Murder In The Red Barn - A Sean Duffy Story

1

March 1992 on a faery hill by the holestone in Doagh.

Probably several words in that sentence that don’t make sense to you which is a problem a narrator always has. I mean how specific can you get? What can you skip over and what do you have to unpack? Ever read Thucydides? He’s the bloody gold standard. He didn’t unpack everything but he knew he was writing for the future so he unpacked plenty.

I suppose I’ll have to explain Doagh and holestone and faery hill.

And the year doesn’t really matter but the month does.

Snow was in the forecast and it was cold, with an ominous wind cutting across the fields from the north.

There are thousands of faery hills all over Ireland. Mounds that local folklore say are the dwellings or otherwise belong to the faery folk. Farmers don’t plant crops on them or cut down trees on them. No one messes with them. All of them have at least one story about some priest or Presbyterian minister who went out there to prove that it was all just pagan superstition. You can imagine what happened to the priest after that. A series of traumatic, painful, but also, somehow, hilarious accidents that did not end well for the man of the cloth.

This particular faery hill was near the village of Doagh (pronounced doke) not too far from the town where I was based, Carrickfergus.

The Doagh Holestone was a unique and beautiful object that is worth looking up in an encylopedia if you’ve got one. It’s a stone megalith that was dragged to the top of the hill by unknown people, but probably the Neolithic tribes who lived in Ulster back then. After they got it to the top of the hill they then carved a perfect circle into its upper third. The Doagh Holestone was a place of long standing magic with disputed interpretations about the nature of this magic amongst local folklorists. Some said that if young lovers put their hands through the holestone they would be instantly wed and protected in this wedlock by the fey. Others said that objects put through the holestone at special times of the year would themselves become magic. Still others said that the holestone allowed you a glimpse into the future, again only at certain times of the year.

I’d driven past it many times on the Doagh Road and it occurred to me that, like most megaliths, it was aligned with either the solstice or equinox or perhaps some other quarter time of the year.

So here I was on March 19 half an hour before sunrise testing a theory about the equinox.

I was fortunate in the cloud cover. The snow clouds were coming from the north and west. But in the east there was nothing.

There was no one else here either. No farmers, no hippies. A few skeptical sheep and cows wandering over the scrabble fields without stone walls.

I was comfortable with most farm animals but I had to admit that I did feel a bit foolish standing out here in me skinny jeans, white t shirt and not very warm leather jacket.

No doubt it would contrive to rain on me despite the forecast.

A cow wandered over and nuzzled my leg.

“Níl aon rud le tabhairt agam duit, a bhean uasail,” I said.

I have nothing for thee.

The cow didn’t quite believe me. It backed away a pace or two but lingered in case I had some sort of treat.

The sky began to lighten in the east, the sun transmuting its components into various golds, yellows and reds.

A harrier hovered over a stone wall, apparently fixated on a mouse.

The nearby cow mooed.

The sun finally rose in a gap between the Antrim hills.

And, as I suspected, after a moment or two it rose through the four thousand year old circle in holestone.

It wasn’t the find of the century or anything. It wasn’t a bedazzled Howard Carter stumbling into Tutankhamen’s tomb or Hiram Bingham moving aside a fern or two and finding Maccu Picchu. But it did mean something, surely, the sun rising directly through the holdstone on the equinox? Cool, right?

I’d been ready to be a bit underwhelmed but I was not underwhelmed.

This was badass. An important discovery. I should it report it to Queens University Archaeology Department or something.

I looked through the holestone circle at the sun.

There was something odd about it. A kind of blurring distortion. Never look directly at the sun TV astronomers tell us and I have no reason to doubt them.

It was weird.

The light didn’t look quite right.

It was not showing me a glimpse of the future before it moved out of the circle.

It was definitely not doing that.

But that was an odd shadow that looked a bit like something on fire, like a police Land Rover on fire. . .

A bird flew overheard.

Were the more interesting songbirds coming back? No. Not until April. They were in Africa now. Some, like the nuthatch, all the way down in Angola. God bless the wee shites.

I felt what could be a snowflake on my face.

The sun was continuing to rise. In a minute its light would illuminate Lough Neagh and then the Sperrin and Blue Stack Mountains and then the indigo Atlantic and then perhaps the Land of the Lost in the west where the Ones That Were Here Before wait patiently for us.

Aye.

More possible snowflakes.

More moos.

I stopped looking through the holestone and rubbed my eyes.

I left the faery hill and the megalith and walked back to the Beemer.

I looked under the Beemer for bombs and got inside.

“There’s a lot of snow in the forecast, folks. Stay home if you can,” they were saying on Downtown Radio.

I wasn’t so sure. Ireland never gets “a lot of snow”. You know how many snow days I can remember as a kid?

Maybe two.

There’s a famous poem by Louis MacNeice about snow but it’s not falling outside the window of his house in Carrickfergus. It’s falling outside the window of his house in London. Ireland is much farther north than London, indeed more northerly than most of Europe, so why the paucity of cold white fluffy stuff?

It’s because of the Gulf Stream innit? Come on. That was an easy one. There are going to be harder ones. You better brush up your ideas if you’re going to be hanging out around these parts.

“It’s March 19, four days after the Ides, two after St Pat’s and coming up New Order,” they said on the radio.

The Equinox, aye. A turning point for the year. The days would get longer and spring would come. I put the car in gear and drove to Carrickfergus. After New Order they played Roxy Music. That one about the blow up doll so reminiscent of the Velvets but with Brian Eno providing some cool distortion.

When I got to the station Lawson had nothing for me. Crabbie wasn’t in.

I pretended to work for an hour and slipped away for a long lunch.

Pint in Ownies. Another pint in Dobbins.

“Snow in the forecast, Sean,” Derek said as he caught me hunched by the fire doing the Times crossword.

“Aye,” I said, skeptically, gazing out the window.

“You should tell John McCrabban to keep his cows in,” Derek said.

“Me tell Crabbie anything about farming? Him and the missus would have a good laugh about that.”

“Aye, well. . .snow. . .”

I finished the pint and walked around Carrick in my DMs, skinny jeans, jacket.

Quiet now in the lanes, alleys, back streets.

I’d been expecting something to happen. The magic of this morning and this being in Ulster with a civil war still going on.

But nothing doing.

The world and his wife were quiet.

I took my Walkman earphones out of my pocket and put them on my ears. I normally hated to do this because any thug or gunman could get the drop on you.

But sometimes you had to give the fuckers a sporting chance. I pressed play on the Walkman and listened to the tape I’d made of Vycpálek’s The Cantata of the Last Things of Man. It wasn’t exactly my šálek čaje but I could roll with it.

Some more Vycpálek and then the other side which was Etta James.

A Sunday Kind of Love got me to the bookies on North Street where they had odds up for the Grand National. There was an eight year old called Romany King they had at 20:1. I put twenty quid on it without much optimism.

Back outside and along West Street. Sammy closing up his barber shop.

“How do, Sean Duffy?”

“Well and you?”

“Can’t complain,” he said.

“Are you even allowed to complain in your Marxist utopia?” I said, joshing him because I knew he was rushing home to listen to the 5 o’clock bulletin from Radio Havana. He’d been a Radio Albania devotee for many years but recent events in the Adriatic had forced him to switch to Radio Havana on long wave.

He grinned. “Oh Sean, still buying that Western propaganda, I see. Come in for a haircut on Saturday and I’ll set you right,” he said.

“I might just do that,” I said, waved, and slid through St Nicholas’s churchyard which had been standing here in one form or another for about seven hundred years.

I stopped at a few of the gravestones and continued on in a loop that took me to the harbour .

More gentle snowflakes. But with every minute they began to get a little heavier.

I walked quickly back to the station, avoided everyone and got the car.

I was supposed to get the tires changed this weekend but if snow really was coming. . .

I checked underneath for bombs, drove down to the garage and found Danny.

“Bout ye, Daniel.”

“Bout ye, Sean, what’s amiss?”

“An extra twenty quid if you can do the tires today,” I said.

“The weather is it?” Danny asked. “You reckon we’re going to be snowed in?”

“Maybe a bit of that and also the fact that I’m about to be flush with cash, mate.”

“How so? A claim in against the council or something?”

“I did some magic shit this morning and stuck a big bet on the Grand National.”

Danny was an old flower child interested in magic and horses. He stuck one hand in his dungarees and stroked his long Gandalf beard with the other. The beard was red, was there another one of those wizards with a red beard? Not Gandalf. . .Redbadgardh. . .Radbraghedge-

“What did you bet on, Sean?”

“Gypsy something.”

“Romany King?”

“Aye, that was the one.”

Danny shook his head and made a little laugh. “Money down the drain, mate. This year it’s Party Politics. Gorgeous stallion that one. A descendant of Hyperion.”

“A good lineage?”

“Hyperion won the Derby! Jesus, Sean, next time you want to make a bet on the horses come to me. Tsk, tsk.”

“I will,” I said and vowed that I would not come see the big know-it-all wizardy shite. I mean, really, if you want to embarrass an Irishman mock his knowledge of whisky or horses.

Hurrying along the sea front trying to zip up my jacket. The zip of course would only go a third of the way to the top. There had been a time when the reliability of zips had been questioned by coat manufacturers so they always provided buttons or duffle coat style togs as a fail-safe. But zips were a thing now, had been for most of the century so buttons had been dispensed with. And this is when the zips had seized their moment and began – deliberately – to fail, so you’d come home wet and soaked and cold.

What the zips’ agenda was was obscure but I was working on a theory or two - they were plotting something. Zips probably in cahoots with the robots.

Snow. The real deal. Heavier and heavier as I went up over the railway bridge, Taylor’s Avenue and Barn Road.

Every kid in the street was out in their front yard, analyzing the sky. It was a Thursday. A possible snow day would kill Friday – giving them a long weekend, maybe even the Monday too.

I turned up Coronation Road.

Mr McFerrin eight doors down was also looking skyward. When he saw me he handed me a plastic bag.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Tomatoes from the greenhouse. Small of course but we have to eat them now. Storm’s coming.”

“Can you not just put a space heater out there?”

He glared at me under big black beetle brows. “Are you serious, son? Tomatoes are delicate. Solanum Lycopersicon, Sean! You can’t blast a heater at them. Eat these. The Aztecs swore by them.”

“I will do that,” I assured him.

I arrived at 113 Coronation Road, opening the black swing gate and went down the path. Mr McFerrin might have had some luck with his winter tomatoes but nothing I had planted was coming up. No tulips, no snowdrops. Other gardens even had daffs coming up but not here. It’s possible that because I was a peeler someone was sneaking into the front yard at night and pouring lime or ammonia on my flowers but more likely I was just shite at gardening.

I liked the paranoid explanation though. It’s good to be a paranoid copper – people really are trying to kill you and MI5 and army intelligence probably are listening in on your phone calls. . .but you can’t let it drive you insane. What’s that quote Crabbie always says from William Burroughs? “A paranoid is a man who is beginning to see what’s really going on. . .”

I kid – Crabbie’s never heard of William Burroughs and wouldn’t like him if he had heard of him.

The house was quiet.

