I Hear the Sirens in the Street (7 page)

“Good morning, ma'am. Detective Inspector Duffy, Detective Constable McBride from Carrickfergus RUC. We're looking for a Martin McAlpine. We believe that this is his address,” I said.

She smiled at me and her eyebrows arched in a well-calibrated display of annoyance and contempt.

“This is why this country is going down the drain,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“I said this is why this country is going down the drain. Nobody cares. Nobody is remotely competent at their jobs.”

Her voice had a distinct Islandmagee country accent tinge to it, but there was something else there too. She spoke well, with a middle-class diction and without hesitation. She'd had a decent education it seemed, or a year or two at uni.

The dog kept barking and two fields over a door opened in another thatched farmhouse and a man smoking a pipe came out to gawk at us. The woman waved to him and he waved back.

I looked at Matty to see if he knew what she was talking about, but he was in the dark too. I took out my warrant card and showed it to her.

“Carrickfergus RUC,” I said again.

“Heard you the first time,” she said.

“Is this Martin McAlpine's address?” Matty asked.

“What's this about?” she demanded.

“It's a murder investigation,” I told her.

“Well, Martin didn't do it, that's for sure,” she said, reaching into the dressing-gown pocket and pulling out a packet of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth but she didn't have a lighter. I got my Zippo, flipped it and lit it for her.

“Ta,” she muttered.

“So can we speak to Mr McAlpine?”

“If you're a medium.”

“Sorry?”

“My husband's dead. He was shot not fifty feet from here last December.”

“Oh, shit,” Matty said, sotto voce.

She took a puff on the cigarette and shook her head. “Why don't the pair of youse come in out of the rain. I'll make you a cup of tea before you have to drive back to Carrick.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The farmhouse was small, with thick stone walls and cubby windows. It smelled of peat from the fire. We sat down on a brown bean-bag sofa. There were spaces on the mantle and empty frames where photographs had once been. Even Matty could have figured out what the frames had once contained.

She came back with three mugs of strong sweet tea and sat opposite us in an uncomfortable-looking rocking chair.

“So what's this all about?”

“I'm very sorry about your husband,” I said. “We had no idea. He was shot by terrorists?”

“The IRA killed him because he was in the UDr He was only a part-timer. He was going up the hills to check on the sheep. They must have been waiting behind the gate out there. They shot him in the chest. He never knew a thing about it, or so they say.”

Matty winced.

Yes, we had really ballsed this one up and no mistake.

“I'm very sorry. We should have checked the name before we came out here,” I said pathetically.

The Ulster Defence Regiment was a locally recruited regiment of the British Army. They conducted foot patrols and joint patrols with the police and as such they were a vital part of the British government's anti-terrorist strategy. There were about five thousand UDR men and women in Northern Ireland. The IRA assassinated between fifty and a hundred of them every year, most in attacks like the one that had killed Mrs McAlpine's husband: mercury tilt switch bombs under cars, rural ambushes and the like.

As coppers, though, we looked down on UDR men. We saw ourselves as elite professionals and them as, well … fucking wasters for the most part. Sure, they were brave and put their lives on the line, but who didn't in this day and age?

There was also the fact that many of the hated disbanded B
Specials had joined the UDR and that occasionally guns from their depots would find their way into the hands of the paramilitaries. I mean, I'm sure ninety-five per cent of the UDR soldiers were decent, hardworking people, but there were definitely more bad apples in the regiment than in the RUC.

Not that any of that mattered now. We should have known about the death of a security forces comrade and we didn't.

“Hold on there, that tea's too wet. I'll get some biscuits,” Mrs McAlpine said.

When she had gone Matty put up his hands defensively.

“Don't blame me, this was your responsibility, boss,” he said. “You just asked for an address. You didn't tell me to check the births and deaths …”

“I know, I know. It can't be helped.”

“We've made right arses of ourselves. In front of a good-looking woman, too,” Matty said.

“I'm surprised the name didn't ring a bell.”

“December of last year was a bad time, the IRA were killing someone every day, we can't remember all of them,” Matty protested.

It was true. Last November/December there'd been a lot of IRA murders including the notorious assassination of a fairly moderate Unionist MP, the Reverend Robert Bradford, which had absorbed most of the headlines; for one reason and another the IRA tended not to target local politicians but when they did it got the ink pots flowing.

The widow McAlpine came back in with a tray of biscuits.

She was still wearing the dressing gown but she'd taken the towel off her head. Her hair was chestnut red, curly, long. Somehow it made her look much older. Late twenties, maybe thirty. And she would age fast out here in the boglands on a scrabble sheep farm with no husband and no help.

“This is lovely, thanks,” Matty said, helping himself to a chocolate digestive.

“So what's this all about?” she asked.

I told her about the body in the suitcase and the name tag that we'd found inside the case.

“I gave that suitcase away just before Christmas with all of Martin's stuff. I couldn't bear to have any of his gear around me any more and I thought that somebody might have the use of it.”

“Can you tell us where you left it?” I asked.

“Yes. The Carrickfergus Salvation Army.”

“And this was just before Christmas?”

“About a week before.”

“Okay, we'll check it out.”

We finished our tea and stared at the peat logs crackling in the fireplace. Matty, the cheeky skitter, finished the entire plate of chocolate digestives.

“Well, we should be heading on,” I said, stood and pulled Matty up before he scoffed the poor woman out of house and home.

“We're really sorry to have bothered you, Mrs McAlpine.”

“Not at all. It chills the blood thinking that someone used Martin's old suitcase to get rid of a body.”

“Aye, it does indeed.”

She walked us to the front door.

“Well, thanks again,” I said, and offered her my hand.

She shook it and didn't let go when I tried to disengage.

