Rain and no leads.

On the Thursday we learned that Bill O’Rourke’s body had been returned to America. His funeral was at Arlington where he got the full honour guard, folded flag treatment. We were told that his dead wife’s sister had surfaced out of the woodwork to claim his house in Massachusetts and his apartment in Florida. I asked the local police to interview her and they did and a Lieutenant Dawson sent me a terse fax stating that there was nothing suspicious about her.

The days lengthened. The Royal Navy Task Force continued its southward journey. On Saturday morning a masked man armed with a shotgun robbed the Northern Bank in High Street Carrickfergus and got away with nine hundred pounds. The sum was insignificant, no one was hurt and I wasn’t going to make it a priority until Brennan summoned me to his office.

“What’s your progress on the O’Rourke murder?”

“It’s about the same as it was when we talked last w—”

“Get on this robbery, then. Your full team. It’s about time you started pulling your weight around here, Duffy!”

Brennan had aged. His hair was going from grey to white and he looked flabby. God knows where he was staying now. What was bothering him? The marriage? Being passed over? Something else? I’d never know. Crabbie had gone through troubles with his missus last year and had never said one word about it.

I investigated the robbery and of course there were no witnesses, but an informant our agent handler knew called Jackdaw told us some good information.

A guy called Gus Plant had bought everyone a round of drinks in the Borough Arms on Saturday night and boasted to everyone that he was going to get himself a new motor. Crabbie and I got a warrant and went to Gus’s house in Castlemara Estate. He’d had the stolen money under his bed.

It was pathetic.

We cuffed him and his wife screamed at him all the way outside. She’d told him that that was the first place the cops would look and he hadn’t listened because he never listened.

“Prison’ll be good for you, mate. Anything to get away from that racket,” I told him in the back of the Rover.

It wasn’t The Mystery of the Yellow Room but it was a case solved and it kept the Chief off our backs for a couple of days.

I called Tony McIlroy and asked him about the Dougherty murder.

For a moment he was baffled.

“We yellowed that file. It’s going nowhere,” he said.

“You interviewed the widow?”

“Aye, I did. You didn’t tell me she was a good-looking lass.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what are your impressions? Did she have something to do with Dougherty’s death?”

“Fuck, no.”

“That’s it? A simple no? She had no alibi.”

“Or motive, or weapon, or cojones, or experience … Hey, I’ve another call, I’ll call you back.”

He didn’t call me back.

Days.

Nights.

Rain through the kitchen window. Thin daffodils. Fragile lilacs. Gulls flopping sideways into the wind. An achromatic vacancy to the sky.

I canvassed for witnesses, tried to nail down Bill O’Rourke’s last movements, but nobody knew anything. Nobody had seen him after he left the Dunmurry Country Inn.

One morning the Chief Inspector had us up to his office. “Lads, listen, I’m putting the name and number of the divisional psychiatrist up on the noticeboard. I suggest you tell the lads to avail themselves of his services. The bottle is not the answer,” he said, finishing a double whiskey chaser.

April marched on.

We put the O’Rourke case in a yellow binder, which meant that it was open but not actively being pursued.

This represented yet another personal defeat. Half a dozen murder investigations under my belt and not one of them had resulted in a successful prosecution.

This time we hadn’t even found out who’d done it.

A man mourning his wife had come on holiday to Ireland and someone had poisoned him, chopped up the body, frozen him and dumped him like trash.

“It’s sickening,” I told Matty and McCrabban over a hot whiskey at the Dobbins.

“It’s part of the job, mate,” Crabbie said philosophically. “You’ll drive yourself mad if you’re after a hundred per cent clearance rate.”

He was right about that, but wasn’t it also possible that I just wasn’t a very good copper? Perhaps I lacked focus or attention to detail or maybe I just didn’t have the right stuff to be a really good detective. Or even a half-decent detective.

A wet, frigid, Monday morning we got a call about a break-in at the rugby club on the Woodburn Road. Trophies had been stolen. The thieves had come in through a skylight. None of us could face going up onto the rugby club roof in this weather so we drew straws. Matty and I got the short ones.

We drove up the Woodburn Road, climbed a rickety ladder, got on the roof and gathered evidence while rain came down in buckets and a caretaker kept saying “It’s not safe up there, be careful, now.”

We heroically dusted for prints and found nothing. A pigeon shat on Matty’s back. We climbed back down, wrote a description of the missing articles and said we’d put the word out. We had a courtesy pint in the club and we were about to drive home when I noticed that the rugby club was right next to Carrickfergus UDR base.

The UDR barracks was even more heavily defended than the police station. A twenty-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire was in front of a thick blast-wall made of reinforced concrete.

It was an ugly structure: utilitarian, grim, Soviet. I had never been inside. You’d think that there were would be a lot of cooperation between the police and the UDr The Ulster Defence Regiment was the locally recruited regiment of the British Army and there were often joint RUC/UDR patrols, but in fact we largely operated in different worlds. We seldom shared intelligence and what they actually did apart from the odd patrol or operation on the border was a mystery. A lot of drinking, snooker and darts, I imagine. We regarded ourselves as a highly professional modern police force operating in extremis – the UDR was, at best, a panicky response to the Troubles. The Troubles was their entire raison d’être and if the war ever ended we would still be here but they, presumably, would have to be disbanded. Were there good UDR officers and men? Of course, but were there a lot of wasters, too? Yes. And bigots, more than likely. These days the police were getting up to twenty per cent Catholic representation, which compared favourably to the forty per cent of Northern Ireland’s population who identified ourselves as Roman Catholic on the census. The UDR didn’t publish its Catholic membership, but it was rumoured to be less than five per cent. Of course the IRA made it their number one priority to kill Catholic UDR men, but even so, the regiment had more than a whiff of sectarianism about it. And it wasn’t just the Nationalist papers in Belfast who criticised it – stories about collusion between the UDR and Protestant terror groups had appeared in the mainstream English press, too.

We were all on the same side, but if we ever wanted to get cooperation from the Catholic community we coppers had to hold ourselves somewhat aloof.

“Where are you going?” Matty asked.

“We never checked out Captain McAlpine, did we?”

“Oh Jesus, this again?” Matty said.

“Can you think of anything better to do?”

Matty thought for a second or two. “No, actually, I can’t.”

We drove to the fortified guard post and showed our warrant cards. A soldier with full body armour, holding an SLR, gave us a suspicious look and then waved us through.

We parked in the visitors lot and went through another checkpoint at the base’s entrance.

“What’s the nature of your business, gentlemen?” the guard asked us. Big Derry lad with a black beard.

“We need to speak to your commanding officer about one of your men. It’s a confidential matter,” I said.