I Hear the Sirens in the Street

by Adrian McKinty

  I called up Belfast Customs and Immigration and politely harangued them about their abilities and their propensity for sticking their heads up their own arses.

  They said that they were working on it but the new computer system was a nightmare and did I know that it was a Saturday and there were only two people in the office, one of whom was Mrs McCameron?

  I said that I knew the former but not the latter and asked them to do their best. I avoided the obvious Mrs McCameron lure, which sounded like a standard civil service crimson clupea. There probably was no Mrs McCameron.

  At around three o’clock someone put on the football but I grew bored and found myself at another table listening to a reserve constable called Wilkes who was also in the Royal Navy Reserve and who’d just gotten a phone call telling him that he was on his way to the South Atlantic as a fire control officer on HMS Illustrious.

  “That’s going to be the fucking Admiral’s ship!” he said, with obvious excitement.

  “Aye and the best target in the fleet for the Argie submarines. Classic frying pan/fire situation for you, my lad. This time next month you’ll be some penguin’s breakfast,” Sergeant Burke muttered. I gave him a cynical grin and went to get a coffee.

  The lads plied Wilkes with questions and when the clock finally got its bum round to five we hit the bricks.

  Since it was indeed a Saturday I got a Chinese takeaway and ate it with a bottle of Guinness back in Coronation Road. It was the dinner of sad single men across Ireland. To really trip on the mood I scrounged up some fuzzy Moroccan black and dug out the copy of the ancient TLS I’d lifted from the doc’s. I flipped through the pages until I found what I was after, which was a poem by Philip Larkin called “Aubade”. I read it twice and decided that it was the greatest poem of the decade. I wanted to share this information with someone, but here at 113 Coronation Road, Carrickfergus there was no one to share it with. My parents wouldn’t be interested and Laura had no time for poetry. And my friends, such as they were, would think I was taking the piss.

  I finished my spliff and called my parents anyway, but they weren’t home.

  I looked at the phone and the rain leaking in the hall window.

  I made myself a vodka gimlet in a pint glass and called Laura.

  Her mother answered.

  “Oh, hello, Sean,” she said cheerfully.

  “Hi, Irene, is Laura there at all?” I asked.

  “No. No, I’m afraid not. Her father drove her to the airport.”

  This took several seconds to sink in.

  “She’s leaving tonight?”

  “Yes. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “She said it was next week.”

  “We had to change the plans. She’s been trying to call you all day. We’re going to take the ferry over with her car on Tuesday and she’s going by plane tonight to get everything sorted.”

  “She tried to call me?”

  “Yes – where were you this afternoon?”

  “Working.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “Aye, on a Saturday. The crooks don’t take the weekends off.”

  “I’m sure she’ll try you again at the airport. The plane doesn’t leave until seven.”

  “Okay, I better get off the line then,” I said.

  I hung up and childishly punched the wall.

  “Fucking lying bitch!” I yelled, which wouldn’t be the last time such edifying dialogue would be heard in Victoria Estate on a wet Saturday night.

  I made myself another pint of vodka and lime juice, walked out the back to the garden shed, opened an old can marked “Screws” and found the stash of high-grade Turkish hashish I’d liberated from the evidence locker before they’d torched it and a couple of bags of brown tar heroin in a ceremony for the Carrickfergus Advertiser.

  I got a Rizla King Size, made myself a joint and smoked it as I walked back to the house.

  The phone was ringing and I almost slipped and broke my neck as I sprinted for the bastard.

  “Sean! At last!” she said.

  Laura. She was calling from Aldergrove Airport. Her plane left in five minutes.

  I don’t remember any of the rest of it.

  It was a story. A fairy story.

  And promises neither of us would keep.

  Five minutes?

  It didn’t last two.

  Her words were frozen birds fallen from the telegraph wires.

  I responded with a vacuum of lies and banality, sick of my own material.

  She finally took mercy on us and said goodbye and hung up the phone.

