by Derek Fee
He stuck his arm out through the open door of the station and turned his palm upwards. His skin was covered instantly in a thin film of water. Belfast wasn’t immune to pollution. He withdrew his hand and rubbed it on the side of his grubby anorak. If he’d opted for an evening at home in Malwood Park, he would toss a few logs on the fire, open a bottle of Black Bush, microwave a lasagne and watch Inspector Morse solve a nice clean crime in nice clean sunny Oxford. But for some silly reason he had foregone that pleasure out of some feeling of empathy with his new outcast colleague. The more he thought about the similarity of their situations the more it bothered him. He shuffled from one foot to the other. Nobody in the station ever invited him for a drink. He was not ‘one of the boys’ and he hadn't invited a woman out since the death of his wife. He wondered what else he and Moira might have in common. The evening ahead filled him with trepidation. One drink and he would be off home to Inspector Morse and the lasagne.
He felt rather than saw the presence of someone behind him.
"Ready," Moira stood directly behind him stuffing a handful of computer printouts into a well-worn black attaché case. A wide grin covered her face and her earlier gloom appeared to have disappeared.
Wilson looked furtively around the hall. The Duty Sergeant stared in their direction with a leer on his face. Screw you, Wilson thought. The news would be around the station before they had their first order in. The inferences people would make would not be very complementary for Moira.
"Let's get on," Wilson smiled warmly at the young constable. "I've a thirst that'd do justice to a camel."
As he walked through the door, Wilson flicked up the hood of his anorak. "Where's your car?" he asked
“I wouldn’t dignify my mode of transport by calling it a car,” she nodded at a battered and rusted white Lada looking abandoned in the corner of the car-park. “My Polish made chariot - without horses of course.”
He looked in the direction she indicated. "We better go in mine," he said. "The weather's too bad for push starts."
"No Lada jokes, please. I've heard them all,” she said following Wilson at a run across the parking lot.
Wilson settled himself in the driver's seat of his Toyota Corolla and flipped open the passenger door. He put the key in the ignition but didn't turn it.
"I don’t want you to take this in the wrong way," Wilson said staring out through the water streaming down the windscreen. "But I think that we shouldn’t go local.”
Her lips curled into a knowing smile.
“Most of the lads from the Station drink locally and I don’t want a sea of faces staring at me every time I lift my pint. This is only day one. Let’s give them a bit of time to get used to you.”
“You’re the expert around here,” she said maintaining the smile. “If we go local tongues will wag. If the look on the Station Sergeant’s face is anything to go by they may already have started. To be honest I wouldn’t feel comfortable in a cop bar right now so let’s go somewhere quiet.”
"I think that you have a future in this business, Constable," Wilson smiled and flicked the ignition switch and the Toyota's engine sprang into life. "There's a couple of yuppie pubs on the Malone Road where money is more important than religion. If you can deal with the sound of mobile phones ringing every second or so we could head up there."
Wilson manoeuvred the car carefully through the crowded carpark towards a barrier between the remains of what had been two mounds of fortifications. Like a mining district it was difficult to put back the police stations in Ulster to their original state. There would always be a scar of what had been. Water ran down the shiny black raincoat of the constable on duty at the barrier and there was a suggestion of reluctance in the man's salute as he raised the barrier to permit the Toyota to enter the outside world of Belfast. The city they entered was grey and dark. The clouds were so low and heavy that they appeared to be right on top of them. It was not the kind of weather which lifted the spirits. He piloted the car down the Shankill Road and on towards the Westlink and then southwards to the Malone Road. He tried to remember what Belfast had looked like before the bombings and the 'peace wall' dividing the communities had turned the city into an obstacle course for motor transport. Normality had gradually returned to the city but there was still an edge to people's thinking. The fat lady hadn't exactly finished singing. Peace had brought prosperity. And prosperity had lured the speculators who had started to re-develop the city and provide jobs. The whole thing had even snowballed like the economists predicted and a minor economic miracle had ensued. House prices escalated and most of the population were basking in a secure future. It was even possible that Protestants and Catholics would begin to see each other as fellow human beings. But there were still buggers out there who could screw the whole thing up. Some idiots didn't want peace and prosperity. There were still religious bigots keen on fighting the religious wars of the Middle Ages. Wilson prayed silently that whoever had killed Patterson wasn't one of those religious bigots. The peace and prosperity were as weak and fragile as a new-born baby. A series of sectarian murders could be the torch-paper that would set off the whole cycle of violence again.
"It's amazing but you remind me so much of the first RUC man I ever saw back in County Tyrone," Moira's voice cut across his thoughts.
"Well it wasn't me."
"I know that," she laughed, "It's just that he had exactly the same build as you. A great big bloke. Tall and strong like a big black mountain. His head was like a giant white globe held in place with a neck like a tree-trunk. Dressed in the long black coat and with a big pistol strapped to his hip he looked like some kind of ogre to us kids."
