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

8. The Phone Box and the Tailor

CHAPTER 8

THE PHONE BOX AND THE TAILOR

I told the constable guarding the crime scene that I would have him relieved shortly and ran Archie home in the Beemer.

I went into the center of town and parked the car in front of McConnell and Low real estate agents. I asked about Mr. Townes, and they confirmed that he’d been in the house rental for nearly three months. He’d paid his deposit in cash; he’d paid his rent on time, in cash.

“Don’t you have to come up with references, ID, to rent a house?” I asked Mr. McConnell, an excitable young man, who was one of those walking-about, waving-his-arms-around types that you didn’t see too much of in Presbyterian Ulster.

“Oh, yes, you do. But that house had been vacant for over a year like so many of the larger properties along the Belfast Road, so we were keen to get him in first.”

“But he eventually showed you some ID, surely.”

“Mr. Townes was from the Republic of Ireland, so he said that he would bring in his Irish driver’s license and references so we could photocopy them.”

“And did he?”

“Uhm, let me look through the file.”

Of course, the look through the file revealed no photocopied driver’s license or passport or any references. Townes had paid his rent early, had charmed everyone in the office, and seemed like a model renter, so no one had pushed him on the ID front. And if they had, the mysterious Mr. Townes would probably have furnished a fake ID anyway.

I thanked McConnell and drove to the station.

I filled Crabbie in on what I’d learned this morning.

Crabbie, who was the polar opposite of the walking-about, waving-his-arms-around type, nodded dourly and leaned back slightly in his chair.

“Bit of a sorry state of affairs that we don’t know the name of the victim on day two of the investigation.”

“Indeed.”

I went to the whiteboard at the front of the interview room and wrote “Quentin Townes/John Doe” in big black letters. Underneath that, I drew two arrows. The first pointed to “Carjacking Gone Wrong Manslaughter”; the second pointed to “Murder.” On the bottom of the whiteboard, I wrote, “Phone box, Dundalk. Tailor, Dublin. Picasso prints at auction.”

Satisfied, I sat back down again. “Three lines of inquiry, Crabbie. That phone box in Dundalk, his tailor in Dublin, and the provenance of those Picassos. We’ll find out who he is, and when we find out who he is, then we’ll find out why they killed him,” I said confidently.

“Nothing new from forensics or patho. I was just on the telephone to the medical examiner. He’s sending over the preliminary report today, but it looks like what it appeared to be last night. Two shotgun blasts a few seconds apart. One in the stomach, then one in the head.”

“It smells like a malice aforethought murder to me,” I said. “Dumping the car and having an escape bike ready... But we’ll have to keep an open mind.”

“Naturally.”

“Toxicology?”

“I put the prelim report on Lawson’s desk for you. I assume you’ll be using Lawson’s office until he gets back?”

“I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose I will.”

As a part-time reservist, I no longer had an office, just a desk in the main room. But I was lead detective on this investigation now. I couldn’t really run a murder case from a cubicle.

“He’s still using my chair. That’s a Finn Juhl chair the old CI gave me.”

“I know. It’s a lovely chair. Don’t be afeard, Sean. You’re entitled to use the office since he’s not here,” Crabbie said with some measure of satisfaction. Was he feeling it as well? That old hunger for the chase?

I went to the office, sat down in the Finn Juhl chair, and read the tox report, which revealed nothing. No illegal drugs, and only a moderate amount of whisky in Mr. Townes’s system.

I confirmed with forensics that the tire tread was almost certainly from a Norton Commando. They were impressed that we already knew that, but they tried not to sound that way on the telephone call.

The additional info forensics had was that the tire was commonly used on Nortons from 1972 to 1977.

I checked with traffic to see if any black Norton Commandos had been stopped speeding at a checkpoint overnight—nope. Alas, you don’t get that lucky.

I called up the Northern Ireland motorcycle owners’ clubs and asked how many Norton Commandos there were in Northern Ireland, and a guy called Jimmy Wallace told me there were fifteen hundred Norton owners registered with the club in Ulster, and maybe another five or six hundred who weren’t registered.

“How many in Ireland?” I asked.

“On all the island of Ireland, there might seven or eight thousand Nortons. It’s a very popular make over here. More than in Britain, even.”

“How many of them painted black?”

“The majority. In fact, it would be the unusual one that was painted any other color.”

“Thanks, you’ve been very helpful.”

I put the phone down and shook my head at the Crabman. “The bloke there says there might be eight thousand Norton Commandos in Ireland. Most of them black.”

He shook his head. “That’s worse than I was expecting... It’s always worse than you were expecting.”

I filled the chief inspector in on our progress, playing down the information-void stuff and playing up our more promising lines of inquiry.

After our morning coffee break, Crabbie and I drove over to Mr. Townes’s house again. I had him wait in the Beemer while I said hello to the constable protecting the crime scene and went inside.

I went upstairs to the master bedroom and found Townes’s clothes closet. I grabbed the other bespoke linen jacket from the rack, went downstairs, took the two Picasso etchings off the wall, and took jacket and art works out to the Beemer.

I put them all carefully in the boot.

“What are you doing with those paintings?” Crabbie asked.

“Can’t leave them in the house. They’re worth a few bob. I’ll put them in safekeeping.”

“Okay. So where to now, then?”

“Dundalk, I think, unless you have any objections.”

“Not I.”

“I’ll stop in Newry and we can get a bite to eat if you want.”

“Okay. Sounds good.”

Carrick. Belfast. Newry. A roadside café where we got Ulster fries (potato bread, soda bread, fried bacon, sausage, and egg) and strong brown tea.

