I Hear the Sirens in the Street (25 page)

The fall-out from Burke's death was immediate. Chief Inspector Brennan was not promoted, but to keep the shifts working effectively we now needed a new sergeant. Someone with a head for detail who could help keeping the place level. I knew that this was my opportunity to push for Crabbie. If they promoted him to acting sergeant now it wouldn't matter how he did on his exam as long as he wasn't a total disaster. I lobbied hard for him but I was a lone voice as everyone else wanted weasly Kenny Dalziel from clerical who could run the admin that everyone else hated.

I told Crabbie after the meeting. “They're promoting Dalziel.”

He was gutted. “What have I done wrong?”

“Nothing. I'm sorry, mate. They don't know anything. I mean, of course they're going to promote a clerk like Dalziel, not someone who actually, you know, goes out and solves crimes.”

The day ended.

The next began.

The week went by like that.

Rain and no leads.

On the Thursday we learned that Bill O'Rourke's body had been returned to America. His funeral was at Arlington where he got the full honour guard, folded flag treatment. We were told that his dead wife's sister had surfaced out of the woodwork to claim his house in Massachusetts and his apartment in Florida. I asked the local police to interview her and they did and a Lieutenant Dawson sent me a terse fax stating that there was nothing suspicious about her.

The days lengthened. The Royal Navy Task Force continued its southward journey. On Saturday morning a masked man armed with a shotgun robbed the Northern Bank in High Street Carrickfergus and got away with nine hundred pounds. The sum was insignificant, no one was hurt and I wasn't going to make it a priority until Brennan summoned me to his office.

“What's your progress on the O'Rourke murder?”

“It's about the same as it was when we talked last w—”

“Get on this robbery, then. Your full team. It's about time you started pulling your weight around here, Duffy!”

Brennan had aged. His hair was going from grey to white and he looked flabby. God knows where he was staying now. What was bothering him? The marriage? Being passed over? Something else? I'd never know. Crabbie had gone through troubles with his missus last year and had never said one word about it.

I investigated the robbery and of course there were no witnesses, but an informant our agent handler knew called Jackdaw told us some good information.

A guy called Gus Plant had bought everyone a round of drinks in the Borough Arms on Saturday night and boasted to everyone that he was going to get himself a new motor. Crabbie and I got a warrant and went to Gus's house in Castlemara Estate. He'd had the stolen money under his bed.

It was pathetic.

We cuffed him and his wife screamed at him all the way outside. She'd told him that that was the first place the cops would look and he hadn't listened because he never listened.

“Prison'll be good for you, mate. Anything to get away from that racket,” I told him in the back of the Rover.

It wasn't
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
but it was a case solved and it kept the Chief off our backs for a couple of days.

I called Tony McIlroy and asked him about the Dougherty murder.

For a moment he was baffled.

“We yellowed that file. It's going nowhere,” he said.

“You interviewed the widow?”

“Aye, I did. You didn't tell me she was a good-looking lass.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what are your impressions? Did she have something to do with Dougherty's death?”

“Fuck, no.”

“That's it? A simple no? She had no alibi.”

“Or motive, or weapon, or cojones, or experience … Hey, I've another call, I'll call you back.”

He didn't call me back.

Days.

Nights.

Rain through the kitchen window. Thin daffodils. Fragile lilacs. Gulls flopping sideways into the wind. An achromatic vacancy to the sky.

I canvassed for witnesses, tried to nail down Bill O'Rourke's last movements, but nobody knew anything. Nobody had seen him after he left the Dunmurry Country Inn.

One morning the Chief Inspector had us up to his office. “Lads, listen, I'm putting the name and number of the divisional psychiatrist up on the noticeboard. I suggest you tell the lads to avail themselves of his services. The bottle is not the answer,” he said, finishing a double whiskey chaser.

April marched on.

We put the O'Rourke case in a yellow binder, which meant that it was open but not actively being pursued.

