I Hear the Sirens in the Street

25: INTO THE WOODS

I’d driven about a hundred yards from Sir Harry’s house when I saw Emma wearing army boots, a blue dress and a raincoat, walking along the sheugh and carrying a basket. Her back was to me on the road and she had an umbrella up, but she was unmistakable with that wild curly red hair.

I pulled the car beside her and wound the window down.

“Hello,” I said.

She seemed a little startled.

“Oh, hi … What are you doing down here?”

“I was seeing your brother-in-law.”

“About Martin?”

“Yes.”

“Anything new?”

“I’m afraid not. Just tidying up some loose ends.”

She nodded, frowned and then smiled.

“What on earth is that music?” she asked.

“It’s Plastic Bertrand.”

“Who’s that?”

“Belgian New Wave guy.”

“What’s New Wave?”

“Jesus, I mean they have the wheel down here, don’t they? And fire?”

She laughed.

“You’re not still living in caves, hunting for woolly mammoths?”

She lifted her basket. “Mussels more like.”

“You need a lift?” I asked.

“A car can’t go where I’m going.”

“Where’s that?”

“Down to the shore.”

She smiled again and something down below decks remembered last night with Gloria.

“Can I come with you?” I asked.

She hesitated for a moment. “What have you on your feet?”

“Gutties,” I said, showing her my Adidas sneakers.

“They’ll get soaked.”

“That’s okay.”

I pulled the BMW over and locked it. I got my leather jacket out of the boot and zipped it up over my sweater and jeans.

“We go down the lane there and then we’re back through the wood,” she said.

Her hair was blowing every which way round her face. She looked elemental and slightly scary and very beautiful.

“This way,” she said, and led me along a lane past a ruined farm with broken windows and a roof with half the tiles missing. The farm was pitched on a rocky red outcrop that bled down the cliff to the water. It was only about thirty feet above the surf and probably on rough days the spray would come right up. We walked through what once had been the living room and the kitchen. There were sodden newspapers and ciggies in the hearth. “One of Harry’s cousins used to live here. But he upped and left for Canada,” she said. “It’s one of my secret places, like the old salt mine.”

This one wasn’t so secret. My cop’s eyes took in discarded syringes, furniture broken up for firewood and an old piano which someone had taken a hammer to. The back garden led to the cliff path right down to the shore. The stone slabs were slippery and I almost went arse over tit in my gutties.

“So, you’re from around here, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m from Mill Bay, just a few miles up the road.”

“Any family still there?”

“No. Folks are in Spain, older sister’s in San Francisco. She wants me to come over to America. I suppose I should. There’s nothing for me now in Ireland. Nothing for any of us here, really.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

We reached the bottom of the track. There were more abandoned cottages down here, much older dwellings. “These are from the famine?” I asked, pointing towards them.

She nodded. “Harry says that this valley used to be bunged with people. Now it’s all sheep and a few of his loyal retainers.”

We stepped onto the stony beach and she gathered mussels and whelks.

“Are you making a soup?” I asked, helping her.

“No, no, you just boil them up in a little chicken stock with some garlic. Delicious.”

“Really?”

“Don’t sound so sceptical.”

In ten minutes her basket was half full. “I think that’s enough,” she said. “We’ll take a shortcut back through the forest.”

We walked along the beach past a long rusting jetty sticking out into the water.

“Harry’s?” I asked pointing at it.

“Yeah, he keeps talking about renovating it, turning it into a marina, but he never will. All talk. Big plans.”

We trudged back up the hill along another trail.

“Initially I got the impression that your brother-in-law wasn’t too impressed with me,” I said.

“Has he come around?”

“A little bit, I think.”

“Its not anything personal. This part of Islandmagee has never been fond of the law. Around here it’s always been about poaching and cattle raiding and rustling stolen cattle over to Scotland.”

We reached the edge of the wood. The trees were enormous and warped by age into strange patterns. Big elms and ashes, beeches and huge old oaks, living statues meditating in the rain. I smiled and I found to my surprise that she was holding my hand.

“They’re talking to us,” she said.

“The trees?”

“You know what they’re saying?”

“What?”

“Every leaf is a miracle. Every leaf on Earth is a miracle machine that keeps us all alive.”

“I think they’re saying, ‘ooh, me aching back, from standing here all day’.”

She hit me on the shoulder. “You’re all the same, aren’t you?”

“Who? Cops? Men?”

There was a glint in her eye that I couldn’t decipher. “Hey, do you want see something really interesting, Inspector Duffy?”

“Sure.”

“This way.”

We followed the woodland trail up a hill, catching the odd glimpse here and there of the motionless sea and beyond that, startlingly close, the Scottish coast.

“Down here,” she said, and led me to a hazel grove where one solitary oak was standing by itself. It was clearly very old, and covered with moss and mistletoe. Prayers and petitions had been placed in plastic bags and hung from the lower branches. Little offerings and notes were leaning against the trunk. Coins, keys, lockets, photographs, at least a dozen plastic baby dolls, wooden boxes, tea cups, a silver spoon, an intricately carved woman with a belly swollen by pregnancy.

