In the Morning I'll Be Gone (17 page)

Mary nodded with satisfaction. It sounded like I was determined to do a thorough job. “I’ll get the key. Annie’ll walk you over. It’s not ten minutes from here.”

“I’m sure I can find it. I, uh, I don’t want to compromise either of you by having you seen in public with a police officer . . . in the circumstances, you know?” I said.

“What, with Dermot on the run?” Annie offered.

“Yeah.”

“As far as I know no one elected Dermot McCann High King of Ireland! And no one will tell me who I can be seen in public with and who I can’t!” Mrs. Fitzpatrick exclaimed. “I’ll take you over there if Annie doesn’t want to!”

“Jesus, if you’d let me get a word in, Mother . . . I don’t mind taking Sean over.”

“No, really, it’s OK, I can get there by myself, I—”

“If anyone asks me, we’ll tell them the truth. You’re a policeman looking into Lizzie’s death. No one in Ballykeel or Antrim will object to that!” Annie insisted.

“And if they do they can answer to me!” Mary said, and gave me a brief look that I understood as a further injunction against bringing up Dermot’s name.

Annie grabbed a coat and a pair of boots and I followed her through the house and out the back gate.

We walked along the boggy lough shore and along a tree-lined lane. There was a bluebell wood to our left and the village up ahead to the right. The trees were filled with wood pigeon and down by the water there were gulls, curlews, oyster catchers. Two wee muckers were in the wood swinging at one another with wooden swords, yelling obscenities, and committing a messy anglocide on the wild flowers.

“It’s a lovely place this,” I said to Annie.

“Aye, it is. This is an ancient forest, not a plantation, and just up there was where they massed for the Battle of Antrim. You know that story?”

“I do. Henry Joy McCracken led the attack on the British garrison. Protestant and Catholic fighting together against the English.” And before she could say it, I added, “And here’s me working for those selfsame English.”

She turned to look at me. The smile was gone but that there was still an ironic glint in her eyes. “I always liked you, Sean. And Dermot liked you. That’s why he could not believe it when he heard that you’d joined the police. He was furious. You were like a wee brother to him.”

“That’s bullshit, Annie. Dermot had no time for me at school and very little time for me afterward. Dermot was in the cool crowd and I wasn’t. Dermot was political and I couldn’t give a shit. Dermot only kept in touch with me after St. Malachy’s because I had a car and he occasionally wanted me to drive him places.”

“Don’t be silly, Sean.”

“I’ve thought a lot about this, Annie. Dermot never saw me as an equal. He condescended to hang out with me from time to time but that was all.”

“And yet you came to him after Bloody Sunday. You begged him to let you join the IRA, didn’t you?”

“He told you about that?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Aye.”

“But he didn’t let you join, did he? He didn’t think you had the nerve for it. He thought you would lose your bottle at a crucial moment.”

I bristled at that. “Jesus! Is that what he told you?”

“That’s what he said.”

“I did ask Dermot if I could join the IRA and he did turn me down but he said it was because he wanted me to finish my PhD at Queen’s. He said that ‘the movement needs men with brains as well as brawn.’”

Annie shook her head and gave a little laugh. “That was a lie, Sean. That was a lie to spare your feelings. He didn’t think you had the bottle. He didn’t think you were reliable. He thought you’d fuck it up and get yourself killed.”

I felt chilled to the bone. “Did he really say that to you?”

“You’ve gone all white. Don’t get offended.”

“Don’t get offended? That’s a terrible thing to say about anybody. Bloody hell! If he told you that, he doesn’t sound like a man who liked me very much, does he?”

“I’m sorry, Sean, I’m a big blabber, so I am.”

Yeah, but you’re not denying it
.

We had reached the village now and I could see the Henry Joy McCracken pub next to a tiny newsagent and post office.

“I’m sorry I brought it up. It’s water under the bridge, Sean.”

“I’m sorry you brought it up too. Jesus!”

She put her hand on my arm and gave it a little squeeze. “He said a lot of things. Don’t take everything so personally.”

