We reached the whitewashed cottage, the postcardy effect somewhat spoiled by a huge rusting oil tank for the central heating plonked right outside. There was no bell or knocker so we rapped on the wooden front door. After a second knock, we heard a radio being turned off and a female voice asked:

“Who is it?”

“It’s the police,” I said. “Carrickfergus RUC.”

“What do you want?” the voice asked.

“We want to talk to Martin McAlpine.”

“Hold on a sec!”

We waited a couple of minutes and a young woman answered the door. She had a towel wrapped round her head and she was wearing an ugly green dressing gown. She’d clearly only just stepped out of the bath or the shower. She was about twenty-two, with grey-blue eyes, red eyebrows, freckles. She was pretty in an unnerving, dreamy, “She Moved Through The Fair”, kind of way.

“Good morning, ma’am. Detective Inspector Duffy, Detective Constable McBride from Carrickfergus RUC. We’re looking for a Martin McAlpine. We believe that this is his address,” I said.

She smiled at me and her eyebrows arched in a well-calibrated display of annoyance and contempt.

“This is why this country is going down the drain,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“I said this is why this country is going down the drain. Nobody cares. Nobody is remotely competent at their jobs.”

Her voice had a distinct Islandmagee country accent tinge to it, but there was something else there too. She spoke well, with a middle-class diction and without hesitation. She’d had a decent education it seemed, or a year or two at uni.

The dog kept barking and two fields over a door opened in another thatched farmhouse and a man smoking a pipe came out to gawk at us. The woman waved to him and he waved back.

I looked at Matty to see if he knew what she was talking about, but he was in the dark too. I took out my warrant card and showed it to her.

“Carrickfergus RUC,” I said again.

“Heard you the first time,” she said.

“Is this Martin McAlpine’s address?” Matty asked.

“What’s this about?” she demanded.

“It’s a murder investigation,” I told her.

“Well, Martin didn’t do it, that’s for sure,” she said, reaching into the dressing-gown pocket and pulling out a packet of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth but she didn’t have a lighter. I got my Zippo, flipped it and lit it for her.

“Ta,” she muttered.

“So can we speak to Mr McAlpine?”

“If you’re a medium.”

“Sorry?”

“My husband’s dead. He was shot not fifty feet from here last December.”

“Oh, shit,” Matty said, sotto voce.

She took a puff on the cigarette and shook her head. “Why don’t the pair of youse come in out of the rain. I’ll make you a cup of tea before you have to drive back to Carrick.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The farmhouse was small, with thick stone walls and cubby windows. It smelled of peat from the fire. We sat down on a brown bean-bag sofa. There were spaces on the mantle and empty frames where photographs had once been. Even Matty could have figured out what the frames had once contained.

She came back with three mugs of strong sweet tea and sat opposite us in an uncomfortable-looking rocking chair.

“So what’s this all about?”

“I’m very sorry about your husband,” I said. “We had no idea. He was shot by terrorists?”

“The IRA killed him because he was in the UDr He was only a part-timer. He was going up the hills to check on the sheep. They must have been waiting behind the gate out there. They shot him in the chest. He never knew a thing about it, or so they say.”

Matty winced.

Yes, we had really ballsed this one up and no mistake.

“I’m very sorry. We should have checked the name before we came out here,” I said pathetically.

The Ulster Defence Regiment was a locally recruited regiment of the British Army. They conducted foot patrols and joint patrols with the police and as such they were a vital part of the British government’s anti-terrorist strategy. There were about five thousand UDR men and women in Northern Ireland. The IRA assassinated between fifty and a hundred of them every year, most in attacks like the one that had killed Mrs McAlpine’s husband: mercury tilt switch bombs under cars, rural ambushes and the like.

As coppers, though, we looked down on UDR men. We saw ourselves as elite professionals and them as, well … fucking wasters for the most part. Sure, they were brave and put their lives on the line, but who didn’t in this day and age?

There was also the fact that many of the hated disbanded B Specials had joined the UDR and that occasionally guns from their depots would find their way into the hands of the paramilitaries. I mean, I’m sure ninety-five per cent of the UDR soldiers were decent, hardworking people, but there were definitely more bad apples in the regiment than in the RUC.

Not that any of that mattered now. We should have known about the death of a security forces comrade and we didn’t.

“Hold on there, that tea’s too wet. I’ll get some biscuits,” Mrs McAlpine said.

When she had gone Matty put up his hands defensively.

“Don’t blame me, this was your responsibility, boss,” he said. “You just asked for an address. You didn’t tell me to check the births and deaths …”

“I know, I know. It can’t be helped.”

“We’ve made right arses of ourselves. In front of a good-looking woman, too,” Matty said.

“I’m surprised the name didn’t ring a bell.”

“December of last year was a bad time, the IRA were killing someone every day, we can’t remember all of them,” Matty protested.

It was true. Last November/December there’d been a lot of IRA murders including the notorious assassination of a fairly moderate Unionist MP, the Reverend Robert Bradford, which had absorbed most of the headlines; for one reason and another the IRA tended not to target local politicians but when they did it got the ink pots flowing.

The widow McAlpine came back in with a tray of biscuits.

She was still wearing the dressing gown but she’d taken the towel off her head. Her hair was chestnut red, curly, long. Somehow it made her look much older. Late twenties, maybe thirty. And she would age fast out here in the boglands on a scrabble sheep farm with no husband and no help.

“This is lovely, thanks,” Matty said, helping himself to a chocolate digestive.

“So what’s this all about?” she asked.

I told her about the body in the suitcase and the name tag that we’d found inside the case.

“I gave that suitcase away just before Christmas with all of Martin’s stuff. I couldn’t bear to have any of his gear around me any more and I thought that somebody might have the use of it.”

“Can you tell us where you left it?” I asked.

“Yes. The Carrickfergus Salvation Army.”

“And this was just before Christmas?”

“About a week before.”

“Okay, we’ll check it out.”

We finished our tea and stared at the peat logs crackling in the fireplace. Matty, the cheeky skitter, finished the entire plate of chocolate digestives.

“Well, we should be heading on,” I said, stood and pulled Matty up before he scoffed the poor woman out of house and home.

“We’re really sorry to have bothered you, Mrs McAlpine.”

“Not at all. It chills the blood thinking that someone used Martin’s old suitcase to get rid of a body.”

“Aye, it does indeed.”

She walked us to the front door.

“Well, thanks again,” I said, and offered her my hand.

She shook it and didn’t let go when I tried to disengage.

“It was just out there where your Land Rover was parked. They must have been hiding behind the stone wall. Two of them, they said. Gave him both barrels of a shotgun and sped off on a motorbike. Point blank range. Dr McCreery said that he wouldn’t have known a thing about it.”

“I’m sure that’s the case,” I said and tried to let go, but still she held on.