A breeze stirred the notes and photographs.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“Sure I do, it’s a fairy tree.”

“You’re not totally ignorant.”

“I’m from the Glens, love, I speak the Irish. I know things.”

“You’re a Catholic?”

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

She nodded to herself. “Yeah, I can see it now … come on, let’s get back.”

We walked back across the boggy pasture.

“Were Martin and Harry close?” I asked.

“I don’t know about close. There was an age difference, but they respected each other. Martin admired Harry for taking on the debts and the burdens of the estate. Harry admired Martin for joining the Army, putting his life on the line.”

“Literally, as it turned out.”

“Yes,” she said, with a melancholy smile. “Even when Martin got Born Again, Harry didn’t give him a hard time about it, and Harry’s as atheist as they come.”

“Martin was a Born Again Christian?” I asked.

“Yes. About a year and a half ago there was a visiting preacher from America who came to the church, and Martin felt called.”

“But not you.”

“No.”

“He must have tried to make you see the light?”

“That was what so lovely about him. He knew I was more into all this …” she said, pointing back at the trees, and I bit my tongue before I said “bullshit”.

“He never bullied me with his faith. Let me go my own way.”

“Sounds like a good guy.”

“He was. He really was.”

We had reached the edge of the pasture and I could see the valley again. The big house, the cottages, the salt mine, my car parked along the road.

“Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked. “I’m making the mussels. It’s a shame to do all that for one.”

“Sounds great.”

We walked over the boggy field to the farm.

Cora started barking and Emma untied her.

“Why didn’t you take her on your walk?”

“I used to, but she’s incorrigible. She worries the sheep and she goes after the game. She goes for everything.”

Except IRA gunmen, apparently.

A man waved to us from the road as he drove past in a Toyota pick-up. She waved back.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Connie Wilson. One of Harry’s tenants from down Ballylumford way. Connie’s in bad shape. He tried to coax barley out of his land this year. Got rid of his flock and tried to grow barley. He hasn’t been able to pay his ground rent, Harry says.”

“How many tenants does Harry have?”

“Quite a few. Twelve, thirteen. Only two or three can actually make a go of the land with the EEC subsidy; but with taxes Harry actually loses about five or six thousand pounds a year on the estate.”

“He loses money on the estate?”

“That’s what he says.”

We went into the house and this time I noted that the door was unlocked.

“Farmers are always complaining. That’s what they do best,” I said.

“Well, as long as he doesn’t put up my rent.”

“He wouldn’t do that to his sister-in-law.”

“You’d be surprised what men do when they’re desperate.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

She nodded and brushed the hair from her face.

A harsh face. Youthful – but when she was older, bitterness would make her pinched and thin-lipped and shrewish.

“Can I help make anything?” I asked.

She smiled, almost laughed again. “No, no. There’ll be no man in my kitchen. Settle yourself down in the living room. I’ll get you a Harp.”

I sat on the rattan sofa and sipped the can of Harp. There were a few novels on the book shelf: Alexander Kent, Alastair MacLean, Patrick O’Brian. She’d got rid of Martin’s clothes and his suitcase, but she’d kept some of his books.

“Mind if I use your phone?” I called into the kitchen.

“Go ahead. Although the reception down here is shocking. It sounds like you’re phoning from the moon.”

I called the station, asked for Crabbie.

“McCrabban speaking,” Crabbie said.

Emma had the radio on in the kitchen but I lowered my voice anyway.

“Mate, listen, it’s me. Do me a favour and see if there’s anything brewing with Finance and Embezzlement or the Fraud Squad on Sir Harry McAlpine or John DeLorean or both of them.”

“John DeLorean?”

“Aye, and Harry McAlpine.”

“Well, the DeLorean factory’s a great big money pit, but I’ve never heard of any actual fraud—”

“Check it out, will you? And don’t forget McAlpine. The DeLorean factory is on his land. Some kind of deal with the Revenue Service, he says.”

Crabbie hesitated. There was static on the phone line.

“Did you get that?” I asked.

“I got it. You want to me to call Special Branch and the Fraud Squad.”

“Yes. What’s the problem?”

“Sean, an inquiry like that will get passed up the chain. I thought you were specifically warned off involving yourself with Sir Harry McAlpine. Two or three days from now when this arrives on the Chief Constable’s desk you’ll be getting a bloody rocket!”

“Goes with the territory, Crabbie. We’re firing blanks here anyway.”

“It doesn’t matter if we’re firing blanks, Sean. The McAlpine case is not our case and the O’Rourke case has been yellowed,” he said, his voice rising a little.

“I know, mate, look, just do it, will ya?”

He sighed. “Of course.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“No problem.”

I hung up.

“Everything okay?” Emma shouted from the kitchen.

“Aye. Everything’s fine.”

I made another quick phone call to Interflora and had them deliver flowers to Gloria at the DeLorean plant. It was thirty-five quid, but it’s always smart to keep the sheilas sweet.

