I Hear the Sirens in the Street

me.
    Rain was pouring down the back of my neck.
    It was cold.
    And yet I knew that the place was not deserted.
    She was here, whoever she was.
    She had called me from the phone box on Victoria Road and now she was here, waiting for me.
    Why?
    I put my hand in my pocket and clicked back the hammer on the revolver and stepped out from behind the Beggs family headstone.
    I walked slowly to the graveyard shelter, scanning to the left and right and whirling one-eighty behind me. I raised my weapon and carried it two-handed in front of me.
    She was here. She was watching. I could feel it.
    I entered the shelter and turned round to look back at the graveyard.
    Nothing moved but there were many hiding places behind the trees, the tombstones and the stone walls.
    There was no glint from a pair of binoculars or a rifle scope.
    “I came. Isn’t that what you wanted?” I said aloud.
    A crow cawed.
    A car drove past on Victoria Road.
    I sat on a long bench that had been vandalised down to a couple of wooden slats.
    I stared out at the dreary rows of headstones, Celtic crosses and monuments.
    Nope. There was nothing and nobody.
    She was more patient than me and that was not a good thing. Impatient coppers got themselves killed in this country.
    Thunder rumbled over the lough.
    The rain grew heavier. Rivers of water were gushing down the Antrim Plateau and forming little pools in the cemetery. I pulled out me Marlboros and lit a cigarette.
    I walked to the edge of the shelter and looked out. Worms by the hundred were disgorging themselves from their human feast and writhing on the emerald grass.
    Grass so green here that it hurt to look at it.
    Why? Why had she called me? What was this about? Had I disrupted her plans by coming over the wall and not through the gates? Had she got cold feet? Was it just a regular crank call?
    I sat there, waited, watched.
    She waited too.
    The sky darkened.
    Magpies descended to feast on the snails and earthworms.
    “Hello!” I yelled out into the weather. “Hello!”
    Silence.
    I turned and walked back and it was only then that I noticed the envelope duct-taped to the back of the bench.
    I immediately looked away and lit another cigarette.
    When the cigarette was done, I turned round with my back to the exposed south entrance. If she was watching she wouldn’t know what I was doing. Perhaps she would think that I was pissing against the wall.
    I took out a pair of latex gloves from inside my raincoat pocket and put them on.
    I checked for wires or booby traps and finding none ripped the envelope off. I examined it. It was a green greeting card envelope. Keeping my back facing south, I opened it. Inside there was a Hallmark greeting card with a shamrock on the cover.
    I opened it. “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day” was the message printed inside.
    At first I thought there was no message at all but then I saw it opposite the greeting.
    “1CR1312”, she had written in capital letters in black pen on the top of the page.
    You could, perhaps, have mistaken it for a serial number.
    I noticed that actually there was a space between the 3 and the 1 so that really it read: “1CR 13 12.”
    Even a non-Bible-reading Papist like me knew what it was.
    It was a verse from the New Testament.
    Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13 , verse 12.
    And not only that – it was something familiar. Something I should know.
    The answers would be in my King James Bible back home. My house was only two minutes away, but there was something I had to do here first.
    I put the card back in the envelope and retaped it to the seat back.
    I pretended to zip up my fly, then I turned round and lit another cigarette.
    I did up the collar on my coat and walked out of the sheltertowards the cemetery exit. I didn’t look to the left or right, instead I hurried on down Coronation Road and only when I was at Mrs Bridewell’s house did I stop and turn and look: two kids playing kerby, a woman pushing a pram, a stray dog sleeping in the middle of the street; no one else, no strangers, no unknown cars.
    I ran up the path and knocked on Mrs Bridewell’s door.
    She opened it almost immediately. She had curlers in and she was smoking a cigarette. She was wearing a pink bathrobe, pink fuzzy slippers and no make up. She seemed about twenty. She was really very good-looking.
    “Oh, Mr Duffy, I thought it was the milk man come back to replace those bottles that the—”
    “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs Bridewell,