I Hear the Sirens in the Street Page 2

  “His genitals are still there,” Crabbie said.

  “And no sign of bruising,” I added. “Which probably rules out a paramilitary hit.”

  If he was an informer or a double agent or a kidnapped member of the other side they’d certainly have tortured him first.

  “No obvious tattoos.”

  “So he hasn’t done prison time.”

  I pinched his skin. It was ice cold. Rigid. He was dead at least a day.

  He was tanned and he’d kept himself in shape. It was hard to tell his age, but he looked about fifty or maybe even sixty. He had grey and white chest hairs and perhaps, just perhaps, some blonde ones that had been bleached white by the sun.

  “His natural skin colour is quite pale, isn’t it?” Crabbie said, looking at the area where his shorts had been.

  “It is,” I agreed. “That is certainly some tan on him. Where would he get a tan like that around these parts, do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll bet he’s a swimmer and that’s the tan line for a pair of Speedos. That’s probably how he kept himself in shape too. Swimming in an outdoor pool.”

  Northern Ireland of course had few swimming baths and no outdoor pools, and not much sunshine, which led, of course, to Crabbie’s next question:

  “You’re thinking he’s not local, aren’t you?” Crabbie said.

  “I am,” I agreed.

  “That won’t be good, will it?” Crabbie muttered.

  “No, my friend, it will not.”

  I stamped my feet and rubbed my hands together. The snow was coming down harder now and the grim north Belfast suburbs were turning the colour of old lace. A cold wind was blowing up from the lough and that music in my head was still playing on an endless loop. I closed my eyes and tripped on it for a few bars: a violin, a viola, a cello, two pianos, a flute and a glass harmonica. The flute played the melody on top of glissando-like runs from the pianos – the first piano playing that Chopinesque descending ten-on-one ostinato while the second played a more sedate six-on-one.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Let’s see if we can find any papers in the case,” Crabbie said, interrupting my reverie.

  We looked but found nothing and then went back to the Land Rover to call it in. Matty, our forensics officer, and a couple of Reservists showed up in boiler suits and began photographing the crime scene and taking fingerprints and blood samples.

  Army helicopters flew low over the lough, sirens wailed in County Down, a distant thump-thump was the sound of mortars or explosions. The city was under a shroud of chimney smoke and the cinematographer, as always, was shooting it in 8mm black and white. This was Belfast in the fourteenth year of the low-level civil war euphemistically known as The Troubles.

  The day wore on. The grey snow clouds turned perse and black. The yellow clay-like sea waited torpidly, dreaming of wreck and carnage. “Can I go?” Crabbie asked. “If I miss the start of Dallas I’ll never get caught up. The missus gets the Ewings and Barneses confused.”

  “Go, then.”

  I watched the forensic boys work and stood around smoking until an ambulance came to take the John Doe to the morgue at Carrickfergus Hospital.

  I drove back to Carrick police station and reported my findings to my boss, Chief Inspector Brennan: a large, shambolic man with a Willy Lomanesque tendency to shout his lines.

  “What are your initial thoughts, Duffy?” he asked.

  “It was freezing out there, sir. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, we had to eat the horses, we’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Your thoughts about the victim?”

  “I have a feeling it’s a foreigner. Possibly a tourist.”

  “That’s bad news.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think he’ll be giving the old place an ‘A’ rating in those customer satisfaction surveys they pass out at the airport.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “We can probably rule out suicide,” I said.

  “How did he die?”

  “I don’t know yet – I suppose having your head chopped off doesn’t help much though, does it? Rest assured that our crack team is on it, sir.”

  “Where is DC McCrabban?” Brennan asked.

  “Dallas, sir.”

  “And he told me he was afraid to fly, the lying bastard.”

  Chief Inspector Brennan sighed and tapped the desk with his forefinger, unconsciously (or perhaps consciously) spelling out “ass” in Morse.

  “If it is a foreigner, you appreciate that this is going to be a whole thing, don’t you?” he muttered.

