I Hear the Sirens in the Street

The patrol makes straight for the Republican Plot. The graves of all the IRA men and women who have died for Ireland.

We reach the final resting place of Bobby Sands. The martyr in chief. The IRA commander in the Long Kesh prison who starved himself to death over sixty-six days.

The sergeant takes something from a pocket underneath his Kevlar jacket and leaves it on the marble headstone.

It is a packet of digestive biscuits.

The soldiers laugh.

The other policemen and myself do not.

Later …

A drive to Carrickfergus through sleet and rain. I go inside and cook sausages. I pour myself a glass of Islay whisky. I eat and drink and doze in front of the TV.

Suddenly the power flickers and goes out. I wait, but the lights don’t come back on. The IRA has undoubtedly blown up the high tension lines or a substation.

I sit in the dark drinking the peaty, smoky, pungent, almost painfully good whisky. I get bored and put batteries in the shortwave. I tune in Radio Albania, my old favourite. Dramatic piano music blares from my stereo speakers. The music ends abruptly and an announcer with an American accent continues the news bulletin in mid- sentence: “… production levels. Comrade Inver Hoxha met with a delegation of workers’ soviets and praised them for their three-fold increase in steel output.”

Later …

I stoke the fire and lie under a duvet, listening to the sounds of the outside: babies gurning, kids yelling, peelers racing along the top road, Army choppers clipping menacingly over the black water …

“I hate your drunken face!” a woman shouts over the back to backs.

“I hate yours more!” a man responds.

I put the sofa cushion over my head. And then finally there is quiet …

The TV buzzes into life at seven in the morning with the news that John DeLorean has been arrested for cocaine smuggling. DeLorean apparently thought he could sell a vast quantity of cocaine in Ireland as a way to save his ailing car company, but the whole thing was an FBI sting operation.

“The bloody F bloody B bloody I.”

I sit closer to the TV.

The DeLorean factory in Belfast has suspended operations. Three thousand workers are being laid off immediately with the effect that the unemployment rate in Belfast is going up to twenty per cent.

Men are filing out of the factory gates looking utterly bereft.

One commentator says that this marks the end of Northern Ireland as a manufacturing centre.

“Maybe the end of the province itself!” another reporter agrees.

A guy from the union comes on the tube and promises riots and demonstrations. Later that morning we get a message that leave is being cancelled. But in the end there are no riots because the unions are weak and the workers are weak and the real power in this land belongs to the men with guns.

The small crowd outside the Dunmurry plant chants “We want jobs! We want jobs!” over and over for the cameras; but eventually even they are sent scurrying inside by the bitter rain from a big storm-front which has stalled in its inexorable eastward progress and which is destined to remain over Belfast for a long, long time.

ABOUT … Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University, he emigrated to New York City where he lived in Harlem for seven years, working in bars, bookstores, building sites and finally the basement stacks of the Columbia University Medical School Library in Washington Heights.

In 2000 he moved to Denver, Colorado where he taught high school English and started writing fiction in earnest. His first full-length novel Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and was picked by Booklist as one of the ten best crime novels of the year. The sequel to that book, The Dead Yard, was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the twelve best novels of 2006 and won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller. These two novels, along with The Bloomsday Dead, form the DEAD trilogy of novels, starring hitman Michael Forsythe.

In mid 2008 Adrian moved to St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia with his wife and children. His book Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award and his novel Falling Glass was longlisted for Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year.

The first of his Sean Duffy thrillers, The Cold Cold Ground, was published in 2012. The third volume, And In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, will appear in 2014.

Visit Adrian’s blog at http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/

Read the first chapter of

And In the Morning I’ll Be Gone

the third volume in the Sean Duffy series

1: THE GREAT ESCAPE

The beeper began to whine at 4.27 p.m. on Wednesday the 25th September, 1983. It was repeating a shrill C sharp at four second intervals, which meant (for those of us who had bothered to read the manual) that it was a Class 1 emergency. This was a general alert being sent to every off-duty policeman, police reservist and soldier in Northern Ireland. There were only five Class 1 emergencies and three of them were a Soviet nuclear strike, a Soviet invasion and what the civil servants who wrote the manual had nonchalantly called “an extra-terrestrial trespass”.

So you’d think that I would have dashed across the room, grabbed the beeper and run with a mounting sense of panic to the nearest telephone. You’d have thought wrong.

For a start I was as high as Skylab, baked on Turkish black cannabis resin that I’d cooked myself and rolled into sweet Virginia tobacco. And then there was the fact that I was playing Galaxian on my Atari 5200 with the sound on the TV maxed and the curtains pulled for a full dramatic and immersive experience. I didn’t notice the beeper because its insistent whine sounded a lot like the red ships peeling off from the main Galaxian fleet as they swooped in for their oh so predictable attack.

They didn’t present any difficulty at all despite the sick genius of their teenage programmers back in Osaka. I had the moves and the skill and they had ones and zeroes. I slid the joystick to the left, hugged the corners of the screen and easily dodged their layered cluster-bomb assault. A lone straggler attempted to trap me with his guided missiles but I was miles too fast for him and skated casually out of his way. That survived, I eased into the middle of the screen and killed the entire squadron as they attempted to get back into formation. It was only when the screen was blank and I saw that I was nudging close to my previous high score that I noticed the grey plastic rectangle sitting on the coffee table, beeping and vibrating with what in retrospect seemed to be more than its usual vehemence.

I threw a pillow over the beeper, sat back down on the rug and continued with the game.

The phone rang and rang and finally, more out of boredom than curiosity, I paused the game and answered it. It was Sergeant Pollock, the duty man at Bellaughray Station.

“Duffy, you didn’t answer your beeper, ya eejit!” he said.

“The Soviet Armies must have blocked the signal.”

“What?”

“What’s going on, Pollock?” I asked him.

“You’re in Carrick, right?”

“Aye.”

“Report to your local police station. This is a Class 1 emergency.”