“How were the cows this morning?” I asked the Crabman as he lit his pipe.

“Cows are good. You get up to anything in the wee hours?” he replied.

“Actually I did. I wrote a poem,” I said.

“About what?”

“A Viking king our ancestors murdered around this neck of the woods.”

“You want to tell me some of it?”

“No chance.”

Newry.

The stark, beautiful Mourne Mountains and then the stark, unlovely border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, which was swarming with soldiers and police. This was the main crossing point between Belfast and Dublin, and it was always a bloody nightmare.

If there had been any kind of express lane, I could have driven up it, flashed my warrant card, and driven on. But there was no express lane, and we had to wait in the queue with all the frigging civilians.

When we finally got to the front of the line, a soldier with a rifle asked to see my driver’s license. I showed him my warrant card.

“DI Sean Duffy, Carrick RUC,” I said.

“What’s the purpose of your visit to the Irish Republic?”

“Official police business,” I said.

“But what is it?”

“It’s confidential, sonny,” I said hoping that he wouldn’t fuck with me. But he was a pale English squaddie shitting himself to be on the border, and only seventeen years old, and he wasn’t going to fuck with anybody.

“Okay, over you go,” he said.

I drove the Beemer south on the N1 until we got to the outskirts of Dundalk. I got a road map from the back seat, and we examined the town map of Dundalk until we found the Garda Siochana station on the Crescent, right in the center of town.

You could tell we were in the Republic of Ireland now because the police station wasn’t surrounded by a bloody great antimissile wall or a sixty-foot fence that was supposed to deter the casual Molotov-cocktail thrower. This was how police stations were supposed to be. An unarmored, inoffensive little red-brick building sandwiched between the distillery and the grammar school. If your cat went missing or you had a break-in, you could just walk into the friendly police station, and the friendly unarmed police officers would help you with your problems. On our side of the border, it was an entirely different story. The police stations were all bunkers, and you had to be searched going in and out, which probably kept many punters away and—silver lining—the crime stats down.

I parked the Beemer, and we went inside (without being buzzed in or searched) and found the desk sergeant, who was not behind bulletproof glass but was, charmingly, behind an actual desk. Friendly ginger-beardy guy in glasses. They were playing music over the speakers, an easy-listening station from Dublin that was currently spinning “’74–’75” by the Connells, a song that always made me kind of depressed since 1975 was my first year in the police—the sort of life change from which there was no stepping back.

“What can I do for you gents?” the desk sergeant asked.

I showed him my warrant card and explained who I was.

“You’ll be wanting the RUC liaison officer,” the sergeant said in a friendly manner. “I’ll take you to him.”

Upstairs to the office of the RUC LO, an Inspector Thomas O’Neill, a confident, bullish mustachioed man in his forties. He sat us down in his office and, when the sergeant had gone, asked what this was all about.

I explained about our John Doe and the phone calls to the mysterious phone box on Point Road. He showed no reaction of any kind to our information, and I thought that maybe I was barking up the wrong tree with this angle.

“Does any of this mean anything to you at all?” I asked a little desperately.

“Hold on a minute,” O’Neill said. He got up from behind his desk, walked across the room, and closed his office door. He sat back down at his desk and picked up the phone. “Kathy, no calls, please,” he said.

“Did you drive out to Point Road this morning at all to have a look at the phone box?”

“No, we came to see you first.”

“Good. That’s very good. There’s a house on Point Road that we have under more or less constant surveillance. I wouldn’t want two RUC officers and their northern-reg car becoming part of our operation.”

“Sorry, what operation? Who are you surveilling?”

“Brendan O’Roarke lives on Point Road,” he said, pausing to see what reaction the name had on us.

I knew who Brendan O’Roarke was, because I’d spent much of the past three years running John Strong. The IRA Army Council thought that Strong was their highest-placed mole within the RUC, but in fact we had turned him and he was a double agent, giving the IRA largely worthless intel while gleaning what he could about the Army Council’s future plans.

The latest info we had was that the IRA was split evenly down the middle. O’Roarke was one of the leaders of the “ultra” faction, who brooked no compromise at all with the British. Other prominent figures within the IRA were more amenable to talks with the UK government, especially in light of the recent electoral successes of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, in Northern Ireland. Many in the IRA were coming around to the viewpoint that the way to get the British out of Ireland for good was to win the moral argument for withdrawal as Gandhi had successfully done with the British Empire in India. But Brendan O’Roarke was an old-school hardman whose model was not Gandhi’s campaign in India but the campaign of the Irgun in Israel, which, with quite different tactics, had also defeated the British Empire. O’Roarke felt that the IRA didn’t need to put out peace feelers; they needed to redouble their efforts to force a weary British public into an immediate withdrawal from the six counties of Northern Ireland.

That was only the beginning of the ultras’ plans. Once the British left Ireland, the IRA was to take control of Dublin and form a true people’s revolutionary government in Ireland on the Cuban model. Heady stuff and not remotely feasible. O’Roarke and his equally scary brothers were that most dangerous of things in Ireland: romantics.

“Brendan O’Roarke?” Crabbie asked.

“You don’t know who he is?” O’Neill asked.

“Never heard of him,” Crabbie said.

“Me neither,” I said because without John Strong’s intel, I probably wouldn’t have known the names of any of the current members of the IRA Army Council. Crabbie and I were just ordinary working peelers, not privy to what was going on at the higher levels of the game...

“He’s the biggest IRA man in town, commander of the north Leinster brigade, on the Army Council for the last ten years.”

“Big shit, then?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. He’s been to Libya three times in the last five years, if that means anything to you.”