Beth and Emma of course were safely ensconced in Scotland.

I was a part-time peeler now, only here seven days a month. I called myself Detective Inspector Sean Duffy but I did very little detecting these days. I’d handed over the reins of Carrick CID to my protegee, Alexander Lawson and he ran a tight little ship.

It was the 1990s now anyway and something different was in the air. Crime was down, terrorist attacks were down, I didn’t exactly know what was happening but it looked to me like negotiations were going on behind the scenes to end all this madness. I hoped so. Freud talks about the narcissism of the small differences and to me that was the only reason for the enmity between Ulster’s Prods and Catholics. They were the same people divided by religion. Religion has a nice way of doing that.

The house wasn’t cold.

Mrs Campbell next door, who had the key, had sent in one of her weans to add some peat to the fire.

Definitely a Nick Cave kind of evening. I put on Kicking Against The Pricks which is a covers album that I’d only ever played once but I remember liking Nick’s version of All Tomorrow’s Parties.

I pulled up an armchair close and poured myself an Islay.

The door kept banging in the gale so I found the heaviest book I didn’t care about and wedged it. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which the Jesuits tried to physically beat into me. Not that they agreed with Kant but their take was that you have to intimately know your enemy.

As soon as I was settled the phone rang.

I swallowed the whisky, moved aside Mr Kant and marched into the hall.

“Duffy,” I said.

“Sean, its Alex, I was wondering if you could give me half an hour of your time,” he said.

“I’ve clocked off,” I said.

“I know.”

He didn’t say any more. It was a good move. He knew my copper’s curiosity would get the best of me. Like presenting a cardboard box to a cat, I was unable to resist.

I bit my tongue. Be strong, Sean.

I didn’t have to do anymore detective work if I didn’t want to, but cases pulled at ya and Lawson knew that. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’ve got an insurance investigator in my office. He’s got a few suspicions about one of his policies.”

“Some poor bastard fiddling his car payments? No thank you! I’m—”

“It might be a murder case, Sean,” Lawson interrupted.

“A murder case? Why aren’t you taking it?”

“I might take it, but it’s delicate. I’d like your opinion, Sean.”

“What about Crabbie?”

“Sergeant McCrabban is here already. We both thought you might be interested in this one.”

“You know it’s supposed to be heavy snow today? I left me motor in to get the tires changed.”

“Maybe you could walk down?”

“Alex, mucker, I just did me walk! I can’t do two walks in one day. Upsets the whole system.”

“See you in fifteen minutes?”

“I’ll need to find me boots.”

“Is that a yes?”

I sighed, coughed, did my best dramatic pause, and finally said, “Aye, ok.”

2

As soon as I put the phone down it rang again. It was Beth in Scotland. I asked how she and Emma were.

They were both good.

Beth was worried. She’d heard there was a storm coming.

“They’re not going to make you go out in the snow are you?”

“What? Me? Who do you think you’re married to? I’m not a traffic cop. I’ll be snug inside the whole weekend doing the crossword.”

“Wrap up warm. Do you have that scarf I knitted?”

“Uhm, yeah, I have that somewhere. . .”

“It’s in the cupboard under the stairs.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

I’d hidden it there for three reasons. Beth had gotten a bit carried away with the scarf and it was a length now that would have given Tom Baker pause during his Dr Who heyday. Secondly it was in Everton’s colours. Or Chelsea colours. You wouldn’t want people to think you were an Everton, or worse, a Chelsea supporter. . .The third reason I’d hidden it was related to the first reason: Isadora Duncan’s death by scarf in Nice. . .

“Promise me you’ll wear the scarf,” Beth said.

“Yeah, I will,” I said. “I’ll need it.”

“Take care. I love you Sean.”

“Love you too.”

I looked out my boots and black beanie hat and lined leather jacket and I hooked the long woolen Everton Dr Who scarf around my neck like a hangman’s noose.

As I stepped outside it was full dark and the snow was already beginning to fall.

I got to the end of Coronation Road before being noticed by young Samantha McCallister. “Have you become a Glasgow Rangers fan now, Inspector Duffy?” she asked.

“No, I have not!” I said but it would of course be the natural progression for the Catholic copper who had betrayed his comrades by joining the RUC. No doubt by summer, like every good Protestant, I would be marching in an Orange Parade, burning effigies of the Pope and keeping my toaster in a cupboard.

I turned down Victoria Road musing on the accordion – certainly the instrument I would be given in hell by Dr (sic) Paisley for my Orange Parade.

No one could ever know this, but I can actually play the accordion. Indeed I had become pretty good at it when I thought there was an off chance I could get into Tom Waits’s backing band during his tour of Ireland.

At the bottom of Victoria Road I crossed the busy carpark, darted into Victoria chippie and got myself a fish supper.

“You seem lost in thought, Sean,” Marjory said.

“I was thinking about that Mark Twain story about his experiences learning to play the accordion. . .it’s uhm, very funny,” I said.

“I don’t know that one. Salt and vinegar on your chips?”

“Aye.”

“But I suppose you know that Mark Twain’s grandfather is from just up the road in Ballyclare. Samuel Clemens,” Marj continued.

“I did not know that.”

“You need to brush up on your local history if you’re going to pass the Carrickfergus Citizenship Exam.”

“I thought I was already long accepted into this fair community?”

“You still have to pass the formal written examination,” she joked. “Salt and vinegar on your fish?”

“Please.”

“There you go. See you Sean, stay off the roads, my Donny says there’s going to be five inches tonight.”

“Isn’t Donny your cat?”

“Aye and he’s never wrong about the weather.”

I ate the fish supper as I walked down to the station.

Straight from the fryer it was bloody delicious.

I looked up at the sky. It was an odd grey black that stretched from here all the way up the Glens and over to Scotland. But five inches at sea level? No chance.

I must have been bloody starving. I’d eaten the whole shebang by the time I arrived at the cop shop on the Scotch Quarter.

“No car, Inspector Duffy?” Dave asked as he let me into the police station.

“No. Apparently the roads are closing cos of the weather.”

“Beemer can’t handle it, eh?”

“It can handle anything. Just being cautious,” I said somewhat defensively.

“The wife’s coming for me after my shift in the tractor,” Dave said.

I nodded. The old joke about Protestants round my way was, it’s easy to spot a Protestant – he’s the one on the tractor or the horse. . .I mean did all of these country coppers know someone who owned a bloody tractor?

I waved, went in the station and up to Lawson’s office.

Minstrel Boy was on the radio. I made a face.

“Don’t you like that one?” Lawson asked.

“I prefer the original, Mozart's Flute Quartet K. 298.”

“Uhm, I think it's an old Irish tune, Sean,” Lawson said.

“Aye, that’s what that Byron burning plagiarsing eejit Tommy Moore would have you believe.”

Crabbie was filling his pipe. The insurance inspector was nowhere to be seen.

“This insurance guy, he’s not invisible is he?” I said in a whisper.

“Mr Vincent had to go because of the snow,” Lawson said. “But he left his report. Sergeant McCrabban and I have read it and we both think further action may be needed before Tuesday.”

“What happens on Tuesday?” I asked. “It’s that rare event every hundred years or so when an insurance company finally has to pay out on a bloody policy?” I asked.

“Mr Vincent has already paid the policy,” Lawson said. “But Smith and his family are emigrating to Canada on Tuesday. Vincent thought he would have one last try at convincing the RUC before they left. This is his file.”

Lawson handed me an insurance investigator’s report, double spaced, well typed, complete with coroner’s report, autopsies, maps, photographs. I put it back on Lawson’s desk.

“Where’s the police file?” I asked.

“In Larne,” Lawson said. “Larne RUC already investigated this case and concluded that there was no foul play.”

“Ah but you see,” I said, leaning back in the chair, “We can’t go around instigating murder investigations in their parish. You know what they’re like.”

Lawson nodded. “I thought you might say that, but look at this. . .”

He unfolded an ordnance survey map on which he had drawn RUC district boundaries in red felt tip pen. There were two Xs on the map one of which was just in the boundary of Carrick RUC’s district.

“What happened here?” I asked, pointing at the second X.

“That’s where Bree Smith supposedly killed herself. As you can see the farmhouse is over the line in the territory of Larne RUC which is why they investigated it and the other suicide but if you look closely at this, the barn where she did the deed is actually in our district.”

I shook my head and looked at Lawson.

“This is pretty thin gruel, Alex,” I said. “What exactly did Larne RUC conclude?”

“Two suicides, 2 days apart,” Lawson explained. “James McDonald and Bree Smith were having an affair. McDonald couldn’t take the guilt anymore and hung himself. Forty eight hours later Bree Smith went to her barn, attached a hosepipe to the exhaust of her car, put it in through the driver’s side window and poisoned herself.”

“And what does Mr Vincent think actually happened?” I asked.

Crabbie handed me the report again. “He thinks Charles Smith forced McDonald to hang himself, probably at gunpoint while McDonald’s wife was out and the kids were at school,” Crabbie began. “And then two days later when his own kids were at school Vincent thinks Smith gave his wife sleeping pills, carried her out to the garage and poisoned her to make it look like they were having an affair.”

“Were they having an affair?” I asked.

Crabbie shrugged.

“I know divorce is a hassle but it’s always less of a hassle than a murder,” I said.

“Unless you’re Henry VIII,” Crabbie offered.

“It does seem a rather baroque solution to an old problem,” Lawson said. “But if you look at the autopsy report there were traces of heavy narcotics in Bree Smith’s system. More than enough to knock her out. How did she even get out to the garage?”

I started thumbing through the report. “Wait a second. Doesn’t suicide invalidate a life insurance policy?”

Lawson shook his head. “Bree and Charles Smith had a life insurance policy that had a no claim pay out clause for suicide for up to the first ten years after signing and then a fifty percent claim policy after that.”

“So Charles Smith got percent of the money,” Crabbie said.

“Which was how much?”

“Two hundred thousand quid,” Lawson said.

I nodded. A tidy sum. “Where did all this take place?” I asked Crabbie.

“Deraskmore,” Crabbie said.

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“Tiny little townland near Kilwaughter,” Crabbie said.

“Just read the report, Sean,” Lawson said.

I moved over to the sofa by the heater and began on the report. Lawson went to the drinks cabinet and poured us all a measure of the 16 year old Lagavulin.

It tasted like a homemade cough elixir that went down with the Titanic, was washed up on a beach 80 years later, and distilled into alcohol by Ben the Tramp from Local Hero.

It was excellent.

The report however was a lot of supposition.

“Well?” Lawson said.

I looked at Crabbie.

“It’s possible,” he said, adding hastily “Not that I’m prejudiced.”

“Prejudiced about what?”

“It’s a Catholic townland surrounded by Protestants so they can be a bit ornery and hostile,” Crabbie explained.

“I don’t blame them,” I said.

I continued to read. “So six months after the deaths he marries Jane McDonald and they combine the farms and blend the families,” I said.

“Uh huh,” Lawson said.

“Six children between them,” Crabbie muttered.

“He must have planned it with this Jane McDonald,” I said. “There’s no way you kill your wife and your lover’s husband on the off chance that she will go along with it. If they did it, they did it together.”

