Nothing but Memories (DCI Wilson Book 1) (7 page)

             
"If you ever quit this job you’ll find a new vocation with a dog-collar," Wilson said trying to lighten the mood. He knew that George wasn’t alone in thinking that there was too much change on the way. For men like him, born in the nineteen sixties into a Protestant-dominated world, the thought of power sharing and working alongside Catholics in jobs that were traditionally reserved for Protestants was anathema. He had recently attended a management seminar where the problems associated with the change were discussed and he was told to empathise with people like George. But not while I’m in the middle of a murder investigation, he thought. His head was pounding now. "I understand where you’re coming from, George. But we’ve got to move on and we’ve got to take our responsibilities whatever the politicians get up to."

             
Whitehouse didn’t reply. He just stood there wearing his hang dog look.

             
Wilson picked up the Patterson file from his desk and handed it to Whitehouse. "Give this to Constable McElvaney on your way out. I want every available man on this case. If we are talking IRA then I want a name and a number. And I want it yesterday. Got it."

             
Whitehouse leaned forward slowly and took the file. As he stood back his right foot caught the edge of the document stalactite and files cascaded across the floor tumbling into other stalactites which crumbled in their wake. He bent down in a vain effort to stay the domino effect.

             
"For Christ sake, leave them, " Wilson waved his hand at the outer office.

             
Wilson surveyed the mass of documents strewn around his floor and rubbed the palm of his left hand across his forehead. The headache which had begun in Jenning's office and was reaching a crescendo. He opened the top drawer of his desk and flipped the top off a tube of strong pain-killers. He popped two tablets into his mouth and swallowed them. It would take at least ten minutes for the drugs to take effect. Then he could think about calling a secretary to help clear up the mess. He sat with his head in his hands looking out at the still silent squadroom. McElvaney sat at her desk staring at the file which Whitehouse had dropped wordlessly in front of her. Now I know how Christ felt in the Garden of Gethsemane, he thought.

CHAPTER 9

Moira read the last page of the Patterson murder book and closed the file. She tossed the buff coloured folder on top of her tiny steel desk in the squad room, let out a deep sigh and stretched in her chair. A strong vodka and orange and a hot bath was what she needed right now. The squad room was deserted. All her new colleagues had departed. Thankfully they hadn’t bothered to proffer any invitations for a drink. She couldn’t have handled that. She’d known that working with six men was going to be difficult. The smell of testosterone was palpable in the room reminiscent no doubt of the locker-room of the Los Angeles Rams. However, her options were limited. It was apparent that she was never going to become one of the boys. That just wasn’t going to happen. They were wearers of the sash to a man. Their Thursday nights would be spent in the company of like-minded individuals trading peculiar hand shakes with one trouser leg rolled up. She smiled at the mental picture of the exposed hairy legs. Was she totally mad? What the hell was a Catholic woman doing in the middle of colleagues who were either Masons or members of the Orange Lodge or maybe even both? The only thing they had in common was that they were coppers. Maybe that wouldn’t be enough. She stretched her arms upwards and brought her hands together it mock supplication. Who would be a newby in an all male Protestant squad? That was the inevitable process of integration but it might last a bit longer in this case. She allowed her arms to drop as she sank into her chair. For the moment and for the foreseeable future she would have to be ‘hail fellow well met’. That would mean laughing at any asinine jokes that would really be intended to put her down either as a woman or a catholic. Eventually she might be admitted to the after-work drink ritual. But that would depend on whether her new colleagues would appreciate being seen with her in their usual watering holes. She came from a town with two Chinese restaurants, one of which was the catholic Chinese while the other was the protestant Chinese. After all this was Ulster. What the hell am I doing here? she thought. More importantly what the hell am I trying to prove? There were women detectives all over the United Kingdom. Some had been in the job for eons more than her. Also some of those women were also Catholics. So there was nothing special about her. Why then did she feel like she was a test case? She looked towards the end of the room where Wilson sat pouring over files. His desk lamp illuminated his face. He definitely doesn’t want me here, she thought. But he has to play along with the game. They had leaned on him to take her. Everybody would be waiting for her to screw up and when she did they would dump on her like a ton of bricks. And I asked for all this, she thought. She felt a sudden dart of pain in her stomach and wasn’t sure whether it was hunger or fear. Don’t be such a wet, she thought. You knew what you were getting into. Nobody said it was going to be a rose garden and anyway what do you care. Two years at the most and then it will be back to Strabane and a bit of family support. Her eyes began to fill as she thought of her parents. They were so damn proud of her. She had worked hard to get into University. After
the African adventure she managed to land a good job with the Ministry of Social Welfare. Her parents thought that she had hit the jackpot with her marriage to an up-an-coming accountant. Then it all went down the toilet starting with the day her husband had decided to show her his true colours by giving her a good thump. She’d given him the mightiest kick in the balls she could muster and then packed her clothes. That was the end of the marriage and the job at the Ministry. Her parents tried to convince her to go back but she’d hit a watershed. No son-of-a-bitch was ever going to lay a hand on her again. They had stood by her when she had joined the Police Force. And her mother had shed buckets of tears when she had been posted to Belfast but at least she had made it to detective constable. She had seen tears form in her father’s eyes also but he wouldn’t allow himself to show weakness in front of her. He was too old-school for that. A tear crept out of her eye and she brushed it away. Maybe she was a bit old-school herself. Christ she had to get out of this mood or she would be on the next train home. She looked down at the file on her desk. The details were skimpy. She thought that perhaps Sergeant Whitehouse was right. On the surface it looked like James Patterson had joined the long list of sectarian murders. There were no witnesses to the event and there appeared to be no clues as to who might have been responsible. The murder appeared to be a classic act of mindless violence. A death based on no other motive than religion.