I nodded vaguely, although I knew exactly what that meant. Nearly every IRA bomb of the past decade had been made with Semtex from the private stores of Colonel Gaddafi. Libyan Semtex had been found in dozens of bombs all over Northern Ireland, and it was Libyan Semtex that the IRA had used in their assassination attempt on Mrs. Thatcher and that Libyan agents used to bring down Pan Am 235. But I wasn’t supposed to know any of that either.

“Have you got the number for that phone box?” O’Neill asked. “And I’ll see if it’s one of the ones near Brendan’s house.”

I handed over the phone box number while he went to check.

“Sounds like we’ve stumbled into a solid lead,” Crabbie said.

“Aye, it could be,” I agreed.

O’Neill came back less than a minute later.

“As I thought, it’s the phone box outside the bowling club.”

“Have you tapped it? I’d love to hear what our victim was talking about with this O’Roarke bloke,” I said.

O’Neill laughed. “No, no, you wouldn’t get a warrant to tap a public phone box down here. It’s just not done.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. We RUC men could tap any bloody phone box we wanted—and, thanks to friendly judges, pretty much any home phone too. Down here, though, it was apparently a different story.

“You haven’t tapped O’Roarke’s phone?”

“No. We haven’t, but he can’t be sure of that, so he uses several public phone boxes around town.”

“And he goes to this bowling club, does he?”

“Almost every day. And he sometimes uses the phone box to call a minicab to take him home from the bowling or into town. Or at least, that’s what we surmise because a minicab shows up a few minutes later.”

“What sort of bowling? Tenpin?”

“Lawn.”

“I thought only genteel old folks played that game.”

“Well, Brendan, for one, is not exactly a genteel guy.”

“Is he a killer, or more of a man behind the man?” Crabbie asked.

“He’s retired from trigger pulling, but he paid his dues. We believe he was one of the shooters at Sion Mills...”

Crabbie and I both remembered that incident. A bus full of workers was returning from a textile plant in South Armagh. They were all blue-collar guys, all friends. Masked men from the IRA stopped the van, and the Protestant workers were separated from the Catholics then lined up against a wall and summarily machine-gunned to death. Fathers, sons, brothers, even a grandfather—innocent men whose only crime was to have been born Protestant. A few days later, the UVF murdered a group of random Catholic workers waiting for a bus, and so the cycle of hatred continued on its merry way, atrocity following atrocity as the Troubles spiraled ever downward. The men behind the Sion Mills massacre had never been caught.

“What exactly do you know about this John Doe and his phone calls?” O’Neill asked.

“We don’t know anything. All we know is that our mysterious victim only made or received phone calls to that phone box on Point Road, and only that phone box called him. What do you make of that?” I said, handing over the phone records for O’Neill to look at.

“Almost all the calls were made in the morning, when Brendan probably would have been at the bowling club,” O’Neill said, handing back the phone records.

O’Neill had missed the next obvious step, so I gave him a nudge. “Do you want to take these records and maybe compare them with your OP logs? Was Brendan at the club or observed making phone calls at the time my John Doe was making calls to Dundalk?” I suggested as gently as I could.

O’Neill frowned. “It’ll require a bit of work, that,” he said.

I reached into my wallet and showed him the crime scene Polaroid of the victim. “That’s Mr. Townes.”

O’Neil shook his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“But if you wouldn’t mind showing the photograph around the station?”

“Okay.”

The photograph was already with Interpol, so in theory the station should already have it. But if the coppers here were like the coppers north of the border, you rarely paid attention to those Interpol faxes and alerts.

“We have to continue to Dublin to see Mr. Townes’s tailor, but we’ll call back here in the afternoon. Will that give you enough to make your inquiries?” I asked, again, trying not to step on toes and being as polite as I could possibly be.

O’Neill was no dummy. He could see that I was railroading him into doing legwork for us, but he didn’t mind too much. If Brendan O’Roarke was somehow mixed up in the death of an artist north of the border, it would be more grist for the mill. Sooner or later, the weight of evidence against O’Roarke would be enough to drag him into court for something, anything...

O’Neill smiled. “To be honest I’ve got nothing else going on today. This shouldn’t take too long.”

“That’s great. We’re heading on to Dub and we’ll be back about three o’clock, I think.”

“What’s the thing about the tailor, if I may ask?”

I explained the tailor angle, and O’Neill nodded. “That’s a good idea. Those old firms generally keep meticulous records,” he said.

Thus encouraged, we drove down to Dub.

The Republic of Ireland was clearly booming. What everyone was now calling the Celtic Tiger economy was evident in the drive from Dundalk to north Dublin. For perhaps the first time in two hundred years, young people weren’t emigrating en masse; instead, they were getting work in software development and at call centers and at the new manufacturing plants for home computers and mobile phones. Even the road itself was an impressive two-lane dual carriageway that was in the process of being turned into an even more impressive motorway, thanks to money from the European Union’s Structural Fund.

We hit O’Connell Street just before noon, and I found a place to park in the Temple Bar.

The tailor’s was just off Rankin Street. I got the jacket out of the Beemer’s boot and looked ruefully at the Picassos.

If our car got nicked down here, there would be hell to pay.

Crabbie did his Vulcan mind-reading thing. “Car thefts aren’t as common as they used to be in Dub,” he said.

“I hope you’re right, mate.”

As we went inside the tailor’s, a little bell sounded and we time-traveled back about thirty years: mannequins in tweeds, mannequins in dark three-piece suits, mannequins in blazers and hunting pink and shooting jackets. This was the place where the Anglo-Irish gentry and upmarket Dublin lawyers got their suits made. Maybe the odd rich American in love with the costumes of The Quiet Man .

