In the Morning I'll Be Gone (18 page)

“I don’t blame her.”

“I don’t blame her either. It’s probably the right move. This country is fucked,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe if your English friends would piss off and leave us alone we could work it out,” she said.

She wasn’t going to suck me in. “Politics? Really, Annie? I mean, who cares?” I said.

“You used to.”

“Me? I never gave a shite about politics. I still don’t. Certainly not bloody Irish politics. No, your sis has the right idea. Did you ever meet any of Dermot’s brothers? I’ll bet you didn’t. They’re all in Australia or America or somewhere. That’s the play. Go to America. Sing a few songs about the Old Country from time to time, donate a few pennies to the cause now and again, but don’t ever go back.”

“Why do you stay?” Annie asked.

“Why indeed?”

The vile Rothmans Special Mild was burning down to the filter unsmoked. Annie took it from me and stamped it on the floor. She wiped the ash from the back of my hand and gave my fingertips a little squeeze.

“Will you stay for tea, Sean?” she asked.

“Is that an invitation?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like that.”

We locked up the Henry Joy McCracken and walked back through the village to the Fitzpatricks’ house. We didn’t talk, but I noticed that she sometimes stole glances at me when she thought I wasn’t looking.

Still sizing me up, was Annie.

And me her, come to that. Feeling a little guilty now too. How could I not be?

I stayed with the Fitzpatricks for tea.

Jim Fitzpatrick came home from his fishing at five o’clock, stinking of mud and whisky. He was a big scary bastard, six foot two, bald, seventeen stone. An old-school Republican but the sort who grumbles about the “men of violence” and moves to a small town and opens a pub, not the sort who nurses grievances across the decades. And he came from money, which distinguished him from most of the guys who ended up in the H Blocks with nothing to lose.

He had in fact caught a fish. A massive brown trout that he had already gutted and beheaded.

Mary made us champ to go with the skillet-fried trout and onions and we talked about the weather and this and that.

I never mentioned the case and Lizzie’s name did not come up. Lizzie’s pictures had been removed from the walls and it was clear that the wound was still raw with the man. In fact it was a wound that was going to kill him. He was putting away at least a bottle a day and probably more.

I took my leave at six and drove back to Carrickfergus.

I debated whether I should keep this confidential or not but I knew it was just delaying the inevitable so I called up Kate and told her the whole story.

She wasn’t sure about it and told me that she felt that I shouldn’t spend all my time investigating Lizzie Fitzpatrick’s death because there was no guarantee that Mary Fitzpatrick could deliver Dermot.

I told her that she was right about that and that I would pursue all our other leads.

I laughed when I hung up. There were no other leads. There were not going to be any other leads. When Dermot finally activated his cell and started blowing people up, perhaps he’d make a mistake and leave a forensic trace, but no one in Ireland was ever going to give him up. Not without a very good reason.

The following Tuesday I drove to Aldergrove Airport and caught the 10 a.m. flight to Aberdeen. I hadn’t been to Aberdeen before but I felt I knew it because Telly Savalas was always telling us what a great city it was in a cheesy film that ran before every movie I’d seen for the last five years. Sometimes you’d only get to see TV’s Kojak talking about Aberdeen for five minutes before there would be a bomb scare and the cinema would be evacuated.

I flew into the gleaming new airport and caught a taxi.

Aberdeen was a strange place to be in the summer of 1984. It was about the only place in Britain that wasn’t in the crapper. After her brave boys had retaken the Falkland Islands, Mrs. Thatcher had handily won the 1983 election. In early ’84 a buoyant Mrs. T had decided to end government subsidies to the coal industry. As she knew they would, the National Union of Mineworkers had come out on strike. The NUM had brought down the previous Tory administration and Mrs. Thatcher was determined to get revenge for that and to end the union’s power forever. She had stockpiled years’ worth of coal at power stations and had guaranteed to keep the pits open for any workers who wanted to defy the picket lines. Every day the English newspapers were full of pictures of battles between cops and picketers outside collieries in Wales and the north of England. But Aberdeen was above all this. It relied on a quite different fossil fuel. It was an oil boom town. House prices were skyrocketing, wages were soaring—a house cleaner in the Bridge of Don made more than a detective inspector in the RUC.

My ex-girlfriend Laura had come here because she’d been offered a professorship in pathology at cash-rich Aberdeen University.

It was a chance to build a new life and she’d taken it.

I didn’t blame her. Maybe I was even a little envious. She’d been able to cut through the guilt and the loyalties and the emotions and go.

Of course I missed her, but I don’t think it went deeper than that. At least I hoped not.

We’d arranged to meet at the Student Union Bar, which she thought would be a nice neutral space. Of course, at lunchtime it was chaotic and it took me a while to spot her. She’d cut her hair short and it didn’t suit her. She was wearing a subdued red dress, low-heeled black shoes, and a diamond engagement ring.

She kissed me on the cheek and told me I looked great.

I said the same about her.

We were both lying already and that made me a little sad.

“Let’s get out of here! It’s more packed than normal,” she said.

We moved to a café adjoining a golf course overlooking the North Sea.

“Life’s treating you OK?” I asked.

“It’s treating me well,” she said.

“You’re back as a detective, then, I see,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That meant a lot to you, didn’t it? What was it you told me . . . the classic peeler schism is between detective and beat cop.”

It pleased me that she’d remembered that. “That’s right,” I said.

A waiter came. I asked what was good and Laura said that it had to be the grilled haddock. We ordered two and a bottle of wine that she picked out.

“You’re getting married,” I said.

“Did you run into my mother?”

“Is he nice?”

