Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“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?”

“They did. Admitted responsibility with a recognised code word.”

“What were their exact words?”

Tony took a notebook out of his sports jacket pocket and flipped it open. He read the IRA statement. “They said, they regretted that this killing was necessary but that the cause of it was the British occupation of Ireland.”

“What was the IRA code word?”

“Wolfhound.”

“Which has been current since?”

“January.”

“January of this year?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s authentic?”

“Oh, aye.”

I nodded.

Tony squeezed my arm. “What’s this all about?” he asked. “Tell me.” Tony was slightly taller than me and he was certainly bigger framed. When he squeezed you it hurt.

I sighed and shook my head. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Go on. Spill,” he said.

“I was talking to Dougherty about one of his old cases. It was a loose end. Nothing really to do with me at all. I’m working on something else.”

“What?”

I filled him in on the body in the suitcase and Mr O’Rourke from Massachusetts.

“And how does it tie to Dougherty?”

“It doesn’t. Not really.”

He squeezed me again. “No secrets, Sean.”

“It’s not a secret. It’s just a bit of a wild goose chase that I’m slightly embarrassed to bring up in front of such an august detective as yourself.”

He laughed at that but he kept staring at me in a way which made me see that I wasn’t going to get away with anything less than the whole story.

“The suitcase O’Rourke was buried in had an old address card squeezed into that plastic pocket near the handle. The killer or the person dumping the body hadn’t noticed it. We were able to decipher it as belonging to a Martin McAlpine who was a captain in the UDR until he was murdered last December. December first, I think. So I went to interview the widow McAlpine and she told me about her husband’s murder and the fact that she had left her husband’s old things including that suitcase at the Salvation Army in Carrickfergus just before Christmas.”

“What’s any of that got to do with Dougherty?”

“He was the investigating officer on the husband’s murder.”

“And?”

“Well … I think he botched it.”

“How?”

“I think there’s at least a chance that she killed him. In Dougherty’s theory the gunmen shot at him from behind a wall twenty yards away but he was clearly shot at point blank by someone who knew him.”

“Why someone who knew him?”

“He let the killer walk right up to him, he didn’t draw his gun, his vicious guard dog didn’t get involved.”

“And you went and told Dougherty about these doubts?”

“Yes.”

“And left it at that?”

“And left it at that. It was a tangent. As my youthful sidekick explained to me, it was an SEP: someone else’s problem.”

Tony nodded and rubbed his sideburns. “So, what? You think you might have shaken Dougherty out of his hammock and the old geezer went to stir some shit?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Mind if I look around?”

“Be my guest.”

I walked the length of the driveway and stopped in front of the garage. I peered at the bullet holes. They were wildly far apart. Feet, instead of inches.

“He was shot three times in the chest?”

“That’s what they tell me. Three in the chest, three in the garage.”

“What’s normally the next step in a case like this?”

“Our next step, Sean, will be to attempt to trace the gun by analysing the slugs. Canvass for witnesses, of which there won’t be any, none that will testify certainly. Put the word out for tips, offer a reward …”

We had finished our smokes now and Tony fished into his pocket and took out his packet of Player’s.

He lit me one. “Smoking can cause cancer”, it said on the packet. It was a fine time to bring that up.

The day had turned cold and fog was rolling down the hill and where it met the electricity pylons little halos of Saint Elmo’s fire were forming, vanishing and reforming again.

I took a puff of the Player. It was pretty rough.

“In other words, Chief Inspector, after the condemnation by the politicians and after the church service ends and the TV cameras leave, this case will go nowhere.”

He was a little ticked at that. “I don’t know how things are done in your manor, mate, but we take every case seriously. It’s not my fucking fault that it’s nearly fucking impossible to break up an IRA cell, is it?”

I nodded and threw the ciggie away. I walked over to the garage again.

“Three rounds in the garage.”

“So.”

“When does an IRA hit team miss not once, not twice, but three times?”

“I’d stake my pension that this is an ordinary assassination by an ordinary IRA cell.”

“Stake something worth a damn. None of us are making old bones, are we? But let’s give it your best-case argument. Let’s say they’ve brought along a newcomer who’s on his first job. They have to blood the newcomers somehow, don’t they? Every killer has a first time.”

“Aye.”

“So after the new boy misses and sticks three in the garage door and Dougherty gets his gun out, then his partner can’t take any more of it and shoots him in the chest.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Tony admitted.

“Two things, Tony. Two things. First, Dougherty is old and fat and drunk and fucking slow ! For him to get that gun out of that leather holster, this team must really be shite.”

Tony nodded. “What’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is that in this scenario the slugs can’t all have come from the same gun. The ones in the garage will be from a different weapon from the ones in Dougherty … But they’re not, are they?”