9. The Caravan Site
CHAPTER 9
THE CARAVAN SITE
Archie tied his dressing gown tight about him, covering his whiter-than-white old man’s knees.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” he asked reluctantly.
“No, no tea. I just want answers.”
A twinkle glimmered in Archie’s eyes. “Well, I did some digging for you, right enough.”
“And?”
“I found out that the aquatints were sold at an estate sale in Enniscorrey, County Monaghan, in 1987. And what’s more is that I happen to know the auctioneer. Charlie Bannion. Old friend of mine from our UCD days,” he said.
“And?”
“And what?”
“So who bought the bloody paintings?”
“I don’t know, but Charlie will have his record book, and all he has to do is look through it and he’ll get you the customer’s name. If you’re buying a Picasso and you have any intention of selling it in the future, you’ll want to make sure the provenance is watertight, so even if you, for example, pay in cash, you’ll still give your name and add?—”
“Call him.”
“Call who?”
“Charlie.”
“I was going to call him. I’ll call him first thing in the morning.”
“Call him now. Old books and old ledgers are spontaneously combusting for some reason in this case.”
“It’s midnight.”
“Call him now!”
Archie could see the look in my eyes.
“He won’t be happy?—”
“I’m not happy, and you should be more worried about that, trust me. Call him now.”
“All right, let me find my book.”
He rummaged through his address book and called Charlie. Archie’s psychic abilities proved good, and Charlie boy was not well pleased to get the call at this time of night. But when Archie told him it was an urgent police matter, he got slightly more cooperative. Clearly, Charlie, like everyone on planet Earth, had something to hide from the peelers.
I took the phone. “Mr. Bannion, this is Inspector Sean Duffy of Carrick CID. Mr. Simmons has explained the situation to you. I have to tell you that time is of the essence in this particular case. I need to know the name of the person who bought those paintings at the 1987 Enniscorrey auction as soon as is humanly possible.”
“But, Inspector, my ledgers are all locked up downstairs.”
“Then you’ll have to go downstairs, please.”
Five excruciating minutes while Bannion went downstairs and started rummaging through his books. He finally found the listing for the Enniscorrey auction and the sale of the Picassos.
“I found the auction,” he said.
“Who bought the Picasso?”
“Two thousand Irish pounds each. Four thousand for the pair. The buyer, a Mr. Alan Locke.”
“Address?”
“We don’t have an address.”
“How can you bid at an auction without an address?”
“At a country auction, all you need is the money and some form of identification.”
“What was the ID?”
“It was probably the usual.”
“And what’s that?”
“A driving license.”
“Do you happen to remember what Mr. Locke looked like?”
“No, not at all!” He laughed. “This was over five years ago.”
“What else does it say in your ledger?”
“That’s it, I’m afraid. Mr. Alan Locke. He’s your buyer.”
“Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.”
I hung up and called Crabbie at the station.
“Carrick CID.”
“Crabbie, it’s me. I have a name for you. Alan Locke could be our John Doe. Could be another alias, but it might not be. Do me a favor and put the name through all the usual databases. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I thanked Archie and ran out to the Beemer.
Eighty miles per hour down Victoria Road and along the Marine Highway to the station. Upstairs to a not-exactly-joyful (Crabbie didn’t really do joyful) but certainly satisfied Detective Sergeant John McCrabban.
He was holding several printouts and puffing his pipe with perhaps more enthusiasm than usual.
“Passport office, MOD records, arrest records,” Crabbie said, handing me the papers.
“Photo?”
“On his Irish passport and MOD file. It’s definitely him.”
“MOD?”
“He was a soldier.”
“Was he, now? Interesting.”
I looked at the two photos first. One a grainy black-and-white of a young man in a dress uniform with, possibly, Quentin Townes’s eyes and nose. Stature seemed to work, and the age worked. The passport photo taken in the 1980s was almost certainly a younger, mustachioed version of our John Doe.
“It’s him, I think,” I said. “What’s your take?”
“It looks like him to me. We only really got to see half the face, but this doesn’t look like a bad match to me.”
“Same here.”
