Down on Cyprus Avenue

by Paul Charles

  “You have some questions for me?” Wolf asked, immediately setting the tone of the proceedings.

  “Yes, firstly, I wanted to thank you for your assistance yesterday evening, last night, for staying with us the entire night, and then getting me the partner’s minutes so quickly.”

  “It really was not a problem and I was happy to help you.”

  “Okay,” McCusker continued, enjoying the aftertaste of the brandy. “I know that Wesley Whitlock was a partner in Mason, Burr & Co., and he worked here in Belfast with you for five years. Did he also have shares in the company?”

  “Yes, he was, in fact, an equity partner. The Whitlock family have been on our board since before the Second World War. When Wesley Whitlock joined us the family holdings were 15 per cent. They had always intended to become more involved but first the war and then the Troubles postponed their efforts, until Wesley joined us in 1987. He remained with us until 1991. It had been his intention to double the family holding in his tenure. When he left, the family owned 27 per cent of Mason, Burr & Co.”

  “So he nearly succeeded in his efforts?”

  “Yes, but not quite,” Wolf replied wryly, helping himself to a generous finger of brandy and shivering visibly as it successfully worked its way into his bloodstream.

  “I see that Mr Whitlock III had some shares in the DeLorean Motor Company, but I also note that he wasn’t their lawyer,” McCusker said. “Tell me this: Was someone else in your firm their lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Did Whitlock lose his investment entirely?”

  “All £50,000,” Wolf said, slightly smugly. “But you know he also had two of the DeLorean cars, in perfect factory condition, shipped back to Boston and they have become collector’s items. I notice that one of the cars used in the film was sold recently for a staggering $300,000, so maybe he fell on his feet on that one as well.”

  Wolf finished off his brandy and then refreshed both their glasses. He studied McCusker the way one would while considering whether or not they were going to share some information. “You know, I am permitted to only answer the questions you ask.”

  “Okay, okay,” McCusker asked, his brain clicking into gear. “Let’s back up a wee bit here. Do you think Wesley Whitlock, while involved in his DeLorean dealings, did something that would have resulted in someone wishing to take revenge on his son?”

  “No, I don’t think you need to look any further into the DeLorean affair.”

  “When Whitlock left Mason, Burr & Co. did he retain his shares?”

  “That is a good question, McCusker,” Wolf said, breaking into a wry smile. “No, he did not.”

  “Did he sell them to you…to someone else?”

  “That is two questions – which one would you prefer I answer?” Wolf asked earnestly.

  “Did Wesley Whitlock do something that meant you forced him to sell the shares back to you?”

  “My partners permit me to give you the following explanation to Whitlock’s departure,” Wolf began. “During our investigation we uncovered no actual infringements of any known laws, however, we did feel that some of his moral judgements called into question the integrity of this firm and, by association, the integrity of the partners. Because of this, we invited him to tender his resignation. Part of the settlement deal we concluded was that the firm would buy back his family shares at the then current market value.”

  “But surely…” McCusker began, “surely his son worked there?”

  “That was also part of the agreement, as was not volunteering any information about the settlement, which is why I have to tread so carefully.”

  “Your staff treated Whitlock Senior like royalty when I came in to hear the reading of his will?”

  “Most of the current staff would not have been around in 1991 when he departed – they would know him only as the father of Adam who was always very popular in our office.”

  “So Kurt...what exactly did he do that made the partners eventually invite him to resign?” McCusker asked.

  “I am not permitted to answer that question,” the German replied plainly. “If I answered such a general question it could be argued I was volunteering information.”

  “Okay,” McCusker said, trying to retrace his steps to safe ground and taking out the two pages Wolf had delivered to him earlier that day. “Is there anything in his dealings with the UTV shares which could have compromised his son’s life?”

  “No.”

  “Harland and Wolff?”

  “That is not a question.”

