In the Morning I'll Be Gone Read online

  “No one put me up to it. I’m in the Cold Case Unit. That’s what we do,” I said. I didn’t need him pursuing this any further.

  “What you do is investigate unsolved murders. The coroner’s inquest said that Lizzie Fitzpatrick’s death was an accident.”

  “No, the coroner returned an open verdict.”

  “Ach, it’s the same thing.”

  “Not quite.”

  Lee finished his pint and put the glass down on the table.

  “Another?” he said.

  “Aye, OK.”

  He came back with two pints of Guinness and two bowls of Irish stew.

  We ate and drank and when we were done Lee offered me one of his Camel cigarettes.

  “So,” he said. “How did a high flyer like you end up in the RUC’s Cold Case Unit?”

  “High flyer?”

  “You took down those Loyalist queer killers from Rathcoole. You got yourself a medal. I did some digging on you, Duffy.”

  “Digging?”

  “Had to, after Barry calls me and says you’re asking questions about me.”

  “That sounds reasonable.”

  “You were headed for the top, but the record goes all quiet for a while and now you’re in some bullshit Cold Case Unit? What happened to you, boy?”

  “I pissed off the wrong people.”

  “What wrong people?”

  “It’s none of your business, McPhail.”

  He nodded. “It was the Chief Constable, wasn’t it? A little bird told me that you fucked up their DeLorean case. Didn’t you?”

  “Jesus! Where do you get this from?”

  “The same little bird.”

  “Your avian informant was mistaken. I didn’t fuck anything up. Don’t you read the papers? DeLorean’s under indictment by the FBI. He’s going down,” I said.

  “That’s not what I hear. I hear he’s going to walk.”

  In truth I’d been avoiding all mention of the DeLorean case in the papers, but Lee’s assessment didn’t surprise me. The FBI DeLorean team that I had run into did not appear to be the most competent bunch of policemen on the planet.

  “Let’s talk about you, Lee. Quite the step up from journo to petty crook to rapist to a character who hangs out with the likes of the Kennedys.”

  “Steady on with the rape remarks, Duffy. She was a week from her seventeenth birthday. Across the water that wouldn’t even be a crime.”

  “Still . . . the Kennedys.”

  “Kennedy’s grandfather was a petty crook, bootlegger, and small-time hood. The whole fucking family is corrupt from top to bottom. Bobby was the only decent one of them.”

  “Jesus, that’s a nice thing to say.”

  “You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll leave it there, then. I’m sure your mother and father have a framed picture of JFK up in their parlor.”

  “They do actually.”

  “He was no Saint Jack and Joe’s no saint either. Everybody thinks he could be president one day but between you and me and the gatepost . . . no chance.”

  “I met Adams once before in the Maze. He doesn’t remember me,” I said.

  “Count yourself lucky, Duffy. You don’t want to be remembered. The only way to survive is to keep your head down. Keep your head down for fifty years.”

  “Fifty years? Is that when the Golden Age is due to begin?”

  “No. That’s when the rest of Europe will be as blighted as Ireland. That’s when the oil will have run out and the Americans will have gone home and the Chinks will be running the world.”

  “Let’s get this train back on the fucking track.”

  “Go on.”

  “That night in the Henry Joy McCracken . . . is it possible someone was hiding in the bog?”

  “The bog?”

  “Aye. The Ladies maybe?”

  “Maybe the Ladies. Not the Gents. We were all in there at one time or another and there was no one there.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. And how did they get out? The doors were locked and barred from the inside, weren’t they?”

  “Locked doesn’t mean shit. You could pick those old locks with a bit of skill. What I can’t get past are the deadbolts on the front and back door. Big heavy sliding bolts that you can only pull across from the inside. But if the killer was hiding, say, in the women’s toilets and then somehow got out after the door was broken down . . .”

  “That sounds like a possibility,” Lee said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not. That’s not what happened at all. When they broke the door down a constable guarded the entrance until CID showed up. And when CID showed up they searched the entire premises and they found no one.”

  “It’s a real mystery, then, isn’t it?” Lee said.

  “It’s only a mystery if it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Well then, you’re in the clear, Duffy. It was an accident.”

  “I’ve got two pathologists who think differently.”

  He laughed. “I’m glad this is your headache and not mine.”

  “Did you happen to notice if there was a problem with any of the light bulbs in the place?”

  “I didn’t notice any problems with the light bulbs. I’m not saying there wasn’t but I never noticed any.”

  “And then there’s that bloody burglary.”

  “What burglary?”

  I told him about the burglary at Lizzie’s law offices and how Chief Inspector Beggs, the original detective on Lizzie’s case, thought it was just a series of robberies done by a bunch of tinkers.

  “Tinkers, eh? Don’t listen to him. Lazy peelers are always blaming every unsolved crime on either the IRA or the tinkers. Is your Inspector Beggs any good?” Lee asked.

  “That’s another problem. He is actually.”

  “And what does he think about Lizzie Fitzpatrick?”

  “Oh, he’s very clear on the matter. It was an accident.”

