The detective up late, p.1
The Detective Up Late, page 1
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PRAISE FOR ADRIAN MCKINTY
“Unrelenting suspense.”
—Stephen King
“Brilliant. Beautifully written. A masterpiece of tension.”
—Don Winslow,
New York Times bestselling author of The Cartel and The Force
“McKinty hangs on to his wit and literacy even under duress . . . Beneath its surface of high-speed thrills, The Chain is clearly the work of the philosophical thinker McKinty has always been.”
—Janet Maslin,
New York Times
“Adrian McKinty just leapt to the top of my list of must-read suspense novelists. He writes with confidence, heart, and style to spare. He’s the real deal.”
—Dennis Lehane,
New York Times bestselling author of Mystic River and Since We Fell
“McKinty has written another irresistible and pulse-pounding thriller about the surprising places evil hides and just how far we’ll go for those we love.”
—Karin Slaughter
“Adrian McKinty is a master.”
—USA Today
“No one does high-stakes tension like McKinty.”
—Sarah Pearse,
New York Times bestselling author of The Sanatorium
“McKinty crackles with raw talent. His dialogue is superb, his characters rich, and his plotting tight and seamless.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“McKinty is one of the most striking and most memorable crime voices to emerge on the scene in years. His plots tempt you to read at top speed, but don’t give in: this writing—sharply observant, intelligent, and shot through with black humor—should be savored.”
—Tana French
“A storyteller with the kind of style and panache that blur the line between genre and mainstream. Top-drawer.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Adrian McKinty [is] a master of modern noir, up there with Dennis Lehane and James Ellroy.”
—Guardian (London)
“McKinty is a streetwise, energetic gunslinger of a writer, firing off volleys of sassy dialogue and explosive action that always delivers what it has promised the reader.”
—Irish Times (Dublin)
“He is a cross between Mickey Spillane and Damon Runyon—the toughest, the best.”
—Frank McCourt,
New York Times bestselling author
BOOKS BY ADRIAN MCKINTY
the sean duffy series
The Cold Cold Ground
I Hear the Sirens in the Street
In the Morning I’ll Be Gone
Gun Street Girl
Rain Dogs
Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly
The Detective Up Late
the michael forsythe series
Dead I Well May Be
The Dead Yard
The Bloomsday Dead
the lighthouse trilogy
The Lighthouse Land
The Lighthouse War
The Lighthouse Keepers
standalone novels
Orange Rhymes with Everything
Hidden River
Fifty Grand
Deviant
Falling Glass
The Sun Is God
The Chain
The Island
THE DETECTIVE UP LATE
THE SEAN DUFFY SERIES
BOOK 7
ADRIAN MCKINTY
Copyright © 2023 by Adrian McKinty
E-book published in 2023 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Stephanie Stanton
All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner
whatsoever without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5047-6271-7
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5047-6267-0
Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
CONTENTS
Prelude in E-flat Major:
1. Perdido Street Station
2. Duffy’s Last Case
3. Twenty Wasted Hours
4. This Is a Bad Town for Such a Pretty Face
5. S = k log W
6. Moving Day on Coronation Road
7. The Return of Ulysses
8. Wet Daylight
9. I Am the One Who Knocks
10. The Three Suspects
11. Mrs McCawley
12. Dunbar, Jones and Mrs McCawley
13. Sent to Coventry
14. The Total Girlfriend Experience
15. Shaking the Tree
16. The Folk Park Incident
17. The Tip
18. The Fourth Floor
19. The AK-74s
20. The Men Who Bump Back
21. Terrible Tradecraft
22. The Old “Dead Girl in the Abortion Clinic” Number
23. The Detective Up Late
24. Closing the Book on DI Duffy’s Last Case
25. The Meet
26. A Short Film About Killing
27. The Postcards
28. The Stone of Divisions
About the Author
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs . . . I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Two English Poems” (1934)
I’m the detective up late.
—Tom Waits, “Bad as Me” (2011)
PRELUDE IN E-FLAT MAJOR:
SEAN DUFFY, YEAR ZERO
Night coils above the eastern skyline.
An occult sun sinks into an alien sea.
The fog smells of rust and rot like an old bicycle.
The boat glides over the unseen water, its 25 cc engine barely turning the prop. “Belfast” in Irish means river mouth, and we are in the city’s throat, where the river Lagan is smothered by the lough.
Put, put, put goes the little outboard. The constable at the prow is waving a xenon arc lamp back and forth as I steer the skiff through the grey twilight. Dusk is falling and it’s not yet three in the afternoon.