“It was just out there where your Land Rover was parked. They must have been hiding behind the stone wall. Two of them, they said. Gave him both barrels of a shotgun and sped off on a motorbike. Point blank range. Dr McCreery said that he wouldn't have known a thing about it.”

“I'm sure that's the case,” I said and tried to let go, but still she held on.

“He only joined for the money. This place doesn't pay anything. We've forty sheep on twelve acres of bog.”

“Yes, the—”

She pulled me closer.

“Aye, they say he didn't know anything but he was still breathing when I got to him, trying to breathe anyway. His mouth was full of blood, he was drowning in it. Drowning on dry land in his own blood.”

Matty was staring at the woman, his eyes wide with horror and I was pretty spooked too. The widow McAlpine had us both, but me literally, in her grip.

“I'll go start the Land Rover,” Matty said.

I made a grab at his sleeve as he walked away.

“He was a captain. He wasn't just a grunt. He was a God-fearing man. An intelligent man. He was going places. And he was snuffed out just like that.”

She looked me square in the face and her expression was accusatory – as if I was somehow responsible for all of this.

Her rage had turned her cheeks as red as her bap.

“He was going to work?” I muttered, for something to say.

“Aye, he was just heading up to the fields to bring the yearlings in, him and Cora. I doubt we would have had a dozen of them.”

“I'm really very sorry,” I said.

She blinked twice and suddenly seemed to notice that I was standing there in front of her.

“Oh,” she said.

She let go of my hand. “Excuse me,” she mumbled.

“It's okay,” I said, and took a step backwards. “Have a good morning.”

I walked back across the yard towards the Land Rover.

The rain was heavier now.

The Alsatian started snarling and barking at me again.

“That's enough, Cora!” Mrs McAlpine yelled.

The dog stopped barking but didn't cease straining at its rope leash.

“That is one mean crattur,” Matty said as I got into the front
seat of the Land Rover.

“The dog or the woman?”

“The dog. Hardly the temperament for a sheep dog.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sheep dogs are supposed to like people.”

I looked back at the farmhouse and Mrs McAlpine was still standing there.

“Jesus, she's still bloody staring at us – get this thing going, Matty.”

He turned on the Land Rover and manoeuvred it in a full circle in the farmyard. The sodden chickens flew and hopped away from us.

We drove out of the gate and began going down the lane.

The man with the pipe across the valley was still there in front of his house looking at us and another man on a tractor one field over on a little hill had stopped his vehicle to get a good gander at us too.

We were the local entertainment for the day.

“Where to now, boss?” Matty asked.

“I don't know. Carrick Salvation Army, to see if they remember who they sold that suitcase to?”

“And then?”

“And then back to the station to see if Customs have that list of names yet.”

Matty put the heavy, armoured Land Rover in first gear and began driving down the lane keeping it well over on the ridge so that we wouldn't get stuck in the mud.

He stuck on the radio and looked to see if I would mind Adam and the Ants on Radio One.

I didn't mind.

I wasn't really listening.

Something was bothering me.

It was something Matty had said.

The dog.

It
was
a mean animal. An Alsatian, yes, but trained to be a mean. I'd bet a week's pay that it was primarily a guard dog. As Matty pointed out, on a sheep farm you'd want a Border Collie, but Martin McAlpine's herd was so small he didn't need that much help with the round up and so he'd got himself a good watch dog instead.

“Stop the car,” I said to Matty.

“What?”

“Stop the bloody car!”

He put in the clutch and brake and we squelched to a halt.

“Turn us around, drive us back to the McAlpines.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“Okay.”

He put the Rover in first gear and drove us back down the lane. When we reached the stone wall, Matty killed the engine and we got out of the Rover and walked across the muddy farmyard again.

I knocked on her door and she opened it promptly.

She had changed into jeans and a mustard-coloured jumper. She had tied her hair back into a pony tail.

“Sorry to bother you again, Mrs McAlpine,” I said.

“No bother, Inspector. What else was I going to do today? Wash the windows a second time?”

“I wanted to ask you a question about Cora? Is that the name of your dog?”

“Yes.”

“And you say your husband was going up to bring the yearlings in, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And did he normally take Cora with him?”

“Yes.”

“So she wasn't tied up?”

“No.”

“Hmmm,” I said, and rubbed my chin.

“What are you getting at?” she asked.

“Was Cora always this bad-tempered or is this just since your husband was shot?”

“She's never liked strangers.”

“And you say the gunmen were waiting just behind the stone wall, right out there beyond the farmyard?”

“They must have been, because Martin didn't see them until it was too late.”

“You say they shot him in the chest?”

“Chest and neck.”

“Did you hear the shot?”

“Oh, yes. I knew what it was immediately. A shotgun. I've heard plenty of them in my time.”

“One shot?” Matty asked.

“Both barrels at the same time.”

“And when you came out your husband was down on the ground and the gunmen were riding off on a motorbike?”

“That they were.”

“And you couldn't ID them?”

“It was a blue motorbike, that's all I saw. Why all the questions, Detective?”

“Who investigated your husband's murder?”

“Larne RUC.”

“And they didn't find anything out of the ordinary?”

“No.”

“And the IRA claimed responsibility?”

“That very night. What's in your mind, Inspector Duffy?

“Your husband was armed?” I asked.

“He always carried his sidearm with him, but he didn't even get a chance to get it out of his pocket.”

“And you ran out and found him where?”

“In the yard.”

“Whereabouts? Can you show me?”

“There, where the rooster is,” she said, pointing about half the way across the farmyard, about twenty yards from the house and twenty from the stone wall. Not an impossible shot with a shotgun by any means, but then again, surely you'd want to get a lot closer than twenty yards and if you got closer, wouldn't that have given Captain McAlpine plenty of time to get his own gun out of his pocket?