Rain Dogs

by Adrian McKinty

  ‘No, no, but you could tell,’ he said.

  We stopped outside her room.

  This, we all knew, would probably be the moment of truth.

  I distributed latex gloves and Kevin put the key in the door. This was not one of the suite rooms with the new key cards.

  ‘Maybe call forensics in?’ Lawson suggested.

  ‘Forensics would be furious to get called in for something like this,’ I said, and Crabbie concurred.

  We went into Lily’s hotel room.

  Freshly made bed. Clothes in the wardrobe and the drawers. Portable Olivetti electric typewriter on the desk. Toiletries in the bathroom. An empty suitcase and a typewriter carry case on the suitcase stand. Nothing of interest anywhere. Lily had travelled light.

  No note in the typewriter. No note anywhere in the room. We did a thorough search, but found nothing. In the bathroom we found Aspirin, Nembutal, Valium. Nobody knew what Nembutal was, but we’d find out.

  ‘No note and no sign of that notebook, either,’ McCrabban said.

  ‘Aye, I don’t like that missing notebook,’ I agreed. ‘I saw her writing in it.’

  McCrabban’s grey face contorted into a sort of scowl. ‘I don’t like it either, Sean. The shoe on the wrong foot, the missing notebook. It’s almost enough to make you start to wonder, isn’t it?’

  I turned to Lawson. ‘I asked Mike Mulvenny to have one final search of the castle with his dogs. Do me a favour and go and find out what he came up with, eh?’

  Lawson nodded and left the room. When he was gone I closed the door on Kevin, who was still hanging around in the hall.

  ‘Lightning doesn’t strike twice, Crabbie.’

  ‘You’re referring to Lizzie Fitzpatrick,’ he said, lowering his voice and giving me a significant look.

  ‘I am.’

  He gazed out of the window at the black lough and the castle beyond.

  ‘No note, a missing notebook, a shoe on the wrong foot,’ he said to himself.

  I sat on the edge of Lily’s bed and let him think it through.

  ‘But on the other hand, a lonely lass, and absolutely no way anyone else could have been involved,’ he said.

  ‘Aye,’ I agreed.

  Lawson came back with news about Mike Mulvenny.

  ‘He says he didn’t find anyone hiding in the castle. He’s a hundred per cent sure. He made sure to tell me it was “a hundred per cent sure, not ninety-nine per cent sure,”’ Lawson said.

  ‘That’s the fourth search we’ve done now, Sean,’ McCrabban said. ‘Three with dogs. There’s no murderer in the castle.’

  ‘Tell the big Scouse git thanks. And call him Sergeant Mulvenny not “big Scouse git”.’

  When he returned Crabbie and I had thoroughly searched the room, finding nothing of interest.

  ‘Still no notebook, Lawson. I want you to take half a dozen PCs and search all the bins in the castle, all the bins in the centre of Carrick and go through all the bins in the hotel.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I called up Carrick Cars, the only vehicle rental place in Carrick, and found that Lily Bigelow had rented a Ford Escort for her stay in the town. ‘What sort of mileage had she done?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll check … Log says twenty-five miles.’

  Twenty-five miles seemed rather a lot when you considered that she was travelling with the delegation most of the time, in Northern Ireland civil service transport. Why bother to hire a car at all? Side trips? Tourism?

  ‘She leave anything in the car?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll send an officer to examine it, we’re looking for a notebook.’

  I decided to go with the officer myself but there was nothing of evidentiary value in the vehicle. I put on rubber gloves and joined in on the rather revolting search through the bins in the centre of Carrick. No notebook.

  When we got back to the station I noticed that Lawson had written Lily Bigelow’s name on the incident room whiteboard in blue pen. Blue pens were what we used for accidental deaths, suicides and deaths from natural causes.

  He saw me looking at the pen. He picked up the red pen. Red pens were for homicides and suspected homicides.

  ‘Nah, you were right the first time. The blue pen for now,’ I said.

  8: THE KILLING OF THE CHIEF SUPER

  Station buzz. A violent death. An English girl. Eyes on this one. Media. UTV. The BBC. Maybe journos from over the water.

