“The blackguard. Who hits a woman? To think we have to share a breakroom with such a fellow.”
“Indeed and if he’s the gaffer we can’t take him outside and give him a hiding. I like that word blackguard by the way. It doesn’t get enough of an airing these days. Listen, mate, if you go and Dalziel is the chief, what then? I might as well bloody quit too.”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t know. Beth’s da’s loaded. Maybe he’d give me a job.”
If Beth and I are still a couple?
Crabbie nodded. “If you go and I go I suppose they’d make Lawson a detective sergeant and bring in a young DC … but I don’t think you should resign, Sean. You are one of the best detectives I have ever worked with.”
“So are you. Please don’t go, mate. We need you. I need you,” I said.
“I’m still thinking about it,” Crabbie said.
I leaned against the steering wheel.
“Everything’s just spinning out of control today,” I muttered.
“Eyes on the road, Sean, come on. I’ll put the radio on for you. You like Radio 3, don’t you? Let me see if the reception’s better.”
I pulled over. “You drive.” We swapped seats and as luck would have it, Arvo P?rt’s Tabula Rasa was playing, which worked perfectly with the rain’s assault on the bulletproof windscreen.
We drove to the Moyle Hospital in a contemplative silence.
A man in a raincoat who looked like a reporter but who could have just been a man in a raincoat was standing outside.
“Fifty quid if you run that journalist-looking fucker over,” I said.
Crabbie ignored me and parked the Rover but it was a wasted trip, for Ivan Morrison had checked himself out three hours earlier.
While Crabbie got Morrison’s home address from the matron I took the opportunity to get my asthma prescriptions filled at the on-site chemist. A pharmacist showed me how to work the inhalers. It wasn’t that complicated.
Crabbie came back with the address.
“18 Old Wyncairn Road,” he said.
“You know where that is?”
“No idea, but there’s a map in the Rover.”
Outside into the rain. Arvo P?rt. Ten minutes getting lost. Another ten finding the house. Another ten and we would have missed Ivan completely as he was nearly finished packing. The house was a cheaply built post-war prefab that smelled of damp, desperation and dope. It was built in a row behind a slaughter house at the bottom of a hill.
We parked the Rover and got out. Someone was playing Jackson C. Frank’s eponymous first – and only – album which seemed apropos for the day, the estate, the weather and, you know, just life in general.
The slaughter house was quiet but it gave up the terrible stench of fear and sawdust and blood and murder.
“It reeks here,” I said.
“Aye, it’s bad,” Crabbie agreed and he had a farm.
We knocked on the living-room window and I showed my warrant card.
“Carrick RUC,” I said.
“I told youse everything,” a man said from inside the house.
“You can tell us again.”
He reluctantly opened the front door and we went inside.
Clothes all over the floor. A duffel bag and a suitcase open and being loaded up.
I looked at him. Looked at his twenty-two-year-old-going-onfifty face. With his short hair and his pink skin and his beady black eyes he was like a lab rat who’d been undergoing a terrible series of experiments to see exactly when he would have a mental breakdown.
“This better be quick. I’ve a ferry to catch,” he said.
“We want to know who shot you,” Crabbie said.
“I didn’t see him.”
“How do you know it was a he?”
“Didn’t see her either.”
“One man or two?”
“I told all this to Larne RUC.”
“So you won’t mind telling us as well.”
“I’ve no idea who shot me. It was dark, I was walking along, fucking huge fucking pain in my back and I went down like a ton of bricks. Car driving off pronto.”
“What type of car?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you had any threats lately?”
“Threats about what?”
“We know you’re a drug dealer.”
“Who told you that?”
“Look, Ivan, we want to help. You are not under arrest, nothing you say will incriminate you. I’m not drugs squad and I give you my word I won’t pass any information on to the drugs squad.”
“How can I trust you? Never heard of you. Don’t know you from Adam. You’re not even a Larne peeler. You could be anybody.”
I showed him my warrant card again. “Read that. Carrickfergus CID. Not drugs squad, not Special Branch. I’m investigating a murder in Carrick yesterday – you might have heard of it.”
“I have heard of it. Why do you think I’m packing?”
“All we want to know is who threatened you.”
“I’m not talking. I’m not saying fucking anything to you, pal.”
I grabbed the little lab rat by his Fred Perry Polo shirt and flung him into the aluminium walls of his house, aluminium that if it had somehow become sentient would no doubt have relished the action, having been in a previous incarnation the panels of a fighter plane or a Lancaster bomber. Ivan bounced off the briefly happy wall and gave me a hurt look.