I Hear the Sirens in the Street (15 page)

My head's splitting. I stop to urinate outside the Presbyterian Church and an old lady walking her mutt tells me that I'm a sorry excuse for a human being. “I agree with you, love,” I say but when I turn round to make the argument there's no one there at all.

A week went by without any developments. Like the majority of murder cases in Northern Ireland this one was starting to die. No new information from America. No eyewitness testimony. No calls on the Confidential Telephone. Mr O'Rourke had last been seen in Dunmurry. He'd got some Irish money, checked out of his crummy B&B and then he'd turned up dead. In another week or so the Chief would tell me to put the O'Rourke case on the back burner. A week after that, we'd move it to the yellow folders: open but not actively pursuing …

It was a Wednesday. The rain was hard and cold and coming at a forty-five-degree angle from the mountains. The sound of shotguns somewhere up country woke me at seven. I listened for a moment or two but there was no return fire and it was probably just a farmer going after foxes.

I put on the radio.

The local news was bad. An army base in Lurgan had been attacked with mortars, a firebomb had destroyed a bus depot in Armagh and an off-duty police reservist had been shot dead at the wheel of his tractor in Fermanagh.

The national news was about the Falklands War. Ships were still sailing south, the Pope wanted a peaceful resolution, the Americans were doing something, the EEC was calling for sanctions against Argentina.

I lay under the sheets for a while and finally wrapped myself
in the duvet and dragged my ass downstairs.

I called my mother. She said she was just going off to play bridge. Dad was also on his way out, going birding up the Giant's Causeway.

“What do you see up there?” I asked, faking interest.

“Buzzards, kestrels, peregrines, sparrowhawks, gannets, occasional black and common guillemots, razorbills, eider ducks, purple sandpipers, colonies of fulmar, kittiwakes, Manx shear-waters, puffins, twites.”

“You're making half those up.”

“I am not.”

“There's no such bird as a fulmar or a twite. I wasn't born yesterday.”

“Fulmar from the Norse ‘full', meaning foul, ‘mar' meaning gull, ‘fulmar', because of their oily bills. They're a type of seagull. Highly pelagic birds …”

“Which means?”

“They spend most of their life out at sea, like albatrosses.”

“And a twite?”

“A small passerine bird in the finch family.”

We both knew that I didn't know what a passerine bird was, but an explanation would weary me. “I have to go, Dad.”

“Okay, son, see you, take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

I hung up and put on Radio Albania to get a Maoist version of the world news. I put Veda bread in the toaster and made a Nescafé. I ate the toast at the kitchen table and thought about my folks. They'd never spoken about why they'd only ever had one kid. I hadn't been deprived of love, but I'd just never really connected with either of them. Dad was into fishing, bird watching, hare coursing, fell walking, hiking, that kind of thing, and as a wean I'd thought that I was interested in it too, but I was only fooling myself. When I told them I was going to be a cop they neither approved or disapproved. If I'd told them I was going to
be a terrorist I probably would have gotten the same reaction.

I carried the coffee into the living room.

I put on all three bars of the electric heater and stared out stupidly at the front garden. Radio Albania's spin on the Falklands War was that it was a struggle between two fascist regimes in an attempt to repress revolt among their own working classes.

I trudged back into the kitchen, changed the channel to Radio Four to get confirmation that this really was a Wednesday. I had accumulated a lot of leave and in a deal with Dalziel in clerical I was taking two Wednesdays a month off until my leave was back down to manageable levels.

I made another cup of coffee and when I discovered that it was indeed a Wednesday I retired to the living room with a Toffee Crisp and my novel.

I was reading a book called
Shoeless Joe
which had gotten a good review in the
Irish Times
and was about a man obsessed by baseball and J.D. Salinger – but not in a creepy Mark David Chapman way.

The phone rang.

I trudged into the hall and picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Is this Duffy?”

“It is.”

