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
