Death on the Line

by Derek Fee

  He stared at the pad in front of him. Irene Carlisle was right. If her husband had been murdered, you could pencil in the names of half the population of Belfast as possible suspects. He picked up the phone on his desk and dialled the Carlisle residence. He smiled to himself. Carlisle was living in a beautiful house in the most up-market village in Northern Ireland. His tiny one-bedroomed flat would fit into one corner of Carlisle’s living room. The world was ill-divided.

  ‘Irene Carlisle,’ her voice was quiet and intruded on Davidson’s contemplation of the vicissitudes of life.

  ‘It’s Detective Constable Davidson, I was at your house yesterday.’

  She laughed. ‘My memory’s not that weak and I’m not that old.’

  He felt embarrassed. ‘Apparently your husband was due to have his first morphine injection on the day he died.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of that. He tried to keep me away from the business of his dying.’

  ‘However, we’ve spoken to the matron at the hospice and she told us that earlier that day someone called and cancelled his appointment. She had no idea who called, she wasn’t even sure if it was a man or a woman.’

  ‘Well it certainly wasn’t me.’ Her voice was softer and gentler than he remembered at the house.

  ‘We would appreciate it if you would contact your telephone provider and give permission for the PSNI to obtain your phone records for the period around your husband’s death.’

  ‘You’re actually going to investigate Jackie’s death?’

  Davidson didn’t reply immediately. It was one of those occasions that he would prefer if he wasn’t speaking for the boss. He knew that the chief super wasn’t totally onside with the investigation and that the boss insisted that they tread lightly. ‘Yes, but we wouldn’t like to broadcast it, your husband was a personality and if the press discovered that we were looking into his death it could lead to wild speculation and our superiors would be quick to close such an investigation down. So, it’s in everybody’s interest not to say anything outside our small circle.’

  ‘I understand,’ she hesitated. ‘But I would like to be kept informed of the progress. I’ve been thinking, and there are some things that I’d like to discuss with you personally. I’d like it very much if you could come and visit me soon.’

  Something in her voice brought Davidson back to his courting days. Was she being coquettish with him? It hardly seemed possible, for God’s sake, she had only recently been widowed, but yet there was something in her voice. He tried to dismiss the thought as she continued.

  ‘I get so few guests these days. Our friends were Jackie’s friends. To be honest, I’m really quite lonely.’

  That sealed it. Davidson could feel his heartbeat increasing. It had been a hell of a long time since he’d felt that kind of excitement. The new dating trends had passed him by and his reduced level of finances meant he could barely keep himself alive. ‘I’ll probably have some time to drop by tomorrow. In the meantime if you’ve already spoken with your telephone provider perhaps we can confirm whether your husband made the call to the hospice.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that. Will Sergeant Browne be with you?’

  ‘No, I’m leading the enquiry myself.’

  ‘Then I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.’

  Davidson didn’t exactly need a bucket of cold water thrown over him, but there were parts of his body responding to a potential liaison with the widow Carlisle. Was he being a silly old bugger or was there life in the old dog yet? Maybe it would be fun to find out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Siobhan O’Neill was alone in the incident room when Wilson returned. He put the folder that Duane had given him on his desk on top of another folder that O’Neill had left for him.

  ‘Forensic report,’ she called from the other side of the room.

  Wilson nodded. The whiteboards had arrived and O’Neill had already attached the crime scene photos of Thomas Kielty in two rows along the top. She had included one photo of McDevitt. Wilson wanted to get on with the forensic report and Duane’s dossier, but he had one task to complete first. He took out his mobile, called Craigavon Hospital, identified himself and asked to speak to McDevitt’s doctor. The consultant had just finished his rounds and confirmed that McDevitt was making good progress. Wilson wanted to know how soon McDevitt would be ready to travel. While McDevitt remained in Craigavon, he was at the mercy of Gibson’s organised protection. Wilson was anxious to get the only witness to the events in Aughnacloy to Belfast. The consultant hedged his bets but thought that McDevitt could travel by ambulance within twenty-four hours. Wilson asked him to make the arrangements. He then phoned Reid and asked her to help arrange a room for McDevitt at the Royal Victoria. When he finally closed his phone, he felt more confident that the McDevitt issue was in hand.

  Wilson decided to deal with the forensic report next. The major finding of the report was that there was not a great deal of forensic evidence at the scene. The technicians concluded that the shots had been fired from a distance of more than fifty metres at two figures running in the opposite direction, surprise, surprise. There were no shoe impressions since the grass in the field was too high and had been trampled by all the participants. There were also no fibres, no hairs and no DNA. The main constituent of the report concentrated on the bullets taken from the bodies of Kielty and McDevitt. They were nine millimetre parabellums fired from a Browning pistol. The FSNI technician had run the gun through the computer and Wilson was not surprised to learn that it had been used before. The weapon had been employed in seven assassinations that had taken place in mid-Ulster in the 1970s and 80s. This kind of discovery made a joke of the whole weapons decommissioning exercise. The province was still awash with all kinds of armaments. Wilson wondered when they would stop running across guns that had been used in sectarian crimes thirty years previously. Now all he had to do was find the gun and match a test-fired slug with those taken from Kielty and McDevitt and the case would be solved. If only life was that easy. The gun could be anywhere. It certainly wasn’t about to materialise of its own volition. He closed the report. Forensics wasn’t going to save his skin on this one. He put the report aside as O’Neill laid another buff-coloured file on his desk.