This represented yet another personal defeat. Half a dozen murder investigations under my belt and not one of them had resulted in a successful prosecution.

This time we hadn't even found out who'd done it.

A man mourning his wife had come on holiday to Ireland and someone had poisoned him, chopped up the body, frozen him and dumped him like trash.

“It's sickening,” I told Matty and McCrabban over a hot whiskey at the Dobbins.

“It's part of the job, mate,” Crabbie said philosophically. “You'll drive yourself mad if you're after a hundred per cent clearance rate.”

He was right about that, but wasn't it also possible that I just
wasn't a very good copper? Perhaps I lacked focus or attention to detail or maybe I just didn't have the right stuff to be a really good detective. Or even a half-decent detective.

A wet, frigid, Monday morning we got a call about a break-in at the rugby club on the Woodburn Road. Trophies had been stolen. The thieves had come in through a skylight. None of us could face going up onto the rugby club roof in this weather so we drew straws. Matty and I got the short ones.

We drove up the Woodburn Road, climbed a rickety ladder, got on the roof and gathered evidence while rain came down in buckets and a caretaker kept saying “It's not safe up there, be careful, now.”

We heroically dusted for prints and found nothing. A pigeon shat on Matty's back. We climbed back down, wrote a description of the missing articles and said we'd put the word out. We had a courtesy pint in the club and we were about to drive home when I noticed that the rugby club was right next to Carrickfergus UDR base.

The UDR barracks was even more heavily defended than the police station. A twenty-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire was in front of a thick blast-wall made of reinforced concrete.

It was an ugly structure: utilitarian, grim, Soviet. I had never been inside. You'd think that there were would be a lot of cooperation between the police and the UDr The Ulster Defence Regiment was the locally recruited regiment of the British Army and there were often joint RUC/UDR patrols, but in fact we largely operated in different worlds. We seldom shared intelligence and what they actually did apart from the odd patrol or operation on the border was a mystery. A lot of drinking, snooker and darts, I imagine. We regarded ourselves as a highly professional modern police force operating in extremis – the UDR was, at best, a panicky response to the Troubles. The Troubles was their entire
raison d'être
and if the war ever ended
we would still be here but they, presumably, would have to be disbanded. Were there good UDR officers and men? Of course, but were there a lot of wasters, too? Yes. And bigots, more than likely. These days the police were getting up to twenty per cent Catholic representation, which compared favourably to the forty per cent of Northern Ireland's population who identified ourselves as Roman Catholic on the census. The UDR didn't publish its Catholic membership, but it was rumoured to be less than five per cent. Of course the IRA made it their number one priority to kill Catholic UDR men, but even so, the regiment had more than a whiff of sectarianism about it. And it wasn't just the Nationalist papers in Belfast who criticised it – stories about collusion between the UDR and Protestant terror groups had appeared in the mainstream English press, too.

We were all on the same side, but if we ever wanted to get cooperation from the Catholic community we coppers had to hold ourselves somewhat aloof.

“Where are you going?” Matty asked.

“We never checked out Captain McAlpine, did we?”

“Oh Jesus, this again?” Matty said.

“Can you think of anything better to do?”

Matty thought for a second or two. “No, actually, I can't.”

We drove to the fortified guard post and showed our warrant cards. A soldier with full body armour, holding an SLR, gave us a suspicious look and then waved us through.

We parked in the visitors lot and went through another checkpoint at the base's entrance.

“What's the nature of your business, gentlemen?” the guard asked us. Big Derry lad with a black beard.

“We need to speak to your commanding officer about one of your men. It's a confidential matter,” I said.

He didn't like that, but what could he do? We were all supposed to be pulling for the same team.

“You're lucky, lads. The Colonel's here. I think he's down on
the range. You'll have to leave your weapons, gentlemen. Only authorised personnel are allowed to carry firearms inside the base.”

We left our guns and got directions to the range.

