I Hear the Sirens in the Street

could—”
    Mr Fallows slid a cardboard file across the desk.
    “You can keep this,” he said.
    It contained a photostat of Bill O’Rourke’s driver’s licence and passport. He was a handsome man, was Bill. Lean, tanned, with dark black hair greying only slightly on the left hand side. He had an intelligent, unyielding face and there was that certain something about him that commanded respect. Maybe it was all that horror he’d experienced in World War Two.
    “We’ve never had an American murdered in Northern Ireland in all my time here,” Fallows said. “Surprising, given the level of violence.”
    “There’s got to be a first time for everything,” Crabbie said.
    “We’ll also need his work records from his employer and any possible criminal records from the FBI,” I added.
    “You ask for a lot.”
    “And I’ll need a local police officer to investigate his houseand report back to me about what he finds.”
    “Oh, they won’t like that,” Fallows sniffed. “That’s vague. Report back about what?”
    “I’ll need a full report on his home – homes, I should say – his recent activity at the bank, that kind of thing. The cops will know what to do.”
    “And whether he has a greenhouse. And we’ll need to know if he has a plant in that greenhouse called rosary pea,” McCrabban added.
    “Rosary pea?” Fallows said, and couldn’t quite meet our gaze.
    I shot another quick glance at McCrabban. Yup, he’d seen it too. This fucker was hiding something.
    “ Rosary pea rings a bell, does it?” I asked.
    Fallows shook his head. “Never heard of it in my life.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Quite sure. Never heard of it before you mentioned it.”
    “Your last diplomatic posting wasn’t Trinidad, was it?” McCrabban asked.
    “No. Six years in Canada and then here. Why?”
    I smiled and shook my head. “No reason.”
    We fired a few more questions at him but he gave us back nothing that we wanted. We made sure that he got the message about the cooperation of the Massachusetts police and the FBI and he said that he would see what he could do.
    When we got outside we rubber-banded the file and headed for the Rover. Queen’s Street was one of the places where you could get into the centre of Belfast through the steel security barriers erected across the road. Every single pedestrian going into Belfast had to be patted down and their bags searched in an effort to stamp out bomb attacks. Of course we peelers just flashed our warrant cards and jumped straight to the head of the line.
    “Fucking cops,” someone muttered behind us in the queue.
    “Aye,” someone else agreed. “They think they run the fucking world.”
    When we were through the barrier I patted McCrabban on the back, something which the big phobic Proddy ganch always hated. “That was a good question, mate, rosary pea seemed to take that skinny wee shite aback a bit, didn’t it?”
    “Maybe the local American cops have already found something in O’Rourke’s greenhouse?” Crabbie said, shrinking from the touch of a fellow human being.
    “Maybe, Crabbie, maybe. But, as Bobby D. says, there’s something funny going on, I can just feel it in the air.”
    “A complication?”
    “Brennan’s not going to like it, but yeah, it’s beginning to sound that way, isn’t it?”

10: GOOD PROGRESS
    The case was flying now. We had made a shit load of progress and as I looked at myself in the mirror and shaved with an electric I saw a man who was at least professionally content, if not exactly happy in any other aspect of his life. I certainly wasn’t worried about meeting the Chief this morning. He’d kept off my back for a few days and I was determined to show him that his faith in the long leash was justified.
    I finished shaving, put the kettle on and went outside. The starlings had been at the milk: clever wee shites, they had figured out that gold-top bottles contained the full cream stuff and silver top the ordinary milk. Their intelligence was a rare commodity round these parts. I grabbed a gold-top, made coffee and toast and I was about to head out to the car when the phone rang. It was Carol, who told me that the Chief Inspector wanted to meet me at the police club in Kilroot, not at the station.
    “Fine by me,” I lied.
    I checked under the BMW for bombs, didn’t find any and drove down Coronation Road.
    I was stopped at an army checkpoint outside of Eden Village. Two Land Rovers and half a dozen jittery