In the Morning I'll Be Gone (28 page)

“Like what?”

“I’m going to go to Canada. Montreal. Vanessa says they need teachers out there. I’m not too old to start something new.”

“Of course not.”

“New country, a whole new life.”

“I think it’s a great idea.”

“I’m worried about my mum and dad, though, you know?”

“Your mother’s a strong, capable woman and she’ll cope just fine without you.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

She smiled sadly, kissed me on the cheek, and went back inside the house.

So the IRA didn’t get a permanent propaganda coup, they quickly repaired Carrickfergus police station and rebuilt it with a reinforced roof and a huge fence around the outer perimeter wall. I went back to my office but it was so morbid in there I immediately abandoned the idea and started working in Carrick library instead, booking one of the study rooms and reading the case notes over and over . . .

That’s where McCrabban found me one afternoon with a look of mild satisfaction on his face. “I’ve got something for you,” he said.

“What have you found out?”

“Our friend who owns that nice French restaurant we had lunch at. Turns out he has a teenage burglary conviction.”

“Barry Connor?”

“Mr. Barry Connor to you,” Crabbie said, giving me the arrest sheet.

It was a teen rap sheet on a newsagent and post office, in Bangor, County Down. We’d all shoplifted at some point in our teenage lives and everyone dreams about robbing a bank when they’re a kid, but the interesting part of Barry’s epic tale was the fact that he had picked the newsagent’s lock before tripping the silent alarm.

McCrabban grinned when I got to that bit. “Barry knows how to get into locked rooms,” he said.

“This is good work, mate! You fancy some free French lunch?”

“I might.”

We drove the Beemer into Belfast and parked it at Queen Street cop shop.

We walked to Le Canard, took a discreet seat near the back, and ordered off the à la carte. “And we’ll talk to the boss. Tell him it’s Detective Inspector Sean Duffy,” I told the waiter.

When Barry appeared he was sweating, purple faced, and harassed looking.

“You can’t keep doing this. Not in the middle of lunch service. It’s not right!” he said.

“Why don’t you write to your MP?” I suggested.

“I will!”

I pulled a chair from a neighboring table and set it next to me.

“Let’s talk about your burglary conviction, shall we, Barry?”

He sat down with a groan. “That was twenty years ago,” he hissed.

“How did you learn how to pick locks?” I asked him.

“From a book.”

“What book?”

“A book of magic.
Houdini’s Secrets Revealed
,” Barry said.

“Weren’t you saying something about magic tricks, Inspector Duffy?” Crabbie said to me.

“I was indeed, Sergeant McCrabban. I was saying that only a magician could have killed Lizzie Fitzpatrick and got away with it,” I replied.

“I didn’t kill Lizzie Fitzpatrick! I was home in my bed!” Barry said, sweating even more profusely now. The dishes from the à la carte arrived but I was off my grub.

“Tell me about this book,” I said.

“It taught you how to pick every lock. Handcuffs, that kind of stuff. The one time I tried it on a shop, I got caught. I was seventeen, for heaven’s sake!”

“Do you happen to remember what the locks were like on the Henry Joy McCracken?”

“I have no idea! I grew out of all that!”

“How would you escape from a locked room if you had to, Mr. Connor?”

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea,” he protested.

“How would Houdini do it? Come on, son, rack your brains.”

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Houdini? I don’t know. A trapdoor. A hidden wall. A false bottom. That kind of thing,” he said desperately.

I looked at McCrabban and he gave me the minutest little shake of the head. I agreed with him. This guy wasn’t our man. I popped a piece of bread into my mouth.

“Do you have any questions, Sergeant McCrabban?”

“No, I don’t.”

“All right, Mr. Connor, you can go back to your lunch service.”

“That’s it? I’m free?”

“That’s it. You’re free. But if you think of anything pertinent to this case next time you better call me before I come calling on you, OK?”

“OK, yes, Officers, yes!” he said with palpable relief.

Crabbie ate his lunch and we asked for the bill but naturally it was on the house again. Not only that but we were given half a dozen vouchers for a free lunch. Since we were in the neighborhood I tried to see Lee McPhail but he was escorting another American politician around Belfast. This time it was some guy called Peter King, who was the comptroller of Nassau County and grand marshal of the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade. While he was in Ulster, King got a lot of publicity by calling Gerry Adams “the George Washington of Ireland” and by championing IRA bomb attacks and assassinations as part of the legitimate struggle against British imperialism. On the TV news that night Lee looked like the cat who got the cream. King was even better than Kennedy at generating headlines.

Ennui. Anomie.

I took riot duty even though I didn’t have to. Belfast in silent tableaux: skeleton cars, men in balaclavas, men in riot gear, bonfires, the tea-colored lough, bombsites growing with fern and alyssum, Venus above the Pleiades, petrol smell as sweet as new-mown hay, felled telegraph poles, feral kids, smoke curled over the city streets like some great dragon . . . Days like this. Nights.

A vodka gimlet.
Dr. Who
. A knock at the door. Mrs. Hamilton from over the way in floods of tears. The problem was Jessie Watson, who had stolen one of her kid’s go-karts to use in the “ark” he was building in his back garden. I knew all about Jessie Watson: a lay preacher in one of those apocalyptic American sects that had been blossoming in Carrickfergus recently. God had told him that the polar ice caps were melting and he was the one to build a boat. Jessie, who’d had no previous experience with carpentry, naval architecture, or the interpretation of divine visions, did have a history of violence and psychiatric problems, so I went over with my revolver and opened his front door with extreme caution. I found him sobbing on the kitchen floor, naked, and covered in what I hoped was brown paint. The go-kart was in the back garden undamaged. I didn’t see any evidence of any “ark,” which wasn’t surprising considering that it was bonfire season. I returned the go-kart to Mrs. Hamilton.