  I sat in the living room and relit my joint. The Turkish was the shit and it wasn’t ten minutes before I was as high as a fucking weather balloon floating over Roswell, New Mexico.

  I expectorated in the back yard and watched The Great Bear’s snout bend down and touch the lough. Spacing, I was. “Bear mother, watch over us,” I said. “Like you watched the old ones …”

  There was a good quarter inch left but I tossed the joint, went back inside, put on Hunky Dory. Hunky Dory became Joan Armatrading became Dusty in Memphis.

  At eleven o’clock there was a knock at the door.

  I got my revolver from the hall table and said “Who is it?”

  “Deirdre,” I think she said.

  “Deirdre who?”

  “From next door.”

  I opened the door. It was Mrs Bridewell. She was holding a pie. It had got wet in the rain. She was wet. Mrs Bridewell with her cheekbones and bobbed black hair and husband over the water looking for work …

  “Oh, hello,” I said. “Come in.”

  “No. I wont stop over. I’ve left Thomas with the weans and a bigger eejit never stuck his arm through a coat.”

  “Come in out of the rain, woman.”

  She took a cautious step into the house. She looked at my picture of Our Lady of Knock and suppressed a skewer of polemic against the Papists.

  “I only wanted to leave this off. I made it for the church bake sale tomorrow but it’s been cancelled because of the war.”

  “What war?”

  “Argentina’s invaded the Falkland Islands!”

  “Oh, that war.”

  “None of my lot can eat a rhubarb tart. But I know you like it.”

  I turned on the hall light. She’d put on lipstick for this little sally next door and she was beautiful standing there with her wet fringe and puzzled green eyes, tubercular pallor, dark eyelids and thin, anxious red lips.

  “Mr Duffy?” she said.

  There was no one in the street. Her kids would be abed. The air was electric. Dangerous. It was fifty-fifty whether we’d roo like rabbits right here on the welcome mat. She could feel it too.

  “Sean?” she whispered.

  Christ almighty. I took a literal step back and breathed out.

  “Yes … Yes, a rhubarb tart. Love them.”

  She swallowed hard.

  “M-make sure you eat it with cream,” she said, left it on the hall table and scurried back to her house.

  I left the pie where it was and broke out the bottle of Jura instead. At midnight I put on the news to see if there had been any plane crashes but all the telly wanted to talk about was Argentina and I had to sit through several angles on that story before it became obvious that there hadn’t been any airline disasters and that Laura was completely safe.

  8: VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS

  On Sunday an Atlantic storm parked itself over Ireland and it was raining so hard it could have been the Twelfth of July or one of those other holidays when God poured out his wrath on the Orangemen marching through the streets in bowler hats and sashes. I didn’t leave the house the whole day. I was so bored I almost went to the Gospel Hall on Victoria Road where, allegedly, they spoke in tongues, danced with snakes and afterwards you got a free slice of Dundee cake. Instead I listened to music and read One Hundred Years of Solitude which had come from the book club. It was a good novel but, as the man said, maybe seventy-five years
of solitude would have been enough.

  Dozens of different birds had stopped in my back garden to take shelter from the weather. I was no expert but I was my father’s son and with half a brain noted starlings, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, swifts, magpies, rock doves, robins, gulls of every kind.

  On Monday the birds were still there and Mrs Campbell from the other side of the terrace was in her back garden in a plastic mac throwing bread to them. You could see her jabbers through the mac, which me and Mr Connor in the house opposite were both appreciating through our kitchen windows. The Campbells were a mysterious people and although I shared an entire wall with them I never really knew what was going over there, if her husband was working or at home, or how many kids and relatives’ kids she was looking after. She was an attractive woman, no doubt, but the stress and the smokes would get to her like they got to everyone else.

  And speaking of ciggies, I lit myself a Marlboro, put The Undertones on the record player, showered, ate a bowl of cornflakes and hot milk, dressed in a shirt and jeans and headed out for the day. I checked under the BMW for mercury tilt bombs and drove to the station.

