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

6. The Burned-Out Car

CHAPTER 6

THE BURNED-OUT CAR

We drove up the North Road to the Glenfield Estate, where we found a couple of forensic men I didn’t know doing their last bit of work on the torched Jaguar. The car was a real mess—beautiful like an abstract sculpture or some great prehistoric beast. J. G. Ballard would have bloody loved it.

I pulled the Beemer behind the vehicle. Fire brigade foam was still blowing around the street, and there was the usual crowd of gawkers.

“I’d be very surprised if we get any solid forensic data out of that,” I said, killing the engine.

Crabbie nodded and started filling his pipe again, which reminded me to take a hit on my asthma inhaler. I’d given up the smokes for two years now and my lungs were doing much better, but I still had to take the odd dose of Ventolin.

“Where are we?” McArthur asked, looking around him like a frigging tourist.

“Glenfield, sir,” I replied.

“Don’t think I’ve been here before,” he said.

This was an odd part of Carrickfergus. In theory, it could have been cute up here. As the crow flies, we were just half a kilometer from my manor, Victoria Estate, but this was much more rural. Two lanes leading deep into the Irish countryside ran through the neighborhood, and a really quite lovely wood and river dominated the eastern part of the housing development. The houses were concrete-and-brick jobs built after a slash-and-burn operation in the countryside, but they weren’t bad houses. Despite all that, it was a pretty bad hood. From the graffiti, it was obvious that the place was overrun with Loyalist gangs, particularly the UVF. American evangelical churches also had sprouted like toadstools, and there were several such places: the Elim Church of God, the Church of the Nazarene, the Church of the Living Christ. There were also a few bunker-like newsagents and a bookie’s.

I got out of the car and turned up the collar of my jacket.

“Look at that,” Crabbie said with disgust, pointing down the street.

At the junction of Carson Avenue and the Marshallstown Road, a Confederate battle flag and some kind of Waffen SS flag were being displayed from a telegraph pole.

“That’s, er, a Nazi flag, is it?” the chief inspector said.

“I think so.”

“Dispiriting,” the chief inspector said glumly.

I looked at the burned-out Jag and talked to the FOs, but they’d found nothing. The car had apparently been swept clean of anything incriminating and then had been set on fire with the accelerant.

“What does one do now?” McArthur asked.

“We canvass for witnesses,” I said.

A gang of children had gathered around the charred Jag skeleton, and Crabbie and I went through them asking if any of the wee shites knew who had dumped this vehicle in the first place. No one had seen anything. We knocked on doors, but the Belfast omertà held sway everywhere. No one knew where the car had come from; no one had seen who torched it; no one saw which direction the hijackers had fled.

Crabbie and I examined skid marks on the road next to the burned-out vehicle.

“This is interesting,” I said.

Crabbie concurred, and I ordered one of the remaining FOs to take a photograph.

The chief inspector looked at the asphalt. He didn’t see what we were seeing.

“It’s a motorbike,” I explained.

Crabbie nodded. “A big one,” he added.

The chief inspector examined the skid mark. “How can you tell that?” he asked, apparently amazed by this most obvious of forensic truths.

I cleared my throat. “Well, sir, there’s only one tire tread, so, er, that makes it a motorbike. And if you look at it, it’s clear that he took off from here in a hurry.”

Crabbie knelt to examine the tire mark more closely. When the FO professionals looked at the photos, they should be able to tell us the make, model, and maybe even year from their book of tire treads. That ability was beyond me but not, apparently, the Crabman.

“British bike,” Crabbie said.

“You can tell?” I said, impressed.

“I may be wrong, but that looks like a Roadrunner Universal Grand Prix tire. Nineteen-inch wheel, of course. Four-inch width.”

“For a Norton?” I asked.

Crabbie nodded. “Norton Commando, I think. FO experts will tell us for sure, of course.”

“Do car thieves often ditch their burned-out vehicles and then go off on a motorbike?” McArthur asked.

“No, they don’t, sir. They usually ditch the car not too far from home and then leg it.”

A bunch of wee muckers had gathered to look at us now.

“Anybody get a look at the motorbike that drove away from here?” I asked.

But again: zilch.

“There’s a tenner in it for anyone who can tell me what make of motorbike it was. Or maybe you lot don’t know your bikes.”

