The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  Bunty laughed. He was drunk but not yet indiscreet.

  ‘We’re the cowboys. All the rest are the Indians.’

  Candlestick by then understood that Bunty was using them to encourage Herron and the UDA to operate on two fronts. Bunty wanted the Protestant paramilitaries to fight their own war against the IRA, and also to terrorize the local Catholic population into rejecting its support for the IRA. The message ‘all taigs are targets’ had begun to appear daubed on loyalist walls. Candlestick was left wondering to what extent Herron was a puppet of the British, perhaps even being run by Bunty.

  Bunty laughed even harder in December when a bomb went off in McGurk’s bar in North Queen Street, killing fifteen Catholics. The security forces announced an IRA own-goal, when it was in fact the work of the UVF, an operation planned by Baker and Candlestick.

  ‘Hell of a bang,’ said Bunty. ‘Any retaliation?’

  Candlestick said he had heard that the IRA had taken to driving around and shooting Protestants on the streets.

  ‘Fuck me, no. Pardon my indiscretion, it’s the Brits doing that.’

  Candlestick realized he still had a lot to learn.

  12

  THE big clock on the wall said the man was late. Vinnie listened to the noise of traffic bleed into the country music song on the jukebox. He was waiting in the same bar they’d taken him to before. It was large and crowded enough not to attract attention but not yet full, which made him feel exposed.

  Most of the time Vinnie was able to persuade himself that he had the cunning to see both sides off. He’d survive. He had always lied well, though he preferred to think of it as making up stories. As a kid he had been good at avoiding punishment.

  He sat and waited for the policeman and rued his breaks. Maybe if he hadn’t lost his regular girlfriend as a result of the whole business he’d have had the strength to resist getting sucked into the peeler’s net. The night he had gone off joyriding he had lost her to Brendan, who was supposed to be his best friend. This girl – not the one he’d been joyriding with – let him have sex without a rubber because of a scam she had of getting the pill from a sister in Manchester.

  When Vinnie found out about her and Brendan he was that upset he went out and stole a car, an Astra GL, regardless of any threat of punishment. He drove down to Twinbrook, where he put on a show for a crowd that gathered to watch him burning up the road and doing handbrake turns. He didn’t care who saw or if anyone caught him. But nothing happened and soon after eleven he went home, dumping the Astra on the way.

  Feeling he had nothing left after losing the girl – both girls, with the McMahon one still in hospital, he’d heard – Vinnie started watching the IRA man, O’Mara, as a way of mourning for the rubber-free girl, who would not even come to the door when he’d gone round. He drank in O’Mara’s pub, taking Des, a friend from his Fianna days, who had kept a clean sheet since. Des knew people in the pub and Vinnie found himself on the fringes of a crowd of more or less decent citizens, most of whom he knew by sight.

  O’Mara usually arrived late and drank only a couple of beers. At first Vinnie was not sure if he intended to pass on any of this information, which struck him as pretty pathetic. Anyway, he preferred the look of O’Mara to either Heinz or Eric with their stupid pretend names. O’Mara looked like the jolly farmer in an old children’s picture book of his, always laughing and joking.

  The meeting Heinz was late for was their third. He hadn’t seen Eric since the first.

  When Blair arrived twenty minutes late, the bar was full enough for Vinnie to feel less anxious. Blair asked how the job was going.

  ‘Fine,’ said Vinnie.

  ‘I hear you were ill today.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Vinnie, refusing to be drawn. ‘Amazing how news gets around.’

  He’d slept in because of a hangover.

  Blair had arranged for Vinnie to do a labouring job on a building site in the north of the city for a contractor who paid cash and asked no questions. Vinnie was suspicious when the offer was made, but, as he had not worked in a year and liked money, he decided to take the job and play dumb with Heinz on the question of information. But it didn’t turn out like that. Instead, Vinnie realized he was being outmanoeuvred when the policeman gave him the address of a loyalist arms dump to pass on to O’Mara.

  ‘To give you an in, like,’ said Blair.

