I Hear the Sirens in the Street Read online

  “I’m certain, Detective. The cell damage caused by freezing is consistent throughout what’s left of his body.”

  “And so you have no idea when all this happened?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It is beyond my capabilities to state how long he was frozen for.”

  “So you’re not able to determine a time of death?”

  “I am afraid that I am not able to determine a time or date of death. Although I will continue to work on the problem.”

  “Poisoned, frozen, chopped up, dumped,” McCrabban said sadly, writing it down in his notebook.

  “Yes,” Laura said, yawning. I gave her a smile. Was she already bored by death? Is that what happened to all pathos in the end? Or was she just bored by us? By me?

  “The rosary pea. That is interesting,” McCrabban said, still writing in his book.

  “Our killer is not stupid,” Laura said. “He’s got a little bit of education.”

  “Which more or less rules out the local paramilitaries,” McCrabban muttered.

  “They’re not that bright?” Laura asked.

  “Poison is far too elaborate for them. Too elaborate for everybody really around here. I mean what’s the point? You can get guns anywhere in Northern Ireland,” I said.

  McCrabban nodded. “The last poisoning I remember was in 1977,” he said.

  “What happened then?” Laura asked.

  “Wife poisoned her husband with weedkiller in his tea. Open and shut case,” McCrabban said.

  “So what do you think we’re looking at here, then? A loner, someone unaffiliated with the paramilitaries?” I asked him.

  “Could be,” McCrabban agreed.

  “Do us a favour, mate, call up a few garden centres and ask about rosary pea and get cracking on ‘No Sacrifice Too Great’, will ya?”

  Crabbie wasn’t dense. He could read between the lines. He could see that I wanted to talk to Laura in private.

  “You’ll walk back to the station, will you, Sean?” he asked.

  “Aye, I’ll walk, I could do with the exercise.”

  “Fair enough,” he said and turned to Laura. “Nice to see you again, Dr Cathcart.”

  “You too, Detective McCrabban,” Laura said.

  When he’d gone I walked to her and took off her mask.

  “What?” Laura asked.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Ugh, Sean, I don’t have time for this, today.”

  “Time for what exactly?”

  “The games. The drama,” she said.

  “There’s no drama. I just want to know what’s going on.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What’s going on with us?”

  “Nothing’s going on,” she said.

  But her voice quavered.

  Outside I could hear Crabbie start up the Land Rover.

  I waited for a beat or two.

  “All right, let’s go to my office,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  We walked the corridor and went into her office. It was the same dull beige with the same Irish watercolours on the wall. She sat in her leather chair and let down her reddish hair. She looked pale, fragile, beautiful.

  The seconds crawled.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she began.

  I closed my eyes and leaned back in the patient chair. Oh shit, I thought, that means it’s going to be a really big deal.

  “I’ve been offered a temporary teaching position at the University of Edinburgh,” she said, her voice sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a coal mine.

  “Congratulations,” I replied automatically.

  “Don’t be unpleasant, Sean.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “It’s in the medical school. First year class on basic anatomy with a cadaver. To be honest, I need the break, from, from—”

  “Me?”

  “From all this …”

  It didn’t have to be about me. Anybody with any brains was getting out. The destination wasn’t important. England, Scotland, Canada, America, Australia … the great thing was to go.

  “Of course.”

  She explained why it was an exciting challenge and why it didn’t necessarily mean the end of us.

  I nodded, smiled and was happy for her.

  I completely understood. She would leave Northern Ireland and she would never come back. I mean, who tries to get back on board the Titanic?

  Furthermore her sisters were out of high school and her parents were in the process of moving abroad. The only thing keeping Laura here were her ties to this shitty job and to me and both of those were severable.

  “When are thinking of heading?” I asked.

  “Monday.”

  “So soon?”

  “I signed a lease on an apartment. I need to get furniture.”

  “What about your house in Straid?”

  “My mum will look after it.”

  “What about the hospital? Who’s covering for you here?”

  “The other doctors can pick up the slack in the clinic and I’ve asked one of my old teachers to do my autopsy work in the interim. Dr Hagan. He’s coming out of retirement to do me this favour. Very experienced. He worked for Scotland Yard for years and he taught at the Royal Free. He says he’ll be happy to cover me for a few months. He’ll be much better at this kind of work than me.”

  “I doubt that.”

  She smiled.

  And then there was silence. I could hear a kid crying all the way back at Reception.

  “Will you have dinner with me this weekend?”

  “I’ll be very busy. Packing and all that.”

  So that’s the way it was. Well, I wasn’t going to beg. “If you change your mind give me a call.”

  “I will.”

  I got up. I blinked and looked at her. Her gaze was steady. Resolved. Even relaxed. “Bye, Laura.”

  “Bye, Sean. It’s only for a term. Ten weeks,” she said. She wanted to add something else, but her mouth trembled for a moment and then closed.

  I nodded and to avoid a scene left it there. I gave her a little nod as I left the office and half slammed her door. “Heart of Glass” by Blondie was my exit music from the hospital reception.

