Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“Where is it?”

“You just go through the gate, turn left and follow the wall about a hundred yards and you’ll see it.”

“Is it out the back with the greenhouse and everything?”

She tapped my forehead. “What’s the matter with your brain? No, you don’t need to go through the house. Immediately you enter Harry’s estate turn left, go long the wall and … you know what, sit there, I’ll do it. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ve been taking some pills. I need the air.”

“I’ll phone him and tell him you’re coming.”

“No need, no need, I’ll be fine. Have you got a torch?”

Of course I wasn’t fine. You try carrying a box of steaks uphill in the rain at night over muddy ground with a dog barking at you.

I reached the gates to Red Hall.

My brain was fugged. Did she mean go down the driveway to the house and then go left, or go immediately left here?

“I think she meant here,” I said.

I walked towards a clump of trees and I saw an old timber curing shed, where they would hang the pheasants for five or six days.

“That must be the place,” I thought.

It was easily a hundred years old and in the shade of a couple of willow trees that would keep the shot pheasants at a nice 55 degrees year round.

The door wasn’t locked.

I opened it and went inside. I fumbled for a light switch and found one.

There were a dozen hooks hanging from the ceiling. There were no birds but there was a massive meat freezer against the far wall.

I hefted the box of steaks over to it and rested it on top.

The meat freezer had a chain and padlock on it, but the padlock was unlocked.

I lifted the lid. The freezer was completely empty.

I tipped the box of steaks inside and closed the lid.

I threw the empty cardboard box in a corner and walked back across the curing shed. I put my hand on the light switch.

I hesitated with my finger on the switch.

Hesitated.

While synaptical connections formed a pattern.

I walked back to the freezer and opened it.

I shone the torch inside. There was something on the freezer bottom.

It was a patch of human skin.

I reached into my raincoat pocket and found a pair of latex gloves. I put the gloves on, leaned into the freezer and tugged at the skin. It came loose. I flipped it over and there on the back was a faded blue ink ‘t’. It had come from a tattoo which said “No Sacrifice Too Grea t.”

This was the freezer O’Rourke had spent time in after he had been murdered.

This was where Harry had kept O’Rourke’s body before he’d decided to get rid of it once and for all. He had probably done it himself – the getting rid of – I mean.

He had driven down to Emma’s and asked if she had any old suitcases knocking around and she’d said of course. And he checked it to make sure that it didn’t contain anything that could be traced back to him or Emma and wiped it of prints and he’d chopped up the body and disposed of the head and arms in a bog and the big torso he’d dumped miles and miles away with no hope of it ever coming back to him.

Except that he hadn’t quite checked the suitcase as well as he should have.

And Emma when questioned by us had lied, and after we’d left had called him in a panic. And he knew we were on to him but he told her to play it cool. The cops? Don’t worry about the cops. The cops have nothing. And she did play it cool. And he played it cool. And the cops had nothing.

The question was why?

The question was what was going on?

I’d have to think about it.

I had to get away from here and process this evidence and think about that.

I folded the latex glove around the piece of skin and put it in my pocket. I closed the freezer door and turned.

“Anything interesting in there?” Harry asked. He was carrying a Remington pump action.

“Nope. Just leaving off some steaks.”

“So it was open then. Usually we keep it padlocked in case kids would go in there while playing hide-and-seek,” he said in a monotone.

His face a mask. A sickly yellow mask. The Remington had one in the breach, it was pointed down at the ground, at my feet, but it would be nothing, nothing at all to raise it and pull the trigger.

Hell, you’d have a great place to put the body. “Yeah, I’ve seen those public information ads on telly. That wee kid is playing hide-and-seek. He gets locked in the freezer. He yells but no one can hear. Sensible to keep it locked.”

“But it was open.”

“Yes.”

“Careless on my part.”

“No harm done at all, mate. I was just leaving off some steaks. Heading back to the house now. Emma’s got dinner on the burner.”

He looked at me.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t be sure if I’d found anything or not. Was there anything in there? Had they been thorough? If he let me go was he signing his own death warrant?

“What’s that in your pocket?” he said looking at a finger of latex.

“Nothing, piece of plastic, so I don’t get freezer burn handling the steaks.”

“Can I see?”

“You want to see a piece of plastic?”

“Yes.”

“I have to go, Harry. I’m late for dinner.”

He raised the shotgun and I grabbed the .38 from my belt.

Shotgun and .38.

Cop and robber.

Blue eyes/green eyes.

All those dichotomies flitting by at once. Wonderfully.

I smiled at him.

“It’s a piece of skin, Harry. It’s the missing piece of Bill O’Rourke’s tattoo. A ‘t’ from the motto ‘No Sacrifice Too Great’. You didn’t even know it was there, did you?”

He shook his head.

“Why did you kill him, Harry?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Was he digging into your relationship with DeLorean? And for that matter, mate, what is your relationship with DeLorean?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Who did?”

“Give me that piece of skin. Give it to me.”

I laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll fucking blow your legs off before you get near the trigger of that pop gun,” he said.

“No, it won’t play like that. Look at my .38. It’s fully cocked. The slightest motion or noise will set it off and it’s pointing right at your heart, me old mucker. You’re not surviving that. Aye, you’re right, that shotgun will take my fucking head off. But for you … It’ll be a bad death. Your heart will be ripped out of your chest. Blood will pour into your chest cavity from your arteries. Your lungs will fill. You’ll drown in your own blood. Like your brother Martin. Can you imagine? There’ll be no white light for you, me old China plate. No friendly waving from the far shore. You’ll be fighting it to the last, desperately trying to breathe.”

Now he looked even more yellow.

“What happened to O’Rourke, Harry? Tell me,” I said softly.

He smiled.

“All right,” he said.

31: IN EXTREMIS

Harry cleared his throat. “The whole thing started with one of Martin’s touts who spotted O’Rourke lurking around the DeLorean factory, taking photographs, asking questions. He stood out. He was an American.”

“And your brother came to you?”

“Yeah, Martin told me about it all. Martin knew that John DeLorean and me were pulling off a big score. He knew this guy was bad fucking news.”

“What did you do with the information?”

“I decided that we should bring O’Rourke in to answer a few questions.”

“How did you do that?”

“Got a few lads in balaclavas, stole a white Transit, grabbed him off the bloody street in front of some bed and breakfast in Dunmurry.”

“So you don’t know Willy McFarlane?”