  The story was that Vinnie had come by the information during an evening’s drinking with another labourer, a Protestant – he was even given a name – who bragged of knowing about the weapons and had taken the sceptical Vinnie along to look.

  Vinnie wondered at the extent of Blair’s plan, and how the bits were meant to fit together: fixing him with work that gave him access to information to pass on to O’Mara, to what end?

  Blair finished his drink quickly.

  ‘No more for me, but get yourself another.’

  He gave Vinnie twenty pounds. When Vinnie came back from the bar the other man was gone.

  Later that evening Vinnie approached O’Mara and asked if he could have a word. O’Mara inclined his head, like a bishop receiving an audience.

  ‘What about, son?’

  ‘In private,’ said Vinnie, like he was in The Godfather. ‘If you don’t mind.’

  O’Mara nodded to a man across the bar and all three went into a back room, which was empty except for stacked chairs. Vinnie was frisked and declared clean by the minder. O’Mara cocked his head, indicating that Vinnie should step forward, and when he did O’Mara drove his fist into the softness of his stomach.

  It was a clinical punch, executed with the minimum of fuss, Vinnie realized, even as he gasped for air, doubled over. He was aware of O’Mara gently holding him by the shoulders, massaging them, and making him stay down until he had got his breath back.

  ‘There, there. You’ll be right as rain in a second.’

  When Vinnie had recovered enough to stand up, O’Mara patted him on the face.

  ‘No more cheek, son. So long as you understand that, we’ll get along fine.’

  13

  CROSS asked for, and got, extra help to carry out a door-to-door inquiry to help reconstruct the missing thirty-six hours in the life of Mary Elam.

  Catholic neighbours were reluctant to co-operate, Mary having been one of theirs. Rather than imply criticism of her lax behaviour, they preferred to pretend ignorance, beyond acknowledging her as a bit of a lark and surely the sister of a saint. Local Protestants were more forthcoming. To them Mary Elam was a woman of loose morals and an inadequate mother.

  ‘There’s several screws missin’, for a start,’ said the woman living adjacent. But for all her nosy vigilance, she hadn’t seen anything either. ‘She doesn’t do it on her own doorstep, that’s for sure, and she’s easy enough to spot skippin’ down the road, but I remember nothing on the Tuesday. Mind, the curtains are always drawn and half the time she’s sleepin’ off the drink.’

  Bennett’s, the local taxi firm, was at least able to provide details of Mary’s regular haunts, Catholic bars on the edge of the district and beyond. But she had not been spotted in any during the unaccounted-for period.

  Cross asked Hargreaves to organize tracing the men connected to the telephone numbers on Mary’s livingroom wall. It was a job that required more discretion than Cross thought him capable of. But as most of the men would probably turn out to be married, he figured they’d probably rather talk to a man, so he told Westerby to look into Mary’s background.

  Cross sought relief in working long hours on the case. The days bled into each other and his domestic problems receded. Several nights it was after midnight before he finished. Too tired to drive home and too late to call Deidre, he slept in the cells.

  Hargreaves had little to report on Mary Elam’s men. ‘The general picture, like one of her casual fellers said, is of a girl who liked a good time.’

  ‘Any suspects?’

  Hargreaves shook his head. Cross turned and asked W
esterby for her report on Mary.

  ‘She was an affectionate if careless mother, but Josephine could be relied on to look after the children. There seems to have been no bad feeling about that. However, Mary’s behaviour did come to the attention of the welfare people, who interviewed her. I’ve not talked to the social worker as she’s away, but Josephine says it caused a lot of resentment because the local Catholics were sure it was a Protestant neighbour who’d reported her.’

  Cross suspected that Mary’s promiscuity was the real cause of affront. Her friendships with men depended on favours or presents in exchange for sex. The pattern of sexual activity was interesting, he thought. It took place away from home and often involved travelling by taxi to one of several pubs. It seemed Mary only had sex with men she knew, though there were at least a dozen of those. Cross asked Hargreaves where they went, given that she didn’t take them home.

  ‘They were reluctant about that, sir. One said they used his van or went outside in summer.’

