days. I listened for a while and found him pretty convincing. Before I could be “saved”, however, a freak wave drenched me and another late arrival and the old folks laughed at this perverse joke of Providence.
The Royal Oak was just opening for the day and was already full of sturdy alcoholics and peelers eager to make good on the police discount.
Alex, the barkeep, was dressed in a tie-dye shirt, furry boots and a full-length velvet cape. Clearly he had discovered a time portal to 1972 or he was off to see Elton John. Neither interested me that much.
I said hello and ordered a stiff Scotch.
“Women or work?” Alex asked.
“Is it always one or the other?” I asked.
“Aye, it is,” he said thoughtfully.
“Women then,” I said.
“In that case, mate, I’ll make it a double on the house,” he said compassionately.
3: THE BIG RED ONE
I was tempted to order another double whiskey and a Guinness and make this a proper session but it was a Friday which meant that the lunch special was deep-fried pizza and that stuff reeked of the cardiac ward.
I said hello to Sergeant Burke on the desk, complimented him on his throwback Zapata moustache, and went straight upstairs to the incident room.
“Jesus! Where did you come from?” Matty said, caught throwing darts at the dartboard.
“At the nineteenth level of Zen Buddhism you learn how to teleport – now put them darts away, we’ve work to do,” I said irritably.
Matty threw the final dart and sat at his desk.
He was getting on my nerves, Matty. He had let his hair grow and because of his natural Mick frizz it had gotten
He and McCrabban were staring at me with gormless expressions on their faces.
“Missing persons reports?” I asked.
“None so far, Sean.”
“Any luck on that motto?”
“Not yet,” McCrabban replied mournfully.
“Keep at it! Remember what Winston Churchill said, ‘there’ll be plenty of time for wanking when the boats are back from Dunkirk’, right?”
“I don’t think Churchill ever said any such—”
“And you, Matty, my lad, get on the blower to garden centres and ask about rosary pea.”
We phone-called for an hour.
Not a single garden centre in Northern Ireland stocked the rosary pea. I phoned the Northern Ireland Horticultural Society but that too drew a blank. No one they knew had ever shown or grown it. But you’d definitely need a greenhouse they said.
“The killer probably has a greenhouse. Write that on the whiteboard,” I said.
Crabbie added that to our list of boxes and arrows on the incident-room whiteboard.
“Keep the calls going. I’m off to the library,” I said.
I walked back along the Scotch Quarter. A tinker was selling a dangerous-looking goat from the back of his Ford Transit. “Goat For Sale. Temper. All Offers Considered,” his sign said.
“No thanks, mate,” I said and as it began to hail I hustled into Carrickfergus Library and said good afternoon to Mrs Clemens.
“They say it’ll be a lovely day later,” I added conversationally.
“Who said this?” she demanded suspiciously.
I liked Mrs Clemens very much. She was going on seventy-five. She had lost an eye to cancer and wore an eye patch instead of a glass bead. I dug that – it gave her a piratical air. She was dyspeptic and knew the library backwards and hated anybody borrowing anything.
“Plants, horticulture, botany?” I asked.
“581,” she said. “There are some good encyclopaedias at the beginning of the section.”
“Thank you.”
I went to 581 and looked up the rosary pea:
ABRUS PRECATORIUS,
“Interesting,” I said to myself. I photocopied the page and, with Mrs Clemens’s help, found a book on poisons. The listing I needed was under ‘Jequirity Seed’:
I photocopied that page too and jogged back to the station through the hail. The place was deserted apart from a tubby, annoying new reservist called McDowell who had come up to me on his first day and asked me point blank if “it was true that I was really a fenian” and it was a lucky break for me that it had been raining just then because I was able to dramatically take off my wool cap and ask him to look for horns. The place had erupted in laughter and Inspector McCallister was gagging so hard he nearly threw a hernia. McDowell had avoided me ever since.
I found everyone in a haze of cigarette smoke up in the second-floor conference room where Chief Inspector Brennan was giving a briefing on the current terrorist situation – a briefing he had just been given at a station chiefs and divisional commanders meeting in Belfast. “Glad you could join us, Inspector Duffy, do have a seat, this concerns you, too!”
“Yes, sir,” I said and took a chair at the back of the room next to Sergeants Burke and Quinn.
I listened but I wasn’t paying much attention. Brennan told us that we were in what the boys in Special Branch called a “regrouping and reconnaissance period”. The IRA’s problem was very much an embarrassment of riches. IRA recruitment had soared because of the hunger strikes last year and especially after the martyrdom of Bobby Sands. Volunteers were having to be turned away and money was flowing into the organisation through protection rackets, narcotics and pub collection boxes in Irish bars in Boston and New York. The Libyans had supplied the IRA with Semtex explosive, rockets and Armalite rifles. The IRA leadership was currently having difficulty figuring out what to do with all its men and guns but the lull wouldn’t last and we were all to be on our guard for what could be an epic struggle ahead.
Brennan’s method was only to give us the facts and he didn’t bother with a pep talk or encouraging words. We were all too jaded for that and he knew it. He didn’t even break out his stash of good whiskey which wasn’t really on at all.
“Are you paying attention to this, Duffy?” he asked.
“Aye, sir,
“Aye, it is. And don’t talk foreign. All right, everyone, you’re dismissed,” he said brusquely.
I corralled Matty and McCrabban back into the incident room where our whiteboard gleamed with a big red “1” drawn above the list of known facts about our John Doe.
“What’s that for?” I asked Crabbie.
