I Hear the Sirens in the Street (29 page)

“Oh, there's a difference, baby. Believe me. I was in there half an hour later.”

I scoped her, and my God, she was a stunner. She looked like Miss World 1979, one of the ones Georgie Best couldn't get.

“You want to get a bite to eat? I know this fabulous Italian that just opened up in Carrick. The food's so good the place won't survive past Christmas.”

“Italian food?”

“Italian food.”

“I'll try anything once.”

“Oooh, I like the sound of that.”

She laughed and I knew I was in like Flynn.

The Tutto Bene was deserted apart from a bald gourmand who was loving everything he was given and kept sighing dramatically at each new dish. We were given the window seat overlooking the harbour. I ordered the second most expensive red. She plumped for the spag carbonara and I got the risotto.

She didn't like the grub but the desserts killed her.

I asked her if she wanted to come back chez Duffy and hear my records. She said that that sounded interesting.

Coronation Road. Nine in the p.m. Curtains drawn. I was spinning Nick Drake, while Gloria checked out the Nickster's sad eyes on the sleeve.
Soften them with up Nicky D. and Marvin Gaye and then unleash the inner perv with the Velvets …

I made her a vodka martini and questioned her about her life and times. She was from a town called Spartanburg, South Carolina. She'd gone to Michigan State to major in business and from there it was a short hop to GM and JDL's own company.

We were getting on famously when there was a knock at the
front door. I turned the TV off and looked through the living-room window. It was Ambreena.

“Shit,” I said to Gloria and went into the hall.

“Anything wrong?”

“Not a bit of it, get that martini down your neck.”

I opened the front door. “Hello,” I said.

“I hope I'm not bothering you,” she said.

She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. Her hair was braided. The T-shirt was tight. She looked fabulous. She was holding something covered in tin foil.

“I made you this, to thank you,” she said.

“Oh, thanks.”

“It is merely brandy snaps. The only thing I can make,” she said.

I took the tin foil off and bit into one. It was like biting into stale bread soaked in rubbing alcohol.

“Amazing,” I said, fighting the gag reflex. “Look, I'd invite you in, but I'm busy.”

She smiled. It was the smile to light up the porch, to light up this whole fucking gloomy street.

“Well, thanks. Maybe another time, we could have a drink or something.”

“I cannot stay long. I have to pack.”

“Pack?”

“I am moving to England.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I have been offered a place at Cambridge University. My father pulled a few strings, as fathers do.”

“Cambridge?”

She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“You're welcome.”

She turned and walked down the path. I closed the door and went back to the living room.

Gloria was burrowing deep into my extensive, prized record collection.

“Who was that?”

“Just some chick whose life I saved.”

“No, really, who was it?”

I grabbed her round the waist and carried her to the sofa. I kissed those big pouty red American lips. Damn, she tasted good.

“Just some chick whose life I saved,” I insisted.

I made more martinis and played her
What's Going On
and
Pink Moon
. Everything was proceeding according to plan.

“Does he ever play in Ireland?”

“Who?”

“Nick Drake.”

“He's dead, baby,” I informed her. “He killed himself.”

“Why?”

“I think he was depressed.”

Another round of martinis and I span the Velvets.

She leaned over and kissed me. She tasted wonderful.

She seemed the kind of girl who liked to party. I got the quality hemp from the garden shed. The stars were out. It was dark. Quiet. There was a cold wind from the North Channel. I got some logs I bought from the tinkers: oak and hazel and copper birch. I went back inside, rolled a spliff and put the logs on the fire. The smell from them was fennel and deer spoor and wet earth.

We lay there on the sofa.

She told me stories about America.

I took off her secretary blouse and bra and skirt and marvelled at her perfect, huge, beautiful breasts and luscious hips.

I kissed her neck and between her breasts and she pulled down my jeans.

Nico sang in her tone-deaf monotone and we baked the Moroccan and smoked it neat and fucked on the leather sofa like two people who have witnessed a van getting blown apart and sped through a hostile city under police sirens.

I fucked her and it was me fucking all of America. And we kissed again and finished the Moroccan and slept.

We lay all night there on the living-room sofa until the sun came up over the Scottish coast, rising prismatically over the pink lough, over Leinster and Munster and all of red-handed Ulster, over the DeLorean factory and the McAlpine farm in Islandmagee, over the rubble of Ballycorey RUC station, over Belfast. A pale orange sun rising out of a cobalt dawn that warmed the hearts of innocent men and guilty men and men whose task it was to heal and those whose burden it was to hurt.

The sunlight came in through the back kitchen and woke me on the sofa.

The place smelled good: cannabis and martini and peat logs and
woman
and coffee.

“Is that you up?” Gloria said.

“What time is it?”

“Lie there. Don't move. I'm making coffee and toast.”

She made coffee in the cafetiere that was suitably hardcore. We had toasted soda bread and we went upstairs and showered together like people in a French film. Post-shower she was radiant. Belfast people sucked the light from their surroundings black-hole fashion – this woman was giving off about two-thousand candlepower from her smile alone.

I drove her back to the DeLorean plant in Dunmurry and walked her to her desk.

There was a box waiting on her seat with a ribbon around it.

“I love these!” she exclaimed.

She opened the lid.

A box of Irish “fifteens”. With M&Ms in them instead of Smarties.

“Those look good,” I said.

“They're delicious,” she replied.

“Where do you get them?” I asked.

“Sir Harry brings them in. His sister-in-law makes them.”

“Sir Harry McAlpine?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know Sir Harry?” I asked conversationally.

“I don't! Not really. Mr DeLorean knows him.”

“How does Mr DeLorean know Sir Harry?

“The factory is on his land. Sir Harry leased it to the DeLorean Motor Corporation at a very generous rate.”

