Gun Street Girl (5 page)

“Says you.”

I shrugged and looked the big Calvinist ganch in the eye. He was unflinching.

“You feel strongly about this?” I asked.

“I do. And besides, they've been very high handed to our men. They want taking down a peg or two.”

I sighed and the sigh became a yawn. I was exhausted. Not just from the long night, but from ten years of this shit.

Ten years with no end in sight.

“You'll have to be lead, OK? You're the duty detective.”

McCrabban grinned at me. I was saying all the right things today.

“I can pick your brain on it, though?” he asked.

“Of course. But not now and I'm not interviewing this Mrs. McCawly woman or anyone else for that matter. If you want the case, fine, but I'm going home to my bed.”

McCrabban nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

We walked back to Chief Inspector Kennedy.

“Well?” he said. “Can we finally get fucking going?”

“If by going, you mean get going back to that ruinous cesspit of incompetence and inadequacy known as Larne RUC, then yes, you can get going, Kennedy, and if you want I'll come down and give you boys a seminar on how to read a fucking map, because clearly you fucking morons didn't twig that this property is a good two hundred yards on our side of the jurisdiction line.”

Kennedy's blimpish purple face began to swell up like Violet Beauregarde's.

“I've got something to say to you, Inspector . . .” he sputtered.

“Well, go ahead and say it, then, you big dozy cunt,” I told him.

He's going to explode
, everyone in the room was thinking . . . 

And yes, he did explode, but I'll spare you the details because the scene itself was not exactly Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw swapping barbs at the Albemarle Club—unless Oscar was a lot more sweary than history has led us to believe. Kennedy started yelling. One of his underlings started yelling. And when they had exhausted their rather limited capacity for invective, Kennedy started in with the threats: “I play golf with the Assistant Chief Constable!” “I can get you posted to the border,” etc.

Me and the Crabman said little, which only infuriated them more, and rather than observe the veins throbbing in Kennedy's forehead, I watched the big red and white car ferry chug out from Larne Harbor in the direction of Stranraer across the Irish Sea. Kennedy and his sidekick burned themselves out, like a failing double act at the Glasgow Empire, like colonels spluttering over their toast at the latest outrage in the
Daily Mail 
. . .

When the rant was done they stormed out.

It was a bad example for the younger officers.

“That's a bad example for the younger officers,” I said to Crabbie.

“Yes,” he agreed.

We set the photographer to work and turned the Belfast forensics officers loose on the crime scene.

“And while we're on the subject, where is the new blood?” I asked McCrabban.

“Oh, they'd just get in the way, wouldn't they? I'll brief them later.”

“You wake me up and I'm not even on duty but you let the new detectives lie in bed?”

“They're kids, Sean, they need their sleep.”

“
I
need my sleep. If I had any feelings left they would likely be resentful ones. And that resentment would be directed at you and them. But fortunately with age I have acquired wisdom and patience.”

We had two new officers, one of them a slip of a girl, the other a likely lad, but neither of them an adequate replacement for our late lamented colleague Matty McBride, who'd been killed last year in a small, random mortar attack on our police station. There would never be closure over Matty's death because his killer had never been caught and, in fact, never would be caught.

“Wisdom and patience,” I reiterated. “Like the prophet Elijah. He's the one that made the bears eat the kids who were laughing at him, right?”

“I believe that was the prophet Elisha, Sean.”

“You gotta give me points for only missing it by a letter.”

“Bloody Larne RUC. They couldn't organize a bum rape in a barracks,” one of the forensics officers muttered as he got to work.

“That's not what I heard,” McCrabban said in a very rare moment of levity.

I gave him the once-over. There wasn't even a smirk at the edge of his long, dour, ashy, Presbyterian face.

“You're in fine fettle today, aren't you?” I said.

He nodded, took me to one side, lowered his voice even lower than the normal Ballymena burr. “Just between us, Sean, and I don't want to tempt fate or anything, but, God willing, it looks like the clan McCrabban might be increasing. Only two months along. You're supposed to wait until three, but, well, I know I could tell you.”

“Well done, mate!”

“Thanks, Sean.”

