The Piano Has Been Drinking - A Sean Duffy Story

1

Mud, rain, fields so green they stunned the eye with their greenness. A heavy over-saturated malachite green. Fields bursting with moisture. Fields so verdant you might be in Java or northern India during the monsoon.

But I was not.

I was in County Antrim in the hills behind Carrickfergus.

I’d stopped at a stand selling sausage rolls outside the village of Ballycarry that I knew had to be pretty good because there was a queue of twenty men in tweeds and work coats and high vis vests.

I parked the Beemer and avoided killing two giggling boys running home with their sausage rolls held aloft, triumphantly, like they were football trophies, like they were brand new confections from Mr Wonka.

I joined the queue’s end, nodded hello to the woman in front of me, and took in the view across Larne Lough and the North Channel. On a clear day up here you could see Scotland and the Isle of Man, but this was not a clear day. This was a typical day: rainy, with low clouds coating the hills like dirty grey blankets.

In the queue for the sausage roll van all the simple hierarchies of the countryside had vanished: day labourers, rich farmers, poor farmers, cattle brokers, shepherds and just ahead of me a man who was clearly the Lord Lieutenant of County Antrim – the Queens representative in these here parts.

“It’s going to sleet later but only a wee bit,” the woman said.

Everyone up here was supposed to have an opinion on the weather. For farmers it was always too cold or too hot or too wet. Usually too wet.

“Not a fan of sleet,” I replied

“Who is?” the woman said indignantly.

The man who made the sausage rolls looked like a warlock. Tight grey beard, dark eyebrows, wild hair under a bobble hat. His son or possibly grandson took my money.

He was indeed a wizard of pastry and spices and what I took to be venison.

The sausage roll was two quid. When I took a first greedy bite I understood the length of the queue and the reverent looks on the faces of the customers.

He could have charged twenty quid and still had as many takers.

I had scarfed the whole bloody thing before I made it back to the car. Should have gotten one for Crabbie and Lawson. No question of me saving them a bit. No one has that strength of character.

I drove down the hill into Carrick.

Through Eden Village and Victoria and along the water.

Forensic vans parked outside the police station did not bode well. The desk sergeant told me what all the fuss was about. Last night some joker had thrown a Molotov cocktail clean over the Anti-Molotov Wire.

The Station was about two thirds cop, one third civilian staff. The civilians got paid less but had exactly the same dangers. The IRA in fact would often try to kill these civilian cleaning and secretarial staff because they were softer targets.

The Molotov went through the second floor window and exploded next to the newly installed Coke machine. The night crew had the nous to put out the fire, get a pic of the thrower on CCTV and distribute free Cokes to everybody from the now busted machine.

Our new secretary, Lorraine, working late, had quit on the spot.

Unemployment was 20% in Carrick and she’d be hard pressed to find any other line of work but you didn’t blame her. Who wants to be typing some tedious report, listening to bloody Nicky Campbell on Radio 1, and then suddenly see a petrol bomb come flying through the window.

Aye.

I went upstairs. No one had thought to board up the broken window and snow was coming in. It was freezing and everyone had their coats on. Crabbie, Warren and Lawson had moved all the paperwork from Lorraine’s desk by the window to big piles on the floor.

“What’s all this malarkey?” I asked.

Lawson shook his head. “Lorraine has gone.”

I nodded. “Well, at least we can see clearly now.”

Crabbie ignored me but Lawson sort of flinched.

2

Lawson might have been preparing a remark to add to the great centuries long conversation of mankind, but just then the phone on Crabbie’s desk started to ring.

Crabbie was not a man to let a desk phone ring to its hearts content. He picked that wee skitter up, listened to a voice on the other end and began writing down notes.

When he hung up he looked impassive.

Impassive to the outside observer but I had made a special study of the Crabman and I could tell that that slight furrow above the nose could only mean trouble.

I give him the old Spock eyebrow raise.

“I think there’s been a murder, Sean,” he said.

I smiled kindly at the Crabman and pointed at the gaffer.

“Tell him and then tell her,” I said.

The gaffer was Detective Sergeant Lawson. I outranked him, but Lawson was the senior detective in Carrickfergus now. Her was DC Warren, Lawson’s rising star sidekick.

It was their station.

Crabbie and I had been put out to pasture.

Part-time coppers. Serving our 6 days a month until we got our bloody pensions.

They were other names for part-time peelers around here:

Wasters. Jokers. Nobodies.

We in particular were a bit of an embarrassment when we were on the premises at our desk by the window. Crabbie was a sergeant and I was an inspector. Carrickfergus RUC did not need two senior detectives filling out theft reports and giving out parking tickets. It was ridiculous. It was better for everyone during those 24 or 25 days a month when we weren’t here. Me driving around Shortbread Land in my Beemer scarifying the haggises off the mountains, Crabbie up Magheramorne way with his beloved dairy herd.

It would have been better for everyone really if that bloody mortar had killed the pair of us that time over the border. No more Sundays at the garden centre and holidays in Tenerife for yours truly, no more cattle auctions and gypsy horse fairs for the Crabman.

All that flashed through my mind in the second it took for Crabbie to put the phone down. It was very much an ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ moment. A reference for which I knew I would get no credit, more likely the reverse: Owl Shit Bridge? What are you talking about old man?

Crabbie was thinking of a cultural reference of his own.

“Is this going to be like the A Team every time there’s a case when you’re in the building?”

“A Team? What are you on about, mate?”

“Every episode they have to break Murdock out of the loony bin and convince Mr T to fly on the mission against his will.”

And who am I in this analogy? Mr T or the nutcase?”

“Perhaps you share elements of both characters?” he suggested.

“What’s your bloody point, Crabbie?

“My point is, all four of us are here, we’re not doing anything. Why don’t we all go check out this murder?”

“If you want me to go with you, just say it.”

“I want you to come with us,” Crabbie said.

“What are you two conspiring about?” Lawson said, looking up from his paperwork.

“There’s been a murder, boss,” I said. “Crabbie’s got all the details and he was wondering if we two old war horses could tag a long with you and your brilliant assistant like in the old days? To give us purpose, you know? Crabbie says it’s either we go with you or its the old rope and the step ladder for him.”

Lawson looked heavenward for assistance but there was no help coming from that quarter until Judgement Day which wasn’t until August 29th, 1997 - 4 long years away.

Lawson grabbed a piece of a paper and a CD case to lean on to write down the details.

“REM fan, Sean?” he asked, passing me the CD. It was a record called Out of Time and it was bloody excellent but I wasn’t going to admit that to that wee git.

“Annoying typesetting on the album cover,” I said dissmisively and asked Warren to sign out a Land Rover.

“Where is this murder?” I asked the Crabster.

“Round your way, apparently, the Laird Mansion.”

“The Laird Mansion? A quid says the butler did it.”

“The butler’s dead, Sean.”

“Shite,” I said, tossing him a quid.

3

Before I left I found a senior sergeant and told him to have that bloody window fixed by the time we got back.

We went downstairs and got in the Land Rover.

Warren was driving. “Where exactly is this crime scene?” I asked her. “Crabbie said something about the Laird Mansion?”

“It’s up Victoria Lane if you know where that is. One of the fields behind the Laird Mansion. Double murder, they’re saying. One inside the house, one outside.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Which one are we doing first?”

“I think we’ll do the one in the field first before the light goes,” Lawson said.

I nodded.

The Land Rover was a good idea, I wasn’t going to risk the Beemer driving up Victoria Lane, but if I were in charge I would have done the inside death first in the vague hope that the weather might improve while we were in there or Special Branch would arrive and take over the investigation or something. There must have been crime scenes I’d visited in Northern Ireland where the sun was shining and the sky was blue but it was hard to think of any. Always some form of precipitation or foul weather. On this particular afternoon that lovely sleet we had been promised.

Victoria Estate where I lived at 113 Coronation Road had once been part of the Laird Estate, the big wigs in these parts; it was one of those House of Usher aristocratic families on the slide and they’d been selling bits of their land since the 1930s. All that remained now was only the Georgian Mansion itself and a couple of fields around it.

We went up the very familiar Victoria Road a little ways past the graveyward where the road suddenly petered out and became little more than a country track up into the Antrim Hills. Victoria Lane was rough and boggy, almost impassable. Tractors where about the only vehicle that could make it up here but the Land Rover was coping ok with it and Warren was doing a good job with the driving.

“They found a body up here?” Lawson asked, articulating the question we were all asking. Who would come up here to be murdered, or, who would want to dump their body so far up an almost impassable road.

“And they’re definitely calling this a double murder are they?” I asked.

“Potential murder-suicide I heard on dispatch. A body in a field behind the house and the butler apparently shot in an outhouse,” Warren said.

I turned to Crabbie with a look of triumph. “Murder-suicide? What did I tell ya? He killed his girlfriend or blackmailer or whatever and then he topped himself.”

“We don’t know the butler did it,” Crabbie said. “It might be two unrelated deaths. This is a bad bit of the country.”

He was probably thinking an accidental death up here. Some farmer killed by a piece of his own machinery or something. Around the bend in the lane we clocked the lights of the Forensic Land Rovers and several white boiler-suited forensic officers going about their work.

A cold, wet uniformed peeler waved a glove at us.

Warren wound the window down.

“Detective Inspector Lawson?” he asked.

“That’s me,” Lawson said.

“There’s a Chief Inspector Donaldson of forensic ready to see you, sir, and the coroner’s van is on the way.”

“Who are you, son?” Lawson asked.

“Constable Strange, sir,” he said.

“Right, is there anything else I need to know?” Lawson continued.

“No, sir, Inspector Donaldson has all the details.”

“Get away on home then, lad, you’re soaked through, tell the sergeant CID is covering the rest of your shift.”

“Oh, thank you, sir! I—

“Away with you! Home! Now!”

“Thank you, sir,” he said and darted away.

I looked at Crabbie and smiled. We were both pleased with that little interaction. Our protege cared about the men and women under him and that was a very good thing.

We got out of the Rover and marched, through the intermittent sleet across a boggy field. A few cows were lurking in a corner under an oak tree with a farmer protecting them from the peelers. Fog had rolled in from the south and you could see nothing of Carrickfergus itself. To the east rising out of the mist was the middle finger of the massive chimney of Kilroot Power Station where it had been pumping death over this part of Ireland for a decade now. The way they picked the power station locations for Northern Ireland was very simple: you make a list of the ten most picturesque and ecologically vulnerable places in the province and put the power station there. Kilroot was built on the top of Jonathan Swift’s old house – because of course it was. It was an oil fired power plant because oil was an abundant natural resource not subject to wild price fluctations and its chimney was designed with the prevailing winds in mind to send its effluvia over nearby Carrickfergus and North Belfast. It was brutal, ugly, damp and hideous. With a cinematographer’s eye Tarkovsky would have loved this little diorama especially the chimney bit.

The crime scene was in the middle of the field in an abandoned skeleton of a car. The vehicle had no windscreen or wheels or doors, just a rusting shape of what once had been a Morris Minor. FO’s in boiler suits were taking photographs and prints and samples and whatever else they did to work their magic.

There was a body in the front passenger seat of the car. A young man or woman with long blonde hair. Man, I suspected, not woman, because he was wearing jeans and a denim jacket, but maybe I was wrong.

A Forensic Officer came over from the tea tent. Young bloke. Didn’t recognize him. Couldn’t really recognize him anyway under his full FO outfit that he was still wearing, boiler suit hood up over his head.

“Are you Lawson?” he asked Alex.

“Yes, Sergeant Lawson, Carrick CID,” Lawson said.

“Chief Inspector Donald Galvin, nice to meet you,” he said with a smug smile that got on my nerves.

“Nice to meet you too, Chief Inspector,” Lawson said. “What’s the story with our driver here?”

“A boring story. Overdose. Probably heroin. We found a hypodermic syringe on the ground next to him and a bag in his pocket that is likely brown tar.”

“Time of death?” Lawson asked.

“Three or four hours ago? The patholgist can tell us for sure. Our preliminrary prognosis is no foul play. Some fool from your parish called it in as a murder. Unlikely. Accidental death of a druggie. No need for you boys to come out at all really,” the Chief Inspector said.

I examined the young man in the shell of the car. Delicate features, but not skinny, no scabs, no look of the junkie about him. Still you could OD on your first go around – it happened all the time.

“Who called this one in?” I asked.

“Farmer, saw the body when he was rounding up an errant cow,” Galvin said, pointing to the bloke under the oak tree.

“And when was that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We got the call about forty five minutes ago and were on the scene fifteen mninutes after that,” Galvin said smugly.

The implication being of course that he’d beat us to the scene of the crime and this was our bloody manor.

“Any ID on the victim?” I asked.

“No,” Galvin said.

