Текст книги "I Hear the Sirens in the Street"

Автор книги: Adrian McKinty

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

I knew he was right. Nine times out of ten it’s a hoax. But that one time … that’s the time that gets you.

The Army bomb disposal unit showed up and the robot blew open the back doors of the Transit. The robot looked inside and fired a shotgun into a wooden box, but it only contained tools. Behind us the blue-collar staff was filing out of the factory, most deciding to go home for the day. An enterprising mobile chip van showed up and DeLorean bought our little group fish suppers out of his own pocket.

The Army EOD unit still wasn’t completely satisfied with the situation, so they carried out a further controlled explosion which destroyed the van completely, sending metal fragments and a fireball into the air. There had been no secondary blast which proved that the Ford had contained no bomb or combustible materials.

DeLorean was not triumphant. He was resigned now. Fed up. He shook my hand.

“I yelled out of turn,” he said. “You did the right thing. Better safe than sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I replied.

The Army gave us the all clear but some fool had left a backpack in the executive car park in his haste to evacuate and the disposal unit roped off the car park to carry out a controlled explosion on that too. It was five o’clock now. Many of the white-collar staff were effectively trapped until the Army said that this was a negative result too.

“My car’s in the visitor’s car park. Anyone need a lift going Carrick way?” I asked.

Gloria put up her hand. “I do,” she said.

“No problem.”

We drove through the centre of Belfast where rush hour and a string of incendiary devices on buses had created chaos.

“Where do you live?” I asked her.

“A town called Whitehead. An apartment overlooking the water. Wonderful view, full of charm.”

“Sounds like a nice place.”

“Oh, yes. Mr DeLorean picked our accommodations out personally.”

We were stuck in traffic for twenty-five minutes.

I was getting annoyed.

Worse. Losing face.

“This is ridiculous. Time for my Starsky and Hutch moves,” I said.

I took the portable siren out of the glove compartment and put it on the roof of the Beemer. I turned it on and drove the wrong way down the one-way system at the City Hall.

“Are you allowed to do this?” Gloria asked, in what I discovered later was a South Carolina burr.

“I’m allowed to do anything, love, I’m the Johnny Law.”

“You’re the what?”

“Put the windows down, sweetheart!”

She wound down the window and I cracked Zep in the stereo. Good Zep. LZIII. We ran the one-way systems and frightened the civvies and hit the ten lanes where the M2 leaves the city. Six camouflaged sacks of shit were stopping suspicious characters where the M2 merges with the M5, but the siren got me past them and on the M5 I got the Beemer up to a ton. At Hazelbank I killed the woo woo and took us down to seventy-five.

We drove past Whiteabbey RUC.

“A rocket went through that police station,” I said.

“A rocket?”

“Yeah, not an RPG. A rocket.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Oh, there’s a difference, baby. Believe me. I was in there half an hour later.”

I scoped her, and my God, she was a stunner. She looked like Miss World 1979, one of the ones Georgie Best couldn’t get.

“You want to get a bite to eat? I know this fabulous Italian that just opened up in Carrick. The food’s so good the place won’t survive past Christmas.”

“Italian food?”

“Italian food.”

“I’ll try anything once.”

“Oooh, I like the sound of that.”

She laughed and I knew I was in like Flynn.

The Tutto Bene was deserted apart from a bald gourmand who was loving everything he was given and kept sighing dramatically at each new dish. We were given the window seat overlooking the harbour. I ordered the second most expensive red. She plumped for the spag carbonara and I got the risotto.

She didn’t like the grub but the desserts killed her.

I asked her if she wanted to come back chez Duffy and hear my records. She said that that sounded interesting.

Coronation Road. Nine in the p.m. Curtains drawn. I was spinning Nick Drake, while Gloria checked out the Nickster’s sad eyes on the sleeve. Soften them with up Nicky D. and Marvin Gaye and then unleash the inner perv with the Velvets …

I made her a vodka martini and questioned her about her life and times. She was from a town called Spartanburg, South Carolina. She’d gone to Michigan State to major in business and from there it was a short hop to GM and JDL’s own company.

