Текст книги "I Hear the Sirens in the Street"

Автор книги: Adrian McKinty

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Jesus, what the hell was going on?

Should I take this to the local peelers or the FBI? Maybe. But, I’d have to think about it. Have a think, find a phone box, maybe call Crabbie, get it all sussed.

I walked to my car which was parked in the lot behind State Street.

I decided that I would drive to the VFW Post, give them the five hundred dollars and perhaps try to talk to some of O’Rourke’s buddies. What if he wasn’t a retired IRS agent? What if post-retirement he’d taken on a new career? A PI or something? Maybe someone would know.

I got in the Buick and drove out of Newburyport along the 1A. I’d gotten about a mile out of town when I saw flashing lights behind me.

It was an unmarked police car.

Had I been speeding?

Who knew what the limit was around here.

I pulled the Buick to the side of the road.

Thick woods on either side of the car. An odd patch of snow in the deeper parts of the forest. I wound the window down. There was a smell of salt water and marsh gas.

A man wearing sunglasses and a suit and tie got out of the unmarked prowler behind me. He had a gun drawn. Didn’t traffic cops always have to wear uniforms?

“Get out of the vehicle and put your hands on the hood.”

I sighed, got of the car and put my hands on the roof of the Buick.

“Spread them!” the man yelled.

I spread my hands far apart.

I heard him come up behind me.

“Was I speeding, Officer?” I asked.

“Give me your right wrist and do it real slow,” he said.

I put my right hand behind my back. He slapped the cuff on. He asked for my left hand and cuffed that, too.

“How can I get my driver’s licence out now?” I said.

“We won’t be needing that, Duffy,” he said.

I just had the time to experience a little rush of panic before he hit me in the neck and I crumpled to the ground.

I wasn’t unconscious, but I was dazed.

Two men were dragging me into the trees. There was a third man keeping an eye on the road.

When I was well off the road one of the men kicked me in the head. Another kicked me in the gut. The wind was knocked out of me and I winced in agony. Somehow, I scrambled to my feet, but I was hit twice in the ribs in quick succession by a really big guy with a long reach who was a fighter and fast and strong.

My heart was pounding and there were white spots in front of my eyes.

I threw up in my mouth and I felt myself being tossed down a small embankment.

A momentary respite and then more kicks.

Blood in my eyes.

Scrapes all down my back.

Pain everywhere.

Red out …

Black out …

Faces.

“Shut the fuck up, he’s coming to!”

Tape over my eyes, and then they were holding my mouth open, pouring in bourbon.

I choked, spat, and they poured in more.

It was a goddamn classic.

I almost laughed.

Someone held my head in his greasy paws and they made sure I got the bottle down.

I was scared now. Drunk and scared. They could kill me and make it look like an accident.

“Motherfuckers! What is this all about? I’m a cop.”

A punch in my kidneys.

“You’re not a fucking cop. You’re a fucking Brit, you’re a fucking black and tan bastard.”

“Stop talking to him,” another man said.

They slapped my face. Gut punched me. Sucker punched me.

Hands squeezing my throat.

More booze.

I was well gone now.

Beyond the pain. Across the border. Into the dark.

I watched as the world erased itself.

I was being carried.

I was in the car.

“This is a good one, lads. This is an old-school fix up,” I said.

The engine kicked into life. The car was moving. Fast.

Death stamped her iron hooves. She was coming. With Finn’s spear and Ossian’s bow. At the speed of understanding.

The car hit.

Exquisite silence.

Fire.

I was on the car’s ceiling. I was upside down.

I wanted to lie there.

I couldn’t breathe. The seat was burning. The seatbelt had trapped me in.

“Help!” I said weakly.

“Help!”

“Help!”

Smoke.

Vomit.

No breath.

Smoke.

An ellipsis.

Breaking glass.

An arm around my neck.

Air.

Sweet, beautiful air.

“Christ, son. Are you all right?”

I breathed.

“My God, you’re lucky I was passing!” the voice said.

“Lucky,” I said.

29: DRIVING UNDER THE INFLUENCE

I wasn’t here. I was at the Langham Hotel on Regent Street watching a man clutching his chest, falling, his right hand flapping like a dove in a magician’s act. I was eleven years old with my aunt Beryl. The man was yelling without sound and we sat there under the palms, taking in the wonder of it as if we were at the starblown circle of the Giant’s Ring. Everything frozen save for the man’s right hand which was scrabbling for a finger hold on the air which he thought would save him and pull him vertical once again.

It did not …

No.

My mistake.

Not his finger in the air.

Mine.

