“No you didn’t ID the bike or no you didn’t find any tracks?”
“I don’t like your tone, Inspector Duffy,” he said.
There hadn’t been any tone. I’d been careful about that. He was just getting ticked off at the holes I was poking in the case.
“Please, I didn’t mean to imply—” I said.
“We didn’t find any motorcycle tracks, Inspector, because they drove off on the road. It’s tarmac – it’s not going to leave any fucking tracks, is it?”
“If they’re behind the wall surely they’re going to start the bike there, not push it to the road and kick start it there?” Matty said. “There should be tracks.”
“Well, we didn’t find any.”
I frowned. “Look, Inspector, I’m going to ask a question and please don’t take it the wrong way …”
“Go on,” he said, steam practically coming out of his ears.
“Did you look for the tracks or were they just not there?”
His fist clenched and unclenched, but then he closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he smiled at us.
“I’m not going to bullshit you, Duffy, I honestly don’t remember. Hold on a minute and I’ll get my notes.”
“Thank you, I appreciate that,” I said.
He opened a drawer and flicked through a green jotter. He slid it across to me, but I couldn’t decipher the handwriting. I did notice that under “McAlpine” there was less than half a page of text. All in pencil. With a few doodles on the side. When
I passed the notebook to Matty, who had been sufficiently pedagogically indoctrinated by me to frown and shake his head. He skimmed the notebook back across the table. Dougherty took it and smiled a little smile of satisfaction as if he was saying –
“No tracks. But I can’t tell if we looked behind the wall or not,” he admitted.
I turned to Matty. “Do me a favour, go down to the evidence room and see if you can bag me one of the shotgun pellets. We’ll see what they can find out up at the lab in Belfast? If that’s okay with you, Inspector Dougherty?”
“I don’t see what this has to do with your investigation?”
“Do you object?”
“No. If you want to go around wasting everyone’s time, go ahead, be my guest.”
Matty got up and left the office.
Dougherty looked at me. “I take it you’re not happy with the wife’s story then, is that it?” he asked.
So he wasn’t a complete fool. At least he saw my angle.
I shook my head. “I don’t know about that. She seemed fairly credible to me. I just want to eliminate all the other possible contingencies.”
“She came from a good family. Islandmagee locals. Her father was a Justice of Peace and of course she married into the McAlpines.”
“What’s special about the McAlpines?”
“Harry, the elder brother, is a big wheel. His grandfather did
something for the Empire. They gave him a gong for it.”
The clock on the wall reached twelve and with that he breathed an audible sigh of relief and reached in his desk drawer for a bottle of Johnnie Walker.
“A wee one before lunch?” he asked.
“Don’t mind if I do,” I replied.
He produced two mugs and poured us each a healthy measure.
When he had drunk and topped up his own mug he grinned.
“You like the wife for it?” he asked. “How do you explain the IRA code word? And I still don’t see what this’s got to do with your suitcase?”
“I’m not saying it was her. But the grouping on that wound is so tight it looks point blank to me. And if a couple of terrorists were marching up to him so close as to do that kind of point blank damage surely the dog would have been on them and he would have had his sidearm out,” I said.
“Aye,” Dougherty said thoughtfully.
“And besides the IRA don’t use shotguns anymore. Not since the early ’70s. Not since our Boston friends and Colonel Gaddafi started sending boatloads of proper ordnance. They’ve got M16 rifles and Uzis and Glock pistols now,” I said.
“I suppose,” he said, refilling his mug.
“And then there’s the lack of witnesses. And no trace of a gun, no shells, no motorbike,” I continued.
“But what about the code word?” Dougherty asked.
“Jesus, those things leak like a sieve. Her own husband might have told her the IRA-responsibility code word for late last year.”
“Why would she do it? There was no insurance policy. We checked that. And the army pension is pathetic.”
“A domestic, maybe? I don’t know,” I said.
“And your fucking suitcase?”
“Probably unrelated, but you never know, do you?”
He nodded, poured himself a
“I’ve heard of you, Duffy. You were the hot shot in Carrickfergus who got himself the Queen’s Police Medal. Are you looking to make a big fucking splash in Larne, too?”
He was getting punchy now.
It was time to leave.
“No. I’m not. This isn’t my case. I’m done and unless Mrs McAlpine is involved in my murder somehow you probably won’t be hearing from me again.”
“Aye, pal, don’t forget this is my manor, not yours.”
“I won’t forget.”
I got to my feet and offered him my hand and he reluctantly shook it.
I saw myself out.
I waited for Matty by the desk sergeant’s desk.
He came back from the evidence room empty-handed.
“What happened, they wouldn’t let you in?”
“They let me in all right but the locker’s empty boss. Nothing there at all.”
“They’ve moved it?”
“Lost it. A few weeks ago they moved the McAlpine evidence to the Cold Case Storage Room but when I went there the box was empty. The duty sergeant looked through the log and has no idea where the stuff went. He told me shite like this happens all the time.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. All right, I better go myself.”
We went to the evidence room and searched high and low for half an hour but it was gone. Either lost in a spring cleaning or deliberately thrown out. Incompetence or cover up – both were equally likely. I liked the former better because asking who was covering up for whom raised all sorts of difficult questions.
It was drizzling when we got back outside.
Matty lit me one of his Benson and Hedges and we smoked under the overhang and watched the potholes fill up with water for a couple of minutes.
“I’m not saying that these lads are the worst cops in Ireland …” Matty began and then hesitated, unsure if I was going to countenance this level of perfidy.
“Yes?”
“If there’s a shittier station than this lot I hope to God I’m never posted there,” he concluded.
“Oh, there’s worse. I was at a station in Fermanagh where they dressed up as witches for Halloween. Big beefy sergeant called McCrae dolled up as Elizabeth Montgomery was the stuff of nightmares … Larne would be okay, you’d be the superstar of the department if you got the bloody days of the week right.”