My clumsy attempt at bribery and reverse psychology also met with complete silence.

It began to rain a little more heavily now, and the crowd began to drift away one by one until they almost all had slipped indoors. It was probably nearly one in the bloody morning now too.

“We’re done,” the final FO said, and off they went in their white FO Land Rover.

The three of us were alone now in the street. The proudly flying Nazi flag and the complete lack of cooperation from the general public had greatly deflated Chief Inspector McArthur. “These people—don’t they know we’re here to help them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How are you supposed to solve a case without a single bloody eyewitness willing to tell us anything?”

“Welcome to my world, sir.”

“And look at that horrible flag.”

I walked to the Beemer, unhooked the radio mic, and ordered a tow truck for the remains of the Jag. They’d bring it to the depot and keep it there for a few weeks and then take it to the wrecking yard. We’d get nothing more out of it.

“Shall we head on, then?” Crabbie asked, looking at his watch.

“What time is it?”

“It’s midnight plus forty-five.”

“I’ve missed my ferry now for sure.”

“I suppose you’re staying in Ireland, then.”

“I suppose I am.”

McArthur cleared his throat. I caught his eye. Aye, mate, there’s nothing more to do here. We CID goons are mortals just like you. I’ll go back to One-Thirteen Coronation Road, and you go back to your young wife Tina and her annoying parents.

“Okay, let’s hit the bricks,” I was just about to say when a big, tattooed skinhead dude in a red parka came down the street toward us. He was accompanied by what could only be described as henchpeople. Three other skinhead blokes in rain gear, and a couple of skinhead girls. They were all in their teens or early twenties, and rather than looking ridiculous, they actually looked like trouble.

At their appearance on the street, some of the wee kids who should have been in bed long before drifted back out of the shadows.

“Look at these giant soggy pork scratchings,” the large skinhead dude said, to great mirth from his comrades.

“And who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Pete,” Pete said. “You might have heard of me.”

“I have heard of you. You denied our Lord three times after he was arrested in the garden,” I said.

“What? No. What are you talking about? That wasn’t me.”

“Well, then, I haven’t heard of you,” I said.

“Pete Scanlon. This is my wee neck of the woods. And youse boys have been here long enough disturbing the peace, annoying everybody, so I think it’s time youse went on home. Get me?”

“We were just about to—” McArthur began but I cut him off.

“Did you put that flag up?” I asked, pointing at the Nazi rag.

“No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“No.”

“Did you see who drove a Norton Commando away from that Jaguar there a couple of hours ago?”

“No.”

“Well, then, Pete Scanlon, you’re fucking wasting my time. Take your baldy crew and go back inside your houses, or I’ll have the fucking lot of you lifted for affray.”

“Who’s gonna do this lifting?” he said with a pretty fair amount of menace.

“Me and my mates,” I said, getting a skeptical look from McCrabban, and a no bloody way look from McArthur.

“This is a Young Carrick Defenders street, and you’re here on it by our grace and favor, and we the residents think it’s time you fucking left, peeler,” Pete said.

“I’m CID. I’m investigating a murder,” I explained.

“I don’t care what you’re investigating. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll fuck off,” he said.

Several more scary-looking dudes had appeared from various doorways and side streets, and the mob of wee kids had increased to about twenty now.

Crabbie wasn’t going to let me lose face in front of a paramilitary thug, but I could see the concern knitting his forehead. He gave me a little shake of the head that meant leave it, Sean, it’s not important. We’ve done what we came here to do; now let’s go home.

I took a step closer to Pete Scanlon. “The Assyrians came down like the wolf on the fold,” I said.

“What?”

“And their cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.”

“Is that fact?”

“Aye, well, it’s in the Bible, mate, so while not a fact as such, it is at least invested with a venerable provenance.”

“You think this is Sunday school. You think you can quote Bible at us, and we’ll go the fuck away?”

“It’s not the Bible. It’s a poem. Don’t you like poetry? Here’s some more: the sheen of their spears was like the stars on the sea, when the blue waves roll nightly on deep Galilee.”

“What are you talking about, peeler?” he said, confused.

“Sorry, I thought you’d be interested. It’s about these fucking cunts who tried to fuck with the wrong people.”