“Can you be at the shelter in Victoria Cemetery in ten minutes?” a woman asked. A young woman, with an odd voice. English. Old fashioned. So old fashioned it sounded like she was doing an accent or something.

“Sorry?”

“Can you be at the Victoria Cemetery shelter in ten minutes?” she repeated.

“I can, but I'm not going to be.”

“I've got information about one of your cases.”

“Come down my office, love, anytime,” I said.

“I'd like to meet with you in person.”

“I don't do graveyards. It'll have to have to be at the office.”

“This will be worth your while, Duffy. It's information about a case.”

“Listen, honey, they pay me the same wages whether I solve the cases or not.”

The lass, whoever she was, thought about that for a second or two and then hung up.

She didn't call back.

I looked out the window at the starlings for ten seconds. One of the little bastards shat on my morning paper.

“Fuck it,” I muttered, ran upstairs, pulled on a pair of jeans and gutties. I threw a raincoat over my Thin Lizzy T-shirt and shoved my Smith and Wesson .38 service piece in the right hand coat pocket.

“I don't like it,” I said to myself and sprinted out the front door.

The graveyard was on the other side of Coronation Road, over a little burn and across a slash of waste ground known as the Cricket Field – the de facto play area for every unsupervised wean in the estate.

The sky was black.

The wind and rain had picked up a little.

I jumped the stream and scrambled up the bank into the Cricket Field: burnt-out cars and a gang of feral boys throwing cans and bottles into a bonfire.

“Hey, mister, have ye got any fags?” one of the wee muckers asked.

“No!” I replied and hopped the graveyard wall.

I circled to where I could see the concrete shelter that had been built to give protection to the council gravediggers while they waited for funeral services to be concluded. This part of Carrick was on a high flat escarpment exposed to polar winds, Atlantic storms and Irish Sea gales. I'd been to half a dozen funerals here and it had been pissing down at every one of them.

I had envied the men in the shelter, although I had never actually been in it myself. It was large and could easily accommodate a dozen people. If I remembered correctly there were several wooden benches that ran along the wall. There were no doors to get into it as it was open to the elements on the south side like a bus shelter.

If I could circle due south through the petrified forest of graves I could easily see if someone was waiting in there or not.

I ran at a crouch through the Celtic crosses and granite headstones and the various family plots and monuments.

I made it to the perimeter wall on Victoria Road due south of the building. I looked across the cemetery and squinted to see into the shelter and moved a little closer and looked again.

No one was there.

I walked a few paces forward until I was behind a large monument to a family called Beggs who had all been killed in a house fire in the '30s.

I watched the cemetery gates and the shelter.

No one came in, nobody left.

There appeared to be no one else here but me.

Rain was pouring down the back of my neck.

It was cold.

And yet I knew that the place was not deserted.

She was here, whoever she was.

She had called me from the phone box on Victoria Road and now she was here, waiting for me.

Why?

I put my hand in my pocket and clicked back the hammer on the revolver and stepped out from behind the Beggs family headstone.

I walked slowly to the graveyard shelter, scanning to the left and right and whirling one-eighty behind me. I raised my weapon and carried it two-handed in front of me.

She was here. She was watching. I could feel it.

I entered the shelter and turned round to look back at the graveyard.

Nothing moved but there were many hiding places behind the trees, the tombstones and the stone walls.

There was no glint from a pair of binoculars or a rifle scope.

“I came. Isn't that what you wanted?” I said aloud.

A crow cawed.

A car drove past on Victoria Road.

I sat on a long bench that had been vandalised down to a couple of wooden slats.

I stared out at the dreary rows of headstones, Celtic crosses and monuments.

Nope. There was nothing and nobody.

She was more patient than me and that was not a good thing. Impatient coppers got themselves killed in this country.

Thunder rumbled over the lough.

The rain grew heavier. Rivers of water were gushing down the Antrim Plateau and forming little pools in the cemetery. I pulled out me Marlboros and lit a cigarette.

