I Hear the Sirens in the Street

30: BACK TO BELFAST

They took me out of Mass General on a gurney and across Boston to Logan in a black windowed private ambulance. I felt like Howard fucking Hughes.

They flew me first class to New York LGA on the Delta Shuttle.

An FBI driver met me with a wheelchair.

JFK. The first-class lounge. The Concorde from JFK to Heathrow.

Christ, they wanted rid of me fast. Whatever they were cooking up was hot, hot, hot. And speaking of food. Canapés and champagne; Russian caviar with traditional accompaniments (blini, chopped egg white and yolk, chopped spring, white, and red onions); free-range chicken breast with black truffle, foie gras, savoy cabbage; lobster and saffron crushed potato cakes with spinach and bloody Mary relish; cheese service with Stilton, chevre and pecorino with balsamic vinegar, biscuits, walnuts, dried apricots and berries; a hand-made box of chocolates; port wine and tea; a sweet of mango and almond gratin.

We left New York at 5.00 p.m. The jetstream was strong and we crossed the Atlantic in three hours dead.

I spent the time thinking about Bill O’Rourke. He must have refined and milled the Abrin himself. Perhaps all this time he was carrying his depression around with him.

Suicide?

If I had to spend any time in William McFarlane’s bed and breakfast in Dunmurry, West Belfast it might push me over the edge too. Suicide and then McFarlane fakes an American Express bill, sends the body to a mate who runs a cold storage who finally cuts him up and dumps him?

Maybe.

It would certainly be fun bringing McFarlane in for questioning.

Heathrow. And then the British Airways Shuttle to Belfast. So fast it made your head spin. I was in my bed in Coronation Road by ten thirty p.m. Eastern Standard Time – a not unreasonable three thirty in the morning GMT.

Vodka and aspirin.

A death sleep.

I woke groggily and looked at myself in the mirror. I was no oil painting. Bruises, cuts. My ribs were aching. I needed some painkillers.

Still in my dressing gown I went outside, looked under the Beemer and drove down to the newsagents. “SAS Recapture South Georgia!”, or variations thereof, the yelled headlines on all the papers.

It was the cheeky girl again. Sonia. Her nose was pierced. Her hair was dyed orange.

“Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner,” I said.

She looked at me with contempt.

“You mean Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep?”

“Do I?”

“Aye, you do.”

“Have you got any aspirin?”

She looked up from her magazine. “The fuck happened to you?” she said.

“The FBI got me drunk and crashed my car with me in it so I wouldn’t spill the sensitive information that I knew about John DeLorean’s dirty dealings.”

“That’s the best one I’ve heard today. Aspirin won’t do you any good. Hold on a minute.”

She went into a back room and came back with a plastic bag filled with white pills.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Two every four hours. Be careful with them. It’s a low dose diamorphine. They’ve been cut with chalk, but they’ll do for you. Street value a hundred quid. I’ll let you have the packet for fifty.”

“Do they work?”

“If you’re not satisfied I’ll give you your money back, fair enough?”

“Fair enough.”

“And I’ll take a Mars bar and an Irish News and the Daily Mail.”

I drove home, popped two of the ‘low dose diamorphines’ with my coffee and the Mars bar. They worked immediately. The pain reduced itself by several degrees of magnitude and my head felt better.

I took the phone off the hall table and carried it on its lead into the living room.

I made myself a cup of tea.

I stared at the phone with a growing sense of annoyance.

Presumably the mystery caller knew what had happened to me. She knew what had been taped behind the mirror in room #4 of McFarlane’s bed and breakfast and presumably she’d been too cowardly to go to that safe deposit box herself. Yes, I gave her credit for doing a better job of searching the bed and breakfast than my team, but I gave her no credit at all for sending me off to America to get nine kinds of shite kicked out of me. What was she? MI5, Special Branch, Serious Fraud Squad, Army Intel, MI6? Did it matter? The whole thing was baroque. This whole situation was ridiculous.

Fuck her.

The tea went cold. I stuck on Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, the album where he’d had to train like a prize fighter to bend those notes and solder the rock riffs to the jazz.

I took two more pills.

There was a knock at the front door.

It was Bobby Cameron. He was holding a massive cardboard box. Anything could have been in there. A bomb, the head of an informer …

“Yeah?”

“You’ve got a freezer, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Mine’s already full. I brought you some meat,” he said.

I looked inside. It was a box of steaks. I took it from him, but it was so heavy I had to place it on the floor.

“What happened your face?” he asked.

“Car accident,” I said.

He nodded. “Aye, I’ve had car accidents like that when the missus catches me with some bird down the pub.”

“No, it really was a—“

“I was only joking – I saw that you had a BMW loaner. Assumed your own was in the garage. Nice wee runner?”

“Yeah.”

He pointed at the steaks. “From the EEC,” he explained again. “Prime Angus. Good stuff. Look inside.”

