned to the McAlpine murder if he was such a bloody lightweight?” I asked.

“Chief Inspector Canning was in for his appendix,” Conlon said.

“And after he came back from his appendix?”

“Well, that was an open and shut case, wasn’t it?”

“It’s hardly shut, son, is it? No prosecutions, no convictions?”

Conlon coughed. “What I mean is, I mean, we know who done it, don’t we?”

“Do we? Who done it? Gimme their names and I’ll have them fuckers in the cells within the hour,” I said.

“I mean, we know who done it in the corporate sense. The IRA killed him.”

“The corporate sense is it now? The IRA did it. Just like they killed Dougherty himself.”

“Well, didn’t they?” Conlon asked.

“Yes, they did,” Tony said. He waved a file at me.

I looked at Conlon. “That’ll be all. And do us a favour, mate, keep your mouth shut.”

“About what?”

“Exactly. Now fuck off.”

He exited the office and I closed the door.

“What did you find, mate?” I asked Tony.

“Nothing of interest in any of them. Dougherty has nothing in his ‘active’ file and there’s a layer of dust on everything else.”

“I take it that’s the McAlpine file?”

He slid it across the table to me.

The last notes on it had been made in December. He’d added nothing since my visit.

I shook my head. Tony squeezed my arm again. “Everybody can’t be as impressed by you as I am, mate. I’m afraid you didn’t wow Dougherty as much as you would have liked.”

“I suppose not.”

Tony was almost laughing now. “Maybe you should have worn your medal or told him about that time you met Joey Ramone.”

“All right, all right. No point in raking me. Let’s skedaddle.”

We straightened the desk, closed the filing cabinets.

“And look, if you find a case notebook in the house or the car or anything, I’d be keen to take a look at it,” I said to Tony.

“You got it, mate,” Tony assured me.

“And I did see Joey Ramone, he was right across from me in the subway.”

“Big stars don’t ride the fucking subway.”

We had almost made it out of the incident room when young Conlon approached us diffidently. “Yes?” Tony wondered.

“Well, it’s probably nothing.”

“Go on,” I said encouragingly.

“There was one thing that was a wee bit of the ordinary,” Conlon began.

“What was it?” I asked, my heart rate quickening.

“Well, Dougherty knows that I’m from Islandmagee, doesn’t he? And he knows that I take the ferry over here every morning, instead of driving round through Whitehead. It saves you twenty minutes.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I suppose that’s why he asked me how much it cost.”

“He asked you how much the ferry cost from Larne to Islandmagee?”

“Aye.”

“And that was strange, was it?” Tony asked.

“A wee bit. Because he hadn’t spoken to me at all this year. You know?”

I looked at Tony. “He was going to take the ferry over to Islandmagee and he wanted to check the price.”

Tony nodded.

“Did he say anything else?” I asked.

“Nope. I told him it was twenty pence for pedestrians and a quid for cars. And he thanked me and that was that.”

I looked at Tony. He gave me a half nod.

“You done good, son,” I told DC Conlon.

Tony and I did the rounds, said hello to a couple of sergeants and left the station. We got in the Beemer and headed out into the street.

“When he investigated McAlpine’s murder he would have had a driver. He would have gone over there in a police Land Rover the long way round through Whitehead. But he was going over himself in his own car,” Tony said.

“Going to question Mrs McAlpine,” I said.

“Possibly. What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. “Nine thirty.”

“I feel like that ad for the army: ‘We do more things before breakfast than you’ll do all day.’”

“Aye, more stupid things.”

“Yeah.”

“Shall we go do one more stupid thing?”

“Aye.”

I drove the Land Rover down into Larne and easily found the ferry over the Lough to Islandmagee. We paid the money and drove on. It left on the half hour and five minutes later we docked in Ballylumford, Islandmagee. “Let’s go see what alibi this bint of yours has cooked up for her whereabouts last night,” Tony said.