In the Morning I'll Be Gone (22 page)

“Fish? Enchilada?”

“Magnate in these parts. His construction company built half of Antrim town. He was a Protestant but he was liked well enough by everybody. A real . . . uhm . . . character. Used to have these big Halloween and Christmas parties for all the local kids. That’s how Lizzie, Vanessa, and me got to know Harper. We’ve known him since he was a wee nipper. His dad was big into fishing and the rugby club.”

“He had a stroke, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. He was in a bad way for a while and died not too long after Lizzie’s accident. Harper was completely lost.”

“What about his mother?”

“Don’t mention his mother. She ran off to England with some actor when Harper was only five. She’s been pestering Harper for money since Tommy’s death. Of course, he gives it to her because it’s his mother, but she’s a frightful woman by all accounts.”

We opened the back gate and began walking up the garden path to the house, which I could see now was a lovely red sandstone manor from the 1780s or ’90s.

Annie took us to the back door, which led into a large scullery off the kitchen.

“Wait a minute, will he mind us coming in the back door like this?”

“I’ve come in this way a thousand times!” she scoffed.

I followed Annie through the scullery and the kitchen into an enormous, slightly old-fashioned living room that overlooked the lough.

“Hello!” she yelled. “Hello! You’ve got company!”

“Is that Annie McCann?” a man’s voice asked from an adjoining room.

“Annie Fitzpatrick, if you don’t mind!” she said.

A side door opened and Harper McCullough came in. He turned on the light and gave Annie a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He was tall, six four, handsome, about twenty-six or twenty-seven. He had an open, clean-shaven face with a sharp, square jaw, thick black hair, and dark brown eyes. His frame, however, was slight, and he was skinny, and when he walked it was with a stoop. In another age you would have had him down as a consumptive artist. He was wearing a mustard-colored sweater, blue jeans, and no shoes. If he put on a few stone he’d look like one of those wankers who are born with money and good looks and who swan through life; but this character wasn’t swanning anywhere. His mother had abandoned him, his father had passed away recently, and his girlfriend had died in some kind of bizarre accident . . .

“Is this your new beau?” he said to Annie, offering me his hand.

“God, no!” Annie laughed. “This is . . . well, I suppose you could say that this is an old friend of the family . . . Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of the famed Special Branch.”

I shook Harper’s hand and his grip was firm.

“A policeman? How can you bunch of rebels have a policeman as a family friend?” Harper asked with a laugh.

“You have slandered us, sir! We’re actually a diverse and pluralistic lot,” Annie said, poking Harper in the chest.

Harper shook his head and winked at me. “Your know her ex-husband is a famous IRA commander! You’re in trouble, pal. This is a classic honey trap if ever I saw one.”

Annie punched him on the shoulder. “Stop it! I’m not seeing Sean! I’m not seeing anyone. He’s here on official business.”

“Oh?” Harper said.

“Yes, I am, Mr. McCullough. I’m in the Cold Case Unit of the RUC Special Branch. We’re looking into the death of Lizzie Fitzpatrick.”

Harper’s eyes widened. “Finally!” he exclaimed. “Lizzie never got justice! I don’t care what they say. That whole thing was very suspicious, to say the least.”

“How so?” I asked.

“They say she fell off the bar and broke her neck? Impossible! She was very coordinated. She had terrific balance. She could do a handstand with one hand!”

Annie groaned. “The handstand thing again? We can all do that! Look!”

She got down on the kitchen floor, did a handstand and lifted her left hand off the ground. She fell and did it another two times until she managed to hold it there for a ten count. Harper looked at me, embarrassed, and I was embarrassed for Annie too.

She finished her handstand and sprung back to her feet.

“There! What do you think of that!” she said.

Harper smiled. “That was brilliant, Annie. All three of you girls were always incredibly talented.”

Annie smiled from ear to ear and unconsciously gave me a little nudge on the back.

“What is going on in here?” a female voice said behind me.

I turned to look.

She was blonde, winsome, pale, very pretty, and nine months pregnant.

“There she is! Ready to pop!” Annie said, and kissed the pregnant woman on the cheek.