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Cross.

  Hargreaves looked stumped. Cross sensed he was embarrassed by the Elam case. He looked at Westerby.

  ‘I think she must have had a room somewhere.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She wasn’t a prostitute in the usual sense and I can see her being quite fussy about where she took them. Not home, for a start. Her bedroom is, well, untidy but quite romantic, not the sort of place you’d take someone unless you knew them well. It also suggests she’d want some comfort, but I can’t see her using a hotel because it’d be money she’d rather have for herself.’

  Cross nodded and told Hargreaves to find out where Mary went with the men because it may have been where she was killed.

  Hargreaves looked irritated and sighed noisily when Westerby added, just as it looked as though the meeting was over, ‘One more thing, sir. This behaviour with men was quite recent.’

  Cross was surprised. The messy patterns of Mary’s life had suggested long-term habits.

  ‘According to Josephine, Mary’s disappearances started less than a year ago. Before that she had been a reliable mother, slightly vague but a good provider. She had a man living with her for about three years, not the children’s father.’

  ‘Where’s the children’s father?’

  ‘Zaire, the last anyone heard. He’s an engineer and before he left five years ago they lived in a smart house, with a car. According to Josephine, Mary had done well for someone of their background.’

  What followed with the husband was the usual Irish divorce. He was only supposed to be gone a year but then didn’t come back. When the cheques stopped coming, Mary sold the house to be near her sister.

  ‘What happened to the other man?’ asked Cross.

  ‘Seamus McGinley. Same sort of thing. He drifted off to the Republic to find work – he’s a carpenter – and didn’t send for them like he’d promised.’

  ‘Run a check on both of them, just to be sure.’

  ‘I’ve checked on McGinley,’ said Westerby. ‘He’s in Galway living with another woman. He reported to work both days of Mary’s disappearance. And on the husband I’m waiting to hear back from the consulate.’

  Mary Elam’s autopsy confirmed that death was by strangulation. There was no water in the lungs. The skin on her wrists showed signs of chafing, perhaps the result of being bound. The stomach contents revealed nothing unusual. Her liver showed a history of alcohol abuse. There were no signs of sexual intercourse. Ricks, as fastidious as ever, remarked disdainfully, ‘Unless of course he masturbated into her underwear.’ The underwear was missing.

  14

  HARGREAVES uncovered the first lead in the Elam case. More questioning had produced a witness, an eight-year-old child. Cross was about to hand the statement back when the name of the witness caught his eye.

  ‘Teresa Reilly? Josephine Reilly’s daughter?’

  Cross couldn’t believe that they’d questioned the whole neighbourhood without bothering to check the immediate family. Hargreaves looked embarrassed.

  ‘It’s not quite as bad as it looks. The wee girl was upstairs sick with a fever that day and was still in bed when the Reillys were questioned.’

  ‘Give the man who spotted it a medal.’

  ‘It was me, sir.’

  Cross looked at Teresa Reilly’s statement again. She described seeing someone from her bedroom window who she thought was her Aunt Mary getting into a red van some time on the Tuesday morning. When shown pictures she picked out a Ford Escort.

  ‘We cross-checked on the Vulcan,’ said Hargreaves. Vulcan was the high-speed computer log of vehicles registered in Northern Ireland. ‘There are eight red Escorts in the immediate vicinity, all accounted for. We’re working on similar ones in the areas where she drank.’

  ‘What was her temperature?’

  ‘Her temperature?’

  ‘The little girl’s fever, man. If she had a high fever she might have imagined the whole thing.’

  Cross had not meant to snap, but his gut told him that the girl’s description was unreliable.

  His mood did not improve when he discovered later that Westerby was responsible for discovering the Reilly girl and not Hargreaves as he had claimed.

  By then Cross had the feeling that his other investigation into the frozen man was close to a state of complete inertia and soon to be consigned to that limbo of unsolved cases whose only chance of revival was a lucky break. It was not a crime that could be sustained by some larger force – like public outrage – which would lead to resources being thrown at it until a solution was produced. It hadn’t even rated a mention in the papers.

