I Hear the Sirens in the Street

he?”
    “That’s where you’re wrong again. Red Hall is entailed. He can’t touch the freehold or sell it or lease it out. It’s all going to his eldest son.”
    “He has kids?”
    “Two.”
    “One of each?”
    “Two boys. They live with their mother. Actually they’re both at Harrow.”
    “Harrow over the water?” I asked stupidly.
    “Do you know any other Harrow?”
    “He’s divorced, then.”
    “You really are a detective. A regular Poirot,” she said, with a sweet teasing smile that got her back into my good books. She snugged her legs up underneath her body. Riding horses had given her powerful thighs and done wonders for her complexion.
    “I’ll take that,” she said, holding my wrist and removing the empty tea cup. I’ve known judo instructors with a less impressive grip. And that assurance, too. This was no blushing, weeping widow. Not now.
    “What about you? How are you doing for money?” I asked.
    “Since my husband’s murder, you mean? Is this also part of your investigation? Could I be compelled to answer?”
    “Perhaps.”
    “Don’t you find question and answer a rather tedious form of discourse? Wouldn’t you rather have a conversation?”
    “When time is a factor there’s really no other way, I’m afraid.”
    “Is time a factor here? My husband was killed in December. It’s April.”
    “Time is always a factor in police work, Mrs McAlpine.”
    She sighed. “I live on Martin’s army pension of seventy-five pounds a week. I pay twenty-five pounds of that to Harry. For rent.”
    I nodded. “And how much does the land bring in?”
    She laughed. “Are you serious?”
    “Aye.”
    “I have forty sheep. Shorn, I’ll get perhaps three pounds a fleece; come lambing season, perhaps another five pounds a lamb. This year I may make two hundred pounds from the entire acreage.”
    “Can’t you grow something? I’m always hearing things about the high cost of wheat.”
    “No arable crops will grow here. It’s a marsh. This whole part of Islandmagee is one enormous swamp.”
    “Where were you last night, Mrs McAlpine?” I asked, abruptly changing tack.
    “When Dougherty was killed, you mean?”
    “Yes.”
    “I was at home. Reading. In other words, I have no alibi.”
    “What were you reading?”
    “ Middlemarch .”
    “I see.”
    “George Eliot.”
    “I know … Is that what you’re reading now?”
    “Yes.”
    She passed me the book. I flipped through it and gave it back.
    “Why would I kill poor Inspector Dougherty?” she asked while I was thinking of my next question.
    “Why indeed?”
    “No, let’s not play that game. Why do you think I may have done it? What possible motive could I have had?”
    I was looking for a little more outrage from her: How dare you accuse me of such a terrible thing! Not that that would have had much probative value one way or the other. Maybe she just wasn’t the demonstrative type.
    “Because I got him all riled up about your husband’s murder. Because I put a seed of doubt in his head that maybe you weren’ttelling everything you knew and because he came barging down there to ask you a whole bunch of questions,” I said.
    She smiled. “Then I got a gun from heaven knows where, found out where he lived and shot him?”
    And then dumped the weapon, drove to a phone box and claimed the hit on behalf of the IRA using a recognised IRA code word .
    “The assumption, naturally, is that I killed my husband for whatever reason and I was worried that Dougherty was getting close to discovering that I had done it and so he had to go too. Is that it?”
    “I suppose so,” I agreed.
    “Let me dissect this theory of yours a little … if I may.”
    “Be my guest.”
    “First of all, I didn’t kill Martin. Everything I’ve told you about his murder is completely true. I loved him. He loved me. We rarely argued. And what possible motive could I have had to do it? Fiduciary? For the pathetic lump sum I’ll get years from now from the compensation board? For the army pension? We had no life insurance—”
    “Why didn’t he take out life insurance?”
    “The weekly rates for a serving army officer are astronomical.”
    “Of course.”
    “Let me continue … So, no life insurance, a pathetic pension and then there’s the farm. What’s to stop Harry from kicking me out once Martin’s dead? I lose my husband, his income and my house? For what?”
    “There are other motives.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like the oldest motive