I Hear the Sirens in the Street (6 page)

“Jesus Christ!” Matty screamed while I put my foot on the accelerator to get us away from the trouble. More machine-gun fire tore up the road behind us and rattled off the rear doors.

“They're shooting at us!” Matty yelled.

“I know!”

I hammered down the clutch, switched back into third gear and accelerated round a bend in the road. I got us a hundred yards from the corner and then I hand-break-turned the Land Rover in a dramatic, tyre-squealing 180. Fire was melting the Land Rover's window wipers and licking its way down towards the engine block. If it reached the petrol tank … I grabbed my service revolver and the fire extinguisher.

“You're not going out there without a bullet-proof vest are you?” Matty said, horrified.

“Call the incident in, ask Anderson to send down help and tell them to be careful,” I barked and opened the side door.

“Don't go out there, Sean! That's what they want! It's an ambush.”

“Not with half the police force just up the road. They've long gone. Two quick bursts on a machine gun and they'll be heroes in the pub tonight.”

“Sean, please!”

“Call it in!”

I got out of the Land Rover, pointed my service revolver at the surrounding low rises but no one was around. Keeping the revolver in one hand and the fire extinguisher in the other I sprayed foam over the windscreen and easily dowsed the flame.

I climbed inside the Rover to wait for back up. We sat there for twenty-five minutes but Anderson's lads never came so I told Matty that we'd write up the incident ourselves later since we had actual work to do this morning.

“Unless – that is – this offends your forensic officer sensibilities and you feel compelled to go back to the scene of the shooting and gather shell cases, pieces of jerry can and other assorted evidence?”

“Bollocks to that!” Matty said and we took the A2 north again. Unfortunately the petrol bomb had burned the rubber off one of the tyres and we limped back to Carrickfergus RUC to get a replacement Rover.

This day was destined never to get going. Brennan was in his office now with a nasty look on his once handsome face. I tried to avoid him by sneaking to the incident room while Matty was signing out a new Rover, but the bugger saw and summoned me.

“Hello sir, what are you doing in on a Saturday morning?” I said.

“My duty, Duffy, my duty. What progress have you made on your murder victim?” he muttered, putting his feet up on his desk. He was wearing slippers and some kind of dressing gown and he hadn't shaved. Had he been secretly here all night? Was there trouble on the home front? Should I offer him my big empty house on Coronation Road? Before even the possibility
of an Oscar & Felix scenario formed in my brain, I reconsidered: he was a Presbyterian and no doubt he'd take my offer as some kind of insult to his pride.

“A couple of promising leads, sir. We have Customs and Immigration getting us a list of names of Americans who entered Northern Ireland in the last year and we'll cross reference that with any who are the right demographic and have served with the First Infantry Division. I'm optimistic that we should be able to ID our victim pretty soon.”

“Good,” he said with a yawn. “What else?”

“We found a name in that suitcase our victim was locked up in. Matty found the name, I should say – good police work from him. It was an old address label and we're going to follow up on that this morning.”

“Excellent.”

“If you don't mind me saying, sir, if you're looking for a place to stay I've got a big empty house on Coronation Road,” I blurted out despite myself.

Brennan looked at his slippers, took his feet off the memo pad and hid them under his desk. He was pissed off that I'd accurately deduced his home situation. He had presence, did Brennan, like a fallen actor once famous for his Old Vic Claudius now doing Harp lager commercials on UTV.

“You know what you could do for me, Duffy?”

“What, sir?”

“You could build a fucking time machine, go back forty-five seconds and shut the fuck up after I say the word ‘excellent', okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you look bloody terrible. What's the matter with you? The flu?”

“No, sir, Matty and I were out in a Rover and someone threw a petrol bomb. I had to go out and extinguish it.”

“Someone threw a petrol bomb at ya? Did you write it up?”

“No, sir, not yet.”

“See that you do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you read the papers this morning, Sean?” he said in a less abrasive voice.

“No.”

“Listened to the news?”

“No, sir.”

“You have to stay abreast of current events, Inspector!”

“Yes, sir. Anything interesting happening?”

“General Galtieri has decided that his personal manifesto, like all the very best manifestos, needs to be unleashed on the world in a rainy windswept bog, filled with sheep shit.”

“General who? What?”

“Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands.”

“The Falkland Islands?”

“The Falkland Islands.”

“I'm not really any the wiser, sir.”

“They're in the South Atlantic. According to the
Mail
they've got ten thousand troops on there by now.”

“Shite.”

“You know what that means for us, don't you? Thatcher's going to have to take them back. It's either that or resign. She'll be sending out an invasion fleet. They'll be getting troops from everywhere. I imagine we'll lose half a dozen regiments from here.”

“That's going to stretch us thin.”

About half of the anti-terrorist and border patrols in Northern Ireland were conducted by the British Army; we, the police, could not easily pick up the slack.

Brennan rubbed his face. “It's bad timing. The IRA's gearing up for a campaign and we're going to be losing soldiers just when they're surging. We could be in for an even trickier few months than we thought.”

I nodded.

“And spare a thought for what will happen if it's a debacle. If Thatcher doesn't get the islands back.”

“She resigns?”

“She resigns, the government collapses and there's a general election. If Labour wins, and they will, that's it, mate – the ball game is fucking over.”

The Labour Party under Michael Foot had a policy of unilateral withdrawal from Ireland, which meant that they would withdraw all British soldiers and civil servants. Ireland would be united at last under Dublin rule which was all fine and dandy except that the Irish Army had only a few battalions and it was a laughable idea that they would be able to keep the peace. What it would mean would be full-scale civil war with a million well-armed, geographically tightly knit Protestants against the rest of the island's four million Catholics. There would be a nice little bloodbath until the US Marines arrived.