  Downstairs to Interview Room #2. Start the tape recorder. Mr Underhill, please state your name and date of birth and how long you have been in your current occupation. No leading questions. Let him talk, let him digress if he wanted. Lawson watching me. Crabbie watching me. A nod to Lawson, a nod to the Crabman, a nod to Mr Underhill. No need for good cop/bad cop. Never a need for good/bad cop. Good cop/bad cop seldom worked. The statement spooled into the tape recorder. Lawson made notes. Crabbie made notes. I looked at the notes.

  We tried to crack Mr Underhill’s timeline. It didn’t crack. We tried to crack his certitude on the locked front gate. That didn’t crack, either. We tried to crack the punctiliousness with which he performed his job. No dice there either.

  A constable brought in Mr Underhill’s criminal record: a drunk and disorderly in Glasgow in 1955, a drunk and disorderly in Portsmouth in 1961 and again in Portsmouth in 1964. That was it.

  ‘Did you kill Lily Bigelow?’

  ‘No, I didn’t! How many times are you going to ask me that?’

  ‘Did you touch or move Lily Bigelow’s body after you found her dead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You like the drink, Mr Underhill?’

  ‘I haven’t touched the stuff in twenty years.’

  ‘This inspection that you did … do you wear glasses, Mr Underhill?’ Lawson asked.

  ‘Never needed to!’

  ‘When was the last time you had your eyes tested?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Lawson led him outside, asked him to read the number plate of a car in the car park and the bugger could do it. We couldn’t crack his story, we couldn’t crack his timeline, we couldn’t crack his confidence that the castle was locked and bolted all night. No way in, no way out.

  We released him and told him that we might need to talk to him again.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon going through the CCTV footage and conducting wide source interviews.

  The CCTV camera pointing at the rear entrance of the Northern Bank was by far the most helpful. It covered the Marine Highway and the entrance to the castle and its twenty-four hours of tape was more than sufficient for our purposes. We spotted Lily going into the castle with the delegation at 4 pm the day before. There was a confusing mass of people leaving the castle at a quarter to six, when Mr Underhill kicked out all the visitors, but when we freeze-framed and meticulously examined the tapes we didn’t see Lily among them. Not that we could have. Lily had stayed behind when Mr Underhill closed the castle gate and lowered the portcullis. She had stayed behind to kill herself, for reasons that were still obscure.

  We interviewed the two civil servants from the Northern Ireland Office who had taken the delegation to the castle. They had nothing helpful to add. Had known that Lily was joining the tour, hadn’t noticed that she hadn’t exited with the Finns. They’d been so intent on getting Mr Laakso up and down the castle’s spiral staircase without breaking his neck that they hadn’t noticed anything else.

  Norwich police called us back at four. I put them on speakerphone in the CID incident room and a chatty Chief Inspector Broadbent filled us in on all the gloomy details of the notification. Mr Bigelow was devastated. He lived alone, his son from a previous marriage was in America, his ex-wife was in South Africa. Lily was all that he had … She had taken the train up from London to see him once a month. No, he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, or any change in her behaviour, but it was true that she hadn’t been that happy since the break-up from her boyfriend, Tim, the previous
year. They’d been going together since college and after the break-up, Lily had been quite upset.

  ‘Who broke up with whom?’ I asked.

  ‘It was complicated, her father says,’ Broadbent explained. ‘He works for Lloyds. He got offered a promotion to the office in New York. He wanted her to come with him. She tried to get the FT to transfer her but they wouldn’t do it. New York is for senior reporters only and she was very much a cub. Apparently they had a big row, then they made up and Tim proposed. She thought about quitting her job and going to live with him in America, but in the end she decided to stay in London. They tried the long-distance relationship thing for about half a year, but it didn’t work out. Tim met someone else, apparently, and the relationship fizzled out.’

  ‘This Tim fellow still in New York?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Full name, contact number?’

  ‘Tim Whalen. I don’t have a contact number. You think he might have some insight into the case?’