  “Is there anything in Wesley Whitlock III’s dealings with his Harland and Wolff shares which could have compromised his son’s life?”

  “No.”

  “Okay Kurt, let’s try this: is there anything in Wesley Whitlock III’s dealings with his O’Electronics investment that could have compromised his son’s health?”

  “I am permitted to tell you that Wesley Whitlock III was James O’Neill’s lawyer before Mr O’Neill became a director of O’Electronics.”

  Suddenly a very bright light switched on in McCusker’s brain. That morning in the Europa Hotel, as he was entering the lift to go up to Whitlock’s eleventh floor suite, McCusker couldn’t be sure but he spotted a man he thought he recognised exiting the other lift. When McCusker had finally entered the suite it was clear that Whitlock had already entertained someone for breakfast. McCusker now realised the man exiting the lift was none other than James O’Neill.

  But why would James O’Neill want to murder his lawyer’s son?

  Chapter Forty

  As McCusker was leaving Herr Wolf’s study he made a slight detour via the German’s stereo system to check the title of the music that had been playing when he entered. He was shocked to find it was not Mozart or even Beethoven, which would have been his second wild guess. No, in fact he had been totally off base. The music which had impressed him so was none other than the original soundtrack for the movie Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and the composer and performer was none other than Neil Diamond.

  Late that Saturday he hoofed it around town until he found a copy of the CD in Head Records, at the Victoria Square shopping centre, just as it was closing. He spent all of Sunday lazing around enjoying the soundtrack and reading the papers. He was still listening to it at 7.20 a.m. on Monday morning when DI Lily O’Carroll called around to pick him up.

  “Ah Neil Diamond,” she said as she entered his tidy flat. “I didn’t know you liked him. Grace and a few of us went to see him in Dublin in some football stadium last year – he was mega.”

  “How was your weekend? You seem in fine spirits?”

  “Sorry, oh yes, The Sea Horses were incredible,” she enthused. “Not a big crowd, but that’s probably because no one knows them yet, although I did overhear someone at the door ask for his money back because John Squire wasn’t with them. The wee girl in the box office told the annoyed patron that was the English group and they spelt their name as one word and no longer existed."

  “Right,” McCusker muttered conceding that she’d lost him after, ‘not a big crowd.’

  “But Grace and I enjoyed ourselves...even though there was not one eligible man in sight.” She paused for a sip of her coffee. “Also I made a decision, a major decision, but I’ll talk to you about that later. In the meantime, how did you get on Saturday afternoon after I left?”

  McCusker spent a few minutes bringing her up to speed on his interview with Kurt Wolf.

  “And here we are wasting time talking about Neil Diamond and The Sea Horses! We should nip around now to O’Neill’s house and pick him up.”

  “Nagh,” McCusker sighed, checking his watch, “I’d prefer to speak to Polly O’Neill first and it’s best we wait for James O’Neill to get out of the house or she won’t say a word to us.”

  “Yes, I remember now,” O’Carroll said. “When she was trying to get her husband to cough up the ransom she told me she’d had to threaten him with revealing their affair behind her first
husband’s back. When that didn’t work she’d threatened to tell anyone who would listen that O’Neill had cheated her first husband out of his shares of the company.”

  “This should be interesting,” McCusker said, as he turned off his stereo. “But first we’ve time for a breakfast.”

  * * *

  By 8:40 a.m. they were parked up a discreet distance from the O’Neill’s grand residence in the Malone Park, which was so expensive you felt you should wear new shoes just to go in there. At 8:53 James O’Neill was chauffeured in his racing green Jaguar S-Type out of his drive and off into the distance. McCusker and O’Carroll waited another three minutes before walking up to the front door and ringing the doorbell.

  A startled Polly O’Neill, still wearing the same Barbour uniform, gingerly opened the door a minute or so later, but only after O’Carroll had rang the bell an additional three times.