Emma came up behind me.

“Ordering flowers?”

“Me mother’s birthday.”

“You are such a dutiful son.”

“Aye, I am.”

“The stock’s on. It’ll take an hour. Do you ride? I borrow Stella from Canny McDonagh down by the sheddings. She’s got a young hunter called Mallarky that needs a run or two.”

“I haven’t been on a Dob for fifteen years.”

“You don’t forget.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

We put on coats and she lent me Martin’s riding boots.

Canny McDonagh wasn’t home, but Emma made free and easy with the farm and in the stable block she harnessed and saddled both horses. Mallarky was a big hunter but he had just gorged himself on oats and was no bother at all.

We rode over the fields till we reached a beach on the Irish Sea side of Islandmagee. She galloped Stella and I got Mallarky up to a canter. Cora barked happily along side.

When they’d had a good run we dismounted them and walked them in the surf.

It was colder now. The beach was empty. Emma threw a stick to the dog and she ran to fetch it in the water.

I looked north. You could see up the glens to the Atlantic Ocean. The wild deep blue of it chilling my retinas from here.

The sun began to set behind the cloud banks to the west.

“Look! There!” she said.

A massive gorse fire was burning on a hill in Scotland.

“Jesus, will you look at that.”

“Sometimes the heather will burn for days,” she said.

We watched it until the set sun. It was getting dark now.

“We better get these horses back, don’t you think? I’m not that confident about riding at night.”

“Yes. All right.”

We rode back and Cora barked and Canny McDonagh still wasn’t home, so she left him a note, telling him what she had done and that Mallarky had taken the canter well.

Mussels and country bread at the kitchen table.

She lit a paraffin lamp.

“Do you fancy something stronger?” she asked, when I finished a second Harp.

“Poteen?”

“You won’t tell the excise, will you?”

“Are you joking? Cops and the excise are natural enemies.”

She took an earthenware jug from under the sink.

“Everybody distils their own round here,” she explained.

She poured me an honest measure and we clinked glasses.

We drank and it was evil rough stuff, around 120 proof.

We both coughed. She poured us another.

“Yikes, do you have anything to cut this with?” I asked, knocking back shot number two.

“There’s orange juice in the fridge.”

I went to the fridge, looked out a couple of tall glasses and made us a couple of screwdrivers.

She drank hers and moved closer to me on the couch.

“You’re not married, are you?” she asked, looking at me with those azure eyes and those full lips with the little dent in the middle of the lower.

The eyes. The pale cheeks. The dangerous red hair.

“Would it make a difference?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said, and placed her cold hand on mine. “As you can imagine, it’s been some time.”

We went to the bedroom.

The big south-facing window looked out over the valley and the clear night gave up the winter constellations. Naked, she was beautiful, but gaunt and pale, like a case, like something washed up in the Lagan.

I took her, and I was gentle with her, and I held her and she slept in my arms. I listened to her heart and watched her chest heave up and down.

She was frowning in her dream.

Those closed blue eyes could not see any good in the future.

I fell asleep watching her.

She woke me in the wolf’s tail – that grey Irish light that comes before the dawn.

“Huh, what is it?” I asked.

“I heard a noise!” she said. “Something’s outside.”

I sat up, rubbed my face.

“What?”

“Outside. I hear something. I’ll get the rabbit gun.”

“No, I’ll go.”

I pulled on my jeans and sneakers and my raincoat. I grabbed a torch and my .38.

Cora growled at me as I walked into the yard.

It was drizzling, the ground was slick.

“Hello?” I said, turning on the torch.

I walked towards the road.

I slipped on the mud but saved myself by grabbing the gate post. I saw something flash further down the track. Maybe nothing or maybe the fluorescent strip on a rain jacket or a pair of training shoes.

“Is there anyone down there?” I yelled.

I held out the .38 and shone the torch beam down the road.

Nothing. I flashed the beam up into the hills.

No movement, no sounds.

The distant lough, the even more distant sea.

I stood there, waiting for something. Anything. “There’s nothing here,” I said to myself. I walked a little bit further down the lane and then cut back to the farm along the hypotenuse of the nearest field. I nearly took a header into a bog hole filled with water, but saved myself before the final step. When I got back to the house Cora was barking again and Emma was standing in the doorway with a shotgun.

“Well?” she asked.

“It was nothing,” I told her. We went back to bed and I kept the blinds open. The moon was giving out a yellow candle light and the sky about it was eerie and in a state of strange coruscation. Neither of us went back to sleep.

In the morning, Emma made me scrambled eggs and coffee. The coffee was like coal dust but the country fresh eggs with butter were good.

I ate breakfast and kissed her and said goodbye. I walked down to the car and I saw what the commotion had been the night before. Someone had tossed a brick through the windscreen of my BMW. A helpful note had been tied around it which read: “Fuck Off And Die Peeler Scum!”

I threw the brick into a field, carefully pushed out the windscreen, carried it to the stone wall and left it there. I brushed the broken glass off the driver’s seat and headed home.