I Hear the Sirens in the Street t-2

by Adrian McKinty

  “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

  “Sure I do, it’s a fairy tree.”

  “You’re not totally ignorant.”

  “I’m from the Glens, love, I speak the Irish. I know things.”

  “You’re a Catholic?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No.”

  She nodded to herself. “Yeah, I can see it now … come on, let’s get back.”

  We walked back across the boggy pasture.

  “Were Martin and Harry close?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about close. There was an age difference, but they respected each other. Martin admired Harry for taking on the debts and the burdens of the estate. Harry admired Martin for joining the Army, putting his life on the line.”

  “Literally, as it turned out.”

  “Yes,” she said, with a melancholy smile. “Even when Martin got Born Again, Harry didn’t give him a hard time about it, and Harry’s as atheist as they come.”

  “Martin was a Born Again Christian?” I asked.

  “Yes. About a year and a half ago there was a visiting preacher from America who came to the church, and Martin felt called.”

  “But not you.”

  “No.”

  “He must have tried to make you see the light?”

  “That was what so lovely about him. He knew I was more into all this …” she said, pointing back at the trees, and I bit my tongue before I said “bullshit”.

  “He never bullied me with his faith. Let me go my own way.”

  “Sounds like a good guy.”

  “He was. He really was.”

  We had reached the edge of the pasture and I could see the valley again. The big house, the cottages, the salt mine, my car parked along the road.

  “Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked. “I’m making the mussels. It’s a shame to do all that for one.”

  “Sounds great.”

  We walked over the boggy field to the farm.

  Cora started barking and Emma untied her.

  “Why didn’t you take her on your walk?”

  “I used to, but she’s incorrigible. She worries the sheep and she goes after the game. She goes for everything.”

  Except IRA gunmen, apparently.

  A man waved to us from the road as he drove past in a Toyota pick-up. She waved back.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Connie Wilson. One of Harry’s tenants from down Ballylumford way. Connie’s in bad shape. He tried to coax barley out of his land this year. Got rid of his flock and tried to grow barley. He hasn’t been able to pay his ground rent, Harry says.”

  “How many tenants does Harry have?”

  “Quite a few. Twelve, thirteen. Only two or three can actually make a go of the land with the EEC subsidy; but with taxes Harry actually loses about five or six thousand pounds a year on the estate.”

  “He loses money on the estate?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  We went into the house and this time I noted that the door was unlocked.

  “Farmers are always complaining. That’s what they do best,” I said.

  “Well, as long as he doesn’t put up my rent.”

  “He wouldn’t do that to his sister-in-law.”

  “You’d be surprised what men do when they’re desperate.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  She nodded and brushed the hair from her face.

  A harsh face. Youthful – but when she was older, bitterness would make her pinched and thin-lipped and shrewish.

  “Can I help make anything?” I asked.

  She smiled, almost laughed again. “No, no. There’ll be no man in my kitchen. Settle yourself down in the living room. I’ll get you a Harp.”

  I sat on the rattan sofa and sipped the can of Harp. There were a few novels on the book shelf: Alexander Kent, Alastair MacLean, Patrick O’Brian. She’d got rid of Martin’s clothes and his suitcase, but she’d kept some of his books.

  “Mind if I use your phone?” I called into the kitchen.

  “Go ahead. Although the reception down here is shocking. It sounds like you’re phoning from the moon.”

  I called the station, asked for Crabbie.

  “McCrabban speaking,” Crabbie said.

  Emma had the radio on in the kitchen but I lowered my voice anyway.

  “Mate, listen, it’s me. Do me a favour and see if there’s anything brewing with Finance and Embezzlement or the Fraud Squad on Sir Harry McAlpine or John DeLorean or both of them.”

  “John DeLorean?”

  “Aye, and Harry McAlpine.”

  “Well, the DeLorean factory’s a great big money pit, but I’ve never heard of any actual fraud—”

  “Check it out, will you? And don’t forget McAlpine. The DeLorean factory is on his land. Some kind of deal with the Revenue Service, he says.”

  Crabbie hesitated. There was static on the phone line.

  “Did you get that?” I asked.

  “I got it. You want to me to call Special Branch and the Fraud Squad.”

  “Yes. What’s the problem?”

  “Sean, an inquiry like that will get passed up the chain. I thought you were specifically warned off involving yourself with Sir Harry McAlpine. Two or three days from now when this arrives on the Chief Constable’s desk you’ll be getting a bloody rocket!”

  “Goes with the territory, Crabbie. We’re firing blanks here anyway.”

  “It doesn’t matter if we’re firing blanks, Sean. The McAlpine case is not our case and the O’Rourke case has been yellowed,” he said, his voice rising a little.

  “I know, mate, look, just do it, will ya?”

  He sighed. “Of course.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “No problem.”

  I hung up.

  “Everything okay?” Emma shouted from the kitchen.

  “Aye. Everything’s fine.”

  I made another quick phone call to Interflora and had them deliver flowers to Gloria at the DeLorean plant. It was thirty-five quid, but it’s always smart to keep the sheilas sweet.

  Emma came up behind me.

