I Hear the Sirens in the Street

dialect were at times difficult to understand. I got it when they used the occasional word in Irish but often I found them speaking a form of lowland Scots straight out of Robert Burns. They almost sounded like Americans from the high country of Kentucky or Tennessee.
    I’d been there several times. Always in my civvies, as I’d heard that they didn’t like peelers snooping around. As Matty drove I unfolded the ordnance survey map and found Ballyharry. It was halfway up the lough shore, opposite the old cement works in Magheramorne. On the map it was a small settlement, a dozen houses at the most.
    We turned off the Shore Road onto the Ballyharry Road. A bump chewed the New Order tape so I flipped through the radio stations. All the English ones were talking about the Falklands but Irish radio wasn’t interested in Britain’s colonial wars andinstead were interviewing a woman who had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary who had told her that the sale of contraceptive devices in Dublin would bring a terrible vengeance from God and his host of Angels.
    The Ballyharry Road led to the Mill Bay Road: small farms, whitewashed cottages, stone walls, sheep, rain. I looked for Red Hall but didn’t see it.
    Finally there was a small private single-laned track that led into the hills that had a gate and a sign nailed to an old beech tree which said “Red Hall Manor, Private, No Trespassing”, and underneath that another sign which said “No Coursing or Shooting Without Express Permission”.
    “You think this is the place?” I asked, looking up the road.
    Matty examined the map and shrugged. “We might as well give it a go.”
    We drove past a small wood and into a broad valley.
    There were farms dotted about the landscape, some little more than ruins.
    A sign by one of them said Red Hall Cottage and Matty slammed on the brakes. It was a small farm surrounded by flooded, boggy fields and a couple of dozen miserable sheep. The building itself was a whitewashed single-storey house with a few cement and breeze block buildings in the rear. It looked a right mess. Most of the outbuildings had holes in the exterior walls and the farmhouse could have done with a coat of paint. The roof was thatched and covered with rusting wire. The car out front was a Land Rover Defender circa 1957.
    “Well, I don’t think we’re dealing with an international hitman, that’s for sure,” I said.
    “Unless he’s got all his money overseas in a Swiss Bank.”
    “Aye.”
    “Maybe you should go in first, boss, and I’ll stay here by the radio in case there’s any shooting.”
    “Get out.”
    “All right,” he said, with resignation.
    We parked the Rover and walked through the muddy farmyard to the house.
    “My shoes are getting ruined,” Matty said, treading gingerly around the muck and potholes. He was wearing expensive Nike gutties and unflared white jeans. Is that what the kids were sporting these days?
    An Alsatian snarled at us, struggling desperately at the edge of a long piece of rope.
    “Yon bugger wants to rip our throats out,” Matty said.
    The chickens pecking all around us seemed unconcerned by the dog but he did look like a nasty brute.
    We reached the whitewashed cottage, the postcardy effect somewhat spoiled by a huge rusting oil tank for the central heating plonked right outside. There was no bell or knocker so we rapped on the wooden front door. After a second knock, we heard a radio being turned off and a female voice asked:
    “Who is it?”
    “It’s the police,” I said. “Carrickfergus RUC.”
    “What do you want?” the voice asked.
    “We want to talk to Martin McAlpine.”
    “Hold on a sec!”
    We waited a couple of minutes and a young woman answered the door. She had a towel wrapped round her head and she was wearing an ugly green dressing gown. She’d clearly only just stepped out of the bath or the shower. She was about twenty-two, with grey-blue eyes, red eyebrows, freckles. She was pretty in an unnerving, dreamy, “She Moved Through The Fair”, kind of way.
    “Good morning, ma’am. Detective Inspector Duffy, Detective Constable McBride from Carrickfergus RUC. We’re looking for a Martin McAlpine. We believe that this is his address,” I said.
    She smiled at me and her eyebrows arched in a well-calibrated display of annoyance and contempt.
    “This is why this country is going down the drain,” she muttered.
    “Excuse me?” I replied.
    “I said this is why this country is going