We were getting on famously when there was a knock at the front door. I turned the TV off and looked through the living-room window. It was Ambreena.

“Shit,” I said to Gloria and went into the hall.

“Anything wrong?”

“Not a bit of it, get that martini down your neck.”

I opened the front door. “Hello,” I said.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” she said.

She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. Her hair was braided. The T-shirt was tight. She looked fabulous. She was holding something covered in tin foil.

“I made you this, to thank you,” she said.

“Oh, thanks.”

“It is merely brandy snaps. The only thing I can make,” she said.

I took the tin foil off and bit into one. It was like biting into stale bread soaked in rubbing alcohol.

“Amazing,” I said, fighting the gag reflex. “Look, I’d invite you in, but I’m busy.”

She smiled. It was the smile to light up the porch, to light up this whole fucking gloomy street.

“Well, thanks. Maybe another time, we could have a drink or something.”

“I cannot stay long. I have to pack.”

“Pack?”

“I am moving to England.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I have been offered a place at Cambridge University. My father pulled a few strings, as fathers do.”

“Cambridge?”

She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“You’re welcome.”

She turned and walked down the path. I closed the door and went back to the living room.

Gloria was burrowing deep into my extensive, prized record collection.

“Who was that?”

“Just some chick whose life I saved.”

“No, really, who was it?”

I grabbed her round the waist and carried her to the sofa. I kissed those big pouty red American lips. Damn, she tasted good.

“Just some chick whose life I saved,” I insisted.

I made more martinis and played her What’s Going On and Pink Moon. Everything was proceeding according to plan.

“Does he ever play in Ireland?”

“Who?”

“Nick Drake.”

“He’s dead, baby,” I informed her. “He killed himself.”

“Why?”

“I think he was depressed.”

Another round of martinis and I span the Velvets.

She leaned over and kissed me. She tasted wonderful.

She seemed the kind of girl who liked to party. I got the quality hemp from the garden shed. The stars were out. It was dark. Quiet. There was a cold wind from the North Channel. I got some logs I bought from the tinkers: oak and hazel and copper birch. I went back inside, rolled a spliff and put the logs on the fire. The smell from them was fennel and deer spoor and wet earth.

We lay there on the sofa.

She told me stories about America.

I took off her secretary blouse and bra and skirt and marvelled at her perfect, huge, beautiful breasts and luscious hips.

I kissed her neck and between her breasts and she pulled down my jeans.

Nico sang in her tone-deaf monotone and we baked the Moroccan and smoked it neat and fucked on the leather sofa like two people who have witnessed a van getting blown apart and sped through a hostile city under police sirens.

I fucked her and it was me fucking all of America. And we kissed again and finished the Moroccan and slept.

We lay all night there on the living-room sofa until the sun came up over the Scottish coast, rising prismatically over the pink lough, over Leinster and Munster and all of red-handed Ulster, over the DeLorean factory and the McAlpine farm in Islandmagee, over the rubble of Ballycorey RUC station, over Belfast. A pale orange sun rising out of a cobalt dawn that warmed the hearts of innocent men and guilty men and men whose task it was to heal and those whose burden it was to hurt.

The sunlight came in through the back kitchen and woke me on the sofa.

The place smelled good: cannabis and martini and peat logs and woman and coffee.

“Is that you up?” Gloria said.

“What time is it?”

“Lie there. Don’t move. I’m making coffee and toast.”

She made coffee in the cafetiere that was suitably hardcore. We had toasted soda bread and we went upstairs and showered together like people in a French film. Post-shower she was radiant. Belfast people sucked the light from their surroundings black-hole fashion – this woman was giving off about two-thousand candlepower from her smile alone.

I drove her back to the DeLorean plant in Dunmurry and walked her to her desk.

There was a box waiting on her seat with a ribbon around it.