             
She glanced up at Wilson’s office and remembered how chuffed she had been when she’d heard that he was going to be working for the most famous detective in the PSNI. She was pleasantly surprised when she realised that the legend was actually flesh and blood just like everybody else. She assumed that it was the same with all heroes. From a distance they appeared to be supermen but up close they were pretty ordinary. It wasn't Wilson’s fault that the recruits had pictured him as some kind of Irish Dirty Harry. What they would have got in reality was a soft-spoken gentle giant who wore a stained sports coat and a shirt that looked like it hadn’t seen an iron in months. She picked up the file and walked towards Wilson’s office.

             
"Excuse me sir," she remained at the door to the office.

             
Wilson looked up slowly from the papers he was working on. "Constable McElvaney, what can I do for you?" he said in a bored tone. It was going to be difficult not to think of the young woman in front of him as the ‘father of all things for to bother him’.

             
She held up the résumé of the Patterson file. "I've been reading this file, sir, and I can't help thinking that there must be some way we can get the bastards who're doing these killings. There must be some way of putting the evidence together so that we can put them away." She didn’t usually use strong language but she realised that within the context of her current situation a concession to the vocabulary of her colleagues would be a necessity.

             
Wilson stared at the young woman wedged between the door-jams of his office. My God, he thought, what wouldn't I give to return to the state of innocence in which crimes of murder could be solved by diligent policework. The sifting of facts and the testing of hypotheses was the stuff of classic detection and had no relevance to solving crimes in the province of Ulster. This was the land of the informer and the super-grass. It was the land of the confession beaten out of the miscreant during his six days of incarceration in Castlereagh. What price police work in a province where a serial killer can give an interview to a mainline British newspaper concerning his crimes and still walk free? Maybe the idea of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission wasn’t such a bad one after all. It was high time that the Province gave up its psychopathic killers to justice. The families of the dead and injured deserved no less. It was time to dig out the King Rats and the Mad Dogs and to be rid of them forever. He looked into McElvaney's fresh freckled face and wondered whether he should begin the process which would result in destroying the innocence and replacing it with hard-bitten cynicism. There was a major job of mentoring to be done here and he realised that if Constable McElvaney were a man he would have jumped right into the role. Mentoring a woman, especially for someone with his chequered sexual past, might raise more problems than it was worth. The common perception was that he had screwed most of his female colleagues. That wasn't quite true but he had never taken advantage of his rank while pursuing his colleagues. They had all come willingly.

             
“When you were on the beat did you ever help out in a murder enquiry that was sectarian?” he asked.

             
“Once or twice,” she replied.

She was leaning against the door-jam now in a pose which in other circumstances Wilson might have considered provocative. For God’s sake, he gave himself a mental slap in the face. You’re old enough to be her father. “How did it go?” he said putting the cap on his pen. “Did they collar anyone for the crime?”

“Everybody in town more or less knew who was responsible but there was no evidence and his alibi was rock solid. He was lifted and interrogated but nothing came of it.”

