“I’ve got information about one of your cases.”
“Come down my office, love, anytime,” I said.
“I’d like to meet with you in person.”
“I don’t do graveyards. It’ll have to have to be at the office.”
“This will be worth your while, Duffy. It’s information about a case.”
“Listen, honey, they pay me the same wages whether I solve the cases or not.”
The lass, whoever she was, thought about that for a second or two and then hung up.
She didn’t call back.
I looked out the window at the starlings for ten seconds. One of the little bastards shat on my morning paper.
“Fuck it,” I muttered, ran upstairs, pulled on a pair of jeans and gutties. I threw a raincoat over my Thin Lizzy T-shirt and shoved my Smith and Wesson .38 service piece in the right hand coat pocket.
“I don’t like it,” I said to myself and sprinted out the front door.
The graveyard was on the other side of Coronation Road, over a little burn and across a slash of waste ground known as the Cricket Field – the de facto play area for every unsupervised wean in the estate.
The sky was black.
The wind and rain had picked up a little.
I jumped the stream and scrambled up the bank into the Cricket Field: burnt-out cars and a gang of feral boys throwing cans and bottles into a bonfire.
“Hey, mister, have ye got any fags?” one of the wee muckers asked.
“No!” I replied and hopped the graveyard wall.
I circled to where I could see the concrete shelter that had been built to give protection to the council gravediggers while they waited for funeral services to be concluded. This part of Carrick was on a high flat escarpment exposed to polar winds, Atlantic storms and Irish Sea gales. I’d been to half a dozen funerals here and it had been pissing down at every one of them.
I had envied the men in the shelter, although I had never actually been in it myself. It was large and could easily accommodate a dozen people. If I remembered correctly there were several wooden benches that ran along the wall. There were no doors to get into it as it was open to the elements on the south side like a bus shelter.
If I could circle due south through the petrified forest of graves I could easily see if someone was waiting in there or not.
I ran at a crouch through the Celtic crosses and granite headstones and the various family plots and monuments.
I made it to the perimeter wall on Victoria Road due south of the building. I looked across the cemetery and squinted to see into the shelter and moved a little closer and looked again.
No one was there.
I walked a few paces forward until I was behind a large monument to a family called Beggs who had all been killed in a house fire in the ’30s.
I watched the cemetery gates and the shelter.
No one came in, nobody left.
There appeared to be no one else here but me.
Rain was pouring down the back of my neck.
It was cold.
And yet I knew that the place was not deserted.
She was here, whoever she was.
She had called me from the phone box on Victoria Road and now she was here, waiting for me.
Why?
I put my hand in my pocket and clicked back the hammer on the revolver and stepped out from behind the Beggs family headstone.
I walked slowly to the graveyard shelter, scanning to the left and right and whirling one-eighty behind me. I raised my weapon and carried it two-handed in front of me.
She was here. She was watching. I could feel it.
I entered the shelter and turned round to look back at the graveyard.
Nothing moved but there were many hiding places behind the trees, the tombstones and the stone walls.
There was no glint from a pair of binoculars or a rifle scope.
“I came. Isn’t that what you wanted?” I said aloud.
A crow cawed.
A car drove past on Victoria Road.
I sat on a long bench that had been vandalised down to a couple of wooden slats.
I stared out at the dreary rows of headstones, Celtic crosses and monuments.
Nope. There was nothing and nobody.
She was more patient than me and that was not a good thing. Impatient coppers got themselves killed in this country.
Thunder rumbled over the lough.
The rain grew heavier. Rivers of water were gushing down the Antrim Plateau and forming little pools in the cemetery. I pulled out me Marlboros and lit a cigarette.
I walked to the edge of the shelter and looked out. Worms by the hundred were disgorging themselves from their human feast and writhing on the emerald grass.
Grass so green here that it hurt to look at it.
Why? Why had she called me? What was this about? Had I disrupted her plans by coming over the wall and not through the gates? Had she got cold feet? Was it just a regular crank call?
I sat there, waited, watched.
She waited too.
The sky darkened.
Magpies descended to feast on the snails and earthworms.
“Hello!” I yelled out into the weather. “Hello!”
Silence.
I turned and walked back and it was only then that I noticed the envelope duct-taped to the back of the bench.
I immediately looked away and lit another cigarette.
When the cigarette was done, I turned round with my back to the exposed south entrance. If she was watching she wouldn’t know what I was doing. Perhaps she would think that I was pissing against the wall.
I took out a pair of latex gloves from inside my raincoat pocket and put them on.
I checked for wires or booby traps and finding none ripped the envelope off. I examined it. It was a green greeting card envelope. Keeping my back facing south, I opened it. Inside there was a Hallmark greeting card with a shamrock on the cover.
I opened it. “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day” was the message printed inside.
At first I thought there was no message at all but then I saw it opposite the greeting.
“1CR1312”, she had written in capital letters in black pen on the top of the page.
You could, perhaps, have mistaken it for a serial number.
I noticed that actually there was a space between the 3 and the 1 so that really it read: “1CR 13 12.”
Even a non-Bible-reading Papist like me knew what it was.
It was a verse from the New Testament.
Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 12.
And not only that – it was something familiar. Something I should know.
The answers would be in my King James Bible back home. My house was only two minutes away, but there was something I had to do here first.
I put the card back in the envelope and retaped it to the seat back.
