Rain Dogs

by Adrian McKinty

  ‘Shoot!’ Ek yelled.

  I let it run past me across the ice.

  Ek fired the rest of his clip.

  ‘Shoot!’ he yelled again and ripped the gun out of my hands; but it was too late, the wolf was gone.

  ‘Why didn’t you fire?’ he snarled at me.

  ‘I didn’t want to.’

  ‘You are a fool, Duffy. A fool and a coward.’

  ‘I just didn’t want to shoot the –’ I began and stopped when I saw that Ek had turned and was pointing the AK-47 at me. There was a full clip in the weapon. At this range half a dozen of those big rounds would rip me to pieces.

  Miller was nowhere nearby. Hornborg and Lawson were back at the house. The whole thing would be a tragic accident. If I turned and ran he’d spray me on full auto. I wouldn’t get five feet.

  I blinked the snowflakes out of my eyes and saw Ek grinning at me in the dark.

  ‘I can see the future, Duffy – a closed coffin funeral for you, I think. Do you have a girl? Will she weep for you?’

  Yes. Beth would weep.

  She’d look good in black.

  Ek lowered the muzzle and pointed it at my heart, his face rigid behind that crude iron sight.

  I was not afraid. Somehow I was not afraid. Through my trouser pocket I touched my wallet where I kept the postcard of Guido Reni’s Michael Tramples Satan.

  ‘In answer to your question: hundreds of civilians, Duffy. As we Panzergrenadiers marched back to Berlin. More than I can remember. In Leningrad, in Poland, in those final weeks on the Oder. Russians. Poles. Germans. Your death would not make me bat an eye.’

  The rifle. The muzzle. The iron sight. The steady hand of Harald Ek. In the background the distant strains of Magnus Lindberg – perfect dying music.

  The cold clawed at my face with dead man’s fingers.

  A thousand miles away, Morrigan the crow turned her harsh heathen head to the east.

  ‘Sir? Sir?’ Lawson called out to me, from the edge of the ice.

  ‘Over here, Lawson!’

  Lawson approached us, holding his AK-47. Ek lowered the weapon to his side.

  ‘The wolf escaped,’ Ek said.

  ‘Is everything all right, sir?’ Lawson asked.

  ‘It is now,’ I said.

  Ek began walking back across the ice towards the wood. ‘Hurry, gentlemen, if Constable Hornborg is going to get you to your hotel room before the road closes she will have to leave now.’

  I touched my wallet again. The Patron Saint of warriors, mariners, pilgrims and policemen had protected me once more. Saint Michael and the timely appearance of Lawson with a Kalashnikov.

  21: MERCURY TILT

  Oulu–Helsinki–Manchester–Belfast. The Mezzanine and Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory occupying the time.

  Crabbie meeting us at the airport in a Land Rover. Me filling him in on everything: the pointing of the gun, the pseudo confession, the pseudo threats. Lawson stepping in at the last minute. Crabbie was surprised, but not shocked. Ek had given him a bad feeling, too.

  While we’d been away, he had brought our inquiries about Kinkaid YOI to the RUC Sex Crimes Unit at Newtownabbey but so far they hadn’t got back to him.

  We returned to the station for the interview with the Chief Inspector and I made up a bunch of bullshit that would keep him happy: ‘We liaised successfully with the Finnish police and conducted our interviews with the competence and authority you would expect from officers in the RUC.’

  Sergeant Kenny Dalziel from admin was not so easily impressed. ‘I don’t know why two officers had to go to Finland. Two officers to follow up a potential lead on two cases, one of which is the responsibility of the DPP’s office and the other the responsibility of Larne RUC. We’re going to get an internal audit over this little jaunt of yours Duffy, oh, yes, mark my words, and you’ll need to fill in form 890 or I’ll have your guts for –’

  Tune him out. Tune them all out. Always.

  Dalziel stopped speaking.

  ‘Did any of that go in, Duffy?’ he asked.

  ‘No. And it’s Inspector Duffy to you, Kenny.’

  ‘Your comeuppance has been a long time coming. You know what hubris is, Duffy?’

  ‘A type of pasta?’

