Down on Cyprus Avenue

by Paul Charles

  “James came to run the company, and also to flirt his socks off with me. Ray put his white coat back on and seemed much happier for it, on the surface.

  “But behind the scenes what I’ve subsequently learnt was that, between them, James and Wesley owned 45 per cent of the company. Ray and I owned 55 per cent and we’d given 10 of that to various members of both of our families. James diligently worked away behind the scenes and eventually bought 6 per cent for an over-the-top price from shareholders on both sides of our family.

  “Wesley Whitlock called an extraordinary meeting. He said O’Electronics needed to shape up, join the big boys on the world platform, and to do that we needed to raise more funds. Ray was in shock and said in his current situation there was no way he wanted to invest more money. He felt that by agreeing to bring James O’Neill on board they’d all start to take some money out of the company for the first time. But Wesley and James overruled him; said it was a done deal and if he couldn’t or wouldn’t invest, they’d have to ‘reluctantly’ replace him. Ray reminded them both that he was the major shareholder and nothing could be instigated without his approval. And then Wesley smugly waved three leaves of paper at Ray and announced that he and James had now successfully secured enough shares to make them the majority shareholders. If you’d had a camera on Ray’s face at that moment, you would have been able to see all the life physically drain out of his eyes. It never returned.

  “James O’Neill took over as managing director of O’Electronics in 1986. My husband Ray was like a zombie. He ignored the boys. He ignored me. Most importantly he ignored himself.

  “I’m not proud of myself but I’d been ignored for too long and I’ll admit to you that eventually I succumbed to James’ advances. On my boys’ lives I do not believe that Ray was aware of my affair, but the following year he took an overdose of his medication and ended his life. The year after that I married James O’Neill and the longer I live with him the more I wish I had paid proper attention to poor Ray."

  “The ten shares you and your first husband gave to your family: Do you remember how they were broken down?” McCusker asked.

  “Yes, we gave our parents four-a-piece, that’s two each, and my sister and her husband got the remaining two.”

  “Do you know which of those shares Whitlock and his partner, your second husband, managed to buy?” McCusker continued.

  “Yes, as a matter of a fact I do...” she admitted. “My parents were going through a very bad time financially and needed the money. My sister never liked Ray and would have been happy to give away her shares. As it turned out, Whitlock and James did not take advantage of this fact.”

  “So Ray’s parent’s kept their four shares?” McCusker asked, knowing he might be heading for troubled waters but feeling there might be some mileage with this line of questioning. “Have they still got them?”

  “Sadly they passed away within a year of each other in the mid-nineties.”

  “Do you know what they did with their shares?” McCusker said.

  “Yes, they willed them, and not much else, to Lawrence and Ryan,” she said quietly.

  “I suppose Lawrence and Ryan needed to sell their shares to support Larry’s List?” McCusker asked quickly.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” she laughed. “I’m happy to say my boys have been more loyal to Ray than I was – you couldn’t prize those shares away from the boys if their lives depended on it.”

  “Did Ray have any brothers or sisters?” O’Carroll chipped in.

  “No, he was an only child,” Polly replied wistfully. “You know, that just might have been part of his problem. If he’d spent more time with siblings, maybe he’d have been better prepared for the rough and tumble of life.”

  “Did Ray have any good friends, best mates?” McCusker asked.

  “Just me, I’m sorry to say. It’s my biggest regret that I didn’t look after him properly.”

  Silence ruled the room.

  “Are you married Inspector?” Polly eventually asked, looking at O’Carroll and draining the remainder of her fresh glass of sherry.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well, when you do, you promise me you will remember to always support your husband, take very good care of him. The one thing I have discovered in my life is that the male species don’t do very well left to their own devices.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Either Wesley Whitlock III was aware of what they’d uncovered through searching his old case files at Mason, Burr & Co., or he’d spent the weekend soul-searching, but either way he was a changed man when they dropped into his suite in the Europa later that Monday morning. To McCusker it seemed like he’d made a conscious decision that he no longer needed to preoccupy himself with the murder of his son. If only the Portrush detective could have found a way of getting the senior American citizen to pass the information on.

  He wondered if there had been something more obvious in the files that they had missed. But then it had seemed to McCusker that Herr Wolf had gone to great trouble to steer him down this particular road.

  McCusker and O’Carroll could immediately tell how far they’d dropped down Wesley Whitlock III’s priority list in that not only did he not offer them breakfast, he didn’t even offer them a cup of tea.

  “Oh come in, I have been expecting you,” was his greeting from inside the room as one of his Amazonian girls answered O’Carroll’s knocking on the door. “So?”

  “So,” McCusker started, “we’ve…”

  “I know where you’ve been, I know what you’ve found out,” Whitlock admitted through his perfectly white gritted teeth. It appeared to McCusker that the older Whitlock looked more ridiculous as his teeth appeared. Polly O’Neill clearly still felt enough of a wife to James to have told him of her conversation with the officers. James O’Neill had equally felt duty bound to relay the same information to Whitlock.