             
“Welcome to the real world,” Wilson said looking directly into those hazel eyes. It was day one and he was going to have to get his head around the fact that he was going to spend a lot of time around a very attractive young woman that he could not possibly touch.  It would be a difficult enough task for an ageing Lothario. “A group of suspects with cast iron alibis is an Ulster phenomenon.”

             
“How can we win in a situation like that?” she asked.

             
"Moira," he was about to add darlin’ but stopped himself just in time. He covered the hiatus with a smile. "To-day, I'd like to begin your initiation as a real murder squad officer by telling you a few home truths."

             
Wilson beckoned her into the room.

             
"That file in your hand," Wilson began, "constitutes all we know about that particular crime. You know that we call it the murder book." The look on her face said 'don't treat me like a child'. "In other words there's no further evidence, no new witnesses, in short, nothing else. Most of the murders we do solve are the results of either confessions by the perpetrators or information provided by informants. Confessions are always dodgy and since the `supergrass' period there's been a distinct lack of individuals willing to put their entire kith and kin at risk by informing on their mates. So we're left with the files. You’ve been told that this job was paperwork, paperwork and even more paperwork. There is no super detecting work. We will not sift clues and develop startling conclusions. That’s Agatha Christie and Jessica Fletcher. You’ve read the file. What do you think of the Patterson case? Is it a sectarian murder?"

             
“I know next to nothing,” she sat gingerly on a pile of folders. “But if we’re going to play the Socratic game that we did in tutorials in college so be it. There’s always a motive. That motive might be sectarian which might make the victim random or there might be a motive which concerns this victim alone. Since we cannot test the hypothesis concerning the sectarian motive because of the random nature of the victim, then we should begin by testing the hypothesis that the victim was intended and that there is a motive. If we find nothing in that direction then we would be justified in accepting that the killing was sectarian.”

             
Not just a pretty face, Wilson thought. “Your approach is right of course and I’d agree if this murder had taken place on the mainland. A large proportion of murders are domestics and another major category is targets of opportunity, criminals killing each other or murders committed in the course of another crime. The killer and the victim are generally known to each other. Police work consists of rooting around in the rubbish of human relationships until a motive for X to murder Y is found. It might be money or sex or both or any combination of factors but once you’ve found it you’re half way to solving the crime. Let’s get back to the case in point. Patterson had no family, no friends, no pets even. He was a loner who apparently didn’t bother a soul. We’ve only just scratched the surface of his life but for the moment that appears to be it. So what are we left with. George’s theory - an act of mindless violence . The wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could just as easily have been any other citizen. We’ve had too many examples of that kind of crime to discount the possibility. That means no motive other than religion. We could waste a lot of time following your approach. In the meantime the pressure cooker begins to boil. We don’t locate your motive and the boys who still have a gun buried somewhere in the back-garden decide that the scores have to be evened. Then we’re not looking at one murder but two and possible three or four before we can put a stop to the mayhem. This is not Police College and this is not the Big Island. So we start by showing the men with the guns and the public that we’re looking at the bad boys for this one. If in the course of our enquiries we stumble across drugs or women or men for that matter then we go in that direction. But first we try to contain a reaction. Not classic police response but par for the course. This way nobody gets to drag us back into the maelstrom.”

             
"You make it sound so damn futile," there was a note of tiredness in her voice.

             
"Just remember that you’re talking to an old cynic" He had no wish to cut off the young woman's enthusiasm completely. "Sometimes we do some police work and we nab a real bad one. But generally the real bastards deal with each other. I suppose you've heard about the `Shankill Butchers' case."

             
"We discussed it during training," she said.

             
"It wasn't exactly our finest hour in this station. Eighteen people murdered on our patch. Most of them mutilated with hatchets and knives. The early victims were Catholics. Then it was anyone who got in their way. We did all the police work, forensiced the evidence until we were blue in the face but in the end of the day we couldn't break the suspects' alibis. We knew that Lenny Murphy and his pals were the culprits but we just couldn't nail the bastards. Thousands of hours of careful police work and the murderers were still on the streets. Just when we were despairing of ever gettin' the swine, the IRA took Lenny out and the rest of the gang folded. We jailed them but they discovered God and now they're rambling the streets just like you and me. They hacked people to death and they're back in society. It's just another example of justice Ulster style. Depend on one set of psychopaths to take out another and let the justice system deal with the camp followers. We don't have to agree with it but when you've been here as long as me, you'll settle for what you can get."