Текст книги "I Hear the Sirens in the Street"

Автор книги: Adrian McKinty

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“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Constable McBride cannot claim for time and a half danger money while also claiming overtime! That would be triple time and believe me, Duffy, nobody, and I mean nobody, is getting triple time on my watch …”

I stopped paying attention. When the conversation reached a natural conclusion I told him that I understood his concern and hung up the phone. I switched on the box. A preacher on one side, thought for the day on the other. This country was Bible mad.

Half an hour later Dick Savage called me with info about Abrin. It was an extremely rare poison that he said had never been used in any murder case anywhere in the British Isles. He thought that maybe it had been used in a couple of incidents in America and I might want to look into that.

I thanked him and called Laura, but she didn’t pick up the phone.

I made myself another vodka gimlet, drank it, turned off the soup, and put “Bryter Layter” on album repeat and then changed my mind. Nick Drake, like heroin or Marmite, was best in small doses.

As was typical of Ulster’s spring weather systems, a hard horizontal rain was lashing the kitchen windows now so I switched the record player to its 78 mode and after some rummaging I found “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” by The Ink Spots with Ella Fitzgerald.

I tolerated the Ink Spot guy singing the first verse but when Ella came on I just about lost it.

The phone startled me.

“Hello?”

“You know the way you’re always saying that I’m a lazy bastard and that I don’t take this job seriously?”

It was Matty.

“I don’t believe that I’ve ever said any such thing, Matty. In fact I was just defending your honour to that hatchet-faced goblin, Dalziel, in clerical,” I said.

“That sounds like a bold-faced lie.”

“You’re paranoid, mate.” I told him.

“Well, while all you lot were copping off with female reservists and buggering away home I’ve been burning the midnight whale blubber.”

“And?”

“I’ve only gone and made a breakthrough, so I have.”

“Go on.”

“What’s that racket in the background?”

“That ‘racket’ is Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Never heard of him.”

“What’s going on, mate? Have you really found something out?”

“I’ve only gone and cracked the bloody case, so I have,” he said.

“Our John Doe in the suitcase?”

“What else?”

“Go on then, you’re killing me.”

“Well, I was on the late shift anyway to cover the station, so I thought instead of breaking out the old stash of Penthouses and having a wank I’d do something useful and get back on that suitcase …”

“Yes . . ?”

“No forensics at all. No liftable prints. Blood belongs to our boy. But you know the wee plastic window where people write their addresses?”

“McCrabban already checked that window – there was no address card in there. No one would be that much of an eejit.”

“That’s what I thought too, but I cut it open and I noticed a wee sliver of card scrunched up in the bottom of the window. You couldn’t possibly have seen it unless you cut open the plastic and shone a torch down into the gap.”

“Shite.”

“Shite is right, mate.”

“It was an old address card?”

“I got a pair of tweezers, pulled it out, unscrunched it and lo and behold I’ve only gone and got the name and address of the person who owned the suitcase!”

“Who was it?”

“Somebody local. A bloke called Martin McAlpine, Red Hall Cottage, The Mill Bay Road, Ballyharry, Islandmagee. What do you think about that?”

“So it wasn’t the dead American’s suitcase, then?”

“Doesn’t look like it, does it? It’s like you always say, Sean, the concept of the master criminal is a myth. Most crooks are bloody eejits.”

“You’re a star, Matty, my lad.”

“An underappreciated star. What’s our next move, boss?”

“I think, Matty, that you and me will be paying Mr McAlpine a wee visit first thing in the morning.”

“Tomorrow? It’s a Saturday.”

“So?”

He groaned.

“Nothing. Sounds like a plan.”

“See you at the barracks. Seven sharp.”

“Can’t we go later?”

“Can’t go later, mate. I’m having me portrait done by Lucian Freud and then I’m off to Anfield, playing centre back for Liverpool on account of Alan Hansen’s injury.”

“Come on, Sean, I like to sleep in on a Saturday.”