Lawson nodded.

“Moving to Canada, eh?” I said, as I continued to read.

“Next week,” Crabbie reminded me.

“But all this happened, what two years ago? Any physical evidence will be long gone,” I said. “How are we supposed to investigate? Trick them into a sudden confession after all this time?”

Neither Lawson nor Crabbie had an answer to that one and the mysterious Mr Vincent had palmed this off to us with the nonchalance of Pontius Pilate.

The wind rattled the office. Snow was coming down harder now.

“The insurance company has paid out the policy. They’re leaving the country. One strong argument would be that maybe it’s best to just let sleeping dogs lie?” I suggested.

“Why did we join the peelers in the first place if we don’t want to catch criminals?” Crabbie said.

I stood, put down the report and the whisky and walked to the window.

“A cold coming we had of it/Just the worst time of the year/For a journey and such a long journey/The ways deep and the weather sharp,” I muttered.

“Sean?” Lawson said, slightly concerned.

“By tomorrow it’s going to be impassable up there,”I said. “It might be like that for days. If we’re going to go we should take a police Land Rover and go up there tonight.”

Lawson looked first at Crabbie and then at me.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

3

I let the Crabman drive. He lived up in the hills and his experience with snow was a bit more extensive than mine. Lawson and I sat in the back. This was a 1990s RUC Traffic Land Rover rather than a bog standard 1980s job. They had removed the RPG cage from the sides and had even installed a little slit window, made from thick bullet proof glass, that allowed you to see out a little.

Crabbie was driving in a low gear and being very careful but we could still feel the wheels sliding around in the slush and snow.

“Don’t get us in a sheugh, mate,” I said to Crabbie through the back partition.

“Don’t disturb me when I’m driving, please!” he replied.

He sounded stressed so I let it go.

“How is it being the boss?” I asked Lawson.

“You made it look difficult, Sean. But it’s easy peasy,” Lawson said.

“Cheeky wee skitter,” I muttered.

“George Joseph Smith,” Lawson said after a minute or two.

“What about him?” I said.

“He was a bloke who preferred murder to divorce,” Lawson said.

“Oh yeah, the infamous Brides in the Bath case,” I said dimly remembering the name now. He preferred murder, bigamy, desertion, fraud, anything really to divorce.

“Too many Smiths,” I said. “I don’t like it. I don’t buy it. There’s probably a reasonable explanation.”

Lawson looked at me the way young people look at their elders to get on their nerves.

“This is getting tricky. I’m going to have to take the Ballynure Road,” Crabbie said.

“Never been to Ballynure,” Lawson said.

“There’s a good chippie,” Crabbie said.

“From the Irish Baile an Iúir 'homestead of the yews' no doubt,” I contributed.

“What does Deraskmore mean?” Lawson asked.

The village of Derask was a new one on me. I’d never heard of it in all my time in Carrickfergus. “In Irish Darach is oak, uisige is water, maybe oak water? Mor means big so literally big oak water or big oak?” I speculated.

Lawson nodded while I continued to think about it.

“There’s a Norse word drekkja that means swamp,” I said.

“So if we get out and it’s a swamp I guess the Vikings made it up here and killed everyone, but if it’s oaks and a nice wee stream I guess they didn’t,” Lawson said.

“If we make it at all,” I said. “It’s really coming down now. Whose idea was this malarkey?”

“It was a collective decision, Sean. We’re all taking the blame for this one,” Lawson said.

“If we lose one of Traffic’s brand new Land Rovers we’ll never hear the end of it, though,” Crabbie said.

“John McCrabban I am confident you will get us there in one piece, just you wait and see,” I said and made a quick silent prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, the patron saint of policemen.

Saint Michael almost always comes through and when he doesn’t it’s only because he was busy helping other coppers elsewhere. And sure enough a mere twenty minutes later we were at the Smith farm with its extensive outhouses, byres, fields and possible murder barn.

“We’re here,” Crabbie said. “How we’re getting back, I dunno, but we’re here.”

4

The Vikings must not have made it up here. We were in the hills. Scrabble farms, whitewashed cottages, a strand of oak and willows lining a little river.

The snow was about three inches deep now. Perhaps in somewhere like Canada this would be considered a light dusting but here, in Northern Ireland, the place was going to be paralyzed for days. The airport would close, trains wouldn’t run, there would be car accidents all over the shop.

A wind was whistling off the mountains further north. I buttoned my coat and pulled down my hat.

Crabbie had parked the Land Rover in a lane on the edge of a farm yard. “All right gents, let’s go in and do our due diligence before these folks blow the jurisdiction. Alex, you wanna lead?” I asked.

“Nah, Sean, you’re the senior inspector you run it and we’ll try and keep up with your moves,” Lawson said.

“No need to be sarky,” I said.

“Sorry Sean. Honestly, I’m fine with you running it, ok?”

I looked at Crabbie. He nodded. That was fine with him too.

“I’ll be Buddy Rich, you guys can be Bird and Diz,” I said before realizing that neither of them would ever get that ref.

We walked into the farmyard and I saw that Crabbie had noticed something already.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“Look how pristine it all is. Spotless. Everything squared away.”

“They’re neat farmers?” I suggested.

“No. They’ve sold practically everything. The livestock, the chickens, the feed, the machinery. And they’re making this look pretty for a buyer or the new owner,” he replied, pointing at the barns and outhouses which had been painted an attractive burgundy shade of red

“How much would a place like this go for?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. They have a good few acres by a watercourse, three hundred thousand?” he said.

“So with that money and the life insurance policy he’ll be taking over half a million quid with them to Canada,” I said.

“Aye,” Crabbie agreed. “Get yourself some land in the prairie with that.”

I put the file under my arm and we hurried through the snow to the farmhouse which did not have a doorbell, but it did have a large iron knocker which must have been on that door since the nineteenth century.

I knocked and within seconds a tiny, cute, blonde child wearing a jumper several sizes too big answered it, took one look at us and ran away shouting “daddy!”

Inside there were the yells of more children and a couple of blonde blurs ran past the door.

A toddler in a nappy appeared next, hastily pursued by a tall extremely handsome brown haired woman about 35 years old.

“Sorry about this, I’ll get Kevin,” she said, grabbed the toddler and ran off.

More laughter from the other rooms and an older child yelled, “Daddy! There’s somebody at the door!”

My morale had sunk completely now. Did we really want to bust all this up with our nosey peeler questions?

“Seems like a nice family, maybe we should head back before the snow closes the—” I began, but stopped when the man of the house appeared.

He was a curly brown haired, pasty faced Mick with green eyes and a sort of aquiline Roman nose. On another face the combination might not have worked but with Mr Smith it did and his easy smile didn’t hurt either.

“What can I do for you gents? Hope you haven’t come about the Defender. I just sold it this afternoon,” he said.

I reached into my wallet and produced my warrant card.

“We’re police. Carrick RUC,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I’m Detective Inspector Sean Duffy and these are my colleagues Detective Inspector Lawson and Detective Sergeant McCrabban,” I said.

“Is there something the matter?” Smith said.

“Could we come in and have a very quick word?” I asked. “It’s getting quite chilly out here.”

“Oh my goodness, of course, come in gents! Come in.”

We went inside a lovely, airy farmhouse filled with children’s toys and the smell of baking.

Boxes had been stacked up in the hall with shipping labels attached.

“This way,” Mr Smith said.

He took us upstairs to a tiny study overlooking the river.

It was an interesting place to take us. If he had nothing to hide, why not the living room? How was he going to offer us tea up here? Was he going to traipse downstairs and come back with a scalding hot tea pot on a tray? Strange.

We sat on a ratty but comfortable sofa opposite Smith who turned around the swivel chair that was facing his desk.

“Some weather, eh?” he said.

“Yes, the weather is going to be a limiting factor here. We want to get back before the roads close,” I said.

“Fire away,” he replied cheerfully.

“There’s no way to delicately to begin this Mr Smith, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to launch in,” I continued. “We’re looking into the death of your first wife two years ago. You found the body, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if you could take us through your recollection of that day.”

“What’s this about?”

“Just inquiries. We heard you were leaving the country and we have to tie up a few loose ends before you go.”

Smith looked surprised but quickly composed himself.

“I’ll never forget anything of that day,” he said.

“Please tell us, if you don’t mind,” I said.

“I got the kids off to school. And I just popped over to see Jim McDonald’s family. They were all over there. His wife, his brothers, his mum. They were still in pieces as you can imagine. No one had any clue as to why Jim might have done it.”

“Why he might have killed himself?” Lawson asked.

“Aye. Exactly. His farm was doing well. He seemed happy enough, it was only later that. . .” he said and his voice faded away.

“You came back from seeing Mr McDonald’s family and then. . .” I continued for him.

“Wife wasn’t feeling too great so I checked in on her and she seemed to be doing a wee bit better and I told her I was away to the hardware shop to get some feed, you know?”

“And then what?” I asked.

“I got the feed, came back, noticed her wee Ford had been moved inside the barn.”

“How did you know she hadn’t driven off?” I asked.

“I heard the motor going. I couldn’t see the car because she’d driven it into the barn and closed the doors behind her. I was a wee bit surprised at that, I suppose, because the doors are quite heavy and normally I had to help her.”

“Could the doors have closed accidentally?” Lawson asked.

He shook his head. “Oh no. Not these doors. Big heavy wooden jobs.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“I heard the engine still going in there and that surprised me too. I wasn’t panicked yet. I thought she might be just warming up the motor, you know? So I went in the side entrance of the barn and that’s what I saw what I saw,” he said.

“What did you see?” I asked.

“She’d let the horses out and I saw a hose going from the exhaust of her car to the driver’s side window. The whole car was filled with smoke.”

“What did you do then?” Crabbie asked.

“I opened the car door, pulled out Mary. She wasn’t breathing but I’d done first aid in the Boys Brigade so I knew how to do CPR. I did that for a couple of minutes and then ran inside and called for an ambulance. Ran straight back outside and started on the old CPR again.”

“Where were your children?” I asked.

“It was a Monday so they were at school.”

“When did they leave for school?” I asked.

“Seven twenty, to catch the school bus,” he said.

“Your wife and you got them ready for school together?” I asked.

“No. Like I said she was a bit under the weather,” Smith said. “So I did it all. Got them dressed and out.”

“Was she often under the weather?”

“No. Very healthy. But she’d been a bit. . .”

“A bit what?”

“A big weepy since Jim’s death,” Smith said.

I read from the insurance investigator’s report. “When the ambulance arrived from Larne they found you still attempting CPR on your wife.”

“Aye, I didn’t stop,” Smith said.

“The ambulance drivers told Larne police that when they arrived both garage doors were open and you had turned off the Ford Escort’s engine off. At what point did you do that?” I asked.

“I dunno. Maybe straight away?” Smith said.

“Before you began administering CPR?” I asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know it’s all a bit of a blur. What’s all this about?” he asked.

I looked at him and tapped my pen on the report. “It’s not a big deal I suppose but it is a contradiction,” I began. “You said just a few moments ago that you’d never forget anything from that day but now you can’t remember when you opened the garage doors or turning the engine off on the Ford Escort? Would you have taken the time to do it while you were rushing to get your wife outside and administer CPR?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I did it while I was waiting for the ambulance?”