“There’s this thing that they do now where you give a damaged body to a sculptor and ask them to reconstruct the face. If we did that, we could compare the completed sculpture head to Mr. Locke,” Crabbie said.
“That sounds very interesting. Where did you hear about this?”
“I was talking to trainee Detective Constable Warren before she went off to the CID school. Young Lawson did it on a case they were working on. He’s up on all the new procedures and techniques. He’s very good, so he is.”
Crabbie was not trying to get my back up. Crabbie didn’t really do passive-aggressive or snarky, but this praise of Lawson’s apparent youthful brilliance was not what I wanted to hear when I’d just uncovered a major bloody break in the case.
“Let me see what else you’ve got!” I snapped at him, and instantly regretted it.
Crabbie said nothing, but his eyelids drooped a little as he handed me the printouts.
I took the various documents from him and read them fast.
Alan Locke, born in London in 1942 to an Irish mother. No listed father. Mother dies in 1948 of tuberculosis. Custody to an aunt in Dublin. He attends the Friends School in Dublin until at some point, he runs off to England, where there are no records of what he is up to until 1963, when he joins the parachute regiment. He does well in the paras, qualifying as an infantry sniper and serving in Oman, Belize, Germany. He sees combat in Oman and is awarded a Military Cross for “gallantry under fire.”
“Was there some kind of war in Oman?” I asked Crabbie. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“I have no idea, Sean. Sorry,” Crabbie said, still a bit hurt by my curtness.
Back to the report.
Locke was honorably discharged from the army in 1971 with the rank of sergeant. No records at all on him in any of the databases until 1972, when he was arrested for driving a stolen car back in County Cork. In 1973, he was arrested for possession of explosives in Drogheda. Both cases were dropped for lack of evidence. In 1975, he was named as part of a conspiracy to assassinate the Irish prime minister (shit!), but again the case was dropped for lack of evidence. In 1978, he moved to London and worked as an art dealer until 1981, when a fugitive IRA man was discovered in his house. He was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, but again there was no real evidence of wrongdoing and he was released. In 1985, he sold the house in London and moved back to Ireland, where he apparently kept his nose clean as he vanished from the criminal databases yet again.
I put down the papers and clapped Crabbie on the shoulder to break the ice.
“Wow, you did well, mate. Did you see that thing about the Irish prime minister?”
“Indeed. Heady stuff.”
“I don’t know about sculpting the face of our victim, but what if we took the fingerprints from one of his arrest records and compared them with...” I began, but I could see that Crabbie was way ahead of me.
“I’ve already put in a formal request for a forensic officer to do a comparison. But you know what they’re like, Sean: nine-to-five types. I was able to get fingerprint records from the 1981 case, and I compared them to the records of our John Doe. I’m no forensic expert, but they look identical to me.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Crabbie,” I said. “In 1985, he comes back to Ireland from London and then vanishes from the radar. Seven years he’s been back here doing God knows what, and for the last three or four months he’s been living under the alias Quentin Townes in Carrickfergus. It’s fucking sinister, if you ask me.”
“Are you thinking he’s a player?”
“Sniper? Plot to assassinate the Irish prime minister? Illegal explosives?”
“It looks like he’s never been convicted of anything,” Crabbie said, always one to give his fellow humans the benefit of the doubt. “Although he’s certainly had quite the interesting life.”
“Until somebody shot him in the driveway of his house.”
Across the incident room, WPC Babcock was marching toward us with a big smile on her face.
“What’s her deal?” I asked.
“Well, I asked her to look up Alan Locke’s name in all the local property registries.”
“Which is exactly what I did,” young Babcock said in a cheeky voice for one so young and so low on the totem pole.
“What did you find?”
“Here’s something that’ll cheer you both up,” she said, giving me an address on a yellow legal pad. She was clearly pleased with herself.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Mr. Townes didn’t have any other addresses anywhere in Carrickfergus. But a Mr. Alan Locke has a caravan on the caravan site up the New Line Road.”
“You’re kidding me. A caravan!”
“A caravan.” She grinned.