  When the list of American citizens who had entered Northern Ireland in the previous year finally came in at eleven on Monday morning it was longer than we’d been expecting. Six hundred names. Five hundred of whom were men. Northern Ireland during the Troubles was not a popular tourist destination but the hunger strikes had sucked in scores of American journos, protesters, politicians and rubberneckers.

  “How are we going to tackle this?” McCrabban asked dourly. His default method of asking anything.

  “We’ll break the list into three and we’ll start making phone calls. We’ll begin with the over-forties first,” I said.

  Fortunately each visitor to Northern Ireland had to fill out a full information card giving his or her home address, phone number, emergency contact, etc.

  There were three hundred and twenty American men over forty who had entered the Province in the previous twelve months.

  “All these calls to America are going to cost us a fortune,” Matty said. “The Chief won’t like it.”

  “He’s going to have to lump it,” I told him. “And let’s hope that our boy hasn’t been frozen for years.”

  “Wait,” McCrabban said. “I’ve thought of another problem.”

  “What?” I said, somewhat irritated because I was keen to get started.

  “We can’t make any phone calls before one o’clock. They’re five hours behind, remember?”

  “Shite,” I said, slapping my forehead. He was right. It wasn’t decent to call people up first thing in the morning.

  “So what are we going to do in the meantime?” Matty asked.

  “Do what everyone else does around here. Pretend to work,” I said.

  Matty opened up some files and spread them on his desk, but read the Daily Mail. The Mail and every other paper was all Falklands all the time. The country was mad for the war. Thirty years since the last good one, not counting what had been going on in our little land.

  McCrabban took out his notebooks and started studying for his sergeant’s exam.

  I looked through a couple of theft cases to see if anything would leap out at me. Nothing did. Theft cases rarely got solved.

  On a hunch I called up every life insurance company in the book to see if there had been any payouts on anyone called McAlpine in the last four months.

  Nope.

  At eleven the phone rang.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello, is this Inspector Duffy?” a voice asked.

  “Yes.”

  The voice was Scottish, older. I immediately thought that something had happened to Laura in Edinburgh and she’d put me down as her emergency contact.

  “Is this about Laura?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Well, yes and no,” the voice said.

  “Go on.”

  “I’m Dr Hagan, Laura, er, Dr Cathcart’s replacement at Carrickfergus Clinic. I was reading over Dr Cathcart’s report on the torso in morgue number 2.”

  “Yes?”

  “The John Doe torso.”

  How many torsos did he think we got in a week?

  “Yes?”

  “Well, something occurred to me that I thought I should share with you.”

  “Go on, Dr Hagan.”

  “Well, Laura has written down in her notes ‘victim frozen, time and date of death unknown’.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But, she’s also written down that the victim’s last meal was a Chicken Tikka Pot Noodle.”

  “So I read.”

  “In case you don’t know, Sergeant Duffy, that was a really quite extraordinary bit of forensic medicine. She must have analysed the stomach contents and then compared them with a list of ingredients for every Pot Noodle that Golden Wonder make.”

  I wasn’t really in the mood to hear Laura praised to the skies.

  “Okay, so she was extremely diligent at her job – how does this help me, Dr Hagan?”

  “It helps you because it considerably narrows down the window in which the victim died. Since I retired from full-time practice I’ve been fishing a lot more and on occasion I’ve taken a Pot Noodle and a thermos of hot water with me …”

  I was getting excited now. The old git was on to something.

  “I know for a fact that the Chicken Tikka Pot Noodle was only introduced in November of 1981. I’d seen the advertisements for it and I made a point to try it when it came out as I spent quite a few years in Malaya and thought it might be a nice blend of Indian and Chinese cuisines. Unfortunately it wasn’t that tasty … but this is me running off on a tangent – do you get my drift, Sergeant Duffy?”

