I Hear the Sirens in the Street (5 page)

I phoned the General Post Office in Belfast and asked if they had any records of seeds being seized or coming through the mail. They said that they had no idea and would call me back.

McCrabban called UK customs to ask them the same question and after going through a couple of flunkies a “police liaison officer” told him that importing such seeds was not illegal or subject to duty so customs would have no interest in them.

The post office phoned back with the same story.

I called Dick Savage in Special Branch. Dick had taken chemistry at Queen's University about the same time as me. He wasn't a high flyer but he'd written several surprisingly acute internal memos on methods of suicide and how to distinguish a true suicide from a murder disguised to look like one.

Dick had heard of Abrin but had never heard of it being used in a poisoning anywhere in the British Isles. He told me he'd look into it.

I went into see Chief Inspector Brennan and broke the bad news that our John Doe was definitely American but that we had a good chance of finding out who he was through the immigration records.

“When we've got his name we should inform the US Consulate. And we'll probably need the Consulate's help cross referencing our list of names against veterans of the First Infantry Division.”

Brennan nodded. “I suppose you want
me
to call them.”

“Better coming from you, sir. You're the head of station. More official, all that jazz.”

“You just don't want to do it.”

“Could be a difficult phone call.”

“And?”

“I'm feeling a bit fragile today, sir. I may just have been dumped by my girlfriend.”

“That doctor bint you were seeing?”

“Aye.”

“I could see that coming. She was out of your league, son.”

“Will you make the call, sir?”

“It'll be the start of a shitstorm … a dead American – as if we don't have enough problems.”

I stood there and let weary resignation over come his weathered face like melted lard over a cast-iron skillet. He sighed dramatically. “All right. I suppose I'll do it for you, like I do everything around here. You're sure he's a Yank?”

I told him about the tattoo.

“All right, good. Scram. And get Carol's cake, ready. She's in in half an hour.”

When Carol came in at three we had her party.

Tea, cake, party hats, both types of lemonade.

Carol had been on planet Earth for sixty years. She ate the cake, drank the tea, smiled and said how wonderful it all was. Brennan gave her a toast and it was Brennan, not Carol, who told us the story of her first week on the job in 1941 when a Luftwaffe Heinkel 111 dropped a stick of 250 kilograms bombs on the station. We'd all heard the tale before but it was a reteller. The only person who'd been hurt that day was a prisoner in the cells who broke an arm. Course, up in Belfast, where the rest of the Heinkel squadron had gone, people were less fortunate.

The sun came out and the day brightened to such an extent that a few us spilled out onto the fire escape and started slipping rum into the Coke. A pretty female reservist with a tiny waist and a weird Geordieland accent asked me if it was true that “I had killed three men with my bare hands”.

She was creeping me out so I made myself scarce, gave Carol a kiss, said goodnight to the lads, locked up the office and headed home.

Coronation Road in Victoria Housing Estate was in one of its rare moments of serenity: stray dogs sleeping in the middle
of the street, feral moggies walking on slate roofs, women with rollers in their hair hanging washing on plastic lines, men with flat caps and pipes digging in their gardens. Children from three streets were playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek called 123 Kick A Tin. Children who were adorable and shoeless and dressed like extras from a '50s movie.

I parked the BMW outside my house, nodded a hello to the neighbours and went inside.

I made a vodka gimlet in a pint glass, stuck on a random tin of soup and with infinitely more care picked out a selection of records that would get me through the evening: “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division, “Bryter Layter” by Nick Drake and Neil Young's “After The Goldrush”. Yeah, I was in
that
kind of mood.

I lay on the leather sofa and watched the clock. The children's game ended. The lights come on all over Belfast. The army helicopters took to the skies.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is this Duffy?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I was looking for you at work, Duffy, but apparently you'd left already. Lucky for some, eh?”

It was the weasly Kenny Dalziel from clerical.

“What's the matter, Kenny?”