  “It’s nice to have certainty.”

  “Isn’t it? Here, how did you get that statutory rape charge expunged?”

  “I married her.”

  “That helps, does it?”

  “It does.”

  “Are you still married to her?”

  “It didn’t work out. Another round?”

  “Aye, why not.”

  He got another round and I got another round and it went on like that for the rest of the day.

  My eye started to throb where Kennedy had punched me and Lee went off for five minutes and came back with a frozen steak.

  “Put that on it and you’ll be right as rain. And if you’re not, sue the bastard. He can afford it.”

  I liked Lee McPhail. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help myself. He was gleefully amoral and had contempt for all sides in Northern Ireland’s pointless religious wars. For him nationalism was a perverse hangover from the nineteenth century, and the sooner everyone started thinking of themselves before their country the better.

  We drank until last orders and I walked to Queen Street police station, where I’d parked my Beemer. The cops there wouldn’t let me take it because they said that I was intoxicated, which may have been true after nine or ten pints of stout, but I still kicked up a stink about it.

  “Forget it, Duffy, we’ll get you a taxi,” Lee said.

  We found a taxi rank and parted like old friends . . .

  There was rain all the way back to Carrick and the driver charged me an extra fiver because I was out of area. I paid him and when he’d gone I noticed a strange car parked outside my house. A black Jaguar. I knew it could be an assassination squad come to kill me from pretty much any side, but I was too blitzed and tired and fed up to get agitated about it.

  I got halfway down the path when I noticed that there was music coming from the living room. With some difficulty I drew my service revolver and put the key in the lock.

  “Who’s there?” I demanded, pushing the
door open.

  “What time do you call this?” Kate demanded from the living room. “The dinner’s ruined. I knew this was a bad idea.”

  I put the gun away.

  She came into the hall and looked at me with concern.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “President Kennedy’s nephew punched me in the face.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t go all diplomatic incident on me. He didn’t do it on purpose. At least, I think he didn’t.”

  “Do you have a steak? You should put a steak on that,” she said.

  “I’ve done the whole steak thing. I could do with a drink, though. Anything nonalcoholic. I think there’s lime juice in the fridge.”

  I went into the living room. She’d been listening to my Motown collection and had made her way through to Gladys Knight and the Pips.

  She brought me the lime juice and a bag of ice.

  “Maybe I should run you a bath or something,” she said.

  “Did you really make dinner?”

  “Yes. Pasta.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “It’ll be all sticky now.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  We ate at the kitchen table. The pasta was a little dried out but still good. When we were done, it was well after midnight.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how I got in here?” Kate said.

  “I assume MI5 have their methods.”

  “The neighbors let me in. Mrs. Campbell. We had a nice chat about you.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Yes. She told me that she was worried about you for a while there,” Kate said with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Not anymore?”

  “Not anymore. She thinks you’re doing much better now.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Are you doing better now, Sean?”

  “Despite appearances . . . yeah. I’ve got something to get my teeth into. We all need a job to work. Otherwise you think too much and you know what that leads to . . .”

  I put a finger gun to my head and mimed pulling the trigger.

  “We’ve received some new intelligence. We think Dermot might be in Germany.”

  “Germany. Why would he be in Germany?”

  “Preparing an attack on one of the British army bases there?”

  I shook my head. “I doubt it. When Dermot announces himself it’s going to be something huge. A spectacular. It’s not going to be an attack on an out-of-the-way British army base in bloody Germany.”

  I suddenly got a stabbing pain in my eye. “Jesus! That fucker really clocked me.”

  “Let me draw you a bath, Sean,” she said, rather sweetly.

  “That’s surprisingly intimate.”

  “Don’t get any ideas. It’s just a bath.”

  When she went upstairs I made a hasty vodka gimlet and followed her up.

  She had lit the paraffin heater on the landing and was looking at my bookcase. Mostly novels but quite a few of them were Penguin classics. The usual suspects: nineteenth-century biggies, the Americans, a Frog or two, and the Beats. I left her to it and got in the bath. A minor miracle that there was hot water at this time of night. I started to drink the vodka gimlet in the tub and it went straight to my head.

  “Mind if I read this?” she asked from my bedroom.

  “What is it?”

  “The Counterfeiters.”

  “It’s not about what you think it’s going to be about . . . Oh, wait, you probably know that. Grab me a book too, will you?”

  “What book?”

  “Any book . . . No, on the bottom shelf, on the far left, get me that biography of JFK.”

  She opened the door and primly slid the book across the tiled floor.

  “Ta.”

  I picked up the big hardback, which had been a Christmas present from my parents that I had never had the motivation to read. I flipped it open, read a couple of paragraphs, and put it aside. I couldn’t care less about the bloody Kennedys. I finished the vodka gimlet and put the glass on the floor next to the tub and sank deeply into the water. I gazed fixedly at my map-of-the-world shower curtain. Australia was all bunched up in the corner. Greenland was way too big.

  “I suppose you wanna know about the investigation?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing what you’ve got.”

