I Hear the Sirens in the Street Read online

“I’ll get the file,” he said.

  He opened a metal cabinet and flipped out a thin – very thin – cardboard file.

  He spread it on the desk between us and very slowly he sat down again with one hand on the desk and one hand to balance him. Jesus, how far gone was this eejit?

  “Okay, let me see … Ah yes, Martin McAlpine shot in the chest with a shotgun, at approximately nine twenty in the morning of December first. He died instantly, assailants fled on a blue motorcycle which has not been recovered. IRA claimed responsibility with a recognised code word that evening with a call to the Belfast Telegraph… We didn’t find the murder weapon, or the bike, and we’ve had no tips.”

  He put the file down.

  That’s it? I was thinking. A man gets blown away and that’s bloody it?

  “Can I take a look?”

  He passed the file across. His report was one paragraph and they had tossed all the crime-scene photographs except for one which showed Martin McAlpine face up on the ground. The shotgun pellets had ripped apart his chest and throat and a couple had buried themselves in his temple. His dead face seemed to register surprise more than fear or panic but that didn’t mean anything. The interesting thing about the picture was the tightness of the grouping on his torso. There was no way this had been done at twenty yards. Twenty feet perhaps, but not twenty yards. The assailants had definitely gotten a lot closer to McAlpine than the wall. How had they done this carrying shotguns without alerting Cora or giving McAlpine a chance to draw his sidearm?

  I passed the photograph to Matty.

  “Did you take photographs of the bootprints near the body?” I asked.

  Dougherty shook his head. “What do you mean?”

  “It was December, it must have been muddy, you could have gotten casts of the killers’ shoes.”

  Dougherty raised an eyebrow at me. “No, you’re not getting it, Inspector Duffy. They shot him from behind the wall. They didn’t come into the farmyard. They were in the field. There were no bootprints.”

  “It seems to me that they must have been a good bit closer than that.”

  “They shot him at the wall.”

  “Is that where you recovered the shotgun shells? The wall?”

  “We didn’t recover any shells.”

  “They shot him and then they stopped to take the shotgun shells before running off to their motorbike?”

  “Apparently they did,” Dougherty said, bristling a little. He was now sitting on his left hand to stop the DTs from becoming obvious.

  Matty looked at me and raised his eyebrows a fraction but I didn’t mind Dougherty. He was close to retirement and when he’d joined up the RUC must have seemed like an easy life. He couldn’t have predicted that come the ’70s and ’80s it would be the most stressful police job in Europe. Nah, I didn’t mind him, but boy he was an indolent fuck, like all them old characters.

  “What was the murder weapon? Did your forensic boys get a bead?”

  “A shotgun.”

  “What type?”

  Dougherty shrugged.

  “Twelve-bore, over/under, single-trigger, double-barrel, what?” I asked.

  He shrugged again.

  “Pigeon shot, buck shot, deer shot?”

  He shrugged a third time.

  And this time it made me angry.

  They hadn’t even spent time doing a basic ballistic inquest?

  He could see it in my eyes. He went defensive. “The IRA killed him with a stolen or an unregistered shotgun, what difference does it make what type it was?”

  I said nothing.

  Silence did my talking for me.

  It worked him some more.

  “… Look, if you’re really interested I’m sure we kept some of the fucking pellets in the evidence room just in case we ever recovered the gun. If you go down there Sergeant Dalway will let you see.”

  I nodded and wrote “Dalway” in my notebook.

  “Were there any other witnesses apart from the wife?” I asked.

  “No, and she wasn’t really a witness. She heard the shooting but when she ran out McAlpine was dead and the gunmen were already making a break for it on the motorbike.”

  “And you say you never recovered the gun?”

  “No.”

  “Did you not find that strange at all?”

  “Why?”

  “Two guys on a motorbike carry a murder weapon with them all the way back to Belfast?”

  “Don’t be fucking silly! They probably threw it in a sheugh or the Lough. We did look for it but we didn’t find it,” Dougherty said.