Still, I wondered how they competed with Savile Row. Why wouldn’t upmarket Dublin lawyers and the Anglo-Irish gentry just pop over to London?

I quickly found out when I looked at some of the sample prices on the sport jackets.

“Six hundred quid!” I said to Crabbie.

“This suit is a thousand,” he replied in amazement.

That was how they competed with Savile Row—instead of undercutting London, they made their suits even more expensive and thus even more exclusive.

An unctuous balding young man intercepted us a third of the way into the shop. He could tell by our shoes alone that we had come to the wrong place.

“How can I help you gentlemen ?” he asked in an ill-mannered, passive-aggressive tone that I didn’t like one bit. You can fuck with me until the cows come home, but no one looks at my comrade in arms, DS John McCrabban, and puts a skeptical underscore on the word “gentlemen”—not on my goddamn watch.

“Detective Inspector Sean Duffy, Carrickfergus CID. I’m investigating the murder of one of your clients,” I said, all business.

“And?”

“We have a name that is probably an alias, but it occurred to me that your tailor might recognize the cut of this particular jacket and, if he did, who this jacket was cut for.”

The unctuous young man quivered for a moment. “I’ll get Mr. Andre.”

“Yeah, do that.”

Mr. Andre appeared from a back room. He vibed mean-spirited old git from the permanent purse of his lips. He had gelled salt-and-pepper hair, and a thick crease that ran across his brows as if from years of having to look at the fashion sense of his fellow Dubliners on public transport. He was about sixty now, but you knew he’d live till he was a hundred on pure spite alone. “Which one of you is the policeman?” he asked in a posh South Dublin accent.

“We’re both policemen,” I said. “I’m Inspector Sean Duffy of Carrickfergus CID.”

“And what do you want?”

I showed Andre the Polaroid of the dead man. “I know it’s not a very good photograph, but I was wondering if you recognize this man. He was going by the name of Quentin Townes.”

Mr. Andre shook his head. “I can’t say that I do.”

“He was probably a customer of yours,” I insisted.

“We have so many customers.”

“How many?”

“There are about two thousand people in our books. Quentin Townes? Hold on a sec...”

He darted into a back room and came back shaking his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“All right. Look, I know it’s a bit of a long shot, but I was wondering if any of your tailors would recognize the stitching or any other sort of distinguishing mark on this particular jacket. You’re the experts, aren’t you? It would be really helpful.”

Mr. Andre examined the jacket, and a little frown of recognition further knitted his brows for a moment.

“Hmmmm,” he said.

“Does it look familiar?”

“Perhaps.”

“Wow, you’re good. You’re maybe the only man in Dublin who could have helped us!” I said because, you know, sometimes flattery works.

“I’ll ask Francis to step out. He’s our tailor in chief,” he said.

He went back behind the curtain, and we heard him yell, “Frankie! We need ya, so we do!” in a decidedly unposh West Belfast accent.

Frankie was a mole-like little man with thick black specs and a mess of curly gray hair. He was wearing a rumpled yellow shirt with brown slacks and black shoes. If they let him look and dress like that in this place, I reasoned, he must be very good at his job.

I showed him the jacket and asked if he could identify it.

Frankie grinned. “Your instincts were right, Inspector Duffy. Every jacket, every waistcoat, every trouser is unique,” he said cheerfully in another West Belfast accent. He held a sleeve up to the light, and his smile broadened. “And yes, this is my work. Definitely. I used the 1947 Singer on this one. Oh, yes indeed.”

I nodded at Crabbie. Now we were getting somewhere. “Do you think you can find out the name of the person who had this jacket made?”

Frankie thought about it. “It’s quite a unique cloth. A lamb’s-wool–linen blend. You don’t see that much. And the stitching is definitely from the ’forty-seven. I went back to the Singer for two years in the early eighties. 1981–1983, I believe. And the cloth should be in the records somewhere... Can you gentlemen wait?”

“We can do that,” I said excitedly.

“Why don’t you retire to our waiting area. Would either of you care for a cup of tea?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, don’t put yourself to any trouble on my account. Only if you’re making a pot for yourself,” Crabbie said, which was Ulster Presbyterian code for I am absolutely gagging for a cup of tea .

“I’ll put a wee pot on. Follow me, gents,” he said, and led us back to a smart waiting area that resembled a gentlemen’s club from another era: ancient leather sofas, old copies of Punch and Country Life , dusty potted plants.

“Maybe I will take a cup of tea,” I said, sitting down on a sofa that had been softened by the bums of the gentry into the most supreme state of suppleness.

“This is nice,” Crabbie said.

“I could wait here all day,” I agreed.

“Me too,” Crabbie concurred. “Although you wouldn’t want to get used to all this softness,” he added quickly.

Frankie went to the back office, and I grinned at the Crabman. This was proper old-fashioned police work. We old seventies dinosaurs had survived into the 1990s—the age of computers and DNA and smart young men and women in lab coats—but breaking this case would involve legwork, asking simple questions, and hard graft.

A thin, handsome, relaxed young man brought us tea and Jacobs biscuits. We ate and drank, and I leafed through a back issue of Punch .

When I finished my tea, I looked at my watch. “He’s been gone twenty minutes. Do you think something’s amiss?” I asked Crabbie.

“I don’t know,” Crabbie said. “The files are probably in old ledgers. It might take a while to go through those.”

Another twenty minutes passed, and Frankie came back with Mr. Andre and a trim, short older man with gray hair, gray eyes, and a sharp blue three-piece suit. He looked cross, and I could tell from his body language that something was wrong.

“Are you two gentlemen the northern police officers?” he asked.

“We are.”

“And you wanted to look at our files, is that right?”

