In the Morning I'll Be Gone (26 page)

Kate said something. “What?”

She said it again.

I ignored her and sank beneath the water. I surfaced and my eye still hurt.

“Hey, you couldn’t make me another gimlet, could you, I’ll never get to sleep with this eye,” I said.

She said something that might have been “I think you’ve had enough.”

“I’m dying of thirst.”

“Are you decent?”

“The bath’s quite foamy.”

“I’ll bring you some water.”

She came in with a pint glass of iced water. I drank it and gave it back to her.

She sat down on the laundry bin.

“I found out your name. Shoddy security at your end. Kate Prentice!”

“I would have told you. It’s not a secret.”

“That’s what you say now, after I found out. Do me a favor and pass me that book.” She gave me the JFK biography and I went back to the paragraph I’d just been reading. “Listen to this . . . It all comes down to the Kennedy hair. Listen. It says here that on the morning of 22 November 1963 Jack Kennedy was given a Stetson at the Fort Worth Hotel by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. His aides begged him to wear the Stetson on the motorcade route through Dallas because they knew it would be a real crowd-pleaser. But Jack Kennedy had great hair and he had a policy of never being photographed in a hat. He
refused
to wear the Stetson and we all know what happened next.”

“What?”

“Oswald’s third shot was aimed at the dead center of JFK’s unmistakable helmet cut. If he’d been wearing the Stetson the whole history of the world would have been different.”

“Did you tell this to the president’s nephew? Is that why he punched you?”

“He punched me by accident. It was a misunderstanding!”

“I think you should take a couple of aspirin and go to bed.”

“OK.”

“I’ll leave while you get out.”

I put on my dressing gown, took two aspirin, and lay down on the bed. My head was spinning again and my eye throbbing.

Kate sat beside me and helped me under the covers.

“Kiss it better, will you?” I said. “And say ‘there, there.’”

“There, there,” she said.

No kiss but that was OK. I smiled under the cool sheets and within half a dozen heartbeats I was asleep.

I pulled back the curtains. Another dishwater sky and rain falling so slowly that you wondered how it was coming down at all. As if it had to be dragged from the clouds to water yet another dreary Ulster morning.

I stood there looking at the hills. I thought about the three fishermen and their alibis. I thought about Lizzie. I thought about the impossibility of the crime.

I thought about Annie. Poor, lost, beautiful Annie.

When I went downstairs I was surprised to find Kate still there. She’d grabbed a sleeping bag from her car and had dossed down on the sofa. She was awake, drinking a mug of tea. The Open University was on the telly.

“Watcha watching?”

“It’s about volcanoes.”

“What about volcanoes?” I asked.

“Volcanism. Magma. Iceland. Hawaii. You know the story.”

“Pompeii in there somewhere?”

“Do you want some tea?”

“Aye, OK.”

“You want some Weetabix?” she shouted from the kitchen.

“Nah.”

She made me the tea and sat next to me on the sofa. “Where were you last night?” she asked.

“The Crown.”

“Nice?”

“Never been?”

“No.”

“They filmed
Odd Man Out
in there.”

“They didn’t actually. Carol Reed had the whole place remade in Alexander Korda’s London Films Studios. Same place that they made all those wonderful Michael Powell films.”

“Do you know everything?”

“Yes. I do. Look, I have to head on, Sean.”

“OK.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve just read one of those Philip Larkin poems you come across in the
Observer
.”

“We’re having a meeting about you at the end of next week,” she said, biting her lip.

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“I’m going to tell them that you’re working very hard.”

“I
am
working very hard.”

“Good. And, er, is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine! Apart from a splitting headache.”

She looked at me affectionately. “Do you think maybe the time has come to shut down this lead and pursue other lines of enquiry?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think we’re there yet. It’s beginning to look like Lizzie’s death was an accident but I can’t say it definitively and I don’t want to go to Mary Fitzpatrick until I know for sure. There’s this
coincidental
burglary I don’t like the look of for a start.”

“OK, well, you know best.”

She got up and went into the hall. She put on her coat, came back in, rolled up her sleeping bag, and tucked it under her arm. “Please don’t lose sight of the fact that the reason we brought you back was to help us find Dermot McCann. That’s your job. Nothing else. All right?”

“All right! Don’t get all eggy,” I said wearily.

“I’m not ‘eggy’ or even cross but do remember we’d really like to find him before the IRA’s big push. It’s the last thing we need with the miners’ strike starting to cause tremors. If the government falls, God knows what will happen.”

“The government’s not going to fall. Who calls a miners’ strike in the summer when nobody uses coal and when the power stations have been stockpiling it all year? Thatcher’s manipulated this whole situation. She’s pulling all of our strings.”

“Quite,” she said, and went outside to her car.

On the TV a beardy guy with glasses was blathering on about earthquakes and tidal waves. Mrs. McDowell came over to borrow sugar. I asked her the name of the famous baby-rearing book and she told me that no book was necessary—the slightest wee dash of Irish whiskey in the bottle was all you needed for a good night’s sleep.

I showered, had a quick breakfast, and drove to Carrick police station. I chatted to Matty and McCrabban about their cases and I left my office door open so that they could come in whenever they wanted to talk to me about mine.

I did this every day. I reread Chief Inspector Beggs’s case report and I examined the photographs of the locks on the two doors of the Henry Joy McCracken.

In the Oxfam shop I grabbed a copy of Edward Thomas’s
Icknield Way
and a brand-new copy of
Baby and Child Care
by Benjamin Spock. When I paid, the Spock fluttered open, revealing a news story cut out from the
Daily Mail
that I picked off the floor.

“What’s that?” Margaret asked.

