I Hear the Sirens in the Street

3: THE BIG RED ONE

I was tempted to order another double whiskey and a Guinness and make this a proper session but it was a Friday which meant that the lunch special was deep-fried pizza and that stuff reeked of the cardiac ward.

I said hello to Sergeant Burke on the desk, complimented him on his throwback Zapata moustache, and went straight upstairs to the incident room.

“Jesus! Where did you come from?” Matty said, caught throwing darts at the dartboard.

“At the nineteenth level of Zen Buddhism you learn how to teleport – now put them darts away, we’ve work to do,” I said irritably.

Matty threw the final dart and sat at his desk.

He was getting on my nerves, Matty. He had let his hair grow and because of his natural Mick frizz it had gotten wide. He had a pinky ring and he’d taken to wearing white jackets over white T-shirts. I’m not sure what this look was supposed to be exactly but I didn’t like it, even ironically.

He and McCrabban were staring at me with gormless expressions on their faces.

“Missing persons reports?” I asked.

“None so far, Sean.”

“Any luck on that motto?”

“Not yet,” McCrabban replied mournfully.

“Keep at it! Remember what Winston Churchill said, ‘there’ll be plenty of time for wanking when the boats are back from Dunkirk’, right?”

“I don’t think Churchill ever said any such—”

“And you, Matty, my lad, get on the blower to garden centres and ask about rosary pea.”

We phone-called for an hour.

Not a single garden centre in Northern Ireland stocked the rosary pea. I phoned the Northern Ireland Horticultural Society but that too drew a blank. No one they knew had ever shown or grown it. But you’d definitely need a greenhouse they said.

“The killer probably has a greenhouse. Write that on the whiteboard,” I said.

Crabbie added that to our list of boxes and arrows on the incident-room whiteboard.

“Keep the calls going. I’m off to the library,” I said.

I walked back along the Scotch Quarter. A tinker was selling a dangerous-looking goat from the back of his Ford Transit. “Goat For Sale. Temper. All Offers Considered,” his sign said.

“No thanks, mate,” I said and as it began to hail I hustled into Carrickfergus Library and said good afternoon to Mrs Clemens.

“They say it’ll be a lovely day later,” I added conversationally.

“Who said this?” she demanded suspiciously.

I liked Mrs Clemens very much. She was going on seventy-five. She had lost an eye to cancer and wore an eye patch instead of a glass bead. I dug that – it gave her a piratical air. She was dyspeptic and knew the library backwards and hated anybody borrowing anything.

“Plants, horticulture, botany?” I asked.

“581,” she said. “There are some good encyclopaedias at the beginning of the section.”

“Thank you.”

I went to 581 and looked up the rosary pea:

ABRUS PRECATORIUS, known commonly as Jequirity, Crab’s Eye, Rosary Pea, John Crow Bead, Precatory Bean, Indian Liquorice, Akar Saga, Giddee Giddee or Jumbie Bead in Trinidad & Tobago, is a slender, perennial climber that twines around trees, shrubs, and hedges. It is a legume with long, pinnate-leafleted leaves. The plant is native to Indonesia and grows in tropical and subtropical areas of the world where it has been introduced. It has a tendency to become weedy and invasive. In India the seeds of the Rosary Pea are often used in percussion instruments.

“Interesting,” I said to myself. I photocopied the page and, with Mrs Clemens’s help, found a book on poisons. The listing I needed was under ‘Jequirity Seed’:

The Jequirity Seed contains the highly toxic poison Abrin, a close relative to the well known poison, Ricin. It is a dimer consisting of two protein sub units, termed A and B. The B chain facilitates Abrin’s entry into a cell by bonding to certain transport proteins on cell membranes, which then transport the toxin inside the cell. Once inside the cell membrane, the A chain prevents protein synthesis by inactivating the 26S sub unit of the ribosome. One molecule of Abrin will inactivate up to 1,500 ribosomes per second. Symptoms are identical to those of Ricin, save that Abrin is more toxic by several orders of magnitude. Weaponised high toxicity Abrin will cause liver failure, pulmonary edema and death shortly after ingestion. There is no known antidote for Abrin poisoning.

I photocopied that page too and jogged back to the station through the hail. The place was deserted apart from a tubby, annoying new reservist called McDowell who had come up to me on his first day and asked me point blank if “it was true that I was really a fenian” and it was a lucky break for me that it had been raining just then because I was able to dramatically take off my wool cap and ask him to look for horns. The place had erupted in laughter and Inspector McCallister was gagging so hard he nearly threw a hernia. McDowell had avoided me ever since.