There was the customary cooing over the baby bump before Harper introduced me.

“This is my wife, Jane. Jane, this is Sean Duffy. He’s a police detective. He’s looking into Lizzie’s death.”

Jane frowned and shook her head. “Poor Lizzie. Don’t believe them when they tell you she could just have fallen off a table. She could do these one-handed handstands that were—” Jane began.

“I was just showing them! I was just after showing them. Right this minute!” Annie interrupted.

“So did you all go to school together?” I asked.

“Aye. Antrim Grammar. I was a couple of years ahead of Harper. And Jane was in Lizzie’s year,” Annie said.

That would put Harper at about twenty-eight and Jane at about twenty-five, I thought, and made a mental note of it.

“I live about a mile that way,” Jane said, pointing down the lough.

“Jane was one of Lizzie’s best friends,” Annie added.

“
The
best friend!” Jane insisted. “Now just because I’m ready to explode I am not going to forget my duties. Who wants a cup of tea?”

Jane and Annie went to make the tea, which gave me a chance to talk to Harper alone.

“If you don’t mind, Mr. McCullough, I’m reinterviewing everyone. Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Of course.”

“I’d like to bring you back to the night Lizzie Fitzpatrick died, 27—”

“27 December 1980, I’ll never forget it.”

“That night you were at some rugby club dinner in Belfast?”

“Yes. It was the Antrim Rugby Club Awards Dinner at the Montjoy Hotel. They were giving an award to my father. Lifetime achievement thing. I was his representative.”

“He’d had a stroke.”

“Aye. A month before. I didn’t want to go to the dinner, not with my old man sick and Lizzie’s dad in the hospital for his knee surgery. Did they tell you Jim was in the hospital for his knee?”

“Yes. That’s why Lizzie was running the pub.”

“She didn’t have to. It could have closed for one bloody night. She was going to be a lawyer. It still makes me furious. I think Mary guilted her into it.”

“So you were reluctantly at this rugby club dinner.”

“Reluctantly is right. It hardly seemed a time to be getting blitzed with the bloody rugby club. A game I’ve never liked, incidentally. And if I hadn’t gone none of this would have happened.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, I would have been with Lizzie the whole time, wouldn’t I?”

“What do you think happened to Lizzie, Mr. McCullough?”

“Somebody killed her. Had to be. She would never have fallen off that bar. I’ve seen her jump from twice that height as happy as Larry.”

“How did they do it, with all the doors locked and bolted from the inside?”

“I don’t know. You’re the detective! She wouldn’t die like that. So random like that.”

“What do you do for a living, Mr. McCullough?” I asked him.

“I’m a builder.”

“You physically build things?”

He laughed. “Me? No. Look at me. I run a construction company. My dad’s company.”

“Were you working for your father when you were going out with Lizzie?”

He shook his head. “God, no. I was at Queen’s.”

“Studying?”

“Archeology.”

“A fascinating subject.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, his eyes lighting up for the first time in our interview. “I’ve always loved that stuff. I wanted to do underwater archeology. You know what that is?”

“No. Not really.”

“I got a book on it when I was ten. I’ve been entranced ever since. You dive on drowned cities. Alexandria, Piraeus, places like that. It’s a brilliant field and they’ve barely, er, scratched the surface.”

“Why don’t you still do that?”

He shook his head and sighed. “Somebody has to run the bloody firm, don’t they? After my dad had his stroke, I sort of got sucked into it. And then after Lizzie’s . . . after she died, well, I sort of buried myself in the work . . . And it’s too late now, isn’t it? I’ve a kid on the way,” he said, looking a little panic stricken.

“I see.”

“Do you have any kids, Inspector?”

“Me, no.”

“I mean, how do you raise kids?”

“I think it’s all quite straightforward, sir. Uhm, you get the book and everything’s in the book.”

“What book? There’s a book?” he said, hopefully.

“My next-door neighbor, Mrs. McDowell, has ten or, possibly, eleven kids. I’ll ask her.”

“Thank you. Where
are
the girls with the tea?” Harper said, distracted.