“And just to be clear,” I said. “Your working hypothesis is that the deceased came out here in the sleet to shoot up in this skeleton of a car where he overdosed, and has been here for about four hours? That’s what you’re telling us?”

Galvin’s smile was beginning to falter. He knew something was coming but he couldn’t tell what yet.

“Yes, er, that’s what we’re telling you,” he said.

I leaned over and touched the sleeve of the denim jacket. I squeezed the material between thumb and forefinger and it confirmed what my eyes had told me.

“If he’s been out here for four hours, how come his jacket is practically bone dry?” I asked.

“His hair too,” Crabbie said.

“Heroin users don’t shoot up in old cars with no roof in the middle of fields in the freezing rain. You want somewhere warm,” I said.

“And back here,” Warren said, “Look at the depth of the footprints.”

“The depth of the—?” Galvin began but Lawson finished the thought:

“The depth of the footprints, particularly on the right hand side. A man was carrying another man – presumably the victim – over his right shoulder.”

I turned to the lads. “I’d say he’s been out here at most one hour. If they’re right about the time of death – and we’ll have to check that – he died or was killed somewhere else and then moved here this afternoon. I suppose they thought he wouldn’t be found until tomorrow but they got unlucky with the farmer and his cow.”

“What are you saying, I. . .” Galvin stammered.

“What we’re saying Chief Inspector Galvin is that this little scene is absolutely, definitely, foul fucking play,” I said.

“Who are you?” he asked, irritated.

“Sean Duffy, of the part-time reserve,” I said.

He pulled off his forensic hood and was about to give me a bollocking but some instinct or perhaps the excited expressions on Warren and Lawson’s faces cooled his ardour.

He was an odd looking chap without the hood. His face was like a reflection of a face in a toaster. Probably no harm to him really, just a bit of an arrogant cunt who wasn’t that good at their job.

“Thank you for all your hard work. We’ll take it from here, pal,” I said.

4

The weather still couldn’t decide what to do so it switched back to the default Northern Irish drizzle that it had been sending to this benighted province since it was brought into existence by an evil demiurge in 1921.

Lawson and Warren had taken control of the crime scene.

Crabbie was offering assistance like a kindly uncle. I knew I wasn’t wanted. I lurked beyond the POLICE – DO NOT CROSS tape near the tea tent and observed Lawson.

Detectives needed a style. Quiet unassuming competence was a safe bet to please the bosses and the punters. Quiet, unassuming competence had never been my thing. A certain chic insouciance as to results was perhaps my thing. Although now that I thought about it - that sounded a bit fucking Parisian lefty professor from the early 1970s which was not the look I wanted at all.

What did I want? What do any of us want?

The occasional “good job mate” from our peers? Cranking 110 MPH on the motorway at 3 in the morning while listening to The Fall? A random girl with red hair asking us what we’re reading on the Tube?

Or is that just me again with me fucking ennui and poor morale.

The 1890s were surprisingly similar to the 1990s.

Read HG Wells or Conrad. Everyone was obsessed by entropy and what Lord Kelvin (a disaffected, glum Belfast boy of course) was calling the impending heat death of the universe - that time in the future when no more work could be done and all the fine deeds of all the civilizations in the cosmos had unravelled into nothingness. And they knew all that in 1893. High Victorian optimism and the Whig interpretation of history was all a fucking front. Where are we heading? The shitter, that’s where.

Crabbie was coming over. “Cup of tea, Sean?” he asked.

“Aye, that would be nice,” I said.

He brought me a cup. Milk two sugars – the way normal people took their tea.

“Cheers,” I said and had a wee sip.

“Lawson wonders if we’d like to go into the big house and get started on the butler’s death?” Crabbie said.

“Yes, that’s probably a good idea,” I said. “I can only do another hour though. I’m clocking off at six and going home. I think Lawson and Warren can handle this, whatever this is.”

5

Laird House was built in the 1790s by an Anglo-Irish family with, according to Who’s Who, “interests in shipping”. Whenever you read something like that it’s always, invariably, coded language for the slave trade. The Lairds got into slavery rather too late to make any serious money from it as the Empire banned the practice in 1807. The Who’s Who entry on the Carrickfergus Lairds is brief and reading between the lines you can clearly see a drunken, useless bunch of wastrels who managed never to serve in the army, parliament, the church or make any impression at all on the wider culture. In 1914 Suffragettes tried to burn down Laird House but typically even that was a fiasco that set fire to local fields and a set of workers cottages next door. In 1941 the Luftwaffe scored a direct hit on Laird House, however the bomb’s fuse was a dud and it failed to go off.

You could see Laird House through the fields of my bedroom window on Coronation Road but the place was so gloomy and dull that people rarely spoke about it. We’d heard some gossip of course – the only son had been killed in a motor race in the 1950s, the father had drunk himself to death, the mother lived alone with a much reduced number of servants. Carrickfergus had been a camp for about 10,000 American GIs before D Day and Mrs Campbell told me that on an inspection tour Eisenhower had stayed at Laird House in 1944. Since then almost no visitors of any kind – not even distant relations trying to keep in with the old lady so they could inherit one day.

“Been in here before?” Crabbie asked as we walked up to the entrance.

“No, you?”

He shook his head. “Never heard of it, but I was just wondering, isn’t that your street across the fields there?”

“Aye, it is. Never been up here though.”

We rang the bell and a young woman, a girl really, answered the door.

“The poliss at last!” she said in some kind of fast difficult to decypher Scottish accent.

“I’m Duffy, this is McCrabban, we work for Sergeant Lawson of Carrick CID,” I said.

“I’m Joanna. Joanna Price I’m the home help.”

“Very good, Joanna, can we—”

“Come in! Come in! Poor Mr Yardley’s been out there for hours with a hole in him the size of a cabbage and his nephew’s deed too by all accounts! It’s a bloody massacre. Me ma told me not to come over to Ireland. She was right.”

Joanna led us through us a shambolic unkempt hallway; furniture covers had been draped over tables, chairs and ottomans and there were buckets and even a small paddling pool to catch water from leaks in the ceiling. The evidence of vermin was everywhere. Rats and mice by the looks of it and the scat from a larger animal, possibly a fox.

“Are you owner of the house?” Crabbie asked.

“No! I’m the home help! Are ya deef? l already said! Lady Caroline’s upstairs. It’s just me and her and Mr Yardley and Sam. They’re both deed now if that is Sam in the wee field. So it’s just me and her god help us.”

“Does she have a dog?” I asked.

“A dog, what are you talking about? There’s a man deed out there and you’re talking about dogs,” Joanna said, irritated.

“I was wondering what left those piles of shite all over the floor,” I said. “I suppose it wasn’t Lady Caroline?”

“She’s no that far gone! Probably badgers. Sneaky wee fucks coming in,” Joanna said.

“Does no one clean here?” Crabbie said.

“I cannae do it. I’m the home help. Full time with Lady Caroline. Sam and Mr Yardley do everything else. A wee woman comes in ta clean every Saturday but it builds up during the week.”

“I see,” I said, but I didn’t really. Couldn’t someone have dealt with the badger shit on weekdays? Or find the hole and stop them getting in?

“This way, back outside,” Joanna said. “This is where Mr Yardley is.”

“And he’s the butler?” Crabbie asked.

“Aye, but more than that, sort of does everything. Maintenance, cook, carpenter, electrician. Him and his wee nephew kept this ship from sinking until I came.”

“An invaluable fellow,” I said.

“And that wasnae his job to begin with. He was a literary man. Trinity College Dublin. He was Lady Caroline’s, what’s the word. . .”

“Secretary?”

“Amanuensis. She was writing the family history. But over the years everyone else quit or was sacked until he was the last one left, doing everything, butling, cooking...”

“Not cleaning,” I muttered.

Judging from her dirty look Joanna had clearly held Mr Yardley with some measure of respect and thus scolded I decided to keep my counsel until we got to the crime scene.

She led the way to an old stableblock that had seen its last horse decades earlier and now was filled with assorted junk as well as some office furniture and a rather nice plush old purple leather sofa. The sofa, however, would never be nice again because draped on it was presumably Mr. Yardley with a wound in his chest where his heart used to be. Next to Yardley was a double-barreled shotgun. On a cluttered desk in front of him was, presumably, a suicide note.

“I found him like this,” Joanna said.

“Did you go in here, touch anything?” Crabbie asked.

“God no! I wouldnae touch a thing with you lads coming,” Joanna replied.

“Has forensic been out here?” I asked.

She was confused by the question. “What’s forensic?”

“Are we the first policemen to see the crime scene?” Crabbie asked.

“Yes! My God, festina lente, are you going in or not?”

Yardley was dead about three or four hours. The blood had thoroughly drained from his body and rigor was setting in. Doubtless Chief Inspector Galvin would say that Yardley had shot himself in the last five minutes. Mr Yardley was wearing black working slacks and a yellow shirt under a thick wool jumper. Despite the sleet and rain outside he had avoided the worst of the weather. His curly grey hair was unbrushed and dry.

“One barrel only,” Crabbie said, examining the shotgun.

“Could he have done it himself?” I asked.

It was always the question with a long barreled shotgun suicide. Could the victim’s finger actually have reached the trigger? Crabbie was the shotgun expert: owned a couple, had to use them often to scare off foxes and dogs worrying his cows.

“Possibly,” Crabbie said.

“Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary this morning or this afternoon?” I asked Joanna.

“Nothing. I got here at eleven. I was upstairs with Lady Caroline the whole day until Charlie comes banging on the door.”

“Who is Charlie?”

“Has the fields next door. He comes banging on the front door, says he has to use the telephone. That’s when I learned about Sam, Mr Yardley’s nephew, deed. And I went for Mr Yardley and I find him deed too. Just after Charlie had called the poliss I had to call them as well.”

“Maybe Lady Caroline saw or heard something unusual?” Crabbie suggested.

I nodded. We would certainly have to go upstairs and interview her. I had built quite the picture of her in my head already – something between Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, Mr Rochester’s attic dwelling first wife in Jane Eyre and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I was not looking forward to the interview.

“I don’t think so, nothing she said to me,” Joanna said.

“Could Lady Caroline have shot him?”

Joanna laughed. “She’s all of six stone, she couldn’t lift a pin never mind a shotgun. I’m no poliss but I can see he topped himself! What does poor Mr Yardley’s note say?” Joanna asked.

You’d have to lean over the body to get through the mess to read the note. We shouldn’t really do anything like that yet.

“We can’t touch the note or the gun until forensic show up to photograph everything,” Crabbie explained.

“And who’ll do the funeral? I cannae do it, I cannae afford it,” Joanna said, her mind drifting to the immediate future.

“Surely Lady Caroline has—” Crabbie began but Joanna snorted dimissively.

“Poor as a church mouse. Her solicitors give Mr Yardley 400 pounds a month and out of that he has to pay for everything. They have debts higher than Ailsa Craig,” Joanna said and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

“You can’t smoke in here,” I said. “Not until forensic have done their work.”

“I’ll see you later then, I’m gagging. Och, poor Mr Yardley, God bless ya wee man,” she said and scuttled oustide.

Crabbie and I stood next to the body.

“What now?” I said.

“As you said nothing doing until forensic come,” Crabbie said.

“Do you want to go upstairs and interview the—”

“Sir! Sir!” we heard coming from somewhere in the courtyard.

“Lawson,” Crabbie and I said together.

I looked at my watch. It was 6.05. I was off the clock for another three weeks. I wasn’t going to have to interview Miss Havisham after all. Or figure out any of this shit. Lawson, Warren and the forensic officers were going to do that.

Crabbie looked at his watch.

He was off the clock too.

His Proddie work ethic and natural curiosity couldn’t help but try to think of a solution. “Yardley finds his nephew dead of a heroin over-dose,” Crabbie began. “He doesn’t want the scandal to be associated with his employer so he moves the body away from the house, he thinks about the whole business for a bit, gets depressed and grabs the shotgun?”

“He moves his nephew’s body to a car in the middle of muddy field in the rain?”

“He was grief stricken, he didn’t know what he was doing, he was carrying the body in the rain and ended up there,” Crabbie said.

“That’s better than anything I’ve got,” I said.

“Except that Mr Yardley here is bone dry,” Crabbie said.

“Indeed.”

“And why move the body and then kill himself in the very house he wanted to get the scandal away from?”

“Aye.”

“I suppose he could have changed his clothes,” Crabbie said.

“But we both know he didn’t,” I said.

“Yes,” Crabbie agreed.

“Shall we go out and find Lawson and clock off,” I suggested.

“We better,” Crabbie said.

“Will we have a wee peek at the note before we go?”

“Nothing good will come of it,” Crabbie said.

“No,” I agreed.

