“Your case hangs on the fact that Dougherty went digging after his wee talk with you.”
“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Easy to check.”
“He goes back to the widow, starts throwing accusations around. She goes all panic stations, gets herself a piece, comes here and shoots him? You think that’s more likely than an IRA hit?”
I laughed and looked at my DMs. “I suppose it’s a bit thin, Tony, but I can’t help thinking that these three holes in the garage mean
He looked at me, squinted into the sun juking between the clouds over the Antrim Plateau and grinned. “You know what I liked about you when we worked together in the County Armagh?”
“What?”
“Even when you were completely wrong about something, the journey into your wrongness was always fucking interesting. Come with me.”
We walked over to a tall, lean guy with a big Dick Spring moustache.
“Gerry, take over here, I’m going down to Larne RUC to have a wee look at Dougherty’s current case load. Could be personal, not random, you never know, do you?”
“Aye,” Gerry agreed.
Tony had come in a cop Land Rover so we took my car.
It was a ten-minute run from rural Ballygalley to the grey misery that was Larne. We chatted a little and Radio One played “Ebony and Ivory”, a new song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. The breakfast DJ Mike Read played it two times in a row which was pretty hardcore of him as it was clearly the worst song of the decade so far, perhaps of the entire century.
Larne RUC.
With one of their own gunned down, the atmosphere was apocalyptic and doom laden. We paid our respects to the duty sergeant and ostentatiously put a few coppers in the widows and orphans box.
We met with the Superintendent, expressed our condolences, told him that we wanted to look into Dougherty’s old cases and Tony explained that this was nothing more than Standard Operating Procedure.
The Super couldn’t have cared less. He was new on the job, had barely interacted with Dougherty and now he had a funeral to suss and with the Chief Constable and half a dozen VIPs coming it was going to be a friggin’ nightmare.
We left him to his drama and found Dougherty’s office.
A shining twenty-three-year-old detective constable called Conlon showed us in. I asked him to hang around to answer questions while Tony looked through Dougherty’s files.
“Was Inspector Dougherty a family man?” I asked conversationally.
“Wife and a grown daughter. Ex-wife. He was divorced.”
“Where’s she? The wife, I mean.”
“Wife and daughter are both over the water, I gathered.”
“Whereabouts?”
“I don’t know. London somewhere?”
“Was he a social man – did you all go out for drinks come a Friday night?”
Conlon hesitated, torn between loyalty to the dead man and a desire to tell me how it was.
“Inspector Dougherty wasn’t exactly a social drinker. When he drank, he drank, if you catch my meaning.”
“I catch your meaning. Was he the senior detective here?”
“Detective Chief Inspector Canning is the senior detective here. He’s in court today, I could try and page him?”
“No, no, you’ll be fine. Tell me more about Inspector Dougherty; what sort of a man was he?”
“What do you mean?”
“Friendly, dour, a practical joker, what?”
“Well, he was, uh, sort of semi-retired, so he was. Nobody really … I didn’t have much to do with him.”
“Was he working on anything in particular in the last couple of days?” I asked.
“I thought this was all a random IRA hit?” Conlon asked suspiciously.
“It
“Did Dougherty mention any threats or anything that was troubling him?”
“Not to me.”
“To anybody else?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“What was he working on the last few days?”
“I didn’t know him very well,” he said, hesitated, and looked out the window.
“You don’t want to speak ill of the dead … is that the vibe I’m catching here?” I asked him.
DC Conlon reddened, gave a little half nod and said nothing.
“The Inspector didn’t do much but come in late, sit in his office, drink, leave early, drive home half drunk, is that it?” I wondered.
DC Conlon nodded again.
“But what about the last couple of days? Did he seem different? More fired up? Onto anything?”
“Not so I’d noticed,” Conlon said.
“Nothing out of the ordinary at all?”
Conlon shook his head. His hair seemed to move independently of his head when he did that and it made him look particularly stupid.
“How did he get assigned to the McAlpine murder if he was such a bloody lightweight?” I asked.
“Chief Inspector Canning was in for his appendix,” Conlon said.
“And after he came back from his appendix?”
“Well, that was an open and shut case, wasn’t it?”
“It’s hardly shut, son, is it? No prosecutions, no convictions?”
Conlon coughed. “What I mean is, I mean, we know who done it, don’t we?”
“Do we? Who done it? Gimme their names and I’ll have them fuckers in the cells within the hour,” I said.
“I mean, we know who done it in the corporate sense. The IRA killed him.”
“The corporate sense is it now? The IRA did it. Just like they killed Dougherty himself.”
“Well, didn’t they?” Conlon asked.
“Yes, they did,” Tony said. He waved a file at me.
I looked at Conlon. “That’ll be all. And do us a favour, mate, keep your mouth shut.”
“About what?”
“Exactly. Now fuck off.”
He exited the office and I closed the door.
“What did you find, mate?” I asked Tony.
“Nothing of interest in any of them. Dougherty has nothing in his ‘active’ file and there’s a layer of dust on everything else.”
“I take it that’s the McAlpine file?”
He slid it across the table to me.
The last notes on it had been made in December. He’d added nothing since my visit.
I shook my head. Tony squeezed my arm again. “Everybody can’t be as impressed by you as I am, mate. I’m afraid you didn’t wow Dougherty as much as you would have liked.”
“I suppose not.”
Tony was almost laughing now. “Maybe you should have worn your medal or told him about that time you met Joey Ramone.”
“All right, all right. No point in raking me. Let’s skedaddle.”
We straightened the desk, closed the filing cabinets.
“And look, if you find a case notebook in the house or the car or anything, I’d be keen to take a look at it,” I said to Tony.
“You got it, mate,” Tony assured me.
