I Hear the Sirens in the Street

by Adrian McKinty

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you look bloody terrible. What’s the matter with you? The flu?”

  “No, sir, Matty and I were out in a Rover and someone threw a petrol bomb. I had to go out and extinguish it.”

  “Someone threw a petrol bomb at ya? Did you write it up?”

  “No, sir, not yet.”

  “See that you do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you read the papers this morning, Sean?” he said in a less abrasive voice.

  “No.”

  “Listened to the news?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You have to stay abreast of current events, Inspector!”

  “Yes, sir. Anything interesting happening?”

  “General Galtieri has decided that his personal manifesto, like all the very best manifestos, needs to be unleashed on the world in a rainy windswept bog, filled with sheep shit.”

  “General who? What?”

  “Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands.”

  “The Falkland Islands?”

  “The Falkland Islands.”

  “I’m not really any the wiser, sir.”

  “They’re in the South Atlantic. According to the Mail they’ve got ten thousand troops on there by now.”

  “Shite.”

  “You know what that means for us, don’t you? Thatcher’s going to have to take them back. It’s either that or resign. She’ll be sending out an invasion fleet. They’ll be getting troops from everywhere. I imagine we’ll lose half a dozen regiments from here.”

  “That’s going to stretch us thin.”

  About half of the anti-terrorist and border patrols in Northern Ireland were conducted by the British Army; we, the police, could not easily pick up the slack.

  Brennan rubbed his face. “It’s bad timing. The IRA’s gearing up for a campaign and we’re going to be losing soldiers just when they’re surging. We could be in for an even trickier few months than we thought.”

  I nodded.

  “And spare a thought for what will happen if it’s a debacle. If Thatcher doesn’t get the islands back.”

  “She resigns?”

  “She resigns, the government collapses and there’s a general election. If Labour wins, and they will, that’s it, mate – the ball game is fucking over.”

  The Labour Party under Michael Foot had a policy of unilateral withdrawal from Ireland, which meant that they would withdraw all British soldiers and civil servants. Ireland would be united at last under Dublin rule which was all fine and dandy except that the Irish Army had only a few battalions and it was a laughable idea that they would be able to keep the peace. What it would mean would be full-scale civil war with a million well-armed, geographically tightly knit Protestants against the rest of the island’s four million Catholics. There would be a nice little bloodbath until the US Marines arrived.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

  “Best not to.”

  He picked up his copy of the Daily Mail.

  The headline was one word and screamed “Invasion!”

  I noticed that the date on the paper was April 3rd.

  “Are you sure this isn’t all some kind of belated April Fool’s joke?”

  “It’s no joke, Duffy, the BBC are carrying it, all the papers, everybody.”

  “Okay.”

  “We won’t get our knickers in a twist. We’ll take all this one day at a time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Back to work. Get out there and wrap up this murder investigation of yours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I pushed back the chair and stood.

  “One more thing, Duffy. ‘A chaperone for a conquistador perhaps’?” he said, tapping his crossword puzzle with his pencil and then thoughtfully chewing the end of it.

  It was easy enough. “I think it’s an anagram, sir,” I said.

  “An anagram of what, Duffy?”

  “Cortes,” I said trying to lead him to the solution but he still didn’t get it and he knew that I knew the answer.

  “Just tell me, Duffy!” he said.

  “Escort, sir.”

  “What? Oh, yes, of course … now piss off.”

  As I was leaving the office I saw Matty struggling to get a long knitted scarf out of his locker.

  “No scarves. Accept it. The Tom Baker era is over, mate,” I told him.

  Hard rain along the A2.

  Matty driving the Land Rover.

  Me riding shotgun, literally: a Winchester M12 pump-action across my lap in case we got ambushed on one of the back roads.

  I put a New Order cassette in the player. They’d gone all disco but it wasn’t as bad as you would have thought.

  “Did you hear the news, Matty?”

  “What news?”

  “You have to stay up with current events, Constable. The Falklands have been invaded.”

  “The what?”

  “Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands.”

  “Jesus, when was this?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “First the Germans and now the bloody Argentinians.”

  “You’re thinking of the Channel Islands, mate.”

  “Where’s the Falklands then?”

  “Uhm, somewhere sort of south, I think.”

  “I suppose that’s Spurs fucked now, isn’t it?”

  “How so?”

  “Half their team’s from bloody Argentina. They’ll be well off their game.”

  “The Chief Inspector wants us to think about the geo-political consequences.”

  “Aye, geo-politics is one thing, but football’s football, isn’t it?” Matty said, putting things into a proper perspective.

  5: THE WIDOW MCALPINE

  We drove through the town of Whitehead and hugged the shore of Larne Lough until we were on Islandmagee. Islandmagee was an odd place. A peninsula about six miles north-east of Carrickfergus with Larne Lough on one side and the Irish Sea on the other. It was near the major metropolitan centre and ferry port of Larne, yet it was a world away. When you drove onto Islandmagee it was like going back to an Ireland of a hundred or even two hundred years before. The people were country people, suspicious of strangers, and for me their accent and dialect were at times difficult to understand. I got it when they used the occasional word in Irish but often I found them speaking a form of lowland Scots straight out of Robert Burns. They almost sounded like Americans from the high country of Kentucky or Tennessee.