  ‘Hubris, Duffy. Mark my words.’

  ‘You’re going to have to explain yourself better, Kenny. Greek mythology has always been my Achilles elbow.’

  Fury knitting his brows in a way that you hoped would lead to a stroke, but knew it wouldn’t.

  Back to Coronation Road to sleep. Window wipers on maximum.

  Park the Beemer, walk down the path in a downpour. Raining so hard it failed to wet me when it hit. Just bounced off …

  Cat pleased to see me. Neighbourhood kids hadn’t killed him. Play with him and listen to Peetie Wheatstraw’s ‘Police Station Blues’. Sleep upstairs, by the light of the paraffin heater. Blue flame, petroleum smell.

  Comforting. Comforting as opium …

  Phone ringing in the hall.

  Downstairs in my duvet.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Now then, young man, where have you been?’

  ‘Is this Jimmy Savile?’

  ‘It is.’

  It was either Jimmy Savile or someone pretending to be Jimmy Savile. Anyone could do Savile’s voice. He’d been part of the cultural furniture for decades.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Savile/faux Savile asked.

  ‘Finland. Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been doing work for Mrs Currie and Mrs Thatcher and I told them about you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that. They’re not my type.’

  ‘I told them you’ve been going around asking questions, making innuendos, bothering friends of mine.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Never you mind, pal! Put a stop to it or I’ll put a stop to it for you. You can say what you like about me but when you go after friends of mine that’s a line you’ll regret crossing.’

  Was this Threaten Sean Duffy Day or something? I was weary of all of this. Ek, Dalziel and now Jimmy fucking Savile.

  ‘Am I making myself clear, Inspector Duffy?’ Savile growled.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Why don’t you do everyone a favour and just fuck off?’ I said and hung up the phone.

  Next to the phone I wrote ‘this wasn’t a dream’, in case I thought it was in the morning.

  Upstairs to the cold, cold bed.

  Sleep.

  Cat meowing, low winter sun coming in through the blinds.

  Walked to the window and looked out. Coronation Road on a wet February day. Mist rolling down from the Antrim Hills.

  Coronation Road. I was making a Deep Map of this street. I knew its nooks. I knew the cracks in the pavement. I knew the parked cars. I was the world expert in its sociology and geography. There goes the man who dresses up as his dead wife. There goes Mr Grimes who walks like that because he was tortured by the Japanese in Burma. There goes somebody I don’t know. Black Parka again. Didn’t like the look of him. I watched him walk around the bend in Coronation Road. Who was that guy?

  Later I remembered the footprint in the back garden and one or two other instances of feeling that I was being observed.

  Downstairs. A note next to the phone: ‘this wasn’t a dream’.

  I called Crabbie at the station. ‘Betty Anderson grassed us up to her mate Jimmy Savile. He called me last night at home, warning us off her.’

  ‘What exactly did he say?’

  I told Crabbie the entire brief conversation.

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘Without making them annoyed, we get the Sex Crimes Unit to redouble their efforts.’

  ‘I’ll get on to them again.’

  ‘Do that.’

  Kitchen.

  Radio 3 playing another Bruckner which was a bit much for this hour of the morning, the BBC perhaps labouring under the Elizabethan theory that
melancholy music could draw out the melancholy humours. The announcer said it was the Fourth Symphony played by the Vienna Philharmonic, but she didn’t say which of the various scores the orchestra had gone with. Symphony Number Four existed in five different versions that varied in length from sixty-five to eighty minutes. It was a serious classical-DJ offence not to tell the listener which one it had been. In protest, I flipped to Radio 1.

  Shower. Dress. Still pouring, so I got my heavy raincoat.

  ‘Goodbye, cat. Protect the house, don’t go near me records!’

  Outside to the BMW, checked underneath it for mercury tilt switch bombs, didn’t find any, got in.

  Key in the ignition.

  Hair sticking up on back of neck.

  Fear of the unseen. Something menacing, close, terrible.

  ‘Wait a minute … Wait a goddamn minute.’

  Key gently out of the ignition. Car door open. Out of the car again.

  Down on my knees. Down on my knees in the cold, hard rain.

