I Hear the Sirens in the Street

that was odd? The timing, I mean.”
    “No.”
    “And they show up when?”
    “About half an hour ago, like I said.”
    “Were they in uniform?”
    “No.”
    “They have ID?”
    “I didn’t think it was necessary to check. I mean, they said they were on their way and then they showed up.”
    “Describe them.”
    “Just a couple of blokes. Suits, ties … I wasn’t really paying attention.”
    “Did they sign for her? Anything like that?”
    “Are they supposed to?”
    “You let two strangers come in here and take a suspect out of the cells and you didn’t check their IDs or ask them to sign for her?”
    “She was only in for bike theft, wasn’t she?”
    I walked down to the cells to see if she’d left anything there.
    She hadn’t.
    I spent the next hour calling Special Branch.
    Of course there was no Superintendent McClue and no officers had been sent to Whitehead Police Station to pick up a suspect. This was as I had expected. I ran the name Alice Smith through the database but nothing of interest came up.
    I walked to the nearest Eason’s in Carrick and bought myself a copy of Doctor Faustus . Baroque wasn’t the word. Made Henry James seem like Jackie Collins. Not the kind of book I’d bring on a stakeout, but none of this play was the way I would have done things. It was very much amateur hour which could mean anything from civilians on a jape to the goons on Gower Street who still prided themselves on their “amateur” status.
    Bath. Vodka gimlet. King James Bible. No luck on seeing through the glass darkly. Ask Presbyterian church elder McCrabban in the morning and get his take. Probably bollocks. Cryptic messages were for spy films and crazy people. In my experience when people wanted to tell you something they bloody told you. That was the Ulster way. Best to say nothing but when you do speak make sure that you are understood.
    I went to bed with Doctor Faustus and its powerful soporific qualities became readily apparent.

14: A VERY ORDINARY ASSASSINATION
    The clock radio woke me at 7.06. I’d been fiddling with the alarm for several days now and I had precisely timed it for when the news bulletin ended and BBC Radio One would only be playing music. These days only a madman would want to wake to the actual news. The Beeb could be relied upon to do things on schedule. The talk and the bulletin were indeed over and the song was “Hanging on the Telephone” by Blondie.
    I listened to the song, had a quick Debbie Harry fantasy, and got of bed.
    Stairs. Kitchen.
    Doorbell. It was a tinker disguised in drink, offering to pave my driveway for twenty quid. When I told him I didn’t have a driveway he said he’d fix my broken electrical appliances or recite a verse from the Tain for a shilling. I let him recite me some poetry and gave him fifty pence if promised not to tell his mates I was a soft touch.
    After toast and two cups of coffee I finally put on the eight o’clock Radio Ulster News. The policeman’s murder was not the headline. It was only the fourth lead after three separate stories about the Task Force’s adventures in the Falkland Islands. Some wars, it seemed, were more important than others.
    “In Ballygalley, north of Larne, a full-time RUC officer was shot dead outside his home late last night. Inspector David Dougherty, fifty-nine, was divorced with one child. TheProvisional IRA claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to the BBC using a recognised code word. Ian Paisley, the MP for the constituency, called Inspector Dougherty’s murder ‘a reprehensible act of murder in the continuing IRA campaign of genocide against the Protestant people’. The Inspector’s widow could not last night be reached for comment. In other news Harland and Wolff shipyard have laid off a further five hundred welders under a restructuring—”
    There could only be one Inspector David Dougherty at Larne RUC.
    I switched off the radio, went back upstairs, got dressed in my black polo neck sweater, black jeans, DM shoes, black raincoat. I put my leather shoulder holster under the raincoat, picked up my Smith and Wesson and checked that there were six rounds in the barrel.
    “Right,” I said, and slipped outside.
    I looked under the car for a mercury tilt bomb, found nothing, opened the door, wound down the windows, put the key in the ignition.
    There was a whoosh through the vents which, for a brief unhappy moment, I thought was the percussion wave of an explosion, but it