I Hear the Sirens in the Street

20 THE UDR BASE

The media bought the tale about the “accidental shooting” – whether the life insurance company dicks would was another story but that, thank Christ, was not my concern. The funeral was on a Sunday at a small Scottish Calvinist Church up the Antrim coast. The ceremony was alien to me: singing of Psalms, prayers, nothing about the dead man. Rain and sea spray lashed the unadorned church windows and there was no heating of any kind.

A tall, Raymond Massey-like church elder said: “Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord that He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust. Surely He will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only observe with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked.”

This was definitely my kind of god but unfortunately it hadn’t quite worked out that way for Sergeant Burke. At the graveside, a divisional chief super gave a eulogy mentioning Burke’s years of devoted service. Of course there were no shots over the coffin or anything like that. You save that kind of thing for the Provos.

The fall-out from Burke’s death was immediate. Chief Inspector Brennan was not promoted, but to keep the shifts working effectively we now needed a new sergeant. Someone with a head for detail who could help keeping the place level. I knew that this was my opportunity to push for Crabbie. If they promoted him to acting sergeant now it wouldn’t matter how he did on his exam as long as he wasn’t a total disaster. I lobbied hard for him but I was a lone voice as everyone else wanted weasly Kenny Dalziel from clerical who could run the admin that everyone else hated.

I told Crabbie after the meeting. “They’re promoting Dalziel.”

He was gutted. “What have I done wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry, mate. They don’t know anything. I mean, of course they’re going to promote a clerk like Dalziel, not someone who actually, you know, goes out and solves crimes.”

The day ended.

The next began.

The week went by like that.

Rain and no leads.

On the Thursday we learned that Bill O’Rourke’s body had been returned to America. His funeral was at Arlington where he got the full honour guard, folded flag treatment. We were told that his dead wife’s sister had surfaced out of the woodwork to claim his house in Massachusetts and his apartment in Florida. I asked the local police to interview her and they did and a Lieutenant Dawson sent me a terse fax stating that there was nothing suspicious about her.

The days lengthened. The Royal Navy Task Force continued its southward journey. On Saturday morning a masked man armed with a shotgun robbed the Northern Bank in High Street Carrickfergus and got away with nine hundred pounds. The sum was insignificant, no one was hurt and I wasn’t going to make it a priority until Brennan summoned me to his office.

“What’s your progress on the O’Rourke murder?”

“It’s about the same as it was when we talked last w—”

“Get on this robbery, then. Your full team. It’s about time you started pulling your weight around here, Duffy!”

Brennan had aged. His hair was going from grey to white and he looked flabby. God knows where he was staying now. What was bothering him? The marriage? Being passed over? Something else? I’d never know. Crabbie had gone through troubles with his missus last year and had never said one word about it.

I investigated the robbery and of course there were no witnesses, but an informant our agent handler knew called Jackdaw told us some good information.

A guy called Gus Plant had bought everyone a round of drinks in the Borough Arms on Saturday night and boasted to everyone that he was going to get himself a new motor. Crabbie and I got a warrant and went to Gus’s house in Castlemara Estate. He’d had the stolen money under his bed.

It was pathetic.

We cuffed him and his wife screamed at him all the way outside. She’d told him that that was the first place the cops would look and he hadn’t listened because he never listened.

“Prison’ll be good for you, mate. Anything to get away from that racket,” I told him in the back of the Rover.

It wasn’t The Mystery of the Yellow Room but it was a case solved and it kept the Chief off our backs for a couple of days.

I called Tony McIlroy and asked him about the Dougherty murder.

For a moment he was baffled.

“We yellowed that file. It’s going nowhere,” he said.

“You interviewed the widow?”

“Aye, I did. You didn’t tell me she was a good-looking lass.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what are your impressions? Did she have something to do with Dougherty’s death?”

“Fuck, no.”

“That’s it? A simple no? She had no alibi.”

“Or motive, or weapon, or cojones, or experience … Hey, I’ve another call, I’ll call you back.”

He didn’t call me back.

Days.

Nights.

Rain through the kitchen window. Thin daffodils. Fragile lilacs. Gulls flopping sideways into the wind. An achromatic vacancy to the sky.

I canvassed for witnesses, tried to nail down Bill O’Rourke’s last movements, but nobody knew anything. Nobody had seen him after he left the Dunmurry Country Inn.

One morning the Chief Inspector had us up to his office. “Lads, listen, I’m putting the name and number of the divisional psychiatrist up on the noticeboard. I suggest you tell the lads to avail themselves of his services. The bottle is not the answer,” he said, finishing a double whiskey chaser.

