I Hear the Sirens in the Street

that I was interested in it too, but I was only fooling myself. When I told them I was going to be a cop they neither approved or disapproved. If I’d told them I was going tobe a terrorist I probably would have gotten the same reaction.
    I carried the coffee into the living room.
    I put on all three bars of the electric heater and stared out stupidly at the front garden. Radio Albania’s spin on the Falklands War was that it was a struggle between two fascist regimes in an attempt to repress revolt among their own working classes.
    I trudged back into the kitchen, changed the channel to Radio Four to get confirmation that this really was a Wednesday. I had accumulated a lot of leave and in a deal with Dalziel in clerical I was taking two Wednesdays a month off until my leave was back down to manageable levels.
    I made another cup of coffee and when I discovered that it was indeed a Wednesday I retired to the living room with a Toffee Crisp and my novel.
    I was reading a book called Shoeless Joe which had gotten a good review in the Irish Times and was about a man obsessed by baseball and J.D. Salinger – but not in a creepy Mark David Chapman way.
    The phone rang.
    I trudged into the hall and picked it up.
    “Hello?”
    “Is this Duffy?”
    “It is.”
    “Can you be at the shelter in Victoria Cemetery in ten minutes?” a woman asked. A young woman, with an odd voice. English. Old fashioned. So old fashioned it sounded like she was doing an accent or something.
    “Sorry?”
    “Can you be at the Victoria Cemetery shelter in ten minutes?” she repeated.
    “I can, but I’m not going to be.”
    “I’ve got information about one of your cases.”
    “Come down my office, love, anytime,” I said.
    “I’d like to meet with you in person.”
    “I don’t do graveyards. It’ll have to have to be at the office.”
    “This will be worth your while, Duffy. It’s information about a case.”
    “Listen, honey, they pay me the same wages whether I solve the cases or not.”
    The lass, whoever she was, thought about that for a second or two and then hung up.
    She didn’t call back.
    I looked out the window at the starlings for ten seconds. One of the little bastards shat on my morning paper.
    “Fuck it,” I muttered, ran upstairs, pulled on a pair of jeans and gutties. I threw a raincoat over my Thin Lizzy T-shirt and shoved my Smith and Wesson .38 service piece in the right hand coat pocket.
    “I don’t like it,” I said to myself and sprinted out the front door.
    The graveyard was on the other side of Coronation Road, over a little burn and across a slash of waste ground known as the Cricket Field – the de facto play area for every unsupervised wean in the estate.
    The sky was black.
    The wind and rain had picked up a little.
    I jumped the stream and scrambled up the bank into the Cricket Field: burnt-out cars and a gang of feral boys throwing cans and bottles into a bonfire.
    “Hey, mister, have ye got any fags?” one of the wee muckers asked.
    “No!” I replied and hopped the graveyard wall.
    I circled to where I could see the concrete shelter that had been built to give protection to the council gravediggers while they waited for funeral services to be concluded. This part of Carrick was on a high flat escarpment exposed to polar winds, Atlantic storms and Irish Sea gales. I’d been to half a dozen funerals here and it had been pissing down at every one of them.
    I had envied the men in the shelter, although I had never actually been in it myself. It was large and could easily accommodate a dozen people. If I remembered correctly there were several wooden benches that ran along the wall. There were no doors to get into it as it was open to the elements on the south side like a bus shelter.
    If I could circle due south through the petrified forest of graves I could easily see if someone was waiting in there or not.
    I ran at a crouch through the Celtic crosses and granite headstones and the various family plots and monuments.
    I made it to the perimeter wall on Victoria Road due south of the building. I looked across the cemetery and squinted to see into the shelter and moved a little closer and looked again.
    No one was there.
    I walked a few paces forward until I was behind a large monument to a family called Beggs who had all been killed in a house fire in the ’30s.
    I watched the cemetery gates and the shelter.
    No one came in, nobody left.
    There appeared to be no one else here but