“I love these!” she exclaimed.

She opened the lid.

A box of Irish “fifteens”. With M&Ms in them instead of Smarties.

“Those look good,” I said.

“They’re delicious,” she replied.

“Where do you get them?” I asked.

“Sir Harry brings them in. His sister-in-law makes them.”

“Sir Harry McAlpine?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know Sir Harry?” I asked conversationally.

“I don’t! Not really. Mr DeLorean knows him.”

“How does Mr DeLorean know Sir Harry?

“The factory is on his land. Sir Harry leased it to the DeLorean Motor Corporation at a very generous rate.”

“As an incentive to get DeLorean to set up his factory in Belfast as opposed to Scotland or wherever?”

“Precisely. But over the last year Sir Harry and Mr DeLorean have become fast friends.”

“Have they indeed?” I said.

24: PEOPLE IN GLASS HOUSES

I was feeling good as I drove down the coast road to Islandmagee. I accelerated the Beemer up to seventy and then got it up to a nice 88 mph. I dug out a mix tape and put it in the player.

Plastic Bertrand took me all the way through Carrick, Eden, Islandmagee.

Sir Harry’s estate.

The gate along the private road was closed and there was a man there now, sitting on a stile, wearing a Barbour jacket and holding a shotgun. Old geezer, grizzled, game-keeper type.

“This is private land,” he said in a country accent.

“I’m the police,” I told him.

“You’ll have a warrant then,” he said.

“To drive down this road I’ll need a warrant?”

“This is not the King’s Highway. All these farms, right down to the water, is all Sir Harry McAlpine’s property,” the man insisted.

“Just let me through, mate, I’m the peelers. I’ve been here before.”

“So you say. But we have to careful. We had a murder here last year.”

I got out of the Beemer, opened the gate and showed him my warrant card.

“If you want to shoot me, shoot me, but I’m going to see McAlpine.”

The old geezer nodded.

It was more than his job was worth to get in the way of a determined copper.

I drove past Emma’s farm.

No sign of her.

I followed the dirt trail up the hill to the big house.

The gate down that drive was also closed but there was no chain across it so I got out and opened it. I drove over the cattle grid and down the palm-lined driveway.

The Roller was parked out front.

I rang the bell. Mrs Patton answered the door. I showed her my warrant card.

“Remember me, love?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to le grand fromage.”

“He’s in the greenhouse. I’ll go get him.”

“The empty greenhouse? Don’t trouble yourself, Mrs Patton. I know the way.”

I walked through the house and the kitchen and out into the back garden.

There had been a few changes: the garden looked tidier, neater. There were bags of soil and peat and empty terracotta pots. Sir Harry’s finances must have stabilised some if he could afford a guard down there on the private road and a revamp to his back garden.

And there he was in a ratty brown shirt and brown corduroys.

I knocked on the greenhouse door.

He was pulling a jumper over his head. When the head popped through he turned round, saw me, frowned.

I opened the door and went inside.

It was warm. There was a little humidifier in the corner pumping out steam.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he asked, not even attempting to conceal his dislike, which was certainly un-Irish, but perhaps not un-Anglo-Irish.

And it wasn’t that clear why he disliked me. Sure, everybody hated the peelers. We were lazy and crap at best, corrupt and sectarian at worst … but at least I was trying to solve the murder of his brother, wasn’t I?

I walked over. He was fussing with an orchid of some kind and it made me think – ah, a real horticulturist, eh?

“The last time I was in this greenhouse the place was deserted,” I said.

“I’m restocking … and what business is of it yours, anyway?” His eyes were bulging in his face. His cheeks were red. That and the green Wellingtons and the accent. He was really an old-school character. I found myself warming to him.

“Do you ever grow rosary pea in here?”

“What pea?”

“Rosary pea.”

“Never heard of it. What are you doing here? You’ve come to ask me about my garden?”

“I’ve been up to see John DeLorean.”

“And?”

“The car guy. The guy who is going to save Northern Ireland from the abyss.”