“Inspector Duffy, I think we should be heading on,” Chief Inspector McArthur said. The mob was still about twenty people, and the Beemer was parked facing the wrong way in the cul-de-sac. Might be hairy if it came to?—

Something hard struck me on the side of the head.

Crabbie was immediately at my side, his hand reaching for his weapon in his shoulder holster.

I touched my left temple, and although I wasn’t bleeding, it hurt like hell. Something shiny was rolling between my feet. I bent down and picked it up. A ball bearing.

I addressed the crowd.

“Who fired that!” I demanded.

No one said anything, but the crowd parted a little to reveal a blond kid of about fourteen years, holding a slingshot.

“Right,” I began, but before I could say anything more, the wee shite took off running.

It was way beneath my dignity, and a detective really shouldn’t be distracted by stuff like this, but I couldn’t help myself. I reached into my pocket, took an enormous drag on my asthma inhaler, and belted off after him.

“No, Sean!” I thought I heard Crabbie yell, but it was too bloody late.

I chased the wean down Glenfield Street, where he turned and sprinted across the top road and up one of the lanes into the countryside. He was scared and fast, but I was big and angry, bearing down on him like a bull in Pamplona. I slipped, almost went arse over tit, righted myself, and ran on.

Through a bramble hedge, around an apple tree, over into a field.

Rain, mud, sheep shit, frightened sheep.

He slipped on a gate as he tried to get out of the field and went backward into the muck.

“You wee fucking turd,” I said as I reached him.

“Mister, that?—”

I grabbed his collar, pulled him to his feet, and slapped him on the head.

“Aow! That’s police brutality, that is!”

I slapped him again.

“It’s what?” I asked him.

“Police bru?—"

I hit him again.

“It’s what?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s right. Now, I’ve got some questions for you, and there will be a fiver in it for you if you give me the answers, and it’ll be a trip to the police station for assaulting an officer if you don’t. Understand?”

“A fiver?”

“A fiver if you can answer all my questions.”

“All right.”

“Did you see who dumped that stolen car and burned it out?”

“I seen him.”

“What’d he look like?”

“He was wearing a balaclava and a brown leather jacket.”

“He rode off on what?”

“A motorbike.”

“What type?”

“Don’t know.”

“He’d parked the motorbike here earlier, drove the car here, burned out the Jag, and drove off on the bike. Am I right?”

“Aye.”

“Come on, lad, what type of bike?”

“I don’t know! Big loud one.”

“License plate?”

“Fuck knows. It was parked behind the old offy; nobody seen it until he came roaring out on it.”

“This guy—he say anything to anybody?”

“No. He just dumped the car, burned it out, put on his helmet, and rode off.”

“What type of helmet? Shoei? What?”

“No idea.”

“And before that, he was wearing a balaclava?”

“Aye.”

“He parks the car, burns it out, and he drives off?”

“Yup.”

“Nobody said boo to him?”

“He was gone in under a minute.”

“Describe the bike.”

“Black. Loud.”

“How tall was this guy?”

“Your height. No, taller.”

“Fat? Thin?”

“I don’t know. Normal. Lemme go!”

That, I knew, was all I was going to get out of him. It was a miracle that I’d gotten so much. It was clever of the murderer to make the killing look like a carjacking gone wrong, it was clever of him to dump the car on this street in this neighborhood where no one would talk... and it was just his bad fucking luck that this wee shite had fired a ball bearing at me, and I’d gotten him away from his peers in the madding crowd.

“All right, sonny, one other question: who put that fucking Nazi flag up?”

“Jonty Reed. He’s big into the Nazis, so he is.”

“Where does he live?”

“Number four. House with the blue door.”

I reached into my wallet and gave the wee shite a five-pound note. He took it greedily.

“No more shooting catapults at policemen. You could get yourself shot by some of my more excitable colleagues.”

I turned and walked back across the field and down the muddy lane.

When I got back to Glenfield Close, Crabbie and the chief inspector were visibly relieved to see me.

“Sean, thank God, are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” I said.

“Let’s go, for God’s sake!” McArthur said.

“One more wee bit of business first, sir,” I said.

I took another discreet hit on my asthma inhaler and marched across the street to number bloody four. I rapped on the door, angry-peeler fashion. I could see that the TV was on in the living room, its blue light casting ghostly images onto the living room wall. What was on at this time of night? Some foreign film on channel four? The Open University?