  “Ordering flowers?”

  “Me mother’s birthday.”

  “You are such a dutiful son.”

  “Aye, I am.”

  “The stock’s on. It’ll take an hour. Do you ride? I borrow Stella from Canny McDonagh down by the sheddings. She’s got a young hunter called Mallarky that needs a run or two.”

  “I haven’t been on a Dob for fifteen years.”

  “You don’t forget.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  We put on coats and she lent me Martin’s riding boots.

  Canny McDonagh wasn’t home, but Emma made free and easy with the farm and in the stable block she harnessed and saddled both horses. Mallarky was a big hunter but he had just gorged himself on oats and was no bother at all.

  We rode over the fields till we reached a beach on the Irish Sea side of Islandmagee. She galloped Stella and I got Mallarky up to a canter. Cora barked happily along side.

  When they’d had a good run we dismounted them and walked them in the surf.

  It was colder now. The beach was empty. Emma threw a stick to the dog and she ran to fetch it in the water.

  I looked north. You could see up the glens to the Atlantic Ocean. The wild deep blue of it chilling my retinas from here.

  The sun began to set behind the cloud banks to the west.

  “Look! There!” she said.

  A massive gorse fire was burning on a hill in Scotland.

  “Jesus, will you look at that.”

  “Sometimes the heather will burn for days,” she said.

  We watched it until the set sun. It was getting dark now.

  “We better get these horses back, don’t you think? I’m not that confident about riding at night.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  We rode back and C
ora barked and Canny McDonagh still wasn’t home, so she left him a note, telling him what she had done and that Mallarky had taken the canter well.

  Mussels and country bread at the kitchen table.

  She lit a paraffin lamp.

  “Do you fancy something stronger?” she asked, when I finished a second Harp.

  “Poteen?”

  “You won’t tell the excise, will you?”

  “Are you joking? Cops and the excise are natural enemies.”

  She took an earthenware jug from under the sink.

  “Everybody distils their own round here,” she explained.

  She poured me an honest measure and we clinked glasses.

  We drank and it was evil rough stuff, around 120 proof.

  We both coughed. She poured us another.

  “Yikes, do you have anything to cut this with?” I asked, knocking back shot number two.

  “There’s orange juice in the fridge.”

  I went to the fridge, looked out a couple of tall glasses and made us a couple of screwdrivers.

  She drank hers and moved closer to me on the couch.

  “You’re not married, are you?” she asked, looking at me with those azure eyes and those full lips with the little dent in the middle of the lower.

  The eyes. The pale cheeks. The dangerous red hair.

  “Would it make a difference?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said, and placed her cold hand on mine. “As you can imagine, it’s been some time.”

  We went to the bedroom.

  The big south-facing window looked out over the valley and the clear night gave up the winter constellations. Naked, she was beautiful, but gaunt and pale, like a case, like something washed up in the Lagan.

  I took her, and I was gentle with her, and I held her and she slept in my arms. I listened to her heart and watched her chest heave up and down.

  She was frowning in her dream.

  Those closed blue eyes could not see any good in the future.

  I fell asleep watching her.

  She woke me in the wolf’s tail – that grey Irish light that comes before the dawn.

  “Huh, what is it?” I asked.

  “I heard a noise!” she said. “Something’s outside.”

  I sat up, rubbed my face.

  “What?”

  “Outside. I hear something. I’ll get the rabbit gun.”

  “No, I’ll go.”

  I pulled on my jeans and sneakers and my raincoat. I grabbed a torch and my .38.

  Cora growled at me as I walked into the yard.

  It was drizzling, the ground was slick.

  “Hello?” I said, turning on the torch.

  I walked towards the road.

  I slipped on the mud but saved myself by grabbing the gate post. I saw something flash further down the track. Maybe nothing or maybe the fluorescent strip on a rain jacket or a pair of training shoes.

  “Is there anyone down there?” I yelled.

  I held out the .38 and shone the torch beam down the road.

  Nothing. I flashed the beam up into the hills.

  No movement, no sounds.

  The distant lough, the even more distant sea.

  I stood there, waiting for something. Anything. “There’s nothing here,” I said to myself. I walked a little bit further down the lane and then cut back to the farm along the hypotenuse of the nearest field. I nearly took a header into a bog hole filled with water, but saved myself before the final step. When I got back to the house Cora was barking again and Emma was standing in the doorway with a shotgun.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “It was nothing,” I told her. We went back to bed and I kept the blinds open. The moon was giving out a yellow candle light and the sky about it was eerie and in a state of strange coruscation. Neither of us went back to sleep.

  In the morning, Emma made me scrambled eggs and coffee. The coffee was like coal dust but the country fresh eggs with butter were good.

  I ate breakfast and kissed her and said goodbye. I walked down to the car and I saw what the commotion had been the night before. Someone had tossed a brick through the windscreen of my BMW. A helpful note had been tied around it which read: “Fuck Off And Die Peeler Scum!”

  I threw the brick into a field, carefully pushed out the windscreen, carried it to the stone wall and left it there. I brushed the broken glass off the driver’s seat and headed home.

