Nothing but Memories (DCI Wilson Book 1) (8 page)

             
She smiled "What’s that line from Gilbert and Sullivan – ‘a policeman’s lot is not a happy one."

             
“Ain’t that the truth,” Wilson smiled back. It was quite a while since he'd smiled with one of his colleagues. “Receive any warmth from your new colleagues?”

She rubbed her hands together theatrically. “A cold wind has been blowing all day. I appear to have upset the equilibrium of the squad room,” she lifted herself gently off the folders making sure not to tip them over.

“Don’t worry. They’ll come round,” he lied knowing full well that it would be a cold day in hell before George Whitehouse would accept her. "Nobody said it was going to be easy." He leaned forward. "You can always demand a transfer."

             
She threw her eyes up to heaven. “Every one of our conversations contains an exhortation from you for me to quit and go back to where I come from. I could develop a complex, sir. I could begin to feel unwanted. If I weren’t so thick skinned." Christ, I'm flirting with this guy, she thought to herself. She could feel a blush rising in her face at the thought.

             
Wilson saw her cheeks redden. I’ve gone too far, he thought. And it wasn’t fair. She was having a difficult time with the other officers. It was time that he gave her a break

"What about a drink after work?" he asked before he’d thought about the ramifications.

              "Thank you, boss,” she said formally. "I think I’d like that."

             
"OK," Wilson felt that he had been hooked on his own line. He was suddenly embarrassed and shifted awkwardly in his seat. "Outside the station at eight o'clock. In the meantime why don't you run along and learn how to play with our computers. Take along the Patterson file and see what you can come up with."

             
“By the way,” she said looking back into the squad room. “I don’t like mentioning it but there’s a funny smell in the squad room underneath the normal male smells of testosterone and farts.”

             
Wilson smiled. “Before it became a police station the building was a brewery and they never quite got rid of the smell of stale beer. Don’t worry you’ll get used to it.”

CHAPTER 10

Case was getting slightly pissed off. He stood sheltering from the rain in a doorway across the road from Charlton's Garage in the Newtonards Road on the Southern shore of the Lagan River. The heavy rain which had threatened all day had finally started to fall. Away to his right a neon light tried in vain to pierce through the enfolding mist while overhead the rain fell from an impenetrably dark sky. Water vapour sprayed into his face but still his eyes remained fixed on the glass booth in which two men sat talking and smoking. A combination of rainwater and condensation had made the glass of the booth almost opaque and Case was forced to strain his eyes in order to concentrate on the object of his attention. Theoretically this should have been the easiest of kills. The man he was straining to see was a well built young man of about twenty-eight and according to Case's own timetable the guy should already be explaining himself to Saint Peter. He smiled at the thought of Saint Peter drumming his fingers impatiently over the non-arrival. The plan had been screwed when he had arrived at the garage and found his intended victim was deep in conversation with a visitor. The hitch was unforeseeable but would only serve to delay the inevitable. The filthy weather had reduced business at the filling station to a trickle and he had watched the attendant leave the booth on only two occasions to dispense petrol. He glanced at his watch: it was almost eight o’clock. He stuck his head out from his shelter and looked in both directions. The normally busy street was dark and virtually deserted. A few stragglers, bundled up against the rain and cold, rushed unheedingly along the street anxious to reach the comfort of their homes. Case was completely impervious to both the cold and the damp which easily penetrated the narrow opening in which he had chosen to wait. He had been trained to ignore the elements and concentrate all his attention on one particular task. Soon he would have to make his move, visitor or no visitor. 

             
He pulled a small passport photograph from his right hand pocket and examined the face yet again. There could be no mistakes. Everything had to be done correctly and on time. One mistake could screw up the whole operation. He shuffled his feet in impatience. Get out of there you stupid fucker, he addressed his thoughts to the visitor to the booth as if trying to will the man to leave. His hand slid into his inside pocket and closed around the handle of the Browning. He couldn't wait any longer. Both of them would have to go. He pulled his balaclava further down over his eyes and left his doorway shelter. The deserted street was a near perfect killing ground. The dim light from the booth illuminated the silhouettes of the two men.