  “The victim couldn’t possibly have been killed before November of last year,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I thanked Dr Hagan and shared the news with the boys.

  We called Golden Wonder to confirm the release date of the Chicken Tikka Pot Noodle and they told us that it had been shipped to shops and supermarkets on November 12. It helped a little. Yes, the victim had been alive in November, but he still could have entered Northern Ireland anytime in the last year. Tourists overstayed their ninety-day visas all the time, as did journalists and businessmen. But still, assuming he was a law-abiding citizen, we could cut off the list of names at, say, 30th June 1981 for our initial series of phone calls.

  That winnowed the list down to a measly two hundred and fifty over-forty American males who had entered Northern Ireland between 30th June 1981 and 30th March 1982. I drafted in a reserve constable with the unlikely name of John Smith so that we could divide the effort in four. Sixty names each didn’t seem that onerous.

  Matty wondered if any Canadians or Brits abroad had joined or been seconded into the First Infantry Division and it was a damn fine point but we couldn’t afford to get sidetracked this early. We took it as a useful fiction that they had not.

  We started making phone calls at 1 p.m., which was 8 a.m. on the East Coast.

  For once we caught a break and by just three forty-five we had a first-class lead on our hands.

  Matty did the call. A man called Bill O’Rourke had put the number of his Veterans of Foreign Wars Lodge as his emergency contact. VFW Post 7608 in a place called Newburyport, Massachusetts, which we discovered was a hop, a skip and jump north of Boston.

  A guy called Mike Lipstein was happy to fill Matty in on his buddy Bill who no one had heard from since before Christmas 1981.

  Bill was a former IRS inspector who had indeed served in The Big Red One, in North Africa, Sicily, France and Germany. He was an enlisted man who had risen to the rank of First Sergeant by the end of hostilities.

  He was also a widower who had retired from the IRS in Boston to take care of his wife Heather who was dying of terminal breast cancer. She had died in September of 1980. It had hit him hard and everyone had told him that he had to get away somewhere. He had taken a trip to Irela
nd just before Halloween to visit the old country and retrace his roots. He’d gone for a few weeks, loved it and said he was going back to do some more exploring. This second trip was just before Thanksgiving and no one had heard from him since.

  “Did he say why he was going to Northern Ireland?” Matty had asked.

  His paternal grandparents had come from County Tyrone, Matty had been told.

  “Did he keep himself fit by swimming at all?” Matty had wondered, and had been informed that Bill was a keen swimmer and further that he had a condo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida where he usually spent the winters …

  “I think I have the bastard!” Matty yelled.

  Crabbie and I put down our phones.

  “Matty my lad, you have the moves, son,” Crabbie said.

  He laughed. “I am sweet to the beat, boys!” and told us all about Mr O’Rourke.

  To be on the safe side we worked out our way through the other names on our list but not a single one of them had served in the First Infantry Division.

  Now it was action stations. We called the Newburyport Police Department and talked to a Sergeant Peter Finnegan. We explained the situation and Sergeant Finnegan gave us his Bill’s dates and social security number and promised to fax us a copy of his driver’s licence from the DMV. Sergeant Finnegan didn’t know about kids or next of kin but said that he would look into it for us.

  I also put in a call to the FBI and after half a dozen suspicious flunkies I got someone who said that he would let me know if Bill had a criminal record. This information had only been forthcoming after a threat to go through the State Department “or the President himself”, which had Matty and Crabbie cracking up in the aisles.

  I went in to tell the Chief.

  “We may have our John Doe, sir.”

  “Who is it?”

  “A retired IRS inspector called Bill O’Rourke from Massachusetts.”

  “What’s the IRS?”

  “Internal Revenue Service. He was a taxman.”

  “A taxman. Jesus. There’s your motive.”

  “A retired taxman. Born 1919. Apparently he had come here to trace his roots. He’s the right age, he’s a veteran of the right regiment and no one’s heard from the bugger in months.”