“Nah, mate, we’ll go early, get the drop on him. It’ll be fun.”

“All right.”

“And well done again, pal. You did good.”

I hung up the phone. Funny how things turned out. Just like that, very quickly indeed, this potentially tricky investigation was breaking wide open.

4: MACHINE GUN SILHOUETTE

The alarm was set to Sports Talk on Downtown Radio which was a nice non-threatening way to start the day. The conversation this morning was about Northern Ireland’s chances in the 1982 World Cup. The topic, as usual, had gotten round to George Best and whether the thirty-five-year-old had any game left in him. The last I had heard of Best was his notorious stint playing with Hibernian when he was more famous for out-drinking the entire French rugby team and seducing the reigning Misses World and Universe in the same weekend.

I turned off the radio, made coffee, dressed in a black polo neck sweater, jeans and DM shoes, went outside. I checked under the BMW for any mercury tilt explosives but didn’t find any. Right about now seven thousand RUC men and women were all doing the same thing. One or two of them would find a bomb and after shitting their pants they’d be on the phone to the bomb squad, thanking their lucky stars that they’d kept to their morning routine.

I stuck on the radio and listened to Brian Eno on the short drive to the barracks. Wasn’t a big fan of Eno but it was either that or the news and I couldn’t listen to the news. Who could, apart from those longing for the end times.

I thought about Laura. I didn’t know what to do. Was I in love with her? What did that feel like? If she went away it would hurt, it would ache. Was that love? How come I was thirty-two and I didn’t know? Was that bloody normal? “Jesus,” I said to myself. Thirty-two years old and I had the emotional depth of a teenager.

Maybe it was the situation, maybe Northern Ireland kept you paralysed, infantilised, backward … Aye, blame that.

I nodded to Ray at the guard house and pulled into the police station.

As usual Matty was late and before we could get rolling Sergeant Burke told me that Newtownabbey RUC needed urgent assistance dealing with a riot in Rathcoole. It was completely the wrong direction, I was a detective not a riot cop, and I outranked Burke, but you couldn’t really turn down brother officers in need, could you?

With Matty grumbling things like “this isn’t what I signed on for”, and “I could be fishing right now”, we burned up the A2 to that delightful concrete circle of hell known as the Rathcoole Estate.

“Good Friday night?” I asked Matty when his moaning was over.

“Oh, it was a classic, mate. Since I wasn’t allowed out, it was a fish supper, a six-pack of Special Brew and a wank to Sapphire and Steel on the video.”

“David McCallum or Joanna Lumley?”

Matty rolled his eyes.

We arrived at Rathcoole to find that it was only a half-hearted sort of riot that had been running since the night before. About thirty hoods on the ground throwing stones and Molotovs from behind a burnt-out bus, maybe another two dozen comrades offering them assistance by tossing petrol-filled milk bottles from the high-rise tower blocks nearby. The cops under a Chief Superintendent Anderson were keeping well back and letting the ruffians exhaust themselves. I reported to Anderson while Matty stayed in the Rover reading The Cramps’ fanzine: Legion of the Cramped. Anderson thanked me for coming, but said that we weren’t needed.

He asked if I wanted a coffee and poured me one from a flask. We got to talking about the nature of riots, Anderson venturing the opinion that social deprivation was at the root cause of it and I suggested that ennui was the disease of late-twentieth-century man. Things were going swimmingly until Anderson began banging on about “it all being part of God’s plan” and I decided to make myself scarce.

“If we’re not needed, we’ll move out, sir, if that’s okay with you?” I said and he said that that was fine.

It was when we were safely back in the Rover and heading out of the Estate that we were hit by a jerry-can petrol bomb thrown from a low rise. It exploded with a violent whoosh across the windscreen and it was followed a second or two later by a burst of heavy machine-gun fire that dinged violently off the Land Rover’s armoured hull.

“Jesus Christ!” Matty screamed while I put my foot on the accelerator to get us away from the trouble. More machine-gun fire tore up the road behind us and rattled off the rear doors.