I found everyone in a haze of cigarette smoke up in the second-floor conference room where Chief Inspector Brennan was giving a briefing on the current terrorist situation – a briefing he had just been given at a station chiefs and divisional commanders meeting in Belfast. “Glad you could join us, Inspector Duffy, do have a seat, this concerns you, too!”

“Yes, sir,” I said and took a chair at the back of the room next to Sergeants Burke and Quinn.

I listened but I wasn’t paying much attention. Brennan told us that we were in what the boys in Special Branch called a “regrouping and reconnaissance period”. The IRA’s problem was very much an embarrassment of riches. IRA recruitment had soared because of the hunger strikes last year and especially after the martyrdom of Bobby Sands. Volunteers were having to be turned away and money was flowing into the organisation through protection rackets, narcotics and pub collection boxes in Irish bars in Boston and New York. The Libyans had supplied the IRA with Semtex explosive, rockets and Armalite rifles. The IRA leadership was currently having difficulty figuring out what to do with all its men and guns but the lull wouldn’t last and we were all to be on our guard for what could be an epic struggle ahead.

Brennan’s method was only to give us the facts and he didn’t bother with a pep talk or encouraging words. We were all too jaded for that and he knew it. He didn’t even break out his stash of good whiskey which wasn’t really on at all.

“Are you paying attention to this, Duffy?” he asked.

“Aye, sir, ce n’est pas un revolte, it’s a friggin’ revolution, isn’t it?”

“Aye, it is. And don’t talk foreign. All right, everyone, you’re dismissed,” he said brusquely.

I corralled Matty and McCrabban back into the incident room where our whiteboard gleamed with a big red “1” drawn above the list of known facts about our John Doe.

“What’s that for?” I asked Crabbie.

He grinned and got me a sheet of paper from his desk which turned out to be his notes on the First Infantry Division of the United States Army.

“Our boy is a Yank. ‘No Mission Too Difficult, No Sacrifice Too Great’, is the motto of the United States Army’s First Infantry Division. I did some digging. If our John Doe was World War Two age, his unit was in the worst of it: Sicily, Normandy, The Hurtgen Forest. That’s maybe where he got the shrapnel wounds too.”

“Excellent work, Crabbie!” I said, really pleased. “This is great! It gives us a lot to go on. An American! Boy oh boy.”

“I helped!” Matty protested a little petulantly.

“I’m sure you did, mate,” I reassured him.

“An American ex-GI comes to Northern Ireland for his holidays or to visit his old haunts and the poor bugger somehow ends up poisoned,” Crabbie said reflectively.

“Aye,” I said and rubbed my chin. “Have you been on the phone to Customs and Immigration?”

“We have. They’re on it now. We’ve got them compiling a list of names of all American visitors to Northern Ireland in the last three months,” Matty said.

“Why three months?”

“If his body was frozen it could have been any time at all, but any earlier than three months and we surely would have had a missing persons report,” Matty said, a little oversensitively.

“Call them up and ask them to go back a full year,” I said.

“Jesus, Sean, that could be hundreds of names, maybe thousands,” Matty said.

“We’ll go back five years if we have to. We’re looking for a result here. You heard what the Chief said. We’ve got the luxury of one case right now. We could be looking at murders a plenty in the next couple of months.”

Matty nodded and got on the phone and I shared what I had found about the nature of the poison with McCrabban.

“That’s a rare old bird indeed,” he said.

“Aye.”

“We’ve got to see who could grow a plant like that, or where you could get the seeds.”

“Back on the bloody blower?” he asked.

“Back on the bloody blower, mate.”

I went to the crapper and read the Sun, a copy of which was always in there. I’ll say this for Rupert Murdoch, he made a good paper to read on the bog.

When I came out Matty was looking triumphant.

“What did customs say about the names?” I asked.

“Well, there was a lot of complaining.”

“Did you lean on them?”

“Those bastards hate to do any work, but I applied the thumbscrews and they said they’ll have them for us by the end of the week.”

“Good. Although, in civil service speak that means the end of the year.”

“Aye, so what do you want me to work on now?”

“Is that suitcase still around?”

“Of course. It’s in the evidence room.”

