Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

I went in to tell the Chief.

“We may have our John Doe, sir.”

“Who is it?”

“A retired IRS inspector called Bill O’Rourke from Massachusetts.”

“What’s the IRS?”

“Internal Revenue Service. He was a taxman.”

“A taxman. Jesus. There’s your motive.”

“A retired taxman. Born 1919. Apparently he had come here to trace his roots. He’s the right age, he’s a veteran of the right regiment and no one’s heard from the bugger in months.”

“1919, eh? Lucky baby to have survived the influenza.”

“Not so lucky now, of course.”

Brennan nodded. “Who are you following up with?”

“I’ve asked the Yank cops to fax me a copy of his driver’s licence and after a lot of pushing and shoving I even got the FBI to come on board and send me any files they have on him.”

“Why bother the FBI?”

“It’s an unusual case. I just want to be sure that he wasn’t mixed up in anything he shouldn’t have been mixed up in.”

Brennan grinned and slapped his hand into his fist. “You’re dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s. It’s an American after all. I’ll confirm the bad news with the Consulate. They’ll want to know one of their own has definitely met with a sticky end. And the press too, they’ll want a piece of this. The Irish press, the English press, the American press,” Brennan said, starting to see other angles in this case. PR angles. Promotion angles.

“Hold your horses, Chief. If we go to the media everybody’s going to be looking over our shoulder and we’re not completely sure that he’s our stiff,” I complained.

“The newspapers will want this, Duffy. A dead American’s worth a hundred dead Paddies any day of the week,” Brennan said.

Brennan opened his desk drawer and took out the Tallisker single malt. I sat down and was persuaded into a glass.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” he said.

“Maybe we should wait a day or two before turning on the spotlights,” I said, trying to erase his overconfident grin.

“O’Rourke’s our lad! I can smell it.”

“What does this magic nose of yours tell you about who killed him?”

“Don’t mock your elders! My intuition comes from years of experience. I had a premonition about Elvis’s death two weeks before he passed on, God rest his soul. I told Peggy and she said I should call Graceland. I didn’t of course. Shame … Lost my train of … What were we … Oh, yes – if it makes you happy, we’ll say that he’s a ‘possible victim’ in a ‘possible homicide’, will that satisfy you?” he asked.

“I suppose so, sir.”

I drank another round of Tallisker and Brennan opened a packet of Rothmans, fired one across to me and lit one for himself. I noticed a sleeping bag bundled up in the corner of the office. I decided not to comment on it.

“Any leads on the poison angle?” Brennan asked.

“None at all, sir, I am sorry to say. Abrin is an extremely rare substance. I don’t know who the hell would have taken the trouble to refine and process it or why they would have used it as a murder weapon on an island filled to the brim with guns.”

He nodded and blew smoke at the brown stain on the ceiling that uncannily resembled Margaret Thatcher’s hairdo. “I’m sure it’s going to take you into some interesting areas, but do me a favour, don’t let it get too complicated, will you, Sean?” Brennan muttered. He shifted his weight from his left to his right side. He grunted and rubbed his eyelids. “Do you hear me, son?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “I’ll keep it simple, you know me.”

“I do know you, pal, that’s the bloody trouble.”

I nodded, drank the rest of the whiskey and got to my feet.

“And Duffy?”

“Yes, sir?”

“That Elvis story is just between us,” Brennan said.

“Of course, sir,” I replied and exited the office.

9: BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

Someone passed me a brandy to help “batten down the hatches on our breakfasts”. I’d only had a coffee but I took a swig of the flask anyway and passed it back.

I walked to the top of the hill and waved away the oncoming traffic. I wasn’t properly in uniform. No shirt, no tie, just black trousers and a black sweatshirt under my flak jacket which said “Police” on it in yellow letters. I was wearing my green uniform hat and fidgeting with a Sterling submachine gun loaded with a 25-round clip. The same gun I’d used to repel the attack on Coronation Road and win me my police medal and my invitation to Buckingham Palace.

I was fiddling with the gun rather than looking downhill at the carnage. Everyone was compensating in their own way. One guy was whistling, two other cops were talking about the football. That was their way of not being in the present. “We have better things to do with our time than direct traffic,” Matty was grumbling to Crabbie because he knew better than to grumble to me.

“You do what you’re told to do and that’s an end to it,” Crabbie told him and like a good Free Presbyterian refused the brandy and passed it back to me. I shook my head and walked along the lane to where a dead cow was lying in the sheugh. Killed by the concussion shock wave or a random piece of debris. I looked down into the valley. The helicopter’s spotlights were still scouring the scene in the predawn light, even though everyone was now accounted for: the dead, the dying, the miraculously survived. I lit a Marlboro and drew in the good, safe, dependable American tobacco. It comforted me. I sat on a tree stump and watched the helicopter’s powerful incandescent spotlight beams meditating on the pulverised brick and stone, on the smashed breeze block walls, on the cars ripped inside out. I watched as the rotors sucked embers, paper fragments and debris into the sky in huge anti-clockwise spirals.

That comforted me too, making me feel that something, anything , was being done. Half an hour passed this way, then dawn made its presence felt across the landscape and the chopper banked to the left and flew back to RAF Aldergrove.

I could see the full havoc wrought on Ballycoley RUC station, now.

It was a country police barracks and with only a thin brick wall around the perimeter, which was why it had been chosen for the terrorist attack. The main building itself had been flattened and a portacabin structure in the rear had been tossed halfway up the nearest hill. Many of the surrounding houses had been wrecked, part of a railway line had been ripped up and an electricity substation destroyed. It was lucky that the number of civilian casualties wasn’t higher.

With the Wessex gone the valley was relatively quiet.

Cops talked to one another, radios crackled, generators hummed and a massive yellow digger pawed at the rubble like a brachiosaurus over its dead young.

I went back to the other officers and we shared smokes and turned away a milk delivery lorry and explained what had happened to the bemused driver. “There’s been an incident, the road’s closed for the time being, mate, you’ll have to find an alternative route …”

“What happened?”

“A bomb blast in the wee hours down at the police station there.”

“Anybody dead?”

“Aye. Four.”

The driver nodded and turned his car around. Ballycoley RUC was only six miles from Carrickfergus but I didn’t know any of the deceased. Two of them were peelers, one was the driver of the bomb vehicle and one was a civilian woman, a widow who lived across the road and who apparently had been eviscerated by her own disintegrating bedroom windows.

Matty yawned. “How much longer are we going to have to stand here like eejits, Sean?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “I’ll go down there and find out.”