I shook my head. “It can’t be that. Because you said that you took just one break from CPR to make a phone call and ‘didn’t stop’ until the ambulance arrived.”

Smith rubbed his chin. “Uhm, well, I’m not sure. I guess I was exaggerating a wee bit when I said I’d never forget anything from that day, because I don’t remember the barn doors or the car.”

I nodded. In truth it wasn’t a big deal at all.

“When did you find out that your wife Mary and Jim McDonald were having an affair?” I asked.

“The police told me about that,” Smith said.

“How so?”

“We’d gotten a computer to do our accounts on the farm. I’m useless at those sort of things but Mary adapted very quickly to it. And it was one of the police officers who found a kind of journal that she’d written in one of the files detailing her affair.”

The ‘journal’ was barely that. A few pages of hastily typed entries.

Met J. We can’t keep our hands off each other.

I love him so. He loves me too but he cannot bear to be with me. The guilt is killing him.

It was possible that it was authentic but it was also possible that it was written by Smith himself. The report from Larne RUC said that the journal had only begun a month before the final entry and Mary’s ‘suicide’. That raised some alarm bells but it wasn’t what you might call proof.

“And after you read Mary’s journal, what did you think?” I asked.

“I began to put two and two together,” Smith said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, I’d seen them very friendly together over the last year and she was always going over there to bring them tray bakes and that kind of thing. She always seemed so happy when she came back. Whereas around me and the weans. . .well, you know?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Depressed, anxious. . .that kind of thing.”

Lawson cleared this throat and held up a piece of paper from the file. “You told the coroner’s inquest that you thought Mary had killed herself because she couldn’t live without James McDonald,” Lawson said. “And McDonald killed himself because he was consumed by guilt about the affair.”

“Aye and I stick by that,” Smith said sadly.

“Jim didn’t try to work his fingers into the noose even though strangulation is one of the most painful deaths imaginable,” I said.

It wasn’t a question but it invited an answer.

“He was determined was Jim,” Smith said. “Once he set his mind to something, he did it.”

I looked at Crabbie and Lawson. Was there anything more to add? Sad details about the two funerals. Vulgar questions about the life insurance?

The door opened and Mrs Smith, formerly Mrs McDonald came with a tea tray. A china pot, four cups and saucers and shortbread that she had evidently made herself.

We all stood and thanked her.

“Anything the matter, gents?” she asked. She was smiling and relaxed. She hadn’t been listening at the door. She had no idea why we’d come. Three detectives in the middle of a snowstorm with night settling in.

“They’re asking about Mary’s death,” Smith said.

There was the slightest flicker in her eye, a look at her husband, and then the return of the smile.

She exited and we all sat back down again as Smith poured.

“It’s not stopping,” Crabbie said looking out at the weather.

“Aye,” Smith said. “Do you have chains for your Rover? Could be tricky on the hills on the way back.”

We did not have chains for the Land Rover and even if we did I doubt we’d know how to apply them.

“So how many kids do you have now?” Crabbie asked.

“I had the twins and Shirley, Bree had the two girls and a boy. So six now.”

“I hear you’re all moving to Canada,” Crabbie continued. I could see what he was doing. It was an old police tactic. Not exactly good cop/bad cop but you soften the witness up with some more conversational inquiries. Unfortunately we didn’t have time for any of that with the snow coming down.

“Did she leave a note? There’s nothing in the file,” I interjected.

“Mary?”

“Aye.”

“No. She didn’t leave a note. There was the journal but no note.”

“That’s quite unusual. Most suicides do leave a note,” I said.

“But not all?” Smith inquired.

I looked at him. That was a smirky out of character thing to say. So far he’d projected up front, blunt, smiley, honest. . .

“Not all,” I agreed. “But most.”

I looked through the printed pages of the journal.

Declarations of love, guilt. . .It was an odd document. Nothing about Jim’s physical characteristics, no stolen kisses, no love making. . .A lot of “I love hims.” Was it the sort of antiseptic thing Smith might have written or was it just the sort of Jane Austen thing you’d expect from a repressed woman living up in the wilds of County Antrim sheep country?

“This is a bit of indelicate question Mr Smith,” I began. “But do you think their affair was platonic or could it actually have been consummated?”

Smith blushed and looked at the floor. “I have no idea.”

“Is it possible they could have had time alone together with you both so busy with the farm?” I persisted.

“It’s possible. I was often away at the markets. Mary kept it all together here and with the weans at school. . .”

“Was Jim McDonald often away at the markets and his wife Bree left alone?” I asked.

Smith raised his head and anger flashed briefly like the The Maidens Lighthouse.

“Yes. She would have been alone too, when Jim was at the market,” Smith said.

I again picked up the investigator’s report.

“The night before your wife died, do you remember who prepared dinner?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“Did you sometimes prepare dinner for the family?”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

“On what occasions?” I asked.

“I don’t know. When Mary was knackered or depressed or whatever, or just as a wee treat.”

“Inspector McKenna, from Larne RUC, who investigated this case, says that you did indeed prepare the family meal the night before your wife died. You made Irish stew because your wife quote seemed down following James McDonald’s death, unquote.”

“Yeah, now you mention it, that sounds right.”

“Did your wife have a cup of tea every night before she went to bed?” I asked.

“Why do you ask that?”

“The autopsy found traces of tea in her system. I’m assuming she drunk it the night before? If you’re going to hang yourself and there’s a limited window of opportunity while your husband is out at the shops, I don’t think you’d make a cup of tea first.”

“You might if you wanted to think about your options,” Smith said.

“I’m sorry, Mr Smith, I should have been more direct,” I said, “Did you make your wife a cup of tea the night before her suicide?”

“Uhm, thinking about it now, yes,” he said.

“Your wife had traces of Seconal in her liver,” I read from the report.

“Aye. She used to take that to alleviate her epilepsy. She’s been taking different drugs for the last decade or so for but she must have some of that old stuff squirreled away. I told all this to the coroner.”

“There was quite a bit of Seconal in her system. I’m surprised she wasn’t completely conked out,” I said.

“Not quite,” Smith said. “But she was very groggy in the morning. That’s why she really couldn’t help with the kids.”

“To reiterate it was mostly you who got the kids dressed and ready for school?”

“Yes.”

“And did they come in to give her a kiss goodbye before they left for school?”

“There wasn’t time. I had overslept, the kids had overslept and Mary wasn’t feeling well at all. I got the kids out to the bus.”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“Well, I’d promised Bee McDonald I’d come over, so I went over there and had a wee word.”

“How did you get over there?”

“In the tractor. It’s just two fields down. I could have walked but I took the tractor.”

“How long did you spend at the McDonalds?” I asked.

“Fifteen minutes. There was plenty of folk there. I was surplus to requirements so I came home.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“I asked Mary how she was doing. She said she was feeling better. And I told her I was away to Ballynure Farm Supply to get some chicken feed,” Smith said. “We were almost out.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Nine or so?”

“And how long would that normally take you?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes?”

“There and back?”

“If I floored it?”

“Did you floor it?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What time did you get back?” I asked.

“I don’t know that either.”

“Before ten?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you expressly told her you were leaving?”

“Aye. I told her I was away in the Land Rover.”

“And when you left her, she was conscious?” I asked.

“Yeah. She said she was going to get up and do a few chores while I was away.”

“So in that very brief window, your wife who had taken a tranquilizer, managed to walk across the farm yard here, get into the barn, rummage around for a hose, connect it to the exhaust of the Ford Escort, turn the car on and poison herself with carbon monoxide?”

“Yes. Somehow she did!”

“The autopsy on Jim McDonald found a rope burn on his hands,” I said, reading a different part of the report.

“So?”

“Hard to tell apart a rope burn and ligature marks,” I said.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Smith said.

“Someone could have tied his hands behind his back. Put his head in a noose and tossed him off that chair.”

I looked at Lawson and Crabbie. The snow was really coming down now. It was probably time to confront him and get his reaction. And if it didn’t elicit a Perry Mason style confession it was time for us to head the fuck back to Carrick.

“Let me put to you, Mr Smith, one alternative explanation for these extraordinary and tragic events,” I said.

I looked at Lawson who gave me the nod. We had to get on with this shite or pack it in.

“Please,” Smith said.

“Your wife and James McDonald were not having an affair,” I began. “You and Bree McDonald were having the affair. It had been going on for some time and you couldn’t keep seeing one another around school schedules and her husband’s occasional trips to the market. You wanted to be together. Of course divorce in the Catholic church is not easy and certainly not a contested divorce where you wished to keep your kids. And then there was the question of the money. The suicide clause had long since expired on your family life insurance, so that was a quarter of a million quid to be taken into account, plus the uniting of the two farms and the two families.”

“No,” Smith said, simply.

“No what?”

“You’ve got it all wrong. You’re spouting madness.”

“Yes, it was madness. Pre-meditated madness, or what we peelers like to call first degree murder with mens rea. This was all intricately planned, wasn’t it?”

“What? No.”

“The first step was dealing with Jim McDonald. You waited until the kids were at school and then you left with your shotgun to deal with the foxes on the hill, or some bullshit like that. In fact you went over to the McDonalds and you ordered Jim McDonald out to his barn at the point of a gun. Then you and possibly Bree as your accomplice tied his hands, rigged up the noose in the barn and hanged him. You took the rope off his wrists as quickly as you could but there was still the hint of ligature marks. Then you hurried up the hill and fired your shotgun a couple of times and came back home again. His suicide was a shocking mystery to the entire community until your wife’s suicide two days later and the discovery of her journal. But then it all made sense.”

“And I killed her too?” Smith said.

“That was the second part of the plan,” I began, “But, of course, this murder was easier. You knew she had those old Seconal pills which you dissolved into the tea she had that night. Perhaps you hoped that might do the trick, but she was still alive in the morning. Very groggy yes, but very much alive. So Plan B kicked in. After the kids had left, you carried her out to the garage, attached the hose and left for the farm supply place in Ballynure.”

I looked at him.

There was no outrage. He did not burst into tears and say “it’s a fair cop, gov.”

He merely sighed and shook his noggin in a way that I felt he had been rehearsing for a year or two. He’d been expecting this challenge from Larne RUC and it had never come. Maybe he’d been expecting it from the insurance investigator too. When it finally had come he was ready for it.

“Is there one shred of proof of any of this?” he asked.

“Nope. No proof at all.”

“So coming up here, at night, in the snow was all just – what’s the word for it – a fishing expedition?” he asked with a slightly sleekit tone to his voice.

I nodded. “Something like that. With you leaving the country for good, we thought we should do our due diligence.”

“I’d like you to get out of my house now and not come back,” he said.

I turned to Lawson and Crabbie, but they had nothing.

Crabbie finally shrugged.

Lawson got to his feet and offered Smith his hand.

“Well thank you for your time, Mr Smith,” he said.

“No problem,” he replied to Lawson while keeping his eyes fixed on me.

