Adrian McKinty: I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“Yes, sir,” I said and took a chair at the back of the room next to Sergeants Burke and Quinn.

I listened but I wasn’t paying much attention. Brennan told us that we were in what the boys in Special Branch called a “regrouping and reconnaissance period”. The IRA’s problem was very much an embarrassment of riches. IRA recruitment had soared because of the hunger strikes last year and especially after the martyrdom of Bobby Sands. Volunteers were having to be turned away and money was flowing into the organisation through protection rackets, narcotics and pub collection boxes in Irish bars in Boston and New York. The Libyans had supplied the IRA with Semtex explosive, rockets and Armalite rifles. The IRA leadership was currently having difficulty figuring out what to do with all its men and guns but the lull wouldn’t last and we were all to be on our guard for what could be an epic struggle ahead.

Brennan’s method was only to give us the facts and he didn’t bother with a pep talk or encouraging words. We were all too jaded for that and he knew it. He didn’t even break out his stash of good whiskey which wasn’t really on at all.

“Are you paying attention to this, Duffy?” he asked.

“Aye, sir, ce n’est pas un revolte , it’s a friggin’ revolution, isn’t it?”

“Aye, it is. And don’t talk foreign. All right, everyone, you’re dismissed,” he said brusquely.

I corralled Matty and McCrabban back into the incident room where our whiteboard gleamed with a big red “1” drawn above the list of known facts about our John Doe.

“What’s that for?” I asked Crabbie.

He grinned and got me a sheet of paper from his desk which turned out to be his notes on the First Infantry Division of the United States Army.

“Our boy is a Yank. ‘No Mission Too Difficult, No Sacrifice Too Great’, is the motto of the United States Army’s First Infantry Division. I did some digging. If our John Doe was World War Two age, his unit was in the worst of it: Sicily, Normandy, The Hurtgen Forest. That’s maybe where he got the shrapnel wounds too.”

“Excellent work, Crabbie!” I said, really pleased. “This is great! It gives us a lot to go on. An American! Boy oh boy.”

“I helped!” Matty protested a little petulantly.

“I’m sure you did, mate,” I reassured him.

“An American ex-GI comes to Northern Ireland for his holidays or to visit his old haunts and the poor bugger somehow ends up poisoned,” Crabbie said reflectively.

“Aye,” I said and rubbed my chin. “Have you been on the phone to Customs and Immigration?”

“We have. They’re on it now. We’ve got them compiling a list of names of all American visitors to Northern Ireland in the last three months,” Matty said.

“Why three months?”

“If his body was frozen it could have been any time at all, but any earlier than three months and we surely would have had a missing persons report,” Matty said, a little oversensitively.

“Call them up and ask them to go back a full year,” I said.

“Jesus, Sean, that could be hundreds of names, maybe thousands,” Matty said.

“We’ll go back five years if we have to. We’re looking for a result here. You heard what the Chief said. We’ve got the luxury of one case right now. We could be looking at murders a plenty in the next couple of months.”

Matty nodded and got on the phone and I shared what I had found about the nature of the poison with McCrabban.

“That’s a rare old bird indeed,” he said.

“Aye.”

“We’ve got to see who could grow a plant like that, or where you could get the seeds.”

“Back on the bloody blower?” he asked.

“Back on the bloody blower, mate.”

I went to the crapper and read the Sun, a copy of which was always in there. I’ll say this for Rupert Murdoch, he made a good paper to read on the bog.

When I came out Matty was looking triumphant.

“What did customs say about the names?” I asked.

“Well, there was a lot of complaining.”

“Did you lean on them?”

“Those bastards hate to do any work, but I applied the thumbscrews and they said they’ll have them for us by the end of the week.”

“Good. Although, in civil service speak that means the end of the year.”

“Aye, so what do you want me to work on now?”

“Is that suitcase still around?”

“Of course. It’s in the evidence room.”

“See if you can find out where it came from, how many were sold in Northern Ireland, that kind of thing.”

“What good will that do?” he said with an attitude.

“Matty, in the words of William Shakespeare: just fucking do it, ya wee shite.”

“Will do, boss,” he replied and went to the evidence room to unwrap the suitcase from its plastic covering.

We called garden centres all over Ireland for the rest of the afternoon. We got nothing. Few had heard of rosary pea and no one had a record of anyone growing it or requesting seeds.

I phoned the General Post Office in Belfast and asked if they had any records of seeds being seized or coming through the mail. They said that they had no idea and would call me back.

McCrabban called UK customs to ask them the same question and after going through a couple of flunkies a “police liaison officer” told him that importing such seeds was not illegal or subject to duty so customs would have no interest in them.

The post office phoned back with the same story.

I called Dick Savage in Special Branch. Dick had taken chemistry at Queen’s University about the same time as me. He wasn’t a high flyer but he’d written several surprisingly acute internal memos on methods of suicide and how to distinguish a true suicide from a murder disguised to look like one.

Dick had heard of Abrin but had never heard of it being used in a poisoning anywhere in the British Isles. He told me he’d look into it.

I went into see Chief Inspector Brennan and broke the bad news that our John Doe was definitely American but that we had a good chance of finding out who he was through the immigration records.

“When we’ve got his name we should inform the US Consulate. And we’ll probably need the Consulate’s help cross referencing our list of names against veterans of the First Infantry Division.”

Brennan nodded. “I suppose you want me to call them.”

“Better coming from you, sir. You’re the head of station. More official, all that jazz.”

“You just don’t want to do it.”

“Could be a difficult phone call.”

“And?”

“I’m feeling a bit fragile today, sir. I may just have been dumped by my girlfriend.”

“That doctor bint you were seeing?”

“Aye.”

“I could see that coming. She was out of your league, son.”

“Will you make the call, sir?”

“It’ll be the start of a shitstorm … a dead American – as if we don’t have enough problems.”

I stood there and let weary resignation over come his weathered face like melted lard over a cast-iron skillet. He sighed dramatically. “All right. I suppose I’ll do it for you, like I do everything around here. You’re sure he’s a Yank?”

I told him about the tattoo.

“All right, good. Scram. And get Carol’s cake, ready. She’s in in half an hour.”

When Carol came in at three we had her party.

Tea, cake, party hats, both types of lemonade.

Carol had been on planet Earth for sixty years. She ate the cake, drank the tea, smiled and said how wonderful it all was. Brennan gave her a toast and it was Brennan, not Carol, who told us the story of her first week on the job in 1941 when a Luftwaffe Heinkel 111 dropped a stick of 250 kilograms bombs on the station. We’d all heard the tale before but it was a reteller. The only person who’d been hurt that day was a prisoner in the cells who broke an arm. Course, up in Belfast, where the rest of the Heinkel squadron had gone, people were less fortunate.