by Paul Charles
‘No, you see when you’re in that zone, well, when I’m in that songwriting-zone, it’s a truly blissful state and times flies by, and before you know it, it’s the next day. The only person I spoke with during the entire evening was Elizabeth, when she rang me up in the early hours of the morning and asked me to come around.’
Chapter Eleven
‘Do we go and see Miles Bloom now?’ O’Carroll asked.
‘I’d favour getting some more information on him before we interview him,’ McCusker replied.
‘Okay, let’s head back to the Customs House and see how they’re all getting on.’
When they returned to the sanctuary of her battered, metallic yellow Mégane, O’Carroll said she thought McCusker, for some reason, looked gutted, and unusually down, even to the point that she felt she should bring up the subject of what was troubling him.
‘So why are you so down today? It’s not due to the fact that you lost your beauty sleep is it?’
‘Nagh.’
‘And if it’s to do with my sister, I really don’t want to know. It’s just that it’s not like you – you’re usually chipper. I mean, yes, you’re certainly antediluvian, but mostly chipper.’
McCusker shrugged, conceding she wasn’t wrong in her assessment. ‘You won’t laugh?’
‘I’ll try not to,’ she said, a little concerned.
‘Promise you won’t laugh?’ McCusker pleaded.
‘Oh, don’t tell me, I know what it is – you’ve worn out the last pair of your Royal & Awesome plus-fours and you can’t find a draper in Belfast who still stocks them?’
No reaction.
‘Okay, McCusker – I’ll really try not to laugh.’
‘Well Rory…’
‘Rory?’
‘Rory McIlroy.’
‘Oh… that Rory, okay… go ahead,’ she encouraged.
‘So Rory plummeted from third to thirteenth in the World Rankings in the space of a sand bunker yesterday.’
‘Right, I’d hate to see what mood you’d get into if you gave the refugees equal consideration. You don’t even know him – R O R Y – and you’re behaving as if he’s your best mate.’
McCusker just looked at her, he’d nothing to say.
‘McCusker… come on, you’ve not been hiding anything from me have you? He’s not a mate? Is he? If he’s a mate and you haven’t introduced me to him… he’s right fit, you know. And then if he’s still with that tennis girly-type… well, at least he could introduce me to his fellow professionals, some of them look… well, okay, you know, I mean a few beers makes all the difference.’
‘Ah, O’Carroll, TMFI.’
‘TMFI?’
‘Too much ’eckin information,’ McCusker replied, sounding like he was waiting for a drum roll and the crash of a cymbal to finish off his sentence. ‘And no, I don’t know him, but it doesn’t make it any easier.’
‘Why McCusker, why?’ she asked, sounding sincere.
McCusker knew that when she sounded sincere, that was when she was at her most cynical and lethal, so he continued cautiously. ‘I really don’t know, the only thing I can figure is that he’s from the wee North, and like George Best, Alex Higgins, John Watson and Eddie Irvine, he’s one of the five world-beaters in their chosen sport that we’ve ever produced, so when you see him underperform I find it very depressing.’
‘So you’d much prefer he was the cock-of-the-north and won everything?’
‘No, it’s not that!’
‘It seems to me, McCusker, that you should consider how bad it feels when your team loses. Right? Next you should think about how you feel when they win. The balance of the intensity of the feeling is very heavily in favour of the loss. So can I just say that in any of the sports you’ve just mentioned, there can only be one winner and that means there have to be lots of LOO-SERS!’
‘No, I don’t mind him losing, it’s just when he underperforms you get annoyed on his behalf, because you know he can do better, you know the games he could have won.’
‘Really,’ O’Carroll replied, just the slightest hint of boredom creeping into her voice. ‘So you know how he could have won?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Really?’ O’Carroll replied, just the slightest hint of intrigue creeping into her voice. ‘So pray, tell me how.’