  Look behind the rear driver’s side wheel for a bomb.

  A box? A wire?

  Nothing. No bomb.

  Adrenalin. Heart pumping.

  Round the other side of the car. The rear passenger’s side.

  And there it was.

  A brick of Semtex. A bag of nails. A battery. A detonator. A vial of mercury connected to the detonator.

  Holy Mary Mother of God.

  Shaking.

  Inside to the telephone.

  999.

  Cigarette.

  ‘What is the nature of your emergency?’

  ‘Love, I think we’re gonna need the bomb squad.’

  22: CLOSING THE NET

  How to make yourself popular with the neighbours, just when they’re finally getting used to you after seven years on the street.

  Banging on doors. ‘Out! Everybody out! Everybody to the end of the street!’

  ‘But it’s raining.’

  ‘There’s a bomb under my car! Everybody out!’

  Evacuation of ten houses up and ten houses down from the Beemer. Dirty looks. Grumbling.

  ‘I’m missing the news.’

  ‘The weans are at their breakfast.’

  ‘I was asleep.’

  Army Land Rovers and Saracens. Police from as far away as Ballymena. All of us standing around in the mist and rain.

  The bomb-disposal unit of the Royal Engineers arrived and began their work.

  A Lieutenant William Cooper, in full bomb-disposal rig, assessed the situation, looked underneath my car, got a tool, snipped the wires of the detonator, thus rendering the explosive device inert. He removed the Semtex block by hand and put it in the Saracen. The rest of the device he left to his Sergeant.

  Applause from the crowd.

  I shook Cooper’s hand. ‘Thanks, mate. That was impressive.’

  He took off his massive helmet. ‘It wasn’t terribly challenging, actually. These ones are comparatively easy. You just cut the detonator wire. Nothing to it,’ he said, with sangfroid.

  ‘As long as you don’t nudge the vial of mercury while you’re doing it?’ I suggested.

  ‘No, you mustn’t nudge the vial of mercury. That wouldn’t be pleasant. Listen, old chap, we’re going to have to do a controlled explosion on the boot of your car to see if there’s a device in there. Hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘What does that entail?’

  ‘We’ll fire a shotgun into the boot and if there’s not a bomb in there, it won’t go off. And if there is a bomb in there, it will go off.’

  ‘So how is that a controlled explosion? That’s just an explosion explosion. You’ll wreck my car.’

  ‘That’s the way we do things.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, I’m not having that. You’re not blowing up my Beemer.’

  ‘We have to.’

  ‘I’ll open the boot.’

  ‘No you won’t. I’m in charge here, Inspector Duffy. Not you.’

  The remote-controlled army robot drove up to the back of the BMW. It waited for a minute and then it fired its shotgun at the boot.

  The little boys, who were disappointed that the Brit lieutenant hadn’t been blown to bits, cheered en masse.

  There was no bomb in the boot. And in truth the damage to the car wasn’t too bad.

  Forensics did their work and the bomb was taken away for analysis. The good people of Coronation Road went back to their homes. Some of them patted me on the back, others shook my hand. Kyle Acheson, who worked in a garage, said he’d fix my boot for nothing. ‘It’s no problem, you helped with Jeanie’s ex and that restraining order. Least I can do. And you’ve got bottle, so you have. You’ve got the heart of a tiger, Sean.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s why they gave me the lifetime ban at the zoo, Kyle.’

  Kyle didn’t get it. But that was OK.

  Chief Inspector McArthur came to see me with the number of the divisional psychiatrist and the injunction that I had to take at least three full days off before returning to work.

  ‘Go see Doctor Havercamp, he’s very good. We’re encouraging our officers to talk about their issues after events like this.’

  ‘Maybe I will, sir, maybe I will.’

  Instead, a day later, I called forensic for their analysis of the bomb.

  A rather crude home-made device. No fingerprints. No claim of responsibility because it was a failed hit.

  ‘Yes, Inspector Duffy it was similar to the device which killed Chief Superintendent McBain.’

  ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’

  I’d been given the rest of the week off on full pay, so I did what any sensible man would do on his off-time and drove down to Larne RUC, to see how they were getting on with the Ed McBain case.