“The situation is a disaster. A total disaster. I've been pulling my hair out. You don't happen to know who started all this, do you?”

“Gavrilo Princip?”

“What?”

“What's this about, Kenny?”

“It's yet another problem with your department, Inspector Duffy. Specifically Detective Constable Matty McBride's claim for overtime in the last pay period. It's tantamount to fraud.”

“Wouldn't surprise me.”

“Constable McBride cannot claim for time and a half danger money while also claiming overtime! That would be triple time and believe me, Duffy, nobody, and I mean nobody, is getting triple time on my watch …”

I stopped paying attention. When the conversation reached a natural conclusion I told him that I understood his concern and hung up the phone. I switched on the box. A preacher on one side, thought for the day on the other. This country was Bible mad.

Half an hour later Dick Savage called me with info about Abrin. It was an extremely rare poison that he said had never been used in any murder case anywhere in the British Isles. He thought that maybe it had been used in a couple of incidents in America and I might want to look into that.

I thanked him and called Laura, but she didn't pick up the phone.

I made myself another vodka gimlet, drank it, turned off the soup, and put “Bryter Layter” on album repeat and then changed my mind. Nick Drake, like heroin or Marmite, was best in small doses.

As was typical of Ulster's spring weather systems, a hard horizontal rain was lashing the kitchen windows now so I switched the record player to its 78 mode and after some rummaging I found “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” by The Ink Spots with Ella Fitzgerald.

I tolerated the Ink Spot guy singing the first verse but when Ella came on I just about lost it.

The phone startled me.

“Hello?”

“You know the way you're always saying that I'm a lazy bastard and that I don't take this job seriously?”

It was Matty.

“I don't believe that I've ever said any such thing, Matty. In
fact I was just defending your honour to that hatchet-faced goblin, Dalziel, in clerical,” I said.

“That sounds like a bold-faced lie.”

“You're paranoid, mate.” I told him.

“Well, while all you lot were copping off with female reservists and buggering away home I've been burning the midnight whale blubber.”

“And?”

“I've only gone and made a breakthrough, so I have.”

“Go on.”

“What's that racket in the background?”

“That ‘racket' is Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Never heard of him.”

“What's going on, mate? Have you really found something out?”

“I've only gone and cracked the bloody case, so I have,” he said.

“Our John Doe in the suitcase?”

“What else?”

“Go on then, you're killing me.”

“Well, I was on the late shift anyway to cover the station, so I thought instead of breaking out the old stash of
Penthouses
and having a wank I'd do something useful and get back on that suitcase …”

“Yes . . ?”

“No forensics at all. No liftable prints. Blood belongs to our boy. But you know the wee plastic window where people write their addresses?”

“McCrabban already checked that window – there was no address card in there. No one would be that much of an eejit.”

“That's what I thought too, but I cut it open and I noticed a wee sliver of card scrunched up in the bottom of the window. You couldn't possibly have seen it unless you cut open the plastic and shone a torch down into the gap.”

“Shite.”

“Shite is right, mate.”

“It was an old address card?”

“I got a pair of tweezers, pulled it out, unscrunched it and lo and behold I've only gone and got the name and address of the person who owned the suitcase!”

“Who was it?”

“Somebody local. A bloke called Martin McAlpine, Red Hall Cottage, The Mill Bay Road, Ballyharry, Islandmagee. What do you think about that?”

“So it wasn't the dead American's suitcase, then?”

“Doesn't look like it, does it? It's like you always say, Sean, the concept of the master criminal is a myth. Most crooks are bloody eejits.”

“You're a star, Matty, my lad.”

“An underappreciated star. What's our next move, boss?”

“I think, Matty, that you and me will be paying Mr McAlpine a wee visit first thing in the morning.”

“Tomorrow? It's a Saturday.”

“So?”

He groaned.

“Nothing. Sounds like a plan.”

“See you at the barracks. Seven sharp.”

“Can't we go later?”

