I Hear the Sirens in the Street (34 page)

“So, I hear you're preparing to make a serious allegation against a local police department?” he said.

“I'm not making any allegation,” I said.

“You're not filing a complaint?”

“No.”

“You're not alleging theft or the violation of your person?”

“No.”

He took off his absurd aviator sunglasses. His eyes were light green. Squinty.

“What is it that you want, Duffy?”

“I only want one thing. But I'll tell you what I don't want first. I don't want to know who was in the photographs with DeLorean. I don't want to know what operation you or other agencies are planning with or without the cooperation of John DeLorean. I don't want to know why you followed me to the Ten Cents Bank Safety Deposit or why you did what you did with me and the car. I just want to know one thing. Tell me that, and I'll leave this green and not so fucking pleasant land and I won't come back.”

“And what is that one thing, Mr Duffy?”

“I want to know who killed Bill O'Rourke.”

“What if we don't know who killed Mr O'Rourke?”

“Then I want to know what you do know about him and his mission in Ireland.”

Howell grimaced.

He thought about it and stood.

“Wait here,” he said.

“Where am I going to go?”

He went out to make his phone call.

He came back two hours later with a document for me to sign on a roll of fax paper. It was a confession to the charge of DUI and dangerous driving.

“This stays sealed as long as you keep your mouth shut,” Howell said.

I didn't like the look of it, but I signed.

“Good,” he said, with a smile that didn't suit his face.

“Now your part of the bargain,” I said.

Howell sat on a chair and pulled it close to the bed.

“O'Rourke was a Treasury Agent recruited from the IRS. He kept his IRS cover but he was Treasury his whole career. He looked into currency fraud and fraudulent currency transactions. Occasionally he went into the field. He was good,” Howell said.

“What was he doing in Ireland?”

“Well, he was compulsorily retired from the IRS at sixty. Officially retired, so to speak.”

“But unofficially?”

“He still worked for the Treasury Department.”

“So what was he doing in Ireland? Was he investigating DeLorean?”

Howell grimaced. “Yes.”

“As part of something bigger?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“That, I am not permitted to tell you.”

“A Treasury thing?”

“It was only after Agent O'Rourke's death that we realised that two agencies of the United States government were working on the same problem.”

“Jesus! The FBI and the fucking Treasury were both investigating DeLorean and you didn't tell one another?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss that at this time.”

“Okay. Tell me this: when did O'Rourke file his last report? Where was he? What was the situation on the ground?”

“O'Rourke wasn't required to file daily reports. He didn't generally present his findings until he knew what he was talking about. Treasury didn't expect a report until he had concluded his field work.”

“But he came back to America after his initial visit.”

“To attend a colleague's retirement party.”

“And leave off those photographs?”

“Apparently.”

“You didn't know about the photographs until you started tailing me?”

“No.”

“Why did you start tailing me?”

“Immigration alerted us to your arrival in the country. We thought you might try and do some digging over here.”

I leaned back into the sturdy hospital pillow. Through the double-glazed window of Mass General I could see rowers and little sailing boats gliding past on the Charles River.

“Who killed O'Rourke?”

Howell shook his head. “We don't know,” he said.

“You
really
don't know?”

“We don't know. We were hoping that the RUC would find out for us.”

“Maybe we would have if you had cooperated with us from
the start.”

“You must understand, Inspector Duffy, we have bigger fish to fry here. Special Agent O'Rourke would have understood that.”

“What
do
you know about his death?”

“No more than you do, Inspector Duffy. Your investigation has been the primary information vector for us.”

“You knew that he was investigating John DeLorean, which I didn't discover until the last few days.”

“Inter-agency suspicion and communication problems have been a feature of this investigation from the beginning. You, for example, were not supposed to have been injured, never mind nearly killed. Our apologies for that.”

“So why was I nearly fucking killed?”

“Our surrogates got carried away.”

“I see.”

“They have been disciplined.”

“I would hope so. You have no idea at all about who killed Bill O'Rourke?”

“No.”

“Why should I believe you?” I asked.

“I can't think of a reason after the way you've been treated, Inspector Duffy, but nevertheless it's the truth.”

I nodded.

There was a period of silence.

“It has come to our attention that your investigation into Special Agent O'Rourke's death has more or less been suspended?” Howell asked.

“Yes, it has. We can't close the case because we never found his killer, but the investigation has reached a natural dead end,” I said.

Howell's eyes narrowed. “It is in the interests of the United States Government that the investigation into Special Agent O'Rourke's death remain suspended at least until our own
investigation into John DeLorean has concluded.”

“I'm sure you don't want to tell me how to do my job, Agent Howell, but I will say that in the absence of any new evidence I don't really see how I can proceed with the O'Rourke case at the moment.”

Howell nodded, picked up the faxed confession and put it in a briefcase.

“Do you have any more questions?” he asked.

“A million.”

He looked at his watch. “Well, Inspector Duffy, I'm afraid that those are the only answers you are going to get, today.” He tapped the briefcase. “I trust that I can count on your discretion?”

“Of course.”

“You'll keep your nose clean, I'm sure,” he said.

“Once I get the bloody scabs out of it, I'll keep it clean.”

He walked to the door, opened it, but didn't leave.

He looked at me and then, in a lower tone of voice, he said: “There is one thing, Duffy.”

“Yes?”

“Bill O'Rourke had a condo in Florida.”

“I know.”

“He grew plants on the balcony. We had them analysed. You know what those plants were?”

“Rosary pea?” I gasped.

He nodded and closed the door behind him.

They took me out of Mass General on a gurney and across Boston to Logan in a black windowed private ambulance. I felt like Howard fucking Hughes.

They flew me first class to New York LGA on the Delta Shuttle.