  “I’d like to tell you a story,” Wesley said, surveying the suite to ensure he had their undivided attention. “You know, Monty gave each of his infantry seven Woodbines a day? Well, by doing so he most likely was responsible – long term of course – for more of their deaths than Hitler ever was. My point is that he clearly felt that he was being a good commander; he was looking after his men as best he knew how with the information he had access to at that time. That is to say, nicotine relaxes you, relieves your stress.”

  “So you’re actually suggesting to us,” O’Carroll snarled, “that you felt you were doing Ray O’Sullivan a favour; that you were looking after your client properly?”

  “It certainly started out that way,” Whitlock explained, “and the company most certainly grew and grew and eventually the company became the important issue. The decision we were all faced with was what was best for the company? Ray was just a casualty of those strategic moves, there was nothing personal.”

  “So,” McCusker started, feeling his blood boil, “to continue your war-time analogy, Ray O’Sullivan was just collateral damage...an acceptable loss?”

  “Exactly!” Whitlock enthused, his confidence appearing to grow now he believed he had someone on his side.

  “You piece of…” McCusker started as O’Carroll glared him into silence.

  “Sorry?” Whitlock said, in a bring-it-on tone.

  “What I was about to say...” McCusker started again. This time O’Carroll looked like she was about to get up and bop him one, “is that all you needed to do, all the O’Sullivan family, all Ray, Polly, Larry, and Ryan needed you to do was to put someone in to run the business side of O’Electronics, leaving Ray to continue to do what he loved: invent and develop. All you had to do was pay someone to run his business. You did not need to give them a share of the business. You did not need to eventually side with your chosen Lieutenant against your client in a coup to take over the business.”

  “Listen to me now,” Whitlock barked. “I did nothing illegal. I never broke a law. I did nothing that is not being repeated in boardrooms
up and down your country and my country every day of the week, every week of the year.”

  “Sir, not actually breaking the law is nothing to boast about,” McCusker said quietly, having gained control of himself again. “Laws are nothing more than manmade rules that your profession has created to allow you to line your pockets and to create your ‘acceptable losses’ for mankind. What your criteria should have been is this: Would I have wanted my father to have been treated this way? Would I have wanted my mother to have been treated this way? For heaven’s sake, man, even on a more selfish level, would I want to be treated this way? There are moral rules which we should follow. We should follow them not because we’ll get sued or thrown in prison if we don’t, but just because it is simply not our right to break them.”

  “Oh don’t be so fucking naïve,” Wesley Whitlock III hissed.

  “That’s as may be Mr Whitlock, but we’re here today investigating the death of your son and it appears to us that your actions were most likely the motive behind someone murdering your son. It is becoming apparent to us that if you hadn’t acted the way you acted then your son Adam would still be alive today.”

  O’Carroll’s comment was lethal. It hit the mark with such precision that its impact was immediate. An animal when shot will still try to continue moving. Animals have no comprehension that they have been fatally wounded, they don’t understand that they should fall to the ground to prolong their lives – they will do their utmost to maintain their momentum, to keep on going, to stumble onwards. Whitlock, mentally speaking, behaved like a mortally wounded animal.

  “So you’re here to tell me you’re about to make an arrest?”

  “We’re here hoping that this time you really will help us with our enquiries,” O’Carroll offered.

  “But who are the victims here?” Whitlock asked in reply. “Who are the real victims?”

  “It’s always the innocent sir,” McCusker quietly offered.

  “I just don’t know what else to say,” Whitlock muttered, as much to himself as O’Carroll and McCusker. “I just don’t know what else to say,” he repeated, proving the error of his first statement.

  Wesley Whitlock did not say another word that morning. One of his Amazonian girls went off down the corridor to fetch his surviving son and the police left him tending to his father.

  As McCusker left the suite, he realised for the first time that the less charitable reason for Whitlock being pedantically courteous to all of his staff was because, behind the scenes, he really was such a shit.

  * * *

  “So you’ve turned the case around McCusker,” O’Carroll offered, as they sped back to the Custom House.

  “Yes but I’m not exactly sure where we’ve turned it around to,” McCusker replied, checking his safety belt. “We’ve turned away from a few slim pickings of suspects only now to be facing absolutely no suspects whatsoever.”

  O’Carroll pondered on this for a while. “Well, I suppose I could argue that perhaps Polly O’Neill could be a suspect?”

  “Nagh, that doesn’t work for me,” he sighed regretfully. “She wouldn’t be capable and because of the way she fusses over her boys, I couldn’t in a million years see her murdering someone else’s son. Now if it was her husband who was currently lying in the morgue, well that would be a different matter altogether and she’d be at the very top of my list of suspects.”

  “Then the boys themselves?” O’Carroll suggested.

  “That was my first thought,” he admitted, “but we already know they’ve got an unbreakable alibi.”

  “Of course they have,” she replied as the penny dropped, “I hadn’t put it together before you said that just now, but of course – they were conveniently kidnapped at the time Adam Whitlock was murdered.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  McCusker returned to his desk and spread out the scene of crime photographs. He thought he spotted something. He summoned Barr. “Watch this,” he said to O’Carroll.