“I know who he is.”

“Of course you do, Harry. His factory is on a piece of your land. Some old waste ground in Belfast that is now the hub of Ireland’s regeneration project.”

He put down the pot he was working on and took off his thick gardening gloves. He cleared his throat. “And what exactly has this got to do with anything?”

“Your brother was an intelligence officer for the UDr He ran a series of informers for them. One of them told him something about a guy asking questions and taking photographs at the DeLorean factory. I went to see Mr DeLorean and he told me that he’s subject to industrial espionage all the time, that it’s pretty much par for the course, so that’s okay. But you see this tip about Dunmurry was the last entry in your brother’s log book and the informer that gave your brother that tip has gone missing. And of course your brother himself was murdered. I thought perhaps that these incidents were connected somehow and I thought that maybe you might have some insight into them?”

“What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything. I merely thought that you might possibly have an angle on this that I, as an outsider, would not.”

“I am not terribly fond of your tone, detective,” Sir Harry said.

“I’m sorry about that. There was no tone, sir. No offence meant, I assure you.”

That seemed to mollify him a little.

He sniffed and sized me up.

“So you’re still looking into Martin’s death?”

“I am.”

He nodded and breathed out slowly. “I take it you think it wasn’t a random IRA hit then?”

“Oh, no, I haven’t got that far yet. I just want to parse this link a little. You, DeLorean, Martin’s informer … I wanted to see where all this went.”

“All right, maybe I can help. Come into the house and we’ll discuss it over tea. Have you got some time?”

“All the time in the world.”

“That other detective, the one who died … I hate to speak ill of the dead, but, well … I didn’t have much confidence in him.”

“No.”

We went into a library on the ground floor.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with old books. A formal leather sofa worn comfortable by generations of use and repair, use and repair. A few more modern chairs, an oak table, a reading lectern and a nice bay window with an easterly prospect of the coast and the Irish Sea only a few hundred yards over the fields.

Mrs Patton brought the tea.

It was a Darjeeling. Very strong and over-steeped. Harry didn’t seem to notice. He was much more relaxed now. “So you really think this could be something to do with John DeLorean?” he asked, eagerly.

“Perhaps. What exactly is the nature of the relationship between you and Mr DeLorean?”

He shrugged. “Relationship. Ha! The man’s a user. He doesn’t have relationships with people. He uses people.”

“How did you get to know him in the first place?”

“Two years ago I started hearing rumours that DeLorean was looking to invest in Northern Ireland. Build a big auto plant for this sports car he was designing. Lots of jobs. The whole thing would be underwritten by the Northern Ireland Office. They’d pump in fifty million. They were desperate to have any kind of investment, actual honest to God money flowing into Northern Ireland. So, as you may or may not know, I’ve been a having a few financial problems of my own. My father died in ’69 and I’m still paying the estates taxes – that’s not hyperbole, by the way, I really am still paying them off. If he’d died one year later it would have been under the Tories, but no, he had to die in 1969, when the rate was through the roof … Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins, asked me to quote, donate, unquote, some land that I had in Dunmurry for a factory site. And I did, and that’s how I know DeLorean. I’m his landlord.”

That confirmed what I knew, but I didn’t see how it tied into Martin’s death or into anything else.

“You want to know how much he pays me for all those acres?”

“How much?”

“You’d choke on your chocky biscuits. The man’s a cancer. I just hope to God the Yanks don’t find out before they buy a million of his cars.”

“Yes, I—”

“And I’ll tell you something else. Ever been in his office? He’s got a sign on his desk, ‘Genius At Work’. Genius at work, my foot! You know who’s behind the curtain, don’t you? You know who the real Wizard of Oz is?”

“No.”

“DeLorean didn’t even design the car. He made a sketch, a bullshit sketch. Colin Chapman, heard of him?”

“The name rings a bell.”

“Lotus! Lotus Sports Cars. Colin Chapman is the man who made Lotus. He’s the real designer of the DeLorean, not John D.L., as he likes to be called.”

