Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

The McAlpine murder had been investigated by an Inspector Dougherty, a red-nosed, white-haired old stager with a tremble in his left hand that to the uneducated eye could be Parkinson’s disease or MS or some other malady but which was actually the eleven o’clock shakes. At lunch time he’d slip out to the nearest pub and after a couple of triple vodkas he’d be right as rain again.

We met him in a large book-lined office overlooking the harbour and ferry terminal. The books were mostly thrillers and detective fiction which I found encouraging, but they were all from the ’60s and early ’70s, which wasn’t such a good sign. At some juncture in the last decade he’d lost interest in reading – had lost interest in everything probably. There was no wedding ring on his left hand, but many Presbyterians didn’t wear a ring because they considered it a Papist affectation. Even so, the room stank of divorce, failure and alcoholism – the standard troika for many a career RUC officer.

We were both the same rank, detective inspector, but he’d been on the force twenty years longer than me, which made me wonder what the hell he had been doing all that time, and whether I was destined to go the same route.

The rain was still pelting the windows and Scotland was a blue smudge to the east.

“Gentlemen, have a seat,” he said. “Cup of tea or coffee?”

“Thanks but no, we’re all tea’d out this morning,” I replied, with as decent an apologetic smile as I could muster.

Dougherty folded his hands across his ample belly. He was wearing a white shirt and a brown suit that he’d obviously had for quite a few years, which, as he sat down, bunched at the sleeves and gave him an unfortunate comic air. A peeler could be a lot of things: a drunk, a thug, an idiot, a sociopath, but as long as you looked the part it was usually fine. Even in Larne Dougherty would have a hard time currying respect.

“So what brings you gentlemen down from Carrick?” he asked.

“I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the McAlpine murder,” I said, all business.

“The what?”

“Martin McAlpine. He was a part-time UDR captain who was shot at his farm on Islandmagee last December.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. What’s this pertaining to?”

I explained about the suitcase and the John Doe and how we had traced the suitcase back to Martin McAlpine.

“And what did his wife say happened to his suitcase?” Dougherty asked.

“She says she left it in at the Carrickfergus Salvation Army before Christmas,” Matty said.

Dougherty looked puzzled.

“She left it at the Salvation Army before Christmas?” he asked.

“Yup,” Matty said.

“So, what’s his murder got to do with anything? The murderer of your John Doe obviously just bought the suitcase for a pound from the Sally Army and used it to dump a body, right?”

“Almost certainly,” I agreed.

“So, why bother dredging up the McAlpine case? Your killer could have grabbed any random suitcase, couldn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And the timeline … She leaves the suitcase in just before Christmas. McAlpine is murdered back in early December. Your body is discovered this week? In April?”

I shook my head. “The body had been frozen for an indeterminate amount of time, but aye, I’m with you, Dougherty, I agree, it’s weak beer; but you see it’s not us, it’s our Chief; he’s going to want us to have pursued every lead out there and as soon as he finds out that the suitcase belonged to a UDR captain who was assassinated by the IRA, he’s going to be firing a million questions at me.”

Dougherty breathed a sigh of relief. I was not an internal affairs spook come to investigate his work, I was just another working stiff dealing with an arsehole boss.

“I’ll get the file,” he said.

He opened a metal cabinet and flipped out a thin – very thin – cardboard file.

He spread it on the desk between us and very slowly he sat down again with one hand on the desk and one hand to balance him. Jesus, how far gone was this eejit?

“Okay, let me see … Ah yes, Martin McAlpine shot in the chest with a shotgun, at approximately nine twenty in the morning of December first. He died instantly, assailants fled on a blue motorcycle which has not been recovered. IRA claimed responsibility with a recognised code word that evening with a call to the Belfast Telegraph … We didn’t find the murder weapon, or the bike, and we’ve had no tips.”

He put the file down.

That’s it? I was thinking. A man gets blown away and that’s bloody it?

“Can I take a look?”

He passed the file across. His report was one paragraph and they had tossed all the crime-scene photographs except for one which showed Martin McAlpine face up on the ground. The shotgun pellets had ripped apart his chest and throat and a couple had buried themselves in his temple. His dead face seemed to register surprise more than fear or panic but that didn’t mean anything. The interesting thing about the picture was the tightness of the grouping on his torso. There was no way this had been done at twenty yards. Twenty feet perhaps, but not twenty yards. The assailants had definitely gotten a lot closer to McAlpine than the wall. How had they done this carrying shotguns without alerting Cora or giving McAlpine a chance to draw his sidearm?

I passed the photograph to Matty.

“Did you take photographs of the bootprints near the body?” I asked.

Dougherty shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“It was December, it must have been muddy, you could have gotten casts of the killers’ shoes.”

Dougherty raised an eyebrow at me. “No, you’re not getting it, Inspector Duffy. They shot him from behind the wall. They didn’t come into the farmyard. They were in the field. There were no bootprints.”

“It seems to me that they must have been a good bit closer than that.”

“They shot him at the wall.”

“Is that where you recovered the shotgun shells? The wall?”

“We didn’t recover any shells.”

“They shot him and then they stopped to take the shotgun shells before running off to their motorbike?”

“Apparently they did,” Dougherty said, bristling a little. He was now sitting on his left hand to stop the DTs from becoming obvious.

Matty looked at me and raised his eyebrows a fraction but I didn’t mind Dougherty. He was close to retirement and when he’d joined up the RUC must have seemed like an easy life. He couldn’t have predicted that come the ’70s and ’80s it would be the most stressful police job in Europe. Nah, I didn’t mind him, but boy he was an indolent fuck, like all them old characters.

“What was the murder weapon? Did your forensic boys get a bead?”

“A shotgun.”

“What type?”

Dougherty shrugged.

“Twelve-bore, over/under, single-trigger, double-barrel, what?” I asked.

He shrugged again.

“Pigeon shot, buck shot, deer shot?”

He shrugged a third time.

And this time it made me angry.

They hadn’t even spent time doing a basic ballistic inquest?

He could see it in my eyes. He went defensive. “The IRA killed him with a stolen or an unregistered shotgun, what difference does it make what type it was?”

I said nothing.

Silence did my talking for me.

It worked him some more.

“… Look, if you’re really interested I’m sure we kept some of the fucking pellets in the evidence room just in case we ever recovered the gun. If you go down there Sergeant Dalway will let you see.”

I nodded and wrote “Dalway” in my notebook.

“Were there any other witnesses apart from the wife?” I asked.

“No, and she wasn’t really a witness. She heard the shooting but when she ran out McAlpine was dead and the gunmen were already making a break for it on the motorbike.”