I Hear the Sirens in the Street

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.