“They’re shooting at us!” Matty yelled.

“I know!”

I hammered down the clutch, switched back into third gear and accelerated round a bend in the road. I got us a hundred yards from the corner and then I hand-break-turned the Land Rover in a dramatic, tyre-squealing 180. Fire was melting the Land Rover’s window wipers and licking its way down towards the engine block. If it reached the petrol tank … I grabbed my service revolver and the fire extinguisher.

“You’re not going out there without a bullet-proof vest are you?” Matty said, horrified.

“Call the incident in, ask Anderson to send down help and tell them to be careful,” I barked and opened the side door.

“Don’t go out there, Sean! That’s what they want! It’s an ambush.”

“Not with half the police force just up the road. They’ve long gone. Two quick bursts on a machine gun and they’ll be heroes in the pub tonight.”

“Sean, please!”

“Call it in!”

I got out of the Land Rover, pointed my service revolver at the surrounding low rises but no one was around. Keeping the revolver in one hand and the fire extinguisher in the other I sprayed foam over the windscreen and easily dowsed the flame.

I climbed inside the Rover to wait for back up. We sat there for twenty-five minutes but Anderson’s lads never came so I told Matty that we’d write up the incident ourselves later since we had actual work to do this morning.

“Unless – that is – this offends your forensic officer sensibilities and you feel compelled to go back to the scene of the shooting and gather shell cases, pieces of jerry can and other assorted evidence?”

“Bollocks to that!” Matty said and we took the A2 north again. Unfortunately the petrol bomb had burned the rubber off one of the tyres and we limped back to Carrickfergus RUC to get a replacement Rover.

This day was destined never to get going. Brennan was in his office now with a nasty look on his once handsome face. I tried to avoid him by sneaking to the incident room while Matty was signing out a new Rover, but the bugger saw and summoned me.

“Hello sir, what are you doing in on a Saturday morning?” I said.

“My duty, Duffy, my duty. What progress have you made on your murder victim?” he muttered, putting his feet up on his desk. He was wearing slippers and some kind of dressing gown and he hadn’t shaved. Had he been secretly here all night? Was there trouble on the home front? Should I offer him my big empty house on Coronation Road? Before even the possibility of an Oscar & Felix scenario formed in my brain, I reconsidered: he was a Presbyterian and no doubt he’d take my offer as some kind of insult to his pride.

“A couple of promising leads, sir. We have Customs and Immigration getting us a list of names of Americans who entered Northern Ireland in the last year and we’ll cross reference that with any who are the right demographic and have served with the First Infantry Division. I’m optimistic that we should be able to ID our victim pretty soon.”

“Good,” he said with a yawn. “What else?”

“We found a name in that suitcase our victim was locked up in. Matty found the name, I should say – good police work from him. It was an old address label and we’re going to follow up on that this morning.”

“Excellent.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, sir, if you’re looking for a place to stay I’ve got a big empty house on Coronation Road,” I blurted out despite myself.

Brennan looked at his slippers, took his feet off the memo pad and hid them under his desk. He was pissed off that I’d accurately deduced his home situation. He had presence, did Brennan, like a fallen actor once famous for his Old Vic Claudius now doing Harp lager commercials on UTV.

“You know what you could do for me, Duffy?”

“What, sir?”

“You could build a fucking time machine, go back forty-five seconds and shut the fuck up after I say the word ‘excellent’, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you look bloody terrible. What’s the matter with you? The flu?”

“No, sir, Matty and I were out in a Rover and someone threw a petrol bomb. I had to go out and extinguish it.”

“Someone threw a petrol bomb at ya? Did you write it up?”

“No, sir, not yet.”

“See that you do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you read the papers this morning, Sean?” he said in a less abrasive voice.

“No.”

“Listened to the news?”

“No, sir.”

“You have to stay abreast of current events, Inspector!”

“Yes, sir. Anything interesting happening?”

