“We still have to try and find the murderer. Let me get a cup of coffee and we’ll get to work.”
I went to the coffee machine and pressed the chocolate and coffee buttons at the same time. What came out was a surprisingly drinkable concoction that for many years I thought I’d invented until I heard tell of a “mocha”.
I read through the complete witness-canvassing statements from Mountbatten Terrace, but no one had heard or seen anything. I read Mrs Deauville’s full statement, but it was no help either.
I read the forensic report and called up Frank Payne to ask how exactly you could tell if all the crossbow bolts were fired from the same crossbow. He spun me some shite about score marks on the aluminium paint that I decided to believe.
Lawson’s inquiries got nowhere and we took a tea break to read the paper.
“Is it better to reign in hell or serve in heaven?” Lawson asked, looking up from the Daily Telegraph.
“Reign in hell,” I said.
“Reign in hell,” he agreed.
“Serve in heaven,” McCrabban dissented grimly and not completely convincingly.
At 10 o’clock Lawson and I drove to Belfast to check out the two archery shops in Northern Ireland that sold crossbows. We showed them Mr and Mrs Deauville’s photographs, but no one remembered either of them buying a crossbow. We asked them questions and the more facts we got the more we were disheartened by what we heard. Combined, the two shops had sold well over two thousand crossbows in the last three years to target shooters, hobbyists and even hunters. Since crossbows were entirely legal neither shop kept a list of who had purchased them. Reselling crossbows was also legal and unregulated. The particular bolts that had killed Francis Deauville were nothing special and could be fired from any of their weapons. Again, they did not keep records of who bought these bolts.
“How close would you have to get to kill someone with a crossbow?” I asked Jake of Jake’s Archery Stores on Anne Street.
“The average hunting range is fifty, maybe sixty yards. You can obviously go beyond that – even an eighty-yard shot would still be powerful enough to kill medium and even big game. The real question here is whether you can land the shot with perfect precision and penetrate the vital organ(s); most people can’t do so with consistency. Which is why most crossbow hunters will prefer to take a shot from a maximum of thirty-five yards away …”
Thirty-five yards was much further than I’d been expecting. Deauville and Morrison could have been shot from the far side of the street.
“How long does it take to get good at firing a crossbow?”
“Most people can get reasonable accuracy with a few days’ practice. Even out of the box you can be pretty accurate first time out. There’s no technique. You just look down the iron sights and shoot.”
“And if you had some experience with the weapon?”
“You’d be deadly. And, of course, the advantage of a crossbow over a gun is its silence. Doesn’t make any appreciable noise at all. As you probably know, Inspector, even a suppressed pistol will make some noise,” Jake said.
“And suppressors can affect accuracy,” Lawson said.
“So a crossbow is accurate at considerable range, a barbed bolt will penetrate all manner of clothing and leather, it’s completely legal and it’s silent,” I said. “I’m surprised more paramilitaries don’t use them.”
“That surprises me, too, to be honest. A hundred quid will get you a decent starter package,” Jake said.
We drove back to Carrickfergus RUC and told Crabbie this unhelpful news. While I’d been out Strong had called the switchboard looking for me, so I went into my office to call him back.
He wasn’t in his office and I didn’t feel comfortable calling him at home so I left him a message saying that I’d been in and out of the office all day.
We spent the rest of the morning doing old-fashioned police work, combing through arrest records for crossbow offences, looking up similar crimes in the UK, Ireland and further afield and going through the evidence we’d taken from the Deauville residence.
Helpful and/or stupid criminals often kept their receipts and this was how we found the lock-up garage.
A receipt dating back to the previous December for a shed on an allotment out in Eden.
I called Harry Mulvenny from the canine unit and we went out there in the Land Rover. While Crabbie and Lawson went up front I sat in the back with Harry and his two bitches Cora and Louise. I closed the partition to the front, so we could have some privacy.
“No pun intended, Harry, but I have a bone to pick with you,” I said.
“What have I done?” he said in his just-off-the-boat Scouse accent.
“You were at Deauville’s house?”
“Yeah, we didn’t find anything.”
“You were there when Dalziel sent McCrabban to the hospital and when forensics fucked off?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Dalziel left and when you left that meant Lawson was there by himself.”