We leaned over Mr Yardley’s corpse and craned to see his suicide note.

It was not a suicide note.

It was a list of names:

Gerry Adams Senior

Liam Adams

XXXXX XXXXXXXXX

XXX XXXXXXX

XXXXX XXXXXX

Sir Jimmy Savile

XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXX XXXXXXX

Paul Francis Gadd

XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXX X XXXXXXX

I turned to Crabbie. Presumably my face was as pale as his was.

“This isn’t great,” he said.

“Nope.”

“Royalty, Members of Parliament, IRA and UVF commanders and bloody Jimmy fucking Savile again,” I said.

We had run into Savile once before as part of a murder investigation. The DJ and television personality had recently been knighted by the British government and the Pope for his charity work. Crabbie and I had concluded that he was a wrong ‘un and we had forwarded our suspicions to Scotland Yard but nothing had been done.

“What can it all mean?” Crabbie said.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know who Paul Gadd is? Or XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX?” Crabbie asked.

“Nope.”

We heard Lawson encounter Joanna outside.

We heard her explain that we were inside with the late Mr Yardley.

“I’m off the clock, Crabbie, I have a ferry home to catch,” I said, pointing again at the time.

“Are you really going to leave Lawson in the lurch here?” Crabbie said, disheartened.

“He’s a grown up man and a full time detective, mate. That’s why they pay him the big bucks,” I said and made my way outside.

6

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates argues that writing fosters forgetfulness by reducing the need for people to practice and rely on their own memory.

As an argument it is dodgy as fuck.

But it is useful to recall that Socrates didn’t approve of everything being written down.

Writing things down causes problems.

In Ireland people have been writing things down since at least 2400 BC.

But forgetting is also an important skill.

Whatever you say, say nothing is the kind of statement foreigners take back with them to their homeland from their visits to Belfast; but no person from Belfast ever needed to be told such a thing. Before saying anything you had to see something or hear something and then remember it. And no one in Belfast ever saw anything or heard anything or remembered anything.

Omertà is the one word in Sicilian that everyone in Ulster knows.

Within days of seeing that list on Mr Yardley’s desk I had forgotten all of the names. I had forgotten the blue of Joanna’s tear filled eyes. I had forgotten the hole the size of a cabbage in Mr Yardley’s chest.

Perhaps I had never been in Laird House or its stableblock. All I knew about it were rumours: Eisenhower had been there once in 1944, the son and heir had been killed in a motor racing crash, a woman walked the upper floors like the Lady of Shalott.

My memory banks had been wiped and the only thing I could vaguely recall of the day’s events was the smell of blood and gunpowder and badger shit.

Smell is the most layered of the senses digging deep into the psyche. Smell you can’t easily forget but you can try.

Dream yourself into the BMW.

Dream yourself insomniac into the Beemer with brand new radio station Classic FM on the stereo. Dream yourself onto the M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh in the wee hours, carving up Scotland at 100 MPH. Carving up Scotland like it’s a moist Dundee cake.

Comrade Shostakovich is doing his bit.

It’s mostly trucks at this time but there are other cars on the road.

Other men and women who cannot sleep.

In Ford Escorts and Mondeos and Mercs and Toyota Supras.

Occasionally someone will catch your eye and flash their headlights and the race is on over the next five miles.

In the fast lane.

100 MPH, 110, 120, 125, 130.

In Northern Ireland because of the car jackings and car bombings you can’t get insurance for a fuel injected beast like mine. I can beause I’m a cop but your ordinary punter has to pay through the nose. So there, in a world of Ford Cortinas and Mini Coopers and Hillman Hunters this car, a BMW E30, is an apex predator.

Here on the M8 through Scotland it’s a fairer competition.

They were phasing out magnetic portable sirens but I was hanging on to mine for grim life. Nothing like it, on the motorway into the sunset with all those horses galloping under the bonnet and your siren going like there’s a massive city killing emergency somewhere that only you can prevent.

Not that I would ever abuse the siren just to get home before the chippie closed.

Or win a race against a guy in an Aston Martin in the western suburbs of Edinbrugh in the wee hours.

Not me.

Shostakovich Symphony number 7 still playing on the stereo.

You can hear the Nazi 88’s in the timpanis.

You can hear the Stuka dive bombers in the screaming violins.

Hitler is envious of Saint Petersburg’s beauty and issues a directive that it be wiped from the map. The city’s population is to be exterminated and the buildings bulldozed back into the swamps. The Neva River is to be the uninteresting, unvisited border between the Reich and Finland.

Comrade Shostakovich explains all this through the oboes and clarinets.

The starving city digs trenches and fights back as Army Group North advances along with the cellos.

By the third movement I am no longer racing.

I am turning and heading back to Glasgow.

Glasgow and then south to Portpatrick.

The music and the drive has served its purpose.

I am thinking of other things.

I am tired.

I have a daughter and a common law wife.

When I return to Belfast it will be a return to parking tickets and paperwork.

It is a dull but uncomplicated life.

There is nothing to worry about.

There is no monster lurking behind the donut shop.

List?

What list?

The Seventh Symphony ends in drums and trombones and a conclusion that is not exactly triumph, more an exhausted, weary, defiance. It is the perfect ending for the end of the twentieth century too.

“You’ve been listening to the Chicago Symphony playing Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony with Leonard Bernstein conducting,” the man on the radio says.

Through the southern suburbs of Glasgow to the petrol station phone box I sometimes use when I suspect the goons might be tapping my phone. I slow the car. “I was sick and tired of everything when I called you last night from Glasgow…” a wise Swedish woman once said.

Who will I call? What will I say?

I shake my head and drive on.

I pull the car into the garage, pet the cat who has been waiting patiently for me, run the tap in the kitchen sink, get a drink of water, and slip back into bed.

“Were you at the loo?” Beth asks, drowsily.

“Nah, just getting a drink of water,” I say.

“Are you nervous?”

“About what?”

“You’re back on the job in Northern Ireland tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“Oh that? Nah, nothing to be nervous about there.”

Beth yawns and rolls over. “Good, get your paycheck, avoid trouble.”

“I always do.”

7

Off the ferry in Larne and a message on the police radio.

It was Inspector Dalziel’s dreary Lagan Valley voice: “Inspector Duffy, are you in the station?”

“You know I’m not, Kenny, otherwise you wouldn’t be calling me on the radio,” I said.

“Report to me, immediately. We’re all needed for riot duty,” Dalziel said.

“I’m not doing that. We’re CID, we don’t have to go to riots,” I said.

“This is an order from a superior, Duffy,” Dalziel insisted.

“We’re the same rank, Kenny, I’m switching you off,” I said.

“Don’t you dare d—” he said as I turned off the set.

It was always fun to drive through Larne. The unrelenting grimness was bracing. Larne wasn’t fake like Albert Camus who only pretended to be forbidding and pessimistic, but who then produced the optimistic slight of hand of Myth of Sisyphus. No, Larne was the genuine article. Larne was Schopenhauer or Philip Larkin or even Philipp Mainländer. I drove by its mean little pubs, potholed streets, horrifying graffiti and filthy cafes with an impressed smile on my face. Larne never disappointed because it never tried.

Kenny Dalziel seemed anxious to have me at the station for this so called riot duty so I decided to take the long way to Carrickfergus. Up into those malachite green hills again where I found myself pausing at Glenoe waterfall.

If I was still a smoker it would be the perfect place for a ciggie.

As it was I just watched the water and then drove on.

The rain started as I hit the Tongue Loanen and Carrick’s outer edges.

I drove along the Marine Highway and turned into the station. There was no one on the first floor except a gloomy young desk sergeant. Everyone else must had been abducted by aliens or were away on this riot duty scam.

I plodded up the stairs to the second floor where I encountered Kenny putting on his coat.

Kenny was very good at winding me up. His Bible thumping stuff was a part of it but I think the bigger part was just him being him.

Kenny was posh and his small talk was mostly about golf.

He could bore for Ireland.

He was still only the temporary boss but they were probably going to promote him to Chief Inspector and give him the station; which would be bad for everyone, including him.

“Ah, Duffy,” he said. “You’re late. And your whole team has gone on riot duty.”

“It’s not my team, it’s Lawson’s team.”

“Well, they’ve all gone, I don’t blame them, double time plus danger money. They’ve requested all hands. Come along with me.”

“Nope.”

“I said come along, Duffy.”

“And I said no.”

His face was turning red. He had something in his right hand. For a second I thought it was a cosh and he was going to strike me with it, but then I noticed that it was a Good News Bible.

Who the fuck takes a Bible on riot duty?

Maybe I should mention Philipp Mainländer to Kenny?

Too late. He’d turned on his heel and hurried off down the stairs, muttering like a lunatic.

Power was going to make the poor chap completely insane, I suspected.

Depressed, I went into Lawson’s office and and stuck on Radio 3. It was something inoffensive but dull by Bach.

I poured myself some of Lawson’s whisky. A Glenlivet I had bought for him.

I put my feet up on the desk and looked out at the grey lough.

It was the Jesuits who had taught me about Philipp Mainländer so that I could better refute him. Mainländer says that God, realizing the inherent superiority of non-being over being, had committed suicide. This act of divine suicide, not love, was what had created the universe. A universe which was, in effect, God's decaying corpse.

You could see how this sort of thing might upset Kenny. It scared the shite out of the Jesuits.

Bach was ending and I was thinking about all of this when there was a knock at the door.

Before I could say “come in” two goons came in.

They were tall, grey faced men, who didn’t look quite right.

Maybe these were the alien abductors at last?

“Sergeant Lawson?” one of them said.

“No,” I said.

“We’re looking for Sergeant Lawson,” the other one said.

I knew then that they were something much worse worse than fucking aliens. They were Special Branch.

“I haven’t seen him,” I said.

“Who are you?” the first one said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We’ve taken over the Yardley case,” the first one said.

“We just need to take all the master copies of Lawson’s files to, uh, better further our investigation,” the second one said.

They were Special Branch goons working for MI5 or MI6 or some other cabal of posh boy Nigels.

“Lawson’s not here,” I said. “You’ll have to come back at another time.”

“Who the hell are you?” the first one asked again.

“You first,” I insisted.

“Chief Inspector Banks, Special Branch,” firstie said.

“Chief Inspector Hanratty, Special Branch,” secondie claimed.

“Inspector Duffy,” I said.

“Inspector Sean Duffy? Banks said.

“Yes.”

“Of the part-time Reserve?”

“Yes.”

“Get lost small fry. This is way above your pay grade,” Banks said.

I rubbed my chin and looked at him. He had the flinty blue eyes and dark hair of a Nazi general at a war cimres trial. “Did you order out our entire station on riot duty just so you could sneak in here and steal our CID files and the evidence from our Property Room?” I said.

Banks looked at Hanratty.

That’s exactly what they’d done.

It was about that bloody list wasn’t it? Who was on it? Why hadn’t Lawson phoned me and told me Special Branch was taking over his case? What was going on?

The IRA and UVF were talking ceasefires. For two years now we’d be hearing rumours about a comprehensive peace agreement. Peace was coming. Was this something to do with all that?

It seemed unlikely.

This seemed like something else entirely. A loose end that needed hushing up fast.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave, gentlemen, I don’t have authority to give you any case files or let you near our Property Room,” I said.

“We have the authority,” Banks said.

“No, you don’t,” I said.

“You’re going to stop us? A bloody part-time Reservist?”

“Aye, I am,” I said. “What are you going to do, shoot me?”

“We might,” Hanratty said.

I took my feet off the desk and stood. I wasn’t going to be threatened by my own side in my own station.

“Sling your hook, boys. When you return you better come back with something written down from a much higher authority - the Prime Minister or The Chief Constable or bloody both of them,” I said.

The staring contest didn’t last as long as I’d been expecting.

“We will be back,” Banks said and him and his mate headed for the door.

Through the window I watched them walk to a black Audi and scoot out of the car park. I went downstairs and found Rosemary in dispatch. “Find Sergeant Lawson and DC Warren tell them to get back here pronto. There’s an emergency,” I said.

“I think he’s at that riot,” Rosemary said.

“He’s needed here, ASAP,” I said.

I went back upstairs, turned off the radio and slugged the whisky.

I wasn’t sure what was going on but it was definitely trouble with a capital fuck.

8

I was reasonably sure that Special Branch hadn’t bugged Lawson’s office but erring on the side of caution I decided to meet Lawson at an outside watering hole.

Beyond the ancient stone walls of Carrick this town is best known culturally through the song Carrickfergus, through the Louis MacNeice poem Carrickfergus and also perhaps in the great highland war poem Birlinn Chloinne Raghnaill. None of these pieces of literature tells you which pub to go, which is likely why you are here in the first place.