‘Okay, I will,’ McCusker said, looking around him as if he was about to reveal a state secret. ‘When Rory talks about his game of golf before and during a match, you know, when he tries to justify his play, well eight times out of ten he will lose the game. When he keeps himself to himself before and during the game and doesn’t get drawn into anything deep during the required and, most likely, contracted sponsor interviews, well, that’s when he wins. That’s when he’s playing pure golf and not preoccupied with fulfilling his own soundbites.’
‘Right. Good to know, McCusker, thanks for that,’ she said, appearing to glaze over about halfway through his theory. ‘How are you getting on with fixing up the appointment to visit the graveyard guide?’
‘I’ll chase her again when I get to my desk.’
Chapter Twelve
When they entered the iconic building that was the Customs House, the one-time workplace of Anthony Trollope and currently home to the Laganside section of the PSNI, there was a message for them to go and see Superintendent Niall Larkin immediately.
‘Oh goody, bickies,’ McCusker gushed, Rory’s woes clearly an issue of the past.
‘McCusker, how many times do I have to tell you,’ O’Carroll hissed, as they waited outside Larkin’s door, ‘you’re not a teenager anymore and they’re not called bickies, they’re called…’ Just then, Larkin’s PA, Sheila Lawson – aka Wee Sheila – opened the door.
‘He’s expecting you. Go on through and I’ll be in with tea and bickies in a couple of minutes,’ she said, by way of greeting, and winked at McCusker. She was always winking at McCusker. O’Carroll just rolled her eyes.
‘So, any progress to report?’ Larkin asked, without inviting them to sit down.
‘Well, no one seems to have an alibi,’ McCusker offered.
‘Do you know Miles Bloom, Sir?’ O’Carroll asked.
‘Ah, you’ve heard of the crazy brother already.’
‘Do you think he might be involved?’ O’Carroll asked.
‘That’s why PSNI pay you both the big bucks, so you can answer those kinds of questions for me.’
McCusker felt like they’d just been shot down in flames.
‘Look, FYI,’ Larkin continued in a gentler tone, ‘my barber is on the way up, so we need to be brief. The reason I asked you up here is because you really should have a chat with Mrs Larkin. But if you don’t mind, I don’t really feel comfortable bringing Angela in here for her interview, so she said that I should just invite youse over to the house later for a bite. She said McCusker here looks like he could do with a bit of decent food. So how does that sound?’
‘Count me in,’ McCusker offered, enthusiastically.
O’Carroll looked somewhat less enthusiastic, but Larkin glared at her until she agreed.
They met Wee Sheila on the way out. She had a tray with tea and a plate of Larkin’s favourite Jaffa Cakes.
O’Carroll headed on out of the office without stopping, but McCusker milked and sugared up a cup of tea and helped himself to half a dozen Jaffa Cakes as Sheila stood there. He worked on the theory that the Jaffa Cakes were so small you could get away with eating half a dozen a time.
‘Brilliant, Sheila, a lifesaver,’ McCusker said. ‘I’ll bring the cup back up later.’
‘Shoot,’ O’Carroll grunted as they walked down one storey to their floor.
‘Are you just practising, or were you aiming for “shit”?’
‘I was meant to see a prospect for the future Mr Lily O’Carroll tonight,’ she groaned.
‘Oh, who’s tonight’s lucky contestant?’
The DI was actually so shamefaced that she took a piece of paper out
of her inside pocket and read out, ‘A Mr Chris O’Donnell, an entrepreneur in the music business.’
‘How did you meet him?’ McCusker felt compelled to ask.
‘Don’t ask,’ she replied, in a whisper, as they walked through the doors into their open plan office.