April marched on.

We put the O’Rourke case in a yellow binder, which meant that it was open but not actively being pursued.

This represented yet another personal defeat. Half a dozen murder investigations under my belt and not one of them had resulted in a successful prosecution.

This time we hadn’t even found out who’d done it.

A man mourning his wife had come on holiday to Ireland and someone had poisoned him, chopped up the body, frozen him and dumped him like trash.

“It’s sickening,” I told Matty and McCrabban over a hot whiskey at the Dobbins.

“It’s part of the job, mate,” Crabbie said philosophically. “You’ll drive yourself mad if you’re after a hundred per cent clearance rate.”

He was right about that, but wasn’t it also possible that I just wasn’t a very good copper? Perhaps I lacked focus or attention to detail or maybe I just didn’t have the right stuff to be a really good detective. Or even a half-decent detective.

A wet, frigid, Monday morning we got a call about a break-in at the rugby club on the Woodburn Road. Trophies had been stolen. The thieves had come in through a skylight. None of us could face going up onto the rugby club roof in this weather so we drew straws. Matty and I got the short ones.

We drove up the Woodburn Road, climbed a rickety ladder, got on the roof and gathered evidence while rain came down in buckets and a caretaker kept saying “It’s not safe up there, be careful, now.”

We heroically dusted for prints and found nothing. A pigeon shat on Matty’s back. We climbed back down, wrote a description of the missing articles and said we’d put the word out. We had a courtesy pint in the club and we were about to drive home when I noticed that the rugby club was right next to Carrickfergus UDR base.

The UDR barracks was even more heavily defended than the police station. A twenty-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire was in front of a thick blast-wall made of reinforced concrete.

It was an ugly structure: utilitarian, grim, Soviet. I had never been inside. You’d think that there were would be a lot of cooperation between the police and the UDr The Ulster Defence Regiment was the locally recruited regiment of the British Army and there were often joint RUC/UDR patrols, but in fact we largely operated in different worlds. We seldom shared intelligence and what they actually did apart from the odd patrol or operation on the border was a mystery. A lot of drinking, snooker and darts, I imagine. We regarded ourselves as a highly professional modern police force operating in extremis – the UDR was, at best, a panicky response to the Troubles. The Troubles was their entire raison d’être and if the war ever ended we would still be here but they, presumably, would have to be disbanded. Were there good UDR officers and men? Of course, but were there a lot of wasters, too? Yes. And bigots, more than likely. These days the police were getting up to twenty per cent Catholic representation, which compared favourably to the forty per cent of Northern Ireland’s population who identified ourselves as Roman Catholic on the census. The UDR didn’t publish its Catholic membership, but it was rumoured to be less than five per cent. Of course the IRA made it their number one priority to kill Catholic UDR men, but even so, the regiment had more than a whiff of sectarianism about it. And it wasn’t just the Nationalist papers in Belfast who criticised it – stories about collusion between the UDR and Protestant terror groups had appeared in the mainstream English press, too.

We were all on the same side, but if we ever wanted to get cooperation from the Catholic community we coppers had to hold ourselves somewhat aloof.

“Where are you going?” Matty asked.

“We never checked out Captain McAlpine, did we?”

“Oh Jesus, this again?” Matty said.

“Can you think of anything better to do?”

Matty thought for a second or two. “No, actually, I can’t.”

We drove to the fortified guard post and showed our warrant cards. A soldier with full body armour, holding an SLR, gave us a suspicious look and then waved us through.

We parked in the visitors lot and went through another checkpoint at the base’s entrance.

“What’s the nature of your business, gentlemen?” the guard asked us. Big Derry lad with a black beard.

“We need to speak to your commanding officer about one of your men. It’s a confidential matter,” I said.

He didn’t like that, but what could he do? We were all supposed to be pulling for the same team.

“You’re lucky, lads. The Colonel’s here. I think he’s down on the range. You’ll have to leave your weapons, gentlemen. Only authorised personnel are allowed to carry firearms inside the base.”

We left our guns and got directions to the range.

We walked down dreary concrete corridors illuminated only by buzzing strip lights. There were no windows and the sole decorations were posters on the wall warning about the dangers of booby traps, honey traps and other IRA tricks.

The honey trap posters showed an attractive blonde woman leading an unsuspecting squaddie into a terraced house with the caption “Who knows what’s waiting for you on the other side of the door?”

The range was on a lower level deep beneath the ground.