  The station was a morgue that smelled of chips and booze and fear and cigarette smoke. Young men becoming fat old men fast. Police station blues indeed. The case was closed. Ed McBain had been murdered by an IRA active service unit by way of a mercury tilt switch bomb. End of story.

  CI Kennedy wouldn’t speak to me but I found a DC called McGrath who was too new on the force to be completely corrupted.

  ‘Tell me about this bomb,’ I said, over a pint at Billy Andy’s Spirit Grocer (the best pub in Larne).

  He furtively handed me the file, which was so thin it was either a case of inept bungling, or a postmodern critique of police methodology.

  ‘The bomb was interesting. Quite different from the usual IRA type. Cruder. Basically just a block of Semtex, a vial of mercury, a battery and an ignitor. More like a UVF device if you ask me, or even an independent job.’

  ‘How long would it take to make a bomb like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. If you were working from a plan? Two hours?’

  ‘Tell me about the IRA code word claiming responsibility?’

  ‘“Wolfhound.”’

  ‘Which has been current for about four years. Which means that everyone in the police, the media, the army and the paramilitary organisations know it. Maybe 30,000 people.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, sir?’ the curly-haired, shiny-faced, hazel-eyed, young DC McGrath asked.

  ‘Oh, only that if you wanted to kill Ed McBain for personal reasons and you wanted to blame it on the IRA it would be incredibly easy to do it if you knew a little about bomb-making technology and had access to some Semtex, or even a ready-made bomb.’

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  ‘Who indeed? Maybe someone who had encountered a similar case like that in the past …’ I said, a dark idea beginning to grow in my mind.

  ‘CI Kennedy never mentioned any of this,’ McGrath said.

  ‘He wouldn’t. Come on, finish your drink. I’ll drive you back to the station.’

  Billy Andy’s pub to Larne RUC, to the Coast Road Hotel.

  I found Kevin Donnolly behind Reception. ‘Ah, Inspector Duffy, so nice to see you again. You’re looking tan, heard you were away on your holidays,’ he said, doing his best Juli
an Simmons impersonation.

  ‘It’s not a tan. I was in Finland.’

  ‘Oh, nice for some, saunas and all that, eh?’

  ‘No time for chit-chat, Kevin. The night Mr Laakso’s wallet went missing. Remember that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The Finns were out late weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Do you happen to remember what time they got back that night?’

  ‘Oooh, no, not exactly. I don’t keep those sorts of records.’

  ‘Roughly, then?’

  ‘Well, it would have been after eleven, because I had to let them in.’

  ‘Eleven? Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Yes. I shut the doors at eleven and you have to get buzzed in after that. And they were buzzed in, so they were.’

  ‘So it was some time after eleven?’

  ‘Yes but I couldn’t tell you when. Before twelve, probably but I can’t be sure.’

  Back outside to the Beemer. No bombs underneath. Window wipers on max. Radio 1 on the stereo: ‘Sonic Boom Boy’ by Westworld, followed by ‘Heartache’ by Pepsi and Shirlie, followed by ‘Rock the Night’ by Europe.

  ‘Jesus!’

  Stereo off.

  The Eagle’s Nest on the Knockagh Road.

  Mrs Dunwoody wearing a blonde wig today that didn’t suit her in the least. ‘Ah the brave Inspector Duffy. Can I interest you in –’

  ‘Not today, Mrs D. I have a question for you.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The night the Finns were here? Do you remember what time they left?’

  ‘The Finns …’

  ‘The Finns. The two young gentlemen were with the girls, you were playing cards that night with Mr Ek and Mr Laakso

  …’

  ‘Oh yes. No, no, I’m afraid I don’t remember.’

  ‘But roughly. A rough estimate.’

  ‘I don’t like to be put on the spot,’ she protested.

  ‘Roughly … please.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I could check the security footage. It’ll take a while. I’ll have to ask Ronnie to go through it.’

  ‘Please do so.’

  ‘All right. You’ll have to wait. Do you want to see one of the girls?’

  ‘No, I’ll wait at the bar.’

  ‘I’ll send Niamh down to talk to you.’