I Hear the Sirens in the Street

doesn’t come to that.”
    “Amen, sir.”
    He leaned back in the chair and picked up his newspaper.“All right, Inspector, you’re dismissed.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And remember it’s Carol’s birthday on Friday and it’s your turn on the rota. Cake, hats, you know the drill. You know I like buttercream icing.”
    “I put the order in at McCaffrey’s yesterday. I’ll check with Henrietta on the way home.”
    “Very well. Get thee to a bunnery.”
    “You’ve been saving that one up, haven’t you, sir?”
    “I have,” he said with a smile.
    I turned on my heel. “Wait!” Brennan demanded.
    “Sir?”
    “‘Naples in Naples’, three down, six letters.”
    “Napoli, sir.”
    “Huh?”
    “In Naples, Naples is Napoli.”
    “Oh, I get it, all right, bugger off.”
    On the way back to Coronation Road I stopped in at McCaffrey’s, examined the cake, which was a typical Irish birthday cake layered with sponge, cream, rum, jam and sugar. I explained the Chief Inspector’s preferences and Annie said that that wouldn’t be a problem: she’d make the icing half an inch thick if we wanted. I told her that that would be great and made a mental note to have the defib kit on hand.
    I drove on through Carrickfergus’s blighted shopping precincts, past boarded-up shops and cafes, vandalised parks and playgrounds. Bored ragamuffin children of the type you often saw in Pulitzer-Prize-winning books of photography were sitting glumly on the wall over the railway lines waiting to drop objects down onto the Belfast train.
    I stopped at the heavily armoured Mace Supermarket which was covered with sectarian and paramilitary graffiti and a fading and unlikely claim that “Jesus Loves The Bay City Rollers!”
    I waded through the car park’s usual foliage of chip papers,plastic bags and crisp packets.
    Halfway through my shop the piece of music that had been playing in my head began over the speakers. I must have heard it last week when I’d been in here. I got cornflakes, a bottle of tequila and Heinz tomato soup and went to the checkout.
    “What is this music? It’s been in my head all day,” I asked the fifteen-year-old girl operating the till.
    “I have no idea, love. It’s bloody horrible, isn’t it?”
    I paid and went to the booth, startling Trevor, the assistant manager who was reading Outlaw of Gor with a wistful look on his basset-hound face. He didn’t know what the music was either.
    “I don’t pick the tapes, I just do what I’m told,” he said defensively.
    I asked him if I could check out his play box. He didn’t mind. I rummaged through the tapes and found the cassette currently on the go. Light Classical Hits IV . I looked down through the list of tracks and found the one it had to be: “The Aquarium” from Carnival of the Animals by Saint Saens.
    It was an odd piece, popular among audiences but not among musicians. The melody was carried by a glass harmonica, a really weird instrument that reputedly made its practitioners go mad. I nodded and put the cassette box down.
    “I won’t play it again, if you don’t like it, Inspector, you’re not the first to complain,” Trevor said.
    “No, actually, I’m a fan of Saint Saens,” I was going to say, but Trev was already changing the tape to Contemporary Hits Now!
    When I came out of the Mace smoke from a large incendiary bomb was drifting across the lough from Bangor and you could hear fire engines and ambulances on the grey, oddly pitching air.
    From the external supermarket speakers Paul Weller’s reedy baritone begin singing the first few bars of “A Town Called Malice” and I had to admit that the choice of song was depressingly appropriate.

2: THE DYING EARTH
    We stood there looking at north Belfast three miles away over the water. The sky a kind of septic brown, the buildings rain-smudged rectangles on the grim horizon. Belfast was not beautiful. It had been built on mudflats and without rock foundations nothing soared. Its architecture had been Victorian red-brick utilitarian and sixties brutalism before both of those tropes had crashed headlong into the Troubles. A thousand car bombs later and what was left was surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire and a steel security fence to keep the bombers out.
    Here in the north Belfast suburbs we only got sporadic terrorist attacks, but economic degradation and war had frozen the architecture in outmoded utilitarian schools whose chief purpose seemed to be the disheartening