I was familiar with the Lotus sports cars from the James Bond movies.

“Colin Chapman’s the designer, the money’s coming from the British government, the land came from me, the workers are ex Harland and Wolff guys from Belfast, so what exactly does DeLorean do? He’s just the front. That’s all. Just the front. He’s just the fucking hair and the fucking million-dollar smile.”

“And if the front falters?”

He made a plane crashing sound and smacked one hand into another.

“And God help Northern Ireland if it does,” he added.

“So you don’t really see him very much on a social basis.”

“Only when he needs something.”

“Hmmm.”

“So how does this tie into Martin’s murder?” he asked.

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

We sipped our tea and we talked for a few more minutes about this and that, but nothing came of the conversation. He either knew nothing or he was a pretty decent chancer himself.

I finished my tea and stood and offered my hand.

“I’m sorry that we seemed to get off on the wrong footing,” I said.

“My fault, I’m sure. Tarred all you boys with the same brush … If you find anything about Martin, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Only …”

“Yes?”

His eyes moistened. “Only, he’s my wee brother, you’re supposed to look after your wee brother, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

I walked down the palm-lined drive in a thoughtful mood.

I got in the Beemer.

He hadn’t reacted to the rosary pea crack and he seemed genuinely interested in finding out about his brother’s death.

His connection to everything might be tangential.

But that entry in his brother’s book … it was a coincidence.

And coincidence is the sworn enemy of all detectives everywhere.

25: INTO THE WOODS

I’d driven about a hundred yards from Sir Harry’s house when I saw Emma wearing army boots, a blue dress and a raincoat, walking along the sheugh and carrying a basket. Her back was to me on the road and she had an umbrella up, but she was unmistakable with that wild curly red hair.

I pulled the car beside her and wound the window down.

“Hello,” I said.

She seemed a little startled.

“Oh, hi … What are you doing down here?”

“I was seeing your brother-in-law.”

“About Martin?”

“Yes.”

“Anything new?”

“I’m afraid not. Just tidying up some loose ends.”

She nodded, frowned and then smiled.

“What on earth is that music?” she asked.

“It’s Plastic Bertrand.”

“Who’s that?”

“Belgian New Wave guy.”

“What’s New Wave?”

“Jesus, I mean they have the wheel down here, don’t they? And fire?”

She laughed.

“You’re not still living in caves, hunting for woolly mammoths?”

She lifted her basket. “Mussels more like.”

“You need a lift?” I asked.

“A car can’t go where I’m going.”

“Where’s that?”

“Down to the shore.”

She smiled again and something down below decks remembered last night with Gloria.

“Can I come with you?” I asked.

She hesitated for a moment. “What have you on your feet?”

“Gutties,” I said, showing her my Adidas sneakers.

“They’ll get soaked.”

“That’s okay.”

I pulled the BMW over and locked it. I got my leather jacket out of the boot and zipped it up over my sweater and jeans.

“We go down the lane there and then we’re back through the wood,” she said.

Her hair was blowing every which way round her face. She looked elemental and slightly scary and very beautiful.

“This way,” she said, and led me along a lane past a ruined farm with broken windows and a roof with half the tiles missing. The farm was pitched on a rocky red outcrop that bled down the cliff to the water. It was only about thirty feet above the surf and probably on rough days the spray would come right up. We walked through what once had been the living room and the kitchen. There were sodden newspapers and ciggies in the hearth. “One of Harry’s cousins used to live here. But he upped and left for Canada,” she said. “It’s one of my secret places, like the old salt mine.”

This one wasn’t so secret. My cop’s eyes took in discarded syringes, furniture broken up for firewood and an old piano which someone had taken a hammer to. The back garden led to the cliff path right down to the shore. The stone slabs were slippery and I almost went arse over tit in my gutties.

“So, you’re from around here, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m from Mill Bay, just a few miles up the road.”

“Any family still there?”