“That’s right. Mr. Andre here and Frankie have kindly agreed to help us find out which of your clients had a certain jacket commissioned. Who might you be?”

“I’m Dalgetty. I’m the owner.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, standing up and offering him my hand.

He did not shake it, and I was left there looking like an eejit. Dalgetty sniffed. “I’m afraid you’ll need a warrant to look at our records,” he said tersely.

“A warrant? This is a murder investigation.”

“You’ll have to get a warrant.”

“We’re RUC,” I said.

“So?”

“So it’s going to be a huge hassle for me to get a cross-border warrant. I don’t even know what the correct procedure would be, exactly.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“Look, I don’t think you’ve completely understood. A man has been murdered and we want to identify him. We’re not investigating you or your firm or anything like that. All we want to do is notify the next of kin that their relative has been murdered.”

Dalgetty folded his arms and leaned back on his heels. “It doesn’t matter what the reasons are. We hold the privacy of our clients to be sacrosanct. If you want to look into our records, you are going to need a warrant.”

I looked at Frankie and Mr. Andre. “You found out the name, didn’t you? And your boss won’t let you release it to me.”

Frankie stared at the floor. Mr. Andre pursed his lips and looked guilty.

“Show these gentlemen to the door, Terrence. Do not let them back into the shop unless they are accompanied by Irish police officers and a warrant,” Dalgetty said.

“Bloody hell,” I muttered to Crabbie outside. “The bum’s rush, that was. Very unpleasant.”

“Aye. But what can we do?”

“Nothing,” I said, distinctly disliking this feeling of impotence. Was that what it was going to be like after I retired? To be once again a civilian, to be little people...

We found the Beemer unstolen, I checked that the Picassos were still in the boot (they were) and had a discreet look underneath for bombs, and we drove off. On the journey back to Dundalk, we talked over the oddness of this little interaction. Neither Crabbie nor I had ever had any dealings with top-flight suit makers before, so perhaps this level of discretion was only to be expected, but still, our peeler radar didn’t like it one bit.

When I told O’Neill about it in Dundalk Garda Station, he also thought it was very peculiar.

“I’ll get you a warrant if you want,” O’Neill said.

“Would you?”

“Would you give us everything you find out that links your John Doe with O’Roarke?”

“Yes! Of course we will. Will a warrant be difficult?”

O’Neill shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought so. If I say it’s for cross-border cooperation in a murder case, that should be enough to do the trick. I know just the judge to approach. I’ll put a rush on it, and if I’m not busy later on this afternoon, I’ll get down to Dublin myself and have a look through these records for you.”

“Would you really do all that?”

“Not a problem, Inspector Duffy. If your John Doe was working with O’Roarke in some capacity, it’ll be better to know sooner rather than later.”

I shook O’Neill’s hand. “That would be so helpful,” I said, giving him my card and writing my home phone number on the back.

This was progress of a sort on that front, but alas, there hadn’t been any luck with the photograph. O’Neill had passed the victim’s image around the office, but no one recognized him. He wasn’t a local player or a known associate of O’Roarke. Why he’d be calling a phone box outside a bowling club that was a known haunt of a powerful IRA warlord was, therefore, an open question.

I thanked O’Neill and all the boys at Dundalk Garda and went back out to the Beemer. It was raining now and the station car park had flooded, but still I got down on the ground and took the time to look underneath the vehicle for bombs. It wasn’t completely inconceivable that the IRA had a couple of operatives or informers working in the police station, and killing a northern RUC officer in the Republic would be quite a coup.

Of course, there was no mercury tilt switch bomb, and we got inside.

On the way back to Belfast, I had a brainwave. “Hey, Crabman, you wanna swing by this famous bowling club?”

“No.”

“We could get a look at the phone box and the club and the lay of the land.”

“The local police don’t want us anywhere near there.”

“We won’t get out of the car; we’ll just drive by, you know?”

Crabbie shook his head and then, after a significant pause, sighed.

“What’s that big sigh mean?”

“When you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about something, I’ve long since given up trying to persuade you otherwise. Let’s go.”

I swung the BMW around and we found Point Road. The bowling club was halfway along it, and the phone box just outside on the pavement looked green and clean and benign. Funny sort of place, Dundalk. On the surface, it couldn’t have looked more suburban and gentle and dull. But this was where Cuchulainn launched his war against the queen of Connacht; this was where the Vikings invaded eastern Ulster, where the Normans stretched the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement, where Edward Bruce had himself crowned king of Ireland, where the IRA fought the Irish army for the soul of the Free State, and, today, where the Provisional IRA’s northern command had its headquarters. Dundalk had strong martial traditions that went back thousands of years. Point Road, however, gave evidence of none of that. Grandfathers pushing baby strollers, women pushing shopping carts, men with pipes and tweeds and flat caps looking at stories in the Racing Post .

The bowling club did not exactly seethe with evil either. A well-maintained lawn, a slightly faded club facade with red brick and bay windows, roses planted along the fence.

“Looks pretty mellow to me,” I said as we drove past.

“Aye,” Crabbie agreed.

“Could we be barking up the wrong tree here?”

“I don’t think so. It is very suspicious that our victim would call only this one particular phone box in his whole time in Carrickfergus.”

“Very suspicious,” I agreed. I turned the car around at the bottom of Point Road and drove past the bowling club and the phone box again. I was hoping for the old prickles on the back of the neck, or something that told me that was the nexus of foulness that had come all the way to Carrick, but there were no prickles.

“Back to Belfast?” I asked.

“I think so.”

Dundalk to the border. The usual nonsense at the crossing, and then Newry. Newry to Belfast. Belfast to Carrickfergus RUC.