“I’m not taking it personally. I’m not interested in Dermot. I’m only here to see if there’s anything untoward in Lizzie’s death,” I said.

She smiled and didn’t reply and we walked across the quiet street to the Henry Joy McCracken.

“I forgot to bring a torch. Will the lights come on?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she said, taking the key out of her pocket. “I haven’t been in here for years.”

“We don’t need to go in just yet. Let me have a wee gander at these windows first.”

I walked around the pub, which was a small, single-storied building with no adjoining buildings or structures. It was a late nineteenth-century construction in an attractive red brick. The windows had been covered with cast-iron bars to prevent burglaries and as I examined them I saw that the bars were thick and six inches apart. No one was crawling through those. The bars were attached to heavy frames that were solidly bolted into the brick with a dozen thick 10mm hex bolts. I tugged on every single bar to see whether they were all securely fastened to the frame, but there was no give at all in any of them.

“Do you know when these window bars were put in? They weren’t original features of the building, were they?”

“No. Me da had them put in at the start of the Troubles, 1971 maybe, somewhere around then.”

“Every one of them is rock solid,” I said. “Did you notice the paint on them?”

“What about it?”

“It’s consistent on the bars and the bolts.”

“Which means?”

“Well, to get through this you’d have to take the hex bolts out, all twelve of them, and even with a power tool that’s not going to be easy. And then after the murder you have to stand here at the window and reattach the frame. Ten-minute job at least. Someone would have seen you. But let’s say you did it and no one saw you . . . you’re still screwed because you would have left traces of the power wrench in the bolt-head paint and the brick mortar would have been disturbed. But as you can see, the paint on the bars and the bolts on all the windows is undisturbed. Unless the killer also stood here on the night of the murder and painted every bolt head and every bar in all the windows.”

“Someone would have noticed the smell.”

“Indeed.”

“So no one came in through the windows.”

“No one came in through the windows. That’s for certain. Let’s go round the back and see this rear door.”

At the back of the pub there was a low cinderblock wall and a wooden gate that led into a yard with some pallets and a few empty beer kegs. The wall was easily climbable but the back door itself was a thick oak job with stainless-steel hinges.

I got down on my honkers to examine the lock.

The lock was a Portadown Lock Company tumbler lock from the 1950s. Model No. 13 by the look of it.

“I don’t have the back-door key,” Annie said.

“I don’t think we’ll need it.”

I took my trusty lock-pick kit from my jacket pocket.

“Let me just see now,” I said, examining the mechanism.

“What are you doing?” she asked as I inserted the feeler pick into the lock.

“Gimme a minute,” I said confidently. But in fact it only took forty-five seconds with the tension wrench, an angle pick, and a tiny amount of torque.

The lock clicked. I pushed the handle and, as I knew I would, I came right up against the dead-bolt bar. The door didn’t move a centimeter. If the bolt had been across the night Lizzie was killed the killer certainly didn’t get in this way.

If there was a killer.

“Let’s go to the entrance,” I said.

“All right.”

We made our way to the front of the pub again.

“No cellar doors for delivering kegs and barrels?” I asked Annie.

“Nah. Da rolled the barrels right in the back door.”

“Do you know about any other way in?”

“I don’t. And I played in here as a kid. Kids are always the first to find lost wallets and secret tunnels and things, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, they are,” I agreed. “How long has the pub been closed?”

“More or less since Lizzie died.”

“So what do you do for money?”

“That’s a bit of a rude question,” Annie said.

“I’m a cop, Annie, I get to ask impertinent questions.”

“How is it relevant?”

“Everything’s relevant. How are you getting by? I’m sure Dermot never paid you a penny in alimony. Your mother doesn’t seem to work. The pub’s closed. What do you live on?”

“Da inherited a lot of land from his dad in County Donegal. We’ve been selling it off in dribs and drabs for the last few years. Eventually we’ll have to sell this place too. It’s a good location near the water. I’m sure somebody can make a go of it.”

We had reached the front door now and I could see where it had been ripped off the hinges by the police battering ram. They had reset the same door with different hinges on another part of the brick wall.