5

We trudged back to the Land Rover through what was now a complete white out. A blizzard you might even have called it were we in some place that got blizzards. I wrapped myself up in the blue and white treasonous Everton scarf but it was only a tiny bit helpful.

“Christ on a bike this is something,” Lawson said.

The snow was about three four or five inches deep already.

“Does Larne council have a snow plough by any chance?” I asked Crabbie.

He shook his head. “It does not,” he said.

“How are they going to clear these roads?” I asked.

“They’ll do what they do every year it snows,” he said. “Wait until melts.”

“We should be ok, though, right, in the Land Rover, eh?” Lawson asked.

The Crabman’s face so usually a stern anchor of comfort looked now more like a toy anchor in a bath boat.

“Crabbie, Lawson’s right, isn’t he? Our Rover’s not going to let us down.”

Crabbie shook his head. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “A regular Land Rover, aye, but with all the armor plate on this thing and the low gravity suspension. . .”

“I’m freezing, let’s hope the heater doesn’t fail us at least,” Lawson said.

He was out in his jeans, jumpers and some kind of light windbreaker. The eejit. And to think I’d let him mind the store? Crabbie and I were at least wearing proper jackets and boots.

All three of us climbed in the cab. The back of the Rover was not heated but we’d be fine up front. Bit of a squeeze but we’d be ok.

“You better drive, Crabman, you’re the expert,” I said.

He got behind the wheel but he didn’t turn the thing on.

His face was grave.

“What’s the matter me old mucker?” I asked.

“I’ve been to Nolan’s Farm Supplies in Ballynure many times. It doesn’t open until 11. 11 to 8 every day except Sunday. Those have been the hours since the 1950s,” he said.

“Your point being?” Lawson asked. He was being particularly young and thick today it seemed.

“His point being, laddie, Smith said he was going to drive over to Nolan’s at 9.15 and he said it was a ten minute run there and a ten minute run back. I asked him if he made it back by ten and he said yes.”

Lawson was shaking his head. “No way. Larne RUC must have checked on a detail like that.”

“Must they? Larne RUC?”

Lawson looked at his watch. “I suppose one more round of questions Columbo fashion wouldn’t hurt. I mean we’re never going to get up here again before they—”

“Suspiciously flee the jurisdiction,” I said.

“Close the roads,” Lawson said.

“They can extradite people from Canada, Sean,” Crabbie said.

“You and I both know that will never happen,” I insisted.

“Then it’s now or never,” Lawson said, opening the cab door.

6

Back across the whiteout barnyard.

“How many inches now, Crabbie?” I asked him.

“Must be nearly half a foot now,” he said.

We reached the farmhouse door and rattled the heavy knocker.

Smith opened it. He was wearing a bright red sweater and a cheerful grin.

“Car won’t start?” he said.

“Still police business, I’m afraid, Mr Smith,” Lawson said.

“We just have a couple more quick questions, and then we’ll go, five minutes no more we promise,” I said.

He looked dubious. “Five minutes?”

“No more. Cross my heart.”

“Ok, come in, we’ll just go to the living room there, it’s empty, the kids are playing some game with Bree,” he said.

We went into the living room which looked like all the farms up here I imagine. Comfy old fashioned prewar furniture made by the locals themselves. A roaring turf fire in a stone fireplace. Cast iron torture devices hanging on the wall that were probably ancient pieces of farm machinery. . .

We sat in a semi circle around the fire.

Me, Crabbie and Lawson took out our notebooks. I gave Lawson the nod. “Well, Mr Smith here’s the thing,” he began. “You said you left the house at around 9 to go on a ten minute run to Nolan’s Farm Supply in Ballynure.”

“That’s correct,” he said.

“And just to confirm you told your wife that?” Lawson continued.

“Yes.”

“And the call to the ambulance comes in at 10:05, so you actually did get there and back in less than half an hour,” I said.

“That’s right. It was a quiet run. Sometimes in the morning up here you can get stuck behind a school bus or something, but between nine and three it’s usually ok.”

The wind rattled the rafters.

“Some weather, eh?” Smith continued.

He hadn’t quite twigged our line of attack yet which was annoying. He went to that farm supply place all the time, he knew its hours. Surely he must know that we know. Unless Crabbie had messed up but it wasn’t like Crabbie to mess up.

I examined my notes. “This was Nolan’s Farm Supply on the Kilwaughter Road?” I asked.

“Aye.”

“And what did you get there again?” I asked.

“Chicken feed.”

“Did you happen to keep the receipt?”

“Two years ago, I don’t think so. It’s possible but I don’t think so,” he said.

“But you definitely bought chicken feed there and were back before 10 am?” Lawson said.

His face fell. Now he realized his mistake. We were not Larne RUC. We actually looked into things.

“Uhm, I’m not a hundred percent sure about the hour,” he said.

I nodded at Crabbie.

“The shop doesn’t open until 11,” Crabbie said. “I’ve been there many times. It’s 11 to 8 every day except Sundays. You made the phone call to the ambulance at 10:05.”

“So you lied to the police about going to Nolan’s and getting some chicken feed. You didn’t do that,” I said.

“I, I must have got the time wrong, that’s all,” Smith said.

I rubbed my chin. “Are you suggesting you went to Nolan’s and bought the chicken feed after you discovered your wife was asphyxiating in the car? While the paramedics were working on her, perhaps?”

“I’m not saying that at all. I maybe got the day wrong. It was a very stressful time. Maybe I got the feed the day before. Mixed it up in my head,” he said.

Lawson had picked up the case file and turned to the appropriate section.

“Mr Smith,” Lawson began. “When Detective Constable Colbert of Larne RUC asked you where you where while your wife was committing suicide you said and I quote ‘I was out getting chicken feed’.”

Smith saw a little opening here. “It doesn’t say where I went to get the chicken feed does it? Maybe that morning I’d driven in to Larne.”

Unfortunately for all us Constable Colbert had not done the obvious and called Nolan’s to check the alibi so we only had old memories and surmises and statements that maybe could be explained away in front of a jury of Mr Smith’s peers.

This was something but it wasn’t exactly a coup de grace. It wasn’t a coup de anything. With a clever lawyer it would be Scottish tea, weak beer, thin sliced pan bread rather than thick sliced veda bread.

None of it amounted to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

“I put it to you Mr Smith that you didn’t drive into Larne. You said you were there and back in twenty minutes,” I said.

He leaned back in his chair. There was a hint of a smile on his face. “Well, like I say, it was a couple of years ago. I don’t really remember.”

Suddenly the door burst open and half a dozen giggling little kids poured into the room followed by Bree Smith. The oldest was about seven, the youngest a toddler.

“Sorry gents, they got away from me when my back was turned,” Bree Smith said.

She ushered the children from the room.

“All yours?” I asked her husband.

He nodded. “The twins and Shirley are from my marriage. Bree had two boys and a girl. So it’s a nice wee mix.”

“Four boys, two girls? All under, what, seven?” I asked.

“Aye.”

“A handful.”

“It can be. Sometimes. But we’re making it work.”

A turf log cracked in the fire.

I couldn’t think of anything else to hit him with just then. I looked at Crabbie. He had nothing else. Lawson handed me the file and pointed to a highlighted section in Smith’s bio.

When he was 17, he had been arrested for aggravated assault in Ballymena. He’d been given a suspended sentence that time. There was violence in his past. A lot of people had some teenage violence in the past. And that was the kind of thing that the rules of evidence prevented you bringing up in court.

I shook my head at him.

But Lawson’s blue eyes were still glaring furiously at me.

What the hell was he—

“When you were seventeen, Mr Smith, you assaulted a man in Ballymena,” Lawson said.

“And?”

“That man was James McDonald, wasn’t it?” Lawson continued.

Smith nodded and smiled. I was starting to hate that bloody smile. “Which is it, officers? My motive was either a love affair with Bree, or it was me waiting for the ten year period to pass on our life insurance, or it was a long standing antagonism with Jim McDonald?”

“Perhaps it was all three?” I suggested.

Smith got to his feet.

“All right officers, I think that’s enough,” he said. He folded his arms and we had no alternative but to get up ourselves. He began herding us out the door like he probably did with his frigging sheep. “You’ll have to go gentlemen,” Smith continued. “We have a lot of packing and preparation to do. We’re making a new life for ourselves away from the endless gossip and suspicious bloody bullshit of Northern Ireland. If you want to talk to me again, you can make arrangements through my solicitor. And you better talk fast cos we’re on flight on Tuesday night.”

We had no warrant. There was really no option but to leave a second time with our tails between our legs.

Outside the weather was as bad as ever. Worse.

“Bollocks!” Lawson said, as snow and grit from the yard poured into his face.

We ran in the general direction of the Land Rover until we practically bumped into it.

We jumped in the cab and turned the engine on.

Of course the starter chose this moment to fail.

“Is it the spark?” Lawson asked.

Crabbie looked at the younger man in mild amazement before his face refound its equanimity. “It’s a diesel engine,” Crabbie said softly.

“The cold has probably. . .” I began and tailed off, I wasn’t exactly sure what the cold would have done to the engine either.

We tried it again and again and again.

We let it rest and tried again.

“I’ll take a look,” Crabbie said.

He went outside and popped the bonnet.

He came back five minutes later.

“The ignition system hasn’t been prepped for low temperatures,” Crabbie said and went on to explain the problem in some detail.

Lawson and I nodded and pretended to understand.

“What does this mean?” Lawson asked.

“We’ll have to try again in the morning,” Crabbie said.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Quite sure,” Crabbie insisted. His hair was white from the snow and his face was blue. His hands were shaking.

Shite.

I was already on the radio but the battery hadn’t charged it sufficiently and it wouldn’t turn on.

No vehicle, no radio. Now what?

“Sleep in the back tonight?” Lawson said.

Nominally he was the boss of our little expedition but he had fallen back into the role of subordinate. I didn’t mind so much except for cases like now when I was expected to magic up a solution for us.

“It’s supposed to be minus eight tonight. It’d be a metal coffin back there,” Crabbie began. “And the roads are impassable so the only place we can walk to is. . .”

“We can’t,” Lawson said. “Back to Smith farm for a third time? The embarrassment, the shame. . .”

Crabbie shuddered. “No, I suppose you’re right there, Alex, we can’t do that. The looks they’ll give us.”

“And it’ll get back to Larne RUC, we’ll be a laughing stock,” Lawson said.

“Aye,” Crabbie agreed.

But I wasn’t going to let those two bloody lunatics kill us.

“Crabbie, Alex, a wise man once said, ‘a policeman’s lot is not a happy one’. I’m sorry lads, but it’s back to the farm for the three of us. I’m afraid we’ll have to throw ourselves on Mr Smith’s hospitality,” I insisted.

7

Humiliation is indeed a big part of a policeman’s lot. Humiliation by your superiors, by lawyers, occasionally by judges in court. And of course by the general public. Thomas Hobbes says the state and its agents have to have a monopoly on violence for the state to function, but in democracies making fun of these agents is a way of pretending this isn’t real. ‘Making fun’ is a metric on a sliding scale - in London they make the cops wear stupid hats, in Northern Ireland they put mercury tilt bombs under their cars.