We are on a body hunt. The girl was last seen loitering by the Queen’s Bridge and is now nowhere to be found.
We glide over the opaque water, the surface hidden by a thin line of oil and a scum of weed. The yellow light of the lamp oscillates through the gloom, revealing nothing.
Constable Cathcart is a solemn, nervous young man and is not in the mood for conversation, which suits me fine.
From out here Belfast looks abandoned—land and water merging over the estuary. The city has a diluvian feel. It is a city of Doggerland or Heraklion or Atlantis. A flock of scolding herring gulls flies away from us and skids onto the greasy deck of HMS Caroline, a light cruiser dating from World War I that has been attached to its dock for so long that it’s now the second-oldest commissioned vessel in the entire Royal Navy. (The oldest, of course, is HMS Victory in Portsmouth.)
The stillness deepens. The odour of decomposing wood floats across from the crumbling Titanic wharf. Belfast lurks there in the night, swathed in black silence, as taciturn and broody and gruff as its populace. Even the Gazelle helicopter that hovers continually over the Falls Road seems muted, tired and far away.
Calm the water is. Calm the heavens are. Calm the city is.
But underneath the surface of the discernible world is another world of kin struggle and blood feud and death. An older order of ancient laws and obligations, customs that go back to the footfall of the first men through the grasslands of the Great Rift Valley in Africa.
I steer the boat along the piers and jetties, everywhere I think a body might have washed up. Chip papers, newspapers, Coke cans, beer cans but nothing pertinent.
“I’m cold,” Constable Cathcart finally says. “Can we go home now?”
He’s asking me because although we are the same titular rank, I am the senior constable. And realistically all of this—the boat, the spotlight, the search—is only for form’s sake. The tide’s been ebbing for the last three hours, a body would be miles out to sea by now.
Still, returning so soon seems irreverent and unprofessional. “If you’re cold, put the hood up on your parka,” I tell him.
He obeys and the funnel hood restricts his field of vision to about thirty degrees in front of him.
I steer the nameless RUC dinghy into the deep-water channel.
An emerald sandpiper emerges from the murk with a crab wriggling in its mouth. It flies directly through the spotlight beam giving Cathcart a start. But the deep-water channel turns out to be far too choppy for the little boat and water starts coming over the gunwales. We’re out here in our uniforms, sans lifejacket, and with our body armour on we’d sink like a stone if we went over the side.
I turn us around and head back into the harbour towards the Harland and Wolff shipyard where the tide and current might have carried a body onto one of the slipways. Lights are coming on and a mile south
We punt under the cranes, derricks and gantries. The ship looming in the dry dock is the SS Ravenscraig, a 950-foot long bulk carrier being built for British Steel. It’ll be one of the last vessels H&W will make for anyone. Not anticipating the cruise ship boom of the nineties, the Tory government will let the shipyards in Belfast and the Clyde wither on the vine. Once a third of all the ships in the world were built here but within a decade that venerable tradition will be all but extinguished.
But the Duffy of that night doesn’t know that yet. The Duffy of that era knows hardly anything.
The Duffy of that night starts whistling. It will take his girlfriend Beth to tell him that it’s unlucky to whistle in an open boat. The tune he is whistling is “Lament of the Lagan Valley” whose last two lines are “Forgive us, oh, Lord, the sins of the past / and may you in our mercy be kind to Belfast,” which, when you think about it, is a little obvious, a little too on the nose to underscore this scene.
Even the Duffy of that time can see that, and his mind starts playing a different aquatic melody: the Vorspiel in E-flat Major of Das Rheingold, the culmination of Wagner’s work in Romantic drone music.
“Over there along the wharves,” I direct Cathcart while I play in my head the unhurried Von Karajan version that so captures the tension within the counterpoint, as Wagner tries to hide his love/hate relationship with Heine. Love because how can you not love the poems, hate because Heine is a Jew.
The police boat moves slowly back through the calm as the music swirls to a climax. The whiteness darkens into the shapes of buildings. Ruined buildings. Buildings that evoke despair. This town has been broken by ten years of bombings and murder and sectarian civil war. A town from the aphotic zone. A city of the apoca—
“We’ve been out here nearly an hour, how much longer? I’ve a party to go to,” Cathcart mutters.
Party? What party? What’s he talking about?
“An hour’s not enough. The sergeant will accuse us of not fulfilling our due diligence.”
“The sergeant doesn’t give a damn about some wee doll who might or might not have thrown herself in the tide. We’ve bigger fish to fry now we’re on the Butchers case.”
The hood falls, and I look at the back of Cathcart’s neck, white and young, quivering like a goose gizzard. He’s right, of course. This whole thing reeks of pro forma. A going-through-the-motions.
