Serial Sunday: Murder in Hackney, Part II

By Paul Leone.

Kavanagh, confused and curious, followed Keziah across the street to the ragged house that had the lights on earlier. They were off now, at least until Keziah loudly banged the door knocker. Almost instantly, a baby began crying. A moment later, the door opened a crack. A freckly redheaded young woman with one baby in her arms and another in her belly stared out at the two constables.

“What’s this all about?” she asked over the wails of the infant. “You woke us all up.”

Keziah raised an eyebrow. The woman had on pants and a drool-stained shirt, neither of which showed any signs of being hastily donned. “Detective Inspector Keziah Carter, Londonshire Constabulary,” she said, showing her gold badge to the Irish woman. “Are you Niamh Dugan?”

“I am, and what of it?”

“Is constáblaí muid,” Kavanagh began.

“And? I’ve done nothing wrong, neither has the mister. Is it the baby you’re here to arrest?”

“No,” Keziah said. “There was a shooting just down the street tonight.”

The woman’s sour expression softened a little. Just a little. “And?”

“I’d like to talk to you about it.”

Just then, ‘the mister’ appeared. He was a tall, stocky man of like age to the missus, his head neatly shaved, his eyebrows just as red as his wife’s hair. He was fully dressed, too – Genoa pants and a t-shirt of the local abbey ball team. “There’s nothing to talk about. We didn’t see anything,” he said.

“Someone died.”

“We didn’t see anything,” Mrs. Dugan said, but she avoided Keziah’s stern gaze as she did.

“Inis dúinn an fhirinne, cailín. Tá fear marbh,” Kavanagh said gently.

“Ní chonaiceamar aon rud ar bith.” Mrs. Dugan was avoiding both their gazes.

Keziah pursed her lips. “I can bring you downtown.”

Mrs. Dugan looked up, her face hardening. “Not for nothing, you can’t! Where’s your warrant?” She was speaking louder now, loud enough to be heard by the corner boys all up and down the block.

“I can come back with one.”

“Then come back with it and then we’ll see,” Mr. Dugan snapped.

“That’s right. Now are you going to put little Aisling down or will you let me do it?” Mrs. Dugan demanded, gently patting her baby on the shoulder. She was still crying, but less loudly now.

“Someone died,” Keziah said again. “Right where you live.”

“That’s right,” Mr. Dugan said before shutting the door.

Keziah squared her shoulders and then turned to Kavanagh. “Won’t be needing your Irish translation much after all,” she said with a weary sort-of-smile.

Kavanagh scowled at the door. “Dubliners – what do you expect. More English than anything else, most of them…” She trailed off, remembering who she was speaking to.

Keziah eyed her for a moment as she tried to think of a witty rejoinder to defuse the faux pas. In the end, she just shrugged.

***

Two hours later, fortified by a cup of bottom-of-the-pot sludge that could only charitably be called coffee, Keziah finished reading her own hastily assembled notes on Mortimer. From what Records had been able to put together, the preacher had led a generally unremarkable life. He was born in Kirkby Stephen, a small town in Westmorland, in 1962, and spent his then-mandatory 18 months national service in the Navy, stationed in what was then Port Hussey, English Crown Colony of Oran, and now Marsa al-Kabir, Republic of Wahran. Afterwards, Mortimer moved to Carlisle, staying only long enough to get arrested for a peripheral role in a pub brawl and then relocating to Birkenhead. It was the wrong side of England from Hull, but he had indeed been a dock worker up until 2013. Then he changed his domicile to London and lived the quiet life of a (more or less) ordinary civilian until some brute with a gun cut it short.

Armed with and angered by that knowledge, Keziah sat down across from Mike Mullen in one of the mews. Mullen was one of the Hoxtonites that had been grabbed at the scene and left to simmer for hours in a locked room adjacent to the Murder and Manslaughter office. The stale air and flickering fluorescent tube-lights of the holding room had not done wonders for his mood, although the long wait had worn his anger down to exhaustion.

Now, as the sun was rising somewhere behind a veil of dark thunderclouds, he stared blearily at the equally tired constable.

“What was your relationship with Charlie Mortimer?” Keziah asked.

“The crazy old eiricach?”

Keziah smiled coldly. “The preacher, yes.”

Mullen shrugged. “I didn’t have a ‘relationship’ with him. Saw him around now and then, that’s all. Waving his empty cross around and making noise up and down the neighbourhood, you know yourself.”

“Do I?”

He cocked his head and looked at Keziah. “Sure you do – aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile.”

Keziah didn’t know what that translated as, but the meaning was obvious. She ignored it. “Some people might not like that sort of thing. Did he get under your skin?”

That penetrated Mullen’s tired mind. “Not enough to bleedin’ well shoot him. He was just a balloon. Full of hot air.”