Of course it would be the bloody caravan that nailed him. Recently, anti–Irish Traveller legislation had been enacted to cut down on illegal Gypsy and Traveller campgrounds. Now you needed watertight proof of identity to rent a caravan at official campgrounds in Northern Ireland. Most Irish Travellers and Pavee didn’t have driver’s licenses or passports, so they could be kicked out of these campgrounds at any time. But if Townes had wanted to park his caravan, he would have needed to produce a proper photo ID for the council busybodies—something that Mr. Quentin Townes didn’t have but Mr. Alan Locke did.
“Let’s get over there straightaway! Babcock, you’re duty officer in charge of the station. Crabbie, you come with me.”
Crabbie could see the excitement in my face. He knew what I was thinking. We had to get there first before O’Roarke’s goons could get rid of any incriminating evidence.
Evidence of what?
Who the fuck knew?
“What’s the address, mate?” I asked the Crabman as I maneuvered the Beemer out of the station car park.
“Lot fifteen, Clifden Park, the New Line Road, which I think is up near Woodburn Forest.”
I gunned it down the Marine Highway and up the North Road. It was teeming rain, and the lightning had changed from sheet to fork, spectacularly hitting Kilroot Power Station’s chimney in my rearview mirror.
In a minute, we were out of urban Carrickfergus and into the deep Irish countryside from a hundred years ago.
This part of Belfast was like that. The urban recovering war zone ended abruptly in cows, forests, dams, and hayfields from out of a postcard.
We drove up to the top road and found the caravan site easily enough on an unappealing piece of wasteland that had been cleared from the surrounding fields and woods. This seemed to be a site that had been zoned for a housing development that never quite materialized, and gradually the whole lot was returning to a state of nature with giant ferns and nettle bushes and fast-growing trees. There were about thirty caravans in all, most of them white two-person jobs but a few bigger ones for families. Despite the anti-Gypsy ordnances, this was clearly Irish Traveller territory, judging by the number of tethered goats and horses, dodgy-looking cars, and several scrambler motorcycles. The downpour and the hour were keeping any potential rough customers indoors, which was fortunate because coppers sometimes had a hard time walking around Traveller camps unmolested.
The BMW sank into the mud, and Crabbie and I got out into the freezing rain. My watch said two-fifteen in the morning.
“The odd-numbered lots seem to be on this side, the even-numbered ones on that side,” Crabbie said.
“What?”
“Odd-numbered ones on this side!”
“Okay.”
We began walking through the caravan site. I had the feeling that something bad was going to happen—a feeling that I attributed either to ESP or to paranoia, depending on my mood. It was also geographically dependent. If I had been in Scotland, then it would have been safe to assume that nothing bad was going to happen. If I was in Northern Ireland...
I drew my Glock, and Crabbie, thinking along the same lines, drew his revolver. Better safe than sorry. We were both in our civvies, though, which meant no body armor.
“There’s lot nine, lot eleven,” I said, counting off the caravans.
Lot number 13 was partway into the forest, and lot 15 was presumably even deeper into the edge of the wood.
“I think there’s someone there,” Crabbie whispered.
“Where?”
“In front of the caravan, just there!”
He was right. A tall man in black was standing outside the two-person caravan in lot 15, looking suspicious.
“I’ll go on point; you stay behind me, okay?”
“No. I’ll go on point, Sean. I’m wearing a dark coat, and you’ve got those white sneakers on.”
“You’re not trying to be a hero, are you, mate?”
“No, are you? Just get behind me, Sean. Come on, be sensible for once in your life,” he insisted with a hint of frustration.
“Be careful, Crabbie.”
We walked around the nearest caravan, and when Crabbie was twenty-five feet away from lot 15, next to an oak tree, he called me over.
“One man going in and out of the door—tall fella,” he whispered.
“Just one?”
“There could be others inside.”
“If O’Roarke has sent up a crash team, it could be three or four of them.”
“Aye, you’re right about that. So how do you want us proceed here, Sean?”
“Well, we’re the good guys, so we’re going to have to give them a chance to surrender, aren’t we?”
“Yes, we are. I think the big, tall guy has some kind of automatic weapon strapped on him.”
“Shit. All right. Careful, buddy, okay?”
“You too, Sean.”