  I’d been there several times. Always in my civvies, as I’d heard that they didn’t like peelers snooping around. As Matty drove I unfolded the ordnance survey map and found Ballyharry. It was halfway up the lough shore, opposite the old cement works in Magheramorne. On the map it was a small settlement, a dozen houses at the most.

  We turned off the Shore Road onto the Ballyharry Road. A bump chewed the New Order tape so I flipped through the radio stations. All the English ones were talking about the Falklands but Irish radio wasn’t interested in Britain’s colonial wars and instead were interviewing a woman who had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary who had told her that the sale of contraceptive devices in Dublin would bring a terrible vengeance from God and his host of Angels.

  The Ballyharry Road led to the Mill Bay Road: small farms, whitewashed cottages, stone walls, sheep, rain. I looked for Red Hall but didn’t see it.

  Finally there was a small private single-laned track that led into the hills that had a gate and a sign nailed to an old beech tree which said “Red Hall Manor, Private, No Trespassing”, and underneath that another sign which said “No Coursing or Shooting Without Express Permission”.

  “You think this is the place?” I asked, looking up the road.

  Matty examined the map and shrugged. “We might as well give it a go.”

  We drove past a small wood and into a broad valley.

  There were farms dotted about the landscape, some little more than ruins.

  A sign by one
of them said Red Hall Cottage and Matty slammed on the brakes. It was a small farm surrounded by flooded, boggy fields and a couple of dozen miserable sheep. The building itself was a whitewashed single-storey house with a few cement and breeze block buildings in the rear. It looked a right mess. Most of the outbuildings had holes in the exterior walls and the farmhouse could have done with a coat of paint. The roof was thatched and covered with rusting wire. The car out front was a Land Rover Defender circa 1957.

  “Well, I don’t think we’re dealing with an international hitman, that’s for sure,” I said.

  “Unless he’s got all his money overseas in a Swiss Bank.”

  “Aye.”

  “Maybe you should go in first, boss, and I’ll stay here by the radio in case there’s any shooting.”

  “Get out.”

  “All right,” he said, with resignation.

  We parked the Rover and walked through the muddy farmyard to the house.

  “My shoes are getting ruined,” Matty said, treading gingerly around the muck and potholes. He was wearing expensive Nike gutties and unflared white jeans. Is that what the kids were sporting these days?

  An Alsatian snarled at us, struggling desperately at the edge of a long piece of rope.

  “Yon bugger wants to rip our throats out,” Matty said.

  The chickens pecking all around us seemed unconcerned by the dog but he did look like a nasty brute.

  We reached the whitewashed cottage, the postcardy effect somewhat spoiled by a huge rusting oil tank for the central heating plonked right outside. There was no bell or knocker so we rapped on the wooden front door. After a second knock, we heard a radio being turned off and a female voice asked:

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s the police,” I said. “Carrickfergus RUC.”

  “What do you want?” the voice asked.

  “We want to talk to Martin McAlpine.”

  “Hold on a sec!”

  We waited a couple of minutes and a young woman answered the door. She had a towel wrapped round her head and she was wearing an ugly green dressing gown. She’d clearly only just stepped out of the bath or the shower. She was about twenty-two, with grey-blue eyes, red eyebrows, freckles. She was pretty in an unnerving, dreamy, “She Moved Through The Fair”, kind of way.

  “Good morning, ma’am. Detective Inspector Duffy, Detective Constable McBride from Carrickfergus RUC. We’re looking for a Martin McAlpine. We believe that this is his address,” I said.

  She smiled at me and her eyebrows arched in a well-calibrated display of annoyance and contempt.

  “This is why this country is going down the drain,” she muttered.

  “Excuse me?” I replied.

  “I said this is why this country is going down the drain. Nobody cares. Nobody is remotely competent at their jobs.”

  Her voice had a distinct Islandmagee country accent tinge to it, but there was something else there too. She spoke well, with a middle-class diction and without hesitation. She’d had a decent education it seemed, or a year or two at uni.

  The dog kept barking and two fields over a door opened in another thatched farmhouse and a man smoking a pipe came out to gawk at us. The woman waved to him and he waved back.

  I looked at Matty to see if he knew what she was talking about, but he was in the dark too. I took out my warrant card and showed it to her.

  “Carrickfergus RUC,” I said again.

  “Heard you the first time,” she said.

  “Is this Martin McAlpine’s address?” Matty asked.

  “What’s this about?” she demanded.

  “It’s a murder investigation,” I told her.

  “Well, Martin didn’t do it, that’s for sure,” she said, reaching into the dressing-gown pocket and pulling out a packet of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth but she didn’t have a lighter. I got my Zippo, flipped it and lit it for her.

  “Ta,” she muttered.

  “So can we speak to Mr McAlpine?”

  “If you’re a medium.”

  “Sorry?”

  “My husband’s dead. He was shot not fifty feet from here last December.”

  “Oh, shit,” Matty said, sotto voce.