Our entire section has been seconded to the team under Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Nesbitt, head of the CID Murder Squad in Tennent Street RUC. Nesbitt is investigating the Shankill Butchers—a Loyalist death cult who have slaughtered at least twenty people in random attacks over the last three years. Almost all the victims have been Catholics, dragged off the street and hacked to death with butcher knives and meat cleavers.
The Shankill Butchers have become a cause célèbre, folk heroes to some of the more warped denizens of Protestant West Belfast and bogey men to everyone else in the city. DCI Nesbitt has been given carte blanche to try to bring the bastards in. And in fact, the ring leaders are well known but no one is brave enough to testify against them; so its catch them in the act or get forensic residue—neither of which is a very promising prospect. In the end they’ll probably have to fit them up to get them off the streets.
I look at my watch. We’ve been at this over an hour now and there’s nothing out of the ordinary. I turn the tiller to the right and head back up the Lagan.
An elderly cop waiting at the jetty throws me a rope.
“Anything?” he asks.
“Nope.”
We tie the boat and get out.
The jarring suddenness of the land. The air shivering with the smell of rain.
Cathcart and I walk sullenly to the station. The pavements are slippery. The Vorspiel in my head circles continuously around the E-flat major chord before it crescendos, resonates and gutters into silence.
We show our faces to the security camera, go in the station and report to O’Neill, the big ruddy Incident Room sergeant.
“What’s the story, Duffy?”
“No sign of her, sir.”
“Waste of my bloody time. Waste of my officers’ time. Remember that, Duffy. Police work is about priorities. No, no, don’t take your armour off, we’re heading straight out.”
“Right now?”
“Aye, right now. No rest for the wicked. We’re first responders. Nesbitt and the bloody TV news are gonna be right behind us. I hope for your sake you didn’t have a fry for lunch.”
We drive to Montague Street where the body of a trainee nurse has been found with nineteen stab wounds in her chest and back.
“Raped first, a new low for the Butchers,” O’Neill says. Her clothes have been torn off and she’s been disemboweled.
She has ginger hair and delicate features. A kind face. Would have made a wonderful nurse.
We set up a perimeter and began canvassing for witnesses.
When Jimmy Nesbitt arrives with the BBC, ITN and hacks from the English press, we’ve already done all the grunt work.
“She was a Catholic, of course,” O’Neill whispers conspiratorially to me as we take a smoke break.
“How can you tell?” I ask him.
“Rosary in her left hand. She’d have been better to have had a bloody hammer.”
I nod and say nothing.
“Did you hear me, Duffy?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
He looks at me. “Christ you’re exhausted. Get on back to the station, the boss wants a word with you and when he has that word you go on to your bed. You hear me, son?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
Back to the station through the devastated streets. Past bomb sites turned into parking lots and derelict buildings and huge craters brimming with rainwater. I’m being watched by men in doors and alleyways. A peeler on his own. A tempting target. Death is close here.
The blue retreats.
The stars slink out.
Darkness.
Go back an hour, see what the angels saw. See what the angels saw and did nothing to prevent. The trainee nurse on her way to work. The intoxicated men pouring out of the car and dragging her away. Witnesses quickening their step, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.
Go back four hours to the runaway girl sitting on the edge of the Queen’s Bridge. Driven there by what demons? Drunkenness, domestic violence, sexual violence?
Any civilization that fails to appreciate its women is lost.
Deserves to be lost.
Rosemary Street. High Street. The station. Half a dozen cops around the telly watching Olivia de Havilland watching Errol Flynn showing off his archery prowess. Upstairs to the gaffer’s office. His hand outstretched. “Congratulations, Sean.”
I shake the hand. “Congratulations for what?”
“Obviously the higher-ups like what you’ve being doing here. I pride myself on being a mentor.”
“I’m still not clear what—”
“No more foot patrols for you my lad. You’re off the bloody streets for good. You’re the new breed, I suppose, Duffy. University men.”
“I’m being transferred, is that it?”
“Transferred? What? No. You’ve been promoted. You’re not an acting detective constable anymore. In fact, you’re not even a detective constable! You’ve been promoted to detective sergeant. Jesus, you’re really being fast-tracked. In a year you’ll probably be bumped up to DI. Some quiet, out-of-the-way station with your own team. They’re grooming you, Sean. They like the cut out of your jib. Be a good boy and keep your nose clean and don’t get bloody shot and you’ll end up a Chief Superintendent or an Assistant Chief Constable or maybe even the big prize itself with the knighthood and the house in Bangor and the six-figure pension.”