  “Aye.”

  “I foresee paperwork and more paperwork and a powwow from the Big Chiefs and you possibly getting superseded by some goon from Belfast.”

  “Not for some dead tourist, surely, sir?”

  “We’ll see. You’ll not throw a fit if you do get passed over will you? You’ve grown up now, haven’t you, Sean?”

  Neither of us could quickly forget the fool I’d made of myself the last time a murder case had been taken away from me …

  “I’m a changed man, sir. Team player. Kenny Dalglish not Kevin Keegan. If the case gets pushed upstairs I will give them every assistance and obey every order. I’ll stick with you right to the bunker, sir.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “Amen, sir.”

  He leaned back in the chair and picked up his newspaper. “All right, Inspector, you’re dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And remember it’s Carol’s birthday on Friday and it’s your turn on the rota. Cake, hats, you know the drill. You know I like buttercream icing.”

  “I put the order in at McCaffrey’s yesterday. I’ll check with Henrietta on the way home.”

  “Very well. Get thee to a bunnery.”

  “You’ve been saving that one up, haven’t you, sir?”

  “I have,” he said with a smile.

  I turned on my heel. “Wait!” Brennan demanded.

  “Sir?”

  “‘Naples in Naples’, three down, six letters.”

  “Napoli, sir.”

  “Huh?”

  “In Naples, Naples is Napoli.”

  “Oh, I get it, all right, bugger off.”

  On the way back to Coronation Road I stopped in at McCaffrey’s, examined the cake, which was a typical Irish birthday cake layered with sponge, cream, rum, jam and sugar. I explained the Chief Inspector’s preferences and Annie said that that wouldn’t be a problem: she’d make the icing half an inch thick if we wanted. I told her that that would be great and made a mental note to have the defib kit on hand.

  I drove on through Carrickfergus’s blighted shopping precincts, past boarded-up shops and cafes, vandalised parks and playgrounds. Bored ragamuffin children of the type you often saw in Pulitzer-Prize-winning books of photography were sitting glumly on the wall over the railway lines waiting to drop objects down onto the Belfast train.

  I stopped at the heavily armoured Mace Supermarket which was covered with sectarian and paramilitary graffiti and a fading and unlikely claim that “Jesus Loves The Bay City Rollers!”

  I waded through the car park’s usual foliage of chip papers, plastic bags and crisp packets.

  Halfway through my shop the piece of music that had been playing in my head began over the speakers. I must have heard it last week when I’d been in here. I got cornflakes, a bottle of tequila and Heinz tomato soup and went to the checkout.

  “What is this music? It’s been in my head all day,” I asked the fifteen-year-old girl operating the till.

  “I have no idea, love. It’s bloody horrible, isn’t it?”

  I paid and went to the booth, startling Trevor, the assistant manager who was reading Outlaw of Gor with a wistful look on his basset-hound face. He didn’t know what the music was either.

  “I don’t pick the tapes, I just do what I’m told,” he said defensively.

  I asked him if I could check out his play box.
He didn’t mind. I rummaged through the tapes and found the cassette currently on the go. Light Classical Hits IV. I looked down through the list of tracks and found the one it had to be: “The Aquarium” from Carnival of the Animals by Saint Saens.

  It was an odd piece, popular among audiences but not among musicians. The melody was carried by a glass harmonica, a really weird instrument that reputedly made its practitioners go mad. I nodded and put the cassette box down.

  “I won’t play it again, if you don’t like it, Inspector, you’re not the first to complain,” Trevor said.

  “No, actually, I’m a fan of Saint Saens,” I was going to say, but Trev was already changing the tape to Contemporary Hits Now!

  When I came out of the Mace smoke from a large incendiary bomb was drifting across the lough from Bangor and you could hear fire engines and ambulances on the grey, oddly pitching air.

  From the external supermarket speakers Paul Weller’s reedy baritone begin singing the first few bars of “A Town Called Malice” and I had to admit that the choice of song was depressingly appropriate.