I didn’t want to lose this moment. “OK, so bringing you back to the night of Lizzie’s death. What time did you leave the rugby club dinner?”

“The whole thing was supposed to go on until one in the morning with the disco and the bloody karaoke, but the speeches and the awards and the pats on the back were all done by about half eleven.”

“That’s when you called Lizzie’s house?”

“Yeah. I thought she’d easily be finished by then. Glasses cleaned, pub locked up, and home. The pub is only five minutes from their house. So when I called up and she wasn’t there I was worried. I told Mary that I thought something might be wrong and of course that daft old bird told me not to concern myself! I said she should call the police and she said she wasn’t having a policeman in her house! She said she’d go down to the pub and check on her. And then she hung up.”

“What did you do next?”

“I was worried. I ran out to the car and I burned rubber getting back to Antrim. I got there roughly the same time as the peelers.”

“So she did call the police?”

“Yeah, Mary had walked to the pub and seen that it was closed and come back and called the cops.”

“And then what happened?”

“We all went looking for her in the village.”

“And?”

“One of the policemen shone his torch into the pub and he thought he might have seen someone lying on the floor. So we all ran over and started trying to break the door down.”

“And did you break the door down?”

“Yes. It took some work because the bar was across but the cops had a battering ram in their Land Rover and we all gave it a good charge each. And, well, we got in . . .”

“And?”

“She was lying there on the floor, all crumpled up and that stupid light bulb in her hand.”

“How did you see her if the lights were turned off?”

“One of the policemen turned them on.”

“And that’s when you saw the dead bulb in the socket?”

“I didn’t notice that, but one of the peelers did.”

“Is it possible that there was someone hiding in the bar? Waiting there until the door was open so they could slip away?”

He shook his head dubiously. “No. There was nobody in there.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Where would they hide?”

“The toilets.”

He shook his head. “I doubt it. We were all milling around. One of us would have bumped into somebody hiding, wouldn’t we?”

“What do you mean, milling around?”

“We were all just milling around. A policeman had already determined that she was dead. Beyond saving, you know? And Mary was sobbing and I was just
devastated.
And we weren’t allowed near the body and nobody was allowed to leave until the detectives came.”

“Was there a search of the premises?”

“Not then, but it didn’t matter because when that inspector showed up from Antrim RUC he had the pub searched from top to bottom.”

“How long after you broke the door down did the inspector show up?”

“Ten minutes? I don’t know.”

“That seems like a good enough time to make a getaway.”

He shook his head again. “No. You’re not understanding the layout of the pub. She was in the middle of the main room about fifteen feet from the door. There were four policemen, Mary, and me all waiting for the detectives to show up. No one could have slipped past us in that time. And there was one guy on the front door the whole time.”

“And the back door, Mr. McCullough?”

“I checked that myself. Locked and bolted.”

“But you didn’t check the toilets?”

“No. Why would I?”

“And what exactly happened when the inspector came?”

“He looked at the body, determined the situation, and then conducted a thorough search of the premises.”

“And apparently found nothing untoward?”

“That’s what he said.”

I made a note of all of this.

I’d read Inspector Beggs’s report and all four police officers at the scene had said the same thing. No one had left the pub in the time before the search had been carried out.

Annie and Jane came with the tea on a silver tray. The good china, Ceylon tea, fresh milk. They set it on the coffee table and sat there on the edge of the sofa while I continued my questions.

“Did Lizzie have any enemies, Mr. McCullough?”

“I doubt it. She was very good natured. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Do you have any enemies? Someone who might have wanted to hurt you by getting her?”

He considered it for a moment. “Not back then. I was just a student. Maybe now I’d have a few. People complaining about how slowly we’re building their house or something.”

This was getting me nowhere. “Mr. McCullough, you appreciate that both the pub doors, front and back, were barred and locked from the inside?”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And all the windows were barred.”

“Yes.”

“Which pretty much means that it
had
to be an accident,” I said.

“So they say.”

“But you’re not convinced?”

“She was so physically capable. Agile. She rode horses and stuff and never fell off those. As if she’s going to fall off a bar?”