We knocked on the No Entry sign and a “range master” opened the door a crack. He was a sergeant carrying a machine gun. We explained our business with the Colonel.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until Lieutenant Colonel Clavert is finished. You need a range pass to get in here and only Colonel Clavert or Captain Dunleavy can issue those. Captain Dunleavy’s not on the base at the moment.”

We waited outside on uncomfortable plastic chairs.

The sound of gunfire was muffled and distant like it is in dreams.

Finally the Colonel appeared. He was dressed in fatigues. A tall man, with jet black hair, a trim moustache and large, round glasses.

He turned out to be English, which was something of a surprise. I introduced Matty and myself and explained why we had come by:

“We’re looking into the murder of Captain McAlpine and we wanted to ask a few questions about him.”

“I wondered when you chaps would finally appear.”

“We’re the first police officers to come here asking about McAlpine’s death?”

“Yes. And it’s been a while, hasn’t it? It was December when poor Martin copped it. Come with me to my office.”

The office was another windowless bunker.

Lime-green gloss plaint covering breeze blocks. A series of framed pictures of castles. A large wooden desk, pictures of wife and kids, a Newton’s cradle. The whole thing looked artificial, like a movie set.

Colonel Clavert offered us tea and cigarettes. We accepted both and a young soldier went off to make the former.

“Did you enjoy the range?” I asked conversationally.

“Oh, yes! It’s wonderfully relaxing. A friend of mine in the Irish Guards up at Bessbrook sent me down a batch of AK-47s they found in a weapons cache. We had them cleaned and oiled, found some ammo. Have you ever shot one of those? Ghastly things. But fun! Sergeant O’Hanlon proved himself something of a master. Trick is short bursts. Full auto is a disaster.”

I could see Matty rolling his eyes to my left.

The soldier came in with tea and biscuits. When he’d gone I got down to business.

“So, Captain McAlpine?”

Clavert nodded.

“Fourth man we’ve lost since I took command here. Such a shame. First-class fellow. We can’t replace him. Not with the riff raff we, uh …” he began and dried up quickly when he realised that he was talking out of school.

He went to a filing cabinet, and took out a file. He sat back down at his desk, thumbed through the file, read it, and closed it again.

“Can I take a look?” I asked.

Clavert shook his head. “Actually, old boy, I’m afraid not. We do not have a code-sharing arrangement with the RUC and this file has been marked SECRET.”

He had a young, open face, did Colonel Clavert, but now it assumed a pinched, irritated expression. He rubbed his moustache, but didn’t look the least embarrassed.

“I’m investigating the man’s murder,” I said.

“Be that as it may, you can’t see his file without authorisation from the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.”

“Why? What’s so bloody secret? Was he on a death squad or something? Going around shooting suspected IRA men in the middle of the fucking night?” I said, in a silly bout of frustration that I immediately regretted.

Clavert sighed. “Don’t be so dramatic, Inspector, it’s nothing like that … And if it was something like that, do you think I’d still have the file in a little cardboard folder in my office?”

“So, what is then?” I asked

He lit another cigarette and said nothing. He smiled and shook his head. Not only was the bastard disrupting the investigation, but I was losing face in front of Matty.

“This is a murder investigation,” I said again.

“Yes, Inspector. But I assure you that nothing’s amiss. We conducted our own inquiry into Captain McAlpine’s death. His killing was a random IRA murder. Nothing more.”

“What? Who conducted this inquiry of yours?”

“The military police, of course.”

“The military police? I see. And did you pass on your findings to us?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was an internal investigation.”

“This is why the IRA is going to win, because the left hand doesn’t know what the fucking right hand is doing,” I muttered.

“I don’t like that kind of talk. It shows a bad attitude,” the Colonel said.

I tapped the desk.

“Listen, mate, I won’t need to go to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. I’m investigating the murder of an American citizen. Captain McAlpine’s death is only an adjunct to a wider inquiry. The Consul General has been on the blower asking about this case and his boss is the United States Ambassador to the Court of St James. There’s this little thing going on in the Falklands Islands at the moment, you may have heard about it, and Her Majesty’s Government is doing everything it can to keep the Yanks fucking sweet, so if a call comes into your office this afternoon it won’t be from the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, it’ll be from the fucking Prime Minister and she won’t be pleased with you, I promise you that.”

Colonel Clavert’s thin, supercilious smile evaporated.

“Very well. I can let you read this, but I can’t allow you to make notes, photocopy or remove it from this office.”