My finger connected to a pulse monitor. A drip in my arm. Nurses and morphine.

Two days of this and everyone, how shall I put it, a little bit aloof.

A doctor told me I had two minor first-degree burns and three cracked ribs. It could have been worse.

A British consular official came on the third day. He was called Nigel Higgs. He was a tall good-looking spud with a slight stammer. He seemed to be just out of his teens, although presumably he was much older, having gotten a plum like America.

“Nothing broken at least. You’re jolly lucky to be alive,” he said.

“What happened?” I asked.

I knew full well what had happened but I wanted to hear the official story.

“Well, I’m afraid you had a little too much to drink, old boy. You pranged your car. Total right-off … You could well have been killed. You certainly would have been burned alive had not a passing motorist pulled you out.”

“What motorist?”

“He was an EMT.”

“What’s that?”

“A fireman.”

He talked for a while and I listened.

“The Yanks are being awfully nice about the whole thing …The local police say that they’ll only charge you with a misdemeanour DUI.”

The upshot was that if I left the country immediately, everything could be swept under the rug. No one needed to spell it out for me. I got it, even if this fucking Nigel didn’t. However, if I kicked up a stink I’d be charged with dangerous driving, drunken driving and so on. They’d make sure they threw the book at me. They’d probably plant narcotics in the car. I’d be looking at jail …

Oh, yeah. That’s how it would play.

If I forgot the photographs and everything I’d seen and quietly left the country with my tail between my legs then all this would go away. I don’t know what the average bloke would do, but let me stress the fact that I am no fucking hero.

“Tell them I’ll take their offer but I want talk to a goon first. I want to talk to an FBI man. Off the record. That’s my condition.”

“FBI? What are you talking about? You were drunk driving. You’re being prosecuted by the Massachusetts State Police.”

“You heard me, Nigel. That’s my condition. I want to talk to the FBI, off the record. They’ll speak to me. They’ll know what this is about. They already know this whole thing is a crock of shite. Someone tried to get rid of me and someone royally fucked it up.”

He left in a state of confusion.

He didn’t come back. Special Agent Ian Howell did.

He was tall, tanned, pock-marked. Handsome. North of forty. Serious. He looked like he could happily listen to you yakity yak or he could coolly inject an overdose of morphine into your drip – whatever the situation demanded. He was wearing a brown wool suit with very wide lapels. He had a tape recorder running in one of his jacket pockets, that I wasn’t supposed to see.

He introduced himself.

I was sitting up now. I was a lot more comfortable. I was keeping down the solid food. I was ready for him.

“So, I hear you’re preparing to make a serious allegation against a local police department?” he said.

“I’m not making any allegation,” I said.

“You’re not filing a complaint?”

“No.”

“You’re not alleging theft or the violation of your person?”

“No.”

He took off his absurd aviator sunglasses. His eyes were light green. Squinty.

“What is it that you want, Duffy?”

“I only want one thing. But I’ll tell you what I don’t want first. I don’t want to know who was in the photographs with DeLorean. I don’t want to know what operation you or other agencies are planning with or without the cooperation of John DeLorean. I don’t want to know why you followed me to the Ten Cents Bank Safety Deposit or why you did what you did with me and the car. I just want to know one thing. Tell me that, and I’ll leave this green and not so fucking pleasant land and I won’t come back.”

“And what is that one thing, Mr Duffy?”

“I want to know who killed Bill O’Rourke.”

“What if we don’t know who killed Mr O’Rourke?”

“Then I want to know what you do know about him and his mission in Ireland.”

Howell grimaced.

He thought about it and stood.

“Wait here,” he said.

“Where am I going to go?”

He went out to make his phone call.

He came back two hours later with a document for me to sign on a roll of fax paper. It was a confession to the charge of DUI and dangerous driving.

“This stays sealed as long as you keep your mouth shut,” Howell said.

I didn’t like the look of it, but I signed.

“Good,” he said, with a smile that didn’t suit his face.

“Now your part of the bargain,” I said.

Howell sat on a chair and pulled it close to the bed.

“O’Rourke was a Treasury Agent recruited from the IRS. He kept his IRS cover but he was Treasury his whole career. He looked into currency fraud and fraudulent currency transactions. Occasionally he went into the field. He was good,” Howell said.

“What was he doing in Ireland?”

“Well, he was compulsorily retired from the IRS at sixty. Officially retired, so to speak.”

“But unofficially?”

“He still worked for the Treasury Department.”

“So what was he doing in Ireland? Was he investigating DeLorean?”

Howell grimaced. “Yes.”

