I Hear the Sirens in the Street (26 page)

“This is why the IRA is going to win, because the left hand doesn't know what the fucking right hand is doing,” I muttered.

“I don't like that kind of talk. It shows a bad attitude,” the Colonel said.

I tapped the desk.

“Listen, mate, I won't need to go to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. I'm investigating the murder of an American citizen. Captain McAlpine's death is only an adjunct to a wider
inquiry. The Consul General has been on the blower asking about this case and his boss is the United States Ambassador to the Court of St James. There's this little thing going on in the Falklands Islands at the moment, you may have heard about it, and Her Majesty's Government is doing everything it can to keep the Yanks fucking sweet, so if a call comes into your office this afternoon it won't be from the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, it'll be from the fucking Prime Minister and she won't be pleased with you, I promise you that.”

Colonel Clavert's thin, supercilious smile evaporated.

“Very well. I can let you read this, but I can't allow you to make notes, photocopy or remove it from this office.”

He sighed and passed the file across the desk before continuing, “You'll understand my caution when I tell you that Captain McAlpine was our district intelligence officer. He ran our informers.”

I understood. The UDR had its own network of informers and McAlpine was the man who was in charge of paying them and assessing their information. Of course the RUC had its own completely separate list of informers and it was rumoured that MI5 had yet another network of its own too. A really good tout could be getting three paycheques for the same piece of information.

I read the file carefully. It was low grade stuff about arms dumps, suspected IRA men, suspected UVF men, suspected drugs smugglers. The payments were small: fifty quid, a hundred quid. There was nothing dramatic here. I passed it to Matty. I could tell that he wasn't impressed either. I read it again just to be on the safe side and then I spotted something. The penultimate entry about a week before McAlpine's murder was from an informant, codenamed Woodbine, who “had seen a suspicious character hanging round the Dunmurry DeLorean factory carpark”. For this information McAlpine had paid Woodbine the princely sum of twenty pounds. I pointed out the
word Dunmurry to Matty and he nodded.

“Who's Woodbine?” I asked, passing the file back.

“One moment,” Colonel Clavert said.

He went to the filing cabinet and opened another file. “Woodbine, let me see, Waverly, Winston, Woodbine. Ah, yes, a chap called Douggie Preston.”

“Address?” I asked.

“11 Drumhill Road, Carrickfergus.”

We thanked the Colonel, stubbed out our cigarettes and were about to leave when he asked us if we were going to interview the widow McAlpine in the course of our inquiries.

“We might,” I said. “Why?”

“Because she still hasn't picked up Martin's stuff and it's been here four months now.”

“What stuff?”

“From his locker. His dress uniform. A pair of training shoes. There's some money. A cricket bat, of all things. I've called her several times about it.”

I looked at Matty. “Aye, we can take them down to her.”

We drove out of the UDR base into a heavy downpour.

“I suppose we're going to Islandmagee now?”

“Let's try Mr Preston first.”

Drumhill Road was in the ironically named Sunnylands Housing Estate – one of the worst in Carrick. Red-brick and breezeblock terraces, mostly packed with unemployed refugees from Belfast. Lots of kids running around barefoot, burnt-out cars, shopping trolleys and rubbish everywhere. This was RHC territory – the Red Hand Commando – a particularly violent and bloody offshoot of the slightly more responsible UDA.

Preston lived in an end terrace. There was a smashed row boat in the front garden, a pile of old furniture, what looked a lot like an aircraft engine and a little girl about four in a filthy frock playing by herself with a headless Barbie doll.

“So this is how the other half lives,” Matty muttered.

I rang the door bell and when that didn't work I knocked.

“Who is it?” a woman asked from inside.

“The police,” I said.

“I've told you. We do not sell acid. Never have, never will!”

“We're not here about that.”

“What do you want?”

“We're looking for Douggie.”

She opened the door. She was mid-forties but looked seventy. Grey hair, teeth missing, running to fat. Her fingers were stained with nicotine smoke.

