I Hear the Sirens in the Street (20 page)

I gave the house a butcher's: mid-century Georgian, red sandstone, three floors, a steep slate roof and a large wooden door that once had been painted a garish bright blue but which now had faded into a pleasing mottled indigo. The original, elegantly high, curved windows had been replaced by squat square jobs in brown frames. A black, sinister ivy was growing over two thirds of the house and all the third-floor windows were a suffocated tenebrous jungle. At least the ivy helped conceal the house's shambolic condition, but if you looked closely you could see the unrepaired cracks in the walls, the missing tiles in the roof and the strange lean of the entire structure a good ten degrees off the verticle.

I was vibing a classic case of the aristo fallen on hard times: big empty rooms, mad woman in the attic, eldest daughter marrying some garish Yank with money.

I crunched on the gravel and walked up moss-covered granite steps to the porch.

I rang an ancient-looking push bell and contemplated a sour-looking cat who was sleeping on a heap of old newspapers. At least, I assumed he was sleeping, as he didn't seem to breathe once.

A middle-aged woman came to the door. She was wearing an
apron and looked annoyed. “He's not in, so he's not,” she said in a pissed-off West Belfast accent.

“Where is he?”

“Out with the dogs, so he is.”

I showed her my warrant card.

“Poliss, is it? Is there anything wrong? Will I get Betty?”

“Who's Betty?”

“The housekeeper, Mrs Patton.”

“And who are you?”

“Cook. Aileen.”

“Who is else is in the house?”

“No one else. Ned will be with the horses.”

“Is that everyone?”

“Yes.”

I wrote the names in my notebook.

“Is there a wife, girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” Aileen said.

I followed into her a rather gloomy looking hall with dark wood panelling and a staircase curving to the upper floors. There were hunting trophies on the wall, something I had not seen before anywhere in Ireland. Huge stags but also lions, leopards, a cheetah – all from another age.

The place was dusty and it smelled of mildew. The smell was so bad, in fact, that I gagged, and to cover my embarrassment I pointed at the beheaded animals.

“Do they not give you the willies, love? All them eyes looking down at you,” I said in the demotic.

She laughed. “Aye, they're desperate so they are.”

“Is it from himself?” I asked.

I could tell now that Aileen was a Catholic. It was hard to say how I could tell but I could. Accent, body language, who knew? Sir Harry wasn't a raging bigot then.

“No, no. From his da or his grand da more than likely,” she said.

“What does
he
do for fun?”

“When he's not in his office in Belfast he just likes the quiet time. Potters around the garden, reads in his library.”

“Terrible about his brother, the captain in the army.”

“Shocking, so it was. Shocking.”

“I suppose you didn't hear the killing from here?”

“Oh, no. It's too far away. We didn't hear anything.”

“And there were no witnesses?”

“From up here? No.”

“Was Sir Harry at home that day?”

“He was out in the garden, I think. He went over straight away. Of course there was nothing he could do.”

“No. Martin was his younger brother?”

“Yes. Eight or nine years between them, I think.”

I shook my head. “Must have been awful that morning.”

“Oh yes, I'll never forget that day. Shocking, so it was. Such a cowardly act. They're vermin. Vermin shooting a man in the back.”

“He was shot in chest,”

Her eyes scolded me. “What does it matter! What does that matter? What are you here for, anyway? I told you Sir Harry was out. Wait here.”

Before I could call her back she vanished through a door and a rather different woman appeared in blue suit, white pearls and a black bouffant. She was about forty, thin, thin-lipped, and there was a touch of old Hollywood in her heavy lidded eyes and defiant unfeminine chin.

She walked towards me, all systems bristling. “May I see your identification?” she asked.

I showed her the warrant card.

“I take it that you're Mrs Patton?” I asked.

She nodded. She was from Derry, by the sound of it. Brisk
and business-like. I dug the whole
Rebecca
scene, but if she was Mrs Danvers and Sir Harry was Max de Winter, what did that make me – Joan fucking Fontaine?