“As part of something bigger?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“That, I am not permitted to tell you.”

“A Treasury thing?”

“It was only after Agent O’Rourke’s death that we realised that two agencies of the United States government were working on the same problem.”

“Jesus! The FBI and the fucking Treasury were both investigating DeLorean and you didn’t tell one another?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss that at this time.”

“Okay. Tell me this: when did O’Rourke file his last report? Where was he? What was the situation on the ground?”

“O’Rourke wasn’t required to file daily reports. He didn’t generally present his findings until he knew what he was talking about. Treasury didn’t expect a report until he had concluded his field work.”

“But he came back to America after his initial visit.”

“To attend a colleague’s retirement party.”

“And leave off those photographs?”

“Apparently.”

“You didn’t know about the photographs until you started tailing me?”

“No.”

“Why did you start tailing me?”

“Immigration alerted us to your arrival in the country. We thought you might try and do some digging over here.”

I leaned back into the sturdy hospital pillow. Through the double-glazed window of Mass General I could see rowers and little sailing boats gliding past on the Charles River.

“Who killed O’Rourke?”

Howell shook his head. “We don’t know,” he said.

“You really don’t know?”

“We don’t know. We were hoping that the RUC would find out for us.”

“Maybe we would have if you had cooperated with us from the start.”

“You must understand, Inspector Duffy, we have bigger fish to fry here. Special Agent O’Rourke would have understood that.”

“What do you know about his death?”

“No more than you do, Inspector Duffy. Your investigation has been the primary information vector for us.”

“You knew that he was investigating John DeLorean, which I didn’t discover until the last few days.”

“Inter-agency suspicion and communication problems have been a feature of this investigation from the beginning. You, for example, were not supposed to have been injured, never mind nearly killed. Our apologies for that.”

“So why was I nearly fucking killed?”

“Our surrogates got carried away.”

“I see.”

“They have been disciplined.”

“I would hope so. You have no idea at all about who killed Bill O’Rourke?”

“No.”

“Why should I believe you?” I asked.

“I can’t think of a reason after the way you’ve been treated, Inspector Duffy, but nevertheless it’s the truth.”

I nodded.

There was a period of silence.

“It has come to our attention that your investigation into Special Agent O’Rourke’s death has more or less been suspended?” Howell asked.

“Yes, it has. We can’t close the case because we never found his killer, but the investigation has reached a natural dead end,” I said.

Howell’s eyes narrowed. “It is in the interests of the United States Government that the investigation into Special Agent O’Rourke’s death remain suspended at least until our own investigation into John DeLorean has concluded.”

“I’m sure you don’t want to tell me how to do my job, Agent Howell, but I will say that in the absence of any new evidence I don’t really see how I can proceed with the O’Rourke case at the moment.”

Howell nodded, picked up the faxed confession and put it in a briefcase.

“Do you have any more questions?” he asked.

“A million.”

He looked at his watch. “Well, Inspector Duffy, I’m afraid that those are the only answers you are going to get, today.” He tapped the briefcase. “I trust that I can count on your discretion?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll keep your nose clean, I’m sure,” he said.

“Once I get the bloody scabs out of it, I’ll keep it clean.”

He walked to the door, opened it, but didn’t leave.

He looked at me and then, in a lower tone of voice, he said: “There is one thing, Duffy.”

“Yes?”

“Bill O’Rourke had a condo in Florida.”

“I know.”

“He grew plants on the balcony. We had them analysed. You know what those plants were?”

“Rosary pea?” I gasped.

He nodded and closed the door behind him.

30: BACK TO BELFAST

They took me out of Mass General on a gurney and across Boston to Logan in a black windowed private ambulance. I felt like Howard fucking Hughes.

They flew me first class to New York LGA on the Delta Shuttle.

An FBI driver met me with a wheelchair.

JFK. The first-class lounge. The Concorde from JFK to Heathrow.

Christ, they wanted rid of me fast. Whatever they were cooking up was hot, hot, hot. And speaking of food. Canapés and champagne; Russian caviar with traditional accompaniments (blini, chopped egg white and yolk, chopped spring, white, and red onions); free-range chicken breast with black truffle, foie gras, savoy cabbage; lobster and saffron crushed potato cakes with spinach and bloody Mary relish; cheese service with Stilton, chevre and pecorino with balsamic vinegar, biscuits, walnuts, dried apricots and berries; a hand-made box of chocolates; port wine and tea; a sweet of mango and almond gratin.

We left New York at 5.00 p.m. The jetstream was strong and we crossed the Atlantic in three hours 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.