It was a lurid December 1983 account of the suicide of Dr. Spock’s grandson, who had jumped to his death from the roof of Boston’s Children’s Museum. I handed Margaret the clipping.

“He’s not foolproof, then, is he?” Margaret said, tapping Spock’s face.

“Few people are, Peggy.”

“Except for you, Inspector Duffy. There are no flies on you.”

On the Wednesday Crabbie asked me to interrogate an elder who had been accused of stealing money from a Presbyterian kirk because he felt that he would lose his rag with the man. It was a walk in the park. After only forty minutes in Interview Room 1 the poor guy broke down and confessed. Gambling was at the root of it, he said, in tears. It was an ugly business, and to show his gratitude Crabbie offered to drive to Antrim to look over the Henry Joy McCracken and give me his professional opinion.

I took him up on the offer the following Friday.

We drove to Antrim in the Beemer and because of a police action we were diverted into the housing estates and got completely lost. Ballycraigy Estate in particular afforded us an intense, Hogarthian snapshot of human misery before we found the road to Ballykeel.

We called in on the Fitzpatricks: Annie and Mary had gone to Omagh to visit Mary’s mother but Jim Fitzpatrick was home watching a fishing program on Channel 4. It was ten in the morning and the poor sod was half wasted. I asked him for the keys to the pub and he brought them to us without saying a word.

“Was that the dad?” Crabbie asked as we walked into the village.

“Yeah.”

“He’s sixty, is he? He looks ninety.”

“Lizzie’s death has hit him hard.”

“He was half tore. Did you notice that?”

“I noticed.”

“It’s a shame. A crying shame. Strong drink is the curse and ruination of Ireland.”

“That it is.”

We drove to the village and parked the car. We were just getting out of the BMW when we bumped into Harper McCullough and his wife, Jane. I introduced them to McCrabban and a stressed-out Jane informed us that the baby was now officially overdue.

“If she doesn’t start going into labor by the weekend they’re going to have to induce her,” Harper said, with a wild-eyed look of terror in his eyes.

“They did that to my missus. It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Crabbie assured him.

“I want to give birth naturally, that’s why we’re walking round and round the village,” Jane said. “My mother says it might help.”

“Her mother said she should go for a ride on a horse! She said that that would fix her!” Harper said with amazement.

“Me ma was joking,” Jane protested.

Harper rolled his eyes. “The previous generations have some mad notions. I’m surprised any of us are here at all,” he said.

“Here, Harper, me old chum, I got this for you,” I said, and opened the BMW’s boot and gave him the copy of Dr. Spock’s
Baby and Child Care
.

“Oh, this looks great!” he said, clutching it like a lifebelt.

“And I meant to tell you, I saw this Open University program the other morning about earthquakes and tidal waves. This guy with a fantastic beard was talking all about Alexandria and how much of it was under water. You would have liked it. With the new baby you’ll be up all hours of the night. You should look into the Open University, you could take up archeology again,” I said.

Jane gave me a grateful smile. “You really could, you know,” she said to him.

“We’ll see. Let’s get this baby born first. Where are you two gentlemen off to today?” Harper asked.

“I’m going to get Sergeant McCrabban’s professional opinion on the layout of the pub,” I said.

“The locked room problem,” Crabbie muttered darkly.

“The locked room problem, indeed,” I said.

“Of course, if the killer couldn’t possibly have got out of there then there’s no problem,” Crabbie added.

“Because?”

“Because there was no killer.”

“And my two doctors?” I asked.

Crabbie shrugged. “You know why you always have to get a second opinion? Because doctors are often completely wrong.”

“Lizzie had exceptional balance, you know,” Harper said to McCrabban.

“So I’ve been told, but changing a light bulb is a tricky business,” Crabbie said. “Me da fell off his tractor one time in Ballymena. He’d got on and off that tractor every day for forty years. One day he slipped and broke his pelvis.”

“Was he all right?” Jane asked.

“He was in pain for a day or two but then he went to the Lord,” Crabbie said.

“Jesus,” I muttered under my breath.

“We could walk over to the pub with you. We could help you out,” Harper said keenly.

Jane looked less than enthused at this prospect. A dusty pub, the place her husband’s old girlfriend died . . .

“Uh, no thanks, Mr. McCullough, it’s official police business and we can’t really involve civilians.”

Harper looked disappointed. “Well, if there’s anything we can do to help, give us a ring.”

“And tell Annie I was asking for her, if you see her,” Jane said.

We said goodbye to them, wished Jane luck, and continued on to the Henry Joy McCracken.

I opened the door and turned the lights on. I walked Crabbie through the pub, showed him the bar, the toilets, the light bulb fixtures. I didn’t offer any further information. I let him take it in for himself.

He examined the basement, looked at the roof, and finally the front and back doors.

“Obviously they had to repair the broken-down front door, but the back door is the way it was?”

“Aye.”

He went outside and tested the strength of the bars on all the windows.

“No way anyone’s getting through those,” he said.

“I agree.”

“The paint is consistent too.”

“Yes.”

He inspected the basement, shone a torch at the hammer-beam ceiling, walked inside and outside for ten minutes, and then pulled up a chair.

I sat opposite him.

“Well?”

“If both doors were bolted from the inside the killer must have been inside when the police came. But Beggs searched the pub from top to bottom and no one was hiding here, right?”

“Right.”

“Ergo no killer.”

“That’s your opinion?”

“That’s my opinion . . . However . . .”

“However what?” I asked him with a tremor of excitement.

“Her dad’s in the hospital, her mother’s on the way back from the hospital with a status report on her dad’s health, she’s so keen to get home she kicks the punters out at exactly eleven o’clock . . .”