Up to Lawson’s office with the two Picassos. No notes or new developments waiting for us in Lawson’s inbox.

Not quite five. No progress on the case, but I couldn’t go home yet. Some of the newer lads had heard about our Dublin trip and were keen to hear stories of the old days. I told them about my famous cannonball run to Dublin back in ’eighty-four in my then brand-new BMW 325e. Back then in Northern Ireland, we got the ads for McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and the other chains, but because of the Troubles, none of those companies had ever set up in Belfast.

“So, lads, there I was doing a hundred miles per hour down the motorway with my siren on, and Matty next to me in the passenger’s seat screaming and shitting bricks, when all hell breaks loose and I see the Irish police in the rearview mirror...”

Crabbie came in from the bog and looked at me. Only some of that story was true, and his big sour face sucked the wind right out of me.

I finished with less aplomb than I would have liked.

When the other coppers had dispersed, I told him off. “Your face, mate—sucked the wind right out of me.”

“We’ve other actual stories without making up more.”

“They don’t want the sad stories. The kids just want jokey ones.”

And that was true enough. This whole society was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, and we weren’t even post yet.

It was July, so it wasn’t close to being dark out, but it was teatime. “You want a lift home?” I asked the Crabman.

“No need. I’m on until the wee hours. I’m duty detective, it appears,” he said.

“Jesus, I’m sorry to hear that, mate.”

“Oh, it’s all right. I’ve checked with the union rep. It’s double time at the full-time detective sergeant rate,” he said with some satisfaction.

I did the mental arithmetic in my head. He’d be getting twenty quid an hour just to sit by the telephone. That was okay.

A knock on the door. The gleaming pink face of the chief inspector looking a little morose this evening. “Hello, Duffy, Sergeant McCrabban, I see you’re back from your jaunt over the border,” he said.

“Nothing escapes you, sir.”

“Any developments with our case?”

Our case? Oh, crap, was he taking a personal interest in this one?

“We went down to Dundalk to check up on those phone records, and then down to Dublin to see the victim’s tailor. Couple of promising leads there, I think. Excellent cooperation from Dundalk Garda, I must say.”

“Good, good. So who was our victim?”

“Well, I’m afraid we still don’t know that for sure yet, but like I say, we have a couple of promising leads and I’m sure we’ll have this sorted in the next day or so.”

“You still don’t know the name of the dead man?” he asked, surprised.

“Not yet, sir. But it’s nothing to worry about. We have it all well in hand.”

“Superintendent MacNeice saw the story on the BBC evening news. He was asking me about it.”

“Yes, well, like I say, sir, you can tell him that everything’s well in hand.”

He gave Crabbie and me a look that I could not quite interpret but that might perhaps be similar to the one adults give to children performing in some kind of Christmas pageant.

“And the victim’s killers?”

“Nothing yet from the confidential telephone or the tip lines, but it’s very early days yet, sir,” I said.

Every amateur detective knew the old doggie that if you didn’t find out who’d done it in the first twenty-four hours, then it was going to be a tricky one. And this was now hour twenty-four, and we still didn’t know either who done it or who was done by it.

“Drink?” I asked the chief inspector, and he nodded, but when I opened Lawson’s drinks cabinet it contained only lemonade and Coke. “Jesus,” I muttered. “Sorry about this; it’s all soft drinks.”

“That’s all right, I have to head home anyway. It’s Cyril’s first night of the Robins,” McArthur said.

Cyril must be one of his kids, and the Robins must be some Proddy thing, I deduced with my razor-sharp police detective instincts.

“Tell Cyril good luck from me,” I said.

The chief inspector left, and I slumped into the chair feeling defeated.

Life, essentially, is about managing defeat. Anybody tell you that? No? Well, you’re hanging out with the wrong people from a philosophical standpoint, but maybe hanging out with the right people from a mental health standpoint. You don’t want to be around Crabbie and me when things are looking bleak in a stalled case.

I swiveled in the swivel chair and stared morosely out the window.

The gestalt of this bloody case had yet to reveal itself, but I knew that something was up. Something deep. The whole thing with the tailor’s shop smacked of something not quite right.

I phoned Peggy on the internal.

“Any calls for me from Dundalk Garda?”

“Nothing, Inspector Duffy. Are you expecting one?”

“Yeah, that or a fax, or something.”

“I’ll put the call right through if it comes.”

Aye, no gestalt yet, but in the absence of hard information one shouldn’t waste all one’s energy sieving the well-sieved soup.

I opened the window to let the sea breeze in.

I picked up one of Lawson’s paperbacks and starting thumbing through it.

It was a book about a policeman trying to solve cases in a rather nice, leafy part of England. The copper wasn’t too bright, but he had somehow risen to the rank of chief inspector. All the other coppers weren’t too bright either. When I saw that the copper had no idea who Hemingway was, I began to suspect that the writer might be rather posh.

I threw the book out the window and it scudded a wee shite from Internal Affairs who was here to check that we weren’t fiddling our expenses. Totally worth the three quid.

I closed the window, stole some change from the vending machine change return slot, and said goodbye and good luck to McCrabban.

Out into the rain.

BMW to Victoria Estate.

I parked outside the off licence and got a bottle of twelve-year-old Port Ellen and a sixteen-year-old Laphroaig for Lawson’s office. That would keep the guests happy, and if the guests didn’t like peaty, oak-aged, smoky, salty, Islay whisky, then they didn’t deserve to be happy in the first place.

I walked to the Victoria Hot Spot and ordered a fish supper.

