Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

It was colder now. The beach was empty. Emma threw a stick to the dog and she ran to fetch it in the water.

I looked north. You could see up the glens to the Atlantic Ocean. The wild deep blue of it chilling my retinas from here.

The sun began to set behind the cloud banks to the west.

“Look! There!” she said.

A massive gorse fire was burning on a hill in Scotland.

“Jesus, will you look at that.”

“Sometimes the heather will burn for days,” she said.

We watched it until the set sun. It was getting dark now.

“We better get these horses back, don’t you think? I’m not that confident about riding at night.”

“Yes. All right.”

We rode back and Cora barked and Canny McDonagh still wasn’t home, so she left him a note, telling him what she had done and that Mallarky had taken the canter well.

Mussels and country bread at the kitchen table.

She lit a paraffin lamp.

“Do you fancy something stronger?” she asked, when I finished a second Harp.

“Poteen?”

“You won’t tell the excise, will you?”

“Are you joking? Cops and the excise are natural enemies.”

She took an earthenware jug from under the sink.

“Everybody distils their own round here,” she explained.

She poured me an honest measure and we clinked glasses.

We drank and it was evil rough stuff, around 120 proof.

We both coughed. She poured us another.

“Yikes, do you have anything to cut this with?” I asked, knocking back shot number two.

“There’s orange juice in the fridge.”

I went to the fridge, looked out a couple of tall glasses and made us a couple of screwdrivers.

She drank hers and moved closer to me on the couch.

“You’re not married, are you?” she asked, looking at me with those azure eyes and those full lips with the little dent in the middle of the lower.

The eyes. The pale cheeks. The dangerous red hair.

“Would it make a difference?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said, and placed her cold hand on mine. “As you can imagine, it’s been some time.”

We went to the bedroom.

The big south-facing window looked out over the valley and the clear night gave up the winter constellations. Naked, she was beautiful, but gaunt and pale, like a case, like something washed up in the Lagan.

I took her, and I was gentle with her, and I held her and she slept in my arms. I listened to her heart and watched her chest heave up and down.

She was frowning in her dream.

Those closed blue eyes could not see any good in the future.

I fell asleep watching her.

She woke me in the wolf’s tail – that grey Irish light that comes before the dawn.

“Huh, what is it?” I asked.

“I heard a noise!” she said. “Something’s outside.”

I sat up, rubbed my face.

“What?”

“Outside. I hear something. I’ll get the rabbit gun.”

“No, I’ll go.”

I pulled on my jeans and sneakers and my raincoat. I grabbed a torch and my .38.

Cora growled at me as I walked into the yard.

It was drizzling, the ground was slick.

“Hello?” I said, turning on the torch.

I walked towards the road.

I slipped on the mud but saved myself by grabbing the gate post. I saw something flash further down the track. Maybe nothing or maybe the fluorescent strip on a rain jacket or a pair of training shoes.

“Is there anyone down there?” I yelled.

I held out the .38 and shone the torch beam down the road.

Nothing. I flashed the beam up into the hills.

No movement, no sounds.

The distant lough, the even more distant sea.

I stood there, waiting for something. Anything. “There’s nothing here,” I said to myself. I walked a little bit further down the lane and then cut back to the farm along the hypotenuse of the nearest field. I nearly took a header into a bog hole filled with water, but saved myself before the final step. When I got back to the house Cora was barking again and Emma was standing in the doorway with a shotgun.

“Well?” she asked.

“It was nothing,” I told her. We went back to bed and I kept the blinds open. The moon was giving out a yellow candle light and the sky about it was eerie and in a state of strange coruscation. Neither of us went back to sleep.

In the morning, Emma made me scrambled eggs and coffee. The coffee was like coal dust but the country fresh eggs with butter were good.

I ate breakfast and kissed her and said goodbye. I walked down to the car and I saw what the commotion had been the night before. Someone had tossed a brick through the windscreen of my BMW. A helpful note had been tied around it which read: “Fuck Off And Die Peeler Scum!”

I threw the brick into a field, carefully pushed out the windscreen, carried it to the stone wall and left it there. I brushed the broken glass off the driver’s seat and headed home.

26: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

I stopped at Paddy Kinkaid’s BMW dealership in Whitehead and parked the car in a lot full of brand new Beemers. If old Paddy wanted to keep them new he’d need to get the bloody hose out because smoke from Kilroot power station was depositing a fine grey-grained soot on all the windward surfaces, as if the golden head of the enormous chimney top was in sinister coitus with the friggin’ place.

I lit a tab and went inside.

It was basically a big plywood shed painted BMW white and blue. An elderly woman was playing an electric organ in one corner of the showroom and when I saw Father O’Hare I thought perhaps the two were connected by some nexus – a wedding rehearsal or funeral preparations or the like, but in fact they were unrelated. She was Paddy’s wife, playing away to herself, and Father O’Hare was in looking for a car.

“I haven’t seen you in a while, Sean,” Father O’Hare said cheerfully enough, although perhaps with a hint of admonishment. And if a hint was there, I didn’t effing like it.

“Big mistake, Father,” I said.

“What?”

“You can’t be a priest and drive a BMW. It sends out a bad message.”

“Sean, as I’m sure you’re aware, the Popemobile, as they call it, is manufactured by BMW.”

“The Holy Father survived an assassination attempt by the direct intervention of Our Lady of Fatima and can therefore pretty much do what he likes in the vehicular realm; with all due respect, Father, you’re not up there yet.”

He nodded and countered with “I wonder how it looks to have a policeman driving a BMW?”

“Perhaps an inspector in the Vice or the Fraud Squad might have cause for concern, but not a simple homicide detective.”

The organ reached a complicated part of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and Father O’Hare could see from the look in my eyes that I’d already had a somewhat trying morning.

“Perhaps you’re right, Sean, I was only picking up a brochure anyway. Will I see you at Mass before Lady Day?”

“Yes, Father,” I assured him, and he went outside to his rickety 2CV coupe which had death trap written all over it.

Paddy was annoyed with me. He was a tubby, complacent man with a welcoming suntanned bald head, but when he heard the tail end of me chasing out Father O’Hare he was furious.

“That was a customer, Sean. A customer. You don’t see me going around to your manor and solving murders, do you?”

“You’re welcome to, Paddy.”

Paddy went on a rant about Father O’Hare’s pressing need for a new motor and pointed out that the Catholic Church used wealth to glorify God and show the common people a glimpse of the infinite. I was in no mood for the dialectic so I told him that he had a point and apologised and asked about the windscreen.