“I hadn't thought of that,” I said.

“Best not to.”

He picked up his copy of the
Daily Mail.

The headline was one word and screamed “Invasion!”

I noticed that the date on the paper was April 3rd.

“Are you sure this isn't all some kind of belated April Fool's joke?”

“It's no joke, Duffy, the BBC are carrying it, all the papers, everybody.”

“Okay.”

“We won't get our knickers in a twist. We'll take all this one day at a time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Back to work. Get out there and wrap up this murder investigation of yours.”

“Yes, sir.”

I pushed back the chair and stood.

“One more thing, Duffy. ‘A chaperone for a conquistador perhaps'?” he said, tapping his crossword puzzle with his pencil and then thoughtfully chewing the end of it.

It was easy enough. “I think it's an anagram, sir,” I said.

“An anagram of what, Duffy?”

“Cortes,” I said trying to lead him to the solution but he still didn't get it and he knew that I knew the answer.

“Just tell me, Duffy!” he said.

“Escort, sir.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course … now piss off.”

As I was leaving the office I saw Matty struggling to get a long knitted scarf out of his locker.

“No scarves. Accept it. The Tom Baker era is over, mate,” I told him.

Hard rain along the A2.

Matty driving the Land Rover.

Me riding shotgun, literally: a Winchester M12 pump-action across my lap in case we got ambushed on one of the back roads.

I put a New Order cassette in the player. They'd gone all disco but it wasn't as bad as you would have thought.

“Did you hear the news, Matty?”

“What news?”

“You have to stay up with current events, Constable. The Falklands have been invaded.”

“The what?”

“Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands.”

“Jesus, when was this?”

“Yesterday.”

“First the Germans and now the bloody Argentinians.”

“You're thinking of the Channel Islands, mate.”

“Where's the Falklands then?”

“Uhm, somewhere sort of south, I think.”

“I suppose that's Spurs fucked now, isn't it?”

“How so?”

“Half their team's from bloody Argentina. They'll be well off their game.”

“The Chief Inspector wants us to think about the geo-political consequences.”

“Aye, geo-politics is one thing, but football's football, isn't it?” Matty said, putting things into a proper perspective.

We drove through the town of Whitehead and hugged the shore of Larne Lough until we were on Islandmagee. Islandmagee was an odd place. A peninsula about six miles north-east of Carrickfergus with Larne Lough on one side and the Irish Sea on the other. It was near the major metropolitan centre and ferry port of Larne, yet it was a world away. When you drove onto Islandmagee it was like going back to an Ireland of a hundred or even two hundred years before. The people were country people, suspicious of strangers, and for me their accent and dialect were at times difficult to understand. I got it when they used the occasional word in Irish but often I found them speaking a form of lowland Scots straight out of Robert Burns. They almost sounded like Americans from the high country of Kentucky or Tennessee.

I'd been there several times. Always in my civvies, as I'd heard that they didn't like peelers snooping around. As Matty drove I unfolded the ordnance survey map and found Ballyharry. It was halfway up the lough shore, opposite the old cement works in Magheramorne. On the map it was a small settlement, a dozen houses at the most.

We turned off the Shore Road onto the Ballyharry Road. A bump chewed the New Order tape so I flipped through the radio stations. All the English ones were talking about the Falklands but Irish radio wasn't interested in Britain's colonial wars and
instead were interviewing a woman who had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary who had told her that the sale of contraceptive devices in Dublin would bring a terrible vengeance from God and his host of Angels.

The Ballyharry Road led to the Mill Bay Road: small farms, whitewashed cottages, stone walls, sheep, rain. I looked for Red Hall but didn't see it.

Finally there was a small private single-laned track that led into the hills that had a gate and a sign nailed to an old beech tree which said “Red Hall Manor, Private, No Trespassing”, and underneath that another sign which said “No Coursing or Shooting Without Express Permission”.

“You think this is the place?” I asked, looking up the road.

Matty examined the map and shrugged. “We might as well give it a go.”

We drove past a small wood and into a broad valley.

There were farms dotted about the landscape, some little more than ruins.

A sign by one of them said Red Hall Cottage and Matty slammed on the brakes. It was a small farm surrounded by flooded, boggy fields and a couple of dozen miserable sheep. The building itself was a whitewashed single-storey house with a few cement and breeze block buildings in the rear. It looked a right mess. Most of the outbuildings had holes in the exterior walls and the farmhouse could have done with a coat of paint. The roof was thatched and covered with rusting wire. The car out front was a Land Rover Defender circa 1957.

“Well, I don't think we're dealing with an international hitman, that's for sure,” I said.

“Unless he's got all his money overseas in a Swiss Bank.”

“Aye.”

“Maybe you should go in first, boss, and I'll stay here by the radio in case there's any shooting.”

“Get out.”

“All right,” he said, with resignation.

We parked the Rover and walked through the muddy farmyard to the house.

“My shoes are getting ruined,” Matty said, treading gingerly around the muck and potholes. He was wearing expensive Nike gutties and unflared white jeans. Is that what the kids were sporting these days?

An Alsatian snarled at us, struggling desperately at the edge of a long piece of rope.

“Yon bugger wants to rip our throats out,” Matty said.

The chickens pecking all around us seemed unconcerned by the dog but he did look like a nasty brute.

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.