             
He smiled to himself as he slipped quietly across the road. The majority of Belfast's citizens were cursing the weather while for him it was a Godsend. As he crossed the thirty yards which separated him from the petrol attendant's booth, his view of the two men became clearer. His target was wearing a blue overall and was sitting with his feet perched on top of a small cluttered desk. The second man sat facing the door, his chair wedged against one of the angles of the booth. As he approached, he heard the two men burst out laughing. It had to be some bloody good joke. It wasn't a bad thing to die with a smile on your lips. He continued at the same pace satisfied that neither man appeared interested in him. He approached the booth and pulled the glass door open. By the time the men's eyes raised to face the open door, the Browning was already in his hand. The smiles froze on the men's faces then faded to fear. Case saw a level of understanding strike them as he raised the gun. They knew they were about to die. The noise from the first shot ripped through the confined space of the booth. The bullet passed through the attendant's head before shattering the glass panel directly behind him. Case swung the gun in a smooth movement and fired just as the second man began to rise from his seat. The bullet caught him in the throat and he was flung back against the steel stanchion which held the glass panes together. He gurgled like a baby through the torrent of bright red arterial blood which was already issuing from the gaping hole in his neck. Case didn't have to examine either man to know that they were both dead. He moved quickly to the attendant's body and fired two more shots at close range one to the head and one to the heart. He put the Browning back into his coat pocket and turned immediately away from the petrol station. He walked briskly until he came to a corner and after turning it dropped his pace slightly. Footsteps sounded somewhere behind him. He didn't look behind but simply ignored the sounds and continued walking away from the murder scene. On these streets he was just another evening straggler caught in the rain and impatient for the warmth of his home.

CHAPTER 11

Wilson stood at the front door of the police station. Most of the fortification which had marked the station in the 1980's and 1990's had been removed. The few bits of concrete which had been left were now the subject for the cameras of foreign tourists on the "troubles' tour. Tennent Street Station now presented a more benign face to the public. The rectangular building had begun its life as a brewery and despite its conversion to a police station many years before, still had a faint smell of beer in the air surrounding it. Wilson wasn't sure whether he preferred the new approach or the old Fort Apache-like fortifications. The concrete remnants of the protective barrier only remained because the overhaul budget had run out. Unlike the pieces of the Berlin Wall there was no value on the conc
rete which had protected the PSNI from the people they were employed to protect. He sniffed the air. No beer smell this evening. Full scale rain was up there somewhere and the light stuff that blew through the open door and ran along his cheek like fine oil was simply the precursor of more substantial rain to come. Just at that moment the rain started in earnest. For the past ten years he'd thought of himself like a medieval lord looking out from his moated castle, he’d had the impression of being besieged by some outside foe, someone unknown, but dangerous. Separated from the danger by the dark masses of concrete and mounds of sandbags looking for all the world like a row of basking whales on a dark November evening. Future generations would look at photographs of the barricaded police stations and wonder whether their forefathers had been mad.

             
He stuck his arm out through the open door of the station and turned his palm upwards. His skin was covered instantly in a thin film of water. Belfast wasn’t immune to pollution. He withdrew his hand and rubbed it on the side of his grubby anorak. If he’d opted for an evening at home in Malwood Park, he would toss a few logs on the fire, open a bottle of Black Bush, microwave a lasagne and watch Inspector Morse solve a nice clean crime in nice clean sunny Oxford. But for some silly reason he had foregone that pleasure out of some feeling of empathy with his new outcast colleague. The more he thought about the similarity of their situations the more it bothered him. He shuffled from one foot to the other. Nobody in the station ever invited him for a drink. He was not ‘one of the boys’ and he hadn't invited a woman out since the death of his wife. He wondered what else he and Moira might have in common. The evening ahead filled him with trepidation. One drink and he would be off home to Inspector Morse and the lasagne.

             
He felt rather than saw the presence of someone behind him.

             
"Ready," Moira stood directly behind him stuffing a handful of computer printouts into a well-worn black attaché case. A wide grin covered her face and her earlier gloom appeared to have disappeared.