In 1994 Carrickfergus had a dozen reasonable pubs and three very good pubs: Ownies, The Dobbins and The Oak. The Oak was always packed full of cops so Ownies and The Dobbins were your best bet if you wanted to be half way discreet.

Ownies had the best Guinness.

So that decided it.

I told the desk sergeant that DS Lawson was to rendezvous with me at Ownies as soon as he returned and he was to bring the Yardley case file with him.

“Nice for some people,” the sergeant said, with glum sarcasm.

“Hey pal, we’re the tip of the spear, we’re out there keeping you safe, we don’t sit on our arse in a Fuhrer bunker at the back of the barracks wanking and watching football on a secret wee TV,” I said. It wasn’t exactly the pithy departing remark Oscar Wilde might have made to Bernard Shaw in London in 1888 but fuck me I can’t be expected to perform my best work when Special Branch are on my arse again.

I went down to Ownies and ordered a pint of the black stuff.

Lawson and Warren showed up by and by.

No Crabman.

“What is all this, sir?” Lawson asked.

I ordered two more pints and filled them both in about the Special Branch goons.

“What’s going on, Lawson? Wasn’t this a double murder or a murder suicide?”

Lawson shook his head. “I’m not entirely sure about that, sir. After the medical examiner reports came in, of course we began a formal murder investigation but the evidence was somewhat contradictory.”

“What did the ME say? I don’t know anything about the case. No one’s filled me in,” I said.

“You were in Scotland and Special Branch took the case from us, so why would we fill you in?”

“What did the ME say?”

“The ME was Dr Gupta. We know him. He’s very good.”

“What did he say?”

“Overdose death of Sam and then suicide for Mr Yardley. No evidence of foul play, he claims.”

“No evidence of foul play? A body in that car in the middle of the field?”

“No evidence of foul play in the nature of the deaths I think is what he meant. A drug overdose and a suicide.”

“This Sam, doesn’t he have a surname?”

“I’m afraid not. We weren’t able to identify “Sam”. He had no ID of any kind. Mr Yardley presented him as his “nephew” at the house, about a year ago. Detective Warren and myself, er. . .”

“What?”

“We assume that they were gay lovers, not uncle and nephew in any biological sense.”

“You haven’t ID’ed him? In all this time?”

“No.”

“Ok. . .Well let me ask you something else. Why in the name of all that’s holy would Yardley move the body to a car in the middle of a field?”

“We don’t know.”

“Was it Yardley that moved the body?”

Warren was shaking her head. “If he did he thoroughly cleaned his boots and his clothes afterwards,” she said.

“Which he might have done,” Lawson said.

“He might have done. But there is also the puzzling timeline,” Warren said.

“What’s the issue with the timeline?” I asked.

“The timeline isn’t that clear but there’s a moderate possibility that Yardley was already dead before the body was moved to the abandoned car,” Lawson said, sliding me over the ME’s findings from his file.

“That complicates things,” I said.

“It does. Or it did, before Special Branch took the case,” Lawson said.

I read the ME reports a couple of times and shook my head.

There was a lot of hedging, a lot of don’t knows, science talk about cell death, mortification, blood morbidity.

Yardley could have found Sam’s body, could have moved it, could have killed himself.

I took another sip of Guinness. “So your hypothesis is that this: Sam overdoses, Yardley finds the body, kills himself, and then possibly someone else moves the boy’s body?” I asked.

“That doesn’t seem likely,” Lawson said.

“What then?”

“Either Yardley did it for obscure reasons or the boy was murdered, moved there, Yardley finds the body and goes back to his rooms and kills himself,” Lawson said.

“We didn’t really get a chance to look into any of it thoroughly because Superintendent Clare said that Special Branch were taking the case,” Warren said.

“Why did they say they were taking the case?” I asked.

“The list of names on Yardley’s desk had ‘national security implications’ they said.”

“Is this the same Superintendent Clare who ran away that time we were attacked across the border?”

Lawson nodded. “It is.”

“Jesus, that son of a bitch,” I said. “He will say or do anything to save his sorry arse and advance his career.”

“What’s Special Branch’s working hypothesis?” I asked.

“Same as the ME: overdose and suicide,” Lawson said.

Warren was fiddling with her beermat.

“You have a different theory of the case,” I said to her.

“It’s something Alex and I have discussed,” she said.

“And?”

“We think Yardley may have been attempting to get into the blackmail trade. He came across this list of names somehow. We think it’s possible that Sam was murdered and his body moved to the car as a warning to Yardley to keep his nose out of other people’s business,” Warren said.

“Go on. . .”

“We think the killers miscalculated,” Warren said. “We think they didn’t realise that Yardley was in love with Sam and that his death wouldn’t be any kind of warning. It would devastate him.”

Lawson nodded and sipped his pint. “We reckon,” Lawson began. “That Yardley did, in fact, commit suicide in a state of deep depression. But he committed suicide and left out that list of names for us to find as revenge on the killers. Maybe.”

I looked at the pair of them.

“So the official investigation is going with overdose-suicide but you two think: murder/suicide/cover-up?”

“We ran it by Sergeant McCrabban and he also thinks the latter is possible,” Warren said.

“But again no one thought to call me?”

“You were across the sheugh,” Lawson protested.

“What about the list of names. What’s the connection, if there is any?” I asked.

“We did look into that too. People who have been accused of various, alleged, sexual crimes. . .” Warren said and left it there.

“Let me guess, none of these crimes have been taken to the police?”

“Nope.”

“If it’s a cover-up it means that Special Branch is probably part of this cover-up.”

“Possibly,” Lawson said, not quite as cynical of his fellow officers as I was.

I looked out the window at the rain.

I looked back at the pint.

No answers there.

Behind me a woman near the fire a woman was playing a violin and a man was accompanying her on a tin whistle. They were playing Rop tú mo baile, a Choimdiu cride.

Lawson and Warren still looking at me.

What did they want?

I was a part-time Reservist. They were the peelers.

What should I say to them?

It wasn’t their case anymore. They had followed orders and given the case to a higher authority. That was the right thing to do, legally, ethically, career-wise.

And the right thing to do now would be to stop impeding Special Branch and the higher authority from proceeding with their investigation.

Right?

“We have to protect those files in your office from disappearing into a fucking Special Branch black hole,” I said at last.

Warren and Lawson smiled. This is what they’d been hoping I would say.

“How?” Lawson said.

“We have to take all the original pieces of evidence and documents and put them in a secure location where those goons can’t get at them,” I said.

“They’ll get warrants and search all our houses,” Lawson said.

“They will. There’s a Traveller kid I know, Killian, lives in that Tinker camp in Woodburn. Very discreet. He’ll watch them for us in an empty caravan until we figure this out.”

“Special Branch will hit the roof,” Lawson said.

“We’ll photocopy all the reports and notes put them in boxes and let them take the boxes. My guess is that they’re burying this story. They’ll never once look in those bloody boxes. Meanwhile we’ll keep the originals safe…”

“When will we do this?”

“We should be ready to go first thing in the morning. I’ll see Killian tonight. In fact maybe it would be better if you two are off on official business tomorrow morning say between 10 and noon? Plausible deniability.”

They both nodded.

I liked those two.

Hmmm.

Very much hmmm.

Maybe I wasn’t going to potentially ruin their careers because of some quintessential hare-brained Sean Duffy lunacy.

“Actually, you know what? Forget it,” I said. “Forget this whole conversation. The whole thing is ridiculous.”

Lawson was looking at me with cocked head, Golden Retriever style. Warren was looking at him.

We sat there in an uneasy silence, listening to the music, sipping our pints. Rop tú mo baile is a song about asking the gods for protection, which was always appropriate in this neck of the woods.

“Forget it,” I insisted. “But don’t be in your office tomorrow between 10 and noon.”

I said my goodbyes and drove up into Victoria Estate to my Irish home: 113 Coronation Road.

Mrs Campbell or one of her kids had been inside and stoked my fire with peat briquettes and got my paraffin heater going. The whole house smelled pleasantly of gasoline fumes and turf.

I found myself upstairs peering out the bedroom window where Laird House’s ghostly Georgian silhouette was visible between the fields and the fog.

I put on my raincoat and walked to Victoria Hot Spot where I got a fish supper.

When I got home to eat it by the fire a kind of miracle was happening on the radio. “Let no new thing arise,” the old timers around my way used to say in Irish.

But sometimes the new wasn’t so terrible.

Apparently I had missed or maybe even deliberately missed a thing called The Bristol Sound.

And now I was listening to Portishead on Radio 1. Listening to them with a decent 16 year old Bowmore and an excellent fish and chips.

I was pleased.

“Portishead, huh,” I said to no one.

Yeah, no one replied, enjoy it for a minute or two, Duffy, and then take care of the no good cunt parked across the street watching your house.

I looked through the window.

An ugly looking spud in a Ford Escort with binoculars and a camera.

“Fuck this,” I said and put down the whisky and the chips.

Down the front path in my bare feet.

I tapped on his windshield.

“Are you watching my house, fucker?” I said.

He wound his window down.

“What are you talking about, mate?” he said with a conspicuous English accent. A working class Essex accent. He was Army intelligence probably, not MI5 who were still recruiting heavily from private schools and Oxford and Cambridge in order to keep up their quota of dimwits, blackmailable sexual predators and traitors.

“Are you watching my house?”

“Nah, mate.”

“What’s with the binoculars?”

“Bird watching.”

“What’s that bird right there?”

“I don’t know. New hobby for me. Just starting out, mate.”

“Do me a favour and piss off, pal, or I’ll have the local kids come by and let down your tyres,” I said.

“If anyone touches my fucking car they’ll get what for,” he said, patting a tyre iron on the seat next to him.

“If anyone touches any of the kids on this street they’ll get a fucking Belfast six pack before the night is over,” I said.

For emphasis I took out the untraceable US army issue Colt .45 pistol I wasn’t supposed to have and tapped it against his door.

“A Belfast six pack from a .45 at close range and you’ll be lucky to ever walk again,” I said.

“You don’t know who you’re messing with, Duffy,” the man said, starting his car.

“I never bloody do,” I assured him.

9

Sleep on it. An uneasy sleep. A besieged city sleep. The Finns are to your north. The Germans to your south. Stukas are dive bombing you coming back from the bread lines and Shostakovich is banging noisily away on the piano in the apartment upstairs.

There’s no rest for the wicked.

Cut out that racket!

But it wasn’t a piano and it wasn’t a dive bomber. It was a drill outside in the street. Workmen repairing Coronation Road. Russia was someone else’s nightmare. My nightmare was winding down the Troubles with as few casualties as possible. I rolled out of bed in a muck sweat. I stood naked in the bathroom with the smell of the paraffin heater merging with a foul seaweedy stink oozing up from the lough Cthulhu-fashion.

I went downstairs and made coffee and sat there in the living room, without drinking it and without even putting a record on.

Cthulhu stuck his greasy tentacles under the door. The drill continued.

Eventually I grabbed a pair of jeans and snuck out to the shed and found some ancient weed.

I smoked it among the paint cans and shook my head.

“No, no, no,” I said, at last.

No, I was not going to go see Killian.

No, I wasn’t going to break into the evidence room. No, I wasn’t going to mess with Special Branch. No, I wasn’t going to try and solve this case like an eejit lone wolf trying to play Operation while all the other wolves were playing Twister.

Once before I’d had a blackmail case that had become a murder inquiry that had gone horribly wrong. Lesson learned, mate.

In Scotland I’d had the right idea.

Forget the list of names.

Forget this case.

I had five more days to do this month.

Show up for work, swallow your pride, get your paycheck, go home.

Don’t wreck the careers of three good officers: Lawson, Warren and McCrabban.

For once play the long game and trust that Martin Luther King is right and the universe will bend toward justice.

I made some toast, dressed in a black jumper and shit kicker boots, looked under the Beemer for bombs, and drove to work.

“Bend toward justice, my arse,” I said as I pulled into the station.

I went upstairs to Kenny’s office and knocked on his door.

“Come in,” he said.

He wasn’t a drinker but I’d brought him a box of Maltesers.

He eyed it and my smile with suspicion.

“You were right, I was wrong. We all have to do our bit,” I said putting the Maltesers on his desk.

Kenny nodded and took the Maltesers without completely letting go of his suspicion that it might explode in his face.

“What can I do for you, Sean?” he said.

“I want everyone to know that I’m a team player. So sign me up for the nearest riot duty, I feel like bashing some heads today,” I said.

10

A big part of the history of civilization has been finding ways of dealing with the surplus aggression of groups of young men. Young men in groups like to fight. Jane Goodall observed the same behaviour in chimpanzees. And as some other boring fucker has probably already told you we share 98.5 of our DNA with our cousins, the chimps.