“General Galtieri has decided that his personal manifesto, like all the very best manifestos, needs to be unleashed on the world in a rainy windswept bog, filled with sheep shit.”

“General who? What?”

“Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands.”

“The Falkland Islands?”

“The Falkland Islands.”

“I’m not really any the wiser, sir.”

“They’re in the South Atlantic. According to the Mail they’ve got ten thousand troops on there by now.”

“Shite.”

“You know what that means for us, don’t you? Thatcher’s going to have to take them back. It’s either that or resign. She’ll be sending out an invasion fleet. They’ll be getting troops from everywhere. I imagine we’ll lose half a dozen regiments from here.”

“That’s going to stretch us thin.”

About half of the anti-terrorist and border patrols in Northern Ireland were conducted by the British Army; we, the police, could not easily pick up the slack.

Brennan rubbed his face. “It’s bad timing. The IRA’s gearing up for a campaign and we’re going to be losing soldiers just when they’re surging. We could be in for an even trickier few months than we thought.”

I nodded.

“And spare a thought for what will happen if it’s a debacle. If Thatcher doesn’t get the islands back.”

“She resigns?”

“She resigns, the government collapses and there’s a general election. If Labour wins, and they will, that’s it, mate – the ball game is fucking over.”

The Labour Party under Michael Foot had a policy of unilateral withdrawal from Ireland, which meant that they would withdraw all British soldiers and civil servants. Ireland would be united at last under Dublin rule which was all fine and dandy except that the Irish Army had only a few battalions and it was a laughable idea that they would be able to keep the peace. What it would mean would be full-scale civil war with a million well-armed, geographically tightly knit Protestants against the rest of the island’s four million Catholics. There would be a nice little bloodbath until the US Marines arrived.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

“Best not to.”

He picked up his copy of the Daily Mail.

The headline was one word and screamed “Invasion!”

I noticed that the date on the paper was April 3rd.

“Are you sure this isn’t all some kind of belated April Fool’s joke?”

“It’s no joke, Duffy, the BBC are carrying it, all the papers, everybody.”

“Okay.”

“We won’t get our knickers in a twist. We’ll take all this one day at a time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Back to work. Get out there and wrap up this murder investigation of yours.”

“Yes, sir.”

I pushed back the chair and stood.

“One more thing, Duffy. ‘A chaperone for a conquistador perhaps’?” he said, tapping his crossword puzzle with his pencil and then thoughtfully chewing the end of it.

It was easy enough. “I think it’s an anagram, sir,” I said.

“An anagram of what, Duffy?”

“Cortes,” I said trying to lead him to the solution but he still didn’t get it and he knew that I knew the answer.

“Just tell me, Duffy!” he said.

“Escort, sir.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course … now piss off.”

As I was leaving the office I saw Matty struggling to get a long knitted scarf out of his locker.

“No scarves. Accept it. The Tom Baker era is over, mate,” I told him.

Hard rain along the A2.

Matty driving the Land Rover.

Me riding shotgun, literally: a Winchester M12 pump-action across my lap in case we got ambushed on one of the back roads.

I put a New Order cassette in the player. They’d gone all disco but it wasn’t as bad as you would have thought.

“Did you hear the news, Matty?”

“What news?”

“You have to stay up with current events, Constable. The Falklands have been invaded.”

“The what?”

“Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands.”

“Jesus, when was this?”

“Yesterday.”

“First the Germans and now the bloody Argentinians.”

“You’re thinking of the Channel Islands, mate.”

“Where’s the Falklands then?”

“Uhm, somewhere sort of south, I think.”

“I suppose that’s Spurs fucked now, isn’t it?”

“How so?”

“Half their team’s from bloody Argentina. They’ll be well off their game.”

“The Chief Inspector wants us to think about the geo-political consequences.”

“Aye, geo-politics is one thing, but football’s football, isn’t it?” Matty said, putting things into a proper perspective.