“Can't go later, mate. I'm having me portrait done by Lucian Freud and then I'm off to Anfield, playing centre back for Liverpool on account of Alan Hansen's injury.”

“Come on, Sean, I like to sleep in on a Saturday.”

“Nah, mate, we'll go early, get the drop on him. It'll be fun.”

“All right.”

“And well done again, pal. You did good.”

I hung up the phone. Funny how things turned out. Just like that, very quickly indeed, this potentially tricky investigation was breaking wide open.

The alarm was set to
Sports Talk
on Downtown Radio which was a nice non-threatening way to start the day. The conversation this morning was about Northern Ireland's chances in the 1982 World Cup. The topic, as usual, had gotten round to George Best and whether the thirty-five-year-old had any game left in him. The last I had heard of Best was his notorious stint playing with Hibernian when he was more famous for out-drinking the entire French rugby team and seducing the reigning Misses World and Universe in the same weekend.

I turned off the radio, made coffee, dressed in a black polo neck sweater, jeans and DM shoes, went outside. I checked under the BMW for any mercury tilt explosives but didn't find any. Right about now seven thousand RUC men and women were all doing the same thing. One or two of them would find a bomb and after shitting their pants they'd be on the phone to the bomb squad, thanking their lucky stars that they'd kept to their morning routine.

I stuck on the radio and listened to Brian Eno on the short drive to the barracks. Wasn't a big fan of Eno but it was either that or the news and I couldn't listen to the news. Who could, apart from those longing for the end times.

I thought about Laura. I didn't know what to do. Was I in love with her? What did
that
feel like? If she went away it would hurt, it would ache. Was that love? How come I was thirty-two
and I didn't know? Was that bloody normal? “Jesus,” I said to myself. Thirty-two years old and I had the emotional depth of a teenager.

Maybe it was the situation, maybe Northern Ireland kept you paralysed, infantilised, backward … Aye, blame that.

I nodded to Ray at the guard house and pulled into the police station.

As usual Matty was late and before we could get rolling Sergeant Burke told me that Newtownabbey RUC needed urgent assistance dealing with a riot in Rathcoole. It was completely the wrong direction, I was a detective not a riot cop, and I outranked Burke, but you couldn't really turn down brother officers in need, could you?

With Matty grumbling things like “this isn't what I signed on for”, and “I could be fishing right now”, we burned up the A2 to that delightful concrete circle of hell known as the Rathcoole Estate.

“Good Friday night?” I asked Matty when his moaning was over.

“Oh, it was a classic, mate. Since I wasn't allowed out, it was a fish supper, a six-pack of Special Brew and a wank to
Sapphire and Steel
on the video.”

“David McCallum or Joanna Lumley?”

Matty rolled his eyes.

We arrived at Rathcoole to find that it was only a half-hearted sort of riot that had been running since the night before. About thirty hoods on the ground throwing stones and Molotovs from behind a burnt-out bus, maybe another two dozen comrades offering them assistance by tossing petrol-filled milk bottles from the high-rise tower blocks nearby. The cops under a Chief Superintendent Anderson were keeping well back and letting the ruffians exhaust themselves. I reported to Anderson while Matty stayed in the Rover reading The Cramps' fanzine:
Legion of the Cramped
. Anderson thanked me for coming, but said that
we weren't needed.

He asked if I wanted a coffee and poured me one from a flask. We got to talking about the nature of riots, Anderson venturing the opinion that social deprivation was at the root cause of it and I suggested that ennui was the disease of late-twentieth-century man. Things were going swimmingly until Anderson began banging on about “it all being part of God's plan” and I decided to make myself scarce.

“If we're not needed, we'll move out, sir, if that's okay with you?” I said and he said that that was fine.

It was when we were safely back in the Rover and heading out of the Estate that we were hit by a jerry-can petrol bomb thrown from a low rise. It exploded with a violent whoosh across the windscreen and it was followed a second or two later by a burst of heavy machine-gun fire that dinged violently off the Land Rover's armoured hull.