  2: THE DYING EARTH

  We stood there looking at north Belfast three miles away over the water. The sky a kind of septic brown, the buildings rain-smudged rectangles on the grim horizon. Belfast was not beautiful. It had been built on mudflats and without rock foundations nothing soared. Its architecture had been Victorian red-brick utilitarian and sixties brutalism before both of those tropes had crashed headlong into the Troubles. A thousand car bombs later and what was left was surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire and a steel security fence to keep the bombers out.

  Here in the north Belfast suburbs we only got sporadic terrorist attacks, but economic degradation and war had frozen the architecture in outmoded utilitarian schools whose chief purpose seemed to be the disheartening of the human soul. Optimistic colonial officials were always planting trees and sponsoring graffiti clearance schemes but the trees never lasted long and it was the brave man who dared clean paramilitary graffiti off his own house never mind in communal areas of the town.

  I lit a second cigarette. I was thinking about architecture because I was trying not to think about Laura.

  I hadn’t seen her in nearly a week.

  “Should we go in?” Crabbie asked.

  “Steady on, mate. I just lit me fag. Let me finish this first.”

  “Your head. She won’t be happy to be kept waiting,” Crabbie prophesied.

  Drizzle.

  A stray dog.

  A man called McCawley wearing his dead wife’s clothes pushing her empty wheelchair along the pavement. He saw us waiting by the Land Rover. “Bloody peelers, they should crucify the lot of you,” he said as he picked up our discarded cigarette butts.

  “Sean, come on, this is serious. It’s an appointment with the patho,” Crabbie insisted.

  He didn’t know that Laura and I had been avoiding one another.

  I didn’t know that we had been avoiding one another.

  A fortnight ago she’d gone to Edinburgh to do a presentation for a couple of days and after she’d returned she said that she was swamped with catch-up work.

  That was the official party line. In fact I knew that something was up. Something that had been in the wind for months.

  Maybe something that had been in the wind since we had met.

  This was her third trip to Edinburgh this year. Had she met someone else? My instincts said no, but even a detective could be blindsided. Perhaps detectives in particular could be blind-sided.

  For some time now I’d had the feeling that I had trapped her. By putting us in a life and death situation, by getting myself shot. How could she do anything but stay with me through the process of my recovery. She couldn’t possibly leave a man who had fallen into a coma and awoken to find that he had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal.

  She had protected herself to some extent. She had refused to move in with me on Coronation Road, because, she said, the Protestant women gave her dirty looks.

  She had bought herself a house in Straid. There had been no talk of marriage. Neither of us had said ‘I love you’.

  Before the recent absences we had seen each other two or three times a week.

  What were we? Boyfriend and girlfriend? It hardly seemed so much.

  But what then?

  I had no idea.

  Crabbie looked at me with those half closed, irritated brown eyes, and tapped his watch.

  “It’s nine fifteen,” he said in that voice of moral authority which came less from being a copper and more from his status as a sixth generation elder in the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. “The message, Sean, was to come at nine. We’re late.”

  “All right, all right, keep your wig on. Let’s go in,” I said.

  Cut to the hospital: scrubbed surfaces. Lowered voices. A chemical odour of bleach and carpet cleaner. Django Reinhardt’s “Tears” seeping through an ancient Tannoy system.

  The new nurse at reception looked at us sceptically. She was a classic specimen of the brisk, Irish, pretty, no nonsense nursey type.

  “There’s no smoking in here, gentlemen,” she said.

  I stubbed the fag in the ashtray. “We’re here to see Dr Cathcart,” I said.

  “And who are you?”

  “Detective Inspector Duffy, Carrick RUC, and this is my spiritual coach DC McCrabban.”

  “You can go through.”

  We stopped outside the swing doors of the Autopsy Room and knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “DI Duffy, DC McCrabban,” I said.

  “Come in.”

