by Paul Charles
‘Did you get a match?’ McCusker felt scared to ask, but he did anyway.
‘Yes, we found Louis Bloom’s prints on both sides of the photo,’ Barr replied.
‘Right,’ said McCusker, unable to hide his disappointment.
‘Oh yes,’ Barr grandstanded, ‘sorry – there was one other clear set of prints on the photograph, remind me whose they were again?’
No one offered any help to Barr, and McCusker, once again, had that awful X-Factor sinking feeling.
‘Oh yes, the other prints we managed to find were in the police PSNI computer system. They belonged to a certain Mr Noah Woyda.’
‘You’re kidding?’ McCusker said automatically, but accepted that he’d feel a terrible fool if Barr said “Yes sir, I was kidding”.
But no need for McCusker to worry, because Barr said, ‘They checked and re-checked, Sir, and they are 100 per cent confirmed as being the fingerprints of Noah Woyda.’
‘Amazing job, the lot of you,’ McCusker offered in praise of the entire team, and silently ate his “anyone who leaves fingerprints is a fool who we’ll eventually catch anyway” words.
He eventually tracked down DI O’Carroll. Once again she sounded like she was in a noisy bar. She was as happy about the news as he was. Both agreed that they’d still a way to go to join all the dots, but they were a lot more excited than they had been earlier when Leanne Delacato had managed to walk her client, Noah Woyda, out of the Customs House uncharged.
‘Just tell me this, McCusker, before you go,’ she shouted, ‘on a scale of one to ten, just how hot were the photographs?’
‘Oh, I’d say,’ McCusker offered, in a large exhale, ‘on a scale of one to ten they’d be about one…’ and he paused ‘…hundred and ninety-nine!’
Chapter Forty-Three
McCusker felt it only fair he take Barr and the forensic team out for an after-office drink at McHughs.
At first he was preoccupied with the numerous types of body noises about the pub, repeated as signatures. The man who wheezed; the lad who coughed; the girl who cried; the man who sneezed; the woman who sniffled; the man who snocked (a McCusker, pig-like word for the noise of someone drawing snotters back up their nostrils, causing sounds like a death-rattle in the back of their throats). They all reminded McCusker of a street rhyme from his youth and one that Elizabeth Bloom claimed her husband had often used: “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, so trap your germs in your handkerchiefs.” Maybe the word “handkerchief” should be replaced by “Kleenex” in O’Carroll’s modern version. It made him realise that you didn’t see many handkerchiefs around these days. He agreed with himself that perhaps that may not be the best topic to bring up with the DI right now.
The above distraction was but a fleeting one and before long he and DS Barr got into quite a conversation about forensics and firearms.
‘Don’t forget, we are living in a society where we’re always working on ways to kill one another, and we and other police forces are working on ways to, hopefully, prevent said crimes – not only to prevent them, but catching the criminals after the crimes,’ McCusker said, following on from one of Barr’s accounts of how the forensic team were becoming more and more successful. ‘But what we seem to ignore is that it is well within the PSNI’s power to cut out some crimes completely. Say firearms, for instance. We could just ban all firearms and save ourselves and the public so much pain and anguish. Stop all this madness overnight.’
McCusker felt that Barr’s eyes betrayed “That’s just too simplistic a view”, but in respect of McCusker, the DS abstained from saying the actual words.
‘So tell me this, WJ: why are they even legal? Why are people even allowed to buy guns?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about guns, Sir,’ Barr replied confidently, ‘the guns themselves aren’t the problem we need to address. If guns were illegal and someone wanted to kill someone, you can bet your bottom dollar they’d soon find another method.’
‘Yes, yes of course, I get that,’ McCusker offered, sincerely hoping he was debating more than arguing, ‘but don’t you see that with a gun, the assassin removes part of the actual murder process out of the kill? If you seek to kill someone with a gun, you’re once removed from the actual killing. Whereas with Louis Bloom, his murderer got up close and personal with him. Louis’ assassin was close enough to smell Louis’ deodorant, his sweat. The murderer was close enough to his victim to hear him breathe, to feel him gasp for his final breath. That certainly takes a different kind of resolve than someone who just pulls a trigger, maybe even from a distance, maybe even while hidden in the bushes, or from a window high up in Dealey Plaza in faraway Dallas, Texas.’
