I Hear the Sirens in the Street (21 page)

“It was a Bible verse.”

“And?”

“‘Now I see through a glass darkly.'”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

She grinned and slapped her thigh. “Oh, I get it. You thought I was reading the Bible and that maybe I was the person who left you the note, is that it?”

“It
was
a woman on the phone. But it was an English woman.”

“Maybe I was disguising my voice.”

“Maybe you were.”

“I didn't call you and I didn't leave you a note. How would I get your number anyway?”

“I'm in the book.”

“Oh.”

“And I went to see your brother-in-law.”

“Why?”

“Just to be nosey.”

“And what did you find out?”

“His cars are in a bad way.”

“His cars?”

“The Bentley and the Roller. Beautiful machines sadly gone to pot. He should at least keep them in a garage.”

“Are you aware of the Japanese concept of
mono no aware
, the bitter sweetness of things?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“The Japanese sages say the best way to appreciate beauty is to focus on its transient, fragile and fleeting nature.”

I nodded. “Is that what your brother-in-law's doing? I thought he was just a careless fucker.”

“And what else did you learn from your visit to Red Hall?” she asked.

“He's a knight. It's
Sir
Harry McAlpine. He's been to see the Queen. Somebody gave him a knighthood.”

She shook her head. “Nobody gave him a knighthood. He's a baronet.”

“What's a baronet when it's at home?”

“It's the lowest order of peerage.”

I must have looked blank because she elaborated. “It goes Prince, Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Baronet. It's hereditary. It goes to the eldest son. Harry is the third Baronet. It means very little.”

“I wouldn't say that. He's got a title and he's got money.”

“Money!” she laughed. “He's as poor as a church mouse.”

“He's got that big house, all this land …”

“Heavens, Inspector. This land? Well, yes, he owns everything from here to the sea and I'm a tenant and there are half a dozen farms on the other side of the hill, but none of that matters: it's all bogland, it's practically worthless and that big house is a shambles. The top floor is shut up, the walls are crumbling …”

“The house isn't in great nick, but with all this property he's
hardly a candidate for the poor house, is he?”

“That's where you're wrong again. Red Hall is entailed. He can't touch the freehold or sell it or lease it out. It's all going to his eldest son.”

“He has kids?”

“Two.”

“One of each?”

“Two boys. They live with their mother. Actually they're both at Harrow.”

“Harrow over the water?” I asked stupidly.

“Do you know any other Harrow?”

“He's divorced, then.”

“You really are a detective. A regular Poirot,” she said, with a sweet teasing smile that got her back into my good books. She snugged her legs up underneath her body. Riding horses had given her powerful thighs and done wonders for her complexion.

“I'll take that,” she said, holding my wrist and removing the empty tea cup. I've known judo instructors with a less impressive grip. And that assurance, too. This was no blushing, weeping widow. Not now.

“What about you? How are you doing for money?” I asked.

“Since my husband's murder, you mean? Is this also part of your investigation? Could I be compelled to answer?”

“Perhaps.”

“Don't you find question and answer a rather tedious form of discourse? Wouldn't you rather have a conversation?”

“When time is a factor there's really no other way, I'm afraid.”

“Is time a factor here? My husband was killed in December. It's April.”

“Time is always a factor in police work, Mrs McAlpine.”

She sighed. “I live on Martin's army pension of seventy-five pounds a week. I pay twenty-five pounds of that to Harry. For rent.”

I nodded. “And how much does the land bring in?”

She laughed. “Are you serious?”

“Aye.”

“I have forty sheep. Shorn, I'll get perhaps three pounds a fleece; come lambing season, perhaps another five pounds a lamb. This year I may make two hundred pounds from the entire acreage.”

“Can't you grow something? I'm always hearing things about the high cost of wheat.”

“No arable crops will grow here. It's a marsh. This whole part of Islandmagee is one enormous swamp.”

“Where were you last night, Mrs McAlpine?” I asked, abruptly changing tack.

“When Dougherty was killed, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I was at home. Reading. In other words, I have no alibi.”

“What were you reading?”

“
Middlemarch
.”

“I see.”

“George Eliot.”

“I know … Is that what you're reading now?”

“Yes.”

She passed me the book. I flipped through it and gave it back.

“Why would I kill poor Inspector Dougherty?” she asked while I was thinking of my next question.

“Why indeed?”

“No, let's not play that game. Why do
you
think I may have done it? What possible motive could I have had?”

I was looking for a little more outrage from her:
How dare you accuse me of such a terrible thing!
Not that that would have had much probative value one way or the other. Maybe she just wasn't the demonstrative type.

“Because I got him all riled up about your husband's murder. Because I put a seed of doubt in his head that maybe you weren't
telling everything you knew and because he came barging down there to ask you a whole bunch of questions,” I said.

She smiled. “Then I got a gun from heaven knows where, found out where he lived and shot him?”

And then dumped the weapon, drove to a phone box and claimed the hit on behalf of the IRA using a recognised IRA code word
.

“The assumption, naturally, is that I killed my husband for whatever reason and I was worried that Dougherty was getting close to discovering that I had done it and so he had to go too. Is that it?”

“I suppose so,” I agreed.

“Let me dissect this theory of yours a little … if I may.”

“Be my guest.”

“First of all, I didn't kill Martin. Everything I've told you about his murder is completely true. I loved him. He loved me. We rarely argued. And what possible motive could I have had to do it? Fiduciary? For the pathetic lump sum I'll get years from now from the compensation board? For the army pension? We had no life insurance—”

“Why didn't he take out life insurance?”

“The weekly rates for a serving army officer are astronomical.”

“Of course.”

