by Derek Fee
‘Eric,’ Wilson said. ‘You stay on this one. Find me the link between Ronald and McIlroy. My guess it’s the school, but I might be wrong. I put you on the docket for the examination of the gun, so forensics will get back to you. And I also want you to liaise with the uniforms on the search for Ronald. We need to find him as soon as possible. I don’t like the idea of him rambling around out there. Moira has some ideas on the Rice/Morison/Boyle murders.’
Moira came forward and explained her examination of the police files. ‘One of the boss’s predecessors, DI Jack Armstrong, seems to have taken a particular interest in Lizzie and her gang. The Boss and I are going to meet him at ten thirty. We should be on our way, Boss.’
Wilson glanced at his watch. It was nine thirty.
Portaferry is a small town located approximately 30 miles from Belfast at the southern end of the Ards Peninsula, near the Narrows at the entrance to Strangford Lough. It is the kind of pretty seaside village that attracts the elderly and holidaying families. Wilson and Moira were lost in their thoughts during the hour-long drive along the shores of Strangford Lough. A stiff wind was blowing a fine mist of rain across the grey waters of the Lough when they arrived at the Haven Nursing Home on the Shore Road within sight of the marina. They entered along a tree-lined drive and pulled into the parking lot. The Haven was a purpose-built home comprising three red brick two storied buildings. Wilson gazed out over the finely manicured gardens and saw the waters of the Lough in the distance through the trees. He could imagine spending the end of his days in such a peaceful setting. He followed Moira into the door with the large white ‘Reception’ sign over it.
Moira moved to the reception desk and spoke to the lady behind the hatch. ‘We have to sign in,’ she said when she returned to where he was standing.
‘Are they afraid we’ll run away with somebody?’
She raised her eyebrows. Wilson’s and her phones rang simultaneously. They both grabbed at their phones and answered.
Wilson listened wordlessly and then cut the line.
‘Thanks,’ Moira said and turned her phone off. ‘They’ve got him.’
‘Aye, thanks be to God. He’s being taken to the station.’
‘No mobiles inside,’ the receptionist said from the hatch. ‘It bothers the guests.’
‘Armstrong is waiting for us in the sunroom at the rear,’ Moira pressed a button on the wall, and the door sprang open.
They entered a large room where a dozen ‘guests’ were arranged in a semi circle around a television. Only two guests appeared to be concentrating on the programme, the rest displayed no interest. An old lady stopped Moira as she moved round the edge of the semicircle.
‘Have you come to take me home?’ the old lady asked pleading in her voice.
‘Yes,’ Moira said gently. ‘But first we have to take our tea. I’ll come and find you when we’re ready.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ the old lady said and moved on.
‘My granny was in a place like this,’ Moira said by way of explanation. ‘I hope Armstrong isn’t gaga.’
Two people sat at either end of the sunroom. One was an old lady of indeterminate but extreme age, and the other was a man of perhaps seventy-five.
‘DCI Armstrong?’ Moira said as she approached.
The man in the wheelchair laughed. ‘Been a long time since someone called me that.’
They introduced themselves and flashed their warrant cards.
Wilson pulled two chairs over and he and Moira sat down on either side of Armstrong. ‘How long have you been retired?’ he asked. He could see how slight Armstrong was even though he was wrapped in a blanket. His body appeared to be tiny, and his head was large in comparison. He was almost completely bald, and his pate was a mass of liver spots.
Armstrong thought for a second. ‘Twenty-five years, I suppose. I did a bit of private work when I left but then the wife died suddenly, and I wasn’t much at looking after myself. There was some drinking and health problems, and here I am. What can I do for you?’
‘You’ve read the newspapers about the spate of murders,’ Wilson said.
‘Aye, and I’ve seen you on the television. You’re the SIO. I see old Donald Spence is still about. He was a kid when I ran the murder squad.’