  ‘Everything we have on Walter Hanna,’ she said.

  Wilson didn’t like the look of concern on her face. ‘That bad is it?’

  She tapped the file. ‘That man should not be walking around free. Neither should half of the men that he’s associated with. I’m proud to be a PSNI officer, but when I see how we failed all the people that man destroyed it makes me angry. Not only the people he sent to their graves but the collateral lives he ruined.’

  ‘We can only do what we can do,’ Wilson replied. He hated to see a young officer like O’Neill become dispirited. ‘Always be proud of what you do, because it counts.’

  ‘It only counts when we put them away.’

  As she walked away, he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that they had met before. He had racked his brain but couldn’t recall where. But it was there at the back of his mind.

  For now, he had a choice whether to deal with the dossier on Hanna or Duane’s IRA file. He chose Hanna. He opened the first page and looked into the face of the man he was going to have to bring down. Wilson stared at the photo. There was nothing exceptional about the face that stared back at him. Wilson had studied Macbeth at school and was at one with the Bard when he had written that ‘there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’. Hear the story of Fred West and look at his photograph and your mind immediately says ‘he looks like a psychopath’, but simply see that photo of West and you might only conclude that he had been hit by the ugly stick at birth. The connection between the photo and the psychopath is supplied by the story of the horrors that he committed. Hanna had the face of a mid-Ulster farmer. That was, if you ignored the eyes. Even accounting for the photo being a facsimile of the man, Hanna’s eyes were the fea
ture that defined the face. Wilson had seen cold eyes before and they generally belonged to men who had killed many times. Hanna’s eyes were in that category. He had no doubt that he was dealing with a very dangerous man.

  Wilson moved on through the report. Hanna was from the townland of Moy in mid-Tyrone. It was an area that had spawned one of the most vicious of the murder gangs that plagued Ulster in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The gang was responsible for the deaths of whole families, but not one member of that gang had served a day in jail. Hanna had been picked up and questioned on eight occasions but was able to provide an alibi every time. What made his career even more noxious was his membership of the Ulster Defence Regiment, a part of the British Army that had been established to protect the people of Ulster. After the disbanding of the UDR in 1992, Hanna had trod the well-worn path from paramilitary to criminal. The latter part of the report was concentrated on the PSNI’s efforts to put a stop to the smuggling ring that Hanna had established with his old UDR comrades. Having evaded justice for serious crimes for more than two decades, Hanna had no problem in outmanoeuvring the law and even turned his criminal activities into a family business by co-opting his youngest son. Officially, the family ran a two-hundred-acre dairy farm in Moy. The PSNI was following the money trail but had so far come up empty with that strategy. The Hannas had to be making substantial profits from their illegal activities but the PSNI couldn’t locate the money. It wasn’t in any of the family’s accounts. Since none of them was a financial genius, it was obvious that someone was helping them to hide those assets. That was just another part of the conundrum. He closed the file. So much for the Protestant half of the equation.

  The file Duane had given him consisted of eight sheets, each one devoted to an individual member of the IRA cell active in mid-Ulster. Each sheet had a photo attached. The leader, or officer commanding, of the group was a thirty-five-year-old carpenter named Aiden Keenan. He had no PSNI sheet and had never even been interviewed. Keenan had joined the IRA in 1998, just in time for the signing of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. He had risen to the leadership principally because most of the older leaders had decided to renounce violence and go ‘political’. Those who didn’t follow that route vanished into obscurity. Keenan had climbed to the top of the tree not because of his leadership abilities or his loyalty to the cause but because there was no one else. It was clear from the dossier that Keenan had never fired a shot in anger at anyone British. He was an out-and-out opportunist who turned his leadership of a group that had lost its purpose into a criminal enterprise. Like Hanna, Keenan was suspected of smuggling fuel, alcohol and cigarettes, stealing farm machinery and producing illicit alcohol. As far as Special Branch knew, neither he nor any of his crew had been responsible for murder. If Wilson were able to get him, it probably wouldn’t be for murder but for criminal conspiracy, which would be good enough to put him behind bars for a long time. Wilson read quickly through the sheets of the individual members of the IRA band. They were notable only because none of them had taken part in the armed struggle.