“Let me continue … So, no life insurance, a pathetic pension and then there's the farm. What's to stop Harry from kicking me out once Martin's dead? I lose my husband, his income and my house? For what?”

“There are other motives.”

“Like what?”

“Like the oldest motive in the world.”

“Martin wasn't having an affair.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Quite sure, he wasn't the type.”

“All women think that about their husbands right up to the moment when they receive undeniable proof and quite often after they receive undeniable proof.”

“Even if he had been having an affair I wouldn't have shot him.”

“Why not?”

“
I'm
not the type, Inspector.”

I felt a crick in my neck and I was getting a stress headache in this uncomfortable sofa. I got to my feet and stretched. “What is this place, anyway? Some kind of salt mine?” I asked.

“That's exactly what it is.”

“Do you come down here often?”

“I do. I read down here. It's so quiet. No planes, no cars, nothing. Not even wind. They could have a nuclear war out there and I wouldn't know about it.”

“I was wondering how you power the lights.”

“We steal electricity from the grid. Harry rigged it up.” She patted the generator. “This thing is only to pump out water.”

“I suppose if I'm to buy into this theory of family poverty then I can only assume that the seams are worked out.”

“They are. For all commercial purposes anyway. The mines incidentally are what got Sir Harry his ‘Sir'. His grandfather supplied salt for the Empire. It's also why Harry couldn't sell this land even if he wanted to. You can't build on it.”

I smiled and she looked at me strangely.

“What are you thinking right now, Inspector?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“I'm thinking, Mrs McAlpine, that most people would be keeking their whips if they were being questioned about a murder for which they had no alibi and a possible motive. But not you. You're as cool as a cucumber.”

“Because I didn't do it. I've nothing to be worried about. Why do you think I did it? Is it one of those policemen's hunches I'm always hearing about?”

“Hunches are overrated.”

“How does one solve crimes, Inspector?”

“Most criminals aren't that bright. They screw up and we find the screw up pretty quickly and we can usually go to trial, except if the screw up involves eyewitness testimony.”

“What happens if it's eyewitness testimony?”

“The eyewitnesses are intimidated into not testifying. Those cases usually collapse.”

“And what about the hard cases? Like your body in the suitcase? That's still your case, isn't it? Or have you turned your attention to me and Inspector Dougherty now?”

“No, that's still my case. My only case. A colleague of mine is looking into the death of Inspector Dougherty, and your husband's murder, I'm sorry to say, is probably never going to be solved.”

“I see,” she said and pursed her lips.

“Have you ever fired a pistol before, Mrs McAlpine?”

“A pistol, no. A shotgun many times.”

I looked at my watch. I had been at this for twenty minutes and I wasn't really getting anywhere. If this was my case, maybe Crabbie and me would make more progress down the station in a windowless interview room. But it wasn't my concern, was it? I looked at her for a beat or two. “Well, I suppose I must be going. Thank you for the tea,” I said.

“That's it, you're not going to cuff me and drag me off?”

“No.”

“Why not? Do you believe me?”

“I don't know. But you're tangential to my investigation. Chief Inspector McIlroy may want to interview you about Dougherty, but I'm done here.”

“I'll walk you out, if you like,” she said.

I'd been hoping for some sign of relief from her – a blush or a sigh or anything, but grief had washed everything out of Mrs McAlpine already.

I climbed the ladder and she followed me up. Out into sunlight. Or more exactly into the ambient light and rain. The horse whinnied excitedly when he saw Emma and she gave him a sugar lump.

There were several dirty-looking gulls in the fields taking shelter from the wind.

“Do you think those are fulmars?” I said absently.

“Fulmars?”

“Ful from the Norse meaning foul, mar meaning gull.”

She grinned at me. “A man of many interests.”

“Not really.”

We walked the horse back across the bog to the farm. We didn't speak because half a dozen Army Gazelle helicopters were flying south east, at a low ceiling, in a tight menacing formation.

When the choppers had gone she asked me if I'd always wanted to be a policeman. I told her no. I'd been studying psychology at Queens.

She told me that she had done a degree in history.

We talked a little about the university. We'd had no mutual friends and our paths hadn't crossed in the Students' Union. It wasn't surprising. She was seven or eight years younger than me.

“Is Queen's where you met Martin?”

“Well, I'm a local Islandmagee girl so I already knew Martin, but that's where we started going out. He was doing law but he dropped out when he joined the UDr I stayed on for a bit, and then, well … we got married.”

She was blushing. There was a story there, too. A pregnancy? A miscarriage? We reached the farmhouse. My car was there and next to it a shining female constable in a dark green uniform and a dark green Kepi.

“Your chauffeur?” Emma asked.

“Indeed.”

She offered me her hand. “I assume this is where we take our
leave?” she said.

“I expect so,” I said, shaking her hand.

She looked into my eyes. “You're disappointed, aren't you? You think I've gotten away with something.”

I said nothing.

“I promise you, Inspector Duffy, I did not kill my husband, and I had nothing to do with the killing of Inspector Dougherty.”

“Okay,” I said, “how about we just leave it there.”

I dropped Reserve Constable Sandra Pollock back at Larne RUC and drove on to Carrickfergus in the Beemer. Somewhere in County Antrim an Army Puma helicopter had been shot at with either an RPG or a surface to air missile and as a result the highways and byways were flooded with angry soldiers in green fatigues idiotically stopping every third car. Of course, I was one of the lucky stopees. I showed the squaddies my warrant card but they ignored it. Two of them pointed FN FAL rifles at me while their mates went through my boot.

“What's this?” an acerbic Welshman asked me, holding up a flare gun.

“A flare gun.”

“What's it for?”

“For firing flares.”

This could have gone for a while or until one of Taffy's mates shot me, but they decided to let me go instead.