“Have you found him?” she asked.

“We're looking for him,” Matty said.

She shook her head sadly. “Aye, aren't we all.”

“How long has been missing?” I asked.

“Since November,” she said.

“No word at all?”

“No.”

“He lived at home?”

“Aye.”

“No girlfriend, anything like that?”

“Nobody steady like. He was a shy boy, was Douggie.”

Past tense. She knew he was dead.

“When was the last time that anybody saw him?”

“He was down the North Gate on November twenty-seventh, having a wee drink, said he was away home to watch the snooker. That was the last we heard tell of him.”

I wrote the information down in my book.

“They've topped him, haven't they?” she said.

“I have no idea.”

“Aye, they've topped him. God knows why. He was a good boy, was Douggie, a very good boy.”

“Did he have a job?”

“No. He was at Shorts for a year. He was a trained fitter but he got laid off. He tried to get into the DeLorean factory in
Dunmurry, but they had their pick of the crop. He went back several times looking to get in, but jobs is scarce, aren't they?”

“They are indeed,” Matty said.

“Dunmurry, eh?”

“Aye, but there were ten applicants for every one job. Wee Douggie had no chance.”

“He didn't know anyone up there?”

“No. More's the pity.”

“Have there been any strangers hanging around? Anyone asking about him?”

“No.”

We stood there on the porch while the girl behind us in the garden started to make explosion noises. Matty tried a few more lines of approach but the lady had nothing.

“Well, if we hear anything, we'll certainly be in touch,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, and added, “he was a good boy.”

Matty started bitching about another “bloody pointless trip to Islandmagee” so I ditched him at the police station and pulled in to Bentham's shop to get some more smokes. I grabbed a packet of Marlboros from the shelf. Jeff wasn't there, so running the joint was his daughter, Sonia, a sixth-former still in her school uniform. She was chewing bubblegum and reading something called
Interzone Magazine
.

“Where's your da?” I asked her.

“I dunno,” she said, without looking up.

“Are you minding the shop?”

“Looks like it, don't it?”

“What's news?”

She put the magazine down and looked at me. “Philip K. Dick is dead.”

“Who's that?” I asked.

She sighed dramatically. “That'll be two pound for the fags.”

“Your da gives me a policeman's discount,” I said, with a smile.

“Me da's a buck eejit, then, isn't he? About the only person guaranteed not to kneecap you is a peeler. That'll be two pound for the fags and if you don't like it you can fuck off.”

I paid the two pounds and was about to drive down to Islandmagee when an incident report came in on the blower about two drunks fighting outside the hospital on Taylor's Avenue. It wasn't a detective's job but it was my manor so I told the controller
that I'd take care of it. I was there in two minutes. I knew both men. Jimmy McConkey was a fitter at Harland and Wolff until he'd been laid off, Charlie Blair was a hydraulic engineer at ICI until it closed. “For shame. What are you lads doing, blitzed out of your minds, at this time of the day?” I asked them.

Charlie attempted to shove me and while he was off balance Jimmy pushed him to the ground.

With difficulty I got them both in the back of the Land Rover and took them home to their long-suffering wives in Victoria Estate, where the women were using a cameo appearance by the sun to hang clothes from lines and chat over the fences. The men behaved themselves when they got out. We had gone from the adolescent male world of pushing and shoving to the feminine universe of washing and talk and order. There would be no more hijinks from them today.

There was no point writing the incident up. It was nothing. It was just another sad little playlet in the great opera of misery all around us.

I got back in the Land Rover and drove to Islandmagee in a foul mood.

There was a gate across the private road. It was chained up and I couldn't break it without causing trouble for myself so I parked the Land Rover and walked to Mrs McAlpine's cottage carrying Martin's stuff in an Adidas bag.

Cora barked at me, giving Mrs McAlpine plenty of warning.

She opened the door gingerly.