DS WJ Barr had certainly been a busy bee. He’d got the four plastic rubbish bags, including Elizabeth Bloom’s distinctive light blue one, back to Customs House and by the time he’d returned himself, the team had been through each one (including Bloom’s). They’d discovered, thanks to some discarded Amazon packaging, that the bag beneath Elizabeth Bloom’s bag was owned by Mr T Husbands, who lived three doors away from the Bloom residence. The owner of the rubbish bag, which had been found languishing on top of Elizabeth’s own rubbish bag, was proving more difficult to pin down. The only incriminating evidence they could find among the smelly refuse was a plastic bag containing the logo of Kampus Korma, an Indian restaurant that clearly did deliveries as well. Barr had rung the restaurant and discovered that they had delivered: 2 onion Bargees; 1 x Bombay aloo; 1 x Peshwari naan; a chicken korma and a lentil dish; 1 x plain rice, all to a house in Stranmillis Gardens. And the final bag – the bag McCusker, under the watchful eye of Al Armstrong, had removed first from the rubbish bin in Botanic Gardens – had belonged to a Miss Elaine Gibbons from Elaine Street. You couldn’t make that stuff up, but nonetheless, McCusker asked for the proof of address evidence, and he was presented with an evidence bag with not one, but two envelopes (a reminder for an electric bill and a handwritten envelope) containing the name of Miss Elaine Gibbons of Elaine Street, Belfast, BT9 5AR.
McCusker volunteered Barr and himself to nip up there straight away. He wanted to leave O’Carroll in peace for a while, in order to give her a chance to rearrange her blind date, perhaps for even later that evening. On top of which, he was very happy to meet some of Louis Bloom’s neighbours. Neighbours get to see into people’s back gardens and also perhaps to hear things they aren’t meant to hear.
McCusker decided to visit them in the order they’d deposited their rubbish. That would be:
Elaine Gibbons, Elaine Street (2 x envelopes)
Stranmillis Gardens, Name unknown (Kampus Korma delivery bag)
(L Bloom)
T Husbands, Same street, Landseer Street (Amazon packaging)
Miss Elaine Gibbons was surprisingly in residence when Barr and McCusker came calling. Unsurprisingly, the QUB second-year student thought that she was in trouble for dumping her rubbish in Botanic Gardens, albeit in a rubbish bin and, as she went to great pains to point out, at least three other people had got there before her.
‘You’re not in trouble,’ McCusker said, ‘on top of which, I’m not even sure dumping rubbing in a rubbish bin is illegal.’
He intentionally left just that wee bit of doubt hanging in the air in the hope it would encourage her cooperation. Nonetheless, she didn’t invite the two detectives in, and so they conducted the interview on her doorstep. After she’d complained, in her defence, that the bin men didn’t call often enough, McCusker asked what time Elaine would have dumped her black rubbish bag.
‘Let’s see,’ she offered impatiently, ‘around 8.00. I was settling down for the night. I was all cosy and didn’t really want to go out, but equally I didn’t want to do it in daylight just in case people clocked me. So I kinda forced myself to do it. I wasn’t really dressed appropriately, but then again, who was I going to bump into other than other people dressed inappropriately?’
‘And did you meet any inappropriately dressed people?’ McCusker asked, as DS WJ Barr attended to notebook duties.
‘Yes, there were people, but I didn’t clock them for fear they’d clock me,’ she started, stopped, then seemed to think for a few seconds. ‘There were a couple in the shelter across from the bandstand. I was happy enough to look at them – they were sucking so much face, they’d never have noticed me even if I’d been in my birthday suit.’
McCusker knew the shelter well. It was about twenty steps away, down a gentle incline from the bandstand. It was an octagonal rain shelter with a pitched felt roof, resting on red poles and containing two rows of double-sided, black and white seats, which looked like the spokes of a crazy wheel.
McCusker, on one of his many getting-to-know-Belfast walks, had actually sheltered there from a shower and sat in the same seats while viewing the once elegant bandstand, before continuing his dander through a few trees to the nearby rose garden. The Portrush detective remembered actually seeking out the bandstand because he heard somewhere or other that it had been featured in a promo film clip of Van Morrison performing Celtic Swing there in the 1980s.
‘Were they still there when you were on your return journey?’ McCusker continued.
‘Yes, they were, and still snogging. Must have been a first date; you never snog in public unless it’s a first date. I felt like telling them to get a room at the Europa or they’ll scare the animals.’
‘Oh, were there people out walking dogs too?’
‘Just a figure of speech,’ she said, now hopping from foot to foot and keen to return to the warmth of her flat. ‘Look, yes, there were other people around but I ignored them in the hope they would ignore me.’