“Who is it?” a cautious voice asked.

“The Old Bill.”

“The who?”

“The peelers!”

“Hold on.”

A white, lardy slab of a man opened the door in pajama bottoms and a white singlet. He had thick black glasses and wild brown curly hair and fading swastika tattoos. He was taller than I by about six inches, and he must have been eighteen stone. An intimidating guy if you were easily intimidated.

Behind him in the hall were a dozen new rectangular boxes marked JVC and SONY . Video cameras and VCRs.

“What do you want?” he said, grinning dementedly like Bingo from The Banana Splits .

“Did you put that SS flag up there?”

“Who are you?”

“Detective Inspector Sean Duffy, Carrick RUC. Did you put that flag up?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Solidarity.”

“Solidarity with what?”

“White pride. Pride in the Anglo-Saxon race.”

“What the fuck is that flag supposed to be?”

“It’s the genuine article. Not a reproduction, mind. Genuine. So fuck you.”

“What the fuck is it?”

“SS Heimwehr Danzig. Greatest military organization the world has ever seen.”

“The only thing the SS were good at was machine-gunning unarmed women and children and shoving their bodies into pits.”

“Propaganda.”

“All right, fuckhead, go and get a ladder and cut that fucking flag down in the next five minutes or I’m going to punch you so hard it will rip a hole in the fabric of fucking space-time.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“And then once space-time has been ripped a-fucking-sunder, I’m going to find your da on the day you were conceived and kick him in the fucking nuts.”

“Aye, big talk for a?—”

“And then I’m going to travel back to this fucking timeline and arrest you for possession of stolen fucking goods.”

“You can’t fucking do any that, so you can’t.”

“Have you got receipts for all those video recorders in your hall there? Must be three thousand quid’s worth of stuff there. That’s grand larceny, mate. That’s not pay-the-fine-at-the magistrate’s-court. That’s three years in the nick if I was to arrest you.”

He looked worried now.

“But I don’t have to arrest you, do I? I could use my policeman’s discretion and let this all go. What do you think, my little troglodyte friend?”

“In return for what?”

“Cut that fucking flag down. In the next five fucking minutes.”

“It’s freedom of expression.”

“Four minutes and fifty seconds.”

“Look, mate, I know people. I know people in the UVF high command.”

“Four minutes and forty seconds.”

“All right, all right! Hold your horses! I’ll get my ladder!”

He ran out the back to get his ladder, and I took the opportunity to have a wee look-see. I walked past the stolen video cameras and had a look around his living room. A bookcase full of World War II books, a Nazi naval ensign on the wall—this guy was the real deal.

He walked past me carrying a metal stepladder, and I followed him outside to the telegraph pole.

The rain had dispersed most of the crowd, but Pete Scanlon was still there with his skinhead buddies.

“What are you doing, Jonty?” Pete asked the ladder man.

“It’s none of your business,” Jonty replied. He leaned the ladder against the telegraph pole, climbed up, and carefully began cutting down the SS banner.

“Is he making you do that, Jonty?” Pete said. “He has no right to do that. He has no right to make you remove that or any flag.”

“It’s none of your business, Pete,” Jonty grumbled.

“Don’t give in to the peelers! They can’t make you do anything. It’s a free fucking country, so it is!”

“I’m not making him do anything, Peter. He’s doing this of his own free will. Aren’t you, young Jonathan?”

“Yes. Own free will,” he said in a monotone.

He finished cutting down the SS flag and carefully brought it down the ladder with him.

“Give it to me,” I said.

“That’s my property, that is.”

“Give it to me,” I reiterated.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to use it as the lining in my cat’s litter box. It’ll give me a lot of fucking pleasure knowing that my cat is pissing and shitting on a genuine Nazi flag.”

Jonty’s bug eyes bugged even more, and a vein bulged in his neck. Pete and his crew took a step toward us.

“The flag,” I insisted.

Jonty handed over the flag. “Thank you very much. Now, just to let you know, I’ll be driving through here later on this week, and if anybody five streets up or five streets down puts up any kind of Nazi flag again, I’m coming back to you. Do you understand?”

“I might not have done it!”