             
Wilson looked furtively around the hall. The Duty Sergeant stared in their direction with a leer on his face. Screw you, Wilson thought. The news would be around the station before they had their first order in. The inferences people would make would not be very complementary for Moira.

             
"Let's get on," Wilson smiled warmly at the young constable. "I've a thirst that'd do justice to a camel."

             
As he walked through the door, Wilson flicked up the hood of his anorak. "Where's your car?" he asked

             
“I wouldn’t dignify my mode of transport by calling it a car,” she nodded at a battered and rusted white Lada looking abandoned in the corner of the car-park. “My Polish made chariot - without horses of course.”

             
He looked in the direction she indicated. "We better go in mine," he said. "The weather's too bad for push starts."

             
"No Lada jokes, please. I've heard them all,” she said following Wilson at a run across the parking lot.

             
Wilson settled himself in the driver's seat of his Toyota Corolla and flipped open the passenger door. He put the key in the ignition but didn't turn it.

             
"I don’t want you to take this in the wrong way," Wilson said staring out through the water streaming down the windscreen. "But I think that we shouldn’t go local.”

             
Her lips curled into a knowing smile.

             
“Most of the lads from the Station drink locally and I don’t want a sea of faces staring at me every time I lift my pint. This is only day one. Let’s give them a bit of time to get used to you.”

             
“You’re the expert around here,” she said maintaining the smile. “If we go local tongues will wag. If the look on the Station Sergeant’s face is anything to go by they may already have started. To be honest I wouldn’t feel comfortable in a cop bar right now so let’s go somewhere quiet.”

             
"I think that you have a future in this business, Constable," Wilson smiled and flicked the ignition switch and the Toyota's engine sprang into life. "There's a couple of yuppie pubs on the Malone Road where money is more important than religion. If you can deal with the sound of mobile phones ringing every second or so we could head up there."

             
Wilson manoeuvred the car carefully through the crowded carpark towards a barrier between the remains of what had been two mounds of fortifications. Like a mining district it was difficult to put back the police stations in Ulster to their original state. There would always be a scar of what had been. Water ran down the shiny black raincoat of the constable on duty at the barrier and there was a suggestion of reluctance in the man's salute as he raised the barrier to permit the Toyota to enter the outside world of Belfast. The city they entered was grey and dark. The clouds were so low and heavy that they appeared to be right on top of them. It was not the kind of weather which lifted the spirits. He piloted the car down the Shankill Road and on towards the Westlink and then southwards to the Malone Road. He tried to remember what Belfast had looked like before the bombings and the 'peace wall' dividing the communities had turned the city into an obstacle course for motor transport. Normality had gradually returned to the city but there was still an edge to people's thinking. The fat lady hadn't exactly finished singing. Peace had brought prosperity. And prosperity had lured the speculators who had started to re-develop the city and provide jobs. The whole thing had even snowballed like the economists predicted and a minor economic miracle had ensued. House prices escalated and most of the population were basking in a secure future. It was even possible that Protestants and Catholics would begin to see each other as fellow human beings. But there were still buggers out there who could screw the whole thing up. Some idiots didn't want peace and prosperity. There were still religious bigots keen on fighting the religious wars of the Middle Ages. Wilson prayed silently that whoever had killed Patterson wasn't one of those religious bigots. The peace and prosperity were as weak and fragile as a new-born baby. A series of sectarian murders could be the torch-paper that would set off the whole cycle of violence again.

             
"It's amazing but you remind me so much of the first RUC man I ever saw back in County Tyrone," Moira's voice cut across his thoughts.

             
"Well it wasn't me."

             
"I know that," she laughed, "It's just that he had exactly the same build as you. A great big bloke. Tall and strong like a big black mountain. His head was like a giant white globe held in place with a neck like a tree-trunk. Dressed in the long black coat and with a big pistol strapped to his hip he looked like some kind of ogre to us kids."

             
"All us Protestant RUC men look alike. Haven't you heard that? We're all big burly blokes. Just look at George." A wide smile creased his face.