Crabbie’s dour, unsurprised, unflappable expression did not change.

“You want to hear my theory?” I asked.

“Go on,” he said.

“The DeLorean Motor Company is a fucking disaster. DeLorean has been keeping fraudulent books to hide this fact. US Treasury Agents are all over it. One of them is an old, experienced field hand called O’Rourke who they send to Ireland to scout for local info. He comes to Ireland, he takes photographs of DeLorean’s meeting with Provos or paramilitaries or whoever. He goes back to America and puts them in a safe place. He comes back here. He starts to feel lonely. It’s raining all the time. He has no kids, no wife, he wonders what the fuck he’s doing with his life. He’s in Ireland. The Old Country. Where there’s riots every day and eighteen per cent unemployment and things are fucked beyond all imagining. And his job now is to destroy the DeLorean Motor Company? The only firm that’s providing manufacturing jobs in this pathetic country. He misses his wife. He spent two years helping her fight the fight. He watched her die, perhaps he even helped her die in the end …”

“What do you mean?” Crabbie asked.

“He was a chemical engineer. He knew about pharmacology. He grew rosary pea plants on the balcony of their condo in Florida.”

“He made the Abrin himself?”

“It would take some skill. But O’Rourke had skills.”

“So then what?”

“He’s sitting in that bed and breakfast in Dunmurry. His wife’s dead, his friends are getting old and dying. It’s raining and miserable and he just doesn’t see the bloody point. He swallows one of the Abrin pills he’s brought with him for just such an emergency.”

“No suicide note? No explanation?”

“Maybe he did leave a note and McFarlane destroyed it. Maybe O’Rourke had a hunch about that thieving bastard, which is why he taped his stuff behind the mirror. Who knows? The point is McFarlane finds him dead and goes through his gear and figures out that he’s a fucking federal agent and panics and calls in a couple of lads who work in the meat business and they take the body away and throw it in a freezer until McFarlane can figure out what to do with it. In the meantime a greedy and stupid McFarlane forges O’Rourke’s signature on an extortionate American Express bill.”

“And the body?”

“Time marches on. Either the heat’s coming down or McFarlane just can’t see any good coming of keeping Mr O’Rourke in a freezer forever so he has his mates chop up the body and dump the poor lad in a skip. They do this to avoid us and keep their boss Richard Mr Connected Coulter out of the loop.”

Crabbie finished his tea and leaned back in the armchair.

“It’s possible,” he said. “How would you go about proving something like that? McFarlane’s an old lag. You could beat him with a rubber hose and he wouldn’t talk.”

“Maybe he will talk. What are we accusing him of? Disposing of a body? Concealment of evidence? What’s that? A year? Six months? If he pled guilty he could be out in ten weeks.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to go prison at all. Maybe he feels that if he’s inside for any length of time, he’ll be looking shaky.”

“Perhaps.”

Crabbie looked at the bag of pills sitting on the coffee table.

He sipped his tea and leaned back in the chair.

“Your face is a mess, Sean.”

“Aye, they give me a good hiding and no mistake.”

“I told you not to go.”

“You did.”

“This case had plenty of warning signs all over it.”

“It did.”

“We’ll both have to learn how to read those signs better, won’t we?”

“You’re sounding like the Chief Inspector, mate.”

“I’ve got a couple of kids, now. Gotta think of my future.”

I said nothing.

The nothing went on a for a while.

Even after two years with him I couldn’t tell what the hell he was thinking. Opprobrium? Annoyance? What?

Finally he sighed. “This is too deep for the likes of us. Too deep.”

“I know, Crabbie,” I said.

He got to his feet. “You need to rest up, Sean. I don’t think we should bring McFarlane in formally. Not yet. I’ll take a wee run up to the B&B and see if they’ll tell me anything. I’ll go softly softly.”

I stood too and offered him my hand.

“I’m sorry about all this, Crabbie. Like you say we’ll have to learn to read the arcana better.”

“And listen to me next time,” he said shaking my hand.

I waved to him as he drove off.

I had a can of Harp and popped two more of the white pills.

They were helping.

I called up Emma.

“Hey, it’s me,” I said.

“You’re back? Did you bring me a present from the Land of the Free?”

“I forgot.”

“I was only kidding. I don’t want a present.”

“I’ve got a huge box of steaks here that nobody wants.”

“Steaks?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take them.”

“Have you got a freezer? It’s a big box.”

“I don’t, but Harry’s got one.”

“Okay then. I’ll see you in about half an hour … Don’t be freaked, but I, uh, I had a bit of a car accident, I’m slightly beat up.”