I stepped out into the rain and approached the caravan carrying the Glock in front of me in both hands. I was nervous. I looked into the woods on the left and right but didn’t see any movement.
When I was fifteen feet away from Locke’s caravan, I yelled, “Carrickfergus RUC! Put your hands in the air! Put your hands where I can see them!”
The man didn’t hesitate for a second. He raised his AK-47, and before I could quite figure out what was happening, he began shooting those big, terrifying 7.62×39mm slugs at us.
I hit the deck (in this case mud, muck, and nettles) and screamed at Crabbie to get down.
The shooting stopped after a five-second burst, and I crawled behind the caravan in lot 13. Crabbie was crouching there beside me with his gun pointed at the caravan’s edge.
“Are you hit?” Crabbie asked.
“No. You?”
“No.”
“How many of them are there?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see. I just dove for the bloody ground. What about you?”
“Same thing. Hit the deck. Big gun, though. Like that time in the flats in Rathcoole. Something of that order,” he said phlegmatically.
That time was nearly number up for all of us. This could be too if we squibbed it.
“What do you think we should do?” Crabbie asked.
“You wait here. If anyone comes ’round that corner, shoot them.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I might be able to go into the woods and flank them.”
“Maybe we should get to the car and order in backup.”
“If we go back that way, they’ll nail us, won’t they? Nah, mate, this is our only chance to?—”
A scream of tires and a slew of mud coming at us as a large green Range Rover drove past.
I got to my feet. The caravan in lot 15’s door was open, and there was no sign of the man, or possibly men, inside.
“Back to the car!” I yelled to Crabbie.
We ran through the mud and rain to the BMW and jumped inside. I gave Crabbie the radio mic, and he called in a roadblock alert.
“This is Sergeant McCrabban, Carrick RUC. This is a general alert. Stop all green Range Rovers in eastern County Antrim. Suspected terrorists. Suspects armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles.”
While he talked to dispatch, I turned the key in the ignition. A rare time I didn’t look underneath the Beemer for mercury tilt switch bombs, but this was a moot piece of carelessness as the BMW wasn’t going anywhere.
The wheels spun, and the car dug itself deeper into the groove.
“Shite!”
“Try rocking it back and forth,” Crabbie suggested, and I knew what he was thinking—his trusty old Land Rover Defender wouldn’t have gotten stuck.
We rocked the car back and forward, but there was nothing doing.
“You try it gently in first and I’ll push,” I yelled at Crabbie.
He scootched over, and I ran around the back of the Beemer. I shoved the arse end of the car, but the wheels just spun and dug us deeper into the muck. This thing was going nowhere.
“No chance!” I yelled at Crabbie, and ran over to one of the scrambler motorbikes—in this case, a Kawasaki 125. I kicked the starter, and the bike sputtered. I kicked again and it roared to life.
“They went that way!” Crabbie yelled, pointing north into the countryside.
I sat down on the bike and selected first gear. The motorbike had no problem at all with the mud. Bloody loved the mud. It slewed through it in a gorgeous S curve, and I drove out of the caravan park and headed north along Woodburn Forest Road.
Left hand clutch, second gear, clutch again and third gear, clutch again and fourth gear. The little Kawasaki was doing sixty mph now and gripping the slick road like a trooper. The rain was battering my face, but I found the light switch and turned the headlights on and that improved visibility a little.
Deeper into the hills through the downpour.
I was soaked to my skin now. Water drenching my jeans and pouring through the gap at the top of my leather jacket.
At least there was no traffic, and nothing on either side of the road but hedges and stone walls, sheep pasture and cattle runs.
Up the New Line Road until it branched left and right. Left was the Carrickfergus Road, right was the Watch Hill Road. Fifty-fifty where they had gone. I took Watch Hill because it looked like the road less traveled.
The Watch Hill Road became something called the Ballyrickard Road, which narrowed to a single lane. We were climbing higher into the Antrim Hills, getting near the village of Kilwaughter.
Wilder country up here, fewer farms, steeper pasture not good for anything but scraggly sheep runs.
Ever ridden a motorbike fast at night through the rain?
You can certainly bloody imagine it. Nerves jangling, adrenaline pumping.