I took out my fags.

“Oh, there's no smoking in here,” Mrs Patton said.

I put the cigarettes back in my pocket with a mumbled “Excuse me”.

A little victory for the home team, there.

“And how can we be of service today?” she asked.

“I need to see Sir Harry. I was wondering if I could, uh, if I could wait for him in your lovely garden,” I said, putting on a bit of my Glens accent.

“The garden? Why?” she said, both disarmed and suspicious.

“I'm a bit of flower nut and I thought I could spend some time there until Sir Harry comes back. I've heard wonders about his garden.”

“You wish to wait for Sir Harry in his garden?”

“If it doesn't put anyone out.”

“No … I, uh, I don't expect that it would.”

She looked at me and nodded curtly. “Follow me,” she said.

We went through a spotless kitchen, all gleaming surfaces and pots on hooks. The appliances had all been brand new in about 1975. Sir Harry didn't seem like the sort of man who would let his cars rot but get expensive kitchen gear. It must be a feminine influence. His wife had bought that kit, a wife who was, now, where exactly?

I walked through the back door and out into the kitchen garden.

“Here you go,” she said.

I pretended to be fascinated by an ugly yellow smudge of daffodils – the only thing at all growing back here.

Of course I had already seen the greenhouse through the kitchen window.

Mrs Patton said “I'll leave you to it,” and disappeared back
inside. I lit a cigarette. I knew that she'd be spying on me but there was a hedge blocking the rear entrance to the greenhouse from the back windows of the residence. I finished my smoke, inspected more of the flowers and walked behind the hedge. I waited a moment for a cry or footsteps hurrying towards me but I heard nothing. I turned a rusted iron handle and went inside the greenhouse. I didn't know what I was expecting to find but I was not counting on a completely empty space. No plants, no pots, nothing. I wrote “a clean concrete floor, a few gardening tools”, in my notebook. The gardening tools were one rake and one hoe.

I had got what I came for on this trip.

I wrote “Down at heel scion. Hiding something or just an arse? No rosary pea or anything else in the greenhouse” in my notebook and walked into the house again.

Mrs Patton intercepted me in the gloomy hall.

“Inspector Duffy, is anything amiss?” she asked.

“No, nothing's amiss, Mrs Patton. However, I've just remembered that I have to be somewhere else. I was so taken with your daffodils that I completely forgot. You'll have to excuse me, ma'am. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Oh … oh, what shall I tell Sir Harry?”

“No message, thank you,” I said.

I walked briskly out of the hall and onto the crunchy gravel drive. I gave the Bentley and the Roller a sympathetic look and I juked under the palm trees.

Thunder rumbled in a grey skin and it began to rain with big heavy, sporadic drops. At the hill's summit I surveyed the broad wet valley filled with cows and sheep and fields too boggy to accommodate man or beast.

The prospect to the north was of Larne Lough and Magheramorne on the far shore.

The widow McAlpine's farm was a good mile off on the far side of a hill. You wouldn't be able to see it even from the
third floor of this house. No one inside could possibly have witnessed Martin's murder. There would be no teenage maids too frightened to testify but who could be broken by the age-old tactics of question after question after question.

I dandered down the hill and in twenty minutes I was back at the farm.

I went round the back of the house and tried the rear door.

It too was locked. Cora was barking herself hoarse now. A side window was open, but it was too small for me to squeeze through. I lit my last ciggy, climbed a style over the stone wall and strode out across the fields in the direction of the tied-up horse.

The pasture was little better than a bog with some tuft grass and sodden heather, and in a few moments my DMs were soaked through. Sheep pellets were everywhere and in a slurry pond there was the carcass of an old ewe, suspended just beneath the surface.