  She took a puff on the cigarette and shook her head. “Why don’t the pair of youse come in out of the rain. I’ll make you a cup of tea before you have to drive back to Carrick.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The farmhouse was small, with thick stone walls and cubby windows. It smelled of peat from the fire. We sat down on a brown bean-bag sofa. There were spaces on the mantle and empty frames where photographs had once been. Even Matty could have figured out what the frames had once contained.

  She came back with three mugs of strong sweet tea and sat opposite us in an uncomfortable-looking rocking chair.

  “So what’s this all about?”

  “I’m very sorry about your husband,” I said. “We had no idea. He was shot by terrorists?”

  “The IRA killed him because he was in the UDr He was only a part-timer. He was going up the hills to check on the sheep. They must have been waiting behind the gate out there. They shot him in the chest. He never knew a thing about it, or so they say.”

  Matty winced.

  Yes, we had really ballsed this one up and no mistake.

  “I’m very sorry. We should have checked the name before we came out here,” I said pathetically.

  The Ulster Defence Regiment was a locally recruited regiment of the British Army. They conducted foot patrols and joint patrols with the police and as such they were a vital part of the British government’s anti-terrorist strategy. There were about five thousand UDR men and women in Northern Ireland. The IRA assassinated between fifty and a hundred of them every year, most in attacks like the one that had killed Mrs McAlpine’s husband: mercury tilt switch bombs under cars, rural ambushes and the like.

  As coppers, though, we looked down on UDR men. We saw ourselves as elite professionals and them as, well … fucking wasters for the most part. Sure, they were brave and put their lives on the line, but who didn’t in this day and age?

  There was also the fact that many of the hated disbanded B Specials had joined the UDR and that occasionally guns from their depots would find their way into the hands of the paramilitaries. I mean, I’m sure ninety-five per cent of the UDR soldiers were decent, hardworking people, but there were definitely more bad apples in the regiment than in the RUC.

  Not that any of that mattered now. We should have known about the death of a security forces comrade and we didn’t.

  “Hold on there, that tea’s too wet. I’ll get some biscuits,” Mrs McAlpine said.

  When she had gone Matty put up his hands defensively.

  “Don’t blame me, this was your responsibility, boss,” he said. “You just asked for an address. You didn’t tell me to check the births and deaths …”

  “I know, I know. It can’t be helped.”

  “We’ve made right arses of ourselves. In front of a good-looking woman, too,” Matty said.

  “I’m surprised the name didn’t ring a bell.”

  “December of last year was a bad time, the IRA were killing someone every day, we can’t remember all of them,” Matty protested.

  It was true. Last November/December there’d been a lot of IRA murders including the notorious assassination of a fairly moderate Unionist MP, the Reverend Robert Bradford, which had absorbed most of the headlines; for one reason and another the IRA tended not to target local politicians but when they did it got the ink pots flowing.

  The widow McAlpine came back in with a tray of biscuits.

  She was still wearing the dressing gown but she’d taken the towel off her head. Her hair was chestnut red, curly, long. Somehow it made her look much older. Late twenties, maybe thirty. And she would age fast out here in the boglands on a scrabble sheep farm with no husband and no help.

  “This is lovely, thanks,” Matty said, helping himself to a chocolate digestiv
e.

  “So what’s this all about?” she asked.

  I told her about the body in the suitcase and the name tag that we’d found inside the case.

  “I gave that suitcase away just before Christmas with all of Martin’s stuff. I couldn’t bear to have any of his gear around me any more and I thought that somebody might have the use of it.”

  “Can you tell us where you left it?” I asked.

  “Yes. The Carrickfergus Salvation Army.”

  “And this was just before Christmas?”

  “About a week before.”

  “Okay, we’ll check it out.”

  We finished our tea and stared at the peat logs crackling in the fireplace. Matty, the cheeky skitter, finished the entire plate of chocolate digestives.

  “Well, we should be heading on,” I said, stood and pulled Matty up before he scoffed the poor woman out of house and home.

  “We’re really sorry to have bothered you, Mrs McAlpine.”

  “Not at all. It chills the blood thinking that someone used Martin’s old suitcase to get rid of a body.”

  “Aye, it does indeed.”

  She walked us to the front door.

  “Well, thanks again,” I said, and offered her my hand.

  She shook it and didn’t let go when I tried to disengage.

  “It was just out there where your Land Rover was parked. They must have been hiding behind the stone wall. Two of them, they said. Gave him both barrels of a shotgun and sped off on a motorbike. Point blank range. Dr McCreery said that he wouldn’t have known a thing about it.”

  “I’m sure that’s the case,” I said and tried to let go, but still she held on.

  “He only joined for the money. This place doesn’t pay anything. We’ve forty sheep on twelve acres of bog.”

  “Yes, the—”

  She pulled me closer.

  “Aye, they say he didn’t know anything but he was still breathing when I got to him, trying to breathe anyway. His mouth was full of blood, he was drowning in it. Drowning on dry land in his own blood.”

  Matty was staring at the woman, his eyes wide with horror and I was pretty spooked too. The widow McAlpine had us both, but me literally, in her grip.