I opened the box. There were maybe fifty steaks in here.

“Why give them to me?” I asked.

“Well, you have a freezer, don’t you?”

“Aye.”

“And it’s a sort of a wee thank you, anyway,” he explained.

“What for?”

“For getting rid of the black bint without any trouble. I don’t know what you said to her, but she’s gone.”

“I didn’t say anything to her. She’s off to Cambridge University.”

He winked at me. “Sure,” he said. “Anyway, the point is, she’s back in Bongo Bongo Land, no blood spilled, everybody wins. That’s the kind of police work I like.”

He walked down the path and I stood there with the box of steaks at my feet.

I felt nothing but hate for him, for this street, for this town, for this whole country, if you could call it that.

I closed the front door and kicked the box.

I called up the station and asked for McCrabban.

“Acting Sergeant McCrabban,” he said.

“Crabbie, it’s me. Can you meet me at my house in twenty minutes?”

“You’re back in one piece?”

“Not exactly.”

He arrived in his Land Rover Defender, smoking a pipe and looking worried.

“You want some steaks?” I asked, showing him the box.

“Are they stolen?”

“Aye. They’re from the UDA,” I said.

He shook his head. “No, thanks.”

We went into the living room. I made tea and put on Alessandro Scarlatti to calm my nerves. I told him everything. I told him about the photos, and the cops and the car accident. I told him O’Rourke was Treasury. I told him that the FBI and Treasury were planning some kind of hit on DeLorean and O’Rourke was part of the intel gathering team.

Crabbie’s dour, unsurprised, unflappable expression did not change.

“You want to hear my theory?” I asked.

“Go on,” he said.

“The DeLorean Motor Company is a fucking disaster. DeLorean has been keeping fraudulent books to hide this fact. US Treasury Agents are all over it. One of them is an old, experienced field hand called O’Rourke who they send to Ireland to scout for local info. He comes to Ireland, he takes photographs of DeLorean’s meeting with Provos or paramilitaries or whoever. He goes back to America and puts them in a safe place. He comes back here. He starts to feel lonely. It’s raining all the time. He has no kids, no wife, he wonders what the fuck he’s doing with his life. He’s in Ireland. The Old Country. Where there’s riots every day and eighteen per cent unemployment and things are fucked beyond all imagining. And his job now is to destroy the DeLorean Motor Company? The only firm that’s providing manufacturing jobs in this pathetic country. He misses his wife. He spent two years helping her fight the fight. He watched her die, perhaps he even helped her die in the end …”

“What do you mean?” Crabbie asked.

“He was a chemical engineer. He knew about pharmacology. He grew rosary pea plants on the balcony of their condo in Florida.”

“He made the Abrin himself?”

“It would take some skill. But O’Rourke had skills.”

“So then what?”

“He’s sitting in that bed and breakfast in Dunmurry. His wife’s dead, his friends are getting old and dying. It’s raining and miserable and he just doesn’t see the bloody point. He swallows one of the Abrin pills he’s brought with him for just such an emergency.”

“No suicide note? No explanation?”

“Maybe he did leave a note and McFarlane destroyed it. Maybe O’Rourke had a hunch about that thieving bastard, which is why he taped his stuff behind the mirror. Who knows? The point is McFarlane finds him dead and goes through his gear and figures out that he’s a fucking federal agent and panics and calls in a couple of lads who work in the meat business and they take the body away and throw it in a freezer until McFarlane can figure out what to do with it. In the meantime a greedy and stupid McFarlane forges O’Rourke’s signature on an extortionate American Express bill.”

“And the body?”

“Time marches on. Either the heat’s coming down or McFarlane just can’t see any good coming of keeping Mr O’Rourke in a freezer forever so he has his mates chop up the body and dump the poor lad in a skip. They do this to avoid us and keep their boss Richard Mr Connected Coulter out of the loop.”

Crabbie finished his tea and leaned back in the armchair.

“It’s possible,” he said. “How would you go about proving something like that? McFarlane’s an old lag. You could beat him with a rubber hose and he wouldn’t talk.”

“Maybe he will talk. What are we accusing him of? Disposing of a body? Concealment of evidence? What’s that? A year? Six months? If he pled guilty he could be out in ten weeks.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to go prison at all. Maybe he feels that if he’s inside for any length of time, he’ll be looking shaky.”

“Perhaps.”

Crabbie looked at the bag of pills sitting on the coffee table.

He sipped his tea and leaned back in the chair.

“Your face is a mess, Sean.”

“Aye, they give me a good hiding and no mistake.”

“I told you not to go.”

“You did.”

“This case had plenty of warning signs all over it.”

“It did.”

“We’ll both have to learn how to read those signs better, won’t we?”

“You’re sounding like the Chief Inspector, mate.”

“I’ve got a couple of kids, now. Gotta think of my future.”

I said nothing.

The nothing went on a for a while.