“See if you can find out where it came from, how many were sold in Northern Ireland, that kind of thing.”

“What good will that do?” he said with an attitude.

“Matty, in the words of William Shakespeare: just fucking do it, ya wee shite.”

“Will do, boss,” he replied and went to the evidence room to unwrap the suitcase from its plastic covering.

We called garden centres all over Ireland for the rest of the afternoon. We got nothing. Few had heard of rosary pea and no one had a record of anyone growing it or requesting seeds.

I phoned the General Post Office in Belfast and asked if they had any records of seeds being seized or coming through the mail. They said that they had no idea and would call me back.

McCrabban called UK customs to ask them the same question and after going through a couple of flunkies a “police liaison officer” told him that importing such seeds was not illegal or subject to duty so customs would have no interest in them.

The post office phoned back with the same story.

I called Dick Savage in Special Branch. Dick had taken chemistry at Queen’s University about the same time as me. He wasn’t a high flyer but he’d written several surprisingly acute internal memos on methods of suicide and how to distinguish a true suicide from a murder disguised to look like one.

Dick had heard of Abrin but had never heard of it being used in a poisoning anywhere in the British Isles. He told me he’d look into it.

I went into see Chief Inspector Brennan and broke the bad news that our John Doe was definitely American but that we had a good chance of finding out who he was through the immigration records.

“When we’ve got his name we should inform the US Consulate. And we’ll probably need the Consulate’s help cross referencing our list of names against veterans of the First Infantry Division.”

Brennan nodded. “I suppose you want me to call them.”

“Better coming from you, sir. You’re the head of station. More official, all that jazz.”

“You just don’t want to do it.”

“Could be a difficult phone call.”

“And?”

“I’m feeling a bit fragile today, sir. I may just have been dumped by my girlfriend.”

“That doctor bint you were seeing?”

“Aye.”

“I could see that coming. She was out of your league, son.”

“Will you make the call, sir?”

“It’ll be the start of a shitstorm … a dead American – as if we don’t have enough problems.”

I stood there and let weary resignation over come his weathered face like melted lard over a cast-iron skillet. He sighed dramatically. “All right. I suppose I’ll do it for you, like I do everything around here. You’re sure he’s a Yank?”

I told him about the tattoo.

“All right, good. Scram. And get Carol’s cake, ready. She’s in in half an hour.”

When Carol came in at three we had her party.

Tea, cake, party hats, both types of lemonade.

Carol had been on planet Earth for sixty years. She ate the cake, drank the tea, smiled and said how wonderful it all was. Brennan gave her a toast and it was Brennan, not Carol, who told us the story of her first week on the job in 1941 when a Luftwaffe Heinkel 111 dropped a stick of 250 kilograms bombs on the station. We’d all heard the tale before but it was a reteller. The only person who’d been hurt that day was a prisoner in the cells who broke an arm. Course, up in Belfast, where the rest of the Heinkel squadron had gone, people were less fortunate.

The sun came out and the day brightened to such an extent that a few us spilled out onto the fire escape and started slipping rum into the Coke. A pretty female reservist with a tiny waist and a weird Geordieland accent asked me if it was true that “I had killed three men with my bare hands”.

She was creeping me out so I made myself scarce, gave Carol a kiss, said goodnight to the lads, locked up the office and headed home.

Coronation Road in Victoria Housing Estate was in one of its rare moments of serenity: stray dogs sleeping in the middle of the street, feral moggies walking on slate roofs, women with rollers in their hair hanging washing on plastic lines, men with flat caps and pipes digging in their gardens. Children from three streets were playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek called 123 Kick A Tin. Children who were adorable and shoeless and dressed like extras from a ’50s movie.

I parked the BMW outside my house, nodded a hello to the neighbours and went inside.

I made a vodka gimlet in a pint glass, stuck on a random tin of soup and with infinitely more care picked out a selection of records that would get me through the evening: “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division, “Bryter Layter” by Nick Drake and Neil Young’s “After The Goldrush”. Yeah, I was in that kind of mood.

I lay on the leather sofa and watched the clock. The children’s game ended. The lights come on all over Belfast. The army helicopters took to the skies.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is this Duffy?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I was looking for you at work, Duffy, but apparently you’d left already. Lucky for some, eh?”

It was the weasly Kenny Dalziel from clerical.

“What’s the matter, Kenny?”

“The situation is a disaster. A total disaster. I’ve been pulling my hair out. You don’t happen to know who started all this, do you?”