The nearest group of wild chimpanzees to Belfast was far away in Senegal, West Africa. But as you likely also know willow warblers, pipits and wagtails migrate from Northern Ireland to Senegal in winter and come back again in the spring. So you could just imagine the troubled male youth of both societies keeping in contact about the latest developments in violent affray, grooming and banana recipes via gossipy wagtail messengers.

I considered all this as I rode in the back of the Land Rover in full riot gear with the other peelers of the DMSU. Full riot gear meant helmets, body armour, Perspex shields, knee pads, pepper spray, face masks, stun guns and as a last resort, Beretta police pistols. DMSU stood for divisional mobile support unit – the black bastards, the riot squad.

The other men were probably thinking about football but I was imaging Senegalese chimps and Belfast’s oiks sharing banoffee secrets.

“What are you grinning about, grandpa?” a sergeant opposite asked me aggressively.

No doubt he assumed I was an elderly constable looking to get some overtime and he was going to learn me about such foolishness.

I smiled benignly at him, leaned forward and pointed at the two inspector’s pips on my shoulder.

“Oh! Sorry, sir,” the sergeant said, meekly. “I didn’t think we had any senior officers with us.”

“That’s quite all right, sergeant, it’s a young man’s game. I’m just here to observe and report and maybe kick the occasional fucking skinhead in the fucking nuts.”

A young man’s game indeed. On average ten years younger than me by the looks of it. And despite the attempts of the RUC to recruit women, this was an entirely testosterone affair. A stinky testosterone affair in need of deodorant.

There were no windows back here and I had no idea where we were until the Land Rover stopped and someone opened the rear door.

It was somewhere in West Belfast.

I can cope with anywhere in Belfast.

Derry sometimes gives me the heebie jeebies but Belfast is ok.

In front of us was a small group of youths throwing stones at a line of policemen who were standing in front of a newsagent’s shop.

This one was a new one on me. The rioters were objecting to the news? To chocolate bars? Stamps? Comic books?

A bored constable explained what was going on. “National Front,” he said, pointing at the small but vociferous group of rioters, almost all teenage boys.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Nope.”

When I peeked into the shop I saw that the owners were Sikh.

Racism was a fairly new phenomenon in Northern Ireland. The border question and sectarianism so dominated all discourse that people had little time for racial categories. Of course there were racists in Ulster but it was always surprising to see them in the flesh.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked the informed constable.

“Since the good weather,” he said. I nodded. As soon as it stopped raining trouble started brewing in the streets.

“What’s the plan?” I asked him.

“No plan, uhm, sir. We just stand here and guard the shop until the rioters run out of stones and petrol bombs and go home. That’s the duty orders.”

I sized up the situation. There were about two dozen of these National Front rioters and about another dozen girls watching them. They were skinny youths with drainpipe jeans and Fred Perry jackets. Most were throwing stones but some of the older ones were making Molotov cocktails. The girls were wee millies who would not assist the boys or interfere with us.

With our arrival there were about fifteen cops. I went off to find the sergeant who had come with me in the Land Rover.

“We can end this now, sergeant,” I said.

“We can?” he said.

“I’m not Mystic Meg. I have no special powers or abilities, except maybe overtaking in the fast lane, which I am proficient at, but I reckon one good charge and all these wee shites will run away home.”

The sergeant looked at me with skepticism.

“What about all our overtime. . .sir?”

I nodded, he wasn’t dubious about the plan, he was dubious about losing his pay.

“It looks like, by default, I’m the senior officer, here,” I said.

“I think so, sir,” the sergeant said.

“I probably have the authority to log us all in until tea time?” I suggested.

“Midnight would be better,” the sergeant said.

“Ok, tell the men, get them ready for a charge, but I’ll have to go talk to the punters first, try to disperse them with the sheer force of my moral arguments,” I said.

“Good luck with that, sir.”

I took off my helmet and marched down the street to where the wains had formed a ragged line. There was none of the usual chants and singing and I had a feeling that this little “riot” was as a fragile as your granny’s Sunday souffle.

Some of the kids had scarves tied over their faces, a few had New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox baseball caps, all of them were wearing Adidas trainers, but there was one much older man lurking to the side.

He was wearing brogues and brown slacks and a Barbour jacket.

He must be the racist-in-chief.

He looked like Nikita Khrushchev but maybe more potatoey.

I thought the wains might try to prevent me from walking right up to this sinister figure but as I was striding with confidence and it had started drizzling their bravado and the discipline of their line was already beginning to evaporate.

I was hoping to use Socratic reasoning on Comrade Khrushchev but before I could begin my opening monologue he got in first with: “What do you want, peeler? You scum are not welcome here!”

I quickly abandoned my recitation of Plato’s Crito and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and pivoted to Plan B:

“I’m just here to give you a word of warning, cunt,” I said. “We’re charging in two minutes and my truncheon is itching to smash your fat fucking face.”

“We have a right to lawful assembly,” the man said.

“I’ll be thinking about that as I’m beating you about the neck and shoulders,” I said and turned and walked briskly back to the thin green line of coppers.

The sergeant saluted as I approached which was a slightly comical bit of bathos but I felt obliged to return the salute.

“The men are ready, sir,” he said.

“Let’s go now, surprise the wee shites!”

“Let’s go boys!” the sergeant said and we turned and ran immediately at the rioters.

The rain had increased and the sight of a bunch of grown men with shields and batons running at them was enough to quell the ardour of the kiddies. The girls started screaming and running and the boys quickly followed.

Khrushchev had already scarpered.

No one got to hit anyone.

The thing was over in forty five seconds.

The rain intensified and I went back to the newsagents and left my card.

“Any more problems with these eejits and you can call me and I’ll sort it,” I said.

The Sikh proprietor, a Mr Singh, was appreciative. He had fought with the British Army in Burma as a teenager but arthritis had prevented him from taking care of the mob himself today.

“Don’t do it yourself, sir, call me,” I said.

He insisted that every one of the peelers have a Mars bar and a can of Fanta on him, which was much appreciated.

I was feeling good about life and my decisions when I arrived back at Carrickfergus RUC that evening.

It had been the prudent thing to do to let this case go and do some regular police work for a change.

I wasn’t a detective any more. I had to see that and understand it. And until I got my pension I could still help out the punters in a humble capacity. No baroque schemes to steal evidence from the property room. No worrying about conspiracies. Just regular honest police work – that was the ticket for a good life. Wasn’t that what Epicurus was always telling us: cultivate your garden, be a regular copper and maybe scare some annoying wee shites from time to time.

My feeling of giddy elation lasted until I reached the second floor.

Lawson was waiting for me with a funereal look on his face.

“What’s amiss, lad?” I said.

“Hanratty and Banks are dead.”

“Who?”

“The Special Branch detectives who took our case files on that murder suicide at the Laird place,” Lawson said, lowering his voice ominously.

“What are you talking about? How are they dead?”

“Car bomb. They were driving back to Belfast and stopped in for some lunch, someone put a mercury tilt device under their car and it blew up, killing them,” Lawson explained.

“When was this?”

“About four hours ago.”

“Jesus,” I said, sitting down.

I looked at him. Perspiration on his upper lip, a narrowing of his eyes. There was more he had to tell me. I guessed what it was.

“What happened to the boxes of evidence?” I said.

“Did you duplicate any of the files in the end?”

“No.”

“Then everything was completely consumed in the subsequent fire,” he said.

I nodded. “That’s what I get for doing the right thing for once. What are the higher ups saying?” I asked.

“Just a random attack by the IRA, nothing out of the ordinary,” Lawson said.

“But you don’t believe that, do you, son?”

He shook his head.

“Where does that leave us?” Lawson said, after a long pause.

“I think, laddie, that it leaves us in a bit of a scary place,” I said.

11

Things would have to move much faster now.

Priority one get Crabbie and Warren down the station ASAP.

Between us Lawson and I concocted a running order. One of us would go to the scene of Hanratty and Banks’s murder and see if the reports were true that everything had been burned or if any of the pieces of evidence could somehow be salvaged.

Second we would interview Lady Caroline Laird and see what she knew about Mr. Yardley, her amanuensis blackmailing butler.

Third we would inteview Superintendent Clare and ask him why he had removed Carrick CID from the case and given it to Special Branch. What did the creepy fuck know that we did not.?

“Sound good, chief?” I asked Lawson.

“Sounds good,” Lawson said, pleased that I was still acknowledging him as the boss. Which he was.

I didn’t like the look of the sky.

“You heard anything about rain?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Ok, well, nothing for it anyway, I’ll head up to the crime scene. You gather the troops,” I said.

The rain, as ever, began reluctantly, a spit, a hiss, a half-cut squall sliding down from Knockagh Mountain, but by the time I got to North Belfast it was a torrent.

The crime scene was all flashing flights and forensic men. Reporters too and a few eejit civilians with nothing better to do.

I flashed my ID.

The car was a burnt out shell. The bodies were still in the front seat. Transformed from human being into carrion. The fire had been so intense that all trace of the evidence boxes was long gone. Just a few shards of plastic and blackened paper.

I had been to a hundred scenes like this.

I bummed a ciggie off an old mate, Inspector Cyril Tanner.

“They did a good job with this one,” Cyril said surveying the devastation.

I nodded and did not reply. I had fucked up royally here. What had happened to me? I was not old enough to be wiley, I was too old to be nimble and sharp.

The wind was coming off the lough and the rain was falling in hard, cold drops, each one a palimpsest of all the other car bombs and murders and outrages I had seen.

And the smell.

Sickening.

Peace was coming, they said?

Come faster.

Bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

This had been a mistake, coming here.

I’d wasted an hour.

Get back to the station.

I tossed the ciggie and ran to the Beemer, looked under it for my own personal car bomb, didn’t find one, and hit the motorway.

65 MPH. Motorhead. Maiden.

When I reached Carrickfergus RUC I saw Warren and Crabbie’s cars in the car park.

Good. The gang’s all here. Between the four of us we would set the world to rights.

I ran upstairs and saw them all hunkered in the incident room.

I could tell immediately that something else had happened.

“What?” I said

“Lady Caroline. She apparently took a fall at Laird House,” Lawson said.

“She’s dead too?” I said, aghast.

Lawson nodded.

We looked at one another. We were all thinking the same thing.

Is any of us going to survive this case?

12

Depressed and silent we signed out a Land Rover and drove over to Laird Mansion. Forensics were there already, of course, having some kind of supernatural powers about crime scenes that we ordinary coppers don’t have.

Joanna, the Scottish home help, was sitting in the living room with a mug of tea.

She’d been sobbing.

Lawson and Warren comforted her and asked her all the bog standard questions.

She had found the body two hours earlier at the foot of the stairs.

Lady Caroline was in her late seventies, she was a frail woman and the staircase was in a poor state of disrepair. Joanna did not suspect a murder but the third death in a week in this terrible place was bad enough.

“I’m quitting this bricht county and moving back to Scotland, I gave me notice at the agency. Out, thank God, leave all this blather to you heathens,” she said.

I didn’t blame her. She was very upset. I decided not to point that it was the Irish who Christianised the heathen Scots in the mission of St Columba.

We did all the usual cop stuff.

We looked for clues.

We canvassed for witnesses.

We did uncop things: we tried to make the evidence fit the pattern instead of the other way around.

We wanted it to be murder but there just wasn’t the material for that interpretation. Forensics agreed.

Which meant, my gut told me, that the murderer was very very good.

An MI5 goon?

Some top IRA hitman?

If it was a murder it was a nice one, they’d killed the two cops and Lady Caroline simultaneously, while I was off making an arse of myself on riot duty.

It was getting dark when we departed and swore to meet again in the morning like the witches in Macbeth.

I made them promise me that they would watch their backs.

Warren nodded. Crabbie nodded. Lawson nodded.

Good.

None of us would be safe until this was over.

It was the longest day ever but somehow it was only a little after 5 o’clock and I found myself in the Beemer driving to Queens Street RUC where I knew Superintendent Clare was based. I needed to talk to that fucker about what was going on. I deliberately didn’t want Crabbie and the others with me in case he did some cop chickenshit on us or voodoo or whatever he was capable of.

When I arrived and showed my ID at Queens Street I was given over to a secretary called Brownlee who was also Scottish, one of those terrifying Jean Brodie women.

“I’m looking for Superintendent Clare,” I said.

“Chief Superintendent Clare is at a private function,” she said.

“Chief Superintendent?”

“He was promoted by the Chief Constable just yesterday,” Miss Brownlie said, beaming with pleasure.

“I see,” I said and didn’t.

What did that mean? Coincidence? A tap on the shoulder for services rendered?

“I wish he’d told me!” I said, grinning. “He was probably too embarrassed. We’re old friends! Came up through the ranks together! Man, that’s great, so it is. I have to celebrate him! Old Tony Clare a Chief Super!”