  He went back to the autopsy report. A note of the missing teeth led him to enquire what percentage of the population in their fifties wore sets of dentures and he wasted several hours finding out the depressing answer before abandoning the idea. Checking dental records would be too time consuming for their limited resources. Unlike vehicles, which were computer logged, teeth were still card indexed.

  At the end of a frustrating day, Cross decided that his last option was to call Blair, who surprised him by suggesting a drink in the bar. Cross was puzzled by the invitation, as they had never socialized before.

  ‘How’s your man in the road?’ Blair asked, not sounding that interested.

  ‘Pretty hopeless, but I wouldn’t mind another word with the O’Connor boy.’

  Blair looked evasive, which Cross took to mean that the boy was now Blair’s informer.

  ‘I need to give him one more go,’ said Cross. ‘I’ve got nothing else.’

  ‘Hardly seems worth the bother.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  ‘I hear McMahon has taken up permanent watch at his daughter’s bedside,’ said Blair, changing the subject. ‘He ought to be careful. Word will get out.’

  Mention of McMahon seemed to loosen him up.

  Like many officers in the front line, Blair took the attitude that the IRA was a cancer that had to be destroyed by whatever means necessary. It was the fault of gutless politicians that they were left in the absurd position of bending rules which no one really cared about, then were held accountable. Blair was particularly scathing about the term ‘shoot to kill’.

  ‘Of course it’s shoot to kill, it’s not going to be anything else with the weapons they give us. There’d be a lot more squealing if the IRA was running around completely out of hand.’

  Cross let him talk on, unwilling to be drawn.

  For Blair there were two codes never to be violated: the protection of operational methods and police sources of information. Cross realized that the Stalker inquiry was the real target of his spleen, poking into areas where it would only do damage. Unarmed men in the field of fire deserved what they got.

  ‘We’re not cowboys. We do our homework. We have a pretty good strike rate but we’re not infallible.’ Blair took another gulp of beer and said, ‘Well, at least Sir Jack’s fighting our corner. He can’t stand Stalke
r.’

  Cross pointed out that it was the Chief Constable who had called for the inquiry in the first place.

  ‘Daft, isn’t it? By the way, how do you find Sergeant Hargreaves?’

  ‘He’s a good policeman.’

  ‘He’s put in for a transfer to SB.’

  Cross was surprised.

  ‘Don’t tell him you know. It’s early days yet. We should talk about him some time.’

  ‘I can’t say I know him beyond the job. He’s got a crippled daughter, I believe.’

  It was Blair’s turn to look surprised.

  ‘Crippled by a bomb?’

  ‘Since birth, I think. She lives with the mother. They’re separated.’

  ‘As for the O’Connor boy, I’ll see what I can do. But not at the barracks.’

  ‘I’ll meet him wherever.’

  Blair phoned the next day to say that Vinnie would be outside the chemist’s near York Road station that night at eight. Cross was uneasy as he put down the phone. He was never comfortable in Blair’s orbit.

  Cross arrived early at York Road station and passed the time driving around the block. He spotted Vinnie ten minutes later, walking with shoulders hunched against the cold, underdressed in a denim jacket. He let him wait outside the chemist’s while he checked neither of them was being followed then pulled up alongside. Vinnie glanced around nervously before getting into the Volvo.

  Neither spoke. The boy blew into his hands to warm them. Eventually Cross said that he wanted to go back to the site of the accident.

  The boy lit a cigarette. He seemed frightened to Cross, who had a sudden craving to smoke even though it was years since he had.

  ‘Can I have a cigarette?’

  Vinnie seemed surprised by the request and Cross felt obliged to offer an explanation.

  ‘I stopped but the smell of that makes me want one again rather badly.’

  ‘It’s a danger to your health,’ said Vinnie, handing one across.

  Cross lit it with the dashboard lighter. The cigarette tasted strangely sweet, the sensation as familiar as if he had smoked only yesterday. The sudden invasion of nicotine turned him light-headed and he stalled the car at a set of lights.