put the key in the ignition.
There was a whoosh through the vents which, for a brief unhappy moment, I thought was the percussion wave of an explosion, but it was just a whoosh of cold air.
At that moment the black woman I had seen before came out of the vacant house at the end of Coronation Road. She was wearing a purple dress with a red trim. Carrickfergus women didn’t wear purple dresses. And again, for another half a beat, I wondered if I hadn’t in fact just been killed in an explosion.
The engine turned over and the BMW roared into life.
I let out the hand brake, engaged the clutch and drove past her. She looked at me through the windscreen. I nodded a good morning. She smiled. She was very thin and very good-looking – the women on Coronation Road would no doubt begin spreading rumours about her immediately. Was she a student? A refugee? If so, God help her that she had ended up in Northern Ireland.
I was in the mood for no more news so I put on Radio Three and endured Brahms for ten minutes before switching off the radio and listening to nothing but the German-engineered pistons going about their efficient business.
Ballygalley was fifteen miles up the coast, just beyond Larne.
Nice little place with a castle, a beach, a caravan park and a couple of shops. Dougherty’s house wasn’t hard to find. The one with all the police Land Rovers and the van from the BBC outside.
It was a bungalow on a little rise at the end of a cul-de-sac.
I parked down the street, flashed my warrant card to the reserve constables protecting the crime scene and found the detective in charge, Chief Inspector Tony McIlroy, who was an old mate from my days in Bandit Country on the South Armagh border.
Tony was one of the lead detectives in the RUC Assassination Unit which investigated all police murders in Northern Ireland. The RUCAU looked for similarities, common weapons, common strategies etc. in crimes against coppers. We took it personally when the terrorists killed one of our own and it wasn’t unfair to say that the murder of a peeler attracted more money and resources than other murders in the Province. The miserable clearance rate, of course, was about the same: less than ten per cent. Unless the terrorists made a mistake or someone grassed very few of these murders ever resulted in a prosecution (although quite often we would find out who the trigger man on a particular hit had been).
Tony had a degree in criminology from Birmingham University, a wife who was the daughter of a Conservative English MP, a father who was a prominent Belfast barrister, and he had spent a year on secondment to the Met. He was a high-flyer even back then in South Armagh when he’d been a lowly detective sergeant and I a freshly minted DC. Tony would be a chief superintendent by the age of forty and probably chief constable by fifty (chief constable of a force over the water that is, for Northern Ireland was too small a place to contain his ambitions forever).
He shook my hand. “What’s the good word, Sean, me old mucker?”
“Tony, everybody knows that the bird is the word.”
“They do indeed. What have you been up to, Sean?”
“The usual. I’ve got a play opening in the West End, oh, and fingers crossed, I think I’ve just discovered a tenth planet. Gonna name it after me mum. You look good, Tony, wee bit tubby, but who isn’t,” I said.
“You look as if you’re on the heroin diet. And grey hairs? Must be your guilty conscience, Sean, my lad.”
“Grey hairs from hard work, mate.”
He leaned in. “Hey, seriously, congratulations on the medal and the promotion,” he said, with genuine affection.
“Cheers, mate,” I replied with equal amounts of fondness.
He was pale-skinned, and some of that famous shock of red hair was also greying at the temple, but he looked fit, focused, professional. He had acquired rectangular glasses that gave him a professorial air.
“What brings you out here, Sean?”
“I knew Dougherty a little bit. What can you tell me about this business?”
Tony shook his head and took a cigarette from my packet of Marlboros.
“Standard stuff, Sean.”
“Nothing special about it?”
“Nah. Your common or garden IRA hit. Two shooters probably. Or one shooter, one driver. Parked outside his house, a little ways down the street, waited until our boy got home. Popped him as soon as he exited his car. Pretty soft target living here at the end of the cul-de-sac.”
“A bead on the shooters?”
“If I had to guess I’d say it was the West Belfast Brigade, probably a team under Jimmy Doogan Reilly.”
“Pretty adventurous for them to come way up here, no?”
“Nah, they’re always looking to expanding their op zones and if you hoofed it you could be back in Belfast in half an hour.”
“Definitely IRA then?”
“Well, not definitely, but almost certainly.”
Almost every peeler who was murdered in Northern Ireland was murdered by the IRA, usually in one of three methods: a mercury tilt bomb under their car, an ambush by an IRA assassination cell, or in a mass bomb attack on a police station.
“If you’ve got the time, you couldn’t lead me through the physical evidence?”
Tony looked at me askance. “Was this a really good mate of yours or something?”
“Not really, I only knew him through a case of my own.”
Tony opened his mouth, closed it again, perhaps thinking that when the time was right, I’d tell him.
“Okay,” he said, “Over here.”
We walked to the top of the driveway where Dougherty’s Ford Granada was still parked. There was dried blood on the gravel but the body of course was long since gone to the morgue in Larne.
“They shot him at point blank range. Poor bastard managed to get his sidearm out but it was too late. He was done for. Didn’t even get a round off.”
The Ford Granada’s door was closed, which meant they’d waited until he was fully out of the car and was walking towards the house.
“He got his sidearm out?” I asked, surprised.
“Aye.”
“He was shot in the front or the back?”
“The front, why?” he asked, his eyes, narrow, sensing an angle like a stoat on a rat.
“Why didn’t they just shoot him in the back? Bang, bang, bang, you’re dead, John Lennon style.”
“Nah, nah, there’s nothing untoward, mate. They did try and shoot him from behind but the fuckers missed. Our pal Dougherty turns to confront them, half draws his piece and they plug the poor unfortunate sod in the ticker.”
“How do you know they missed?”
“Three bullets in the garage door, look.”
Sure enough three bullets in the garage door.
But didn’t that make things even stranger?
“Okay, so they missed him and he turns to face them and he almost draws his piece and then they plug him. Right?”
“Right.”
“But that raises an additional question.”
“Which is?”
“The question of why they missed?”
“What? Why they missed?”
“Aye. This is a professional hit team, isn’t it?”
“It’s a bloody gun battle, Sean, a couple of bullets are bound to go a bit wild, aren’t they? Even Lee Harvey Oswald missed with his first shot, didn’t he?”
“Did they find the murder weapon?”
“No. And we won’t. It’ll be at the bottom of the Irish Sea by now.”
“The IRA called it in?”