‘We have three dead women, Lizzie Rice, Nancy Morison and Joan Boyle’ Wilson said. ‘We’ve been back through the files, but we can’t come up with a motive. The only lead we have is that they were all members of the woman’s branch of the UVF in the Shankill at the same time. We’re hoping that you can help us.’
‘Morison and Boyle were in the gang with Lizzie?’ Armstrong asked.
‘Yes, we found a photograph of all eight members of the Shankill Branch of the Women’s UVF. All three are in the photo.’
Armstrong’s face hardened. ‘That crowd were worse than a witches’ coven. They had more evil in them than a group of Satanists. I tried as hard as I could to pin something on them but Lizzie was like Teflon back then. You could get her behind bars, but the politicians would have her out before you could say Jack Robinson.’
‘She disappeared off the scene pretty quickly,’ Wilson said.
‘That’s what alerted me,’ Armstrong coughed into his hand. ‘She was a fixture for more than ten years then poof she was history. It doesn’t happen like that.’
‘You have a theory?’ Wilson asked.
Armstrong wheezed and when he spoke it was like the words were passing through a gravel bed. ‘I had a dozen of them at the time. I looked at every crime that occurred about the time she fell from grace. We had a couple of well-known sectarian serial killers active at the time so we were pretty much overloaded. Although I tried, I couldn’t tie Lizzie to any of the active murder cases.’
‘But you didn’t stop there?’ Wilson wanted to give the old man a chance to draw his breath.
Armstrong smiled. ‘I heard about you. You didn’t need to be a copper. You had all that rugby stuff going for you until you walked into a bomb.’
‘Shit happens,’ Wilson said.
‘Your rugby mates could have fixed you up. Got you a nice well-paid job, but you went back to the Force. They say you’re good. Maybe even as good as I was.’ His lined face cracked into another smile.
‘You found something that might have been linked to Lizzie being closed down?’ Wilson said.
‘You are good,’ he wheezed. ‘A disappearance, a woman called Francis McComber, a Protestant and a single mother without any connection to the paramilitaries. She was walking along the street one minute with her little girl in tow, and she just vanished into thin air. The little girl was found in a housing estate just outside Belfast.’ Armstrong drew a long breath. ‘It was assumed the mother couldn’t deal with the child and had skipped across the water. The girl was questioned but at six years of age, she didn’t make much sense.’
‘Why did you link the disappearance to Lizzie?’
‘The husband of one of Lizzie’s gang was a bit of a lad. There was a rumour that he was having a fling with the McComber woman. There was talk of a baby.’
‘Tenuous,’ Wilson said.
‘I know, but when I put the rumour together with the wee girl’s statement, it started to make a little sense.’ He gave a gravelly cough. ‘She talked about a lady with straw coloured haired and her friends hurting her mother. That could have been Lizzie and the coven.’
‘Maybe they gave a message to lay off the husband, and McComber disappeared because she feared the worse.’
Armstrong leaned forward. ‘Don’t you think that I thought of that? I was as good at the job as you are. I spoke to everyone that knew McComber. Everyone one of them said the same thing, she was totally dedicated to her little girl. She would never, and they insisted absolutely never, have abandoned her.’
‘Did you follow up with the young girl?’
Armstrong shifted in the wheelchair. ‘This was a couple of years later. The wee girl was put in care. I went to the orphanage look
ing for her, but she had already been fostered. Apparently, she was a sweet wee thing and children like that get taken quickly.’
‘Which orphanage?’ Wilson asked.
‘It’ll be in my notes.’
‘I haven’t come across any notes from you,’ Moira said.
‘I left all my old notebooks at the station for filing.’
Moira and Wilson exchanged glances.
‘Anything else you’d like to tell us?’ Wilson asked.
‘I did my best to nail Lizzie. I launched missing persons searches for McComber for years. Nothing. I’m convinced Lizzie, and the coven murdered her. The body was never found, and at this stage never will be. I tried to get justice for McComber, and I didn’t succeed. I’m right sorry about that.’