Then the head-turning, conversation-stopping vision that was Grace O’Carroll walked into McHughs, and the two colleagues' debating stopped immediately. As McCusker enjoyed every single microsecond of her walk towards him, he remembered that it was in this very bar that he first spotted Grace, or French Bob, as he had christened her then. He didn’t know at that point that she was DI Lily O’Carroll’s sister. Nor did he know that his many daydreams about her would one day become a reality. Before she was close enough to him to say hello to, he wished with all his might that Thomas Chada and Siobhan might one day themselves enjoy a similar reality.
Chapter Forty-Four
Day Seven: Wednesday
The Wednesday was only a matter of one hour and forty-seven minutes old when McCusker was awoken from his slumber. He tried ever so gently to disentangle his and Grace’s limbs from each other. In the process, he disturbed her but didn’t awaken her.
Ten minutes later he was in her sister’s battered, metallic yellow Mégane, racing towards Miles Bloom’s house up on Cyprus Avenue.
‘How did your date go?’ McCusker asked his partner.
‘Well, it was all going okay, not great, but okay, that is until he asked me back to his place,’ she said, as she jumped a red light at Newtownards Road and Holland Drive.
‘Yeah… and it’s 2018, surely that’s permitted on a first date?’ McCusker offered in surprise.
‘Agreed,’ she conceded, ‘but then that was when he told me he still lived with his mum…’
And that was when McCusker and O’Carroll pulled up outside Miles Bloom’s house at the bottom of Cyprus Avenue.
By the time they arrived there was already an ambulance, two Battenbergs, three Blues and Twos, DI Jarvis Cage’s vehicle, lots of flashing lights and lots of people milling around behind the taped-off “Do Not Cross” police lines, trying to steal a better view of… well, all of the above, really. Mrs Miles Bloom – the other Mrs Bloom - was not in attendance. She was over in Brighton at a conference. She had been contacted and would make her way back first thing in the morning.
McCusker, for some reason or other, had not been expecting what was waiting for them inside Bloom’s house. Even when O’Carroll had rung him, all she had said was there had been an incident of some kind or other up at Miles Bloom’s house and that DI Cage, who was on his third day staking out Miles Bloom, had been hysterical, just screaming at her to get over there immediately.
The first thing that shook McCusker and shattered his happy-go-lucky mood was the copious amount of blood splattered on the walls of the living room.
That was before he even saw the denim-clad remains hidden behind a rose-patterned sofa.
Miles Bloom was dead!
The only two surviving members of the Bloom family had died within a week of each other.
DI Jarvis Cage seemed to have settled down somewhat since his phone conversation with O’Carroll.
‘Just after 1.00 a.m. a large, black 4x4 pulled onto the corner of North Road, just on the corner of Cyprus Avenue and close to the Bloom residence.’ Cage’s eyes darted from O’Carroll to McCusker, as if seeking some kind of approval. ‘Before I actually noticed the vehicle, they’d turned off their lights. I wasn’t concerned about this. I initially thought it was just a few neighbours returning after a nig
ht on the tiles.
‘Then when two men got out of the SUV, walked diagonally across Cyprus Avenue to Mr Bloom’s, I thought I’d better record them on my iPhone. They stopped at the front door for a few seconds before going around to the back of his house. I didn’t hear anything else, but I felt it best to turn off BBC Radio Ulster, which had been getting me through this stakeout for a few nights now, just in case.
‘Next thing I know, the light goes on in what I’ve always assumed was Miles’ bedroom. Then a few seconds later the hall light goes on. Another few seconds passed before the light in the front room went on. Then nothing at all happened for several minutes.
‘Then I heard some screaming and shouting from the living room. I called it in at that point, asking for back-up and started filming with my iPhone again. The screaming and shouting stopped for a couple of minutes then it started back up again. It was louder the second time. I saw a flash and a pop, then another flash and a pop.