  “Why do you think he didn’t pull his sidearm on them? He was walking out to the fields and if they were at the wall they were a good twenty yards from him,” I asked.

  “They had the element of surprise. They jumped up and shot him. Poor devil didn’t have a chance.”

  “And why do you think Cora didn’t go for them?” I asked.

  “Who’s Cora?”

  “The dog, a really nasty Alsatian,” Matty said. “The dog that didn’t bark in the daytime. It’s a classic.”

  “Oh aye, the dog, I don’t know. The gunshots probably scared the shite out of it,” he muttered.

  “Did you find any motorcycle tracks? Were you able to identify the tyre or make of the bike?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “No you didn’t ID the bike or no you didn’t find any tracks?”

  “I don’t like your tone, Inspector Duffy,” he said.

  There hadn’t been any tone. I’d been careful about that. He was just getting ticked off at the holes I was poking in the case.

  “Please, I didn’t mean to imply—” I said.

  “We didn’t find any motorcycle tracks, Inspector, because they drove off on the road. It’s tarmac – it’s not going to leave any fucking tracks, is it?”

  “If they’re behind the wall surely they’re going to start the bike there, not push it to the road and kick start it there?” Matty said. “There should be tracks.”

  “Well, we didn’t find any.”

  I frowned. “Look, Inspector, I’m going to ask a question and please don’t take it the wrong way …”

  “Go on,” he said, steam practically coming out of his ears.

  “Did you look for the tracks or were they just not there?”

  His fist clenched and unclenched, but then he closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he smiled at us.

  “I’m not going to bullshit you, Duffy, I honestly don’t remember. Hold on a minute and I’ll get my notes.”

  “Thank you, I appreciate that,” I said.

  He opened a drawer and flicked through a green jotter. He slid it across to me, but I couldn’t decipher the handwriting. I did notice that under “McAlpine” there was less than half a page of text. All in pencil. With a few doodles on the side. When I conducted a murder investigation, sometimes I filled two or even three ring-bound reporters’ notebooks.

  I passed the notebook to Matty, who had been sufficiently pedagogically indoctrinated by me to frown and shake his head. He skimmed the notebook back across the table. Dougherty took it and smiled a little smile of satisfaction as if he was saying – see, I’m not a fuck up, I even kept my notes.

  “No tracks. But I can’t tell if we looked behind the wall or not,” he admitted.

  I turned to Matty. “Do me a favour, go down to the evidence room and see if you can bag me one of the shotgun pellets. We’ll see what they can find out up at the lab in Belfast? If that’s okay with you, Inspector Dougherty?”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with your investigation?”

  “Do you object?”

  “No. If you want to go around wasting everyone’s time, go ahead, be my guest.”

  Matty got up and left the office.

  Dougherty looked at me. “I take it you’re not happy with the wife’s story then, is that it?” he asked.

  So he wasn’t a complete fool. At least he saw my angle.
r />   I shook my head. “I don’t know about that. She seemed fairly credible to me. I just want to eliminate all the other possible contingencies.”

  “She came from a good family. Islandmagee locals. Her father was a Justice of Peace and of course she married into the McAlpines.”

  “What’s special about the McAlpines?”

  “Harry, the elder brother, is a big wheel. His grandfather did

  something for the Empire. They gave him a gong for it.”

  The clock on the wall reached twelve and with that he breathed an audible sigh of relief and reached in his desk drawer for a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  “A wee one before lunch?” he asked.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” I replied.

  He produced two mugs and poured us each a healthy measure.

  When he had drunk and topped up his own mug he grinned.

  “You like the wife for it?” he asked. “How do you explain the IRA code word? And I still don’t see what this’s got to do with your suitcase?”

  “I’m not saying it was her. But the grouping on that wound is so tight it looks point blank to me. And if a couple of terrorists were marching up to him so close as to do that kind of point blank damage surely the dog would have been on them and he would have had his sidearm out,” I said.

