I Hear the Sirens in the Street

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 thatI 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