Crabbie put a finger in his shirt collar and looked at his Marks and Spencer shoes. He had something more to say, the big eejit. “Sean, I've talked it over with Helen and you wouldn't . . . you wouldn't . . .” he muttered and couldn't finish the sentence.

“What?”

“You wouldn't be interested in becoming the bairn's godfather at all, would you?”

I was touched. I was positively moved. A fierce, Free Presbyterian farm boy like McCrabban asking me, a Fenian left-footer, to be the godfather of his baby? Tears. No joke. Tears welling up.

“I'm thrilled, mate. Really. Of course I'll do it. It would be an honor.”

There was no chance of a hug, but we shook hands and I patted him on the back.

“What do the twins think?”

“John's enthusiastic. Thomas is furious.”

“He'll come round.”

We chewed the fat some more, but Crabbie could see that I was fading.

“I'll walk you back to your car,” he said.

I nodded, coughed, yawned again.

“So what do you want me to do regarding the case?” he asked when we made it to the Beemer.

“It's your case, mate.”

“What would you do if you were me?”

“You know what to do. Get the dirt from Mrs. McCawly on family arguments, disharmony, that kind of thing. The boy's twenty-two and he's still living at home? Why? Full forensics on the victims, look for signs of intruders, canvass the neighbors, financial specs on Mr. Kelly's company, any recent threats, did he have any enemies, etc. All the standard stuff.”

Crabbie nodded.

“I'd also alert border security and make sure the kid doesn't leave the country. Find who his friends are and what he does with himself. Tracking him down has to be priority one.”

“Already took care of that. Airport watch and watch at the ferry terminals in Larne and Belfast.”

I yawned. “Good. Good. You know the ropes, mate. And don't forget a preliminary report to our new boss, Chief Inspector McArthur. Typed. In a binder. Let's dazzle him with the efficiency of our department, eh?”

Crabbie nodded.

A final handshake and I got in the Beemer, then reversed it out of its spot and tried hard not to kill a reporter who was standing in the middle of the road attempting to intimidate me into an interview.

“BBC Radio . . . what can you tell us about the incident?” he asked.

“No comment,” I told him. “I am not the investigating officer. If you want a quote for the press you'll have to wait for Sergeant McCrabban.”

“Is it worth staying for? Can you at least tell me that?”

“I imagine that you and your comrades in the fourth estate are going to be spilling some ink over this one, yes,” I said, and drove home along the Raw Brae Road.

It was time for the Radio 1
Breakfast Show
now. Mike Read read Mystic Meg's astrology predictions from the
Sun
and introduced a new Duran Duran single with his own prophetic avowal that “it would be a sure-fire hit from the Beatles of the 80s.” I turned it off after the tenth bar.

When I got back to Coronation Road I was barely thinking about the Kelly murders. It was McCrabban's case, not mine, and with the locked house gates and no sign of forced entry and the nine-millimeter wounds and the troubled kid fleeing the scene it seemed straightforward. I didn't foresee problems and maybe even Mystic Meg couldn't have predicted the epic shitstorm that was heading our way across the cold grey waters of the Irish Sea.

4: THE NEW BLOOD

I slept for a solid six on the living-room sofa and woke to the sound of knocking. Mrs. Campbell from next door was standing on the porch with a Black Forest gateau she'd made, presumably, as a thank-you for getting her off a speeding ticket.

I opened the door and said hello. She was wearing a little black PVC miniskirt and a white blouse with the top two buttons undone. Her red hair had been cut short and spiked in a style that was reminiscent of mid-period Sheena Easton. Despite that she looked fantastic. She was talking about the cake, about how no one in her house liked cherries, but she knew that I had “more adventurous tastes.”

You don't know the half of it, sister
.

I thanked her and gave her a little kiss on the cheek which she would pass off as some Catholic thing rather than a perv move.

I made a cup of tea and had a slice of the Black Forest. I remembered about the pharma coke, went outside, and nailed a line so pure it was like getting yelled at by God. Yorkshire tea, Mrs. Campbell's Black Forest, Bayer cocaine—
the lunch of champions
.