I walked to the edge of the shelter and looked out. Worms by the hundred were disgorging themselves from their human feast and writhing on the emerald grass.

Grass so green here that it hurt to look at it.

Why? Why had she called me? What was this about? Had I disrupted her plans by coming over the wall and not through the gates? Had she got cold feet? Was it just a regular crank call?

I sat there, waited, watched.

She waited too.

The sky darkened.

Magpies descended to feast on the snails and earthworms.

“Hello!” I yelled out into the weather. “Hello!”

Silence.

I turned and walked back and it was only then that I noticed the envelope duct-taped to the back of the bench.

I immediately looked away and lit another cigarette.

When the cigarette was done, I turned round with my back to the exposed south entrance. If she was watching she wouldn't know what I was doing. Perhaps she would think that I was pissing against the wall.

I took out a pair of latex gloves from inside my raincoat pocket and put them on.

I checked for wires or booby traps and finding none ripped the envelope off. I examined it. It was a green greeting card envelope. Keeping my back facing south, I opened it. Inside there was a Hallmark greeting card with a shamrock on the cover.

I opened it. “Happy Saint Patrick's Day” was the message printed inside.

At first I thought there was no message at all but then I saw it opposite the greeting.

“1CR1312”, she had written in capital letters in black pen on the top of the page.

You could, perhaps, have mistaken it for a serial number.

I noticed that actually there was a space between the 3 and the 1 so that really it read: “1CR 13 12.”

Even a non-Bible-reading Papist like me knew what it was.

It was a verse from the New Testament.

Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians,
chapter 13
, verse 12.

And not only that – it was something familiar. Something I should know.

The answers would be in my King James Bible back home. My house was only two minutes away, but there was something I had to do here first.

I put the card back in the envelope and retaped it to the seat back.

I pretended to zip up my fly, then I turned round and lit another cigarette.

I did up the collar on my coat and walked out of the shelter
towards the cemetery exit. I didn't look to the left or right, instead I hurried on down Coronation Road and only when I was at Mrs Bridewell's house did I stop and turn and look: two kids playing kerby, a woman pushing a pram, a stray dog sleeping in the middle of the street; no one else, no strangers, no unknown cars.

I ran up the path and knocked on Mrs Bridewell's door.

She opened it almost immediately. She had curlers in and she was smoking a cigarette. She was wearing a pink bathrobe, pink fuzzy slippers and no make up. She seemed about twenty. She was really very good-looking.

“Oh, Mr Duffy, I thought it was the milk man come back to replace those bottles that the—”

“I'm sorry to bother you, Mrs Bridewell, but your front bedroom must have an unobstructed view of the graveyard – from mine the big chestnut tree at the cricket field is in the way.”

“We can see into the graveyard – what's this all about?”

“Do you mind if I run up there? We've been getting reports about vandals spray-painting the shelter and stealing flowers from the graves and I think I just saw one of the little buggers go in there.”

“Of course. Of course. That's shocking, so it is. I've complained about them weans to the police but nobody ever pays any mind.”

I ran upstairs to her bedroom. Her husband wasn't here as he was still over in England looking for work. The bedroom smelled of lavender, there was a white chest of drawers, the bed sheets were peach, the wallpaper had flowers on it. A black lacy bra was sitting at the top of a laundry basket. It distracted me for a second, before the bra's owner followed me into the room.

“Why didn't you just wait for him in the cemetery?” she asked.

“It's a she. And if she sees me in the graveyard she won't do anything, will she? But if I can catch her in the act from up here, then Bob's your uncle, I'll have physical evidence and we can
haul her up before the magistrate.”

“Won't it just be your word against hers? You should have brought a camera,” Mrs Bridewell said, which was her way of letting me know that she was not going to be dragged into this. Like everyone else on Coronation Road, testifying against criminals – be they paramilitary mafia or mere teenage vandal – was not an option.