“Thank you,” she said. “A man like that should be locked up. That’s part of your job, Mr. Duffy, to protect the public.”

“Aye, but we’ll be laughing on the other side of our faces when the flood does come and we’re scrambling for a berth, eh?”

A few days later Mrs. Hamilton brought over a ticket for the Monsters of Rock concert at Castle Donington. It was a wee thank-you, and her brother-in-law was looking for a driver. We drove over in the Beemer, pitched our tent, drank a lot, saw AC/DC and Van Halen, and copped off with a couple of strumpets during the Mötley Crüe gig, which Mötley Crüe would have approved of.

The night we got back a sergeant in charge of incinerating seized drugs, guns, and pornography came out to my house with a bag of Moroccan blond cannabis resin the size and shape of a dog turd. “Are you interested?” he asked.

Why did he think I’d want to buy it from him? I suppose I just had that kind of face. The street value was about five thousand quid. I offered him two hundred pounds. He took it no questions asked. I suppose I could have suspected an Internal Affairs sting operation, but I knew the RUC wouldn’t dream of fucking me while I was protected by MI5.

And speaking of MI5. A helicopter to Bessbrook. Grim faces. Questions. I stalled them as best as I could.
Following leads, testing stories, new developments
. . . but they could see that I was never going to solve the Lizzie Fitzpatrick case. Like the
Mary Celeste
, the Bermuda Triangle, and the popularity of Spandau Ballet, some things you were never destined to know the answer to.

Kate liked me, didn’t she? Maybe she would let me string them along for a few more months before quietly letting me rejoin the RUC full time in the new year.

A helicopter ride back to Carrick.

Days. Nights. Bombs. Riots.

Simmering civil war.

Circling.

Circling . . .

There are cops who push through the blocks in a case through the sheer force of their intellect. I am not one of those cops.

I’m a cop who needs a break.

In October I finally got one.

“White Rabbit” was on the stereo, I had rolled myself a fat joint of Atlas Mountains kif and the sweetest North Carolina pipe tobacco, and I was about to get in the bath when I heard the phone ringing downstairs in the living room.

It was fifty-fifty whether I would ignore it or not.

If I had ignored the call Lee said that he wouldn’t have called back because it was his instinct never to offer the police information in any circumstances.

I
did
go downstairs. I did pick the phone off the table. “Yeah?”

“It’s Lee McPhail.”

“Lee. Good morning. I saw you on the telly. Your boy Peter King made quite a splash.”

“I expect big things from him. He’s not presidential material but maybe V-P. And he’s not cheating on his wife like our other friend.”

“What can I do for you, Lee?”

“It’s what I can do for you.”

“Go on . . .”

“About those tinkers.”

“What tinkers?”

“The tinkers your Inspector Beggs thought broke into the Mulvenna and Wright law offices in Antrim in December 1980.”

“You’ve got my full attention.”

“The RUC couldn’t trace those tinkers but I have contacts that the RUC doesn’t have.”

“I was told they were in England.”

“Well, they aren’t.”

“Can I speak to them?”

“I’m not going to tell you who they are, Duffy. I don’t shop friends of friends to the peelers. What’s important for you is the fact that they did not break into the Mulvenna and Wright law offices. I talked to those boys myself and they are not eejits. They knew there wouldn’t be much ready money in a place like that.”

“Of course not!” I said, and slapped my head. “Your information’s completely reliable?”

“My word on it, mate.”

“OK.”

“Do you understand what I’m telling you, Duffy?”

“I do. Thanks, Lee. I appreciate this. I owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me anything. Just get the person who killed Lizzie Fitzpatrick.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Oh, and naturally, we never had this conversation.”

“I understand.”

He hung up. I unplugged the bath and threw the joint down the toilet. I shaved and dressed in a white shirt, black tie, black cords, and a black sports jacket.

I put on my shoulder holster and checked that there were six rounds in my .38.

I went outside. No rain yet but there was some in the forecast.

I said good morning to Mrs. Campbell and Mrs. Clawson. I checked under the BMW for mercury tilt bombs, didn’t find any, and drove down Coronation Road until I hit the Barn Road. I took the Barn Road to the North Road and then the open country of the Raw Brae Road, where I gunned the Beemer up to a ton and change.

Sheep, cows, hills, high blackberry hedges, woods.

I kept to the B roads where traffic was light and I could speed.

I was in Antrim in fifteen minutes, coming in on the single-track lane through Lenagh.

I parked the Beemer in the police station for safe-keeping and got directions to the Mulvenna and Wright law office, which was now known as JJ Wright and Son, Solicitors-at-Law.

It was a glass-fronted building next to a dentist’s on the high street.

An attractive young woman with very red lips and a black bob asked me whether I had an appointment.

I showed her my warrant card and asked her whether Mr. Wright was busy.

She said that she thought not but she would see.

I was shown into his offices a couple of minutes later and the receptionist asked whether I would take a cup of tea. I told her that that would be lovely, milk, one sugar.

“So what can I do for you, Inspector Duffy?” Mr. Wright asked.

He had curly ginger hair, which was miraculously ungreyed despite his age, which was around fifty-five. He was a big man with the build of a prop forward, and knowing how many rugby players became solicitors that’s probably exactly what he was. He had a ruddy, maroon-colored face, massive hands, and a dangerous mien.

I told him who I was and that I was looking into the case of Lizzie Fitzpatrick.

He nodded, said nothing.

“Your former partner, James Mulvenna, when did he pass on?” I asked.

“November 1980, although he was confined to his home from that summer onwards.”

“He had multiple sclerosis, I believe.”

“He did.”

“How old was he when he died?”

“James was fifty-one. The doctors said that he’d be lucky to make thirty. He told me that when we became partners, but by God he showed them.”