Hang on St. Christopher (The Sean Duffy #8)

3. A Straightforward Little Homicide

CHAPTER 3

A STRAIGHTFORWARD LITTLE HOMICIDE

There are many ways to tell this story. I could talk about the redness of everything in this world. The red wind. The red clay. The red stain on the ground where Mr. Townes fell with shotgun pellets in his chest. I could talk about the blue smoke curling from the chimney tops, the icy-blue eyes of the forensic officer, the white and blue Police Land Rover Tangi on its side, wheels spinning, its blue guts spilling men under the withering fire of a machine gun. I could talk about the yellow sun setting over the swamp milkweed by the Chesapeake, or the yellow wings of the goldfinches in the nests along the Portpatrick road, or the little yellow dog of that man who threatened Beth with a closed fist that time. There are, of course, many ways to tell every story. But let’s do it chronologically, at least for now, to keep the facts straight in our heads, yeah? For this straightforward little homicide was, of course, to become something much more complicated...

I went into the station to set up the CID incident room and get a warrant card that said “detective” on it. Then I followed McArthur out the Belfast Road to find this murder scene. Him driving his Volvo station wagon, me behind in the Beemer. He was a hesitant, nervous driver who frequently rode the brakes, so I gave him a lot of space to mess up.

I didn’t actually need him. The murder scene wasn’t difficult to find at all, what with the flashing police strobes on the Land Rovers, assorted coppers milling around, and half a dozen forensic officers in white coveralls going about their meticulous work.

The victim’s house was a big old Edwardian mansion on the lough shore. Willow and chestnut trees and a well-manicured lawn. Similar houses to the left, right, and opposite.

This was where you lived if you had a bit of old money or were an up-and-coming doctor or lawyer. Maybe not the sort of place you saw a lot of violent crime, but if you were kids looking to nick a fancy motor, this was as good a place as any to nab one.

McArthur parked his car and got out. He was offering me his hand, so I shook it. “Well, I got you here. Can I leave all this in your capable hands, then, Duffy?”

“I suppose so.”

“You remember all the procedures?”

“I imagine it’s like riding a bike, sir.”

“Is it? Right, then, I’m off. I’ll put the kids to bed and come back in an hour or two to check up on things.”

“You can just go on to bed, sir,” I said. “I’ll close up the crime scene. I’m sure, as you said, it’s all straightforward enough.”

This was an example of my rustiness. You never said things like that, what with God, the jinx, and fate listening in. Never. What were you thinking, Duffy? You eejit.

“Nah, I’ll come back, Duffy,” he said. He lowered his voice. “My in-laws are over from Stirling. My father-in-law is... well...”

“Understand completely, sir.”

I waved goodbye and looked at the end of the driveway, and there was the stolid, pallid face and the long Raymond Massey–like physique of Sergeant John “Crabbie” McCrabban getting out of a Land Rover Defender. If you were looking to cast a local version of The Crucible , you wouldn’t cast Crabbie as the Reverend Hale, because he’d be a bit too forbidding and grave for the role. But once you got to know him, you realized that underneath that dour Presbyterian visage there was a dry—very dry—sense of humor that he occasionally trotted out, and a guy who would never let you down.

I hadn’t seen him for a while. A month or so. I waved at him. He nodded back. “How you doing, mate?” I called to him.

Crabbie came over. I wanted to hug the big galoot, but that would only embarrass him, so we shook hands.

“How do, Sean?”

“Not bad, and yourself?”

“Mustn’t grumble.”

“Do you ever grumble?”

“Not much occasion to, no. The Lord has been kind.”

“Not to this geezer,” I said, pointing at the corpse.

“This is my first case of any kind in about six months,” Crabbie admitted in low tones. He too had moved to the part-time reserve, so he could spend more time on his dairy farm. “An assist to Sergeant Lawson on an armed robbery.”

“And how did that turn out?” I asked.

“We got them.”

“How? Forensic stuff?”

“Easier than that. Lawson went ’round the car dealerships to see who had just bought themselves a flashy new car. It was like a trail of breadcrumbs to the gang’s door.”

“Well, mate, you’ve gotten more practice than I have. This is my first actual case in over a year. Wee bit nervous about it, actually.”

