I could tell now that Aileen was a Catholic. It was hard to say how I could tell but I could. Accent, body language, who knew? Sir Harry wasn’t a raging bigot then.
“No, no. From his da or his grand da more than likely,” she said.
“What does
“When he’s not in his office in Belfast he just likes the quiet time. Potters around the garden, reads in his library.”
“Terrible about his brother, the captain in the army.”
“Shocking, so it was. Shocking.”
“I suppose you didn’t hear the killing from here?”
“Oh, no. It’s too far away. We didn’t hear anything.”
“And there were no witnesses?”
“From up here? No.”
“Was Sir Harry at home that day?”
“He was out in the garden, I think. He went over straight away. Of course there was nothing he could do.”
“No. Martin was his younger brother?”
“Yes. Eight or nine years between them, I think.”
I shook my head. “Must have been awful that morning.”
“Oh yes, I’ll never forget that day. Shocking, so it was. Such a cowardly act. They’re vermin. Vermin shooting a man in the back.”
“He was shot in chest,”
Her eyes scolded me. “What does it matter! What does that matter? What are you here for, anyway? I told you Sir Harry was out. Wait here.”
Before I could call her back she vanished through a door and a rather different woman appeared in blue suit, white pearls and a black bouffant. She was about forty, thin, thin-lipped, and there was a touch of old Hollywood in her heavy lidded eyes and defiant unfeminine chin.
She walked towards me, all systems bristling. “May I see your identification?” she asked.
I showed her the warrant card.
“I take it that you’re Mrs Patton?” I asked.
She nodded. She was from Derry, by the sound of it. Brisk and business-like. I dug the whole
I took out my fags.
“Oh, there’s no smoking in here,” Mrs Patton said.
I put the cigarettes back in my pocket with a mumbled “Excuse me”.
A little victory for the home team, there.
“And how can we be of service today?” she asked.
“I need to see Sir Harry. I was wondering if I could, uh, if I could wait for him in your lovely garden,” I said, putting on a bit of my Glens accent.
“The garden? Why?” she said, both disarmed and suspicious.
“I’m a bit of flower nut and I thought I could spend some time there until Sir Harry comes back. I’ve heard wonders about his garden.”
“You wish to wait for Sir Harry in his garden?”
“If it doesn’t put anyone out.”
“No … I, uh, I don’t expect that it would.”
She looked at me and nodded curtly. “Follow me,” she said.
We went through a spotless kitchen, all gleaming surfaces and pots on hooks. The appliances had all been brand new in about 1975. Sir Harry didn’t seem like the sort of man who would let his cars rot but get expensive kitchen gear. It must be a feminine influence. His wife had bought that kit, a wife who was, now, where exactly?
I walked through the back door and out into the kitchen garden.
“Here you go,” she said.
I pretended to be fascinated by an ugly yellow smudge of daffodils – the only thing at all growing back here.
Of course I had already seen the greenhouse through the kitchen window.
Mrs Patton said “I’ll leave you to it,” and disappeared back inside. I lit a cigarette. I knew that she’d be spying on me but there was a hedge blocking the rear entrance to the greenhouse from the back windows of the residence. I finished my smoke, inspected more of the flowers and walked behind the hedge. I waited a moment for a cry or footsteps hurrying towards me but I heard nothing. I turned a rusted iron handle and went inside the greenhouse. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find but I was not counting on a completely empty space. No plants, no pots, nothing. I wrote “a clean concrete floor, a few gardening tools”, in my notebook. The gardening tools were one rake and one hoe.
I had got what I came for on this trip.
I wrote “Down at heel scion. Hiding something or just an arse? No rosary pea or anything else in the greenhouse” in my notebook and walked into the house again.
Mrs Patton intercepted me in the gloomy hall.
“Inspector Duffy, is anything amiss?” she asked.
“No, nothing’s amiss, Mrs Patton. However, I’ve just remembered that I have to be somewhere else. I was so taken with your daffodils that I completely forgot. You’ll have to excuse me, ma’am. Thank you for your hospitality.”
“Oh … oh, what shall I tell Sir Harry?”
“No message, thank you,” I said.
I walked briskly out of the hall and onto the crunchy gravel drive. I gave the Bentley and the Roller a sympathetic look and I juked under the palm trees.
Thunder rumbled in a grey skin and it began to rain with big heavy, sporadic drops. At the hill’s summit I surveyed the broad wet valley filled with cows and sheep and fields too boggy to accommodate man or beast.
The prospect to the north was of Larne Lough and Magheramorne on the far shore.
The widow McAlpine’s farm was a good mile off on the far side of a hill. You wouldn’t be able to see it even from the third floor of this house. No one inside could possibly have witnessed Martin’s murder. There would be no teenage maids too frightened to testify but who could be broken by the age-old tactics of question after question after question.
I dandered down the hill and in twenty minutes I was back at the farm.
I went round the back of the house and tried the rear door.
It too was locked. Cora was barking herself hoarse now. A side window was open, but it was too small for me to squeeze through. I lit my last ciggy, climbed a style over the stone wall and strode out across the fields in the direction of the tied-up horse.
The pasture was little better than a bog with some tuft grass and sodden heather, and in a few moments my DMs were soaked through. Sheep pellets were everywhere and in a slurry pond there was the carcass of an old ewe, suspended just beneath the surface.
The horse was an old white mare who barely registered my presence as I approached. I stroked her head, but I had no sugar to offer her. I grabbed some moist dandelion leaves and held them under her nose but she turned her head away disdainfully. “Spoiled rotten, so you are,” I said, and gave her a pat on the neck.
I was curious about the shed so I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I opened it and saw a lantern hanging from the ceiling and a ladder leading underground.
“What’s all this?” I muttered, but the mare kept her thoughts to herself.
I looked down into the hole. It was a vertical tunnel lit by a series of incandescent bulbs. The walls were white, chalky and crumbly and I wasn’t encouraged that the rickety metal ladder was bolted to them. There was a slightly unpleasant, sulphurous smell which also boded ill.
I hesitated at the top of the ladder for a moment and then decided to climb down. Twenty rungs to the
