I Hear the Sirens in the Street (8 page)

“Mrs McAlpine, if you'll bear with me for just another moment … Let me get this clear in my mind. Your husband's walking out to the fields, with Cora beside him, and two guys come out from behind the stone wall and shoot him down from twenty yards away. Cora, who was for taking my head off, doesn't run at the men, and he can't get his gun out in time?”

Her eyes were looking at me with a sort of hostility now.

“I'm only telling you what the police told me. I didn't get there until it was all over.”

“But Cora was definitely loose?”

“Yes, she was.”

“Why didn't the IRA men shoot her? She must have been all over them.”

“I don't know … Maybe she was frightened.”

“She doesn't seem like a dog easily cowed to me.”

Mrs McAlpine shrugged and said nothing.

“And why didn't your husband pull his gun? They come out from behind the wall with shotguns. He must have seen them.”

“I don't know, Inspector, I just don't know,” Mrs McAlpine said in a tired monotone.

“Not if his back was turned,” Matty added.

“But Cora would have smelt them, no? She would have been going bonkers. They're going to see a slavering Alsatian running at them. Wouldn't that have given him a second or two to go for his gun?”

“Evidently not,” she said.

She reached into her jeans, took out a battered packet of Silk
Cut and lit one.

She was pale and wan. Not just tired, something else …
weary
. Aye, that was it.

“They killed him. What difference does it make how they bloody did it?” she said at last.

I nodded. “Yes, of course. I'm sure it's nothing,” I said. “Nothing important … Anyway, I've taken up more than enough of your time.”

“Oh, don't worry about that. These days all I've got is time,” she said, looking searchingly into my face, but I was the master of the blank expression – training from all those years of interrogation.

She puffed lightly on her fag.

“Maybe we should be heading, boss, before the rain bogs us down,” Matty said.

“One final question, if you don't mind, Mrs McAlpine. I noticed some of the farm buildings back there, but I didn't see a greenhouse. You wouldn't have one at all, would you?”

“A what?”

“A greenhouse. For plants, fruits, you know.”

She blew out a line of smoke. “Aye, we have a greenhouse.”

“You wouldn't mind if I took a wee look.”

“What for?”

“I'm afraid I can't say, but it will only take a minute.”

“If it's drugs you're after, you won't find any.”

“Can I take a look?”

She shrugged. “Be my guest.”

She walked me through the house to the muddy farmyard out the back. A smell of slurry and chicken feed. A few more harassed-looking hens sitting on a rusting Massey Ferguson tractor.

“Over there,” she said, pointing to a squalid little greenhouse near a barn.

I squelched through the mud to the greenhouse and went
inside. Several panes had fallen in and rain and cold had turned a neat series of plum bushes into a blighted mess. There was mould on the floor and mushrooms were growing in an otherwise empty trough of black soil. There were no exotic plants or indeed any other plants apart from the withered plums.

I rummaged in the trough where the wild mushrooms now thrived, looking for the roots of a plant that might once have been there, but I came up empty – if Martin had been growing anything interesting here all traces of it had been removed.

I nodded and walked back across the farmyard, cleaned my shoes on the mud rack.

“Did you find what you were after?” she asked.

“Did you ever hear of a plant called rosary pea?”

“What?”

“A plant called the rosary pea? Did you ever hear of it?”

She shook her head.

“It's also called crab's eye, Indian liquorice, jumbie bead?”

“Never heard of it in my life.”

I nodded. “Sorry to have taken up so much of your time, thank you very much, Mrs McAlpine. Good morning,” I said and walked to the Rover.

“What was that all about?” Matty asked as we climbed back inside.

“This thing stinks.”

“What stinks? This? It's a dead end, surely?”

I stared out at the boggy farm and through the rearview mirror I watched her go back inside the house.

“Let's get out of here. Let's see if we can't dig a little deeper into the late Mr McAlpine's murder.”

“What the hell for?”

“Just get us going, will ya?”

“Okay.”

We got about a hundred yards down the lane but a farmer was blocking the road with his tractor. It had stalled on the edge
of the sheugh. He climbed down out of the cab to apologise. He had brown eyes under his flat cap. He was about forty-five. He had a pipe. So far so ordinary, but there was something about him I didn't like. An unblinking quality to those brown eyes that most people didn't have towards cops.

“Sorry lads, won't be a moment,” he said. “I was turning this baste of a thing and I misjudged the size of the road.”

A road he's driven down and turned his tractor around on a thousand times
, I was thinking to myself.

“Oh, that's okay, we're in no hurry,” Matty said.

I added nothing.

“Just got to get the front wheel out of the ditch,” the man said, climbing back into the cab and turning the thing on.

The wheel came out easily and the man pulled the tractor over to let us pass.

Matty started the Rover and waved.

“What do you think that was all about?” I asked as I looked at the tractor in the side mirror.

“What?”

“The man with the tractor.”