“So they knocked this door down?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Were you here that night?”

“No, I was in Derry.”

“Who was here?”

“Mum, a couple of policemen, and I think Harper had made it back from Belfast. Are you going to do your trick with the lock on this one?” she asked.

“Nah, you can get us in.”

The lock was an identical Portadown tumbler lock. A competent locksmith or burglar could easily have picked it, but that didn’t matter much. The two deadbolts were what made this affair a locked room mystery.

Annie put the key in the lock and opened the door. She fumbled for the light switch and after a moment the lights came on.

We walked inside. It was a single room with a long wooden bar at the back. About a dozen tables with wooden chairs stacked on top of them. Hammer-beam ceiling sure enough.

I had a hunch that Chief Inspector Beggs might have been exaggerating his own fastidiousness, so the first thing I did was examine the cellar.

I thought that this might be a key to the whole mystery but when we went down there I discovered no secret trapdoor or tunnel. The brickwork was solid, the floor thick. It was basically just a glorified storage room that you could barely stand up straight in. It would have taken two seconds to ascertain whether someone was in here or not.

“Do you think someone was hiding down here?” Annie asked.

“Beggs and his men searched down here, but I was more interested in the brickwork to see if there was evidence of recent pointing or a false wall or anything like that.”

“And?”

“Nothing like that.”

We went back upstairs and I examined the hammer-beam roof, which was a lovely job: a really nice pastiche of a medieval ceiling in stained pine planking.

The roof was planked and covered with slate tiles and was about twenty feet above the bar. If you’d brought a tall ladder and a hammer, you could have smashed your way out through the roof, but how you would have concealed all the mess was beyond me, and surely the cops would have seen a great big honking hole.

Nah, you couldn’t get out that way.

A dozen or so light bulbs were hanging directly from the ceiling with one of them right above the bar.

“Is this the one she was supposedly trying to change?” I asked.

Annie was too upset to look at it but she nodded her head.

I climbed on top of the bar. I could reach it without much difficulty but then I was five foot eleven.

“How tall was your sister?”

“About five two, five three, something like that?”

“This might have been a bit tricky for her,” I said.

“It obviously was.”

I climbed down and went to check the deadbolts on the front and back door of the premises. They were heavy, sturdy iron bars that ran along the back of the door and hooked into a thick loop in the brickwork. The bar and the loop were held in place with two-inch Phillips-head stainless-steel screws. Even after the cops had used the battering ram on the front door these screws and the bolt had remained in place.

I ran the deadbolt back and forth a few times and locked it into place. It was heavy and just as solid as it looked. The door fitted tightly against the wall and there was only a negligible gap underneath it. The deadbolt was so heavy that attaching a wire to it and trying to somehow close it from the outside was the least likely of all the possibilities here.

“Well?” Annie said.

I shook my head.

“If these bolts were across then there was no way anyone could have got in here to murder her like Dr. Kent suggests,” she said.

“The bolts were across, weren’t they?”

“Unless you believe in the supernatural, it must have been an accident. A tragic accident.”

We took two of the upturned chairs off one of the tables and sat down.

“Tell me about the boyfriend, Harper,” I asked.

“She was a great girl and of course Harper was mad for her,” she said.

“Harper loved her?”

“Oh yes.”

“And she him.”

“Yeah.”

“Talk of marriage?”

“I think so. Yes. Definitely. They would have made a lovely couple.”

There was something a little stilted about her remarks and I wondered whether Annie had been as close to Lizzie as she might have liked. But there was no percentage to be had in bringing something like that up . . .

I looked at the smooth bar covered with a thick coating of dust, dead moths, and my footprints.

“It would be so easy to slip from here and break your neck,” I said.

Annie pulled out a packet of Rothmans Special Mild and offered me one. I took it and she grabbed a packet of matches from an ashtray on one of the tables. We lit our cigarettes and sat there for a while.

“You ever hear from your sister in Canada?” I asked, completely blanking on the name.

“Nah. Hardly ever. She wants to forget Ireland ever existed.”