Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“Poisoned?”

“Poisoned, yes.”

He opened his briefcase and looked at the notes in front of him. “I’ve never heard of this ‘Abrin’ – it’s rare, is it?”

“Very rare. In fact, one of the things we wanted to ask you about was whether you can provide any information for us about Mr O’Rourke’s horticultural connections. Did he have a greenhouse, was he a grower of exotic plants, were any of his relatives engaged in that kind of activity?” Crabbie asked.

“I wasn’t aware that you were here to solicit help with your investigation,” Fallows said.

“Why did you think we were here?” I asked.

“I had been led to believe that this was merely a formal briefing.”

“You’re not refusing to help us with our inquiries, are you?” I asked incredulously.

Crabbie and I exchanged a look.

“Of course not,” Fallows ululated. “You will be given the full and complete cooperation of the United States Embassy to the Court of St James.”

“That’s what we were hoping for,” I said. “For a start the local police force in Newburyport are having some trouble faxing Mr O’Rourke’s driving licence to us. Apparently that requires another level of authorisation or something. I’m not sure what the hold up is but I was wondering if you could—”

Mr Fallows slid a cardboard file across the desk.

“You can keep this,” he said.

It contained a photostat of Bill O’Rourke’s driver’s licence and passport. He was a handsome man, was Bill. Lean, tanned, with dark black hair greying only slightly on the left hand side. He had an intelligent, unyielding face and there was that certain something about him that commanded respect. Maybe it was all that horror he’d experienced in World War Two.

“We’ve never had an American murdered in Northern Ireland in all my time here,” Fallows said. “Surprising, given the level of violence.”

“There’s got to be a first time for everything,” Crabbie said.

“We’ll also need his work records from his employer and any possible criminal records from the FBI,” I added.

“You ask for a lot.”

“And I’ll need a local police officer to investigate his house and report back to me about what he finds.”

“Oh, they won’t like that,” Fallows sniffed. “That’s vague. Report back about what?”

“I’ll need a full report on his home – homes, I should say – his recent activity at the bank, that kind of thing. The cops will know what to do.”

“And whether he has a greenhouse. And we’ll need to know if he has a plant in that greenhouse called rosary pea,” McCrabban added.

“Rosary pea?” Fallows said, and couldn’t quite meet our gaze.

I shot another quick glance at McCrabban. Yup, he’d seen it too. This fucker was hiding something.

“ Rosary pea rings a bell, does it?” I asked.

Fallows shook his head. “Never heard of it in my life.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. Never heard of it before you mentioned it.”

“Your last diplomatic posting wasn’t Trinidad, was it?” McCrabban asked.

“No. Six years in Canada and then here. Why?”

I smiled and shook my head. “No reason.”

We fired a few more questions at him but he gave us back nothing that we wanted. We made sure that he got the message about the cooperation of the Massachusetts police and the FBI and he said that he would see what he could do.

When we got outside we rubber-banded the file and headed for the Rover. Queen’s Street was one of the places where you could get into the centre of Belfast through the steel security barriers erected across the road. Every single pedestrian going into Belfast had to be patted down and their bags searched in an effort to stamp out bomb attacks. Of course we peelers just flashed our warrant cards and jumped straight to the head of the line.

“Fucking cops,” someone muttered behind us in the queue.

“Aye,” someone else agreed. “They think they run the fucking world.”

When we were through the barrier I patted McCrabban on the back, something which the big phobic Proddy ganch always hated. “That was a good question, mate, rosary pea seemed to take that skinny wee shite aback a bit, didn’t it?”

“Maybe the local American cops have already found something in O’Rourke’s greenhouse?” Crabbie said, shrinking from the touch of a fellow human being.

“Maybe, Crabbie, maybe. But, as Bobby D. says, there’s something funny going on, I can just feel it in the air.”

“A complication?”

“Brennan’s not going to like it, but yeah, it’s beginning to sound that way, isn’t it?”

10: GOOD PROGRESS

The case was flying now. We had made a shit load of progress and as I looked at myself in the mirror and shaved with an electric I saw a man who was at least professionally content, if not exactly happy in any other aspect of his life. I certainly wasn’t worried about meeting the Chief this morning. He’d kept off my back for a few days and I was determined to show him that his faith in the long leash was justified.

I finished shaving, put the kettle on and went outside. The starlings had been at the milk: clever wee shites, they had figured out that gold-top bottles contained the full cream stuff and silver top the ordinary milk. Their intelligence was a rare commodity round these parts. I grabbed a gold-top, made coffee and toast and I was about to head out to the car when the phone rang. It was Carol, who told me that the Chief Inspector wanted to meet me at the police club in Kilroot, not at the station.

“Fine by me,” I lied.

I checked under the BMW for bombs, didn’t find any and drove down Coronation Road.

I was stopped at an army checkpoint outside of Eden Village. Two Land Rovers and half a dozen jittery squaddies from the Parachute Regiment. Everyone knew that the Paras were being shipped out of Northern Ireland to be the tip of the spear in the Falklands invasion. It was good riddance. Most Catholics I knew still hated the Parachute Regiment for the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry. I still hated them for that too, as irrational and conflicted as that sounded.

The weekend after Bloody Sunday was one of the hinge points of my life, when I very nearly joined the PIRA, only to be turned down by an old school friend of mine, Dermot McCann, the IRA quartermaster in the city who told me that I should stay at university because “the movement needed thinkers”.

Of course, by joining the police I had betrayed Dermot and the movement.

I don’t know how honour is to be properly measured, but when you saw the Parachute Regiment march the streets of Ulster and you knew that they were your brothers in arms, it certainly didn’t sit well …

I showed the soldiers my warrant card and a big sergeant within an even bigger moustache waved me through the checkpoint.

Another checkpoint took me into the police club.

I parked the Beemer and went downstairs.

I found Brennan at the bar and he suggested a game of snooker, a fiver the winner, while I debriefed him.

Brennan broke and potted the pink with a completely flukey shot off two cushions and a red. Just then the strip lights flickered and the barman flinched as if he was expecting some kind of trouble. He was a civilian. None of the cops moved a muscle.

The cue ball rolled across the baize and came to stop perfectly aligned at another red.

“A-ha!” Brennan said triumphantly, reached into his pocket and put another fiver on the table.

“You want to increase your wager?” he asked, with a malevolent grin.

“You have a ways to go before you make it as a snooker hustler, sir. Displaying your prowess first isn’t usually a good idea.”