  Wilson bundled up the folders. Siobhan would have to collate the information and put it on the whiteboard and in the murder book. He then took out his mobile phone and called Browne, who told him that the search of the field had proved fruitless so far.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Where the hell is Gillian McAuley and how in heaven’s name am I going to find her, Graham wondered. When the person you are looking for has ‘no fixed abode’ next to their name, they could be bloody anywhere. She could be in any one of more than a hundred derelict properties in Belfast. Hell, she could be dossing in a doorway for all he knew. He had put out an APB for McAuley and every uniform on the beat in Belfast had received an instruction that she was to be picked up on sight. He was now hoping against hope that some uniform would run into her but the kind of people in McAuley’s life didn’t keep office hours, and Belfast is a big city. He’d thought about calling the boss to suggest launching a press appeal, but since they were looking into the death without the approval of the chief super, there was very little chance of that. There was another route open. He phoned the Royal Victoria and asked for Reid.

  Reid put down the phone and went into the storage area of the morgue. She pulled out the metal tray and took another look at the child. The tag on his toe had already been altered and Josh McAuley had been added in pen. There was a strong possibility that Wilson would be very angry with her if she did what she was about to do. She went back to her office and picked up the phone. The story would appear in tomorrow’s Chronicle and the hunt would be on for Gillian McAuley in earnest.

  Peter Davidson had spent the afternoon going through the medical report on Jackie Carlisle. He had been as discreet as possible about the reason for accessing the file. Carlisle’s pancreatic cancer was terminal and the prognosis indicated a great deal of pain near the end. There was every reason for Carlisle to end his life and thereby avoid further suffering. No post-mortem had been performed on the body, since the death was neither violent nor accidental and Carlisle had been seen by his doctor two days before his death. There was no confusion concerning the cause of death. A massive dose of morphine had stopped Carlisle’s heart. Maybe the boss was barking up the wrong tree. It all looked cut and dried. Except for the phone call to the hospice. If he couldn’t nail down the phone call to either Carlisle or his wife, there was a possibility that the boss was right. Over the years he had learned to trust Wilson’s intuition. It all hinged on the phone call. It wouldn’t be enough to examine Carlisle’s phone records. He needed to examine the phone records of the hospice as well. He had no desire to go back there again but it was necessary. If he phoned the matron it would be easier for her to say no, and there was no way they were getting a warrant. His phone beeped and he looked at the message. It was from the boss and it announced a team briefing for eight o’clock the following morning. Davidson looked at his watch, four thirty. He was in serious need of a drink, but, unfortunately, the drink would have to wait.

  Davidson had hoped that after his father’s death he would never have a reason to enter the hospice again. He had no problem dealing with the dead, it was dealing with the living who had received a death sentence that he found difficult. His father hadn’t been perfect, far from it. The Davidson household had been ruled with a fist of iron and young Peter had often felt that fist. It had been a harrowing experience watching a man he had feared as a young boy and adolescent deteriorate before his eyes. Watching the disintegration of his father had left Davidson with a pathological fear of ending up the same way. That fear translated itself into his desire never to visit the hospice where his father had passed away. That point had already been reached and passed on his previous visit, although his stomach still protested when he pulled into the hospice parking for the second time in two days. He waited patiently in the hall while a nurse went to fetch the matron.

  ‘Back so soon, Peter.’ The matron took his arm and led him into the day room.

  As they entered, the only resident, an old man dressed in striped pyjamas and a brown terrycloth robe, passed them on his way out.

  The matron indicated a seat, but Davidson preferred to remain standing. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you again,’ he began. ‘But the issue of the source of the morphine is still bothering us. We think the person who cancelled the appointment might be able to help us with our enquiries.’

  The matron looked thoughtful. ‘But I already told you that we were of the opinion that Jackie or his wife must have been the caller.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Mrs Carlisle and she denies making the call.’

  ‘Then it must have been her husband. At any rate, somebody called and cancelled the appointment.’

  ‘We need to trace that call. We’d be grateful if you would contact your phone company and give us permission to examine your phone records for the period around the death of Mr Carlisle.’

  The matron didn’t respond immediately. ‘I’ll have to take some adv
ice on that. There may be some issues of confidentiality.’

  Davidson frowned. ‘Confidentiality? I don’t understand.’

  The matron’s face was suddenly hard. ‘I need to talk to someone before I can comply.’

  ‘We can get a court order,’ Davidson bluffed. There was no official investigation so there would be no court order.

  ‘You may have to.’ She started to leave the room. ‘I’m sorry, Peter, but I’m awfully busy. I’ll get back to you when I’ve taken some advice.’ She marched to the front door and opened it. ‘Goodbye, Peter.’

  Davidson was glad to be outside the building, but he was a little surprised at the reaction of the matron. The request was routine and the response was peculiar. As he turned into the driveway, he glanced at the building. The matron was at the window of the day room and she was watching his progress. Now he really did need that drink.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX