“Girlfriend and child.”
“You need to change your act, Sean. Alcohol consumption down to under twenty units a week. If you can’t quit try and get your cigarette smoking down to two or three a day and you will stop smoking marijuana immediately. If I see it showing up in your blood work again, I’ll have you on restricted duty permanently. I can’t have stoned coppers on the job, even detectives as capable as yourself. You should know better.”
“It’s stressful out there, doc,” I said wondering what Kev would have said if he’d tested me in 1985 when at one point during the Anglo-Irish Agreement crisis I’d been taking cocaine, hash, ciggies, moonshine, Valium and diamorphine pills – usually before lunch.
“I know it is and I’m not expecting you or any of your colleagues to be Supermen, but if you want to remain on active duty you’ll do what I tell you.”
“Christ, this has been a miserable day so far,” I muttered to myself.
“See it as a wake-up call. Here’s the prescriptions for your asthma inhalers,” he said, handing me a couple of scripts.
“If you put me on restricted duty, who is going to run Carrick CID?”
“Sergeant McCrabban will have to do it.”
“McCrabban? He smokes a pipe. I don’t see you telling him off.”
“I’ve told him off already. Now act your age, Sean, and buck up your ideas.”
I took the prescriptions and left the makeshift examination room with my tail between my legs. I clearly wasn’t the only one who had gotten bad news from the doc and there was a foul atmosphere in the air. I was still punchy and pissed off when I finally went upstairs to interview Mrs Deauville with the help of the Bulgarian translator. This was where the day began to right itself and where I began to be lulled into a false sense of security. I could fix things with Beth. My health was going to get better. Maybe Dalziel would shoot himself in the foot either metaphorically or literally before the summer … And anyway there was a job to do. Interviewing a witness/suspect in a murder inquiry was a hell of a way to clear out the cobwebs. Question and answer, question and answer, building a picture, brick by smoky brick. Carving important data points and timelines out of an information blizzard, law out of chaos, order out of entropy.
Yeah, right.
6: MR DEAUVILLE’S INTERESTING PAST
The Bulgarian translator was in fact much more than a mere translator. He was actually a mid-ranking consular official called Pytor Yavarov who had been based in Dublin for nearly two years. A slight, handsome man with an old-fashioned Clark Gable moustache he had dressed himself in what he perhaps thought was the style of an old-fashioned Irish country gentlemen: tweeds, white linen shirt, brown Oxfords, with a rather attractive paisley blue tie. He was pale of face, blue of eye, with a shock of curly black hair. On perhaps any other person in Carrickfergus such a look would have drawn forth sniggers but Yavarov was sitting there with such poise and quiet assertiveness that somehow he managed to pull the whole thing off. Mrs Deauville was a different kettle of fish. Chubby, twenty-something, with dark rings round her eyes she was dressed entirely in sweats: Adidas trackie bottoms, Nike hoodie top. Her hair was a short bowl-cut dyed peroxide blonde. She was wearing a single flip flop that she flipped on and off the stubby crimson-painted toes of her left foot. Like I say, she wasn’t unattractive and if she’d stayed away from the tanning shop and let her natural brown hair grow out you would have said that she was a looker. They made an odd couple sitting there in Interview Room #1 muttering together in Bulgarian, waiting for us to show up. Neither of them looked Bulgarian, whatever Bulgarians were supposed to look like.
We were watching them through the big two-way mirror that ran along one of the walls of the incident room.
“Mrs Deauville seems to have calmed down a good bit,” I said.
“Well, she hasn’t tried to stab WPC Warren or the man from the embassy,” Crabbie said.
“Did either of you get a chance to read the reports from their neighbours?”
“I read them this morning,” Lawson said.
“Fights? Screaming? Yelling? Anything like that?”
“No one heard any arguments or any disputes or anything like that. And no one saw anything on the night of the murder,” Lawson said, handing me the interviews with the Deauville neighbours. These canvassing statements were practically worthless. For all we knew, Mr and Mrs Deauville might have been fighting like cats and dogs every single night since they moved in but no one in Sunnylands would ever tell us that. A drug dealer was bad, a woman who murders her husband was bad, but an informer was a more terrible creature by far than either.
“I also saw you over at the fax machine, Lawson.”
“More detailed autopsy results came through.”
“Anything interesting in them?” I asked Lawson.
“Death by crossbow bolt in the stomach, which we knew. But the preliminary toxicology results were quite interesting.”