5: THE WIDOW M C ALPINE

We drove through the town of Whitehead and hugged the shore of Larne Lough until we were on Islandmagee. Islandmagee was an odd place. A peninsula about six miles north-east of Carrickfergus with Larne Lough on one side and the Irish Sea on the other. It was near the major metropolitan centre and ferry port of Larne, yet it was a world away. When you drove onto Islandmagee it was like going back to an Ireland of a hundred or even two hundred years before. The people were country people, suspicious of strangers, and for me their accent and dialect were at times difficult to understand. I got it when they used the occasional word in Irish but often I found them speaking a form of lowland Scots straight out of Robert Burns. They almost sounded like Americans from the high country of Kentucky or Tennessee.

I’d been there several times. Always in my civvies, as I’d heard that they didn’t like peelers snooping around. As Matty drove I unfolded the ordnance survey map and found Ballyharry. It was halfway up the lough shore, opposite the old cement works in Magheramorne. On the map it was a small settlement, a dozen houses at the most.

We turned off the Shore Road onto the Ballyharry Road. A bump chewed the New Order tape so I flipped through the radio stations. All the English ones were talking about the Falklands but Irish radio wasn’t interested in Britain’s colonial wars and instead were interviewing a woman who had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary who had told her that the sale of contraceptive devices in Dublin would bring a terrible vengeance from God and his host of Angels.

The Ballyharry Road led to the Mill Bay Road: small farms, whitewashed cottages, stone walls, sheep, rain. I looked for Red Hall but didn’t see it.

Finally there was a small private single-laned track that led into the hills that had a gate and a sign nailed to an old beech tree which said “Red Hall Manor, Private, No Trespassing”, and underneath that another sign which said “No Coursing or Shooting Without Express Permission”.

“You think this is the place?” I asked, looking up the road.

Matty examined the map and shrugged. “We might as well give it a go.”

We drove past a small wood and into a broad valley.

There were farms dotted about the landscape, some little more than ruins.

A sign by one of them said Red Hall Cottage and Matty slammed on the brakes. It was a small farm surrounded by flooded, boggy fields and a couple of dozen miserable sheep. The building itself was a whitewashed single-storey house with a few cement and breeze block buildings in the rear. It looked a right mess. Most of the outbuildings had holes in the exterior walls and the farmhouse could have done with a coat of paint. The roof was thatched and covered with rusting wire. The car out front was a Land Rover Defender circa 1957.

“Well, I don’t think we’re dealing with an international hitman, that’s for sure,” I said.

“Unless he’s got all his money overseas in a Swiss Bank.”

“Aye.”

“Maybe you should go in first, boss, and I’ll stay here by the radio in case there’s any shooting.”

“Get out.”

“All right,” he said, with resignation.

We parked the Rover and walked through the muddy farmyard to the house.

“My shoes are getting ruined,” Matty said, treading gingerly around the muck and potholes. He was wearing expensive Nike gutties and unflared white jeans. Is that what the kids were sporting these days?

An Alsatian snarled at us, struggling desperately at the edge of a long piece of rope.

“Yon bugger wants to rip our throats out,” Matty said.

The chickens pecking all around us seemed unconcerned by the dog but he did look like a nasty brute.

We reached the whitewashed cottage, the postcardy effect somewhat spoiled by a huge rusting oil tank for the central heating plonked right outside. There was no bell or knocker so we rapped on the wooden front door. After a second knock, we heard a radio being turned off and a female voice asked:

“Who is it?”

“It’s the police,” I said. “Carrickfergus RUC.”

“What do you want?” the voice asked.

“We want to talk to Martin McAlpine.”

“Hold on a sec!”

We waited a couple of minutes and a young woman answered the door. She had a towel wrapped round her head and she was wearing an ugly green dressing gown. She’d clearly only just stepped out of the bath or the shower. She was about twenty-two, with grey-blue eyes, red eyebrows, freckles. She was pretty in an unnerving, dreamy, “She Moved Through The Fair”, kind of way.

“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.