“Gavrilo Princip?”

“What?”

“What’s this about, Kenny?”

“It’s yet another problem with your department, Inspector Duffy. Specifically Detective Constable Matty McBride’s claim for overtime in the last pay period. It’s tantamount to fraud.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Constable McBride cannot claim for time and a half danger money while also claiming overtime! That would be triple time and believe me, Duffy, nobody, and I mean nobody, is getting triple time on my watch …”

I stopped paying attention. When the conversation reached a natural conclusion I told him that I understood his concern and hung up the phone. I switched on the box. A preacher on one side, thought for the day on the other. This country was Bible mad.

Half an hour later Dick Savage called me with info about Abrin. It was an extremely rare poison that he said had never been used in any murder case anywhere in the British Isles. He thought that maybe it had been used in a couple of incidents in America and I might want to look into that.

I thanked him and called Laura, but she didn’t pick up the phone.

I made myself another vodka gimlet, drank it, turned off the soup, and put “Bryter Layter” on album repeat and then changed my mind. Nick Drake, like heroin or Marmite, was best in small doses.

As was typical of Ulster’s spring weather systems, a hard horizontal rain was lashing the kitchen windows now so I switched the record player to its 78 mode and after some rummaging I found “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” by The Ink Spots with Ella Fitzgerald.

I tolerated the Ink Spot guy singing the first verse but when Ella came on I just about lost it.

The phone startled me.

“Hello?”

“You know the way you’re always saying that I’m a lazy bastard and that I don’t take this job seriously?”

It was Matty.

“I don’t believe that I’ve ever said any such thing, Matty. In fact I was just defending your honour to that hatchet-faced goblin, Dalziel, in clerical,” I said.

“That sounds like a bold-faced lie.”

“You’re paranoid, mate.” I told him.

“Well, while all you lot were copping off with female reservists and buggering away home I’ve been burning the midnight whale blubber.”

“And?”

“I’ve only gone and made a breakthrough, so I have.”

“Go on.”

“What’s that racket in the background?”

“That ‘racket’ is Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Never heard of him.”

“What’s going on, mate? Have you really found something out?”

“I’ve only gone and cracked the bloody case, so I have,” he said.

“Our John Doe in the suitcase?”

“What else?”

“Go on then, you’re killing me.”

“Well, I was on the late shift anyway to cover the station, so I thought instead of breaking out the old stash of Penthouses and having a wank I’d do something useful and get back on that suitcase …”

“Yes . . ?”

“No forensics at all. No liftable prints. Blood belongs to our boy. But you know the wee plastic window where people write their addresses?”

“McCrabban already checked that window – there was no address card in there. No one would be that much of an eejit.”

“That’s what I thought too, but I cut it open and I noticed a wee sliver of card scrunched up in the bottom of the window. You couldn’t possibly have seen it unless you cut open the plastic and shone a torch down into the gap.”

“Shite.”

“Shite is right, mate.”

“It was an old address card?”

“I got a pair of tweezers, pulled it out, unscrunched it and lo and behold I’ve only gone and got the name and address of the person who owned the suitcase!”

“Who was it?”

“Somebody local. A bloke called Martin McAlpine, Red Hall Cottage, The Mill Bay Road, Ballyharry, Islandmagee. What do you think about that?”

“So it wasn’t the dead American’s suitcase, then?”

“Doesn’t look like it, does it? It’s like you always say, Sean, the concept of the master criminal is a myth. Most crooks are bloody eejits.”

“You’re a star, Matty, my lad.”

“An underappreciated star. What’s our next move, boss?”

“I think, Matty, that you and me will be paying Mr McAlpine a wee visit first thing in the morning.”

“Tomorrow? It’s a Saturday.”

“So?”

He groaned.

“Nothing. Sounds like a plan.”

“See you at the barracks. Seven sharp.”

“Can’t we go later?”

“Can’t go later, mate. I’m having me portrait done by Lucian Freud and then I’m off to Anfield, playing centre back for Liverpool on account of Alan Hansen’s injury.”

“Come on, Sean, I like to sleep in on a Saturday.”

“Nah, mate, we’ll go early, get the drop on him. It’ll be fun.”

“All right.”

“And well done again, pal. You did good.”

I hung up the phone. Funny how things turned out. Just like that, very quickly indeed, this potentially tricky investigation was breaking wide open.