  McCusker studied the woman as O’Carroll re-introduced herself and her colleague. Polly O’Neill looked like she might be a shadow of her former self. The thing about looks, McCusker thought, is that he and O’Carroll had just recently met Polly O’Neill and so as far as they were concerned this is what she looked like. But if they’d known her ten or even twenty years ago, how would they feel about her looks now? Would they think that she’d gone off? Or would they think she’d gotten better with age? At what point in our lives do we look like we’re meant to look? Is there that perfect time when we’re finally at our best, while up to that point we’re a work in progress and from that point onwards we start to disintegrate?

  For all of that Polly O’Neill, when she eventually remembered them both, flashed them a smile so large it lit up her entire person. She was very gracious and enthusiastic as she invited them into her kitchen in the back of the antiquated house, saying she’d never had a chance to thank them both for bringing her sons back to her safe and sound.

  “How are they both doing?” O’Carroll asked, as they took seats in the small add-on conservatory overlooking the perfectly manicured garden.

  Again Polly O’Neill’s face lit up like a Christmas tree as she discussed her favourite subject: her sons. “Oh, since they’ve got back Larry’s List has been going from strength to strength. They’re never off the television – they’ve been on the local news three times now and even made the national news once.”

  “That’s brilliant,” O’Carroll offered.

  “Yes, Ryan says their solicitor has been working hard getting all the funding they need in place to give their site the profile it needs.”

  “Do you know if they managed to pay off the loan shark?” McCusker asked.

  “Terrible people, terrible people,” Polly shuddered violently as if just thinking of them could contaminate her. “I forced my husband to pay them off. That’s the reason the boys got into trouble in the first place and as I explained to James, he’s already got more money than Harrods. I’ll let you into a little secret, shall I? I had to throw another wobbly and threaten to air some of the skeletons in our cupboards unless he coughed up. He really couldn’t believe the interest rates those people were charging. I took great pleasure in reminding him that it would have been a lot less money if he’d just given it to the boys in the first place.

  “Anyway,” she continued, rubbing her hands in obvious glee. “If Larry’s List is one-tenth as successful as everyone is predicting it won’t be long before the boys are independent. I do believe they are both mature enough to take more pleasure from it than James ever seemed capable of doing. Now listen to me, nattering on like you’ve come to visit me in an old people’s home; I’m being a terrible hostess...tea, coffee, or shall we have a celebratory sherry?”

  “We’re on duty, we’ll stick to tea but you should enjoy a sherry,” McCusker replied.

  She seemed to hesitate in her tracks for a few moments. “You know what,” she said, “I think I will. You put the kettle on and I’ll raid James’ stash in his study.”

  Five minutes later they were sitting down in the conservatory again, the police with their tea and incredible Ditty’s Bakery Fruit Cake and Polly with the smallest serving of sherry McCusker had ever seen.

  “We actually wanted to talk to you with reference to another case we’re working on,” McCusker said, taking the lead in getting down to business.

  “Please continue.”

  “It involves Wesley Whitlock III…”

  At first Polly rolled her eyes but then added, “It’s really so sad about his poor son isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” O’Carroll said. “Have you known the father a long time?”

  “I’ll say...” she offered tentatively, “he was also involved with my first husband.”

  “What was your first husband’s name?”

  “Ray O’Sullivan,” she said and stopped talking as her eyes focused out into the garden and even beyond. “You know he’s the real father of Ryan and Lawrence? Now he was a good man...I just didn’t realise it at the time.”

  “How so?”

  “Well when I first met Ray he was a very exciting young man. He was a bit of a boffin and even while we were out on dates I’d frequently lose his attention and his mind would be off in invention land, jotting notes down on napkins…” Polly started, her eyes going all misty. “I feel this is going to be a long conversation, excuse me while I just nip into James’ study for a refill.”

  McCusker and O’Carroll were still staring at each other in disbelief when Mrs O’Neill returned with another micro helping of sherry, which barely covered the bottom of the petite glass.