“Someone you’d want to deflate.”

Mullen vehemently shook his head.

“Someone wanted to,” Keziah said. “You can’t shoot someone three times by accident.” You could, in fact, but no need to let that fact derail the conversation.

Mullen stared at her, not quite there yet.

Keziah made it clear for him. “If not you, then who?”

At that, he shook his head again, even more vehemently. “Níl a fhios agam!”

Keziah slammed her hand down on the table, hard enough to make one of the cheap plastic legs creak. Mullen started and leaned away from her. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not ly –”

“You are. Now listen. You can leave this room as a free man or in handcuffs. That’s your decision. Make it. Now.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Prove it.”

“Huh-how?” He paused then. “A-and that’s not how it works! You’ve to prove someone’s guilty, I’ve not to prove I’m innocent…”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know!”

“I don’t believe you!” Keziah slammed her hand on the table again. “Tell the truth or I’ll have you tossed in a hole. Wilful assistant to murder if you’re lucky.”

Mullen paled. “I didn’t do anything,” he repeated in a near mumble.

“Stop wasting my time, then,” Keziah said as she rose to her feet so fast her chair toppled over and landed with a dull thud.

Mullen flinched. He flinched again when Keziah came around the table and yanked him to his feet. She got right in his face. “Listen to me! This is your last chance to talk to someone who isn’t a crown barrister. With them, it’s only what crime you get charged with and how many years your sentence is. Do you understand?”

“Yes!”

“Then tell me who did it!” Keziah pulled him closer, close enough she could count the faint freckles around his eyes. “Tell me.”

Mullen stared at her, wide-eyed, stammering... and then he took a deep breath and exhaled in her face. “I didn’t see anything and I don’t know anything.”

Keziah scowled and pushed Mullen back down into the chair. She’d brought him right to the edge, she knew, but he had no interest in jumping. “I hope you like handcuffs, then.”

Mullen smirked.

Keziah pursed her lips and stalked out without another word. She loudly slammed the door shut behind her, but the anger dropped from her face the moment she did.

Through the two-way mirror, she saw Mullen sitting in the chair, staring down at his knuckles. A moment later, he furtively picked his nose for a few seconds, then spent another few seconds trying to flick the bogey off his finger.

Keziah shook her head. One idiot down, five to go.

Next on the list was Seoirse McKeogh, a hulking twenty-five-year-old with a perpetual sneer thanks to a knife scar on the left side of his face. Keziah knew this particular idiot from her days in Iniquity. In addition to his part-time job as a welder at the Henley Auto factory in Limehouse, he had tried his hand at burglary and drug dealing before settling on pimpery as a safer vocation. He was recently back from a year long holiday at Chiswick Gaol and still on parole.

Keziah stared at him through the mew mirror for a moment before heading into the room.

McKeogh looked up at her, squinting a little. She could practically hear the rusty gears in his mind turning. Who’s this? How the hell do I know her?

“I arrested you once, Mr. McKeogh, and I’d be happy to do it again,” Keziah said as she sat down opposite him. “Just give me an excuse to send you back to Chiswick.”

McKeogh cleared his throat. He sounded like a garbage disposal and Keziah guessed he might’ve picked up smoking while on gaoliday. “For what?”

“For shooting the preacher.”

“I didn’t shoot anybody.”

“You were right there when it happened. You’re a violent man with a history of crime. That’s the kind of math juries like.”

McKeogh scoffed.

“You don’t think so?”

“You don’t have any evidence. I know that, because I didn’t do it.”

Keziah leaned forward a little. “Who should I be talking to, then? Give me a name.”

“I’m no snitch.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“That’s all.”

They went at it for a few more rounds, Keziah pushing harder with each passing moment, before the man finally sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “Am I under arrest?”

“No,” Keziah said. “But I’m going to tell your probation officer. Getting involved in a murder investigation, that’s doing further wrong. Don’t you think?”

Rule Number One of the parole agreement was Do No Further Wrong. And even the appearance of impropriety might be enough to get the probation board to break out the red RETURN TO CUSTODY stamps. At least that’s what Keziah hoped McKeogh was thinking.

From the look on his face, a considerably less cocky one, he was thinking that, or at least his thought was leading him in that direction, however slowly.

“If you’re not involved, then you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Keziah said. “If you are involved, though...”

“I’m not.”

“Then tell me who was. Who pulled the trigger? Who shot the preacher?”

McKeogh hesitated.

“It’s him or you, Seoirse. Whose name will be on the warrant?”

“Bitch,” McKeogh muttered.

Keziah stared at him. “The name.”

He gave it up in a mumble.

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Paul Leone is an author who, among other works, wrote the book In and Out of the Reich for Sea Lion.