  “Aye,” Dougherty said thoughtfully.

  “And besides the IRA don’t use shotguns anymore. Not since the early ’70s. Not since our Boston friends and Colonel Gaddafi started sending boatloads of proper ordnance. They’ve got M16 rifles and Uzis and Glock pistols now,” I said.

  “I suppose,” he said, refilling his mug.

  “And then there’s the lack of witnesses. And no trace of a gun, no shells, no motorbike,” I continued.

  “But what about the code word?” Dougherty asked.

  “Jesus, those things leak like a sieve. Her own husband might have told her the IRA-responsibility code word for late last year.”

  “Why would she do it? There was no insurance policy. We checked that. And the army pension is pathetic.”

  “A domestic, maybe? I don’t know,” I said.

  “And your fucking suitcase?”

  “Probably unrelated, but you never know, do you?”

  He nodded, poured himself a third generous measure of Scotch.

  “I’ve heard of you, Duffy. You were the hot shot in Carrickfergus who got himself the Queen’s Police Medal. Are you looking to make a big fucking splash in Larne, too?”

  He was getting punchy now.

  It was time to leave.

  “No. I’m not. This isn’t my case. I’m done and unless Mrs McAlpine is involved in my murder somehow you probably won’t be hearing from me again.”

  “Aye, pal, don’t forget this is my manor, not yours.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  I got to my feet and offered him my hand and he reluctantly shook it.

  I saw myself out.

  I waited for Matty by the desk sergeant’s desk.

  He came back from the evidence room empty-handed.

  “What happened, they wouldn’t let you in?”

  “They let me in all right but the locker’s empty boss. Nothing there at all.”

  “They’ve moved it?”

  “Lost it. A few weeks ago they moved the McAlpine evidence to the Cold Case Storage Room but when I went there the box was empty. The duty sergeant looked through the log and has no idea where the stuff went. He told me shite like this happens all the time.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. All right, I better go myself.”

  We went to the evidence room and searched high and low for half an hour but it was gone. Either lost in a spring cleaning or deliberately thrown out. Incompetence or cover up – both were equally likely. I liked the former better because asking who was covering up for whom raised all sorts of difficult questions.

  It was drizzling when we got back outside.

  Matty lit me one of his Benson and Hedges and we smoked under the overhang and watched the potholes fill up with water for a couple of minutes.

  “I’m not saying that these lads are the worst cops in Ireland …” Matty began and then hesitated, unsure if I was going to countenance this level of perfidy.

  “Yes?”

  “If there’s a shittier station than this lot I hope to God I’m never posted there,” he concluded.

  “Oh, there’s worse. I was at a station in Fermanagh where they dressed up as witches for Halloween. Big beefy sergeant called McCrae dolled up as Elizabeth Montgomery was the stuff of nightmares … Larne would be okay, you’d be the superstar of the department if you got the bloody days of the week right.”

  We nailed another couple of smokes and got back in the Land Rover. Matty drove us out of the car park and the Constables at the gate gave us the thumbs up as they raised the barrier to let us out.

  Matty drove through Larne past a massive UVF mural of two terrorists riding dragons and carrying AK 47s.

  We turned up onto the A2 coast road.

  “Where to now, Sean?”

  “Carrickfergus Salvation Army,” I said. “It’s a long shot but maybe they’ll remember what happened to that suitcase, if she really did bring it in there.”

  “Why would she lie about that?”

  “Why does anybody lie about anything?”

  Matty nodded and accelerated up onto the dual carriageway. The Land Rover was heavily armour plated and bullet-proofed, but the juiced engine still did zero to sixty in about eight seconds.

  We put on Irish radio again. It was the same programme as before; this time the interviewee, a man called O’Cannagh, from the County Mayo, was talking about the mysterious behaviour of his cattle which baffled the local vets but which he felt was something to do with flying saucers. The man was explaining this fascinating hypothesis in Irish, a language Matty didn’t speak, so I had to turn it off. Neither of us could stand the constant jabber about the Falklands on news radio so we went for Ms Armatrading again.