"All us Protestant RUC men look alike. Haven't you heard that? We're all big burly blokes. Just look at George." A wide smile creased his face.
"In a way you are, you know. It always amazed me that the RUC constables always seemed to be bigger than the rest of the population. Like the Protestants were breeding some sort of supermen just to look after them. I remember seeing the constable towering over my father who was no small man himself. But he cowered before him. The whole scene made the constable grow bigger while my father seemed to grow smaller."
They approached the lower Shankill Road. Wilson waited in a line of traffic before turning onto the Westlink and heading south. Because of the filthy weather, the road was relatively clear of traffic. The office workers had cleared off early.
"At least you seem to have respected your first constable," Wilson moved the car up through the gears.
"I suppose you're correct up to a point."
"Why only up to a point?" Wilson asked.
"Because whatever respect I might have had for him died the day I saw a photograph of him in our local paper. He was standing in about eighteen inches of water in a stream with a big stick in his hand and appeared to be about to unleash the most almighty blow on a poor girl who was on her knees in the water. All that force and strength was just being used to beat up on a poor defenceless girl. It's pretty hard to respect someone who'd do a thing like that. We’re only public servants whether we work in the Ministry of Social Welfare or for the PSNI. If we can show that we’re honest and fair with all sections of the community then we’ll have done a good job."
Wilson knew that there were too many people in Ulster who had had Moira’s experience. There were times that he could imagine Whitehouse wielding that baton to the shouts of encouragement from his Orange brothers. But it was worth remembering that everyone is a product of his or her upbringing. If George was a bigot then someone had fed him that particular line of bullshit.
"Good luck to you," Wilson said. "You may have three A-levels and a university degree but you still have a lot to learn about human nature. That poor stupid copper was only doing what he and a large proportion of the population thought was right. People don’t like change. In fact they hate change and they'll resist it with every fibre of their being. That’s a fact of life. And a lot of them are willing to fight
and die to preserve the status quo. Their actions sometimes reduce them as human beings."
They drove on in silence until they left the city and began to enter the more obviously prosperous suburbs of the Malone area. He turned onto Balmoral Avenue.
“Do you like computers?” Moira asked breaking the silence.
“I’m afraid I missed the computer boat,” Wilson smiled. “Computers, videos, even microwaves. All that kind of stuff is a mystery to me.”
"I’m crazy about them," she said as Wilson pulled into the courtyard of a pub called the `Windsor Arms'. "I did a course while I was stationed in Strabane. I really got into it."
The threat which had been implicit in the dark clouds had been real and the light rain had been replaced by the heavier variety of the previous evening. The two police officers sat staring out through the rain stained car window. Wilson switched off the car and the windscreen wipers stopped in mid sweep.
"Don't ask me why but I guessed that new technology would be your game alright." Wilson smiled at her enthusiasm. The coldness her recollections had engendered had evaporated. "You people with the big brains are always looking for ways to exercise them. Let's get ourselves that well deserved drink."
They sprinted through the heavy downpour and arrived almost together at the door of the pub. At the last moment, she slackened her pace slightly to allow her superior to pass through first. Their bodies touched as they crowded into the doorway and Wilson quickly moved ahead. They stood in the hallway of the pub and shook themselves like a couple of wet dogs.
"If I remember well, this place has a real log fire," Wilson said pushing open the lounge doors. "Ah! There we are." He led the way to where a half dozen logs burned brightly in an open grate, pulled out a chair and placed it directly in front of the fire. "What would you like?" he asked.
"Double vodka and orange, please," she set her briefcase on the floor, took a chair and put it beside Wilson's and removed her coat. “It’s been that kind of day.”
Wilson went to the bar and returned with a pint glass of Guinness and a tall glass containing an orange liquid which he laid on the table before her.
He was suddenly struck by the fact that this was the first time since his wife died that he had taken a woman for a drink. What the hell was he thinking? This wasn’t a date. This was his new officer. He was being kind and considerate to someone who happened to be a woman. It was just a bonus that she was young and attractive. "Good luck," Wilson said and without waiting for her response he took a long swallow of the black liquid. "By God, I needed that." He laid the glass on the table and flopped into his chair immediately feeling the warmth of the alcohol and the fire coalesce into a general feeling of wellbeing.
She sipped her drink and laid her glass beside Wilson's. "It’s great that we all have computers now." she said after settling herself in her chair.
"From what I hear they’re a waste of bloody time," Wilson slipped off his anorak and laid it on the back of a chair. "I know they perform all sorts of miracles but I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve walked past someone looking up the newspapers or booking their holidays when they should have been working. A couple of years ago some boffin type gave me a training course on them. He lost me when he started to talk about something called binary numbers. That's was when I decided to leave the computers to educated young people like yourself"
"I spent the best part of the day on one of the terminals" she pulled a sheaf of computer printouts from his briefcase. "I tried to do some correlations on the Patterson case."