“No. Folks are in Spain, older sister’s in San Francisco. She wants me to come over to America. I suppose I should. There’s nothing for me now in Ireland. Nothing for any of us here, really.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

We reached the bottom of the track. There were more abandoned cottages down here, much older dwellings. “These are from the famine?” I asked, pointing towards them.

She nodded. “Harry says that this valley used to be bunged with people. Now it’s all sheep and a few of his loyal retainers.”

We stepped onto the stony beach and she gathered mussels and whelks.

“Are you making a soup?” I asked, helping her.

“No, no, you just boil them up in a little chicken stock with some garlic. Delicious.”

“Really?”

“Don’t sound so sceptical.”

In ten minutes her basket was half full. “I think that’s enough,” she said. “We’ll take a shortcut back through the forest.”

We walked along the beach past a long rusting jetty sticking out into the water.

“Harry’s?” I asked pointing at it.

“Yeah, he keeps talking about renovating it, turning it into a marina, but he never will. All talk. Big plans.”

We trudged back up the hill along another trail.

“Initially I got the impression that your brother-in-law wasn’t too impressed with me,” I said.

“Has he come around?”

“A little bit, I think.”

“Its not anything personal. This part of Islandmagee has never been fond of the law. Around here it’s always been about poaching and cattle raiding and rustling stolen cattle over to Scotland.”

We reached the edge of the wood. The trees were enormous and warped by age into strange patterns. Big elms and ashes, beeches and huge old oaks, living statues meditating in the rain. I smiled and I found to my surprise that she was holding my hand.

“They’re talking to us,” she said.

“The trees?”

“You know what they’re saying?”

“What?”

“Every leaf is a miracle. Every leaf on Earth is a miracle machine that keeps us all alive.”

“I think they’re saying, ‘ooh, me aching back, from standing here all day’.”

She hit me on the shoulder. “You’re all the same, aren’t you?”

“Who? Cops? Men?”

There was a glint in her eye that I couldn’t decipher. “Hey, do you want see something really interesting, Inspector Duffy?”

“Sure.”

“This way.”

We followed the woodland trail up a hill, catching the odd glimpse here and there of the motionless sea and beyond that, startlingly close, the Scottish coast.

“Down here,” she said, and led me to a hazel grove where one solitary oak was standing by itself. It was clearly very old, and covered with moss and mistletoe. Prayers and petitions had been placed in plastic bags and hung from the lower branches. Little offerings and notes were leaning against the trunk. Coins, keys, lockets, photographs, at least a dozen plastic baby dolls, wooden boxes, tea cups, a silver spoon, an intricately carved woman with a belly swollen by pregnancy.

A breeze stirred the notes and photographs.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“Sure I do, it’s a fairy tree.”

“You’re not totally ignorant.”

“I’m from the Glens, love, I speak the Irish. I know things.”

“You’re a Catholic?”

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

She nodded to herself. “Yeah, I can see it now … come on, let’s get back.”

We walked back across the boggy pasture.

“Were Martin and Harry close?” I asked.

“I don’t know about close. There was an age difference, but they respected each other. Martin admired Harry for taking on the debts and the burdens of the estate. Harry admired Martin for joining the Army, putting his life on the line.”

“Literally, as it turned out.”

“Yes,” she said, with a melancholy smile. “Even when Martin got Born Again, Harry didn’t give him a hard time about it, and Harry’s as atheist as they come.”

“Martin was a Born Again Christian?” I asked.

“Yes. About a year and a half ago there was a visiting preacher from America who came to the church, and Martin felt called.”

“But not you.”

“No.”

“He must have tried to make you see the light?”

“That was what so lovely about him. He knew I was more into all this …” she said, pointing back at the trees, and I bit my tongue before I said “bullshit”.

“He never bullied me with his faith. Let me go my own way.”

“Sounds like a good guy.”

“He was. He really was.”

We had reached the edge of the pasture and I could see the valley again. The big house, the cottages, the salt mine, my car parked along the road.

“Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked. “I’m making the mussels. It’s a shame to do all that for one.”

“Sounds great.”

We walked over the boggy field to the farm.

Cora started barking and Emma untied her.

“Why didn’t you take her on your walk?”

“I used to, but she’s incorrigible. She worries the sheep and she goes after the game. She goes for everything.”

Except IRA gunmen, apparently.

A man waved to us from the road as he drove past in a Toyota pick-up. She waved back.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Connie Wilson. One of Harry’s tenants from down Ballylumford way. Connie’s in bad shape. He tried to coax barley out of his land this year. Got rid of his flock and tried to grow barley. He hasn’t been able to pay his ground rent, Harry says.”

“How many tenants does Harry have?”

“Quite a few. Twelve, thirteen. Only two or three can actually make a go of the land with the EEC subsidy; but with taxes Harry actually loses about five or six thousand pounds a year on the estate.”

“He loses money on the estate?”

“That’s what he says.”

We went into the house and this time I noted that the door was unlocked.

“Farmers are always complaining. That’s what they do best,” I said.

“Well, as long as he doesn’t put up my rent.”

“He wouldn’t do that to his sister-in-law.”

“You’d be surprised what men do when they’re desperate.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

She nodded and brushed the hair from her face.

A harsh face. Youthful – but when she was older, bitterness would make her pinched and thin-lipped and shrewish.

“Can I help make anything?” I asked.

She smiled, almost laughed again. “No, no. There’ll be no man in my kitchen. Settle yourself down in the living room. I’ll get you a Harp.”

I sat on the rattan sofa and sipped the can of Harp. There were a few novels on the book shelf: Alexander Kent, Alastair MacLean, Patrick O’Brian. She’d got rid of Martin’s clothes and his suitcase, but she’d kept some of his books.

“Mind if I use your phone?” I called into the kitchen.

“Go ahead. Although the reception down here is shocking. It sounds like you’re phoning from the moon.”

I called the station, asked for Crabbie.

“McCrabban speaking,” Crabbie said.

Emma had the radio on in the kitchen but I lowered my voice anyway.

“Mate, listen, it’s me. Do me a favour and see if there’s anything brewing with Finance and Embezzlement or the Fraud Squad on Sir Harry McAlpine or John DeLorean or both of them.”

“John DeLorean?”

“Aye, and Harry McAlpine.”

“Well, the DeLorean factory’s a great big money pit, but I’ve never heard of any actual fraud—”

“Check it out, will you? And don’t forget McAlpine. The DeLorean factory is on his land. Some kind of deal with the Revenue Service, he says.”

Crabbie hesitated. There was static on the phone line.

“Did you get that?” I asked.

“I got it. You want to me to call Special Branch and the Fraud Squad.”

“Yes. What’s the problem?”

“Sean, an inquiry like that will get passed up the chain. I thought you were specifically warned off involving yourself with Sir Harry McAlpine. Two or three days from now when this arrives on the Chief Constable’s desk you’ll be getting a bloody rocket!”

“Goes with the territory, Crabbie. We’re firing blanks here anyway.”

“It doesn’t matter if we’re firing blanks, Sean. The McAlpine case is not our case and the O’Rourke case has been yellowed,” he said, his voice rising a little.

“I know, mate, look, just do it, will ya?”

He sighed. “Of course.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“No problem.”

I hung up.

“Everything okay?” Emma shouted from the kitchen.

“Aye. Everything’s fine.”

I made another quick phone call to Interflora and had them deliver flowers to Gloria at the DeLorean plant. It was thirty-five quid, but it’s always smart to keep the sheilas sweet.

Emma came up behind me.

“Ordering flowers?”

“Me mother’s birthday.”

“You are such a dutiful son.”

“Aye, I am.”

“The stock’s on. It’ll take an hour. Do you ride? I borrow Stella from Canny McDonagh down by the sheddings. She’s got a young hunter called Mallarky that needs a run or two.”