He sighed and passed the file across the desk before continuing, “You’ll understand my caution when I tell you that Captain McAlpine was our district intelligence officer. He ran our informers.”

I understood. The UDR had its own network of informers and McAlpine was the man who was in charge of paying them and assessing their information. Of course the RUC had its own completely separate list of informers and it was rumoured that MI5 had yet another network of its own too. A really good tout could be getting three paycheques for the same piece of information.

I read the file carefully. It was low grade stuff about arms dumps, suspected IRA men, suspected UVF men, suspected drugs smugglers. The payments were small: fifty quid, a hundred quid. There was nothing dramatic here. I passed it to Matty. I could tell that he wasn’t impressed either. I read it again just to be on the safe side and then I spotted something. The penultimate entry about a week before McAlpine’s murder was from an informant, codenamed Woodbine, who “had seen a suspicious character hanging round the Dunmurry DeLorean factory carpark”. For this information McAlpine had paid Woodbine the princely sum of twenty pounds. I pointed out the word Dunmurry to Matty and he nodded.

“Who’s Woodbine?” I asked, passing the file back.

“One moment,” Colonel Clavert said.

He went to the filing cabinet and opened another file. “Woodbine, let me see, Waverly, Winston, Woodbine. Ah, yes, a chap called Douggie Preston.”

“Address?” I asked.

“11 Drumhill Road, Carrickfergus.”

We thanked the Colonel, stubbed out our cigarettes and were about to leave when he asked us if we were going to interview the widow McAlpine in the course of our inquiries.

“We might,” I said. “Why?”

“Because she still hasn’t picked up Martin’s stuff and it’s been here four months now.”

“What stuff?”

“From his locker. His dress uniform. A pair of training shoes. There’s some money. A cricket bat, of all things. I’ve called her several times about it.”

I looked at Matty. “Aye, we can take them down to her.”

We drove out of the UDR base into a heavy downpour.

“I suppose we’re going to Islandmagee now?”

“Let’s try Mr Preston first.”

Drumhill Road was in the ironically named Sunnylands Housing Estate – one of the worst in Carrick. Red-brick and breezeblock terraces, mostly packed with unemployed refugees from Belfast. Lots of kids running around barefoot, burnt-out cars, shopping trolleys and rubbish everywhere. This was RHC territory – the Red Hand Commando – a particularly violent and bloody offshoot of the slightly more responsible UDA.

Preston lived in an end terrace. There was a smashed row boat in the front garden, a pile of old furniture, what looked a lot like an aircraft engine and a little girl about four in a filthy frock playing by herself with a headless Barbie doll.

“So this is how the other half lives,” Matty muttered.

I rang the door bell and when that didn’t work I knocked.

“Who is it?” a woman asked from inside.

“The police,” I said.

“I’ve told you. We do not sell acid. Never have, never will!”

“We’re not here about that.”

“What do you want?”

“We’re looking for Douggie.”

She opened the door. She was mid-forties but looked seventy. Grey hair, teeth missing, running to fat. Her fingers were stained with nicotine smoke.

“Have you found him?” she asked.

“We’re looking for him,” Matty said.

She shook her head sadly. “Aye, aren’t we all.”

“How long has been missing?” I asked.

“Since November,” she said.

“No word at all?”

“No.”

“He lived at home?”

“Aye.”

“No girlfriend, anything like that?”

“Nobody steady like. He was a shy boy, was Douggie.”

Past tense. She knew he was dead.

“When was the last time that anybody saw him?”

“He was down the North Gate on November twenty-seventh, having a wee drink, said he was away home to watch the snooker. That was the last we heard tell of him.”

I wrote the information down in my book.

“They’ve topped him, haven’t they?” she said.

“I have no idea.”

“Aye, they’ve topped him. God knows why. He was a good boy, was Douggie, a very good boy.”

“Did he have a job?”

“No. He was at Shorts for a year. He was a trained fitter but he got laid off. He tried to get into the DeLorean factory in Dunmurry, but they had their pick of the crop. He went back several times looking to get in, but jobs is scarce, aren’t they?”

“They are indeed,” Matty said.

“Dunmurry, eh?”

“Aye, but there were ten applicants for every one job. Wee Douggie had no chance.”

“He didn’t know anyone up there?”

“No. More’s the pity.”

“Have there been any strangers hanging around? Anyone asking about him?”

“No.”

We stood there on the porch while the girl behind us in the garden started to make explosion noises. Matty tried a few more lines of approach but the lady had nothing.

“Well, if we hear anything, we’ll certainly be in touch,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, and added, “he was a good boy.”