Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty Read Free Book Online

for photographs against the beached ship.
    â€œAnd Prince Potemkin smiles in his far-off grave,” I muttered to myself.
    â€œI heard you were there, Inspector?” Constable Iain Sinclair asked me.
    â€œMe, there? Nah, I was supposed to go, but I couldn’t be bothered in the end. I’m sure you all know more about it than I do,” I told him, to kill that and any other potentially tedious Q&As about the debacle.
    CID had recently been moved back to the window offices overlooking the lough and that’s where I found Sergeant McCrabban setting up an incident room and schooling our two new DCs in proper protocol.
    I hadn’t really paid close attention to the new officers yet. Both of them were young and I’d been somewhat neglectful of my responsibilities by having Crabbie break them into the ways of the station. The female officer, Helen Fletcher, was, perhaps, the slightly more interesting of the two. This was only her second posting after an obligatory tour on the border. She was a brunette, reasonably pretty, with green eyes and very pale skin. Her personnel file said she was twenty-two, but she looked younger. She hadn’t gone to college but had done OK in her A-levels before joining the cops. She didn’t smoke or drink, but McCrabban told me that this was for “health reasons” rather than some kind of religious thing—which, of course, was much weirder: if you were that worried about your health, why would you join the RUC? On her first day at the office I witnessed her get completely stumped by the coffee machine, which didn’t herald brilliance, but on the other hand WPC Strange told me that Fletcher’s hair was always done up in a fiendishly complicated plait that she said implied hidden skills on the part of the plaitee. The male detective constable was a handsome, blond-haired kid, with an easy charm, good humor, and obvious intelligence. Four As in his A-levels: Maths, History, French, and Further Maths (whatever that was). His name was Alexander Lawson and he really was a kid, with pimples and everything. Everyone else in the station seemed to like him already, but I couldn’t help feel a little bit irritated by his slickness, and I could see that Crabbie felt the same. Lawson had gone to some posh Belfast school and joined the cops straight after. He hadn’t said three sentences to me since he had arrived on the same day as our new chief inspector, but we could sense that we were not destined to become fast friends. Both new arrivals were Protestants, of course, and with the transfer of Constable O’Reilly to Ballycastle RUC, I was again the only Catholic police officer in the building. I didn’t mind. Everyone knew better than to fuck with me. I was the second-highest-ranking copper in the place, and my boss, Chief Inspector McArthur, now owed me a favor.
    I sat down at the conference table and lit a smoke while Crabbie went on with his spiel: “ . . . the victims, Mr. and Mrs. Kelly, were shot at close range with a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol. Both from the same gun. The cleaning lady, Mrs. McCawly, had observed a nine-millimeter semi-automatic in the desk drawer next to Mr. Kelly’s bed. This gun is now missing. Also missing is Michael Kelly, Mr. and Mrs. Kelly’s son. The boy is twenty-two years old and has been living at home now for the last year after dropping out of Oxford University. Mrs. McCawly had been witness to several arguments between father and son. The nature of these arguments seems to be over Michael’s failures to take responsibility for his future, as well as more general complaints from Mr. Kelly about Michael’s demeanor, friends, and attitude. On several occasions these arguments had, quote, ‘almost come to blows,’ unquote, with Mrs. Kelly intervening between the two of them.”
    Constable Lawson was writing furiously in his notebook and, copying his example,