             
"In a way you are, you know. It always amazed me that the RUC constables always seemed to be bigger than the rest of the population. Like the Protestants were breeding some sort of supermen just to look after them. I remember seeing the constable towering over my father who was no small man himself. But he cowered before him. The whole scene made the constable grow bigger while my father seemed to grow smaller."

             
They approached the lower Shankill Road. Wilson waited in a line of traffic before turning onto the Westlink and heading south. Because of the filthy weather, the road was relatively clear of traffic. The office workers had cleared off early.

             
"At least you seem to have respected your first constable," Wilson moved the car up through the gears.

             
"I suppose you're correct up to a point."

             
"Why only up to a point?" Wilson asked.

             
"Because whatever respect I might have had for him died the day I saw a photograph of him in our local paper. He was standing in about eighteen inches of water in a stream with a big stick in his hand and appeared to be about to unleash the most almighty blow on a poor girl who was on her knees in the water. All that force and strength was just being used to beat up on a poor defenceless girl. It's pretty hard to respect someone who'd do a thing like that. We’re only public servants whether we work in the Ministry of Social Welfare or for the PSNI. If we can show that we’re honest and fair with all sections of the community then we’ll have done a good job."

             
Wilson knew that there were too many people in Ulster who had had Moira’s experience. There were times that he could imagine Whitehouse wielding that baton to the shouts of encouragement from his Orange brothers. But it was worth remembering that everyone is a product of his or her upbringing.  If George was a bigot then someone had fed him that particular line of bullshit.

"Good luck to you," Wilson said. "You may have three A-levels and a university degree but you still have a lot to learn about human nature. That poor stupid copper was only doing what he and a large proportion of the population thought was right. People don’t like change.  In fact they hate change and they'll resist it with every fibre of their being. That’s a fact of life. And a lot of them are willing to fight and die to preserve the status quo. Their actions sometimes reduce them as human beings."

              They drove on in silence until they left the city and began to enter the more obviously prosperous suburbs of the Malone area. He turned onto Balmoral Avenue.

             
“Do you like computers?” Moira asked breaking the silence.

             
“I’m afraid I missed the computer boat,” Wilson smiled. “Computers, videos, even microwaves. All that kind of stuff is a mystery to me.”

             
"I’m crazy about them," she said as Wilson pulled into the courtyard of a pub called the `Windsor Arms'. "I did a course while I was stationed in Strabane. I really got into it."

             
The threat which had been implicit in the dark clouds had been real and the light rain had been replaced by the heavier variety of the previous evening. The two police officers sat staring out through the rain stained car window. Wilson switched off the car and the windscreen wipers stopped in mid sweep.

             
"Don't ask me why but I guessed that new technology would be your game alright." Wilson smiled at her enthusiasm. The coldness her recollections had engendered had evaporated. "You people with the big brains are always looking for ways to exercise them. Let's get ourselves that well deserved drink."

             
They sprinted through the heavy downpour and arrived almost together at the door of the pub. At the last moment, she slackened her pace slightly to allow her superior to pass through first. Their bodies touched as they crowded into the doorway and Wilson quickly moved ahead. They stood in the hallway of the pub and shook themselves like a couple of wet dogs.

             
"If I remember well, this place has a real log fire," Wilson said pushing open the lounge doors. "Ah! There we are." He led the way to where a half dozen logs burned brightly in an open grate, pulled out a chair and placed it directly in front of the fire. "What would you like?" he asked.

             
"Double vodka and orange, please," she set her briefcase on the floor, took a chair and put it beside Wilson's and removed her coat. “It’s been that kind of day.”

             
Wilson went to the bar and returned with a pint glass of Guinness and a tall glass containing an orange liquid which he laid on the table before her.

             
He was suddenly struck by the fact that this was the first time since his wife died that he had taken a woman for a drink. What the hell was he thinking? This wasn’t a date. This was his new officer. He was being kind and considerate to someone who happened to be a woman. It was just a bonus that she was young and attractive. "Good luck," Wilson said and without waiting for her response he took a long swallow of the black liquid. "By God, I needed that." He laid the glass on the table and flopped into his chair immediately feeling the warmth of the alcohol and the fire coalesce into a general feeling of wellbeing.