Wilson took a card from his pocket. ‘If anything else occurs to you, I’d be grateful for a call.’ He left the card on the table beside Armstrong.
‘Home for Little Girls,’ Armstrong said lost in thought. ‘Something like that. If you find whoever killed Lizzie, tell them I’m praying for them.’
‘Thank you,’ Wilson said standing. ‘You’ve been a great help.’
Armstrong watched them as they left. The policeman in him wanted Lizzie’s killer caught, but the human being wanted him to escape.
‘What do you think, Boss,’ Moira asked as they sped back towards central Belfast.
‘I think we need to review the McComber file and find out where we can locate her daughter.’ Wilson could feel the tingle he normally got when the case was coming together. ‘It’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got for the moment.’
‘I’m not clear on the figures, but I know that more than a thousand people go missing in Northern Ireland every year. Most of them return home, but a fair number are never traced again. Why should McComber be any different from the others? She was a single mother probably living on the Social in a city that was tearing itself apart. That’s a pretty good set of reasons to disappear.’
‘She might have disappeared, but I agree with Armstrong that she would probably have taken the child with her. Some of the missing that don’t return, do so because they’re already in a hole in the ground somewhere. Francis McComber could be one of them.’
‘But what good will the file of a disappeared person do for us. Surely we need to find a body?’
‘First step will be to examine the file. Someone must have investigated the disappearance. We need to see what the investigating officer found. That’s going to be your job.’
‘And what will you be doing?’
‘I will have the great pleasure of interrogating our former colleague McIver.’
Wilson went to the interview room directly he arrived back at the station. He met Harry Graham at the door and they entered together. Ronald McIver looked like a blowup doll that all the air had been let out of. He was dishevelled and had a two-day growth of beard. His eyes were sunken in his head, and his face was a pasty pale colour. His wife probably looked more alive than he did.
McIver looked up as Wilson and Graham entered. His eyes didn’t seem to register them. There was an untouched plastic cup of tea before him on the table.
‘Has he been cautioned?’ Wilson asked.
‘Not by me, Boss,’ Graham said.
‘Do it.’
Graham issued the normal caution.
‘How are you, Ronald?’ Wilson sat across from McIver.
McIver ‘s head came up slowly and there was a confused look on his face. ‘Boss, I’m all right I suppose.’
‘Harry is going to start the recorder, and the interview is being videoed. Did you understand the caution?’
‘Yes,’ McIver’ s voice had a mechanical tone.
‘Tell me about Ivan McIlroy,’ Wilson said.
‘He was a bully when we were at school. Stole my lunch money whenever I had lunch money to steal. I hated him.’ McIver’s hands were in his lap and he was rubbing one hand against the other absentmindedly.
‘Is that why you killed him?’
McIver laughed out loud. ‘God no.’
‘But you did kill him?’ Wilson asked.
‘I suppose so. The gun went off by itself, Boss. I didn’t mean to kill him. I met him to tell him that I wasn’t going to spy on the team like he wanted me to. I brought the gun in case he wouldn’t let me off the hook. I only wanted to threaten him.’
There was a knock on the door and the desk sergeant entered. He bent and spoke into Wilson’s ear.
Wilson sighed. ‘Interview suspended at twelve ten,’ he said and looked at Graham, who knocked the recorder off.
They followed the desk sergeant out of the interview room.
Jennings’ face was red with anger when Wilson entered Spence’s office. It was clear to Wilson that his boss had been taking a tongue lashing.
‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’ Jennings shouted.
‘I’m interviewing a suspect in a murder case,’ Wilson said calmly.
‘You are interviewing one of your own subordinates. Have you lost your reason?’ He turned and stared at Spence. ‘Are you totally out of control? You cannot have thought it was correct for his superior officer to interview McIver.’
How times have changed, Wilson thought. A few months previous it was perfectly all right to instruct him to interview Joe Worthington, his superior officer at the time. However, now wasn’t the time to throw that back in Jennings’ face. ‘I’m the SIO on the McIlroy case, and it’s my duty to interview individuals suspected of being involved in that murder.’