The BBC
Afternoon News
: a story that I tuned out at the time but in retrospect should maybe have paid more attention to:

“ . . . A spokesman for Shorts could not confirm whether the missile systems had been lost as part of a shipment overseas or whether they had been stolen from the factory itself pre-shipment: ‘At this stage we just don't know how many missiles, if any, have gone missing. We are conducting an internal inquiry the results of which will be made known to the police and the DPP.' And that concludes the news. Now Sam with the weather . . .”

I went outside, looked under the Beemer for bombs, and drove along Coronation Road, navigating the ragamuffin children playing 123 Kick-A-Tin and football. I turned right on Victoria Road, right on the Marine Highway, and drove down to the station. There were columns of black smoke coming from several locations in Belfast that could mean anything. I parked the car in the spot marked “DI Duffy” and went inside the barracks.

The talk was of last night's fiasco with the gunrunners. Apparently it had made the front page of all the local papers. One of the Americans was dead, the rest were wounded, and no less than eight policemen had contrived to get themselves injured. The RUC were presenting it as a triumph. The Northern Ireland Secretary had been flown to the scene and posed for photographs against the beached ship.

“And Prince Potemkin smiles in his far-off grave,” I muttered to myself.

“I heard
you
were there, Inspector?” Constable Iain Sinclair asked me.

“Me, there? Nah, I was supposed to go, but I couldn't be bothered in the end. I'm sure you all know more about it than I do,” I told him, to kill that and any other potentially tedious Q&As about the debacle.

CID had recently been moved back to the window offices overlooking the lough and that's where I found Sergeant McCrabban setting up an incident room and schooling our two new DCs in proper protocol.

I hadn't really paid close attention to the new officers yet. Both of them were young and I'd been somewhat neglectful of my responsibilities by having Crabbie break them into the ways of the station. The female officer, Helen Fletcher, was, perhaps, the slightly more interesting of the two. This was only her second posting after an obligatory tour on the border. She was a brunette, reasonably pretty, with green eyes and very pale skin. Her personnel file said she was twenty-two, but she looked younger. She hadn't gone to college but had done OK in her A-levels before joining the cops. She didn't smoke or drink, but McCrabban told me that this was for “health reasons” rather than some kind of religious thing—which, of course, was much weirder: if you were that worried about your health, why would you join the RUC? On her first day at the office I witnessed her get completely stumped by the coffee machine, which didn't herald brilliance, but on the other hand WPC Strange told me that Fletcher's hair was always done up in a fiendishly complicated plait that she said implied hidden skills on the part of the plaitee. The male detective constable was a handsome, blond-haired kid, with an easy charm, good humor, and obvious intelligence. Four As in his A-levels: Maths, History, French, and Further Maths (whatever that was). His name was Alexander Lawson and he really was a kid, with pimples and everything. Everyone else in the station seemed to like him already, but I couldn't help feel a little bit irritated by his slickness, and I could see that Crabbie felt the same. Lawson had gone to some posh Belfast school and joined the cops straight after. He hadn't said three sentences to me since he had arrived on the same day as our new chief inspector, but we could sense that we were not destined to become fast friends. Both new arrivals were Protestants, of course, and with the transfer of Constable O'Reilly to Ballycastle RUC, I was again the only Catholic police officer in the building. I didn't mind. Everyone knew better than to fuck with me. I was the second-highest-ranking copper in the place, and my boss, Chief Inspector McArthur, now owed me a favor.

I sat down at the conference table and lit a smoke while Crabbie went on with his spiel: “ . . . the victims, Mr. and Mrs. Kelly, were shot at close range with a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol. Both from the same gun. The cleaning lady, Mrs. McCawly, had observed a nine-millimeter semi-automatic in the desk drawer next to Mr. Kelly's bed. This gun is now missing. Also missing is Michael Kelly, Mr. and Mrs. Kelly's son. The boy is twenty-two years old and has been living at home now for the last year after dropping out of Oxford University. Mrs. McCawly had been witness to several arguments between father and son. The nature of these arguments seems to be over Michael's failures to take responsibility for his future, as well as more general complaints from Mr. Kelly about Michael's demeanor, friends, and attitude. On several occasions these arguments had, quote, ‘almost come to blows,' unquote, with Mrs. Kelly intervening between the two of them.”