Miss Brownlee smiled at my obvious pleasure.

“It’s not before time, of course,” she said.

“Of course not, a brilliant peeler and a better man,” I said. “Is tonight’s private function related to the promotion?”

“No, no, no, this is something different entirely,” Miss Brownlee said.

“Please, fill me in,” I said.

“Are you musically inclined at all, inspector?” Miss Brownlee said.

“I can take it or leave it, like most people, what’s afoot? Does Tony have a band?”

Miss Brownlee shuddered as if I had suggested a cocaine fueled threesome with her, me and Michelle Pfeiffer.

“Tonight’s the night of the Chief Superintendent’s recital. I have two tickets left if you want to bring your wife or girlfriend.”

“Oh yes, of course! That’s tonight? I would love those tickets!”

Leaving the cop shop I looked at said tickets. Today’s date and then a simple and elegant announcement:

ONE NIGHT ONLY

ANTHONY CLARE

FELLOW

ROYAL CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC

ULSTER HALL, 7PM

BACH, CHOPIN, SCHUBERT

One the way to the Ulster Hall I clocked the tail twice. They’d stuck that British Army Intelligence goon on me again. The one driving the Ford Escort who was outside my house the other night.

I clearly didn’t scare that bastard enough. Maybe I wasn’t capable of scaring people anymore?

It was already 7:05 when I reached the Ulster Hall.

I parked the Beemer in an emergency vehicle spot, showed my ticket, and snuck inside.

I’d never liked piano recitals. Hate them as much as Geldof hates Mondays, and this one felt like it was gonna be both rolled into one long despairing groan. The hall smelled of aftershave and nouveau riche guilt, all Savile Row and Knightsbridge and the soft shuffling of people pretending to be sophisticated. Outside, Belfast was doing its usual symphony of sirens, but in here Chopin had the floor. I sat near the back, the only man in the place with a revolver under his jacket and the faint tang of cordite still in his nose. The pianist’s fingers moved like some genius savant trying to defuse a bomb, and for a moment I forgot about the murder, the rain gnawing at the windows, and the war slowly coming to an end.

Clare was dressed in his ridiculous penguin kit but he was very good.

And not just formally good, Grade 10 good and, worse, he played with genuine emotion and panache.

It was disgusting really.

When he was done, wild (for dour Belfast) applause and the last note hanging there in the air, like a question I didn’t want to answer. Miffed, I tried to pretend that I’d always preferred jazz – something about fewer ghosts in the melody — but it didn’t work. Clare was better at the ivories than me by a country mile and a better copper too and perhaps even slightly more handsome.

The after party was in the Europa Hotel.

I bided my time until midnight and then I caught him going to the bogs by himself.

I followed him in and waited until he was at the urinal.

Unzipped.

Vulnerable.

“Excellent performance,” I said, slapping him on the back mid piss.

He didn’t flinch or spray piss on himself or panic.

He tensed and untensed and resumed his urination.

“Miss Brownlee informed me that you were coming, Duffy,” he said. “I saw you out there. I could have had security remove you but you must be desperate for culture so I thought I’d let you stay.”

“You call that show culture, pal?”

“Whatever you were hoping to do by showing up like this has not worked, Duffy. I am not intimidated by you, a lowly inspector of police on his way out the door.”

“Two men of yours are dead, Clare! Don’t you give a shit about that?”

“Special Branch will do an excellent job finding the culprits, I’m sure, something you could have done with more of in your police career. Your solve rate was one of the worst in all of Ireland. Indeed why you chose law enforcement as your profession is baffling.”

“I wasn’t as good at piano as you.”

“No. I’ve heard that too.”

The bathroom door opened and a man whose grandaddy must have been Finn McCool came in.

“I’m bored with him, Thomas, get him out of here,” Clare said and a giant, meaty paw grabbed me by the neck.

“Out you come, sonny,” the big man said, lifting me off the ground by the throat and squeezing my carotid artery.

I must have blacked out for a moment for when I came to the big man was dusting me down and smiling at me in front of the Europa Hotel.

“We all right?” he said.

“Uhm. . .” I said.

“Safe home now, don’t come back,” he said. He turned and spat and went back inside blocking the doors temporarily like Goliath trying to get into a Port-a-Loo.

I caught my breath, bummed a cigarette and gathered my thoughts in the drizzle. As my vision cleared I saw that Army Intel bloke standing next to my Beemer in the restricted parking area.

He was smiling at me under an umbrella. He was also smoking and he had a camera or a set of binoculars around his neck. One way to make it obvious.

The depression returned with a vengeance.

Can you be checkmated twice in one game?

That’s what it felt like.

Every move blocked off.

The grandmasters, as usual, several steps ahead of the slow on the uptake plodder.

13

Duffy drove himself home in the Beemer.

Duffy needed to think not drink.

But Duffy found himself in Coronation Road stoking the coal fire in the living room and pouring himself a vodka gimlet, easy on the gimlet, heavy on the Russki firewater.

The rain, through the window, the same old relentless grey curtain turning the streets slick and shining under the jaundiced glow of the sodium lamps. The cold, familiar Carrick drizzle was, I supposed, welcoming in its way.

Nothing familiar about this case.

Not even a case.

A nothing.

Not our problem.

Special Branch’s problem.

In fact none of it was ever my problem.

Vanity that I’m still a proper copper. As Clare pointed out so succinctly I’m just old retainer being shown the door.

My time was almost finished with police work. Can’t I take a fucking hint?

Nah.

I swallowed the gimlet and poured a healthy measure of Bowmore.

I took out a yellow legal pad and tried to plot the case from the nascent blackmail scheme to the murders of the blackmailer’s boyfriend, the butler’s muder/suicide, the coppers carrying the evidence and now Lady Caroline.

Five deaths to keep this list quiet.

I should have photocopied that bloody thing or wrote it all down carefully in my notebook. I thought there would be plenty of time for all that.

Learned nothing from all these years on the job.

Write it down now because the now is going to be overtaken by a tidal wave of other nows and their bullshit.

Paul Gadd was one of the names.

Jimmy Savile.

XXXXX XXXXXXX another.

Gerry Adams’s brother?

XXXXXX XXXXXXX.

This time I did write them down. But I couldn’t get the linkage.

I tried to reverse engineer it.

If you were a spook bringing together a peace process and something like this came up that could jeopardise years of bloody work, would you react so heavy handedly? Didn’t MI5 normally move with finesse? Isn’t that what they teach them at 140 Gower Street? There was that old gag about Cambridge spies - brilliance, buggery and betrayal, but wasn’t brilliance a part of it?

I put on my raincoat and flat cap and DM boots.

I grabbed my .38, stuck it in the raincoat pocket and went outside.

Up Coronation Road.

Not a soul out now, of course.

A right turn onto Victoria Road.

There ahead of me Belfast Lough and the lights of County Down.

I walked down the gently sloping hill, past the butcher’s and the grocery store, by the gospel hall and the chippie.

Everything closed.

The graffiti at the bottom of the road said “This is the modern world” either an ironic lament about Ulster crucified by decades of civil war or a reference to the second studio album by The Jam. Or both. Across the water in England a thing called Britpop was brewing and an album by Blur had just come out called “Modern Life is Rubbish”. Is that what existence in tranquil suburbia did to you? From The Jam’s spikey look at modern Britain to utter anomie and boredom 14 years later?

Boring peace, Jesus, it would be nice to find out what that was like.

Victoria Road to Elizabeth Avenue to Barn Road.

As I reached Taylor’s Avenue I heard the tail behind me go heavily into a puddle.

I turned and saw him thirty yards back on the far side of the road.

I immediately began running toward him.

He was examining his soaked sneaker and didn’t see me for a vital two seconds.

But then he bolted like a hare over the railway bridge and toward the centre of town.

“Fuck.”

The rain coming sideways off the Lough, sharp as tacks, needling through my coat. The bastard was fast—too fast for someone who’d spent the last year on thick porridge, big dinners and pints of Scottish Heavy down the local. But adrenaline has its own kind of fuel, and I wasn’t about to lose this wee shite, not here, not tonight.

He darted between two parked cars, shoes slapping the slick pavement. I followed, half-blind, lungs on fire, the sound of the sea somewhere behind us, black and endless. Carrickfergus at night, in the wee hours, isn’t a town so much as a collection of ghosts. A thousand years of the fucks. You feel them in the walls.

He cut down an alley beside a new Chinese takeaway. My DMs slipped on the uneven cobbles, arms pinwheeling as I caught myself on a rusted drainpipe. Somewhere ahead, I heard the clang of a bin being knocked over, a curse, then footsteps again, fainter now.

“Stop! Police!” I yelled, more for comic effect than anything else.

The alley spat me out onto West Street, the rain coming harder now, thick as piss pouring down from bottles on a bad band at Knebworth. Across the road, under the Big Lamp, he looked back for the first time—hood up, face a blur, but an acknowledgement that he’d probably pushed his bloody luck.

He took something out of his jacket pocket.

“Don’t you do it!” I screamed at him.

But this stupid eejit had lost all sense of professionalism.

He pulled the trigger twice.

I hit the pavement and the bullets slammed in the second floor of Bell’s shop.

He ran across the Marine Highway.

Cars hissed past, tyres slicing through puddles. I waited for a gap and ran, splashing through the road like a friggin madman.

He bolted toward the pier.

This wasn’t his town or he would have known this was a dead end.

I stopped and caught my breath under the lee of the castle.

I saw him get to the end of the pier and contemplate his options.

Dive into the freezing lough?

Waves were crashing against the rocks, the air all salt and diesel.

He’s last about two minutes in there.

I got behind a set of concrete steps and pointed the . 38 at him and waited.

It took his brain about five minutes to figure the only was to come back the way he’d come which he did sheepishly, foolishly.

“Lose the weapon in the harbour, hands up!” I yelled at him.

He tossed his gun and stuck up his paws.

I kept the sight of the .38 on him until I was close enough to smell the sweat coming off him.

It was the Brit Army intel guy alright, that smug smile no longer anywhere near his fat face.

“Mate, look,” he began and I cold clocked him across the jaw.

He slipped on the slick concrete and went down hard, I almost went down with him. I grabbed his jacket, yanked him up sat him on the concrete steps and offered him a cigarette from my emergency stash.

He took it and I lit it for him.

“Too old for this malarkey,” I said between puffs.

“Me too,” he said.

“What regiment?” I said.

“Intel.”

“Originally.”

“Scots guards.”

“You don’t sound—”

“Yeah, I grew up in Colchester, but my father, grandfather. . .”

I nodded. “Were you in the Falklands?”

“I was. Corporal then.”

“What are you now?”

“Captain.”

“14th Intelligence?”

“That’s right.”

“What’s your name?”

“Colin.”

I offered him my hand. “Well you know me,” I said.

He shook the hand. “Yeah.”

We sat for a bit in the rain.

“What’s all this about, mate?” I asked.

“I don’t know much. I was told to follow you. I was told to make it obvious that I was following you,” Colin said.

“To intimidate me?”

“I suppose so.”

“Who gave the order? Chief Superintendent Clare?”

“A copper?” he said and laughed. “Nah, mate. This is way above the Old Bill.”

I nodded.

“What exactly did they tell you?” I asked.

“They said that there was a fucking butler who had supposedly come across a list of names from an old mate of his who ran a paedo brothel and his mate was dead but this butler was stupid and broke and working for an old lady who was going bankrupt. He’d sat on this list for years or maybe he’d just made it up and now he wanted to make some money on it.”

“So he sent out at least one blackmail letter?”

“I think so.”

“What did they tell you happened then?”

“Someone kills his boyfriend and then the butler kills himself. And you lot show up and the fucking list of names is about to be on page 1 of The Sun and The Times.”

“So what? What do they care?”

“Peace process? I don’t know. The names. Not all the names, but some of them, enough of them?” He wondered thinking along my lines.

“So Special Branch gets the call to take the case from Carrick RUC, hush everything the fuck up, and make it go away,” I said.

“Mate I’m not privy to the details I was just told to keep an eye on you and—”

“And what?”

“Shut you the fuck up too, if it came to that.”

I nodded again.

“What else can you tell me?”

“That’s all I know,” he said.

“They killed two coppers already, why?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

I rubbed my chin and tossed the ciggie.

“I wonder if they maybe weren’t quite the company men that Clare and MI5 thought they were,” I said.

Colin shrugged. He genuinely didn’t know.

“You ever listen to Richard Strauss?” I asked.

“No.”

“In his final opera Capriccio, he builds up toward this big climax and then deliberately faffs it, pushing out an anti-climax to challenge the punters, you know? Me, I like an anti-climax. I think it would be much better if you don’t shoot me and I don’t shoot you. What do you think?”