“You do the talking Lawson,” I said as we shivered up to the door, snow in our hair, ears, eyes.

“No way. It’s excruciating. Sergeant McCrabban should do it, he lives nearby and he’s the most respectable of the three of us,” Lawson replied.

Crabbie nodded. “I’ll do it. We’re getting foundered out here,” he said, and knocked on the door.

Mrs Smith answered. Gone now was the lovey dovey. Up now was the defensive hatchet face of an embattled member of a community surrounded by crazy Prods and repressed by fascist cops.

“I can’t believe this!” she said. “Didn’t my husband explain we’re getting ready for the biggest move of our lives? This level of harassment is bollocks, so it is.”

“Uhm, we’re not here to ask any more questions Mrs Smith,” Crabbie said. “Our Land Rover won’t start and we can’t get the radio to work so we were wondering if we could use your telephone—”

She cut him off. “Nope! You can’t. The telephone lines are down.”

Crabbie turned to look at me. I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging nod.

“In that case we were wondering if uhm, you could let us stay somewhere in the house until morning. We’ll be no trouble, but we really can’t spend the night in the Land Rover, it’s subzero and—”

She had crossed her arms now and was slowly shaking her head.

“We have several of the local weans over for a sleepover. To say goodbye sort of thing. The house is stuffed to the gills. There’s no room at all!”

Mr Smith appeared at the door.

“What’s all this?” he asked.

Crabbie explained our predicament. We were going to freeze to death out in the Land Rover. There was no way we could walk to Ballynure and we couldn’t even summon help on the radio, not that help would be able to get through on these roads.

“I told them there’s no room, what with all the weans over now,” Helen Smith said. “It’s a special night for the kids. We can’t have three of them lot in the house anyway ruining everything. Even if they hadn’t been so bloody rude and come here with all their bloody lying insinuating questions.”

She had worked herself up into quite a tizzy. Red cheeks. White lips. Foot tapping. If there was a shotgun behind the door I could imagine her grabbing it and giving us a wee blast of birdshot to learn us some manners.

“There’s the barn, I suppose,” Mr Smith said. “Better than nothing. I can get you some blankets and there’s tons of hay for insulation. Bridey and Brandy are in there. Just checked on them. They’re ok.”

“Bridey and Brandy?” Lawson spluttered, perhaps imagining milkmaids and a night of erotic adventure.

“Mares,” Crabbie said using some kind of psychic farmer skill.

“Aye,” Smith agreed.

I looked at the lads and spoke for them: “That would be ideal, thank you so much, Mr Smith. And you know, apologies, for the earlier confrontational attitude. We are detectives, we were given a lead. We have to follow through on it. It’s our job.”

Smith nodded. “I understand. Go on out there to the barn and I’ll bring some blankets and some soup.”

We thanked him and hurried across the farm yard.

Crabbie opened the side door and we went in the spacious, but surprisingly warm barn that was stacked with hay bails, had an upper level stacked for loose hay and in a wee stall on the right there were a couple of fine looking horses. There was no heating of any kind and you could see your breath but we wouldn’t freeze in here unlike in the Land Rover.

“The murder barn,” Lawson said, melodramatically.

“Maybe now we’re guests we’ll try that presumption of innocence thing again,” I said. We had fired our arrows at Mr Smith and we had missed. He was likely a wrong ‘un but there was nothing we could do about it.

“And holy Christ they kept the death car!” Lawson said.

Sure enough the car in which the first Mrs Smith had committed suicide was parked there in a corner. A little white Ford Escort.

Spooky. Once, many years ago, in circumstances I’d rather not relate, I’d been offered an opportunity to sit in the Hank Williams Death Car, a 1952 blue Cadillac convertible. I’d turned that one down. As peelers however we couldn’t help ourselves. We walked over to the Ford Escort and examined it.

“Why would he keep this vehicle?” Lawson asked.

“He’s a farmer. They’re not sentimental and they’re not superstitious,” Crabbie said.

“They’re superstitious about something things. Faery trees?” I said and Crabbie had to give me that one.

“True enough, Sean, true enough, and there used to be a big faery tree on the road on that wee hill up there,” he said.

“On this farm?”

“Aye, an oak, I drove past it all the time.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Smith must have cut it down and had the roots pulled up to get himself more acreage. You actually don’t get a lot more land but it makes sowing and harvesting easier if you’re an arable farmer.”

“And is Smith an arable farmer?”

“Of course,” Crabbie said, as if the signs were obvious.

The barn door opened and two snow flake covered children came in carrying sleeping bags and blankets. Another child was carrying Tupperware boxes of sausages. We thanked the kids and they ran delightedly back into the snow.

“Where do we kip?” Lawson asked.

“Upstairs in the hayloft,” Crabbie said.

“It’s not exactly warm,” Lawson said, shivering. “I suppose we can’t make a fire?”

Crabbie didn’t even turn to look at him. The glaring from the back of his head was enough.

We ate the sausages and found a tap that poured out cold, delicious well water.

We went upstairs and settled down in the hay with our sleeping bags.

“Do you think they’ll try to kill us in the night?” I asked Crabbie. “I mean it is IRA country.”

“I’m in two minds about that one, Sean. They do hate the police up here but it would be an unusual violation of the rules of hospitality to invite someone into your house and then kill them.”

“Let’s not take any chances, eh? I’ll do the first watch,” I said.

“I’ll go second,” Crabbie said.

Lawson shrugged. “Alright, I’ll go last. You think we can get that light off?” he said, pointing at a big old yellow bulb above us.

“I think we better leave it on,” Crabbie said.

“Aye,” I agreed.

Lawson shrugged and burrowed into his sleeping bag.

“Where do we do the necessary in a place like this?” I asked Crabbie.

“I wouldn’t go outside. Just find a wee corner,” Crabbie said.

Within ten minutes they were both asleep. Bored, I went down the ladder to talk to the horses in Irish. Two medium sized gentle mares about five or six years old.

There was a window with a view up to the house. Difficult to see through the weather but it looked like the lights were all still on.

The wind’s song had a distinct northern quality to it and I supposed that the storm had come here, like the Vikings, from Scandinavia.

I went back up the ladder again.

Crabbie and Lawson still out for the count.

I climbed into the sleeping bag and used the Everton scarf as a scratchy pillow.

I really tried to stay awake but I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew I heard Crabbie’s voice saying, “I’ll take over now, Sean.”

“Ok mate, cheers,” I said and clearly completely unable to read all the portents and warning signs of the last few hours and days I returned to a remarkably deep and untroubled sleep.

8

It was Crabbie not Lawson who shook me awake in the morning. Lawson was snoring loudly on his side.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Snow’s stopped. It’s sunny,” Crabbie said. “Smith’s coming. I think he’s bringing us breakfast.”

I yawned, stretched, looked out the barn window and saw a deep blue sky and an ocean of white covering the fields, stonewalls, hedgerows and everything. No wind. No cows or crows.

“The cows are in their byres. In their dungy byres,” I said trying to recall that as a line of verse from somewhere.

Walking gingerly through a snow ploughed path in the farmyard, Smith was carrying a tray of grub.

“Very hospitable of him,” I said.

“I wonder if he’d tow the Land Rover to the top of the hill there with his tractor? A rolling start might be just the thing to get us going,” Crabbie said. He’d clearly been thinking about this for a while.

“You think we can make it back? There’s no way these roads will have been ploughed,” I said skeptically.

“Well we can’t stay here. Accuse a man of murder and then spend a weekend with him on his farm playing whist and Monopoly?”

“Aye, but the roads.”

“I’ll get us back. Low gear, reduce the tire pressure. . .with our weight we’ll nudge the snow out of the way until we get to Larne,” Crabbie said.

“And then what?”

“The A2 should be ok.”

“If you say so, mate, let’s go down and meet our host, eh?” I said.

I put on my scarf, wrapping it a dozen times about my neck and zipped up me leather jacket. We went down the ladder just as the side door to the barn opened and Smith came in with a tray of tea and scones. He explained that they were made by his missus in the wee hours of this very morning.

“Much appreciated,” I said. “And after we get this we’ll be on our way. We’ve taken too much of your time, already, Mr Smith.”

“No problem,” he said and as he turned to go, he reached into his pocket and fished out a shiny piece of paper.

He handed it to me because Crabbie was holding the tray. “What’s this?” I asked.

“The receipt for the chicken feed. I found it. I didn’t go to Ballynure after all. I went to the Greta’s Hardware in Gleno. I completely forgot until I had a wee rummage last night. And of course Greta’s was open.”

I looked at the time and date stamp.

9:32 am March 8. Two years and twelve days ago.

He had indeed been out shopping while his wife was killing herself.

This whole thing had been an enormous waste of everyone’s time.

Jesus Christ.

Crabbie put the tray down. “Quite the wild goose chase,” I said, handing him the receipt.

He examined it and nodded. “I suppose an apology is in order,” he said.

Smith was shaking his head. “Oh, gentlemen, please, you were only doing your job, as you said.”

I took the receipt back and examined the purchases:

6 pounds of chicken feed

2 boxes of 6 inch nails

2 boxes of 4 inch nails

20 feet of garden hose

pack of 4 50 Watt light bulbs

1 jar of engine grease

I looked at Smith again. He was smiling broadly. He was thinking he’d gotten away with it.

He was fucked.

“Do you still have the garden hose? Is it that green one over there on the shelf?” I asked.

“It is,” he said, oblivious to all the mayhem those two words were going to cause in the next twenty minutes.

9

I took the hose down off the shelf. There was still a tag on it from the Coroner’s Office in Larne.

I handed it to Crabbie.

He nodded and handed it back to me.

“This is the hose your wife used to kill herself,” I said.

Smith nodded sadly. It wasn’t exactly a confession but it would be enough to convict him in front of a jury of his peers.

Twenty to twenty five years he’d get for this.

No happy ending, no ice hockey games, no northern lights for this eejit.

“I believe you did make a trip to the hardware store that morning, I believe you did purchase chicken feed and a hose,” I said.

“I did, you’ve got the proof,” Smith said, stupidly. Even now not seeing the big fat logic truck heading straight toward him.

“Which leaves me confused,” I said. “How did your wife run this hose from the exhaust pipe of the car to her passenger’s side window, if you didn’t actually buy it until after she was dead?”

Crabbie sighed with embarrassment and looked at the straw covered floor. The Poirot moments of police work, while very rare, had never been his favourite part of the job.

Whereas I bloody loved ‘em.

Smith looked at the hose and then at me and Crabbie.

“What?”

“Your wife killed herself with this hose. Which you didn’t actually buy until the morning of her suicide,” Crabbie said.

“Which you didn’t actually buy until she had somehow killed herself with it. She was using the hose to kill herself while you were out buying it. I mean did you also pick up a time travel device that morning? Your car wasn’t a DeLorean was it?” I said, overegging it a bit too much perhaps.

Smith knew there was no point dissembling any more.

“Did you know that he beat her?” Smith said.

“Who beat whom?” I said.

“James McDonald. He was a bully and a ruffian. He beat and bullied Bree for years,” he said sadly.

“Why didn’t you go to the police,” I said.