“How are Beth and Emma?”

“Good. Your brood and your better half?”

“Good.”

We stood in silence for a beat or two.

“I hope we know what we’re doing here, Sean,” Crabbie said at last.

“I hope so too. Apparently, it’s a car theft gone wrong, so not exactly something that will tax our limited mental capacities.”

“If you say so, Sean.”

“Let’s say hello to Frank, eh?”

Frank Payne, the chief forensics officer, had evidently finished his job, because he was drinking tea and taking a cigarette break under a little canopy his team had rigged up.

As I said, Frank was a big, splenetic, heading-for-a-violent-heart-attack kind of man. He had no hair now, and his pale cheeks had taken on a purple cast. The tiny ciggie in his big paw looked somehow comic.

I shook his free hand.

“Well, if isn’t the late, great Sean Duffy,” he said.

“Nice to see you, Francis.”

“I wondered what happened to you. I haven’t clocked you or Crabbie at a crime scene in years! Sergeant Lawson I’ve seen, but not your shining, skinny, backwoods, inbred goblin face. What happened to you, brother? Did you fuck the deputy chief constable’s wife or something? You were caught and they sent you to some scary suicide post on the border?”

“It’s a little more prosaic than?—”

“Well, what have you been doing with yourself? Tell me!”

“I’m in the part-time reserve now.”

He looked amazed. “Part-time reserve? You? Seriously, mate, what happened?”

“Nothing happened. I’m only serving out my time until I can get my pension.”

Comprehension dawned, and Frank nodded. There was nothing untoward about it. Half the coppers he knew were marking time until they got their pension. “And they let you stay as a detective?” he asked.

“No, they didn’t. I only come in six days a month. You can’t do case work with that schedule.”

“So what do you do?”

“Paperwork mostly. Admin and traffic.”

“And what about you, McCrabban?”

“Same thing. Part-timer until I get my pension.”

“Jesus Christ, the pair of you. If you’re not detectives in this organization, you’re nothing. I know you have your farm, Crabbie, but I’m amazed at you, Sean. This was your life.”

“Used to be, mate. It was my choice. Beth and I moved to Scotland and?—”

“The one that looks like a boy?”

“She has a certain boyish grace admittedly, but she’s all?—”

“Did you marry her?”

“Not yet, I?—”

“Wise man. If you do a background check on her, I’ll bet you find she wasn’t born a woman. Smart move on your part, if you ask me. Won’t be able to get her pregnant and have her tie you down.”

“We have a little girl.”

“Aye, well, wonders of medical science, eh?”

“How come it takes only thirty seconds of convo with you before everybody wants to punch you in the fucking face, Frank?”

“I have a talent for shithousery,” he said.

“And how’s your misssus by the way?” I asked.

“You know she left me, Sean.”

“That’s right and she sends her best,” I said.

Frank grinned and suddenly slapped me on the back. “God, man, it’s good to see you. Part-time reserve or no, it’s nice to be dealing with a real peeler for a change!”

“Sergeant Lawson is a real?—”

“Sergeant Lawson is too big for his bloody boots, and everyone else around these parts is a joke. Don’t get me started on Newtownabbey RUC or Larne RUC. I’m swimming in a sea of septic incompetence, Duffy.”

“Well, at least you’ve got the buoyancy for it, mate.”

“Fat jokes are beneath you, Duffy. You’ll be doing ‘your mother’ gags next.”

“Uhm, wait a minute, I have one: your mother is so classless, I mistook her for a Marxist utopia... No? Anybody?”

Frank sighed. Crabbie stared at his boots.

“So I suppose Lawson is on his holidays?” Frank said.

“Nothing escapes you, mate. He’s in Tenerife.”

“Tenerife? Bloody hell, who goes there?”

“Everyone, apparently.”

Frank nodded. “Well, you’re lucky or, I suppose, unlucky if you were hoping for a week’s overtime. Straightforward business. They wanted this bloke’s car. He didn’t want to give them his car. They shot him and took the car. Have you heard the term ‘carjacking’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was one of those.”

“What evidence have you gathered?”

“Shotgun pellets.”

“Anything else?”

“Not much.”