“Oh my God, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Should you be driving?”

“Yes! I’m fine. Look, I’ll see you in a wee bit, okay?”

“Okay.”

I hung up and wondered if I really should be driving all the way down to Islandmagee.

Well, we’d soon find out.

I dressed myself without much difficulty and went out to the Beemer.

I was wearing jeans and a tight black sweater. They’d shaved my head in the hospital to put the stitches in. The ensemble made me look like I was a paramilitary thug. To complete the thing I went upstairs, got my .38 and shoved it in my belt.

“You look like an eejit,” I said to my face in the mirror.

I kept the BMW at a reasonable pace down to Islandmagee.

The private road to Sir Harry’s land had a different goon guarding it now. A kid with big ears, red cheeks and a red hunting hat that he was wearing backwards.

“Is that thing loaded?” I asked, looking at his twelve-gauge shotgun.

“Aye, it is, so you better piss off, mate! This is private land,” he said.

“I’m a peeler, son, open the bloody gate!”

He got off his arse and opened the gate.

I drove down the lane to Emma’s house.

It began to rain.

I parked the car. Took the box of steaks out of the boot. I’d stuffed the freezer compartment of my fridge full but there were still thirty or forty of the bastards left.

I carried the box to the front door while chickens pecked about my feet and Cora barked at me all the way. I leaned them on top of the oil drum for the central heating.

Emma opened the door. “Hi,” she said, and then, “Oh my word.”

“I’m not a pretty sight, am I?”

“Not in the least.”

“Where do you want these?”

She looked in the box. “That’s a lot of meat. I’ll cook two for us tonight and we’ll leave the rest up in Harry’s freezer.”

She was making an assumption that I was staying for dinner and she suddenly felt embarrassed about that. Her cheeks coloured and she looked all the more beautiful for it. “That is unless you have plans, or work, or—”

“I’d love to say for dinner. And there’s no work this week. I’m still officially on leave.”

“Have a seat, leave those things on the kitchen table.”

I carried the steaks inside to the kitchen and then joined her in the living room.

“Get you a drink?” she asked.

“A stiff glass of anything except that moonshine of yours.”

“Johnnie Walker Black?”

“That’ll do nicely.”

She poured me a glass.

“Thanks,” I said and sipped it.

“Sit yourself down there, Sean. I’ll go marinate those steaks in garlic and red wine.”

“Sounds good.”

I drank the Johnnie Walker and watched the sun head towards Magheramorne and the west side of Larne Lough. She came back with a glass of Johnnie Walker for herself. She snuggled next to me on the sofa.

She was wearing a soft wool sweater and faded blue jeans and her hair was tied back.

I liked her being close to me.

It was a nice moment.

“So, what happened to you? Was it driving on the wrong side of the road?” she asked.

I span her a few lies and she went for them. And then, feeling guilty about that, I told her about some stuff from my previous New York trip. She laughed at the story of the Reggie Jackson bar, but she hadn’t heard of The Ramones or the New York Dolls or even Blondie and I vowed that I would rectify that.

“How do you like your steak?” she asked, getting up.

“Call me squeamish, but I’m no fan of rare,” I said.

“Medium okay?” she asked.

“Sure … How long will it take?”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

I got up.

“You’ve no freezer at all?” I asked.

“None.”

“Well, I don’t want them to spoil. I’ll leave the rest of the box up at Harry’s. The only thing that worries me is Mrs Patton giving me the evil eye.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, she’s harmless. Well, she’s outlived two husbands, but that’s neither here nor there, and you won’t even have to go to the house. He’s got a curing shed for hanging his pheasants and there’s a big freezer in that. Just bung them in.”

“Where is it?”

“You just go through the gate, turn left and follow the wall about a hundred yards and you’ll see it.”

“Is it out the back with the greenhouse and everything?”

She tapped my forehead. “What’s the matter with your brain? No, you don’t need to go through the house. Immediately you enter Harry’s estate turn left, go long the wall and … you know what, sit there, I’ll do it. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ve been taking some pills. I need the air.”

“I’ll phone him and tell him you’re coming.”

“No need, no need, I’ll be fine. Have you got a torch?”

Of course I wasn’t fine. You try carrying a box of steaks uphill in the rain at night over muddy ground with a dog barking at you.

I reached the gates to Red Hall.

My brain was fugged. Did she mean go down the driveway to the house and then go left, or go immediately left here?

“I think she meant here,” I said.

I walked towards a clump of trees and I saw an old timber curing shed, where they would hang the pheasants for five or six days.