“Around here no one goes to the police,” he said.

“Did you plan it together? You and Bree?” Crabbie asked.

Smith turned and looked through the barn door at the sun glaring off his fields and the big white snow drifts on the roads and hedgerows. Perhaps Calgary would look like this? A Calgary he was never going to get to in real life.

He shook his head ruefully and smiled.

Then he turned and ran out of the barn and closed the side door behind him.

It would have been comic if it hadn’t been so fucking serious.

“Oh dear,” Crabbie said.

“Lawson! Wake up and get down here!” I yelled into the hayloft.

“Dad?” Lawson moaned.

“No, it’s not your bloody da with your bloody breakfast. Get your boots on and get down here!” I said.

“Be gentle with the lad. He is the gaffer,” Crabbie said, sotto voce.

Aye, but time was of the essence here. We didn’t want Smith to do something stupid.

Lawson came down the ladder and we quickly filled him in.

“So what now?” he asked.

“Now we got up to the house and arrest the murdering wee fuck,” I said. “And Crabbie uses his miracle powers to get the Land Rover working and we drive him to the station for questioning.”

“Ok,” Lawson said.

We went to the side door from which Smith had just made his Buster Keaton egress.

It didn’t open.

We shouldered it, pushed it. No go.

“There must be a latch on the outside, stop animals escaping, I suppose,” Crabbie said.

“Fine, Mr Smith, queen takes pawn, but knight takes bloody queen,” I muttered. “We’ll use the barn doors to get out.”

We said good morning to the horses and jogged to the big barn doors on the other side of the building.

These opened from the inside. We lifted the iron hook at the bottom of the left door, unhooked the right door and pushed into the dazzling sunlight.

The shotgun blast peppered the door and a pellet tore across my shoulder, ripping the leather of my jacket.

“Shit!” Lawson yelled and dived back into the barn closely followed by Crabbie and me.

Another shotgun blast and more shot into the wood.

Crabbie had the presence of mind to crawl to the door and close it.

“Anybody hurt?” I asked, examining the tear across my leather jacket.

“I’m ok,” Lawson said.

“Me too,” Crabbie replied. “What happened to you, Sean?”

I put my hand under my jumper and felt around my shoulder. It was stinging and there was a trickle of blood but there was no pellet in the flesh. I’d just been grazed. Six inches to the right though and I would have been hit in the fucking face. Could have nicked my jugular.

“That was heavy buckshot,” Crabbie said, examining the door. “He’s not messing around. He’s trying to kill us.”

“Did you gentlemen remember to bring your sidearms?” I asked Crabbie and Lawson. Rather late in the day for this kind of question but fortunately they both showed me their revolvers.

“Anyone bring any spare ammo?” I asked.

They shook their heads.

“So we have three guns and eighteen bullets between us,” I said.

“It should be enough,” Crabbie said. “Three against one.”

“Aye, what does he think he’s playing it?” Lawson asked. “He can’t take on three of us.”

“What do you think you’re playing at Smith?” I yelled outside. “You’re just delaying the inevitable.”

There was no reply.

I turned to Crabbie. “Do you remember the layout of the farm-yard? How far from here to the Land Rover? Where’s he likely to be shooting at us from?”

“Twenty five yards to the Rover. We go out and turn left and sprint. He’s likely over by that woodshed opposite the door. He’d get two shots off at us before he’d have to reload his shotgun.”

“But if we go out Butch and Sundance style guns ablazing? Make him keep his head down?”

Crabbie nodded. “I think we could make it without giving him an opportunity to return fire.”

“It would be a really stupid way to die or lose a fucking eye or something,” I said to the Crabman.

“Butch and Sundance?” Lawson said. “Isn’t this how they got killed at the end?”

Crabbie cleared his throat. “What choice do we have? We can’t wait for reinforcements. Who even knows we came up here? My missus will think I’ve hunkered down somewhere because of the roads. Probably won’t get really worried until tea time.”

I rubbed my chin. “What’s his plan, do you think? He’s going to just wait there forever and hope for a lucky shot?”

“You should talk to him, Sean,” Lawson said “Before anyone else gets hurt. What if one of the weans wanders over there?”

I opened the door a crack.

“Don’t shoot, Smith! I’m not coming out! I just want to parley,” I began.

Silence.

“Smith, listen you have a bunch of kids here,” I said. “We’re going to have to come out shooting and someone could get hurt. This is ridiculous. You know how this is going to end. Put the gun down and come to the barn and we’ll take you in without any more fuss.”

Silence.

Was he complying?

I opened the door a further crack.

Two shotgun blasts from different angles ripping up the woodwork.

I slammed the door shut.

“He’s recruited the wife,” Lawson said.

“And she’s pretty handy with a 12 bore shotgun,” Crabbie concurred.

10

At times like these that I’d often think to myself: what would Leonard Cohen do if he was in my shoes? To be honest this has never been a useful line of inquiry or self discovery and I don’t know why I keep doing it. Perhaps wondering what Mark E Smith of The Fall might do in a tight spot would be more profitable, I don’t know. He did fire a roadie once for eating salad.

“Sean, you’re lost in thought! Come on!” Crabbie said. “We’re going to have to go out that side door and double round on them, fast!”

He was right.

We ran to the side door and shouldered it. Crabbie first, then me, then Lawson, then Crabbie again.

“Stand back,” Crabbie said and shot twice through the wood to the hinge on the other side.

Lawson ran at the door and give it full welly with his charge. It began to give. I shouldered it and splinters ran down from the hinge.

Crabbie gave it a good kick with his size thirteen boots and the door opened.

Another shotgun blast from further away but enough to make us hit the deck.

“Fucking hell!” Lawson said as another blast immediately followed the first.

We scrambled from the door back into the barn.

We caught our breath by the ladder to the hay loft.

“They’re covering all the bloody exits!” Lawson said.

“They have at least three shooters,” Crabbie said with the dry equanimity of the BBC weather man announcing only light rain for the morrow.

“He hasn’t recruited one of the kids has he?” Lawson asked.

“Nah, the oldest wean was about seven. He’s got one of his bolshy neighbors involved hasn’t he?” I said.

“That’s a bad sign,” Crabbie said.

“Unpack that for us will ya,” I said.

“It likely means the phones are working and if one neighbor has come over in his tractor to kill some peelers, why not the whole townland?”

“How many men would that be in total, do you think?” I asked.

“A dozen?”

Shite. They could even storm the place if they wanted. Get the drop on us. “Keep your eyes on those doors, lads. If anyone comes in shoot him,” I said.

“We’re fucked, arent we?” Lawson said. He looked worried now. Worse than that – really scared, the poor kid.

“Steady on, son,” I said. “It’s not logical. They’re farmers, practical people. Would they really risk life in prison for a murderer?”

“Think about it, Sean,” Crabbie said. “He’s not told them he’s a murderer. He’s told them a bunch of vindictive, Proddy cops from Carrick have come up here to set him up, right before he leaves the country. Before him and his family have a chance of a better life in Canada.”

“How do they think they can possibly get away with killing us?” Lawson spluttered.

“They’ll say it was an IRA ambush. We come up here, get stuck in the snow, the Land Rover gets petrol bombed and attacked by a local IRA Active Service Unit,” I said.

Crabbie nodded. “The shotgun riddled bodies might be a bit of a giveaway, though,” he said. “They’ll probably bury the bodies in some sheugh and just leave the burned out Land Rover for the peelers to find.”

The colour had drained from Lawson’s normally rosy cheeks. He was still in his twenties. He had his whole life ahead of him. He didn’t want to be buried in some sheugh up here in bandit country, his body never found.

I patted him on the shoulder.

“What do we do? Can we stay here? In the barn?” he asked.

I looked at the Crabman, my go to source for all agricultural shite. “Do you think they’d set the barn on fire with the animals in here?”

Crabbie shrugged. “I suppose as the day lengthens and they get more desperate they’ll have to do something like that. They know we’ve got guns. They don’t want to risk coming in here. So why not smoke us out?”

“Keep your voices down! You’re giving them bloody ideas!” Lawson said.

“Don’t worry about any of that, lad. Just keep looking at that side door and if anyone sticks their ugly bonce through it, shoot it,” I said.

“Listen!” Crabbie said.

In the distance you could hear a diesel engine straining up the hill.

“What is that?” I asked him.

“More locals arriving in their tractors,” Crabbie explained.

“Aggressive wee shites, aren’t they?” I said.

“Aye, they can be,” he said and yawned. He picked up the plate of toast Smith had brought over this morning. He put some marmalade and Smith’s own butter on a few slices and offered them to us.

Lawson shook his head.

“You have to eat,” Crabbie insisted and Lawson took one.

I also had some toast and it wasn’t bad.

Northern Irish butter from Northern Irish cows is likely the best in the world. I’m not sure where the marmalade came from but it was very acceptable too. Smith had been an excellent host until him and his pals had decided to shoot at us.

I again found myself drifting to thoughts of Leonard Cohen. I’d seen him at CBGB’s once in the late 70s. He wasn’t there to perform, he was just there for craic. Blondie had been on the bill that night. I remember it well because after the gig half the men in the place had tried to give Debbie Harry their phone number. I had shyly approached Leonard Cohen at the sticky disgusting, miserable excuse for a bar they had in there and asked him if I could buy him a drink in gratitude for New Skin For The Old Ceremony.

We’d talked and I told him he looked like he was someone who had figured it all out.

He laughed and said that he had nothing figured out but that as he got older he had learned that creativity, communication and human connection were very important to him.

Communication and human connection were perhaps what my subconscious was trying to impart here with this little recollection.

I turned to Crabbie. “I’ll try to parley again. Let all of Smith’s mates know why we come up here,” I said.

I went to the big barn door and opened it a crack.

“This is crazy! You’re not going to get away with it, Smith! You killed your wife and you killed Jim McDonald and we’re going to take you down the station to answer for it!”

No reply.

I looked at Crabbie.

“Give them some more,” he said.

“We’ve got the hose pipe you used to poison your wife with. The hose pipe you bought the morning of her death! That will be enough to convict you for her murder at least!”

Crabbie and Lawson nodded.

“We’re used to your RUC lies up here, peeler! You’re surrounded now. We have six guns pointing at you and half a dozen more on the way,” Smith said.

“We’re three armed well trained police officers in here! If you try to storm this place a lot of you are going to die. And for what? To save a man who murdered his wife and his neighbour?”

“More peeler lies!” Smith replied.

“Smith, if you come with us now, you’ll get a fair trial and nothing will happen to the men you’ve roped into this. There’s no need for anyone else to get hurt or for anyone else to go to jail!”

“No one’s going to jail! Youse should never have come up here!” Smith yelled.

“You should never have killed your wife!” I yelled back.

“That’s what you pigs do. Frame innocent people for nothing! And you a Catholic! You’re a traitor, Duffy! You’re scum! And you’re going to pay for it!” Smith screamed.

“Burn them out!” someone else yelled. A male voice.

“Aye, burn the fuckers out!” another man yelled.

Damn.

I turned to Lawson and Crabbie.

“How many men total in this wee rebel kingdom, Crabbie?”