  I went out into the car park and said “Shite! Shite! Shite!” before lighting a fag. I tried to think of a curse but Irish articulacy had clearly declined since the days of Wilde and Yeats, Synge and Shaw. Three ‘shites’ and a ciggie, that was what we could come up with in these diminished times.

  I walked over the railway bridge.

  A stiff sea breeze was sending foam over the cars on the Belfast Road and there were white caps from here to Scotland. On the Scotch Quarter, outside the Gospel Hall, a wild-haired American evangelist with a walking stick was entertaining a crowd of pensioners with the promise that the end was nigh and the dying earth was in its final 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 wide. He had a pinky ring and he’d taken to wearing white jackets over white T-shirts. I’m not sure what this look was supposed to be exactly but I didn’t like it, even ironically.

  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, known commonly as Jequirity, Crab’s Eye, Rosary Pea, John Crow Bead, Precatory Bean, Indian Liquorice, Akar Saga, Giddee Giddee or Jumbie Bead in Trinidad & Tobago, is a slender, perennial climber that twines around trees, shrubs, and hedges. It is a legume with long, pinnate-leafleted leaves. The plant is native to Indonesia and grows in tropical and subtropical areas of the world where it has been introduced. It has a tendency to become weedy and invasive. In India the seeds of the Rosary Pea are often used in percussion instruments.

  “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’:

  The Jequirity Seed contains the highly toxic poison Abrin, a close relative to the well known poison, Ricin. It is a dimer consisting of two protein sub units, termed A and B. The B chain facilitates Abrin’s entry into a cell by bonding to certain transport proteins on cell membranes, which then transport the toxin inside the cell. Once inside the cell membrane, the A chain prevents protein synthesis by inactivating the 26S sub unit of the ribosome. One molecule of Abrin will inactivate up to 1,500 ribosomes per second. Symptoms are identical to those of Ricin, save that Abrin is more toxic by several orders of magnitude. Weaponised high toxicity Abrin will cause liver failure, pulmonary edema and death shortly after ingestion. There is no known antidote for Abrin poisoning.

  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, ce n’est pas un revolte, it’s a friggin’ revolution, isn’t it?”

  “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.

  He grinned and got me a sheet of paper from his desk which turned out to be his notes on the First Infantry Division of the United States Army.

  “Our boy is a Yank. ‘No Mission Too Difficult, No Sacrifice Too Great’, is the motto of the United States Army’s First Infantry Division. I did some digging. If our John Doe was World War Two age, his unit was in the worst of it: Sicily, Normandy, The Hurtgen Forest. That’s maybe where he got the shrapnel wounds too.”

  “Excellent work, Crabbie!” I said, really pleased. “This is great! It gives us a lot to go on. An American! Boy oh boy.”

  “I helped!” Matty protested a little petulantly.

  “I’m sure you did, mate,” I reassured him.

  “An American ex-GI comes to Northern Ireland for his holidays or to visit his old haunts and the poor bugger somehow ends up poisoned,” Crabbie said reflectively.

  “Aye,” I said and rubbed my chin. “Have you been on the phone to Customs and Immigration?”

  “We have. They’re on it now. We’ve got them compiling a list of names of all American visitors to Northern Ireland in the last three months,” Matty said.

  “Why three months?”

  “If his body was frozen it could
have been any time at all, but any earlier than three months and we surely would have had a missing persons report,” Matty said, a little oversensitively.

  “Call them up and ask them to go back a full year,” I said.

  “Jesus, Sean, that could be hundreds of names, maybe thousands,” Matty said.

  “We’ll go back five years if we have to. We’re looking for a result here. You heard what the Chief said. We’ve got the luxury of one case right now. We could be looking at murders a plenty in the next couple of months.”

  Matty nodded and got on the phone and I shared what I had found about the nature of the poison with McCrabban.

  “That’s a rare old bird indeed,” he said.

  “Aye.”

  “We’ve got to see who could grow a plant like that, or where you could get the seeds.”

  “Back on the bloody blower?” he asked.

  “Back on the bloody blower, mate.”

  I went to the crapper and read the Sun, a copy of which was always in there. I’ll say this for Rupert Murdoch, he made a good paper to read on the bog.

  When I came out Matty was looking triumphant.

  “What did customs say about the names?” I asked.

  “Well, there was a lot of complaining.”

  “Did you lean on them?”

  “Those bastards hate to do any work, but I applied the thumbscrews and they said they’ll have them for us by the end of the week.”

  “Good. Although, in civil service speak that means the end of the year.”

  “Aye, so what do you want me to work on now?”

  “Is that suitcase still around?”

  “Of course. It’s in the evidence room.”

  “See if you can find out where it came from, how many were sold in Northern Ireland, that kind of thing.”

  “What good will that do?” he said with an attitude.

  “Matty, in the words of William Shakespeare: just fucking do it, ya wee shite.”

  “Will do, boss,” he replied and went to the evidence room to unwrap the suitcase from its plastic covering.

  We called garden centres all over Ireland for the rest of the afternoon. We got nothing. Few had heard of rosary pea and no one had a record of anyone growing it or requesting seeds.