The no helmet was an advantage and disadvantage. No protection from the rain, but no steamy visor either.
Higher the road went, but the sweet little Kawasaki 125 loved it.
I turned a bend with the Irish Sea behind me, and there, suddenly, was the Range Rover. Up ahead about five hundred yards.
I had the bastards.
I dropped back and looked at the Kawasaki’s fuel gauge. About a quarter of a tank left. I did a quick mental calculation. This thing probably had a one-gallon tank. It was a two-stroke 125, so it probably got about ninety miles to the gallon cruising, maybe seventy-five the way I was running it. Let’s say eighty to allow for the little bit of extra the designers always chucked in to save you in a tight spot, and that meant I’d need to catch them in the next twenty miles or so.
Twenty miles was plenty if they were going to Belfast, but if they ran back to Dundalk tonight I’d never be able to follow them there.
The Range Rover turned onto the A8 and began heading south and west toward Belfast.
Yes!
Another thought occurred to me. If they were pros, they’d probably try to ditch the Range Rover in the city and change to another car.
I turned off the full beam on the Kawasaki’s headlights and kept what I hoped was sufficient distance behind them not to attract attention. The fuel gauge hadn’t moved at all, which was odd. I tapped it and the needle fell all the way to zero.
Bollocks!
No need to panic, though.
Probably just the gauge that was busted. I jiggled the tank beneath me, and I could feel fuel sloshing around in there.
Enough to get me into Belfast?
Maybe.
If they didn’t run into a police roadblock, I’d flag down a passing cop car and alert the dozy bugger.
I had thought I was being careful, keeping my distance, not trying to overtake, going easy on the full beam, but they must have made me anyway. The roads were deserted at this time of night, and a solitary motorbike in the rearview just on the very edge of the mirror? Who in their right mind would set out on a journey in this fucking weather? Without a helmet? And hadn’t we just driven past a bike exactly like that at the caravan site?
If they’d been more careful or less bold cleanup men, they might have tried to lose me, but as it was, with no witnesses on a country road, they tried something a bit more destructive.
They slowed the car, wound down the passenger’s-side window, and gave me a burst of the AK.
Tracer lit up the asphalt, and white-hot supersonic bullets screamed all around me.
“Holy shit!”
I throttled back and slipped the bike into third.
The rear passenger window opened now, and a man in a balaclava began shooting at me methodically with a revolver.
Another burst of the Kalashnikov that tore up the road all around me with white fire.
“Shite!” I screamed as a bullet hit the headlight and ricocheted past my face. It missed me by a good nine inches, but I lost control of the bike, skidded, tried to right myself and missed the curve T. E. Lawrence style.
I tried to pull it back onto the road.
Come on!
Turn you son of?—
Leaves.
Thorns.
Branches.
A wall.
Blackness.
Silence...
An unknown ellipsis of time.
The return of experience.
The pitter-patter of rain.
The gradual firing up of my consciousness and memory.
Dazed. Dizzy.
“Jesus,” I said.
I had no idea where I was.
Car accident.
I’ve had a car accident in Scotland.
No, not Scotland.
Ireland.
On a case.
A case again after all this time.
I climbed out of the hedge, which had grown up over an ancient stone wall. I was cut and bruised, but nothing was broken and I appeared to be in one piece.
I’d bitten my tongue, and there was blood in my mouth.
I must have been knocked unconscious for at least five or ten minutes, and if they’d wanted to, the Range Rover men could have reversed back and finished me off. But they didn’t. They just wanted to get out of here.
And get they had.
They were long gone now.
I staggered into the road.
Lights.
“Hey, hey!” I croaked, but I must have looked a right state, and the lights drove on.
Five minutes later, I tried to flag down a passing car going the other direction, but it ignored me too. A big black motorbike slowed as it got close to me, but then sped up again and drove past.
Total bastard.
I retrieved the Kawasaki, which was covered with dirt and lying upside down in the sheugh. I righted it, cleaned mud out of the spark, and kicked it. It started first time without any complaints whatever. Just try doing that with the Triumph Bonneville I was still trying to rebuild out in my shed.