“Fifty people? Twenty men? But there’s no way all of them could get here even with tractors. I’d say the neighboring farms would be the limit.”

“He may be bluffing. If his wife was telling the truth and the phones are down no one else is coming,” Lawson said.

“She may have been fibbing about the phones,” Crabbie suggested. “Or the service might have come back on. Very patchy up here at the best of times.”

“But that’s not the issue. The issue is he’s rallied at least some mates and they have come. Could we take them all on now?” I asked. “Couple of quick blasts from our sidearms. Make them duck while we run to the Rover?”

“I don’t know. When it was just him, it seemed possible, but against two, three or four guns?” Crabbie mused.

“There’s a window upstairs in the hay loft. Maybe I can see how it all lies?” Lawson said.

“Aye, run up there lad and see what you can see,” I said.

Lawson ran up the ladder. “I can only see one man behind a log pile with a shotgun,” he said. “There is a tractor coming down the road that we came along.”

I turned to Crabbie. “The longer we wait here, the more precarious it’s going to get, isn’t it?” I asked.

He nodded and offered me another slice of toast but I’d had enough.

“So do we do a Butch and Sundance to the Land Rover?”

“I suppose you’ll want to be Robert Redford,” Crabbie said.

“Mate, you can be Redford,” I offered, magnanimously.

“Uhm, that ship has sailed, lads,” Lawson said. “They’ve set fire to the Land Rover.”

I ran up the ladder with my bad knees to see for myself.

Someone had pried open the bonnet of the Land Rover, poured an accelerant into the engine block and lit it. The flames were ten feet high. Not good. RUC Land Rovers were tough old birds but if we did run out there and make it to the cab, that’s almost certainly where we would breathe our last breaths without ever getting the thing going.

“Well that’s a nice bunch of piss on our fucking chips,” I said.

Not exactly the stiff upper lip or sang froid of my Duffy ancestors but let them try to be peelers in contemporary Ulster with seemingly every knuckle dragging gobshite for miles around trying to kill them or banjax their wheels.

I heard a bottle crack onto the barn’s roof.

“What was that?” Lawson asked.

“Now they’re throwing Molotov cocktails onto the roof,” I said.

“So they are going to burn us out?” Lawson asked, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

“Savages,” Crabbie said. “Don’t they know there’s horses in here?”

“Forget the horses, what about us?” Lawson said.

Crabbie climbed up the ladder somehow still carrying the plate of toast.

Just then another Molotov smashed onto the other side of the corrugated iron roof and exploded.

“We can’t stay here. We’ve nowhere to run to. It’s not good, Crabman,” I said, pointing through the window at our Land Rover which was now entirely ablaze, just as the Holestone in Doagh had kind of foreseen this morning.

“Nope,” Crabbie agreed and bit into his toast with a trifle more vehemence than usual.

11

The roof caught fire. Smoke began filling the barn.

Crabbie was looking at something through the window.

“What is it, mate?” I asked.

“If we can make it to that tractor at the bottom of the yard there, I can drive it across the fields.”

“They’ll kill us as soon as we open the door,” Lawson said.

“Aye. You’re probably right,” Crabbie said. “Well, there is something we can do. We have to get those poor horses out of here. Down the ladder, Sean, come on!”

We went down the ladder and into the barn proper.

Crabbie opened the barn door a crack.

“I’m sending out the horses!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot!”

“What?” someone yelled.

“I’m sending out the horses!”

“The what?”

“He’s sending out the bloody horses!” I screamed at the eejits.

Crabbie led the panicked horses to the barn door and shoved them outside.

The farmers with shotguns did not shoot them and the horses ran to a snowy meadow at the bottom of the yard.

They could burn us and shoot at us with gleeful abandon. I’m not sure Crabbie had done the right thing there. I was as Irish as him. We both loved horses, but with the horses gone it was just three peelers in the barn now. Crabbie was reading my thoughts. “It was the right thing to do,” he said.

“Aye,” I said, but I didn’t see what the next move was.

The roof was rippling with a impressive saffron and yellow flame. “Now I know how Joan of Arc felt,” Morrissey says in Big Mouth Strikes Again. I, myself, did not want to know how Joan of Arc felt.

We could not Butch and Sundance it. We could not stay here.

We—

“The murder car!” Lawson said.

“What?”

“The car! The car he murdered his wife in! His wife’s Ford Escort!”

I looked at Crabbie.

“It won’t be able to get anywhere on these roads this morning, Sean, but if we can get it started I can drive us to that tractor and we’d have a chance to escape at least,” he said.

“Well done Lawson. Now grab that hose, that’s our evidence,” I said. “We’re getting out of here.”

12

On closer examination the murder car was indeed a Ford Escort Harrier from about 1980. There were no keys but to hotwire it all we had to do was kick the area under the steering wheel and the front panel gave entirely way. British automotive engineering at its finest.

The seats were covered with dust and leaves and bits of hay. It apparently hadn’t been used since Smith had killed his wife in it a year ago.

I sparked it and the engine grumbled, whined and died.

What a typically Northern Irish twenty four hours. If we didn’t get this rust bucket going we were dead. This time yesterday I was at the holestone dipping my toes in some mystical shit. I had seen a Land Rover on fire. And, I remembered, I had seen a harrier.

“Come on, I saw you, you’re here to help us,” I said to the car in Irish.

Lawson and Crabbie must have assumed it was a prayer and a damned good one because the engine kicked into life.

“I’ll drive, you lads keep your heads down,” I said.

“Nah, we’ll cover you,” Lawson said. “You drive and we’ll try to shoot the bastards.”

“Crabbie, tell the lad to keep his head down,” I said.

“He’s his own man, Sean,” Crabbie said. I shook my head at him with disappointment. Normally the Crabman and I were sympatico on such matters.

I turned to Lawson and looked him in the eyes. “Keep your fucking head down, you wee shite. Ok?”

“Ok,” he said, chastened.

I reversed the Ford Escort Harrier into the centre of the barn and put it in first.

“Top speed on this beast, you reckon?” I asked Crabbie.

“I don’t know? Fifty?”

“I’ll get us doing sixty out the farm yard. You sure you know how to get that tractor started?”

Crabbie’s contempt for the question left it unanswered.

I floored the accelerator pedal and let go of the handbrake.

We screamed across the barn and by the time we smashed through the barn doors I’d already shifted into second gear.

For two seconds no one shot at us because they didn’t know what had happened.

When they did shoot in the next second they forgot to lead us and we were already doing thirty.

We skidded on the mud, I turned into the skid and turned out again.

Third gear.

Thirty five miles per hour.

A shotgun blast took out the back window. A piece of glass hit the back of my neck and it could have been friggin serious had not the glass fragment got lost in the folded labyrinth of Beth’s Everton scarf.

We hit a haystack and a kid’s bike. Another shotgun blast took out the left rear tire.

“Can I shoot back?” Lawson said.

“No! Keep your fucking head down, son!”

Fourth gear. Forty miles an hour.

We were through the yard and passed the house. Behind me in the rearview I could see the barn on fire and men with long guns in pursuit. If any of them had a rifle we might be in trouble but I bet all they had were doubled barreled shotguns which didn’t have much of a range.

We skidded again and went up on two wheels.

If we flipped we were dead.

We dropped back down again.

“Slow down, Sean. We’re almost at the tractor,” Crabbie said.

But he needn’t have warned me. Out of the yard the road was impassable now and the snow was bogging up the wheels.

“You all right, Alexander?” I asked looking back.

“Fine,” he said, perhaps a little petulantly. Hell with him. He wasn’t going to get himself knocked off on our watch.

We shuddered to a halt.

Crabbie’s passenger door wouldn’t open so he wound down the window and climbed out. Lawson was already out the back with the hose draped over his shoulder. Good lad.

My door opened and I stumbled into the snow and the oh so bright sunlight.

The men with guns were gaining.

Six, no seven, of them.

Smith and his immediate neighbors who either didn’t buy our murder narrative or didn’t care.

I slipped in the snow. Crabbie was already at the tractor climbing up into the cab.

“Do those things need a key or anything?” Lawson asked, helping me to my feet.

“No idea,” I said.

The tractor rumbled into life.

There was the sound of a shotgun blast and we both flinched.

“Get up here!” Crabbie said.

Lawson went first and I followed him into the cab which was designed for one small Irish farmer.

The men with guns were fifty yards away.

“Are you sure we can outrun them?” I asked.

“We can do ten miles per hour through snow. They’ll be lucky to do five,” Crabbie said, starting her up.

“Try to get her up to fifteen,” I said.

Crabbie put the beast in gear and we raced up the road, through a sheugh, through a hedge and over a snow covered arable field.

Within a minute and a half the men were far behind us.

Crabbie got us back on the B road.

Ten minutes along the road we were closer to sea level and the snow was only few inches deep.

We stopped at a farm in Magheramorne and asked to use their telephone.

Their phone was working.

“I like your scarf,” one of the farmer’s kids said.

“You can have it,” I said it. “It’s a lucky scarf. But I’ve used up my bit of its luck.”

Crabbie got through to Larne RUC.

Within twenty minutes half a dozen Land Rovers showed up and Larne RUC, unconvinced they could handle a bunch of farmers with shotguns persuaded the army to send a flipping helicopter. Arrests were made and Larne got the credit. Probably the first murder case they’d “solved” all bloody year.

13

A few weeks later I called the archaeology department at Queens University and explained my discovery about the Doagh Holestone and its connection to the equinox.

It was a wee bit discouraging as they didn’t seem that interested. I was finally put through to a Professor Caldwell who said she was writing down everything I was saying but I think she was only humoring me. They probably had to take a lot of these calls from borderline insane members of the public. She said she’d send a graduate student down to take some measurements of the holestone, but, of course, I never heard anything more about it.

As for Smith. That lad was well up the shite sheugh.

He was in the great shite swamp in fact. The Director of Public Prosecutions said that he was convinced it was a joint criminal enterprise and had Bree Smith arrested and her charged with murder too.

The case against the wife looked weak to me but Smith must have been afraid that the kids would lose both their parents to prison so he cut a deal and confessed to the two murders. They let Bree go and remanded him in custody for sentencing.

There didn’t seem much point in charging him with our attempted murder after that. I didn’t want to go to court and neither did Crabbie so I sort of mislaid the paperwork.

At the sentencing hearing they gave Smith two life sentences to be served concurrently.

Minimum twenty four years, which could have been worse.

He had to pay back the insurance money too which hopefully annoyed him.

Mr Vincent, the insurance investigator, took us all out for a round of drinks at Ownies and a few weeks later he sent me “Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill” a mono Chess 1444 original pressing - which was much appreciated.

Romany King did not win the Grand National.

Party Politics did.

Bree Smith did not move the family to Canada.

She hired someone to help her run the farm. Shortly thereafter she divorced her husband and married the hired hand.

Crabbie sees her occasionally when he goes to Nolan’s farm supply shop in Ballynure. She remembers Crabbie and snubs him, dragging her children out of there, muttering unpleasant stuff about the police. Which is most unfortunate because poor Crabbie can be surprisingly sensitive about that kind of thing.

THE END