“Tell me about the pellets.”

“Twelve-gauge, both barrels, shot from less than four feet away. He had no chance.”

“Victim’s name, occupation—all that jazz?”

Frank sniffed. “That’s none of my business; that’s your job. Do you want to see the body?”

“Not really, but I suppose we have to.”

Frank led me along the pavement to where a white sheet was covering the body. Forensic men (and one forensic woman) had chalk-marked the shotgun pellets that were in the ground and were taking photographs of the tire treads of the stolen car, which had been driven off with some speed.

“You can tell by the tread that the vehicle was a Jaguar,” Frank said.

I raised a skeptical eyebrow.

For all his abilities, I doubted very much that he’d ascertained the make of the car from this tread. He must have canvassed the neighbors. And if he’d canvassed the neighbors, he probably did know the victim’s name, occupation, and so on, but he wanted me to do my own bloody legwork, the hateful big shite.

I lifted the sheet to look at the body. I hadn’t had to do this in a while, and I’d been glad of that. In a lot of ways, I hadn’t been cut out to be an RUC detective—my problems with the chain of command, my issues with the priorities of the organization itself, and my distaste for many aspects of detective work, not least among them looking at recently murdered people.

This particular scene was a mess. A mess that once had been a thinking, feeling human being. Sawn-off shotgun at very close range. Exactly the sort of thing a panicky joyrider would do. Half the victim’s face had been torn off, and the hole in his chest was enormous.

He was wearing a sport jacket, white shirt, and brown slacks with Nike gutties—bit of an unusual ensemble. I bent down to touch the jacket. It was a linen cotton blend, bespoke tailoring. I examined it more closely. The label said that it was from Thomas Browne and Company, an old-money tailoring firm out of Dublin.

I let the sheet fall and stood up to get some air. The sheet drooped over the hole in the victim’s skull and began to absorb some of the only partially dried blood. A macabre, bloody silhouette. It was a gruesome thing to see.

“Oh, crap,” I said, wincing.

Paperwork seldom gave you nightmares. This, however, might.

“Are you all right, Duffy? You’ve gone green,” Payne said with a grin.

“Aye, not used to this. The integrity of my sleep has probably been compromised.”

“Ach, this is nothing. I see shite worse than this every day. Some of the road accidents I have to go to... Decapitations. Partial decapitations. Fire. Kids, you name it. One time I was called to the scene of a fire in a van carrying handicapped kids?—”

I held up my hand. “Save it for another time, brother, will ya?”

“You’ve gotten soft, Duffy.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing, Frank. How long has he been out here like this?”

“About an hour and a half.”

“Who found the body?”

“Report of shots fired to the confidential telephone. Carrick police arrived and they called forensics.”

“The local cops didn’t call an ambulance?”

“He was dead, Duffy; there was no point. I mean, look at him.”

“Twelve-bore, close range—is that what you said?”

“Twelve-bore, very close range. Side-by-side double-barreled shotgun. Fired together or almost simultaneously.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“’Course. Panicky kid stealing a car. Guy resists, wee shite gives him both barrels. Death would have been very quick if not immediate.”

I shook my head and gave Crabbie a look. He had a skeptical expression on his dour face too.

“All right, Duffy. You’ve got your sergeant. The band’s all here. Do you mind if I piss off? I’ve got half a dozen cases like this in Belfast,” Frank said.

“Murders?”

“No. Joyriding stuff. There was some kind of big riot this afternoon after a Loyalist march up the Ormeau Road. We tried to stop them marching up the Falls Road, and the whole thing kicked off. They hijacked dozens of cars and burned them all out. Top brass is hoping there might be some forensic evidence in the wrecked cars. No chance, but it’s going to be a busy night for us looking for fingerprints in all that lot.”

“There won’t be fingerprints. They were all wearing gloves,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I was there,” I said. “They tried to hijack my car.”

“Why didn’t you arrest them?”

“Me against twenty thugs with baseball bats?”

“I would have gone for it,” Payne boasted.

“Sure you would, mate.”

“Look, do you have any more questions, or can I go? Some of us are busy,” Payne said.

“Forensic evidence around the car, Frank?”

“Nothing that we found.”