"And what brilliant insights did the magic machine give you?" Wilson took another swallow from the Guinness glass and looked at the mass of paper she was spreading on the table.
"The computer doesn't give you insights," Moira said picking out one of the sheets. "It only saves and sifts information. The main computer links to the Criminal Records Bureau database in London. It has a store of information on every murder in the United Kingdom. You know the kind of thing that you find in the case file: name, address, religion, social status. Then we get some more pertinent details like the results of the pathology like the location and extent of the wounds and the type of weapon used.”
“Etcetera, etcetera,” Wilson said cutting into what he thought might be a never ending list. The lads from the squad should be here, he thought. She might be a Catholic but she was exactly the same as every young enthusiastic Protestant copper Wilson had met. He’d just put in ten hours at the office and he had opted to be bored out of his tree with this young computer nerd.
“Yes,” she said some of the enthusiasm draining from her face. “Anyway,” she launched forward again. “To get to the point.” She noticed Wilson gazing into outer space. “I ran this guy Patterson through the database. The modus operandi was unique. Thousands of people have lost their lives in Northern Ireland but most of them have been either caught in explosions or wasted in a hail of bullets. Those who have been executed were in general lifted first, interrogated somewhere, shot in the back of the head and then dumped where they could be found. Patterson looks more like a gangland killing than a sectarian murder.”
“So far you’re teaching your grandmother to suck eggs,” Wilson said sipping his Guinness.
“I don’t think that Patterson was a random victim,” she watched Wilson’s face as she took another sip from her glass. Wilson's brow was furrowed.
“I knew that the minute I saw the body,” Wilson said. “I didn’t need to spend endless hours staring at a bloody blue blinking screen. It was too damn professional. Too damn cold. Too emotionless. Too gangland. Except that Patterson had no previous. As far as we're concerned he's snow white.” His mind flitted to a mental picture of Patterson’s bed-sit. Who would want to remove such an insignificant human being? “Did the magic machine give you any clue as to the motive? In the end it's all down to motive. If we can find out why someone wanted to kill a nonentity like Patterson then we'll be half way to a solution. Without a motive Patterson's file will join all those back at the station that have become as cold as a block of ice. If there's no motive or if the killer simply picked Patterson at random then we're up the creek without a paddle. That's what's such a pain in the arse working in this Province. Once they get a lust for blood they don't care who they kill. But rest assured that there's a motive in this case. Patterson wasn't just murdered, he was assassinated. That's the difference. Someone wanted him in particular to die. Somewhere in his nondescript pathetic life there is a nugget which will tell us why someone wanted him dead. Count on it. If we find that nugget then we'll be on our way. ”
“So far I've found nothing that could be called a motive,” she said. “But let’s just suppose that the IRA or some crazy splinter group are responsible. Why should they claim this kind of murder at this point in time? As far as they're concerned sectarian killing is a thing of the past. They know that killing an ordinary unconnected Prod will raise the hackles of the UVF or the UFF. Okay things are always tense but everybody wants peace. If Patterson was killed because he was a Protestant then whoever’s behind the killing looks like he wants to re-start hostilities. I just can't believe the idea that he was targeted by a terrorist splinter group anxious to get the war going again.”
Wilson drained his glass. He’d almost forgotten what it was like to have such boundless enthusiasm. If she lasted a couple of years on the Murder Squad a lot of that youthful exuberance would be well and truly dissipated. But she was right about one thing. Whatever the pols might say Northern Ireland was still a tinderbox. Yes the big boys had all moved on. They’d signed up to the Good Friday Agreement and appeared on television saying they were sorry for what they did but beneath them the rats were still around. Only now that their political justification had disappeared they had simply become gangsters. Just like their counterparts in London or Birmingham or Glasgow they had established their turf and they had entered the world of free criminal enterprise as though to the manor born. They had embraced drugs, prosti
tution and protection. They were making money and if the social system that protected them was attacked by some idiot killing for religious reasons they would be forced to retaliate with inevitable knock on consequences. It didn't bear thinking about.
“Some of the many people I've run across in this job don’t always think with what's between their ears,” he said laying down his empty glass on the table. He laughed. "Even those lucky enough to have had something operational between their ears."
“Another one,” she said quickly finishing off her own drink.
“Trying to butter up the boss,” Wilson barely had the words out of his mouth when his mobile phone began to play the Ode to Joy. “Hold on a minute,” he said as she started to rise. He took the mobile from his pocket and listened without speaking. “There won’t be time for another one to-night. Let's go," he said closing his phone and pulling his anorak from the back of the chair. "Some bastard's just topped two men at a filling station across the river on the Newtonards Road."
