by Derek Fee
She glanced up at Wilson’s office and remembered how chuffed she had been when she’d heard that he was going to be working for the most famous detective in the PSNI. She was pleasantly surprised when she realised that the legend was actually flesh and blood just like everybody else. She assumed that it was the same with all heroes. From a distance they appeared to be supermen but up close they were pretty ordinary. It wasn't Wilson’s fault that the recruits had pictured him as some kind of Irish Dirty Harry. What they would have got in reality was a soft-spoken gentle giant who wore a stained sports coat and a shirt that looked like it hadn’t seen an iron in months. She picked up the file and walked towards Wilson’s office.
"Excuse me sir," she remained at the door to the office.
Wilson looked up slowly from the papers he was working on. "Constable McElvaney, what can I do for you?" he said in a bored tone. It was going to be difficult not to think of the young woman in front of him as the ‘father of all things for to bother him’.
She held up the résumé of the Patterson file. "I've been reading this file, sir, and I can't help thinking that there must be some way we can get the bastards who're doing these killings. There must be some way of putting the evidence together so that we can put them away." She didn’t usually use strong language but she realised that within the context of her current situation a concession to the vocabulary of her colleagues would be a necessity.
Wilson stared at the young woman wedged between the door-jams of his office. My God, he thought, what wouldn't I give to return to the state of innocence in which crimes of murder could be solved by diligent policework. The sifting of facts and the testing of hypotheses was the stuff of classic detection and had no relevance to solving crimes in the province of Ulster. This was the land of the informer and the super-grass. It was the land of the confession beaten out of the miscreant during his six days of incarceration in Castlereagh. What price police work in a province where a serial killer can give an interview to a mainline British newspaper concerning his crimes and still walk free? Maybe the idea of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission wasn’t such a bad one after all. It was high time that the Province gave up its psychopathic killers to justice. The families of the dead and injured deserved no less. It was time to dig out the King Rats and the Mad Dogs and to be rid of them forever. He looked into McElvaney's fresh freckled face and wondered whether he should begin the process which would result in destroying the innocence and replacing it with hard-bitten cynicism. There was a major job of mentoring to be done here and he realised that if Constable McElvaney were a man he would have jumped right into the role. Mentoring a woman, especially for someone with his chequered sexual past, might raise more problems than it was worth. The common perception was that he had screwed most of his female colleagues. That wasn't quite true but he had never taken advantage of his rank while pursuing his colleagues. They had all come willingly.
“When you were on the beat did you ever help out in a murder enquiry that was sectarian?” he asked.
“Once or twice,” she replied.
She was leaning against the door-jam now in a pose which in other circumstances Wilson might have considered provocative. For God’s sake, he gave himself a mental slap in the face. You’re old enough to be her father. “How did it go?” he said putting the cap on his pen. “Did they collar anyone for the crime?”
“Everybody in town more or less knew who was responsible but there was no evidence and his alibi was rock solid. He was lifted and interrogated but nothing came of it.”
“Welcome to the real world,” Wilson said looking directly into those hazel eyes. It was day one and he was going to have to get his head around the fact that he was going to spend a lot of time around a very attractive young woman that he could not possibly touch. It would be a difficult enough task for an ageing Lothario. “A group of suspects with cast iron alibis is an Ulster phenomenon.”
“How can we win in a situation like that?” she asked.
"Moira," he was about to add darlin’ but stopped himself just in time. He covered the hiatus with a smile. "To-day, I'd like to begin your initiation as a real murder squad officer by telling you a few home truths."
Wilson beckoned her into the room.
"That file in your hand," Wilson began, "constitutes all we know about that particular crime. You know that we call it the murder book." The look on her face said 'don't treat me like a child'. "In other words there's no further evidence, no new witnesses, in short, nothing else. Most of the murders we do solve are the results of either confessions by the perpetrators or information provided by informants. Confessions are always dodgy and since the `supergrass' period there's been a distinct lack of individuals willing to put their entire kith and kin at risk by informing on their mates. So we're left with the files. You’ve been told that this job was paperwork, paperwork and even more paperwork. There is no super detecting work. We will not sift clues and develop startling conclusions. That’s Agatha Christie and Jessica Fletcher. You’ve read the file. What do you think of the Patterson case? Is it a sectarian murder?"
“I know next to nothing,” she sat gingerly on a pile of folders. “But if we’re going to play the Socratic game that we did in tutorials in college so be it. There’s always a motive. That motive might be sectarian which might make the victim random or there might be a motive which concerns this victim alone. Since we cannot test the hypothesis concerning the sectarian motive because of the random nature of the victim, then we should begin by testing the hypothesis that the victim was intended and that there is a motive. If we find nothing in that direction then we would be justified in accepting that the killing was sectarian.”
