I Hear the Sirens in the Street

nodded. “I suppose you want me to call them.”
    “Better coming from you, sir. You’re the head of station. More official, all that jazz.”
    “You just don’t want to do it.”
    “Could be a difficult phone call.”
    “And?”
    “I’m feeling a bit fragile today, sir. I may just have been dumped by my girlfriend.”
    “That doctor bint you were seeing?”
    “Aye.”
    “I could see that coming. She was out of your league, son.”
    “Will you make the call, sir?”
    “It’ll be the start of a shitstorm … a dead American – as if we don’t have enough problems.”
    I stood there and let weary resignation over come his weathered face like melted lard over a cast-iron skillet. He sighed dramatically. “All right. I suppose I’ll do it for you, like I do everything around here. You’re sure he’s a Yank?”
    I told him about the tattoo.
    “All right, good. Scram. And get Carol’s cake, ready. She’s in in half an hour.”
    When Carol came in at three we had her party.
    Tea, cake, party hats, both types of lemonade.
    Carol had been on planet Earth for sixty years. She ate the cake, drank the tea, smiled and said how wonderful it all was. Brennan gave her a toast and it was Brennan, not Carol, who told us the story of her first week on the job in 1941 when a Luftwaffe Heinkel 111 dropped a stick of 250 kilograms bombs on the station. We’d all heard the tale before but it was a reteller. The only person who’d been hurt that day was a prisoner in the cells who broke an arm. Course, up in Belfast, where the rest of the Heinkel squadron had gone, people were less fortunate.
    The sun came out and the day brightened to such an extent that a few us spilled out onto the fire escape and started slipping rum into the Coke. A pretty female reservist with a tiny waist and a weird Geordieland accent asked me if it was true that “I had killed three men with my bare hands”.
    She was creeping me out so I made myself scarce, gave Carol a kiss, said goodnight to the lads, locked up the office and headed home.
    Coronation Road in Victoria Housing Estate was in one of its rare moments of serenity: stray dogs sleeping in the middleof the street, feral moggies walking on slate roofs, women with rollers in their hair hanging washing on plastic lines, men with flat caps and pipes digging in their gardens. Children from three streets were playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek called 123 Kick A Tin. Children who were adorable and shoeless and dressed like extras from a ’50s movie.
    I parked the BMW outside my house, nodded a hello to the neighbours and went inside.
    I made a vodka gimlet in a pint glass, stuck on a random tin of soup and with infinitely more care picked out a selection of records that would get me through the evening: “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division, “Bryter Layter” by Nick Drake and Neil Young’s “After The Goldrush”. Yeah, I was in that kind of mood.
    I lay on the leather sofa and watched the clock. The children’s game ended. The lights come on all over Belfast. The army helicopters took to the skies.
    The phone rang.
    “Hello?”
    “Is this Duffy?”
    “Who wants to know?”
    “I was looking for you at work, Duffy, but apparently you’d left already. Lucky for some, eh?”
    It was the weasly Kenny Dalziel from clerical.
    “What’s the matter, Kenny?”
    “The situation is a disaster. A total disaster. I’ve been pulling my hair out. You don’t happen to know who started all this, do you?”
    “Gavrilo Princip?”
    “What?”
    “What’s this about, Kenny?”
    “It’s yet another problem with your department, Inspector Duffy. Specifically Detective Constable Matty McBride’s claim for overtime in the last pay period. It’s tantamount to fraud.”
    “Wouldn’t surprise me.”
    “Constable McBride cannot claim for time and a half danger money while also claiming overtime! That would be triple time and believe me, Duffy, nobody, and I mean nobody, is getting triple time on my watch …”
    I stopped paying attention. When the conversation reached a natural conclusion I told him that I understood his concern and hung up the phone. I switched on the box. A preacher on one side, thought for the day on the other. This country was Bible mad.
    Half an hour later Dick Savage called me with info about Abrin. It was an extremely rare poison that he said had never been used in any murder case anywhere in the British Isles. He thought that maybe it had been used