  26: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

  I stopped at Paddy Kinkaid’s BMW dealership in Whitehead and parked the car in a lot full of brand new Beemers. If old Paddy wanted to keep them new he’d need to get the bloody hose out because smoke from Kilroot power station was depositing a fine grey-grained soot on all the windward surfaces, as if the golden head of the enormous chimney top was in sinister coitus with the friggin’ place.

  I lit a tab and went inside.

  It was basically a big plywood shed painted BMW white and blue. An elderly woman was playing an electric organ in one corner of the showroom and when I saw Father O’Hare I thought perhaps the two were connected by some nexus – a wedding rehearsal or funeral preparations or the like, but in fact they were unrelated. She was Paddy’s wife, playing away to herself, and Father O’Hare was in looking for a car.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while, Sean,” Father O’Hare said cheerfully enough, although perhaps with a hint of admonishment. And if a hint was there, I didn’t effing like it.

  “Big mistake, Father,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You can’t be a priest and drive a BMW. It sends out a bad message.”

  “Sean, as I’m sure you’re aware, the Popemobile, as they call it, is manufactured by BMW.”

  “The Holy Father survived an assassination attempt by the direct intervention of Our Lady of Fatima and can therefore pretty much do what he likes in the vehicular realm; with all due respect, Father, you’re not up there yet.”

  He nodded and countered with “I wonder how it looks to have a policeman driving a BMW?”

  “Perhaps an inspector in the Vice or the Fraud Squad might have cause for concern, but not a simple homicide detective.”

  The organ reached a complicated part of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and Father O’Hare could see from the look in my eyes that I’d already had a somewhat trying morning.

  “Perhaps you’re right, Sean, I was only picking up a brochure anyway. Will I see you at Mass before Lady Day?”

  “Yes, Father,” I assured him, and he went outside to his rickety 2CV coupe which had death trap written all over it.

  Paddy was annoyed with me. He was a tubby, complacent man with a welcoming suntanned bald head, but when he heard the tail end of me chasing out Father O’Hare he was furious.

  “That was a customer, Sean. A customer. You don’t see me going around to your manor and solving murders, do you?”

  “You’re welcome to, Paddy.”

  Paddy went on a rant about Father O’Hare’s pressing need for a new motor and pointed out that the Catholic Church used wealth to glorify God and show the common people a glimpse of the infinite. I was in no mood for the dialectic so I told him that he had a point and apologised and asked about the windscreen.

  Paddy told me he couldn’t possibly get a replacement in less than a week and offered me a loaner of a black BMW 320i for only fifty quid. It was a canny move on his part for he knew that I’d be hooked after a couple of days behind the wheel of that four-cylinder, fuel-injected, 125 BHP beast.

  She purred right up and I notched her at 115 mph on the straight run from the old ICI factory to Eden Village.

  I turned right up Victoria Road, left on Coronation Road and parked the car.

  I found Bobby Cameron’s wean and give him a pound note and told him he’d get another one if he kept all the wee shites away from the Beemer.

  I was exhausted.

  I turned on the hall light to look at myself in the mirror. A pitiful bedraggled
wreck of a man.

  The hall mirror.

  The hall looking glass.

  Alice Through the Looking Glass. Alice Smith because Alice Liddell was too obvious. I see through a glass darkly.

  I saw the phone sitting on the table. I recalled the conversation with our special guest mystery caller.

  I walked outside to the Beemer and drove to William McFarlane’s bed and breakfast in Dunmurry.

  Mrs McFarlane didn’t recognise me without the riot squad to back me up

  I asked if I could have a look at room #4.

  She said all the rooms were the same.

  I said four was my lucky number.

  She said fine, go ahead.

  I went upstairs to room #4.

  I looked at the huge mirror above the dresser.

  I looked at those strange wear marks on the carpet. Exactly where they should be if someone had moved this heavy thing out from the wall.

  I moved the dresser out from the wall.

  Behind the mirror someone had duct-taped an envelope.

  I put on latex gloves and opened the envelope.

  Inside:

  Bill O’Rourke’s Massachusetts driver’s licence, five hundred dollars in fifty-dollar bills, and a key with the number 27 stamped into the metal. Taped to the key with Scotch tape, a piece of paper that said “Ten Cent Bank Safety Deposit, Jefferson Street, Newburyport, Massachusetts”.

  I moved the dresser back and told Mrs McFarlane I’d have to think about the room.

  I went back to the borrowed Beemer and sat there.

  The mystery caller had known about this all along.

  I see through a glass darkly. She had seen through it. She’d seen through it to the other side, but was leaving it to me to do something about it.

  There was only one thing to be done.

  I knew the drama that would erupt if I asked for official permission to go.

  The Chief. The Consulate. DeLorean. The Americans. Especially the Americans.

  The case would be taken away from me.

  The case would vanish into the ether.

  We’d never find out who killed Bill O’Rourke. Perhaps someone would, but not us.

  “No, not us,” I said aloud.

  I drove to Carrick RUC and found Kenny Dalziel among the pay stubs in the sub basement. I told him that before the marching season got going in a month or so now was as good a time as any for me to take my personal days all at once.