  Matty drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. “I know what you’re thinking, Sean, you’re thinking we should stick our noses in here, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Listen, Sean, what if she’s telling the truth about the suitcase but she was, for whatever reason, lying about her husband’s murder?”

  “What about it?”

  “Then it’s not our case, mate, is it?” he said.

  “And if she killed the poor bastard?”

  “If she killed the poor bastard, it becomes, in the coinage of Douglas Adams, an SEP.”

  “Who’s Douglas Adams? And what’s an SEP?” I asked.

  “If you were down with the kids, Sean, you’d know that Douglas Adams has written this very popular radio series called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I listen to it when I’m fishing.”

  “I’m not down with the kids, though, am I? And you still haven’t answered my question. What’s an SEP?”

  “Someone else’s problem, Sean,” Matty said, with a heavy and significant sigh.

  I nodded ruefully. Ruefully, for it was the sorry day indeed when my junior colleague felt the need to remind me that in Ireland you swam near the shore and you kept your mouth shut and you never made waves if you knew what was good for you.

  “SEP. I like it. I’ll bear it in mind,” I said.

  7: SHE’S GOT A TICKET TO RIDE (AND SHE DON’T CARE)

  The Salvation Army was a bust. The lady there, Mrs Wilson, said that they sold dozens of suitcases every month, especially now that everyone was trying to emigrate. They didn’t keep records of who bought what and she did not recall a red plastic suitcase or a Mrs McAlpine.

  “Have a wee think. You might remember her, she was a recent widow. She brought in her husband’s entire wardrobe.”

  “You’d be surprised how many of those we get a month. Always widows. Never widowers. Cancer, heart attack and terrorism – those are the three biggies.”

 
“Well, thank you for your time,” I said.

  When we got back to the station Crabbie’s dour face told me that Customs and Immigration had not yet given us the list of names of all the Americans entering Northern Ireland in the last year.

  “What’s their excuse?” I asked him.

  “They’re transferring everything from the card file to the new computer.”

  “Jesus, I hope to God they’ve haven’t lost them. We’ve had enough of that today.”

  “Nah, there was no note of panic in their voices, just bored stupidity.”

  “Par for the course, then,” I said under my breath, staring at the other policemen and women in here who seemed to have jobs to do but God alone knew what the hell they were. Crabbie, Matty and myself were detectives, we investigated actual crimes, what these jokers did (especially the reservists and the part-time reservists) was a fucking mystery.

  “No luck on the Abrin either. I called the Northern Ireland horticultural society, the Irish Horticultural Society, the British Horticultural Society and no one had any records of anyone growing rosary pea or one of its varieties. It is certainly not a competition or show plant. I phoned UK Customs HQ in London and asked if they had ever impounded any seeds and of course they had no idea what I was talking about. And, you’ll like this, I called up Interpol to see—”

  “Interpol?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I do like it. Go on.”

  “I called up Interpol to ask them to fax me any cases of Abrin poisoning that they had on file in any of their databases.”

  “And?”

  “Three homicide cases: all from America: 1974, 1968, 1945. Half a dozen suicides and another two dozen accidentals.”

  “That’s very good work, mate,” I said, and told him about our interesting day.

  I treated the lads to a pub lunch. Steak and kidney pie and a pint of the black stuff and after lunch I retreated to my office, stuck on the late Benny Britten’s “Curlew River” and read the Interpol files on the Abrin murders:

  1974: Husband in Bangor, Maine, who was a chemist, poisoned his wife.

  1968: Husband who was a banker in San Francisco who grew tropical plants, poisoned his wife.

  1945: Young woman, originally from Jamaica, poisoned her parents in New York.

  I read the suicides and the accidentals but there was nothing significant or interesting about them. There were no Irish connections or intriguing links to the First Infantry Division.