“You’d like him. He is a diver. A professional diver. A real guy’s guy. He’d be right up your alley.”

I told her that he sounded great to pre-empt further discussion but she thought I really wanted to know and gave me the full treatment: his family history, his childhood, how they’d met. I listened politely and took none of it in.

Our food arrived and when we’d eaten I asked her about the case.

“Did you get a chance to look at those documents I sent you?”

“Yes, yes I did.”

“And?”

“Your Dr. Kent seems to be a little . . .”

“What? Eccentric? Mad?”

“Old fashioned in his terminology and technique.”

“He’s in his seventies. Late seventies, I think.”

“That would explain it.”

“So is he off base?”

She opened her bag and removed the file I’d sent her by express mail.

“Do you want the details, or just a summary?” she asked.

“Oh, I’ll take the details. You know me. Details Duffy.”

“There are seven cervical vertebrae. In his autopsy Dr. Kent found that all seven had suffered trauma and the upper three vertebrae had suffered severe trauma. Dr. Kent insists that the stress fractures on these vertebrae are primarily latitudinal, not longitudinal, and this convinced him that the trauma your victim suffered was a violent twisting motion, not an impact from a fall or blow.”

“What do you say?”

“I’d say that the evidence tends to bear out Dr. Kent’s thesis, although it’s a shame he didn’t think to take an X-ray photograph of the victim’s neck. He includes drawings of his pathological study . . .”

“I asked him about that. I suppose in his day it was all drawings. But he said we could exhume the body if we needed to.”

“Yes, he’s quite right. The bones won’t have decayed. You could still take a good photograph.”

“Can you rule out a fall as a cause of Lizzie’s injuries?”

She shook her head. “Rule it out? No. In effect the human body is a massive spring, and when you drop a spring from a height . . . well, pretty much anything can happen.”

“I know it’s not what you do, Laura, but if you were going to assign probabilities to the two scenarios: Lizzie fell off the bar while putting in a light bulb or Lizzie was hit on the head and someone snapped her neck and made it look like an accident . . .”

She thought about it for a while.

“Sixty/forty—murder/accident.”

“Jesus, that’s not very convincing. I thought you were going to say eighty/twenty.”

“No. Like I say, it could have been a fall. I think your Dr. Kent’s hunch is the right one, but I wouldn’t want to take it to court.”

I nodded and made a quick scribble in my notebook.

When I was done I found that she had crossed her hands on the table and she was smiling at me.

“How are you doing, Sean?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you eating OK?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not drinking too much?”

“No more than everybody else.”

“Everybody else drinks too much.”

“Do you blame them?”

“No.”

She was so beautiful when she smiled like that. So beautiful I couldn’t look at her.

“What about you, how are you doing?”

“I’ve never been happier,” she said, and meant it. “When we’re married and settled, I’m going to try and bring my parents out.”

Behind her the North Sea was a cold indigo with whitecaps scudding across the surface. There were tankers and other massive ships leaving the harbor and heading northeast toward the rigs. That’s where the future lay, not west in Ireland, not down the aging mines . . .

“Looks freezing out there. I suppose you never go swimming?” I asked.

“No. Never.”

“What shade of blue would you call that water? Indigo?”

She grinned a little. It was a feeble conversational gambit. “Have you considered moving to Britain, Sean? I’m sure the Metropolitan Police would love someone of your abilities.”

“What abilities? I’m your classic big fish, little pond. Let me ask you something. If you’re changing a light bulb and you’re right handed, don’t you need to have the new light bulb in your left hand? You need your good hand to unscrew the bulb, don’t you?”

Laura considered this for a moment and imagined her own actions. She shook her head. “I don’t know about that. If it were me I would hold the new light bulb in my right hand until I was balanced and ready to unscrew the dead bulb and then I’d transfer the new one to my left and unscrew the dead light bulb with my right.”

“That’s what I said. So you don’t think we can draw an inference from the fact that the new light bulb was in her right hand. The hand she would need to unscrew the old one?”

“No.”

I shook my head. “That seemed pretty thin to me too.”

I stared at the sea again and Laura began stealing glances at her watch.

“This one’s got you baffled, hasn’t it?” she said.

“It has. If it wasn’t for what you and Dr. Kent were telling me I would say that this is a clear-cut case of accidental death. The pub was hermetically sealed from the inside. There was no other way in or out. There were heavy deadbolts on the front and back doors.”

“Could a murderer not have somehow maneuvered the deadbolts into place from the outside?”

“I examined that possibility and eliminated it. They’re just too heavy.”

“And if Dr. Kent and myself are both mistaken, then everything becomes much easier, doesn’t it?”

“It does indeed!”

“Isn’t there a story about a locked room and a murderer who somehow gets in?”

I laughed. “Are you kidding me? There’s an entire literature! An entire genre. I’ve read a dozen of them in the last two weeks alone.
The Big Bow Mystery
,
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
,
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
. . . a couple of different Willkie Collins, Agatha Christie . . .”

“And how does the killer do it in those?”

“Various methods. The secret passage is one technique, a hidden trapdoor, killing the victim from a distance, then there are the magicians’ tricks, the use of animals to do the killing, the supernatural . . . The two I seriously considered were the secret passageway or the possibility that the killer was hiding in the bar when the police arrived and then snuck out through the smashed-in front door sometime in the next day or two.”

“And did he?”

“Sneak out, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“No, he didn’t. The cops who arrived at the bar were pretty sharp. They treated it as a crime scene, wouldn’t let anyone touch the body or let anyone in or out. Detective Inspector Beggs arrived shortly thereafter and he conducted a thorough search of the premises. He assures me that there was no one hiding in the bar and I believe him.”