  Familiar smells. Bright overhead lights. Stainless steel bowls filled with intestines and internal organs. Glittering precision instruments laid out in neat rows. And the star of the show: our old friend from yesterday lying on a gurney.

  Laura’s face was behind a mask, which I couldn’t help thinking was wonderfully metaphoric.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said.

  “Good morning, Dr Cathcart,” Crabbie uttered automatically.

  “Hi,” I replied cheerfully.

  Our eyes met.

  She held my look for a couple of seconds and then smiled under the mask.

  It was hard to tell but it didn’t seem to be the look of a woman who was leaving you for another man.

  “So, what can you tell us about our victim, Dr Cathcart?” I asked.

  She picked up her clipboard. “He was a white male, about sixty, with grey, canescent hair. He was tall, six four or maybe six five. He had a healed scar on his left buttock consistent with a severe trauma, possibly a car accident, or given his age, a shrapnel wound. There was a tattoo on his back – ‘No Sacrifice Too Grea’ – which I take to be some kind of motto or Biblical verse. The ‘t’ was missing from ‘Great’ where his skin had adhered to the freezer compartment.”

  “Freezer compartment?”

  “The body was frozen for some unspecified period of time. When the body was removed and placed in the suitcase a piece of skin stuck to the freezer, hence the missing ‘t’ in great. I’ve taken photographs of this and they should be developed later today.”

  “What did you say the tattoo said?” Crabbie asked, flipping open his notebook.

  She shrugged. “A Biblical verse perhaps? ‘No Sacrifice Too Great’.”

  I looked at Crabbie. He shook his head. He had no idea either.

  “Go on, Doctor,” I said.

  “The victim’s head, arms and legs were removed post mortem. He had also been circumcised, but this had been done at birth.”

  She paused and stared at me again.

  “Cause of death?” I asked.

  “That, Detective Inspector, is where we get into the really interesting stuff.”

  “It’s been interesting already,” Crabbie said.

  “Please continue, Dr Cathcart.”

  “It was a homicide or perhaps a suicide; either way, it was death by misadventure. Th
e victim was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?” Crabbie and I said together.

  “Indeed.”

  “Are you sure?” Crabbie said.

  “Quite sure. It was an extremely rare and deadly poison known as Abrin.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said.

  “Nevertheless, that’s what it was. I found Abrin particles in his larynx and oesophagus, and the haemorrhaging of his lungs leaves little doubt,” Laura continued.

  “Is it a type of rat poison or something?” I asked.

  “No, much rarer than that. Abrin is a natural toxin found in the rosary pea. Of course it would need to be refined and milled. The advantage over rat poison would be in its complete lack of taste. Like I say it is very unusual but I’m quite certain of my findings … I did the toxicology myself.”

  “Sorry to be dense, but what’s a rosary pea?” I asked.

  “The common name for the jequirity plant endemic to Trinidad and Tobago, but I think it’s originally from South-east Asia. Extremely rare in these parts, I had to look it up.”

  “Poisoned … Jesus,” I said.

  “Shall I continue?” she asked.

  “Please.”

  “The Abrin was taken orally. Possibly with water. Possibly mixed into food. There would have been no taste. Within minutes it would have dissolved in the victim’s stomach and passed into his blood. It would then have penetrated his cells and very quickly protein synthesis would have been inhibited. Without these proteins, cells cannot survive.”

  “What would have happened next?”

  “Haemorrhaging of the lungs, kidney failure, heart failure, death.”

  “Grisly.”

  “Yes, but at least it would have been fairly rapid.”

  “How rapid? Seconds, minutes?”

  “Minutes. This particular strain of Abrin was home cooked. It was crude. It was not manufactured by a government germ warfare lab.”

  “Crude but effective.”

  “Indeed.”

  I nodded. “When was all this?”

  “That’s another part of the puzzle.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s impossible to say how long the body was frozen.”

  I nodded.

  “Are you sure about that freezing thing? There are plenty of ways a bit of skin can come off somebody’s back,” McCrabban said.