‘So, tell me more about the couple?’ McCusker asked, realising he was about to lose this one.
‘I didn’t see much, I’ve told you that already,’ she protested.
‘We all see a lot more than we think we see,’ McCusker started off, patiently, ‘please just do me a favour and close your eyes, and go back to last night and think your way through your walk to the rubbish bin and back.’
She humoured him, but only for a few seconds: ‘Nope… no good, all I remember is trying to walk with my bag as inconspicuously as possible, you know, trying to give off the air of: a bag? “What bag? This is not a bag, this is my laundry…” or something similar. I saw the couple in the shelter and, other than that, a lot of the tarmac footpath.’ She stopped talking and closed her eyes even tighter. ‘Okay… the guy was dressed in a dark blue zip-up windbreaker, black trousers. He looked cold. She was much better dressed for the outdoors, grey hoodie under a black duffle coat. YES… yes… the boy was wearing a scarf; it was a yellow and black scarf, which I thought were weird colours for Belfast.’
‘Okay,’ McCusker said in praise, happy with the minor breakthrough.
But Elaine from Elaine Street wasn’t quite finished.
‘There was something else I’ve just remembered,’ she offered, before Barr had a chance to consider putting away his notebook. ‘Yes, the other thing I thought was unusual is that they weren’t kissing in the way you kiss…’
Either she’d lost her confidence, or her thread – or her patience.
‘Yes?’ McCusker persisted.
‘Well, they weren’t kissing like a couple kiss when getting ready to… to…’ she stuttered to a halt, before catching her second wind and continuing with, ‘yes, of course that’s it, they weren’t kissing like a couple who were about to make love, they were just kissing, and seemed very happy to be doing so.’
‘How old were they?
‘He was probably a first-year; she was definitely older than me, maybe a third-year?’
‘Look, we appreciate your time,’ McCusker said, handing her a card. ‘Here’s our details – please give me a shout if you remember anything else.’
McCusker and Barr were just about to walk out of her gate when she called out after them.
‘Hi!’
When they turned round she was looking at McCusker.
‘You were right, you know,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘You said I’d seen more than I’d remembered I’d seen, and you were right,’ she offered through a smile, as she waved his business card at him and closed the door.
* * *
‘So let’s assume that the kissing couple would have been there for a while; perhaps they saw Louis and maybe his assailant?’
‘But goodness, how are we ever going to find them?’ Barr asked, to the mid-air as much as McCusker.
‘Well, the boy was wearing a scarf and the boy will lead us to the girl,’ McCusker said and then stopped mid-step.
‘What – you’ve thought of something?’
‘No, not really,’ McCusker started, ‘it’s just when I was growing up we had girlfriends and girlfriends had boyfriends, but in modern society when you think of a couple engaging in the overtures to sexual activity… well, the words “boy” and “girl” seem highly inappropriate to use. Young men and young women would seem more politically correct these days.’
‘I see what you’re saying, but at seventeen, you’re hardly a man or even a young man?’ Barr offered.
‘Unless of course,’ McCusker said, smiling as he opened the gate at the address in Stranmillis Gardens, which had been opened by the delivery boy (McCusker felt that “boy” was a safe word in this instance) something like fourteen hours previously, ‘you’re seventeen!’
* * *
McCusker rang the doorbell, which produced a ding-dong sound somewhere in the depths of the house, for a good few minutes before they could hear mutterings and footsteps in the hallway.
‘What kind of fresh hell do we have here?’ a man said, before he’d the green door fully open.
The man, all five foot of him, in a cloth cap, was friendlier in person than his opening had been.
Barr, as the official member of the PSNI, introduced them both and, introductions over, McCusker got straight into it.
‘Did you, Sir, by any chance order an Indian takeaway meal from Kampus Korma yesterday evening?’
‘Ah jeez, don’t tell me they’re using dog meat in the restaurants again?’
‘Even if they did, we understand you’ll be okay, because you’d either chicken or lentils,’ McCusker replied.