“No cigarettes, matches, beer cans—anything our crims might have left?”

“Nope.”

“Victim’s wallet?”

“Bagged for you.”

“ID in there?”

“No, just money.”

“No credit cards or driver’s license?”

“No.”

“How much money?”

“Five hundred quid or so. Like I say, I’ve bagged it for you.”

“Let’s see it.”

He went over to one of his junior officers, who found the bag and gave it to me. I put on latex gloves before taking out the wallet and the cash. The wallet wasn’t interesting in itself, but this was a lot of money. And there wasn’t just sterling; there was also two hundred quid in Irish pounds: ten crisp twenty-punt W. B. Yeats notes. Also three French five-hundred-franc notes with a hideous facsimile of Blaise Pascal on them.

I showed the foreign currency to Crabbie. “He got around, did our mystery man,” Crabbie said.

“I think he’s originally from Dublin which is interesting,” I said. “That jacket is a Thomas Browne, just off Connolly Street. Fancy place. If we can’t ID him any other way, they’ll have a list of their clients.”

“You know, joyriders almost never kill anyone,” Crabbie mused.

“But it does happen,” Payne insisted.

“It does happen,” Crabbie agreed. “Strange that they left that big wallet full of cash.”

“They panicked and fled,” Payne said.

“What happened to the shotgun-shell casings?” I asked.

“Gone,” Payne admitted.

“Our panicky joyrider took the trouble to leave the money but pick up the shell casings?” I asked.

“And if they shot him twice at chest height, it’s odd that none of the pellets hit the car,” Crabbie said.

“How do you know none of the pellets hit the car? The bloody car’s gone!” Payne said.

“Well, there are no paint chips and no broken glass that I can see,” Crabbie said.

“And look at those pellets in the asphalt,” I said.

Frank Payne crossed his arms. “All right, smart guys, what do youse think happened?”

“I’m not ruling out your joyrider theory, but to me it looks like an execution. They shot him in the gut with the first barrel, and while he was on the ground they blew half his head off with the second. Look at all the pellets embedded in the pavement. The gun was pointing down.”

Crabbie nodded. “No broken glass from the car windows around the body. The first shot was low in the stomach; the second shot came when he was prone. If he’d been standing against the car for both barrels, the side windows would likely have been taken out.”

Frank looked at the pair of us and then slowly nodded. “Well, you’re the experts. I just gather the evidence,” he said with fake humility. “If it was an execution, there’d be no possibility of pleading manslaughter, then, would there?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“That’s good. Them wee bastards, if they top someone and they’re underage, they let him out after two years. It’s a disgrace if you ask me. Bring back the rope, eh?”

“It might not be kids,” I said.

“It’s always kids. Whole country’s going to the dogs! Bloody kids. There’s no respect anymore. ’Course, the problem is with the parents; they?—”

“Me and the Crabman will find them,” I said to stave off the full juror-number-three-in– 12 Angry Men rant.

“Make sure that you do. I drive a Mercedes. I don’t want it nicked,” Frank said.

“We’ll do our best,” I said, offering him my hand to show that the conversation was at its terminus.

He shook the hand and nodded. “All right, I’ll collect the lads and head out. We’ll be on until the wee hours tonight.”

“No rest for the wicked, Francis,” I said.

“Whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth,” Crabbie added.

Payne gave us a weary look, opened his mouth to do some more moaning, changed his mind, and departed.

“I think that’s it, you know, Sean,” said Crabbie, sensing my thoughts. “The first shot put him on the ground, and while he was down there, they finished him off.”

“Why would joyriders do that?” I wondered out loud. “Murder, I mean. That’s a big step up from car theft.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they just panicked right enough?”

“And again, do panickers take the shell casings with them?”

Crabbie shook his head. “In general, no, they do not. But seeing a man die sobers you up quick, sometimes.”

The medical examiner’s crew turned up to take the body up to the Royal Victoria Hospital, and Crabbie and I talked strategy. The fact that neither of us had been lead on a major case in years was disturbing, but the procedure came back pretty easily: secure the crime scene; canvass for witnesses; ID the victim; search the house for anything incriminating; notify next of kin. Nothing to it. Oh, yeah, and find the killer. That too.