I Hear the Sirens in the Street

bereft.
    One commentator says that this marks the end of Northern Ireland as a manufacturing centre.
    “Maybe the end of the province itself!” another reporter agrees.
    A guy from the union comes on the tube and promises riotsand demonstrations. Later that morning we get a message that leave is being cancelled. But in the end there are no riots because the unions are weak and the workers are weak and the real power in this land belongs to the men with guns.
    The small crowd outside the Dunmurry plant chants “We want jobs! We want jobs!” over and over for the cameras; but eventually even they are sent scurrying inside by the bitter rain from a big storm-front which has stalled in its inexorable eastward progress and which is destined to remain over Belfast for a long, long time.

ABOUT … Adrian McKinty

    Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University, he emigrated to New York City where he lived in Harlem for seven years, working in bars, bookstores, building sites and finally the basement stacks of the Columbia University Medical School Library in Washington Heights.
    In 2000 he moved to Denver, Colorado where he taught high school English and started writing fiction in earnest. His first full-length novel Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and was picked by Booklist as one of the ten best crime novels of the year. The sequel to that book, The Dead Yard , was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the twelve best novels of 2006 and won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller. These two novels,along with The Bloomsday Dead , form the DEAD trilogy of novels, starring hitman Michael Forsythe.
    In mid 2008 Adrian moved to St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia with his wife and children. His book Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award and his novel Falling Glass was longlisted for Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year.
    The first of his Sean Duffy thrillers, The Cold Cold Ground , was published in 2012. The third volume, And In the Morning I’ll Be Gone , will appear in 2014.
Visit Adrian’s blog at http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/

Read the first chapter of
    And In the Morning I’ll Be Gone
    the third volume in the Sean Duffy series
    1: THE GREAT ESCAPE
    The beeper began to whine at 4.27 p.m. on Wednesday the 25th September, 1983. It was repeating a shrill C sharp at four second intervals, which meant (for those of us who had bothered to read the manual) that it was a Class 1 emergency. This was a general alert being sent to every off-duty policeman, police reservist and soldier in Northern Ireland. There were only five Class 1 emergencies and three of them were a Soviet nuclear strike, a Soviet invasion and what the civil servants who wrote the manual had nonchalantly called “an extra-terrestrial trespass”.
    So you’d think that I would have dashed across the room, grabbed the beeper and run with a mounting sense of panic to the nearest telephone. You’d have thought wrong.
    For a start I was as high as Skylab, baked on Turkish black cannabis resin that I’d cooked myself and rolled into sweet Virginia tobacco. And then there was the fact that I was playing Galaxian on my Atari 5200 with the sound on the TV maxed and the curtains pulled for a full dramatic and immersive experience. I didn’t notice the beeper because its insistent whine sounded a lot like the red ships peeling off from the main Galaxian fleet as they swooped in for their oh so predictable attack.
    They didn’t present any difficulty at all despite the sick genius of their teenage programmers back in Osaka. I had the moves and the skill and they had ones and zeroes. I slid the joystickto the left, hugged the corners of the screen and easily dodged their layered cluster-bomb assault. A lone straggler attempted to trap me with his guided missiles but I was miles too fast for him and skated casually out of his way. That survived, I eased into the middle of the screen and killed the entire squadron as they attempted to get back into formation. It was only when the screen was blank and I saw that I was nudging close to my previous high score that I noticed the grey plastic rectangle sitting on the coffee table, beeping and vibrating with what in retrospect seemed to be more than its usual vehemence.
    I threw a pillow over the beeper, sat back down on the rug and continued with the game.
    The phone rang and rang and