We walked down dreary concrete corridors illuminated only by buzzing strip lights. There were no windows and the sole decorations were posters on the wall warning about the dangers of booby traps, honey traps and other IRA tricks.

The honey trap posters showed an attractive blonde woman leading an unsuspecting squaddie into a terraced house with the caption “Who knows what's waiting for you on the other side of the door?”

The range was on a lower level deep beneath the ground.

We knocked on the No Entry sign and a “range master” opened the door a crack. He was a sergeant carrying a machine gun. We explained our business with the Colonel.

“I'm afraid you'll have to wait until Lieutenant Colonel Clavert is finished. You need a range pass to get in here and only Colonel Clavert or Captain Dunleavy can issue those. Captain Dunleavy's not on the base at the moment.”

We waited outside on uncomfortable plastic chairs.

The sound of gunfire was muffled and distant like it is in dreams.

Finally the Colonel appeared. He was dressed in fatigues. A tall man, with jet black hair, a trim moustache and large, round glasses.

He turned out to be English, which was something of a surprise. I introduced Matty and myself and explained why we had come by:

“We're looking into the murder of Captain McAlpine and we wanted to ask a few questions about him.”

“I wondered when you chaps would finally appear.”

“We're the first police officers to come here asking about McAlpine's death?”

“Yes. And it's been a while, hasn't it? It was December when poor Martin copped it. Come with me to my office.”

The office was another windowless bunker.

Lime-green gloss plaint covering breeze blocks. A series of framed pictures of castles. A large wooden desk, pictures of wife and kids, a Newton's cradle. The whole thing looked artificial, like a movie set.

Colonel Clavert offered us tea and cigarettes. We accepted both and a young soldier went off to make the former.

“Did you enjoy the range?” I asked conversationally.

“Oh, yes! It's wonderfully relaxing. A friend of mine in the Irish Guards up at Bessbrook sent me down a batch of AK-47s they found in a weapons cache. We had them cleaned and oiled, found some ammo. Have you ever shot one of those? Ghastly things. But fun! Sergeant O'Hanlon proved himself something of a master. Trick is short bursts. Full auto is a disaster.”

I could see Matty rolling his eyes to my left.

The soldier came in with tea and biscuits. When he'd gone I got down to business.

“So, Captain McAlpine?”

Clavert nodded.

“Fourth man we've lost since I took command here. Such a shame. First-class fellow. We can't replace him. Not with the riff raff we, uh …” he began and dried up quickly when he realised that he was talking out of school.

He went to a filing cabinet, and took out a file. He sat back down at his desk, thumbed through the file, read it, and closed it again.

“Can I take a look?” I asked.

Clavert shook his head. “Actually, old boy, I'm afraid not. We do not have a code-sharing arrangement with the RUC and this file has been marked SECRET.”

He had a young, open face, did Colonel Clavert, but now it assumed a pinched, irritated expression. He rubbed his moustache,
but didn't look the least embarrassed.

“I'm investigating the man's murder,” I said.

“Be that as it may, you can't see his file without authorisation from the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.”

“Why? What's so bloody secret? Was he on a death squad or something? Going around shooting suspected IRA men in the middle of the fucking night?” I said, in a silly bout of frustration that I immediately regretted.

Clavert sighed. “Don't be so dramatic, Inspector, it's nothing like that … And if it was something like that, do you think I'd still have the file in a little cardboard folder in my office?”

“So, what is then?” I asked

He lit another cigarette and said nothing. He smiled and shook his head. Not only was the bastard disrupting the investigation, but I was losing face in front of Matty.

“This is a murder investigation,” I said again.

“Yes, Inspector. But I assure you that nothing's amiss. We conducted our own inquiry into Captain McAlpine's death. His killing was a random IRA murder. Nothing more.”

“What? Who conducted this inquiry of yours?”

“The military police, of course.”

“The military police? I see. And did you pass on your findings to us?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was an internal investigation.”