The horse was an old white mare who barely registered my presence as I approached. I stroked her head, but I had no sugar to offer her. I grabbed some moist dandelion leaves and held them under her nose but she turned her head away disdainfully. “Spoiled rotten, so you are,” I said, and gave her a pat on the neck.

I was curious about the shed so I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I opened it and saw a lantern hanging from the ceiling and a ladder leading underground.

“What's all this?” I muttered, but the mare kept her thoughts to herself.

I looked down into the hole. It was a vertical tunnel lit by a series of incandescent bulbs. The walls were white, chalky and crumbly and I wasn't encouraged that the rickety metal ladder was bolted to them. There was a slightly unpleasant, sulphurous smell which also boded ill.

I hesitated at the top of the ladder for a moment and
then decided to climb down. Twenty rungs to the bottom. A narrow passage lead to a door which said: No Entry Except By Authorised Personnel.

I pushed on the door and entered the chamber. It was like a cave really and everything a cave should be: big, cathedral-like, sonorous, intimidating and impressive.

Two bright arc lamps lit the white, chalky and oddly beautiful walls and cast shadows deep into the back recess of the cavern. To one side there were several metal cupboards and in the middle of the room Emma McAlpine was sitting on a sofa next to a generator which didn't appear to be running. (How the lights were working was the first of the several mysteries.)

She must have heard me coming down the ladder but she did not look up.

“What are you reading?” I asked. “It's not the Bible, is it?”

“Inspector Duffy,” she said, and set the book on her lap. It had yellow binding; not many Bibles had yellow covers, not even The Good News.

She was dressed in jeans, an Aran sweater and a wax jacket. Riding boots, of course, but she had kicked those off. Her hair was tied back in a pony tail. Under the fluorescent lights she looked wan, sickly, not a million miles removed from Elizabeth Siddal in
Ophelia
.

I walked towards her. “I get the feeling that you were expecting me,” I said.

“Why would I be?”

“Because you heard the news.”

She nodded. “Inspector Dougherty. I'm sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what?”

“Dougherty was a brother officer, wasn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like some tea? I brought a flask. It's already made up with milk and sugar. Scandalous, I know.”

“Sure.”

“Have a seat.”

I sat next to her on the leather sofa. She smelled of horse and sweat and leather. The sofa was covered in a layer of powdery white shit from the crumbling ceiling; I brushed myself a space with the back of my hand and sat down. She produced a flask with a paisley design on the side, unscrewed the plastic lid and poured a cup of tea into a white plastic mug.

“I also brought a flask of gin, if you want to slip that in there,” she said, as if that would be the most natural thing in the world.

“No, you're all right, thanks.”

I took the tea, which was weak and very sweet. The way I liked it. The type of tea you were supposed to give to people to stop them going into shock.

“Dougherty came to see you, didn't he?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What about?”

“I think he may have been drunk. He had certainly been drinking.”

“What did he talk to you about?”

“In an extremely vulgar manner he demanded to know exactly where I had been when Martin got shot.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him that I was in the kitchen.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He said that he didn't believe me. He said that I wasn't telling him everything.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I told him that no one could call me a liar in my own home and I asked him to leave.”

“And did he leave?”

“No. He did not. He abused me in the most disgraceful language. At one point I felt that he was going to strike me.”

“And then?”

“Well, then he did leave, but not before melodramatically
promising that he would return.”

I rubbed my chin and leaned back into the sofa cushions.

“But he didn't return, did he?”

“No.”

“Did he call you or have any other communication with you?”

“No.”

“And you didn't go see him?”

“Of course not.”

She looked at me. Her blue eyes were not entirely pleasant. They radiated an icy quality. Not quite contempt but not far off it. Distance, a lack of concern.

“What are you reading?” I asked in a lower register.

“It isn't the Bible, since you ask.”

“The Bible was on my mind. Someone called me up and asked me to meet them and when I went there they had left a note,” I explained, leaving out the chase scene.

“That sounds like fun,” she said. “What did the note say?”