The front fork was bent and there was muck in the air intake, but it moved.
I rode the Kawasaki slowly back to the caravan site, where Crabbie had called in a police forensic team from Belfast to examine Locke’s trailer.
He ran over when he saw me pull up on the bike.
“I lost them,” I said.
“Are you all right? Did you take a spill?” he asked with concern.
I shook my head. “I’m fine. I found them and I was trailing them, but they fucking made me in the rearview mirror. I blew it.”
“What happened?”
“They fired off a burst with the AK; I lost control of the bike and went off the road. When I got my shit together, they were long gone.”
“They shot at you and you went off the bike?”
“Aye.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, mate. Bit shaken up if I’m honest, but okay.”
“Have a seat; I’ll get you some tea,” Crabbie said with real concern.
“Not necessary. What’s going on here?”
“I put the alert out for the Range Rover. Nothing yet.”
“Update it, will you? I think the vehicle is heading for Belfast. It was last spotted on the A8.”
Crabbie updated the report while I went over to the forensic tent and poured myself a cup of tea and had a couple of their biscuits. My hands were shaking, but the tea helped.
“Anything left inside the caravan?” I asked Crabbie when he returned.
“Nope. Clean as a whistle. I had a look myself while you were in pursuit. They didn’t have a key. The handle smashed off and the lock chiseled out.”
“What do you think was in there?”
“Guns. A lot of them. You can still smell the gun oil and the nitro, and there are half a dozen gun racks on the wall. No dust in any of the racks. So until recently, and by ‘recently’ I mean a few hours ago, they contained guns.”
I wanted to have a look myself, but the coveralled forensic officers were very territorial.
“What sort of guns?”
“Long racks, so I’m thinking rifles, shotguns maybe. Gun oil on some of the wood. I imagine those boys you tangled with had to come and take the weapons away because they were forensically linked to various crimes.”
“I expect you’re right,” I said.
Crabbie looked at my forehead and shook his head.
“You should get to a hospital, Sean. You’re badly scraped up. And look at this. You’ve hurt your hand,” he said with dismay.
“I’m okay. I rode back here after the accident.”
“What did you do that for? You should have gone to the nearest farmhouse and called the police.”
“Didn’t think of that,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re probably concussed. I’m taking you down to the hospital.”
“No, you’re not. We have an active crime scene here.”
“That’s enough, Sean. Forensics will report their results wherever we are. Come on. I’m taking you to the hospital. I had your car towed out of the mud.”
“Look, who’s in charge here? I’m not going anywhere,” I said, my head spinning.
“I’m in charge. I’m relieving you of operational control, Sean. On account of incapacity. Now, come with me to the car. I’m driving.”
BMW to the Shore Road.
Crabbie driving. Riding the clutch as if he owned shares in BMW replacement-clutch suppliers.
BMW to Whiteabbey Hospital.
Docs. Nurses. Crabbie doing the talking. “He’s a policeman. He was chasing someone on a motorbike. They shot at him, and he went into a hedge and a bit of wall too, I think.”
Wound cleaning.
Bandages.
Tetanus shot.
Head scan.
Head doc: “You took a nasty spill, but you were lucky. Nothing broken. Still, you should rest up for a few days. Avoid stress, and if you get any headaches you should come back and see me immediately.”
“Thanks, Doc,” I said. “I’ll rest up and I’ll avoid stress. And, um, what about the pain?”
“See the attending for a prescription. And remember what I said about the headaches.”
“I will, Doc, thanks.”
When he’d gone, I pulled Crabbie close. “Do me a favor, mate. Get a prescription for the good painkillers. And while you’re at it, check with the station on the case.”
“No stress, Sean. Leave the case for a bit.”
“This isn’t stress. I live for this.”
Crabbie came back with a script for boring old codeine, and a case update. The initial forensic report on the caravan was that the place had until recently been stuffed full of guns and ammo. And Mr. Locke’s fingerprints were everywhere.
Of course, despite Northern Ireland being chock-full of police and army checkpoints, the Range Rover had completely vanished. If it ever appeared again, it would be a burned-out hulk.