Victoria Hot Spot did the best cod and chips in Carrick, perhaps the best cod and chips in the Greater Belfast Urban Area. I got the unofficial policeman’s discount of 20 percent off.

“One fish supper,” Irene said, handing me the packet wrapped in greaseproof paper and the Belfast Telegraph .

“Ta,” I said, and went back outside into even heavier rain. I looked under the Beemer for bombs and drove up the hill to Coronation Road. I parked the car outside 113 and went inside.

There was a package for me in the hall that Mrs. Campbell had signed for and left inside. It was from Boosey and Hawks—the score for a new work by Alfred Schnittke that I’d inquired about.

I read it as I ate the cod and chips. It was similar to Ligeti’s étude no. 8. Depressing and melancholy but strangely exhilarating too. Schnittke had recently had a series of strokes, and this seemed to be the music one composed when waiting in death’s antechamber. It was a nice piece, and I’d half a mind to take it to Bob McCawley in Victoria Gardens, who had a baby grand piano in his front room. Bob let me play his piano when the need arose, and it saved me the bother of keeping one here.

My Maoist barber also had a rather nice piano, but he never let you play in peace. Always giving you a bloody earful about Chomsky or China.

The phone rang in the hall. I swallowed a mouthful of cod and went to pick it up.

“Hello,” I said.

“Inspector Duffy?”

“That’s me.”

“This is O’Neill. From down south.”

“Oh, hello, how’s things down there in God’s own country?”

“Not too bad, Duffy. Listen, I tried you in your office, but they said you’d gone. I hope you don’t mind me calling you at home.”

“Nah, not at all. Have you got news?”

“I do, but it’s not good news, I’m sorry to say.”

“Oh?”

“I got a warrant easy enough from old Judge Cleary, who owes me a favor for a traffic thing, and I took two of my trainee detective constables and we went down to Dublin. We found your tailor’s shop.”

“So what was the problem? Was it closed?”

“It was open for business. I presented my warrant to Mr. Dalgetty, the owner, and he took me to the back office and showed me the books, and unfortunately for us, the records from 1980–1984 were destroyed in a fire. He showed me the burned ledger, and it’s completely unreadable.”

“A fire? I don’t believe it! No one mentioned a fire to us when we were there.”

“Oh, there was a fire all right. The books were ruined. He says it happened about a year ago.”

“Then why didn’t he tell me that today?”

“I don’t know.”

This was completely bogus. “Did you get the sense that they were covering something up?”

“No.”

“Bloody hell, mate. Dalgetty must have been knobbled,” I thought out loud.

“By whom?”

“By O’Roarke.”

“But why? I mean, you’ll find out your John Doe’s identity eventually, won’t you? What’s he got to gain by intimidating a tailor?”

I considered that for a second. “Time. He’ll gain time. If it takes us a day or two to find out Mr. Townes’s real name, O’Roarke will gain valuable time.”

“To do what?”

“I can think of a couple of things. If this is an attack on him, he can martial his forces before the news leaks out that one of his men has died, or maybe he’s going to use the time to tidy up any links between the victim and himself...”

“Or it could just be a fire in a tailor’s shop,” O’Neill said pragmatically. They were a commonsense lot down in the Garda.

“Or it could just be an ordinary fire, yes,” I agreed. “Well, thanks for traveling down to Dublin for me, brother. You’ve been a big help. Saves me another journey there tomorrow.”

“Sorry I couldn’t crack the case for you.”

“It’s okay, mate. Them’s the breaks.”

We said goodbye and I hung up.

My brain was in second gear. Booze would help. I made myself a vodka gimlet in a pint glass: three inches of vodka, lime juice, ice, pinch of soda water, stir, hold glass against your forehead for a bit, drink.

The vodka helped me think.

It was obvious to me, at least, what had happened. After we visited the tailor, the manager had called O’Roarke, and O’Roarke had instructed him to burn the ledger with John Doe’s name in it.

I called up Crabbie at the station. I told him about the alleged fire. Crabbie was not completely convinced that O’Roarke’s fingers were all over this. “Sean, O’Roarke has to know that we’ll find out who John Doe is eventually. Ireland is a small island.”

The rain outside grew heavier. Sheet lightning danced around the Knockagh.

“He’s playing for time. Time to do something. Time to wipe something out so there’s no link between John Doe and him. He’s doing it right now, as we speak.”

I took another gulp of the vodka gimlet. A ciggie would be great about now, but I was off the ciggies.

“Townes must have a house or an office or an offsite storage locker or a garage under another name. Something we missed,” I mused.

“I ran a thorough search in all the databases for Quentin Townes and came up with nothing.”

“I’m not surprised. It’ll be under a pseudonym, or even—” I slapped my forehead. “No, mate, it’ll be under his real name, won’t it? He’ll have a car and a bank balance and passports and getaway cash stored under his real name. A house or a flat here or maybe Dundalk or Dublin, under his real name.”

“Maybe that’s where he keeps his forged paintings too.”

“Maybe,” I said. “O’Roarke’s minions are probably stripping that flat as we speak, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. When we do find it, there will no be link to O’Roarke or anybody else.”

A long silence down the line.

“Perhaps tomorrow we’ll get a bit closer to a solution,” Crabbie said.

“Aye, mate, see you in the morning... first thing.”

“First thing,” he agreed.

I stretched out on the sofa. I had the peculiar feeling of being a domino in one of those televised record-breaking domino-toppling attempts. All around me, dominoes were falling, and the line was heading inexorably toward me.

I stared at the phone.

Something told me that it was about to?—

Briiiinnnggg, briiiinnnggg. Briiiinnnggg, briiiinnnggg.

I picked it up. “Duffy,” I muttered.