He nodded, got off the steps, offered his hand again.

I shook it again.

“I’ll call in sick. Maybe go home. That’ll buy you some time,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“But they’ll send someone else until this, whatever this is, is sorted out.”

“I know. Maybe a few days is all I need,” I said, pocketing the .38 and wiping the cold rain off my face.

14

I went home and didn’t sleep. I mean, who sleeps?

I got dressed and went back out to Beemer, looked underneath it for bombs and drove to Belfast.

Found myself outside of Chief Superintendent Clare’s house in Bangor.

You’re not supposed to do this kind of thing as a copper in case you end up in the newspapers but it was a wet night in Belfast and there had been an explosion in Newry and punters had been out rioting earlier and the hacks were stretched thin.

It might be fun to use my B&E skills on Chief Superintendent Anthony Clare, see what he’s got locked away in his desk study drawer.

It might not be fun if he bloody shot me.

Think it over in the dark.

Empty house, quiet cul de sac.

Not even a curtain twitch.

Nah.

I gave up after an hour and drove back to civilization on the County Antrim side of Belfast Lough.

Didn’t want to go home so I parked in the Castle carpark and grabbed the wool blanket and tried to kip.

BMW do a comfortable set of wheels but they’re not made for catnapping.

Finally though I did fall asleep for a bit.

And. . .how to say it?

This never happens to me.

I’m not that kind of policeman.

I don’t work intuitively.

I’m a sift the evidence, over and over, kind of guy. Increments. Slow accumulations.

Not blinding insights.

Never blinding insights.

Yet when I woke at 4 as a coal boat pulled into Carrick harbour I’d cracked the case.

Or, at least, I knew whodunnit.

I shivered and turned on the heater and drove around until I found a petrol station selling coffee and hard wee scones.

I had a scone and a black coffee and drove to the station to check on a few things and then up the A2 to John McCrabban’s little farm behind Magheramorne.

I knew he’d be up at 5.00 to milk the sheep or shear the cows or whatever it is one did on a farm.

At 5.01 the front door opened and Crabbie came out. He walked up to the car carrying two mugs of tea.

“What about ye, Sean?”

“Can you take the day off?” I asked.

“Aye, I can. I can get Martin to cover for me, what’s afoot?”

“Cracked the case, mate.”

“How?”

“I dreamed the solution.”

“Well that’s an odd one,” Crabbie said without emotion. “Even for you.”

“Do you want to come with me?”

“I’ll get my coat.”

“And your gun.”

He went back toward the house. I was glad he’d said yes without question. You always need someone like that in your life. Some comrade or mad uncle who is always up for it when the shit is about to go down. I was glad I didn’t say I dreamed it like Kekulé and his benzene ring. Hate the wankers who say shite like that.

Crabbie came back with a bullet proof vest and a shotgun.

Always thinking was the Crabman.

15

We drove to the ferry terminal in Larne.

I showed him my notebook and what my brain had been thinking about so there was no sense of mystery. Crabbie concurred or at least I think he concurred. He didn’t say anything.

We parked the Beemer and went upstairs to get some grub. The ferry was serving a “Full Scottish Breakfast” which was maybe a bit much on a heaving deck with the smell of diesel permeating everything.

Tea and a slice of toast did for us.

After breakfast we went to the stern and watched Ireland retreat. Belfast was somewhere back there behind the hills, hidden like a dirty old man’s porn stash. The gulls were following us and I thought about all the times I’d sworn I’d never come back here and had done so anyway. The ship rolled under us, the water a thick bottle-green that I could taste on my lips.

A sea crossing is special. Flying doesn’t quite cut it, does it? You need to move between these islands by boat. Crabbie understood that. I understood that. The ferry was a kind of ontological hinge between lands, languages and histories. Like the ferry over the Styx, the passage wasn’t just a means of transport, but a threshold where one world was relinquished before another was fully entered. The slowness was part of it.

And the elements. No matter the time of year winter was always stapled to your coat. The sea was always gnawing its blue knuckles. Britain a mere rumour ahead, a thin mouth practicing its own name.

I imagined slipping over the rail into the foaming wake. It would be ok, wouldn’t it? The sea would keep me, press salt into my eyes, teach me a new language, a new story.

Using his powers of telepathy Crabbie saw this and said “Why don’t we get a hot drink in you, Sean,” and I let him take me below.

Milky tea with two sugars and a Paris bun.

What is a Paris bun? Oh my God, do I have to explain everything?

“You think she’ll talk?” Crabbie said.

“No.”

“No, me neither.”

Beneath us the engines throbbed, a mechanical heart insisting we were all still alive. Which we were, but the day was young.

“Would vehicle owners please return to the car deck,” a voice said over the Tannoy as we were coming in.

Back to the Beemer.

Ramp down.

We hit Scotland hard.

The best way to hit it.

And drove north to Glasgow.

I let Crabbie guide me with the address from my notebook and the big road map of Strathclyde.

I had thought the house was going to be some nice wee house in the suburbs but I should have known better.

It was a susbstational pile.

There were two types of MI5 recruits, the posh and the very posh. This was their flaw, of course, their world view was very narrow and susceptible to group think.

Glasgow was well to the south of us and behind was a lough and damp woods and mountains. I didn’t know this area very well. The house looked like a converted Presbyterian manse from the nineteenth century. They probably got away without having to have any servants but it would be tough to keep it clean and warm.

There were four other houses on the road and then sheep farms.

Crabbie and I parked in a layby.

“How did you get her address?” he said.

“She told Lawson her address during the initial questioning and I happened to write it down in my notebook,” I said.

“And you’re convinced she’s the killer?”

“It’s not just dreamlogic, mate, I reverse engineered it. If you were MI5 and you were tasked with investigating this blackmailer you’d want a man inside too, wouldn’t you?”

“Aye.”

“And when I checked her employment records, she’d only been with the temp agency for two months. And before that. . .”

“Before that, what?”

“She’s a ghost.”

It was 9:00 o’clock, she’d be awake now. No element of surprise.

“How do we do this?” I asked Crabbie.

“We do it like we’re following up a lead. We walk up to the front door and knock and politely ask our questions,” Crabbie said and then almost immediately shook his head.

“What?”

“That doesn’t feel right though, does it?”

“I trust your bad intuitions, what do we do instead?”

“I’ll go through that allotment and round the back, you knock on the door like it’s all business as usual. And then I’ll pop in the back door.”

“It’s a plan, mucker.”

Crabbie put on his vest, put his coat over it, grabbed his shotgun and went out. I saw him carefully weave through the greenhouses and allotments in the waste ground next door to the Manse, what once, likely had been the Manse’s kitchen garden.

I got out of the Beemer, crossed the street, opened the Manse gate and walked down its long stone path.

The house was painted a milky grey, an extrememly unpleasant shade, that must have been the only paint they had left in the shop because only a depressive would choose it voluntarily.

Two bottles of gold top milk on the door step and through the frosted window what looked like post, which likely meant she wasn’t up yet.

I rang the doorbell.

What was it George Patton said? No plan survives first contact with the enemy?

I hadn’t seen the upstairs window open.

I hadn’t seen Joanna Price take out a bloody sniper’s rifle.

16

The front door opened, a lanky, beardy character wearing a Barbour jacket and pajamas was standing there with his hands in his pockets. He was about 25 but he somehow looked like a geography graduate student who had time travelled to the 90s from 1971.

“Sean Duffy, RUC, can I come in?” I asked.

“You better come in,” he said. “Or she’ll shoot you.”

“Who will shoot me?”

He nodded up at the roof and I saw her with the rifle.

“Tell him to take out his guns first, handle first, two fingers and give them to you!” Joanna said.

“Oh, you better give me your guns. The revolver and the Glock,” the man said. “Better do it, or she’ll put one in your nut.”

I spread my arms and he patted me down, taking my semi-automatic and my old police special. He even took my pen-knife.

“Clear!” he shouted and led me into a living room which looked like a discarded set from the Young Ones. Pizza boxes, bags of rubbish, clothes piled up on sofas, space heaters on long cables, aged curtains and rugs. Dust levels so thick even Quentin Crisp would have blanched. It was so nasty I bet even the rats had moved away to somewhere nicer.

“Sorry about the mess. We haven’t been here for very long,” the young man said.

I think his point was that they hadn’t been here long enough to sort out a cleaning rota, but the bigger question was how anyone could have gotten a place this filthy after an abbreviated period of time.

“Who is we?” I asked.

He smiled at me and said nothing.

“MI5?” I suggested.

“No,” he said with chagrin “Tried out for them, didn’t get accepted.”

“Really?”

“Funny story, actually,” he said, thought about telling it, and then did not.

Joanna was down from upstairs.

The rifle was gone and in her hands now was a sawn-off double barreled shotgun which would certainly do the job if a job needed to be done on me.

“To what do we owe the pleasure, Inspector Duffy?” she said, all pretense of a Scottish accent gone vanished. Her real accent was posh with, perhaps, a Hampshire inflection.

“I’m here to bring you in for questioning about the murder of Lady Caroline Laird, for starters ” I said.

“Have you got an arrest warrant?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I thought you’d come along voluntarily just to clear a few things up.”

She smiled. “I don’t think so.”

“In that case, you’re under arrest for possession of an illegal firearm. The sawn off shotgun you’re pointing at me is in breach of the Firearms Act 1968,” I said.

“Which you wouldn’t have seen if you hadn’t illegally entered our premises,” she said. “The evidence doesn’t count.”

“I was invited in,” I said. “The evidence absolutely counts.”

We could have gone on like this for ages, no doubt, name dropping famous cases from the rules of evidence but mercifully, Crabbie who had been biding his time, chose this moment to enter the living room with his shotgun. Not for him a sawn off job fired from the hip. He had the thing pointing down from his shoulder at her head. Even one barrel would likely have messily decapitated her at this distance.

“Very slowly and very carefully put down your weapon,” Crabbie said.

She turned and thought about a play and realized it was no go. Not with that stern look on the Crabman’s face.

She put down the shotgun. I grabbed it and searched her and beardy. No knives, no other weapons of any kind.

“Sit next to one another,” Crabbie said. Beardy sat next to Joanna on the vile sofa.

Crabbie cleared a space from one of the chairs and arranged himself so his shotgun was now pointing at both of them. I took the shells out of her shotgun and took back my revolver and Glock.

“Now we’ll get some answers,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “You think so,” she said.

“Who do you work for?” I asked.

She said nothing.

“You’re not a temp, you’re not Joanna Price. Who are you?” I asked. “And who are you, matey?”

“If you want I’ll have a wee hunt for ID’s,” Crabbie said.

“Nah mate, you keep the gun on them. I’ll look,” I said.

“Did you press zero?” Joanna asked her friend.

“Of course,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Whenever there’s any kind of emergency we push the zero button on our phone and help comes,” she said.

“You’re bluffing,” I said.

“Wait us out then,” she said.

I looked at Crabbie. He didn’t think it was a bluff.

“Help comes from where? From who? Which agency?” I asked.

“Maybe it’s divine help,” she said.

“Your mate here already told me you’re not MI5,” I said.

She laughed. “We’re not,” she agreed.

“Then who?” I insisted.

“You’re not army intelligence, no way you’re getting away that bloody beard in the army,” I said.

The beardy kid smiled at that.

“I couldn’t handle the army, all that shouting by that guy at the start,” he said.

“The drill instructor?” Crabbie said.

“Yes,” he said.

Now that he’d spoken a bit more I could see that he too had a Southern English accent from somewhere in the London suburbs. Not that that told us anything.

I got up and started searching the house. I looked in the bedrooms first for personal ID’s, bills, notes, diaries, driver’s licenses, anything like that, but I could find nothing.

“What have you come up with so far, inspector?” Joanna yelled.

“You must have a bloody driving license, what if you’re stopped by the cops?” I said.

Neither of them replied. Joanna looked at me and smiled. In fact there was way too much smiling and chat. Crabbie was pointing a shotgun at them. Crabbie was a serious person who had shot at other humans before.

A civilian would be pissing their pants.

“Maybe we should bundle them into the boot of the Beemer, drive them back to Belfast and take them to Castlereagh holding centre and beat the story out of them with rubber hoses,” I said.

“I don’t see Sergeant John McCrabban allowing you to do that to a woman,” Joanna said. “It would offend his honour code.”

It would too. But how did she know that?

They weren’t army intel. They weren’t M15 or M16. Not the Americans. Not Special Branch or the cops.

“Why did you murder that wee boy?” I asked.

“Who says it was a murder,” she said.

“I do. Forensic does.”

She shook her head. “You must have seen an interrogation go wrong before. Something like that,” she said.

“You were trying to spook his boyfriend, get more information out of them? See who tipped them off about the blackmail?”

