I Hear the Sirens in the Street

hard it could have been the Twelfth of July or one of those other holidays when God poured out his wrath on the Orangemen marching through the streets in bowler hats and sashes. I didn’t leave the house the whole day. I was so bored I almost went to the Gospel Hall on Victoria Road where, allegedly, they spoke in tongues, danced with snakes and afterwards you got a free slice of Dundee cake. Instead I listened to music and read One Hundred Years of Solitude which had come from the book club. It was a good novel but, as the man said, maybe seventy-five years of solitude would have been enough.
    Dozens of different birds had stopped in my back garden to take shelter from the weather. I was no expert but I was my father’s son and with half a brain noted starlings, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, swifts, magpies, rock doves, robins, gulls of every kind.
    On Monday the birds were still there and Mrs Campbell from the other side of the terrace was in her back garden in a plastic mac throwing bread to them. You could see her jabbers through the mac, which me and Mr Connor in the house opposite were both appreciating through our kitchen windows. The Campbells were a mysterious people and although I shared an entire wall with them I never really knew what was going overthere, if her husband was working or at home, or how many kids and relatives’ kids she was looking after. She was an attractive woman, no doubt, but the stress and the smokes would get to her like they got to everyone else.
    And speaking of ciggies, I lit myself a Marlboro, put The Undertones on the record player, showered, ate a bowl of cornflakes and hot milk, dressed in a shirt and jeans and headed out for the day. I checked under the BMW for mercury tilt bombs and drove to the station.
    When the list of American citizens who had entered Northern Ireland in the previous year finally came in at eleven on Monday morning it was longer than we’d been expecting. Six hundred names. Five hundred of whom were men. Northern Ireland during the Troubles was not a popular tourist destination but the hunger strikes had sucked in scores of American journos, protesters, politicians and rubberneckers.
    “How are we going to tackle this?” McCrabban asked dourly. His default method of asking anything.
    “We’ll break the list into three and we’ll start making phone calls. We’ll begin with the over-forties first,” I said.
    Fortunately each visitor to Northern Ireland had to fill out a full information card giving his or her home address, phone number, emergency contact, etc.
    There were three hundred and twenty American men over forty who had entered the Province in the previous twelve months.
    “All these calls to America are going to cost us a fortune,” Matty said. “The Chief won’t like it.”
    “He’s going to have to lump it,” I told him. “And let’s hope that our boy hasn’t been frozen for years.”
    “Wait,” McCrabban said. “I’ve thought of another problem.”
    “What?” I said, somewhat irritated because I was keen to get started.
    “We can’t make any phone calls before one o’clock. They’refive hours behind, remember?”
    “Shite,” I said, slapping my forehead. He was right. It wasn’t decent to call people up first thing in the morning.
    “So what are we going to do in the meantime?” Matty asked.
    “Do what everyone else does around here. Pretend to work,” I said.
    Matty opened up some files and spread them on his desk, but read the Daily Mail . The Mail and every other paper was all Falklands all the time. The country was mad for the war. Thirty years since the last good one, not counting what had been going on in our little land.
    McCrabban took out his notebooks and started studying for his sergeant’s exam.
    I looked through a couple of theft cases to see if anything would leap out at me. Nothing did. Theft cases rarely got solved.
    On a hunch I called up every life insurance company in the book to see if there had been any payouts on anyone called McAlpine in the last four months.
    Nope.
    At eleven the phone rang.
    “Hello?” I said.
    “Hello, is this Inspector Duffy?” a voice asked.
    “Yes.”
    The voice was Scottish, older. I immediately thought that something had happened to Laura in Edinburgh and she’d put me down as her emergency contact.
    “Is this about Laura?” I asked breathlessly.
    “Well, yes and no,” the voice said.
    “Go on.”
    “I’m Dr Hagan, Laura, er, Dr Cathcart’s