  ‘I have no clue, but if I was going to top myself over a broken heart I think I’d try one last communication with the ex,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’ll see if I can track down a phone number, and if I can, I’ll get it over to you,’ Broadbent said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What will I tell them is the official cause of death?’

  ‘Uhm, we don’t have an official cause of death at the moment. There will be an autopsy later today, but barring anything out of the ordinary, we’ll be tagging this one as a suicide.’

  We talked for another ten minutes or so, but nothing pertinent came up. Mr Bigelow had phoned his wife in South Africa, so I was spared the necessity of that notification. While I was on the phone, Lawson called BT and got them to fax over the list of every phone call that was made from the Coast Road Hotel in the previous twenty-four hours, which was smart work.

  He was a good copper, Lawson, almost too bloody good and we lived in fear that he’d be nicked by a big Belfast command, or by the Fraud Squad, or Special Branch.

  Crabbie, Lawson and I worked our way through the list of calls. All local, save a few to England, half a dozen to Finland, but none to America.

  We bagged Lily’s gear and put it in the evidence room.

  ‘Shouldn’t we send it to her father?’ Lawson asked.

  Crabbie shook his head. ‘We’ll have to hang on to it until after the coroner’s inquest and we’ll need to keep that CCTV footage too. If the coroner asks to see it we’ll have to be prepared to show it to him.’

  We got a call from the Medical Examiner in Belfast, asking if any one of us wanted to attend the autopsy which would be getting under way within the hour.

  I turned to Crabbie.

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I hate those things. Always have.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to go,’ I said.

  We both turned to look at Lawson. He was horrified.

  ‘Oh come on, not me. I’m still new here, aren’t I? And it’s snowing. What if I faint? Let the station down?’

  ‘What do you think, Crabbie, will we let him off, just this once?’

  ‘I think we will,’ he said.

  I explained to Lawson that the medical examiners generally disliked it when cops attended the autopsy and only ever asked out of courtesy. There was an unspoken rule that we didn’t poach in their terrain and they didn’t poach in ours.

  ‘You can go on home, lads. There’s nothing much going to happen now, I would imagine. I’ll hold the fort,’ I said.

  ‘But you’ve been on since the first shift,’ Crabbie objected.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. And besides I don’t want to go home. Depressing back there. Cold, empty house.’

  Crabbie emptied his pipe into the litter bin and cleared his throat. He looked nervous and I could tell he was about to launch another bold, doomed Edwardian exploratory expedition into my private life. ‘A girl your own age, Sean, I could ask Helen, uhm,’ he said before his voice trailed off into an embarrassed silence.

  I looked at him. ‘You’re right, of course,’ I agreed. ‘Thanks. Maybe I’ll take you up on that. Go on home, the pair of you, the roads are going to get bad soon.’

  Later. My office. Darkness. Heavy snow outside. Traffic slowed to a crawl on the A2. Fog horns from ships out in the lough. My car had been fixed and rather cheekily I’d sent a constable to my house to pick it up and drive it to the barracks, reminding him to look underneath for bombs, to go easy on the clutch and to bring me the Steve Reich album from the back seat.

  He’d returned safely and I looked at the record. Interesting art work on the sleeve. A painting by someone called Henry Darger. Have to check him out. I took the record out of the press and examined it for imperfections. Number twenty-two of a pressing of a hundred, it said on the label.

  Twenty-two of a hundred? They hadn’t told me that in HMV. Did they even know? I might have got a bargain here. I put the record carefully back in its sleeve. This was too rare to play on my office equipment.

  Instead, I found Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet and put it on. I closed my eyes and after a few bars I wasn’t there. I wasn’t in Carrickfergus, or this office. I wasn’t in 1987, I was wherever the Second Movement of Triple Quartet was taking place: some ashy grey wasteland, where, no doubt, just out of sight Sisyphus was pushing a boulder up a volcanic slope.

  A knock at the door.

  Chief Inspector McArthur.

  ‘Come in, sir, have a seat,’ I said.

  He sat down. I went to the drinks trolley and poured him a glass of Jura, which he took with thanks.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be on your way home?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m just waiting for the preliminary autopsy results on Miss Bigelow. ME might call me. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.’