  When Barr arrived the agency detective stood up and put his hand on the DS’s shoulder. Then, out of the blue, he quickly traced an arc towards Barr’s solar plexus with his other hand. Barr instinctively threw his hands up to protect his abdomen.

  “Sorry WJ,” McCusker announced as he sat down. “I was just trying to demonstrate how one unconsciously reacts when one is about to be stabbed.”

  “Okay, I get it, both hands were immediately deployed in a self-defence mode,” O’Carroll said. “So your point is?”

  “Please take a look at these photographs of the victim,” McCusker replied.

  “Oh, right I’ve got you now...” O’Carroll said, rising out of her slumped position in her swivel seat. “There are no knife marks around Adam Whitlock’s hands, wrists, or even arms.”

  “Which means?” McCusker asked.

  “Whitlock was drugged or unconscious when he was stabbed?” Barr offered, clearly enjoying himself.

  “Not according to the autopsy report,” McCusker said, nodding at O’Carroll for her suggestion.

  “He was stabbed by someone who knew him?” O’Carroll said audibly grabbing at the straws McCusker was clearly hanging on to.

  “Possibly, or?” McCusker continued.

  “Or he stabbed himself,” DI Jarvis Cage offered from the opposite side of the office.

  “Not this much,” McCusker replied tapping on the photograph. “Or…it could imply that someone held him while someone else stabbed him.”

  “He was murdered by two people?” O’Carroll said, appearing to repeat the words for her own benefit.

  * * *

  They spent the remainder of the morning going through the files they had amassed thus far. DS WJ Barr eventually traced Tim Gilmour and ruled him out because he’d been in the Antrim hospital for a kidney procedure over the weekend in question. Consequently another potential suspect bit the dust.

  McCusker started to wade through the piles of files from the house-to-house visits down on Cyprus Avenue. Some of the interviews had produced bizarre replies, which had been duly noted by the coppers on the beat, if only to prove that they had knocked on the doors. The reports ranged from the downright strange:

  “Sorry I can’t help you with your enquiries just now; I’m watching Crimewatch.”

  “I gave it at the office.”

  “Have you come about me reporting that Hitler is alive and well and living in the house just across the road, the one with the grey door? Yes, of course, he’s shaved off his moustache, but he’s not fooling anyone; I’d recognise that haircut anywhere.”

  “The only thing I remember about that night was a big-headed alien with a red motor bike. I know it was an alien because it was pushing the bike, not riding it.”

  “No, I don’t want to make another donation to the Policeman’s Ball, they’re already big enough.”

  “Are youse still searching for Belfast’s Manchester City fan?”

  “The fancy dress party is three doors up.”

  To the more traditional:

  “We were up in Donegal that weekend.”

  “It was Saturday night, there are always lots of noises on a Saturday night; the secret is to learn to ignore them.”

  “I’ve seen all the cop cars and wondered what was going on; is it true it was a ritual killing?”

  “I think he was an American – he was always very polite when I met him on the street.”

  “My father who works…well, I can’t actually tell you where he works…but he said it was all the work of an Iraqi hit squad.”

  And on and on McCusker ploughed through the 38/36s. When he eventually reached the bottom of the pile, he returned it to the file, slapped the file down on his desk and felt sad that the only statements that stuck in his mind were the alien pushing his motor bike and Hitler taking up residence across the road. The sadder fact was that there hadn’t even been a full moon on the Saturday night in question.

  About 4 p.m. on the following afternoon O’Carroll took a phone call. Aft
er hanging up she said: “Oh jeez.”

  “What?” McCusker asked.

  “I messed up big time.”

  “What, what did you do?”

  “Remember this morning I said I’d made a decision and I would tell you about it later?”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “Well the decision I made,” she said, wheeling herself closer to McCusker’s chair and whispering, “was that you and Grace should go on a blind date.”

  McCusker wasn’t as fazed by the prospect as he thought he might have been. “Okay, well yeah, harmless enough,” he offered, “but I can’t work out how you messed up?”

  “Well, the big blind date is for tonight,” she admitted, “which was fine when I set it up with Grace yesterday afternoon but I forgot all about it until now.”

  “Probably best,” McCusker said, still feeling nonchalant about it, “that way I didn’t have to worry about it for days. So...where am I taking Grace for our big date?”

  “You can figure that part out all for yourself, but you’re meeting her in the Fitzwilliam Hotel tonight at 7.30 sharp.”

  McCusker spent the remainder of his day toying with an idea he’d had regarding the Adam Whitlock case. He borrowed O’Carroll and Barr’s notebooks for a good chunk of time. There was a germ of a theory floating around in the back of his head, but he had a major problem with a certain aspect of it. A major aspect of it in fact, but he was not allowing himself to completely dismiss this new approach.

  Before he knew it, the day had flown by and it was time to go home, and shower and change for his big date.

  Chapter Forty-Three