‘Then I repeated my call for back-up. I didn’t know what was going on over there in Miles Bloom’s house but all hell seemed to have broken loose. The front door burst open and those same two men ran out and back to the black Mercedes SUV. A few seconds later, the car sped off without switching on its lights, so I didn’t have a chance to record its number plate.
‘I did get a great clip, on my mobile phone, of them running towards the car. I also shot some footage of them jumping into the car and driving off,’ Cage offered eagerly, as he produced his mobile and replayed the scenes he’d just described.
Mostly the images were too dark to make anything out but the street lamps, but part of it, with the two men high-tailing it, backs to the camera, clearly showed that one of them was wearing a blue plastic car-coat with tell-tale red, green and yellow stripes across the back of the shoulders.
McCusker and O’Carroll just nodded at each other.
DI Cage then took them over to the body.
Miles had a piece of white paper stuffed in his bloody hand. But there was no blood on the paper. DI Cage had waited to remove it until O’Carroll had arrived, although all, in their own way, noted the fact that Cage hadn’t actually said “I wanted to wait until DI O’Carroll and McCusker arrived”.
O’Carroll had the fist and the crumpled paper photographed from every possible angle. Then, gloved up, she carefully removed the paper.
She unfolded it.
It was half of a foolscap page with the typed words “i’m sorry for what I done to my brother. didnt solve my problems. this is my only escape”. A large handwritten “M” was signed beneath the typed lines.
‘And you’re sure you heard two shots, DI Cage?’ McCusker asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ Cage hissed back, indignantly.
‘It was just a question, Cage,’ O’Carroll said, her warm fuzzy feeling for Cage over his stellar work disappearing fast. ‘And where did the second shot go?’ she continued, as they all searched the body.
There was one clear wound right between the eyes. A sickening lot of blood and brain matter were sprayed all over the walls around the sofa. There were no other wounds about the body.
McCusker eventually found the second bullet. It was at the opposite end of the room from the blood-spattered walls. McCusker’s first thought was that this, the living room – the good room – was not the usual room in which to commit suicide. There was also the theory, which McCusker believed held a lot of water, that suicidal people were considerate to their survivors and usually picked a garage or even a forest to do the deed. Certainly, somewhere that would cause minimum stress to those left behind. Most certainly some place away from the window and the front of the house.
The lack of blood on the suicide note, compared to the hand in which it was found, indicated that the note had been stuffed into Miles Bloom’s fist after shots were fired.
Furthermore, McCusker knew that Miles Bloom would never have referred to Louis as “my brother”. He also surmised that surely such a man of letters and writs would have used proper punctuation and wouldn’t have restricted himself to only nineteen words. He most certainly would have had a well-practiced, flamboyant signature, and not just a single initial.
On top of which, two shots were fired in opposite directions, in the company of two strangers… that was stretching the imagination just a wee bit too far.
A few minutes later, O’Carroll found McCusker out in the hallway, sitting on the second-to-bottom stair.
‘Are you okay?’ O’Carroll asked him, quietly.
‘Yes. But now and again I’ll get a flashback to a smell, a fond memory of a treasured smell from my childhood that I’d long forgotten,’ McCusker replied, pulling himself out of his thought. ‘It might be a sweet or a cake I’d enjoyed. Even the smell of a comic, a new comic, you know: Superman or Batman or a Commando comic. They all had very different, distinctive smells. When I catch a whiff like that, I’ll try, sometimes for weeks, to match the smell up to the item that had once brought me such immense pleasure.’
‘Yes, and…?’
‘Well, just there I got a whiff of that there again, and I got it yesterday when we were interviewing Woyda, and that’s why I tried to shake his hand, you know, to try to get closer to him to pinpoint the smell. I couldn’t get close enough – he wouldn’t shake my hand. Then when we were entering this house I experienced the smell again in the hallway; it was just for the briefest of moments, and then my nostrils were filled with the smells of gunpowder in the living room. But then I came back out here – well, the same smell hit me again. This time I got it. It’s sweets, hard-boiled sweets, and that smell is so powerful and so evocative. I always felt the smell was so pungent because they used to keep hard-boiled sweets in those large sweetie jars and then the absolute explosion of aromas on the nostrils when the top was screwed off…. just now when I came out here again, I recalled all this, and it was the same smell that hung on Noah Woyda, as strong and as distinguishable as any talcum powder, aftershave or deodorant. It is the joyous smell of black and white mint humbugs.’