  “I haven’t found Lizzie’s killer. In fact I don’t even know if she was murdered. And if she wasn’t murdered I don’t know if Mary Fitzpatrick will give me Dermot’s whereabouts.”

  “If she even knows them.”

  “Fair point. But she does move in old Republican circles. She’s got some old contacts. Hey, I should have asked Gerry Adams where Dermot was. I was talking to him today.”

  My head was spinning now. The vodka was a mistake.

  Kate said something. “What?”

  She said it again.

  I ignored her and sank beneath the water. I surfaced and my eye still hurt.

  “Hey, you couldn’t make me another gimlet, could you, I’ll never get to sleep with this eye,” I said.

  She said something that might have been “I think you’ve had enough.”

  “I’m dying of thirst.”

  “Are you decent?”

  “The bath’s quite foamy.”

  “I’ll bring you some water.”

  She came in with a pint glass of iced water. I drank it and gave it back to her.

  She sat down on the laundry bin.

  “I found out your name. Shoddy security at your end. Kate Prentice!”

  “I would have told you. It’s not a secret.”

  “That’s what you say now, after I found out. Do me a favor and pass me that book.” She gave me the JFK biography and I went back to the paragraph I’d just been reading. “Listen to this . . . It all comes down to the Kennedy hair. Listen. It says here that on the morning of 22 November 1963 Jack Kennedy was given a Stetson at the Fort Worth Hotel by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. His aides begged him to wear the Stetson on the motorcade route through Dallas because they knew it would be a real crowd-pleaser. But Jack Kennedy had great hair and he had a policy of never being photographed in a hat. He refused to wear the Stetson and we all know what happened next.”

  “What?”

  “Oswald’s third shot was aimed at the dead center of JFK’s unmistakable helmet cut. If he’d been wearing the Stetson the whole history of the world would have been different.”

  “Did you tell this to the president’s nephew? Is that why he punched you?”

  “He punched me by accident. It was a misunderstanding!”

  “I think you should take a couple of aspirin and go to bed.”

  “OK.”

  “I’ll leave while you get out.”

  I put on my dressing gown, took two aspirin, and lay down on the bed. My head was spinning again and my eye throbbing.

  Kate sat beside me and helped me under the covers.

  “Kiss it better, will you?” I said. “And say ‘there, there.’”

  “There, there,” she said.

  No kiss but that was OK. I smiled under the cool sheets and within half a dozen heartbeats I was asleep.

  I pulled back the curtains. Another dishwater sky and rain falling so slowly that you wondered how it was coming down at all. As if it had to be dragged from the clouds to water yet another dreary Ulster morning.

  I stood there looking at the hills. I thought about the three fishermen and their alibis. I thought about Lizzie. I thought about the impossibility of the crime.

  I thought about Annie. Poor, lost, beautiful Annie.

  When I went downstairs I was surprised to find Kate still there. She’d grabbed a sleeping bag from her car and had dossed down on the sofa. She was awake, drinking a mug of tea. The Open University was on the telly.

  “Watcha watching?”

  “It’s about volcanoes.”

  “What about volcanoes?” I asked.

&nb
sp; “Volcanism. Magma. Iceland. Hawaii. You know the story.”

  “Pompeii in there somewhere?”

  “Do you want some tea?”

  “Aye, OK.”

  “You want some Weetabix?” she shouted from the kitchen.

  “Nah.”

  She made me the tea and sat next to me on the sofa. “Where were you last night?” she asked.

  “The Crown.”

  “Nice?”

  “Never been?”

  “No.”

  “They filmed Odd Man Out in there.”

  “They didn’t actually. Carol Reed had the whole place remade in Alexander Korda’s London Films Studios. Same place that they made all those wonderful Michael Powell films.”

  “Do you know everything?”

  “Yes. I do. Look, I have to head on, Sean.”

  “OK.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’ve just read one of those Philip Larkin poems you come across in the Observer.”

  “We’re having a meeting about you at the end of next week,” she said, biting her lip.

  “Is that so?”

  “It is.”

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  “I’m going to tell them that you’re working very hard.”

  “I am working very hard.”

  “Good. And, er, is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine! Apart from a splitting headache.”

  She looked at me affectionately. “Do you think maybe the time has come to shut down this lead and pursue other lines of enquiry?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think we’re there yet. It’s beginning to look like Lizzie’s death was an accident but I can’t say it definitively and I don’t want to go to Mary Fitzpatrick until I know for sure. There’s this coincidental burglary I don’t like the look of for a start.”

  “OK, well, you know best.”

  She got up and went into the hall. She put on her coat, came back in, rolled up her sleeping bag, and tucked it under her arm. “Please don’t lose sight of the fact that the reason we brought you back was to help us find Dermot McCann. That’s your job. Nothing else. All right?”

  “All right! Don’t get all eggy,” I said wearily.

  “I’m not ‘eggy’ or even cross but do remember we’d really like to find him before the IRA’s big push. It’s the last thing we need with the miners’ strike starting to cause tremors. If the government falls, God knows what will happen.”