He lit me one. “Smoking can cause cancer”, it said on the packet. It was a fine time to bring that up.

The day had turned cold and fog was rolling down the hill and where it met the electricity pylons little halos of Saint Elmo’s fire were forming, vanishing and reforming again.

I took a puff of the Player. It was pretty rough.

“In other words, Chief Inspector, after the condemnation by the politicians and after the church service ends and the TV cameras leave, this case will go nowhere.”

He was a little ticked at that. “I don’t know how things are done in your manor, mate, but we take every case seriously. It’s not my fucking fault that it’s nearly fucking impossible to break up an IRA cell, is it?”

I nodded and threw the ciggie away. I walked over to the garage again.

“Three rounds in the garage.”

“So.”

“When does an IRA hit team miss not once, not twice, but three times?”

“I’d stake my pension that this is an ordinary assassination by an ordinary IRA cell.”

“Stake something worth a damn. None of us are making old bones, are we? But let’s give it your best-case argument. Let’s say they’ve brought along a newcomer who’s on his first job. They have to blood the newcomers somehow, don’t they? Every killer has a first time.”

“Aye.”

“So after the new boy misses and sticks three in the garage door and Dougherty gets his gun out, then his partner can’t take any more of it and shoots him in the chest.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Tony admitted.

“Two things, Tony. Two things. First, Dougherty is old and fat and drunk and fucking slow! For him to get that gun out of that leather holster, this team must really be shite.”

Tony nodded. “What’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is that in this scenario the slugs can’t all have come from the same gun. The ones in the garage will be from a different weapon from the ones in Dougherty … But they’re not, are they?”

“Aaahh,” Tony said and shook his head. “Missed that. No, you’re right. Preliminary ballistics suggests that—”

“Lets say the widow McAlpine comes up here. She’s never fired a hand gun before in her life, she squeezes one off, she misses, he turns, she misses again, he starts fumbling for his gun, she misses again, he’s nearly got the .38 out and she finally hits the fucker and hits him again and again.”

“Why?”

“Let’s say you wanted to kill a copper. For whatever reason. Maybe he fucked your wife or embezzled you or something. Say anything. Now, if you or someone close to you was in the security forces, it would be pretty easy, wouldn’t it? You get yourself a gun – anywhere – you put on a balaclava, shoot the bugger and then call the Belfast Telegraph with a recognised terrorist code word. Peelers like you and me show up at the crime scene and because the IRA has claimed responsibility we don’t look too hard at it cos we more or less know who did it and we know that we’ll never catch them in a million years.”

He finished his fag and nodded thoughtfully.

“Your case hangs on the fact that Dougherty went digging after his wee talk with you.”

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Easy to check.”

“He goes back to the widow, starts throwing accusations around. She goes all panic stations, gets herself a piece, comes here and shoots him? You think that’s more likely than an IRA hit?”

I laughed and looked at my DMs. “I suppose it’s a bit thin, Tony, but I can’t help thinking that these three holes in the garage mean something.”

He looked at me, squinted into the sun juking between the clouds over the Antrim Plateau and grinned. “You know what I liked about you when we worked together in the County Armagh?”

“What?”

“Even when you were completely wrong about something, the journey into your wrongness was always fucking interesting. Come with me.”

We walked over to a tall, lean guy with a big Dick Spring moustache.

“Gerry, take over here, I’m going down to Larne RUC to have a wee look at Dougherty’s current case load. Could be personal, not random, you never know, do you?”

“Aye,” Gerry agreed.

Tony had come in a cop Land Rover so we took my car.

It was a ten-minute run from rural Ballygalley to the grey misery that was Larne. We chatted a little and Radio One played “Ebony and Ivory”, a new song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. The breakfast DJ Mike Read played it two times in a row which was pretty hardcore of him as it was clearly the worst song of the decade so far, perhaps of the entire century.

Larne RUC.

With one of their own gunned down, the atmosphere was apocalyptic and doom laden. We paid our respects to the duty sergeant and ostentatiously put a few coppers in the widows and orphans box.

We met with the Superintendent, expressed our condolences, told him that we wanted to look into Dougherty’s old cases and Tony explained that this was nothing more than Standard Operating Procedure.

The Super couldn’t have cared less. He was new on the job, had barely interacted with Dougherty and now he had a funeral to suss and with the Chief Constable and half a dozen VIPs coming it was going to be a friggin’ nightmare.

We left him to his drama and found Dougherty’s office.

A shining twenty-three-year-old detective constable called Conlon showed us in. I asked him to hang around to answer questions while Tony looked through Dougherty’s files.

“Was Inspector Dougherty a family man?” I asked conversationally.

“Wife and a grown daughter. Ex-wife. He was divorced.”

“Where’s she? The wife, I mean.”

“Wife and daughter are both over the water, I gathered.”

“Whereabouts?”

“I don’t know. London somewhere?”

“Was he a social man – did you all go out for drinks come a Friday night?”

Conlon hesitated, torn between loyalty to the dead man and a desire to tell me how it was.

“Inspector Dougherty wasn’t exactly a social drinker. When he drank, he drank, if you catch my meaning.”

“I catch your meaning. Was he the senior detective here?”

“Detective Chief Inspector Canning is the senior detective here. He’s in court today, I could try and page him?”

“No, no, you’ll be fine. Tell me more about Inspector Dougherty; what sort of a man was he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Friendly, dour, a practical joker, what?”

“Well, he was, uh, sort of semi-retired, so he was. Nobody really … I didn’t have much to do with him.”

“Was he working on anything in particular in the last couple of days?” I asked.

“I thought this was all a random IRA hit?” Conlon asked suspiciously.

“It was a random IRA hit,” Tony said, looking up from the filing cabinet.

“Did Dougherty mention any threats or anything that was troubling him?”

“Not to me.”

“To anybody else?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“What was he working on the last few days?”

“I didn’t know him very well,” he said, hesitated, and looked out the window.

“You don’t want to speak ill of the dead … is that the vibe I’m catching here?” I asked him.

DC Conlon reddened, gave a little half nod and said nothing.

“The Inspector didn’t do much but come in late, sit in his office, drink, leave early, drive home half drunk, is that it?” I wondered.

DC Conlon nodded again.

“But what about the last couple of days? Did he seem different? More fired up? Onto anything?”

“Not so I’d noticed,” Conlon said.

“Nothing out of the ordinary at all?”

Conlon shook his head. His hair seemed to move independently of his head when he did that and it made him look particularly stupid.

“How did he get assigned to the McAlpine murder if he was such a bloody lightweight?” I asked.

“Chief Inspector Canning was in for his appendix,” Conlon said.

“And after he came back from his appendix?”

“Well, that was an open and shut case, wasn’t it?”