An FBI driver met me with a wheelchair.

JFK. The first-class lounge. The Concorde from JFK to Heathrow.

Christ, they wanted rid of me
fast
. Whatever they were cooking up was hot, hot, hot. And speaking of food. Canapés and champagne; Russian caviar with traditional accompaniments (blini, chopped egg white and yolk, chopped spring, white, and red onions); free-range chicken breast with black truffle, foie gras, savoy cabbage; lobster and saffron crushed potato cakes with spinach and bloody Mary relish; cheese service with Stilton, chevre and pecorino with balsamic vinegar, biscuits, walnuts, dried apricots and berries; a hand-made box of chocolates; port wine and tea; a sweet of mango and almond gratin.

We left New York at 5.00 p.m. The jetstream was strong and we crossed the Atlantic in three hours dead.

I spent the time thinking about Bill O'Rourke. He must have refined and milled the Abrin himself. Perhaps all this time he was carrying his depression around with him.

Suicide?

If I had to spend any time in William McFarlane's bed and
breakfast in Dunmurry, West Belfast it might push me over the edge too. Suicide and then McFarlane fakes an American Express bill, sends the body to a mate who runs a cold storage who finally cuts him up and dumps him?

Maybe.

It would certainly be fun bringing McFarlane in for questioning.

Heathrow. And then the British Airways Shuttle to Belfast. So fast it made your head spin. I was in my bed in Coronation Road by ten thirty p.m. Eastern Standard Time – a not unreasonable three thirty in the morning GMT.

Vodka and aspirin.

A death sleep.

I woke groggily and looked at myself in the mirror. I was no oil painting. Bruises, cuts. My ribs were aching. I needed some painkillers.

Still in my dressing gown I went outside, looked under the Beemer and drove down to the newsagents. “SAS Recapture South Georgia!”, or variations thereof, the yelled headlines on all the papers.

It was the cheeky girl again. Sonia. Her nose was pierced. Her hair was dyed orange.

“Philip K. Dick,
Blade Runner
,” I said.

She looked at me with contempt.

“You mean
Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep
?”

“Do I?”

“Aye, you do.”

“Have you got any aspirin?”

She looked up from her magazine. “The fuck happened to you?” she said.

“The FBI got me drunk and crashed my car with me in it so I wouldn't spill the sensitive information that I knew about John DeLorean's dirty dealings.”

“That's the best one I've heard today. Aspirin won't do you
any good. Hold on a minute.”

She went into a back room and came back with a plastic bag filled with white pills.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Two every four hours. Be careful with them. It's a low dose diamorphine. They've been cut with chalk, but they'll do for you. Street value a hundred quid. I'll let you have the packet for fifty.”

“Do they work?”

“If you're not satisfied I'll give you your money back, fair enough?”

“Fair enough.”

“And I'll take a Mars bar and an
Irish News
and the
Daily Mail
.”

I drove home, popped two of the ‘low dose diamorphines' with my coffee and the Mars bar. They worked immediately. The pain reduced itself by several degrees of magnitude and my head felt better.

I took the phone off the hall table and carried it on its lead into the living room.

I made myself a cup of tea.

I stared at the phone with a growing sense of annoyance.

Presumably the mystery caller knew what had happened to me. She knew what had been taped behind the mirror in room #4 of McFarlane's bed and breakfast and presumably she'd been too cowardly to go to that safe deposit box herself. Yes, I gave her credit for doing a better job of searching the bed and breakfast than my team, but I gave her no credit at all for sending me off to America to get nine kinds of shite kicked out of me. What was she? MI5, Special Branch, Serious Fraud Squad, Army Intel, MI6? Did it matter? The whole thing was baroque. This whole situation was ridiculous.

Fuck her.

The tea went cold. I stuck on
Bitches Brew
by Miles Davis,
the album where he'd had to train like a prize fighter to bend those notes and solder the rock riffs to the jazz.

I took two more pills.

There was a knock at the front door.

It was Bobby Cameron. He was holding a massive cardboard box. Anything could have been in there. A bomb, the head of an informer …

“Yeah?”

“You've got a freezer, don't you?”

“I do.”

“Mine's already full. I brought you some meat,” he said.

I looked inside. It was a box of steaks. I took it from him, but it was so heavy I had to place it on the floor.

“What happened your face?” he asked.

“Car accident,” I said.

He nodded. “Aye, I've had car accidents like that when the missus catches me with some bird down the pub.”

“No, it really was a—“

“I was only joking – I saw that you had a BMW loaner. Assumed your own was in the garage. Nice wee runner?”

“Yeah.”

He pointed at the steaks. “From the EEC,” he explained again. “Prime Angus. Good stuff. Look inside.”

I opened the box. There were maybe fifty steaks in here.

“Why give them to me?” I asked.

“Well, you have a freezer, don't you?”

“Aye.”

“And it's a sort of a wee thank you, anyway,” he explained.

“What for?”

“For getting rid of the black bint without any trouble. I don't know what you said to her, but she's gone.”

“I didn't say anything to her. She's off to Cambridge University.”

He winked at me. “Sure,” he said. “Anyway, the point is, she's
back in Bongo Bongo Land, no blood spilled, everybody wins. That's the kind of police work I like.”

He walked down the path and I stood there with the box of steaks at my feet.

I felt nothing but hate for him, for this street, for this town, for this whole country, if you could call it that.

I closed the front door and kicked the box.

I called up the station and asked for McCrabban.

“Acting Sergeant McCrabban,” he said.

“Crabbie, it's me. Can you meet me at my house in twenty minutes?”

“You're back in one piece?”

“Not exactly.”

He arrived in his Land Rover Defender, smoking a pipe and looking worried.

“You want some steaks?” I asked, showing him the box.