I Hear the Sirens in the Street

consciously) spelling out “ass” in Morse.

“If it is a foreigner, you appreciate that this is going to be a whole thing, don’t you?” he muttered.

“Aye.”

“I foresee paperwork and more paperwork and a powwow from the Big Chiefs and you possibly getting superseded by some goon from Belfast.”

“Not for some dead tourist, surely, sir?”

“We’ll see. You’ll not throw a fit if you do get passed over will you? You’ve grown up now, haven’t you, Sean?”

Neither of us could quickly forget the fool I’d made of myself the last time a murder case had been taken away from me …

“I’m a changed man, sir. Team player. Kenny Dalglish not Kevin Keegan. If the case gets pushed upstairs I will give them every assistance and obey every order. I’ll stick with you right to the bunker, sir.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Amen, sir.”

He leaned back in the chair and picked up his newspaper. “All right, Inspector, you’re dismissed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And remember it’s Carol’s birthday on Friday and it’s your turn on the rota. Cake, hats, you know the drill. You know I like buttercream icing.”

“I put the order in at McCaffrey’s yesterday. I’ll check with Henrietta on the way home.”

“Very well. Get thee to a bunnery.”

“You’ve been saving that one up, haven’t you, sir?”

“I have,” he said with a smile.

I turned on my heel. “Wait!” Brennan demanded.

“Sir?”

“‘Naples in Naples’, three down, six letters.”

“Napoli, sir.”

“Huh?”

“In Naples, Naples is Napoli.”

“Oh, I get it, all right, bugger off.”

On the way back to Coronation Road I stopped in at McCaffrey’s, examined the cake, which was a typical Irish birthday cake layered with sponge, cream, rum, jam and sugar. I explained the Chief Inspector’s preferences and Annie said that that wouldn’t be a problem: she’d make the icing half an inch thick if we wanted. I told her that that would be great and made a mental note to have the defib kit on hand.

I drove on through Carrickfergus’s blighted shopping precincts, past boarded-up shops and cafes, vandalised parks and playgrounds. Bored ragamuffin children of the type you often saw in Pulitzer-Prize-winning books of photography were sitting glumly on the wall over the railway lines waiting to drop objects down onto the Belfast train.

I stopped at the heavily armoured Mace Supermarket which was covered with sectarian and paramilitary graffiti and a fading and unlikely claim that “Jesus Loves The Bay City Rollers!”

I waded through the car park’s usual foliage of chip papers, plastic bags and crisp packets.

Halfway through my shop the piece of music that had been playing in my head began over the speakers. I must have heard it last week when I’d been in here. I got cornflakes, a bottle of tequila and Heinz tomato soup and went to the checkout.

“What is this music? It’s been in my head all day,” I asked the fifteen-year-old girl operating the till.

“I have no idea, love. It’s bloody horrible, isn’t it?”

I paid and went to the booth, startling Trevor, the assistant manager who was reading Outlaw of Gor with a wistful look on his basset-hound face. He didn’t know what the music was either.

“I don’t pick the tapes, I just do what I’m told,” he said defensively.

I asked him if I could check out his play box. He didn’t mind. I rummaged through the tapes and found the cassette currently on the go. Light Classical Hits IV. I looked down through the list of tracks and found the one it had to be: “The Aquarium” from Carnival of the Animals by Saint Saens.

It was an odd piece, popular among audiences but not among musicians. The melody was carried by a glass harmonica, a really weird instrument that reputedly made its practitioners go mad. I nodded and put the cassette box down.

“I won’t play it again, if you don’t like it, Inspector, you’re not the first to complain,” Trevor said.

“No, actually, I’m a fan of Saint Saens,” I was going to say, but Trev was already changing the tape to Contemporary Hits Now!

When I came out of the Mace smoke from a large incendiary bomb was drifting across the lough from Bangor and you could hear fire engines and ambulances on the grey, oddly pitching air.

From the external supermarket speakers Paul Weller’s reedy baritone begin singing the first few bars of “A Town Called Malice” and I had to admit that the choice of song was depressingly appropriate.

2: THE DYING EARTH

We stood there looking at north Belfast three miles away over the water. The sky a kind of septic brown, the buildings rain-smudged rectangles on the grim horizon. Belfast was not beautiful. It had been built on mudflats and without rock foundations nothing soared. Its architecture had been Victorian red-brick utilitarian and sixties brutalism before both of those tropes had crashed headlong into the Troubles. A thousand car bombs later and what was left was surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire and a steel security fence to keep the bombers out.

Here in the north Belfast suburbs we only got sporadic terrorist attacks, but economic degradation and war had frozen the architecture in outmoded utilitarian schools whose chief purpose seemed to be the disheartening of the human soul. Optimistic colonial officials were always planting trees and sponsoring graffiti clearance schemes but the trees never lasted long and it was the brave man who dared clean paramilitary graffiti off his own house never mind in communal areas of the town.

I lit a second cigarette. I was thinking about architecture because I was trying not to think about Laura.

I hadn’t seen her in nearly a week.

“Should we go in?” Crabbie asked.

“Steady on, mate. I just lit me fag. Let me finish this first.”

“Your head. She won’t be happy to be kept waiting,” Crabbie prophesied.

Drizzle.

A stray dog.

A man called McCawley wearing his dead wife’s clothes pushing her empty wheelchair along the pavement. He saw us waiting by the Land Rover. “Bloody peelers, they should crucify the lot of you,” he said as he picked up our discarded cigarette butts.

“Sean, come on, this is serious. It’s an appointment with the patho,” Crabbie insisted.

He didn’t know that Laura and I had been avoiding one another.

I didn’t know that we had been avoiding one another.

A fortnight ago she’d gone to Edinburgh to do a presentation for a couple of days and after she’d returned she said that she was swamped with catch-up work.

That was the official party line. In fact I knew that something was up. Something that had been in the wind for months.

Maybe something that had been in the wind since we had met.

This was her third trip to Edinburgh this year. Had she met someone else? My instincts said no, but even a detective could be blindsided. Perhaps detectives in particular could be blind-sided.

For some time now I’d had the feeling that I had trapped her. By putting us in a life and death situation, by getting myself shot. How could she do anything but stay with me through the process of my recovery. She couldn’t possibly leave a man who had fallen into a coma and awoken to find that he had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal.