Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“But not someone you want to fuck with. Not with your track record, eh, Duffy?”

“No, sir.”

Brennan sighed, lurched towards me and let a big paw rest on my shoulder.

“I’m glad we had this little chat. When’s your warrant for?”

“This morning.”

“This morning, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, I can square things with the cops in Dunmurry.”

“I was hoping that you’d say that.”

“But there’s a price for my assistance.”

“A price?”

“I want to come with you. I want to come, and I’ll do lead if that’s okay with you? Funny how bored a man can get even in the middle of a so-called civil war.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I think I can handle this one on my own.”

“I said I’ll come with you, Duffy, and I’ll do lead if that’s okay with you?” he reiterated in a growling undertone.

“It’s absolutely fine with me, sir.”

11: NO PROGRESS

A wet April morning in a small provincial city on the fringe of Europe. A bunch of cops carrying out one of the most basic of all cop activities: executing a search warrant. And although everywhere the serving of search warrants is a protocol driven, largely crepuscular activity, nowhere in the “civilised” world does the task come with so much palaver as in Northern Ireland.

Three grey armoured Land Rovers driving up a dreary motorway towards Dunmurry, a drab, soulless sink estate in West Belfast, recently saved from perfect entropy by the DeLorean Motor Company which had been established here precisely for the purpose of resurrection.

Elsewhere on Eurasia in this spring of 1982 men are working in factories, making consumer goods and cars, harvesting winter wheat and barley, toiling in terraced rice paddies; from Shanghai to Swansea there is order, work and discipline and only here, at the edge of the continent, is there war. Funny that.

Getting the warrant has been easy and the Chief has wielded his magic with the local brass. He gathers Crabbie, Matty and myself in his pungent office to share the news. “We have our warrant and we have an okay from the RUC and Army chiefs. This is how the system works, lads. You just gotta be nice and humble to the higher ups,” he says, presenting the wisdom of the ages as some kind of hard-won insider scoop.

Chief Inspector Brennan, Sergeant Burke and Inspector McCallister are in one Land Rover. In a second there are half a dozen police reservists dressed up in riot gear. In a third Matty, Crabbie and myself.

As we drive through the seething estates the locals make us welcome by throwing milk bottles filled with urine from tower blocks and the flat roofs of houses. Of course, if it was night time or an occasion of particular tension, burning vodka bottles filled with petrol would be arcing in our direction.

The convoy pulls up outside a bed and breakfast which lies at the end of a terrace. Reserve constables fan out of the second Land Rover to guard the perimeter. We get out of ours. I am not wearing full riot gear but a simple blue suit and a black raincoat.

Matty is unimpressed by the Dunmurry Country Inn, which looks like a bit of a shitehole. “What was O’Rourke staying here for?” he asks.

An excellent question, that will, no doubt, be asked many times before this investigation is over.

“This way, lads,” Chief Inspector Brennan announces, and we follow him down the path. Sergeant Burke is with him for protection. Sergeant McCallister is waiting back in the Rover with his machine gun at the ready.

We knock on the door.

We are expected.

The door opens. A man called Willy McFarlane opens it and stands there large as life and twice as ugly. He’s five eight, lean, with a handlebar moustache, a black comb-over, aviator sunglasses. He’s wearing a loud blue polyester sports jacket over a yellow Six Million Dollar Man T-shirt. Knife scars. Jail house ink. I dig the T-shirt.

“Are you gentlemen looking for a place to stay?” he says, with a chuckle.

“We’re looking for Richard Coulter,” I tell him.

“Mr Coulter is at a charity lunch in London. Princess Diana is going to be there,” Willy McFarlane says.

“Is this his place of business?” I ask.

“One of many.”

“Who are you?”

He tells us who he is.

“We have a warrant to search these premises, Mr McFarlane,” Brennan announces.

“Be my guest,” McFarlane says with another wee laugh.

“Work your way through from top to bottom and back again. I’ll question Mr McFarlane here.”

The bed and breakfast is small. Two terraced houses knocked into one. Four guest rooms. O’Rourke had been staying in room #4 and I know McCrabban will pay special attention there but I ask him to check all the bedrooms to look for any possible evidence. I’m letting Crabbie lead the search while I run the wheel on McFarlane.

“Upstairs, downstairs. Meet me in the back kitchen,” I tell him.

The back kitchen.

The smell of lard and Ajax. Flypaper hanging against the wall. Clothes drying on an internal clothes line. A checkered linoleum floor: the kind that blood cleans up easily from. Mrs McFarlane, a small birdlike woman, is making tea, humming to herself contentedly.

She’s not a stranger to unusual guests or peelers with machine guns.

McFarlane’s smoking Bensons. Relaxed.

Let’s unrelax the fucker.

“You know why we’re here?”

“No,” McFarlane says, unconcerned.

“Mr Coulter’s account charged seven hundred pounds on one of your guest’s American Express Cards last November. A Mr Bill O’Rourke from Boston, Massachusetts,” I say.

“What about it?”

“Your room rates are twenty pounds a night and he checked out after two nights. It doesn’t compute, does it?”

William McFarlane is not fazed. He rubs a greasy fist under his chin. “I charged that bill. Mr Coulter has nothing to do with it and I’ll thank you not to mention his name again.”

“You charged the bill? So you admit it?”

“Aye. I remember yon boy. He wanted Irish Punts. He wanted six hundred quid’s worth of Irish Punts. I got them for him, legally I might add, from the Ulster Bank in Belfast. In fact I think I might have the receipt right here.”

He produces a piece of paper from his trouser pocket.

What a joke. What a frigging laugh riot. He knew we were coming and why we were coming. Someone tipped off his boss and his boss tipped him.

I take the receipt and read it.

It’s exactly what he says it is. A receipt for six hundred and fifty Irish pounds from the Ulster Bank on Donegall Square, Belfast. Transaction dated 25 November 1981.

I bag it and put it in my jacket pocket.

“What did he want the money for?” I ask.

“He didn’t say.”

“He just stayed here two days and left?”

“That’s right.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No.”

“He paid his bill in full?”

“Aye. No problems.”

“How many other guests did you have?”

“At that time?”

“Yes.”

“None.”

“You’re a bit out of the way here, aren’t you? A bit off the tourist trail.”

“Aye, I suppose so.”

“How many guests do you get a month, would you say?”

“Well, it depends.”

“On average?”

“I don’t know. A dozen. Maybe more, maybe less.”

Hmmmm.

Mrs McFarlane brings me a mug of tea, a Kit Kat and a publication called Teetotal Monthly whose headline for April is “Hibernia Despoiled By Demon Gin”. I thank her.

“Eat that up, love, you’re skin and bones and you look hungry enough to eat the beard of Moses,” she says.

I drink the tea and light a cigarette. McFarlane and I look at one another and say nothing. I read Mrs McFarlane’s pamphlet. There’s a nice exegesis of the wedding feast at Cana which explains that Jesus Christ turned the water not into wine but into a form of non-alcoholic grape juice.