“As an incentive to get DeLorean to set up his factory in Belfast as opposed to Scotland or wherever?”

“Precisely. But over the last year Sir Harry and Mr DeLorean have become fast friends.”

“Have they indeed?” I said.

I was feeling good as I drove down the coast road to Islandmagee. I accelerated the Beemer up to seventy and then got it up to a nice 88 mph. I dug out a mix tape and put it in the player.

Plastic Bertrand took me all the way through Carrick, Eden, Islandmagee.

Sir Harry's estate.

The gate along the private road was closed and there was a man there now, sitting on a stile, wearing a Barbour jacket and holding a shotgun. Old geezer, grizzled, game-keeper type.

“This is private land,” he said in a country accent.

“I'm the police,” I told him.

“You'll have a warrant then,” he said.

“To drive down this road I'll need a warrant?”

“This is not the King's Highway. All these farms, right down to the water, is all Sir Harry McAlpine's property,” the man insisted.

“Just let me through, mate, I'm the peelers. I've been here before.”

“So you say. But we have to careful. We had a murder here last year.”

I got out of the Beemer, opened the gate and showed him my warrant card.

“If you want to shoot me, shoot me, but I'm going to see McAlpine.”

The old geezer nodded.

It was more than his job was worth to get in the way of a determined copper.

I drove past Emma's farm.

No sign of her.

I followed the dirt trail up the hill to the big house.

The gate down that drive was also closed but there was no chain across it so I got out and opened it. I drove over the cattle grid and down the palm-lined driveway.

The Roller was parked out front.

I rang the bell. Mrs Patton answered the door. I showed her my warrant card.

“Remember me, love?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to
le grand fromage
.”

“He's in the greenhouse. I'll go get him.”

“The empty greenhouse? Don't trouble yourself, Mrs Patton. I know the way.”

I walked through the house and the kitchen and out into the back garden.

There had been a few changes: the garden looked tidier, neater. There were bags of soil and peat and empty terracotta pots. Sir Harry's finances must have stabilised some if he could afford a guard down there on the private road and a revamp to his back garden.

And there he was in a ratty brown shirt and brown corduroys.

I knocked on the greenhouse door.

He was pulling a jumper over his head. When the head popped through he turned round, saw me, frowned.

I opened the door and went inside.

It was warm. There was a little humidifier in the corner pumping out steam.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he asked, not even attempting to conceal his dislike, which was certainly un-Irish,
but perhaps not un-Anglo-Irish.

And it wasn't that clear why he disliked me. Sure, everybody hated the peelers. We were lazy and crap at best, corrupt and sectarian at worst … but at least I was trying to solve the murder of his brother, wasn't I?

I walked over. He was fussing with an orchid of some kind and it made me think – ah, a real horticulturist, eh?

“The last time I was in this greenhouse the place was deserted,” I said.

“I'm restocking … and what business is of it yours, anyway?” His eyes were bulging in his face. His cheeks were red. That and the green Wellingtons and the accent. He was really an old-school character. I found myself warming to him.

“Do you ever grow rosary pea in here?”

“What pea?”

“Rosary pea.”

“Never heard of it. What are you doing here? You've come to ask me about my garden?”

“I've been up to see John DeLorean.”

“And?”

“The car guy. The guy who is going to save Northern Ireland from the abyss.”

“I know who he is.”

“Of course you do, Harry. His factory is on a piece of your land. Some old waste ground in Belfast that is now the hub of Ireland's regeneration project.”

He put down the pot he was working on and took off his thick gardening gloves. He cleared his throat. “And what exactly has this got to do with anything?”

“Your brother was an intelligence officer for the UDr He ran a series of informers for them. One of them told him something about a guy asking questions and taking photographs at the DeLorean factory. I went to see Mr DeLorean and he told me that he's subject to industrial espionage all the time, that
it's pretty much par for the course, so that's okay. But you see this tip about Dunmurry was the last entry in your brother's log book and the informer that gave your brother that tip has gone missing. And of course your brother himself was murdered. I thought perhaps that these incidents were connected somehow and I thought that maybe you might have some insight into them?”

“What are you implying?”

“I'm not implying anything. I merely thought that you might possibly have an angle on this that I, as an outsider, would not.”

“I am not terribly fond of your tone, detective,” Sir Harry said.

“I'm sorry about that. There was no tone, sir. No offence meant, I assure you.”

That seemed to mollify him a little.

He sniffed and sized me up.

“So you're still looking into Martin's death?”

“I am.”

He nodded and breathed out slowly. “I take it you think it wasn't a random IRA hit then?”

“Oh, no, I haven't got that far yet. I just want to parse this link a little. You, DeLorean, Martin's informer … I wanted to see where all this went.”

“All right, maybe I can help. Come into the house and we'll discuss it over tea. Have you got some time?”

“All the time in the world.”

“That other detective, the one who died … I hate to speak ill of the dead, but, well … I didn't have much confidence in him.”

“No.”

We went into a library on the ground floor.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with old books. A formal leather sofa worn comfortable by generations of use and repair, use and repair. A few more modern chairs, an oak table, a reading lectern and a nice bay window with an easterly prospect of
the coast and the Irish Sea only a few hundred yards over the fields.

Mrs Patton brought the tea.

It was a Darjeeling. Very strong and over-steeped. Harry didn't seem to notice. He was much more relaxed now. “So you really think this could be something to do with John DeLorean?” he asked, eagerly.

“Perhaps. What exactly is the nature of the relationship between you and Mr DeLorean?”

He shrugged. “Relationship. Ha! The man's a user. He doesn't have relationships with people. He uses people.”

“How did you get to know him in the first place?”