Connor in the house opposite were both appreciating through our kitchen windows. The Campbells were a mysterious people and although I shared an entire wall with them I never really knew what was going over there, if her husband was working or at home, or how many kids and relatives’ kids she was looking after. She was an attractive woman, no doubt, but the stress and the smokes would get to her like they got to everyone else.
And speaking of ciggies, I lit myself a Marlboro, put The Undertones on the record player, showered, ate a bowl of cornflakes and hot milk, dressed in a shirt and jeans and headed out for the day. I checked under the BMW for mercury tilt bombs and drove to the station.
When the list of American citizens who had entered Northern Ireland in the previous year finally came in at eleven on Monday morning it was longer than we’d been expecting. Six hundred names. Five hundred of whom were men. Northern Ireland during the Troubles was not a popular tourist destination but the hunger strikes had sucked in scores of American journos, protesters, politicians and rubberneckers.
“How are we going to tackle this?” McCrabban asked dourly. His default method of asking anything.
“We’ll break the list into three and we’ll start making phone calls. We’ll begin with the over-forties first,” I said.
Fortunately each visitor to Northern Ireland had to fill out a full information card giving his or her home address, phone number, emergency contact, etc.
There were three hundred and twenty American men over forty who had entered the Province in the previous twelve months.
“All these calls to America are going to cost us a fortune,” Matty said. “The Chief won’t like it.”
“He’s going to have to lump it,” I told him. “And let’s hope that our boy hasn’t been frozen for years.”
“Wait,” McCrabban said. “I’ve thought of another problem.”
“What?” I said, somewhat irritated because I was keen to get started.
“We can’t make any phone calls before one o’clock. They’re five hours behind, remember?”
“Shite,” I said, slapping my forehead. He was right. It wasn’t decent to call people up first thing in the morning.
“So what are we going to do in the meantime?” Matty asked.
“Do what everyone else does around here. Pretend to work,” I said.
Matty opened up some files and spread them on his desk, but read the
McCrabban took out his notebooks and started studying for his sergeant’s exam.
I looked through a couple of theft cases to see if anything would leap out at me. Nothing did. Theft cases rarely got solved.
On a hunch I called up every life insurance company in the book to see if there had been any payouts on anyone called McAlpine in the last four months.
Nope.
At eleven the phone rang.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hello, is this Inspector Duffy?” a voice asked.
“Yes.”
The voice was Scottish, older. I immediately thought that something had happened to Laura in Edinburgh and she’d put me down as her emergency contact.
“Is this about Laura?” I asked breathlessly.
“Well, yes and no,” the voice said.
“Go on.”
“I’m Dr Hagan, Laura, er, Dr Cathcart’s replacement at Carrickfergus Clinic. I was reading over Dr Cathcart’s report on the torso in morgue number 2.”
“Yes?”
“The John Doe torso.”
How many torsos did he think we got in a week?
“Yes?”
“Well, something occurred to me that I thought I should share with you.”
“Go on, Dr Hagan.”
“Well, Laura has written down in her notes ‘victim frozen, time and date of death unknown’.”
“That’s right.”
“But, she’s also written down that the victim’s last meal was a Chicken Tikka Pot Noodle.”
“So I read.”
“In case you don’t know, Sergeant Duffy, that was a really quite extraordinary bit of forensic medicine. She must have analysed the stomach contents and then compared them with a list of ingredients for every Pot Noodle that Golden Wonder make.”
I wasn’t really in the mood to hear Laura praised to the skies.
“Okay, so she was extremely diligent at her job – how does this help me, Dr Hagan?”
“It helps you because it considerably narrows down the window in which the victim died. Since I retired from full-time practice I’ve been fishing a lot more and on occasion I’ve taken a Pot Noodle and a thermos of hot water with me …”
I was getting excited now. The old git was on to something.
“I know for a fact that the Chicken Tikka Pot Noodle was only introduced in November of 1981. I’d seen the advertisements for it and I made a point to try it when it came out as I spent quite a few years in Malaya and thought it might be a nice blend of Indian and Chinese cuisines. Unfortunately it wasn’t that tasty … but this is me running off on a tangent – do you get my drift, Sergeant Duffy?”
“The victim couldn’t possibly have been killed before November of last year,” I said.
“Yes.”
I thanked Dr Hagan and shared the news with the boys.
We called Golden Wonder to confirm the release date of the Chicken Tikka Pot Noodle and they told us that it had been shipped to shops and supermarkets on November 12. It helped a little. Yes, the victim had been alive in November, but he still could have entered Northern Ireland anytime in the last year. Tourists overstayed their ninety-day visas all the time, as did journalists and businessmen. But still, assuming he was a law-abiding citizen, we could cut off the list of names at, say, 30th June 1981 for our initial series of phone calls.
That winnowed the list down to a measly two hundred and fifty over-forty American males who had entered Northern Ireland between 30th June 1981 and 30th March 1982. I drafted in a reserve constable with the unlikely name of John Smith so that we could divide the effort in four. Sixty names each didn’t seem that onerous.
Matty wondered if any Canadians or Brits abroad had joined or been seconded into the First Infantry Division and it was a damn fine point but we couldn’t afford to get sidetracked this early. We took it as a useful fiction that they had not.
We started making phone calls at 1 p.m., which was 8 a.m. on the East Coast.
For once we caught a break and by just three forty-five we had a first-class lead on our hands.
Matty did the call. A man called Bill O’Rourke had put the number of his Veterans of Foreign Wars Lodge as his emergency contact. VFW Post 7608 in a place called Newburyport, Massachusetts, which we discovered was a hop, a skip and jump north of Boston.
A guy called Mike Lipstein was happy to fill Matty in on his buddy Bill who no one had heard from since before Christmas 1981.
Bill was a former IRS inspector who had indeed served in The Big Red One, in North Africa, Sicily, France and Germany. He was an enlisted man who had risen to the rank of First Sergeant by the end of hostilities.
He was also a widower who had retired from the IRS in Boston to take care of his wife Heather who was dying of terminal breast cancer. She had died in September of 1980. It had hit him hard and everyone had told him that he had to get away somewhere. He had taken a trip to Ireland just before Halloween to visit the old country and retrace his roots. He’d gone for a few weeks, loved it and said he was going back to do some more exploring. This second trip was just before Thanksgiving and no one had heard from him since.
“Did he say why he was going to