“No, you might not. But it’s going to be your job from now on to remove any Nazi flags that appear in the neighborhood. Do you understand? If I see any of them around here, I’m coming straight to you.”

Jonty nodded.

“Now, get the fuck out of my sight.”

Jonty picked up his ladder and carried it back to his house.

Scanlon was flabbergasted by all this. Jonty was clearly a man of parts around here, and he was leaving the scene like a whipped dog. I threw the car keys to McCrabban. “Turn the car ’round, Crabbie, will ya?” I asked.

“Will do,” Crabbie said. He looked under the Beemer for bombs and then got in the driver’s seat, put the key in the ignition, and did a three-point turn.

Pete’s eyes hadn’t left mine.

“Let me finish that poem for you. I’m sure you’re curious how it all turned out: ‘For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed.’”

“I get the message. You think you’re a hardman,” Pete said.

“Last verse: And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail, and the idols are broke in the temple of Baal... You get the fucking picture, Petey boy?”

Pete got the picture. “What did you say your name was?”

“Sean Duffy, formerly and now again of Carrick CID. Here’s my card if you want to complain about me,” I said, and handed him my card.

“There won’t be any complaints, pal. But there might be a knock on your door in the middle of the night,” he said.

I shook my head. “There won’t be any door knocks in the middle of the night. Ask around, son. I’m fucking unkillable.”

Crabbie opened the passenger’s-side door of the BMW. McArthur was sitting nervously in the back, no doubt vowing never to visit another crime scene with the CID.

I got in the car, and Crabbie drove us out of the subdivision, in the direction of the North Road.

“That was absolutely horrifying,” McArthur said. “Is that always how you conduct your investigations, Inspector Duffy?”

“I forget. I haven’t been on an investigation in a couple of years. Is that how it usually goes down, John?”

“With you, yes, it’s usually something like that,” he said with the merest fractional hint of a grin on his face.

“I thought those men were going to kill you,” he said.

“They weren’t men. Just wee slabbers who talked the talk,” I told him.

“Well, that’s enough excitement for me. It’s very late now,” he said.

“What time is it?” I asked him.

He looked at his watch and sighed. “It’s after one,” he said.

“Aye, long night. Let’s call it.”

“Now I remember why I stay behind a desk all day,” he murmured.

We drove back to the station. McArthur went home and Crabbie went home, and I typed the full report and filed the paperwork.

A long night indeed.

I finally got back to the house on Coronation Road as the sun was coming up over Scotland.

I went in through the front door and took a can of Bass from the fridge, stripped off all my clothes, and had a very quick shower.

I sipped at the Bass and caught my reflection in the steamy bathroom mirror.

“You missed all this, didn’t you, you stupid bastard?”

The Duffy in the mirror did not reply, but you could tell.

He was a forty-year-old man with a wife and child. He ought to be past this nonsense. But yeah, he did bloody miss it.

We were, after all, only thinking reeds, base creatures driven by our base instincts. And one of those instincts was to follow the chase across the savanna. A million years of evolution had ingrained that in us. It was going to take another million to get rid of it.

I went downstairs to the living room and threw kindling, an old newspaper, and a peat log into the fireplace. When it was going strong, I tossed the SS flag in and watched it burn.

I got my sleeping bag and a pillow from the linen closet.

I poured myself a glass of Jura whisky.

I looked through the records and found the one I wanted: “Spiegel im Spiegel,” by Arvo Part. The version I liked, with piano and viola rather than piano and cello.

I lay down on the Persian rug in front of the fireplace.

The music and the smell of the turf and the taste of fourteen-year-old single malt Jura.

I got into the sleeping bag.

In Scotland I was safe. I was a different man. A postmodern man with the postmodern sickness: la chair est triste et j'ai lu tous les livres . Anomie. Weltschmertz. Entzauberung. Call it what you will. In that world of garden centers and hardware barns, that world of order and safety, the fate of men was to grow fat, old, complacent, and reactionary and eventually to die.

That was there. On that side of the sheugh. But not here. Things were different here on this side of the water. Here I had purpose. Here I had a case.

“A murder case,” I said aloud.

Arvo Part.

Whisky.

Nazi flag burning in fireplace.

Perfect.

And I couldn’t wipe the silly grin off my face as I drifted over into sleep.