Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

Paddy told me he couldn’t possibly get a replacement in less than a week and offered me a loaner of a black BMW 320i for only fifty quid. It was a canny move on his part for he knew that I’d be hooked after a couple of days behind the wheel of that four-cylinder, fuel-injected, 125 BHP beast.

She purred right up and I notched her at 115 mph on the straight run from the old ICI factory to Eden Village.

I turned right up Victoria Road, left on Coronation Road and parked the car.

I found Bobby Cameron’s wean and give him a pound note and told him he’d get another one if he kept all the wee shites away from the Beemer.

I was exhausted.

I turned on the hall light to look at myself in the mirror. A pitiful bedraggled wreck of a man.

The hall mirror.

The hall looking glass.

Alice Through the Looking Glass. Alice Smith because Alice Liddell was too obvious. I see through a glass darkly.

I saw the phone sitting on the table. I recalled the conversation with our special guest mystery caller.

I walked outside to the Beemer and drove to William McFarlane’s bed and breakfast in Dunmurry.

Mrs McFarlane didn’t recognise me without the riot squad to back me up

I asked if I could have a look at room #4.

She said all the rooms were the same.

I said four was my lucky number.

She said fine, go ahead.

I went upstairs to room #4.

I looked at the huge mirror above the dresser.

I looked at those strange wear marks on the carpet. Exactly where they should be if someone had moved this heavy thing out from the wall.

I moved the dresser out from the wall.

Behind the mirror someone had duct-taped an envelope.

I put on latex gloves and opened the envelope.

Inside:

Bill O’Rourke’s Massachusetts driver’s licence, five hundred dollars in fifty-dollar bills, and a key with the number 27 stamped into the metal. Taped to the key with Scotch tape, a piece of paper that said “Ten Cent Bank Safety Deposit, Jefferson Street, Newburyport, Massachusetts”.

I moved the dresser back and told Mrs McFarlane I’d have to think about the room.

I went back to the borrowed Beemer and sat there.

The mystery caller had known about this all along.

I see through a glass darkly. She had seen through it. She’d seen through it to the other side, but was leaving it to me to do something about it.

There was only one thing to be done.

I knew the drama that would erupt if I asked for official permission to go.

The Chief. The Consulate. DeLorean. The Americans. Especially the Americans.

The case would be taken away from me.

The case would vanish into the ether.

We’d never find out who killed Bill O’Rourke. Perhaps someone would, but not us.

“No, not us,” I said aloud.

I drove to Carrick RUC and found Kenny Dalziel among the pay stubs in the sub basement. I told him that before the marching season got going in a month or so now was as good a time as any for me to take my personal days all at once.

He said that he’d sound it out with the Chief.

Half an hour later the Chief called me up to his office and declared that I looked as if I needed a break. He recommended Blackpool, which was bracing and inexpensive at this time of year.

I told him that that sounded like a great idea.

I told Kenny I was taking five working days and a weekend exemption from riot duty. I told them that Crabbie was in charge of CID and he should be paid for the week as an acting sergeant. Kenny baulked at that until I said that I’d pay the extra four quid out of my own pocket.

I went back upstairs and told Crabbie about the acting sergeant thing and he was as pleased as I’d hoped. I didn’t tell him about the mirror. Not yet. No point dragging him in until we saw where it all led.

I called Emma McAlpine and said that I had to go out of town for a few days but I’d really like to see her when I got back.

“That would be nice,” she told me.

I ordered Emma flowers from the same place I’d got them for Gloria.

I drove to Grant’s Travel Agency in Carrickfergus and had them book me a flight to Boston. Tomorrow at noon from Heathrow.

I’m not a superstitious arsehole but just to be on the safe side I found out when the next Mass was going to be …

27: HIGH MASS

Coronation Road was the last street in Greater Belfast before the country began and the field behind it felt like another world. A littoral. An Interzone. A DMZ. I put a barley stalk in my mouth and listened to the commingling of music from radios and stereos and from far up the lane a piper practising his scale. The gable graffiti said “God Save the Queen”, and “No Pope Here”, but on this particular April evening Coronation Road belonged to neither Queen nor Pope but to a Jewish girl from Brooklyn called Barbra Streisand. The current UK no. 1 album Memories was warbling from several underpowered hi-fi speakers with most of them repeating the title track, but one preferring Streisand’s melancholy duet with Neil Diamond: “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”. We could be over-egging the theoretical custard here, but for me these torch songs were desperate cries for help from Coronation Road’s female population. Streisand’s mezzo soprano expressing what they couldn’t express from their marriage prisons: longings about foreign travel and roads not taken and above all about their men who were once buoyant and funny and now were aged characters brought low by unemployment and sickness and the drink.

I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten as an act of contrition. Tonight I would take the sacrament of penance and in a state of grace I would go to America.

It was dusk now and the colours were from another latitude: the barley a bold yellow, the sky an epic Sicilian red. I walked past two children playing hide-and-seek behind a burnt-out car. The field had become a dumping ground for bombed vehicles, and these warped and twisted hulks of steel and aluminium possessed a strange, minatory beauty. I touched the side of a Reliant Robin that had been turned inside out by the apocalyptic power of Semtex. A kid put his finger to his lips. I nodded. I won’t turn you in, son.

I reached the street and said hello to my two terrace neighbours, Mrs Campbell and Mrs Bridewell, while Barbra brought her rendition of “Memory” to a histrionic, emotional climax and the ladies dabbed at their cheeks. The sky, the song, the tear: the moment carved with such precision that I knew that it would scratch the iris of my mind’s eye decades from now. If the Lord spared me…

I checked under the Beemer and drove to the chapel.

Revenge is the foolish stepbrother of justice. I understood that. I had lived with that thought for eight months. Ever since that night on the shores of Lake Como. What I had done then was a crime, and it was also a sin. No one cared about the crime, but tonight I was going to confess to the sin. To the act itself and to the feeling of satisfaction I got when I thought about what I’d done.

I parked the car and got out.

The chapel was ancient and barely used, covered in moss and yellow ivy. It lay now in the shadow of Kilroot power station. Only in Ulster could a charming piece of coast like this have been blighted with such a Soviet-style monstrosity. “Kilroot” is a derivation of the Irish Cill Ruaidh meaning “church of the redheads”. The Redheads were the local Celts and supposedly Kilroot had been founded as a parish in 422 AD, which predated St Patrick’s mission by a generation. At that time Ulster, and indeed Ireland, was a land of pagan, poetry-loving, warring, tribal kingdoms. Not much had changed.

Father O’Hare was only twenty-two. He was nine years my junior, but he was an old soul. In defiance of Vatican II, and for the benefit of the five other aging parishioners, he conducted the mass in Latin.