“I have no idea what happened,” Joanna said. “I was just working there as a temp. a couple of days a week. That’s what I do. I’m a home help, like I said, Inspector Duffy.”

“You threw an old woman down a flight of stairs,” Crabbie said. “Don’t deny that.”

She sighed, smiled and shook her head.

Christ that smile was getting on my nerves.

“Alright, Crabbie let’s handcuff the pair of them and march them out to the car,” I said.

“You’re going to arrest us without a warrant and try to get us on to the ferry to Ireland? Even if we tell you something to do with this case of yours, none of it will be admissible,” Joanna said.

“I’m not anything to do with anything,” Beardy said.

“What’s your name and what do you do?”

“Finn McCann,” he lied. “I’m also a temp with Joanna here. We’re just a couple of kids trying to find our way in the world.”

“Why all the guns?” Crabbie said.

“It’s dangerous up here on the edge of the highlands,” ‘Finn’ said.

“What do you think’s going to happen to you? Attack by a herd of sheep?” I said. “The Loch Ness monster?”

“Can I smoke?” Joanna said.

“Help yourself,” I said.

She lit up a Rothmans and offered the pack to her mate who shook his head. Old coppers used to tell me that you could tell a lot about someone by what they smoked but I think that’s bullshit. I had nothing on her.

“If you’re not with the intelligence services who are you with?” I tried.

She folded her arms and yawned.

“Run along, Duffy,” she said.

I looked at Beardy. “You know how I caught her?” I said. “She said festina lente at the crime scene. Not only was her Scottish accent rubbish and her manner fake, what home help goes around quoting Latin maxims, which no doubt her philosophy tutor kept saying to her at her Cambridge college.”

Joanna’s grin faltered and I knew I’d hit the mark there with Cambridge. All the spies, traitors and scumbags went to Cambridge.

“Don’t you both realize how serious this is?” I said, still a wee bit stunned by her Bolshy behaviour.

“You can’t arrest me, it’s not your jurisdiction,” Joanna said.

“I’ll have the Glasgow police here in an hour,” I said.

“Will we still be here in an hour?” she said.

“How’s that going to work? Can you do magic?”

“And if we got away you’ll circulate my name and description to Interpol?” she said.

“Yes! This is a big fucking deal, love. This is a murder investig—”

She cut me off.

“You could do that,” she said. “And not only will it be a big waste of everyone’s time, it might annoy me. And so far, Duffy, you haven’t annoyed me. Not really. And here’s the thing. I like you, Duffy, I like you too John McCrabban, I’d really hate for both of you just to vanish off the face of the Earth one night and your lovely families never even know what happened to you.”

She said it so matter of factly between puffs it chilled the blood.

“Is that a threat?” Crabbie said.

“Not a threat. Just full disclosure about the consequences of your actions.” Joanna held up a finger. “But speaking of threats. . .” she said.

My hearing is not what it was and it took me another couple of beats before I heard the vehicles.

Crabbie was already at the window.

“Two big Range Rovers, stuffed full of blokes,” he said.

“Civilian Rovers? Civilian clothes?”

“Aye,” Crabbie said.

I ran to the window keeping one eye on our two suspects.

Crabbie was right. Civvies, about seven or eight of them. The Range Rovers stopped and the men got out. They were wearing jeans, jumpers, sneakers and all of them were carrying Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine guns. All of them were wearing black or green or camo body armour. Some of them had skimasks over their faces, others just had beanie hats pulled low. They looked hard as fuck.

They were SAS or something even scarier than SAS, some SAS that no one knew about. Another thought occurred to me. . .mercenaries, private contractors?

I marched over to Joanna.

“Who do you fucking work for?” I demanded.

“The temp agency,” she said.

My fist clenched.

Crabbie give me a dirty look. Even with us about to get shot and killed by these car loads of goons he was making sure that I wasn’t going to disgrace myself by hitting a woman.

I thought that maybe I’d try one more question: “Does Chief Superintendent Clare know what’s going on or he is just a clueless donkey piano player?

I knew she wouldn’t answer but that fold between her eyebrows for a moment while she wondered who Clare was was enough to tell me that he was merely a dimwitted, compliant company man.

She tapped her watch.

“Time to take your leave, gentlemen,” she said.

“What do we do, Crabbie? We’re not going to hold out here for long,” I said.

“Let them know this is police business. We’re here making a lawful arrest in a murder investigation,” he said.

For a dour Presbyterian sometimes the Crabman could be wildly optimistic about human nature.

But still. Hundred to one shot.

I opened the window.

“Stay back!” I yelled. “We are making a lawful arrest. We want no interference from any other agency!”

I’m not sure what I was expecting but I wasn’t two of them to immediately take the opportunity to shoot at me. The glass shattered as I jumped back.

Fuckers.

I pulled out my Glock and gave them three or four rounds to scatter them.

They didn’t scatter. They returned fire with overwhelming force. Glass and woodwork shattered all around me.

They were being led by a big guy in his late 50s with a grey droopy moustache. Definitely ex para or SAS or something. What’s that line? Beware of an old man in a profession where men die young.

I lurched over to Joanna. “Who are they?” I attempted for what I knew would be the last time.

“Oh Duffy, all these years in the police,” she said. “All these questions, don’t you ever get bored of the questions?”

I turned to Crabbie and looked at the back door.

He nodded.

We bolted through the kitchen, opened the mud room door and ran. The garden was on a slope upwards to a stone wall. It was filled with rubbish bags and over turned plant pots and old strange pieces of machinery.

The grass was moist and was trying to suck our shoes off.

We heard yelling from inside the house and the front door being kicked open.

The goons were coming in. They’d be round the back in seconds.

Crabbie was, possibly, a bit fitter than me and he reached the stone wall at the bottom of the garden first. He climbed on top and reached a hand back to help me over.

“Oi!” someone yelled from the bottom of the garden and shot at us.

“Fuck!” I said as Crabbie pulled me over.

The heavens opened and the Scottish rain was coming down now like it had a personal grievance against all Micks.

We legged it through the scramble wood. Wet branches slapped our faces, roots reached up to trip me, and the whole forest smelled like a damp dog that’d somehow been on the piss. Somewhere behind us the men were shouting with real intent. There followed the unmistakable punctuation of gunfire. Nothing sharpens the old noggin quite like armed strangers trying to put ventilation holes in you. We ran, two out of shape geezers, lungs on fire. Crabbie was surprisingly quick tearing along beside me, muttering between big breaths.

We burst through puddles deep enough to qualify as inland seas, and another shot cracked past, exploding bark off a tree. I slipped, windmilled, stayed upright.

“This way,” the Crabman said, leading me sideways.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! Come on!”

The wood went on for bloody forever, dark and dripping, and I wondered why so much of my life seemed to consist of running away from men with guns in miserable weather. Somewhere in all that chaos I wondered if this counted as cardio, and whether, if we survived, anyone would believe just how stupid it all looked.

“Quickly, Sean!” Crabbie said, pulling me now.

And I saw the method in his madness.

The big ganch had somehow navigated us back to the Beemer.

I looked underneath it for mercury tilt switch bombs, didn’t see any, jumped in the driver’s seat as Crabbie closed the passenger’s side door. I had hoped in this life to cultivate an air of studied insouciance but you wouldn’t have thought that as I grubbed around in the glove box for my asthma inhaler.

I took a hit, stuck the Beemer in gear and accelerated us the fuck away from there.

Whatever that was.

At fifty miles per hour.

Sixty.

Seventy.

Eighty.

South to Glasgow.

Safety.

“What now?” I asked Crabbie, who was my confederate and moral centre.

“We find a police station,” he said. “We go back, lift the lot of them.”

“And if they’re MI5 goons?”

“Doesn’t matter what they are. Arrest them all for murder and with being accessories after the fact in a homicide.”

Good old Crabbie.

To quote a man he’s never heard of, never compromise even in the face of Armageddon

17

We found a cop shop in Glasgow and roused the local constabulary.

Do I even have to unpack what we found when we got back to Joanna Price’s place?

You’re smart, you can guess it, I’m sure.

Not a trace.

All of them scarpered, high tailed it, gone.

I called in forensic and a fingerprint team but I had a feeling that nobody’s prints would show up in any of our databases.

Someone’s database somewhere more than likely.

But not ours.

And that was the key.

Do you get what I’m saying here?

Next morning Radio 4 were playing Mozart and I got a call from a Superintendent Ford of the Strathclyde Police questioning my authority for calling out his officers and sending them on a wild goose chase. He was quite red under the collar and he threatened me with the sort of things I’d been threatened with a million times before: dismissal, an inquiry, and even an actual charge of “wasting police time”.

I let him blather on until he had exhausted himself.

“Here’s the thing, Duffy,” he concluded. “Wild goose chases might work in Belfast but here we have to account for every penny we spend!”

“Yes, sir, I can see that, sir,” I said and hung up.

18

Crabbie and I filed a report and put out the word with all the British police forces, Garda and Interpol.

Nothing.

And despite Joanna’s threat we remained on the face of the Earth.

A month went by.

I called Chief Superintendent Clare’s office to see how the Special Branch ‘investigation’ was going.

“We’ll let you know if there’s any new developments, Inspector Duffy. . .”

Later that day Crabbie and me were down Ownies by the fire hugging two pints of the black stuff.

We weren’t talking.

We were thinking.

Crabbie was good at that.

Me less so.

“We’re never going to find who killed Lady Caroline or the boy or the bloody butler, are we?” I asked him at last.

“We found her,” he said.

“Who is she? Who does she work for? To not even know why she moved the bloody body? And who helped her? What do the names mean? What the hell happened, mucker?”

Crabbie said nowt.

We’re just part-time peelers, Sean, those kinds of questions are miles above our paygrade was what I took from his silence.

It wasn’t long until my retirement party and it was almost too perfect how this case summed up my life in the RUC. My career was an epistemological disaster - a preposterous autopsy for the very idea of police work. It was borderline funny, so it was. My personnel file must read like a pathetic succession of defeats, wrong turns, non-explanations and humiliations.

And the thing was - there was a case to be solved here and they had put someone in to solve it. But that person was Joanna not me. And she had solved the case. She had found the blackmailer and the absurd blackmail scheme and she had taken care of the problem. The only reason we had been allowed to investigate this murder at all was because we were so inconsequential.

Crabbie could tell I was feeling low and I could see his arm twitch. He was almost going to reach out and pat me on the back, but then he thought better about it.

It made me smile.

The fire crackled.

Peat smoke filled the room.

At least the Guinness in Ownies was good.

As it always was.

“Here’s one for you,” Crabbie said.

“Go on then.”

“A Texas farmer flies to Belfast to trace his ancestry. He’s in a bar in Ballymena talking to a local man called Jimmy Dooey. Jimmy asks him about Texas. ‘Well,’ the Texan says, ‘if you started out in the morning, and drove west, you could drive all day before you reached the end of my property. And if you started the next day and drove east all day, you wouldn’t reach the end of my property.’ ‘Ach, I know what you mean,’ Jimmy says ‘I’ve got a tractor like that as well.’

The long day waned.

We went home.

And then weeks went by.

Then months.

It was quite a bit later when I saw Joanna’s face again on a wanted poster in a post office in Switzerland.

I was there on a Joyce pilgrimage. Nothing to do with any case. The poster said that a British businessman had been murdered in Zurich and this woman was a person of interest.

I took the poster home with me and showed it to the Crabman in the snug at lunch in Dobbins Inn.

“Tell me that doesn’t look like her,” I said.

“It looks like her. “

I waited for him to say something more. As I said Crabbie was my moral anchor, my lodestone, my brother. I wanted him to say let’s get on a flight back to Switzerland tonight.

But poor Crabbie was as exhausted as I was.

He stared at me for a long time and then he filled his pipe with tobacco.

Two hours later we were back at the station, doing paperwork.

Clausewitz said that war dreams of itself.

The war dreamed of me.

And here in the police barracks in Carrickfergus you could feel war humming with its own intensity. You could feel Ulster dreaming of the fights to come. You could feel peace trying hard to be born in the squall.

Lorraine had been persuaded to return to the station. Crabbie offered to make her and me a cup of tea. We both accepted.

A gale blew through the ceiling tiles. Seagulls huddled under the window, pigeons ducked under the eaves. And King Crow’s bedraggled court arrayed itself along the razor wire like a black banner.

Here we were again in the Incident Room at Carrickfergus RUC.

They had long since fixed the windows and through the reinforced panes we could see Belfast Lough, grey and silent, moving slowly like an enormous serpent.

Rain battered the glass.

The tea was good.

Crabbie was also staring at the lough now.

Looking for answers.

But as usual the sea was keeping its secrets to itself.

THE END