“What about it?”

“Him fucking with us like that.”

Matty stared at me and when I didn't elaborate he looked back down the road.

“So where to, boss?” he asked.

“Larne RUC,” I insisted.

We took the shore road past Magheramorne quarry, where the slag heaps ran next to the road and where the fields were a strange John Deere green.

Radio One decided to torture us by heavily rotating “Making Your Mind Up” to commemorate Bucks Fizz's triumph in the previous year's Eurovision Song Contest. Even Matty couldn't take it and after hunting in vain for another station we rummaged in the Land Rover's cassette stash and found Joan Armatrading's
Walk Under Ladders
.

“You didn't really think she'd be growing rosary pea in that greenhouse, did you?” Matty asked.

“You never know, mate, you have to follow up everything.”

“I could have told you it was a waste of time … Sort of like this little journey.”

“You're quite the lippy wee character aren't you, Matthew?”

“I'm on an emotional rollercoaster, mate, someone fired a machine gun at me this morning, not to mention being harassed by a vicious dog.”

“Tell Kenny Dalziel you're putting in for emotional hardship money. That'll make the bastard's head explode.”

Larne RUC station was a massive concrete bunker near the harbour. It was known to be one of the safest cop postings in all of Northern Ireland because the town was small with a population that was over ninety per cent Protestant. The IRA would
have few, if any, safe houses in the community and an IRA cell from Belfast could not easily make an escape to a nearby haven. In general the worst the Larne peelers had to deal with was drunkenness on Friday and Saturday nights and the occasional fracas between rival gangs of football supporters heading over or back from the ferry to Scotland. As a result of all this, Larne was known as a place where they dumped lazy, old and problem officers who could cause real difficulties elsewhere.

The McAlpine murder had been investigated by an Inspector Dougherty, a red-nosed, white-haired old stager with a tremble in his left hand that to the uneducated eye could be Parkinson's disease or MS or some other malady but which was actually the eleven o'clock shakes. At lunch time he'd slip out to the nearest pub and after a couple of triple vodkas he'd be right as rain again.

We met him in a large book-lined office overlooking the harbour and ferry terminal. The books were mostly thrillers and detective fiction which I found encouraging, but they were all from the '60s and early '70s, which wasn't such a good sign. At some juncture in the last decade he'd lost interest in reading – had lost interest in everything probably. There was no wedding ring on his left hand, but many Presbyterians didn't wear a ring because they considered it a Papist affectation. Even so, the room stank of divorce, failure and alcoholism – the standard troika for many a career RUC officer.

We were both the same rank, detective inspector, but he'd been on the force twenty years longer than me, which made me wonder what the hell he had been doing all that time, and whether I was destined to go the same route.

The rain was still pelting the windows and Scotland was a blue smudge to the east.

“Gentlemen, have a seat,” he said. “Cup of tea or coffee?”

“Thanks but no, we're all tea'd out this morning,” I replied, with as decent an apologetic smile as I could muster.

Dougherty folded his hands across his ample belly. He was wearing a white shirt and a brown suit that he'd obviously had for quite a few years, which, as he sat down, bunched at the sleeves and gave him an unfortunate comic air. A peeler could be a lot of things: a drunk, a thug, an idiot, a sociopath, but as long as you looked the part it was usually fine. Even in Larne Dougherty would have a hard time currying respect.

“So what brings you gentlemen down from Carrick?” he asked.

“I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about the McAlpine murder,” I said, all business.

“The what?”

“Martin McAlpine. He was a part-time UDR captain who was shot at his farm on Islandmagee last December.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. What's this pertaining to?”

I explained about the suitcase and the John Doe and how we had traced the suitcase back to Martin McAlpine.

“And what did his wife say happened to his suitcase?” Dougherty asked.

“She says she left it in at the Carrickfergus Salvation Army before Christmas,” Matty said.

Dougherty looked puzzled.

“She left it at the Salvation Army before Christmas?” he asked.

“Yup,” Matty said.

“So, what's his murder got to do with anything? The murderer of your John Doe obviously just bought the suitcase for a pound from the Sally Army and used it to dump a body, right?”

“Almost certainly,” I agreed.

“So, why bother dredging up the McAlpine case? Your killer could have grabbed any random suitcase, couldn't he?”

“Yes.”

“And the timeline … She leaves the suitcase in just before Christmas. McAlpine is murdered back in early December.
Your body is discovered this week? In April?”

I shook my head. “The body had been frozen for an indeterminate amount of time, but aye, I'm with you, Dougherty, I agree, it's weak beer; but you see it's not us, it's our Chief; he's going to want us to have pursued every lead out there and as soon as he finds out that the suitcase belonged to a UDR captain who was assassinated by the IRA, he's going to be firing a million questions at me.”

Dougherty breathed a sigh of relief. I was not an internal affairs spook come to investigate his work, I was just another working stiff dealing with an arsehole boss.

“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.”