Jennings came forward and stood directly in front of Wilson. He had to raise his head at an angle to lock eyes. ‘You’re lucky I stopped the interview when I did. I’m having McIver transferred to another station. He’ll be interrogated by officers from that station, or indeed I may ask for officers from another Force to take over this investigation.’
‘You don’t trust us to be impartial?’ Wilson asked.
Jennings turned and walked to Spence’s desk. He held his thumb and first finger of his right hand close together. ‘I am this far of charging both of you with misconduct. The only thing that’s stopping me is that this event will cause enough bad press for the Force and dragging you two over the coals will only exacerbate that situation. Superintendent Wilson, you are no longer Senior Investigating Officer on the Ivan McIlroy murder case. You will prepare to hand over the murder book, and all pertinent evidence to an officer designated by me.’ He turned to Spence. ‘Chief Superintendent, I will be issuing you with a letter of reprimand which will be added to your personnel file. Nobody from this station speaks to McIver. Understood.’
Neither Wilson nor Spence responded.
Jennings turned and stormed out of the office.
Spence made the action of wiping his brow. ‘I suppose he has a point,’ he said when Jennings was out of the office.
‘Ronald is a mess. Right now he’d confess to killing JFK and Martin Luther King. The only chance he has of getting some kind of justice is if we have all the preliminary interviews done here. Jennings doesn’t just want him transferred to another station. He wants him transferred to somewhere he can control the situation. Somehow or other he’s looking for a way to turn this situation against you and particularly me.’
Spence put his head in his hands. He could see his pension flying out the window. ‘I suppose there’s nothing we can do.’
‘Maybe there is,’ Wilson took out his mobile phone, flipped through his contacts and rang. ‘It’s Ian Wilson, is she available.’ He waited for half a minute or so. ‘Kate,’ he said finally. ‘I need a favour.’
CHAPTER 62
Wilson oversaw the packing up of the murder book and the collection of all the papers relating to the Ivan McIlroy murder. Eric Taylor was particularly pissed at handing over all the good work that he had done on the case. Wilson had Eric take a photo of the whiteboard containing all the information on the McIlroy case before dismantling the board and scrubbing the
writing. The case was no longer his. The dissatisfaction of the team was palpable as they bundled up the information they had collected. No policeman is happy when handing over an almost completed case. It was even worse when the culprit was someone they knew intimately.
‘What’ll happen to Ronald, Boss,’ Harry Graham spoke for his colleagues as they completed the packing of the evidence.
‘My guess is the DPP will come to some arrangement with his legal team. From what we heard today the crime wasn’t premeditated. That means the most he’ll be charged with is manslaughter. I’m sure that his legal team will have some head doctor or other look at him. They’ll decide that he was out of his tree when he committed the McIlroy manslaughter, and he’ll be sent away to get his marbles put back in.’
‘What about the wife?’ Taylor asked.
‘Different case,’ Wilson said. ‘Acting while the balance of his mind was disturbed would be my guess. He’ll be off to the funny farm on that one to.’
‘Come on, Boss. You can’t kill two people and not do time,’ Taylor said.
‘Depends on his legal representation,’ Wilson said. ‘Some people say that O.J. Simpson murdered two people, and he walked out of the courtroom a free man. That’s a hell of a precedent.’
‘Do we concentrate on the Lizzie, Morison and Boyle murders now,’ Taylor asked.
‘We do, and we regroup quickly,’ Wilson said. He briefed them on the meeting with ex-DCI Armstrong. ‘Moira is gone to pick up a copy of the missing persons investigation.’
The door to the squad room opened, and Moira entered carrying a buff folder. She marched to where the team were assembled around the whiteboard. She didn’t look happy. ‘This is a bloody joke,’ she said opening the folder and taking out four A4 pages.
‘That’s it?’ Wilson asked.