Not just a pretty face, Wilson thought. “Your approach is right of course and I’d agree if this murder had taken place on the mainland. A large proportion of murders are domestics and another major category is targets of opportunity, criminals killing each other or murders committed in the course of another crime. The killer and the victim are generally known to each other. Police work consists of rooting around in the rubbish of human relationships until a motive for X to murder Y is found. It might be money or sex or both or any combination of factors but once you’ve found it you’re half way to solving the crime. Let’s get back to the case in point. Patterson had no family, no friends, no pets even. He was a loner who apparently didn’t bother a soul. We’ve only just scratched the surface of his life but for the moment that appears to be it. So what are we left with. George’s theory - an act of mindless violence . The wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could just as easily have been any other citizen. We’ve had too many examples of that kind of crime to discount the possibility. That means no motive other than religion. We could waste a lot of time following your approach. In the meantime the pressure cooker begins to boil. We don’t locate your motive and the boys who still have a gun buried somewhere in the back-garden decide that the scores have to be evened. Then we’re not looking at one murder but two and possible three or four before we can put a stop to the mayhem. This is not Police College and this is not the Big Island. So we start by showing the men with the guns and the public that we’re looking at the bad boys for this one. If in the course of our enquiries we stumble across drugs or women or men for that matter then we go in that direction. But first we try to contain a reaction. Not classic police response but par for the course. This way nobody gets to drag us back into the maelstrom.”
"You make it sound so damn futile," there was a note of tiredness in her voice.
"Just remember that you’re talking to an old cynic" He had no wish to cut off the young woman's enthusiasm completely. "Sometimes we do some police work and we nab a real bad one. But generally the real bastards deal with each other. I suppose you've heard about the `Shankill Butchers' case."
"We discussed it during training," she said.
"It wasn't exactly our finest hour in this station. Eighteen people murdered on our patch. Most of them
mutilated with hatchets and knives. The early victims were Catholics. Then it was anyone who got in their way. We did all the police work, forensiced the evidence until we were blue in the face but in the end of the day we couldn't break the suspects' alibis. We knew that Lenny Murphy and his pals were the culprits but we just couldn't nail the bastards. Thousands of hours of careful police work and the murderers were still on the streets. Just when we were despairing of ever gettin' the swine, the IRA took Lenny out and the rest of the gang folded. We jailed them but they discovered God and now they're rambling the streets just like you and me. They hacked people to death and they're back in society. It's just another example of justice Ulster style. Depend on one set of psychopaths to take out another and let the justice system deal with the camp followers. We don't have to agree with it but when you've been here as long as me, you'll settle for what you can get."
She smiled "What’s that line from Gilbert and Sullivan – ‘a policeman’s lot is not a happy one."
“Ain’t that the truth,” Wilson smiled back. It was quite a while since he'd smiled with one of his colleagues. “Receive any warmth from your new colleagues?”
She rubbed her hands together theatrically. “A cold wind has been blowing all day. I appear to have upset the equilibrium of the squad room,” she lifted herself gently off the folders making sure not to tip them over.
“Don’t worry. They’ll come round,” he lied knowing full well that it would be a cold day in hell before George Whitehouse would accept her. "Nobody said it was going to be easy." He leaned forward. "You can always demand a transfer."
She threw her eyes up to heaven. “Every one of our conversations contains an exhortation from you for me to quit and go back to where I come from. I could develop a complex, sir. I could begin to feel unwanted. If I weren’t so thick skinned." Christ, I'm flirting with this guy, she thought to herself. She could feel a blush rising in her face at the thought.
Wilson saw her cheeks redden. I’ve gone too far, he thought. And it wasn’t fair. She was having a difficult time with the other officers. It was time that he gave her a break
"What about a drink after work?" he asked before he’d thought about the ramifications.
"Thank you, boss,” she said formally. "I think I’d like that."
"OK," Wilson felt that he had been hooked on his own line. He was suddenly embarrassed and shifted awkwardly in his seat. "Outside the station at eight o'clock. In the meantime why don't you run along and learn how to play with our computers. Take along the Patterson file and see what you can come up with."
“By the way,” she said looking back into the squad room. “I don’t like mentioning it but there’s a funny smell in the squad room underneath the normal male smells of testosterone and farts.”
Wilson smiled. “Before it became a police station the building was a brewery and they never quite got rid of the smell of stale beer. Don’t worry you’ll get used to it.”