O’Carroll just smiled.
‘If we needed any more proof that he was here, that was it,’ McCusker claimed.
‘Let’s go and get our man before he does any other harm,’ O’Carroll said, helping her partner up from the step.
Chapter Forty-Five
Noah Woyda was born in Katowice in Poland, on March 4th, 1959. When Noah was three years old his father – a dentist, also named Noah – decided to move the family, lock, stock and barrel, to Antrim in Northern Ireland. He chose Northern Ireland because as a volunteer for the Polish FA he had worked as a medic (or the man with the magic sponge who ran onto the field in times of injury) when the Northern Irish team visited the Chorzow Stadium on the October 10th, 1962, to play Poland in the first round of the European Championship Qualifier. Northern Ireland won 2-0, which was the same score when Poland (with volunteer Woyda) visited Windsor Park, Belfast, on November 28th, the same year, for the second leg. Following the monumental fixtures, Noah Senior told anyone who would listen that he was moving the entire family (himself, wife, Noah and Noah’s two older sisters) to Northern Ireland, simply because he thought the Ulstermen in the Northern Irish FA party were the nicest, funniest and friendliest people he’d ever met in his life. The Woyda family moved to Antrim Town in February 1963. Noah Senior bought into a local, and very successful, dental practice at the perfect time.
Noah Woyda (Junior), unlike the rest of his family, didn’t settle well in Antrim. He fell behind in school because he was so slow learning to speak English. The older Noah got, the more he never forgave his father for moving the family from his native Poland. He didn’t make friends easily; he claimed he didn’t want to be friends with the locals. He blamed them for him not living in Poland. With the passing of years, he became more and more romantically attached to Poland, although, strangely, he never returned to his native land. When he was eighteen years old he refused his father’s invitation to become an apprentice in th
e dental practice; Noah Junior claimed he didn’t want to serve the Ulster people. He didn’t want to serve anybody.
He worked as a labourer on the roads until he was twenty-seven. He wasn’t scared of hard work and was happy to work all the overtime he could get. Then he got a job as a lorry driver. He met his first wife, Maureen, at the Flamingo Ballroom in nearby Ballymena, dancing to the legendary Billy Brown & the Freshmen. Maureen Wallace, aged 32, and her three friends were from Belfast, and dedicated fans of the Freshmen. So Noah Junior moved to the city and married Maureen in 1986. But Maureen still wanted to continue going out with her friends, to see the Freshmen and hang out with the band. That wasn’t what Noah expected his wife to do. So he just up and left her and, in fact, he didn’t divorce Maureen until he met and decided he wanted to marry Murcia in 2014.
By the time he left Maureen, he had his own lorry and was doing very well as a haulage contractor, which is how he got into trouble with the RUC for the first time. Noah was transporting lorry-loads of tobacco and liquor across the border.
He soon realised the shippers had been taking advantage of him. He was the one taking the risk by crossing the border with the contraband; he believed that, logically, he should be the one making the lion’s share of the money. So he started doing his own bootlegging, and in 1992, the RUC lay in wait and caught him red-handed. Some said the RUC had been tipped off by an ex-associate who wasn’t happy that Noah had started up his own “business”.
Noah claimed that the RUC made an example of him because he was a foreigner, rather than arrest the locals, the real organisers. He was found guilty and sentenced to three years in Crumlin Road Gaol, which coincidently was also designed by Sir Charles Lanyon, opened in 1846 and is the only Victorian era prison still standing in Northern Ireland. Noah took great pleasure in working out, beefing up and learning how to handle himself while in prison. All the time he was incarcerated he was very careful to keep his nose clean. With good behaviour, he was out in fifteen months.