Even after two years with him I couldn’t tell what the hell he was thinking. Opprobrium? Annoyance? What?

Finally he sighed. “This is too deep for the likes of us. Too deep.”

“I know, Crabbie,” I said.

He got to his feet. “You need to rest up, Sean. I don’t think we should bring McFarlane in formally. Not yet. I’ll take a wee run up to the B&B and see if they’ll tell me anything. I’ll go softly softly.”

I stood too and offered him my hand.

“I’m sorry about all this, Crabbie. Like you say we’ll have to learn to read the arcana better.”

“And listen to me next time,” he said shaking my hand.

I waved to him as he drove off.

I had a can of Harp and popped two more of the white pills.

They were helping.

I called up Emma.

“Hey, it’s me,” I said.

“You’re back? Did you bring me a present from the Land of the Free?”

“I forgot.”

“I was only kidding. I don’t want a present.”

“I’ve got a huge box of steaks here that nobody wants.”

“Steaks?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take them.”

“Have you got a freezer? It’s a big box.”

“I don’t, but Harry’s got one.”

“Okay then. I’ll see you in about half an hour … Don’t be freaked, but I, uh, I had a bit of a car accident, I’m slightly beat up.”

“Oh my God, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Should you be driving?”

“Yes! I’m fine. Look, I’ll see you in a wee bit, okay?”

“Okay.”

I hung up and wondered if I really should be driving all the way down to Islandmagee.

Well, we’d soon find out.

I dressed myself without much difficulty and went out to the Beemer.

I was wearing jeans and a tight black sweater. They’d shaved my head in the hospital to put the stitches in. The ensemble made me look like I was a paramilitary thug. To complete the thing I went upstairs, got my .38 and shoved it in my belt.

“You look like an eejit,” I said to my face in the mirror.

I kept the BMW at a reasonable pace down to Islandmagee.

The private road to Sir Harry’s land had a different goon guarding it now. A kid with big ears, red cheeks and a red hunting hat that he was wearing backwards.

“Is that thing loaded?” I asked, looking at his twelve-gauge shotgun.

“Aye, it is, so you better piss off, mate! This is private land,” he said.

“I’m a peeler, son, open the bloody gate!”

He got off his arse and opened the gate.

I drove down the lane to Emma’s house.

It began to rain.

I parked the car. Took the box of steaks out of the boot. I’d stuffed the freezer compartment of my fridge full but there were still thirty or forty of the bastards left.

I carried the box to the front door while chickens pecked about my feet and Cora barked at me all the way. I leaned them on top of the oil drum for the central heating.

Emma opened the door. “Hi,” she said, and then, “Oh my word.”

“I’m not a pretty sight, am I?”

“Not in the least.”

“Where do you want these?”

She looked in the box. “That’s a lot of meat. I’ll cook two for us tonight and we’ll leave the rest up in Harry’s freezer.”

She was making an assumption that I was staying for dinner and she suddenly felt embarrassed about that. Her cheeks coloured and she looked all the more beautiful for it. “That is unless you have plans, or work, or—”

“I’d love to say for dinner. And there’s no work this week. I’m still officially on leave.”

“Have a seat, leave those things on the kitchen table.”

I carried the steaks inside to the kitchen and then joined her in the living room.

“Get you a drink?” she asked.

“A stiff glass of anything except that moonshine of yours.”

“Johnnie Walker Black?”

“That’ll do nicely.”

She poured me a glass.

“Thanks,” I said and sipped it.

“Sit yourself down there, Sean. I’ll go marinate those steaks in garlic and red wine.”

“Sounds good.”

I drank the Johnnie Walker and watched the sun head towards Magheramorne and the west side of Larne Lough. She came back with a glass of Johnnie Walker for herself. She snuggled next to me on the sofa.

She was wearing a soft wool sweater and faded blue jeans and her hair was tied back.

I liked her being close to me.

It was a nice moment.

“So, what happened to you? Was it driving on the wrong side of the road?” she asked.

I span her a few lies and she went for them. And then, feeling guilty about that, I told her about some stuff from my previous New York trip. She laughed at the story of the Reggie Jackson bar, but she hadn’t heard of The Ramones or the New York Dolls or even Blondie and I vowed that I would rectify that.

“How do you like your steak?” she asked, getting up.

“Call me squeamish, but I’m no fan of rare,” I said.

“Medium okay?” she asked.

“Sure … How long will it take?”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

I got up.

“You’ve no freezer at all?” I asked.

“None.”

“Well, I don’t want them to spoil. I’ll leave the rest of the box up at Harry’s. The only thing that worries me is Mrs Patton giving me the evil eye.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, she’s harmless. Well, she’s outlived two husbands, but that’s neither here nor there, and you won’t even have to go to the house. He’s got a curing shed for hanging his pheasants and there’s a big freezer in that. Just bung them in.”

“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 Great.”

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.