CHAPTER 10
Case was getting slightly pissed off. He stood sheltering from the rain in a doorway across the road from Charlton's Garage in the Newtonards Road on the Southern shore of the Lagan River. The heavy rain which had threatened all day had finally started to fall. Away to his right a neon light tried in vain to pierce through the enfolding mist while overhead the rain fell from an impenetrably dark sky. Water vapour sprayed into his face but still his eyes remained fixed on the glass booth in which two men sat talking and smoking. A combination of rainwater and condensation had made the glass of the booth almost opaque and Case was forced to strain his eyes in order to concentrate on the object of his attention. Theoretically this should have been the easiest of kills. The man he was straining to see was a well built young man of about twenty-eight and according to Case's own timetable the guy should already be explaining himself to Saint Peter. He smiled at the thought of Saint Peter drumming his fingers impatiently over the non-arrival. The plan had been screwed when he had arrived at the garage and found his intended victim was deep in conversation with a visitor. The hitch was unforeseeable but would only serve to delay the inevitable. The filthy weather had reduced business at the filling station to a trickle and he had watched the attendant leave the booth on only two occasions to dispense petrol. He glanced at his watch: it was almost eight o’clock. He stuck his head out from his shelter and looked in both directions. The normally busy street was dark and virtually deserted. A few stragglers, bundled up against the rain and cold, rushed unheedingly along the street anxious to reach the comfort of their homes. Case was completely impervious to both the cold and the damp which easily penetrated the narrow opening in which he had chosen to wait. He had been trained to ignore the elements and concentrate all his attention on one particular task. Soon he would have to make his move, visitor or no visitor.
He pulled a small passport photograph from his right hand pocket and examined the face yet again. There could be no mistakes. Everything had to be done correctly and on time. One mistake could screw up the whole operation. He shuffled his feet in impatience. Get out of there you stupid fucker, he addressed his thoughts to the visitor to the booth as if trying to will the man to leave. His hand slid into his inside pocket and closed around the handle of the Browning. He couldn't wait any longer. Both of them would have to go. He pulled his balaclava further down over his eyes and left his doorway shelter. The deserted street was a near perfect killing ground. The dim light from the booth illuminated the silhouettes of the two men.
He smiled to himself as he slipped quietly across the road. The majority of Belfast's citizens were cursing the weather while for him it was a Godsend. As he crossed the thirty yards which separated him from the petrol attendant's booth, his view of the two men became clearer. His target was wearing a blue overall and was sitting with his feet perched on top of a small cluttered desk. The second man sat facing the door, his chair wedged against one of the angles of the booth. As he approached, he heard the two men burst out laughing. It had to be some bloody good joke. It wasn't a bad thing to die with a smile on your lips. He continued at the same pace satisfied that neither man appeared interested in him. He approached the booth and pulled the glass door open. By the time the men's eyes raised to face the open door, the Browning was already in his hand. The smiles froze on the men's faces then faded to fear. Case saw a level of understanding strike them as he raised the gun. They knew they were about to die. The noise from the first shot ripped through the confined space of the booth. The bullet passed through the attendant's head before shattering the glass panel directly behind him. Case swung the gun in a smooth movement and fired just as the second man began to rise from his seat. The bullet caught him in the throat and he was flung back against the steel stanchion which held the glass panes together. He gurgled like a baby through the torrent of bright red arterial blood which was already issuing from the gaping hole in his neck. Case didn't have to examine either man to know that they were both dead. He moved quickly to the attendant's body and fired two more shots at close range one to the head and one to the heart. He put the Browning back into his coat pocket and turned immediately away from the petrol station. He walked briskly until he came to a corner and after turning it dropped his pace slightly. Footsteps sounded somewhere behind him. He didn't look behind but simply ignored the sounds and continued walking away from the murder scene. On these streets he was just another evening straggler caught in the rain and impatient for the warmth of his home.
CHAPTER 11
Wilson stood at the front door of the police station. Most of the fortification which had marked the station in the 1980's and 1990's had been removed. The few bits of concrete which had been left were now the subject for the cameras of foreign tourists on the "troubles' tour. Tennent Street Station now presented a more benign face to the public. The rectangular building had begun its life as a brewery and despite its conversion to a police station many years before, still had a faint smell of beer in the air surrounding it. Wilson wasn't sure whether he
preferred the new approach or the old Fort Apache-like fortifications. The concrete remnants of the protective barrier only remained because the overhaul budget had run out. Unlike the pieces of the Berlin Wall there was no value on the concrete which had protected the PSNI from the people they were employed to protect. He sniffed the air. No beer smell this evening. Full scale rain was up there somewhere and the light stuff that blew through the open door and ran along his cheek like fine oil was simply the precursor of more substantial rain to come. Just at that moment the rain started in earnest. For the past ten years he'd thought of himself like a medieval lord looking out from his moated castle, he’d had the impression of being besieged by some outside foe, someone unknown, but dangerous. Separated from the danger by the dark masses of concrete and mounds of sandbags looking for all the world like a row of basking whales on a dark November evening. Future generations would look at photographs of the barricaded police stations and wonder whether their forefathers had been mad.