When the staff nurse said I was good to go, Crabbie wanted to take me home, but I insisted that we drive back up to the caravan site. We ripped away the RUC—Do Not Cross tape, turned on our flashlights, and peered inside the trailer.
Gun racks, all right, and the smell of grease, gun oil, and cordite was overwhelming. In a drawer, we found a dozen spent rifle casings and two paper targets that had the bull’s-eyes blown out of them. I passed them to Crabbie.
“Nice wee setup he has here. All his guns and ammo in his caravan. He can separate his two worlds nicely, can’t he? We would never have found out about it either except by bloody chance.”
“By old-fashioned police work, Sean,” Crabbie corrected.
“Indeed, yes. Old-fashioned police work.”
I admired the targets some more.
“What are you thinking, Sean?” Crabbie asked.
“I’m thinking what you’re thinking.”
“And what’s that?”
“The hit man got hit.”
Crabbie nodded. “It certainly seems that way, doesn’t it?”
“Alan Locke was a player. Probably an assassin. Probably working for O’Roarke.”
“We can’t quite make that connection, can we?”
“Question is, why? Why was he sent north by O’Roarke and living under an alias in Carrickfergus for the last few months? This top bloody soldier of one of the most dangerous men in Ireland. What was the game here?”
“I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t to paint pictures of old ladies and their cats, that’s for sure. He was a sleeper agent. Waiting for his orders. And then for some reason, the assassin himself is hit. Hit by another pro who had almost fooled us into thinking he was killed in a joyriding gone wrong. Almost.”
Crabbie shook his head. “I doubt it would have fooled any half-decent detective.”
“Look around you, mate. Competent detectives in the RUC? In a busy Belfast force, they would have just logged it as such. Aye, Crabbie, it was a good play by this assassin’s assassin, and he would have gotten away with it if not for us meddling kids. And then O’Roarke’s men come up here to this very caravan to remove the late Mr. Locke’s weaponry? Sticks in the craw, mate. If we’d gotten his ID four or five hours sooner, we could have staked this place out or, at the very least, recovered guns that had been used in various murders and robberies.”
“Aye,” Crabbie agreed sadly.
I put the targets in a plastic evidence bag, and we closed the door and reset the Do Not Cross tape.
It was four-thirty in the morning now, and at this time of year that was when the sun would show its face over the Scottish hills. Today, the sun was hidden by gray clouds and rain, but it felt ridiculous to still be on the job at the beginning of a new day.
“We both need to go home and get some sleep. I’ll not expect to see you in the office until the afternoon,” I said to the Crabman.
A grave look blew across his features. “I won’t come in until the afternoon if you promise you won’t come in until the afternoon either.”
“I promise,” I said.
We looked at one another. Someone had fired a machine gun at us earlier. And now we were supposed to go home to our beds and sleep as if nothing had happened.
“It’s a stupid job,” I said. “A bloody stupid job for men of our advancing years.”
“We were almost both out of it.”
“Aye.”
I sighed and looked at the big ganch. A man pumping hot lead at you will turn the stoniest heart philosophical. “What?” he asked.
“I’d shoot you a What’s it all about, Crabbie ? But there’s no point. You’ll say we have to discover God’s will, and I’ll say I’m not even sure there is a God running this charnel house. And then you’ll say that if you believed that you’d give in to despair. And then I’ll say why do you think I’m so depressed. And you’ll say how does your belief in Saint Michael the Protector square with this no-God business. And I’ll say well, there’s more things in heaven and earth, et cetera. And you’ll say well, maybe one of those things is God. And I’ll say look around you, mate, does it look like a deity is in charge of this dump? And you’ll say this is getting us nowhere, and I’ll agree.”
Crabbie nodded. “I’m glad we got that sorted.”
We started walking to the car and were almost back to the Beemer when one of the older tinker kids came out to accost us about stealing his motorcycle. He was giving me a long diatribe in Shelta and Irish about police high-handedness when I recognized him as Killian, a well-known teenage car thief and con man whose police record was already as long as your arm. He was a joker and a thief, and how he had avoided a long stretch, I had no bloody idea.