  ‘I see. Any trouble with the Finns?’

  ‘Nope. And they all caught their planes, so the NIO is happy.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘They were quite an eccentric bunch. Think the civil servants were glad to see the back of them.’

  McArthur shook his head. ‘That’s the wrong attitude, Duffy. We’ll all be delighted, I’m sure, if they decide to build their mobile phone plant here rather than in the Republic.’

  ‘Oh yeah, of course, sir,’ I said.

  ‘This is very good whis–’

  The phone rang. I picked it up.

  ‘Uh huh? … Yes … We had noticed that. Tell him thank you, anyway.’

  I hung up and looked at McArthur. The whisky had dulled his wits slightly and he was grinning like a simpleton.

  ‘What was that about?’ he asked.

  ‘The ME’s nurse passed on a note to us from the doctor. He wanted to know if we’d noticed that the victim’s shoe was on the wrong foot.’

  ‘Wrong foot?’

  ‘The victim had her left shoe on her right foot. I thought, initially, that there might be something untoward about that, but my mind was somewhat put at ease by WPC Warren.’

  ‘How was that?’

  I explained our theory about Lily walking up the spiral staircase and the keep roof barefoot, only putting on her shoe to jump.

  ‘So definitely a suicide then,’ he said.

  ‘It’s looking that way.’

  ‘As long as we can rule out the castle ghost, I’m happy,’ he said, with a wink.

  ‘Yes, sir, there was no supernatur–’

  ‘Chief Inspector! Chief Inspector, are you still here?’ Mabel was yelling from her desk.

  ‘I’m down here in Duffy’s office,’ McArthur called back.

  ‘Oh, sir, I thought you’d want to know immediately!’ Mabel said, running breathlessly into the room.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Chief Superintendent McBain, sir!’ she said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Turn on the news, sir!’

  I turned on BBC Radio Ulster.

  ‘… At the scene of a car bomb in the village of Glenoe, County An
trim that happened late this morning.’

  I looked at Mabel, who was crying now.

  ‘How do they know that it was McBain?’ I asked.

  ‘I confirmed it with district,’ she said.

  ‘… the victim is reported to be a senior police officer. No paramilitary group as yet has claimed responsibility, but our security spokesman Dermot Clawson says that the mercury tilt device bears all the hallmarks of the IRA …’ the newsreader continued.

  I turned off the radio in a state of shock. Ed McBain was one of the good guys. I’d known the big ganch for years.

  ‘Jesus Christ! I was just talking to him yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘Me too. We should get up there! It’s insane that the BBC are there before us. Happened this morning and we’re only finding out about this now?’ McArthur said.

  I shook my head. ‘Glenoe village is not in our jurisdiction, sir. That’s why we haven’t heard. It’s Larne RUC. Their case.’

  ‘Even so, we should offer our help!’

  ‘Uhm, they’re a bit of an awkward bunch, sir. I’ll call them up and offer our assistance, but I doubt they’ll take it.’

  A sobered, grim-faced McArthur nodded and went to his office. A sobbing Mabel went with him.

  The phone on my desk was ringing.

  ‘Duffy, CID,’ I said.

  ‘Sean, did you hear the news?’ Crabbie asked.

  ‘I did. Horrifying.’

  ‘Mercury tilt switch bomb under his car.’

  ‘That’s what they’re saying.’

  ‘You let your guard down for a minute and you get blown up. I’m coming in,’ Crabbie said.

  ‘There’s no point, mate. It’s Larne’s case. You stay home.’

  ‘Aye, OK. He was a good copper, wasn’t he?’

  ‘That he was,’ I agreed. ‘All right, Crabbie, I’ll see you later.’

  McArthur went to get a coat and I put in the courtesy call to Larne RUC. A new DI that I didn’t know, named Armstrong, surprised me by saying that ‘We would love your help, Inspector Duffy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’d love your help.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I be getting in the way?’

  ‘Oh, no, not at all. We’d love it if you came down, Duffy. You knew McBain, did you?’