“And how is this my fault? I’m a canine officer.”
“You’re a sergeant in the RUC. You should have taken command. Acted on your initiative. Lawson is a detective constable with barely two years under his belt. You should have stepped up, assumed command, got forensics in, secured the crime scene until Crabbie got back.”
Harry knew I was right. “Are you going to report me to McArthur?”
“No. I’m the fall guy on this debacle and there’s no point getting anyone else in the shit … But next time remember you’ve got those stripes on your shoulders for a reason.”
We got out of the Land Rover at a squalid little bit of waste ground near Kilroot Power Station. If this was an allotment there wasn’t much evidence of anything growing.
We found Deauville’s shed and the dogs were going crazy before we even opened the door.
Lawson broke the padlock with a pair of bolt cutters and inside Harry discovered a dozen bags of refined heroin. Pounds of the stuff. Not ounces, pounds.
I went back to the Land Rover and got put through to Chief Inspector McArthur.
“Sir, if you want to make someone in the drug squad happy and owe you a big future favour you should get them out here. We found a couple of pounds of heroin. It’s a major score so it’ll be a drugs squad case, not Carrick CID.”
“I’ll call Chief Inspector O’Driscoll.”
“He’d be perfect, sir. And I think you should come out yourself, sir. Some good PR for the station.”
“I think I will do that. Very good PR for the station after yesterday’s black eye.”
The rain came on, so I left Lawson at the shed and waited in the Rover until the drugs squad and McArthur arrived. Seamus O’Driscoll was another rare Catholic detective in the RUC and he’d brought with him seemingly half the narcs in the force. Twenty men and women in white evidence-gathering boiler suits.
“If it isn’t Sean Duffy as I live and breathe,” O’Driscoll said, offering me his hand. He was a tall, unhinged looking fellow with red hair and bad teeth, but he wasn’t a bad sort. We went back aways and I could possibly have liked him if he hadn’t been two years and nine months younger than me and already far ahead of me on the chain of command. We had come up together, though, so there was no question of me calling him “sir”, or of him demanding it.
“O’Driscoll drove with a song, the wild duck and the drake,” I said but the illiterate eejit just give me a funny look, so I dropped the Yeats.
“This is quite a big score you’ve given me here, Sean, I’ll owe you,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything. My gaffer thought you’d be the best man for the job and I agreed.”
O’Driscoll grinned from ear to ear. Not a pretty sight, so I decided to put an end to it. “You could give me one big hand though. I’ve had a couple of men watching Mrs Deauville’s house in the hope that she would lead us to her husband’s lock-up. But now that we’ve found it by other means I’m going to take the men away. I’ve been paying their over-time out of the CID budget. If you want to keep up the surveillance can you pay for it out of your budget?”
“No need for surveillance. I’ll just arrest her.”
“Oh, OK, fair enough. Well do me a favour, Seamus, go easy on her. We don’t think she killed her husband and she’s pretty torn up about it.”
“I’ll be gentle.”
“At least bring in a WPC. We did and we’re not exactly cutting-edge.”
“Isn’t the purpose to get her to talk?”
“No, the purpose is ‘to protect and serve,’” I said, giving him the motto of the LAPD.
“Oh yeah, sure, of course it is.”
“I’ll get Lawson to give you over the files and you can photocopy them. Standard division of duty: you handle the narco aspects, we’ll do the homicide, OK?”
“Sounds good. I heard this wife of his was a foreigner?”
“Bulgarian, but don’t believe any nonsense she tells you about not speaking English. She’s fluent.”
Chief Inspector McArthur had arrived with a reporter from the Carrickfergus Advertiser. I shook his hand and took my leave. Didn’t need any more press attention today.
Back to the barracks on Shanks’s mare.
Of course it began to rain and then hail and I was out only in my T-shirt and thin leather jacket.
Soaked when I got back to the office.
Sandra brought me tea and biscuits while I huddled in front of the single bar of the heater.
The phone rang just as I was thinking of calling Beth again.
“Hello?”
“Ah, Duffy, been trying to reach you all day.”
It was Chief Superintendent Strong. A friendly voice in a cruel world.
“Sir, I’ve been meaning to talk to you, too. I want to thank you for whatever you did to keep yesterday’s story out of the morning papers today.”
He cleared his throat. “I’ll admit that I did make a few phone calls into the shell-like ears of a few people who have had occasion to rely on the police for scoops and tips in the past.”