“If that was your motorbike, I’m a Dutchman. Now, leave us alone. We need to get home to our beds,” I said in Irish.
He looked shiftily about him for a moment. “Well, I’m no informer,” he said to us in English.
“Go on,” I said.
“I don’t know anything about the man who was renting the caravan near the woods. Never spoke to anyone, except he told Joshy McDermott, who runs the site, that if anything ever went missing from his caravan he wouldn’t be dealing with him, he’d be dealing with the boys from Dundalk.”
“By which he meant?”
“You know what he meant.”
“The IRA high command over the border.”
“It wasn’t a threat. It was a promise. You could see it in his eyes. And no one went near his caravan. No one so much as looked in the window.”
I could see there was more. “What else?”
“Sometimes, early in the morning he’d come by the caravan and take out a long rifle and go off into the woods there and do some target practice.”
I took out my notebook and tried to write this down, but after falling off a motorbike, writing wasn’t as easy as it looked.
“We need to know everything about him. You’re not grassing on him. He’s dead. He was the man who was killed on Prospect Avenue the other night. A man who was calling himself Quentin Townes,” Crabbie said.
“But whose real name was Alan Locke,” I added.
“He never used either of those names here. He never used any name. But I seen him around town driving that big Jag of his.”
“What else did you see, Killian?”
His eyes narrowed. He was no oil painting, and with the squinty eyes he looked a wee bit more reptilian and mean. “How much has it been worth so far?” he asked.
“Twenty quid?”
“How about fifty?”
“How about fifty if you tell us something really good,” I suggested.
“The fact that he was probably IRA isn’t good?”
“We knew he was IRA already. And we’ve already been to Dundalk asking about him,” Crabbie said, and Killian could tell that Crabbie wasn’t lying.
“Something good, eh?” Killian said. “What about the Norton Commando?”
“What about it?”
“It said on the news that the police were seeking the assistance of a man riding a Norton Commando, to help with their inquiries.”
“And?”
“What if I was to tell you that a man riding a black Norton Commando came sniffing around here?”
Even my semiconcussed eyes lit up at that one.
“Doing what, exactly?”
“Nosing around Townes’s caravan. Didn’t see him break in, but you never know; he might of. It was weird. We don’t get too many casual visitors or tourists around here, so I noticed him and the bike and he sort of casually walked over to your man’s caravan.”
“When was this?”
“Not sure, couple of days ago. Way early, when he thought everybody would be asleep. But I wasn’t.”
“Before the murder?”
“Aye, few days ago.”
“You’ve good eyes, son. You get a reg of this bike?” Crabbie asked.
“Didn’t think to. Sorry.”
“What did this guy look like?” I asked.
“That I can tell you,” he said, and paused.
I took out my wallet and counted out fifty quid. He reached out to take it and I held it back Rockford Files style. “This better be kosher.”
He grabbed the money. “Now, admittedly, I only saw him from the back—” he began, and I made to grab the cash back, but Killian tucked it into his pocket.
“Six foot one, medium build, gingery-blond hair, pale, probably left-handed because he was carrying his bike helmet in his left hand. A Shoei helmet. He was wearing Levi’s and a black motorcycle jacket,” he said quickly.
“Well, that’s something,” Crabbie said, taking out his pipe.
“Not worth fifty quid,” I muttered. I gave Killian my card. “If you see him around here again or anywhere else in Carrick, you give me a call. There’s another fifty in it for you.”
“It’s a deal. Hey, Duffy.”
“What?”
“Did you hear about the dyslexic guy who walks into a bra?”
I tried to clip him on the ear, but he had already drifted into the shadows.
Back at the station, we filed our incident reports with the duty sergeant and checked the logs to see if the Range Rover had shown up, but there was no sign of it.
The sun was now fully up over Scotland, and the traffic was increasing on the Marine Highway through Lawson’s window.
“You know when I took my spill last night, a motorbike rode right past me. A black bike. A black Norton maybe. I was dazed and out of it, but maybe it was a black Norton,” I said.
“Bit of a coincidence, eh?” McCrabban said.
“And you don’t like coincidences, do you?”
“And neither do you,” he said.
“Nope. Can’t stand the bastards.”