  “Where was I?” she asked herself, “oh yes, anyway, Ray and I were getting on great, we were married in 1981 the same year he invented…”

  Here she paused and chuckled to herself before continuing, “You know, to this day I still don’t know exactly what it was he invented or developed, or even if there is a difference between the two, but anyway it was something that went into the back of televisions or stereo systems which gave the signal a more natural sound rather than the usual electronic sound, if you know what I mean. I believe it was a filter of some kind. I seem to remember they called it a gate; yes, that’s it, the O’Sullivan Gate.

  “Anyway,” she said, raising her glass to the heavens. “This invention caused quite a furore and absolutely everyone wanted to buy it from Ray. Now if Ray ever made a good decision in his life it was to refuse to sell his invention. He chose instead to manufacture it himself and sell the finished product on to the various big companies. So he set up O’Electronics. It was originally going to be O’Sullivan Electronics but Ray wasn’t comfortable with having his name plastered around everywhere and so he shortened it to O’Electronics. Pretty soon they literally could not keep up with demand and that’s where and when Wesley Whitlock entered the picture.

  “He was a partner at the firm and represented Ray. He persuaded my husband that he could raise enough finance to expand in order to keep up with demand.

  “Now lately I’ve come to realise that my poor husband was an amazing boffin but a terrible business man. And, yes, he most certainly developed other projects, but he was forced to spend the majority of his time trying to run the business side of O’Electronics. And he just, pure and simply, didn’t enjoy that side of things. He became another person altogether; permanently at his wits end. He was always off to the doctor and taking some prescribed medication for one ailment or another. In the middle of all of this Lawrence was born in 1983 and then Ryan came along shortly thereafter in 1985, and so I was preoccupied with my boys and I will admit that I wasn’t paying proper attention to my husband and his business affairs.

  “In hindsight I now realise that if only I had been tuned in to him and found someone for him, someone he could trust to run the business side of things, leaving Ray to be the inventor he so desperately wanted to be, he as a business and we as a family probably would have been perfectly fine. But, as I say, I was preoccupied with the boys.

  “Anyway, water under the bridge, sp
ilt milk, cracked eggs or whatever you want to call it. I didn’t and that’s that and I spend so much time these days talking to my sons about it and regretting it.

  “However, Wesley Whitlock had his finger in the pie and he wasn’t about to see his investment go down the drain, so he came to us one night for dinner and he brought a magnificent bottle of wine, flowers and chocolates, as was his style. Everything was very social and he was as entertaining as ever, and then over coffee and chocolates he got to his point. He said he felt that Ray was just not up to running the company by himself. He said he felt they needed to bring in a business biased director to run O’Electronics and organise their expansion plans, leaving Ray to put his white coat back on and go and invent some more gizmos to feed the machine for their future years...sorry, I’m out of sherry again...won’t be a mo.”

  Once more she positively sped out of the conservatory and returned a few seconds later, but this time her glass was not only filled to the top, but it was so full that she spilt some as she sat down. She carried the half full bottle in her other hand.

  “Right that’s better,” she said helping herself to a genteel, yet generous, sip. “While Ray and I were both feeling warm from the alcohol, our American benefactor got straight to the point and said he had the perfect man to come in and run the company for us. He was a man already wealthy in his own right and experienced, having successfully run his family cattle feed business. Enter stage left a certain James O’Neill, overweight even in those days. Wesley made the point that James was also prepared to put some of his own money into O’Electronics.

  “Now, here’s the clever bit of the story: If Wesley had made this pitch direct to Ray, he, as usual, would have run a million miles from these straight business people. Mr Whitlock knew that I was already worried about my husband, so by presenting his plan to both of us together, he most likely knew I would support him.

  “Wesley insisted that James meet both Ray and I together and he took the three of us out for a grand dinner and we all – James, Wesley, and myself, I’m sorry to admit – successfully persuaded Ray this was the way forward for O’Electronics.