There was blood on her hands.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello.”

“Is that blood?”

“Aye.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“This whole question question question thing is very tiresome.”

“Bad cop habit.”

“I'm butchering a ewe, if you must know,” she said.

“Can I come in?”

“All right.”

Her hair was redder today. Curlier. I wondered if she'd dyed it or was that a reaction to sunlight and being outdoors. She looked healthier too, ruddier. You would never call her Rubenesque but she'd put on weight and it suited her. Perhaps she was finally getting over Martin's death. Looking after herself a little better.

I went inside carrying the green army shoulder bag.

“Do you mind if I finish up?”

“Not at all.”

We walked to the “washhouse” at the back of the farm where a sheep carcass lay spreadeagled on a wooden table. She began sawing and butchering it into various cuts of meat.

“This'll last you a while. Do you have a freezer?”

“Harry does.”

“I'd help you carry it over, but I'm supposed to stay away from your brother-in-law. I got a shot across my bows from the Chief Constable no less.”

She laughed at that. “My God. I suppose his Masonic contacts are the only thing left in his arsenal.”

She cut long strings of sinewy meat from the bone and trimmed the fat and threw it into a box marked “lard”.

Thwack
went the cleaver into bone.
Thug
went the cleaver into meat and fat.

“So, uh, let me tell you why I'm here today. I was down at Carrickfergus UDR base and they asked me to take you some of Martin's things. I brought them in the bag out there.”

“You shouldn't have.”

“It was no trouble. Interesting place, that UDR base. Bit grim.”

“I wouldn't know. I never went there.”

“Like I say, pretty grim. Hard job, too, I expect,” I said.

She hacksawed off the sheep's head and put it in a tupper-ware box. She looked at me.

“What are you getting at, Inspector?”

“Did Martin ever talk to you about his work?”

“Sometimes.”

“He was an intelligence officer. Did you know that?”

“Of course.”

“Did he ever talk to you about specific cases?”

“Hardly ever. He was very discreet.”

“He ever mention the name Woodbine, or talk about Dunmurry or the DeLorean factory?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Are you sure?”

“If he did, it didn't make an impression.”

She finished butchering the aged ewe and I helped her bag the meat. We washed up and went inside the cottage.

“I was baking today. You want a fifteen while I put the kettle on?”

“Sounds delicious.”

“Wait till you taste them. My mother was the baker.”

“Your mother's passed on?”

“Aye, passed on to the Costa del Sol,” she said with a laugh. She brushed a loose strand of hair from her face. She caught me looking at her. She held my gaze a second longer than she should have.

“Its ages since I had a fifteen. How do you make them?”

She laughed. “Well, when I say baking, that's a bit of a fib, isn't it? The flour's only for rolling them on the board.”

“What do you do?”

“They're so easy. Fifteen digestive biscuits, crushed, fifteen walnuts, finely chopped, fifteen maraschino cherries, fifteen coloured marshmallows, a can of condensed milk. Flour and flaked coconut. Mix everything except the coconut. Roll into a ball. Divide the ball into two and make two log rolls.”

“And then what?”

“Scatter a chopping board with flour and the coconut.”

“Something about a fridge, isn't there?”

She smiled. “Roll the sausages in floury coconut and then wrap each log tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for two hours. Couldn't be simpler. My secret ingredient is Smarties or, for Harry's friend, M&Ms, which is the American equivalent.”

“The fifteens are for Harry too?”

“You have to keep the landlord happy don't you?”

“I suppose so.”

“They're for a friend of his. An American lady.”

“A rich American lady? A potential bride?”

“I didn't ask.”

She handed me a plate of the treats. “I must warn you,” she said. “They're sweet.”

I tried one and they were way too sweet for my blood. They made your head hurt. Emma came back a minute later with tea.

“Delicious,” I said.

She smiled. Sipped her tea. Didn't eat.

She looked at the bag full of Martin's gear.