“This is Dan Harkness.”

Harkness was a Special Branch chief super in RUC intel. Highflier. He had come up with me, but his career had graphed from bottom left to top right in a pretty linear trajectory. Mine, of course, had had its ups and downs and, since John Strong’s untimely demise, was pretty much flatlining...

“Hello, Harkness, my old friend,” I said.

“ Friend is coming it a bit strong, is it not, Duffy?”

“What can I do for you, Daniel?”

“Duffy, it’s more what I can do for you.”

“Oh, yeah, and what can you do for me?”

“What is it that you want, Duffy?”

“To time-travel back to 1974 and consider an entirely different career for myself?”

“Nah, what you want, Duffy, is a quiet life.”

“Is that what I want, Dan? And I suppose you’re going to tell me how I can go about achieving that?”

“Aye, I can.”

“Go on, then. I’m all ears.”

“How about, for one thing, you stop going over the border without permission from your superiors? How about, for two, you stop going over the border and liaising with Republic of Ireland police officers without permission? How about, for three, you don’t stick your nose into Special Branch territory, nosing around serious fucking players like Brendan fucking O’Roarke? Maybe if you did all of that, people like me wouldn’t be tempted to take a crap on you from a great height, eh?”

“Is this an official warning, then?”

“No, this isn’t a warning, Duffy. This is just a friendly wee chat, that’s all.”

“In that case, I have to go, mate. I’m a detective on a case and I’m very bloody busy and don’t really have time for friendly wee chats,” I said, and hung up and walked onto the porch to look at the lightning.

I sipped the vodka gimlet, and behind me the phone rang again. It rang and rang, and eventually I had to pick it up.

“What is it now?” I asked.

Static down the line for a moment before Lawson came on. “Oh, sir! I’m so glad I reached you. I tried calling you at the office, but you were out all day.”

“Lawson! Where are you?”

“Tenerife, sir. In, uhm, Spain, sir.”

“I am aware where Tenerife is. Why are you trying to reach me?”

“Well, sir, I’ve heard the news!”

“What news?”

“There’s been a murder in Carrickfergus!”

“Murders have been happening in Carrickfergus since the suspicious death of Fergus Mor Mac Erc fifteen hundred years ago.”

“Well, yes... but...”

“But what, Lawson?”

“I was wondering if you wanted me to fly home early. I could do that if you needed me to. The chief inspector called me, and he said I should call you.”

“The chief inspector called you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In Spain?”

“He called my father, and my father gave him the number of the hotel where I’m staying.”

“ Why did he call you?”

“Well, he wanted to let me know about the murder and to see if you needed any help with the case.”

Lawson was head of Carrick CID, true, but the chief inspector should never have called him about this. I was Lawson’s superior in rank, and I had conducted at least a dozen murder investigations. Did he really have so little confidence in me?

I thought back over all my previous homicide cases. In fairness to McArthur, I didn’t have a single conviction, but I had found out who had done it in every single capital crime that I had investigated.

“There’s no need to come home from your holidays early, Lawson. Sergeant McCrabban and I have this one very much in hand.”

“Sergeant McCrabban? Uhm, aren’t you both in the, uhm?—”

“In the what, Lawson?”

“In the part-time reserve, sir. You’re both not?—”

“Real policemen anymore?”

“Oh, sir! I wouldn’t say that! I would never say that. I just wondered if you needed any help from someone who, you know, is, uhm, au fait with the latest investigative and forensic tech?—”

“No, thank you, Lawson. We’ll be fine. Sergeant McCrabban and I were conducting murder inquiries when you were still in primary school, I believe.”

“Oh, of course, sir. I didn’t mean any offense. I, uh?—

“None taken, Lawson. Enjoy your holidays. Don’t worry, we old duffers won’t sully the good reputation of Carrick CID, I promise. Goodbye, Lawson.”

Silence.

“Lawson?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I said goodbye.”

“I know, sir...”

“What is it, Lawson?”

“Well, it was only that when I spoke to the chief inspector, he seemed a bit concerned that you hadn’t even been able to positively ID the victim yet.”

“These things take time!”

“That’s what I told the chief inspector. And he said that if I wanted to cut my holiday short and come back, he would smooth it over with you, sir, but I thought that I should probably check with you first, sir.”

Wow, neither of them had any faith in me at all.

I checked my reflection in the hall mirror. Did I look so much older now? Did I project an incompetent vibe? Was it the booze? Was it my reputation?

Lawson, I knew, wasn’t a big drinker. Or maybe it was the relative clearance rates: under Lawson Carrick, CID’s clearance rates were among the highest of all the stations in Northern Ireland... whereas I had run a, ahem, looser ship, sometimes letting petty offenders off with a stern warning.

“Lawson, don’t worry, everything’s in hand. When are you supposed to come back?”

“Sunday.”

“Then come back Sunday. All is well here, okay?”

“Okay, sir. Bye, sir.”

“Goodbye Lawson.”

As soon as he hung up, I went into the living room, turned off the stereo, grabbed my leather jacket, and went back outside into the rain. I looked under the BMW for bombs and drove straight to Archie Simmons’s house.

I parked the Beemer, ran up his path, and banged on his front door.

The light came on upstairs, and I heard him clump down the stairs.

“Who is it?” he demanded.

“Police. Sean Duffy,” I said.

He opened the door. “What is it at this time of night?”

“I need answers and I need them now. Who bought those bloody Picassos?”

“Couldn’t this have waited until the morning?”

“No, it couldn’t.”

“Well, you better come in, then,” he said, looking at the clock, which claimed that it was five to midnight. Five to midnight, and the real excitement of that particular evening still lay ahead.