I Hear the Sirens in the Street

twice as ugly. He’s five eight, lean, with a handlebar moustache, a black comb-over, aviator sunglasses. He’s wearing a loud blue polyester sports jacket over a yellow Six Million Dollar Man T-shirt. Knife scars. Jail house ink. I dig the T-shirt.
    “Are you gentlemen looking for a place to stay?” he says, with a chuckle.
    “We’re looking for Richard Coulter,” I tell him.
    “Mr Coulter is at a charity lunch in London. Princess Diana is going to be there,” Willy McFarlane says.
    “Is this his place of business?” I ask.
    “One of many.”
    “Who are you?”
    He tells us who he is.
    “We have a warrant to search these premises, Mr McFarlane,” Brennan announces.
    “Be my guest,” McFarlane says with another wee laugh.
    “Work your way through from top to bottom and back again. I’ll question Mr McFarlane here.”
    The bed and breakfast is small. Two terraced houses knocked into one. Four guest rooms. O’Rourke had been staying in room #4 and I know McCrabban will pay special attention there but I ask him to check all the bedrooms to look for any possible evidence. I’m letting Crabbie lead the search while I run the wheel on McFarlane.
    “Upstairs, downstairs. Meet me in the back kitchen,” I tell him.
    The back kitchen.
    The smell of lard and Ajax. Flypaper hanging against the wall. Clothes drying on an internal clothes line. A checkered linoleum floor: the kind that blood cleans up easily from. Mrs McFarlane, a small birdlike woman, is making tea, humming to herself contentedly.
    She’s not a stranger to unusual guests or peelers with machine guns.
    McFarlane’s smoking Bensons. Relaxed.
    Let’s unrelax the fucker.
    “You know why we’re here?”
    “No,” McFarlane says, unconcerned.
    “Mr Coulter’s account charged seven hundred pounds on one of your guest’s American Express Cards last November. A Mr Bill O’Rourke from Boston, Massachusetts,” I say.
    “What about it?”
    “Your room rates are twenty pounds a night and he checkedout after two nights. It doesn’t compute, does it?”
    William McFarlane is not fazed. He rubs a greasy fist under his chin. “I charged that bill. Mr Coulter has nothing to do with it and I’ll thank you not to mention his name again.”
    “You charged the bill? So you admit it?”
    “Aye. I remember yon boy. He wanted Irish Punts. He wanted six hundred quid’s worth of Irish Punts. I got them for him, legally I might add, from the Ulster Bank in Belfast. In fact I think I might have the receipt right here.”
    He produces a piece of paper from his trouser pocket.
    What a joke. What a frigging laugh riot. He knew we were coming and why we were coming. Someone tipped off his boss and his boss tipped him.
    I take the receipt and read it.
    It’s exactly what he says it is. A receipt for six hundred and fifty Irish pounds from the Ulster Bank on Donegall Square, Belfast. Transaction dated 25 November 1981.
    I bag it and put it in my jacket pocket.
    “What did he want the money for?” I ask.
    “He didn’t say.”
    “He just stayed here two days and left?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Did he say where he was going?”
    “No.”
    “He paid his bill in full?”
    “Aye. No problems.”
    “How many other guests did you have?”
    “At that time?”
    “Yes.”
    “None.”
    “You’re a bit out of the way here, aren’t you? A bit off the tourist trail.”
    “Aye, I suppose so.”
    “How many guests do you get a month, would you say?”
    “Well, it depends.”
    “On average?”
    “I don’t know. A dozen. Maybe more, maybe less.”
    Hmmmm.
    Mrs McFarlane brings me a mug of tea, a Kit Kat and a publication called Teetotal Monthly whose headline for April is “Hibernia Despoiled By Demon Gin”. I thank her.
    “Eat that up, love, you’re skin and bones and you look hungry enough to eat the beard of Moses,” she says.
    I drink the tea and light a cigarette. McFarlane and I look at one another and say nothing. I read Mrs McFarlane’s pamphlet. There’s a nice exegesis of the wedding feast at Cana which explains that Jesus Christ turned the water not into wine but into a form of non-alcoholic grape juice.
    McCrabban comes back downstairs.
    He shakes his head.
    Brennan and Sergeant Burke appear from wherever they’ve been. Mrs McFarlane offers to make them tea. Brennan accepts. Sergeant Burke goes outside to have a smoke.
    I let McCrabban ask McFarlane all the questions I have already attempted in order to ascertain if there are any