I Hear the Sirens in the Street

of the human soul. Optimistic colonial officials were always planting trees and sponsoring graffiti clearance schemes but the trees never lasted long and it was the brave man who dared clean paramilitary graffiti off his own house never mind in communal areas of the town.
    I lit a second cigarette. I was thinking about architecture because I was trying not to think about Laura.
    I hadn’t seen her in nearly a week.
    “Should we go in?” Crabbie asked.
    “Steady on, mate. I just lit me fag. Let me finish this first.”
    “Your head. She won’t be happy to be kept waiting,” Crabbie prophesied.
    Drizzle.
    A stray dog.
    A man called McCawley wearing his dead wife’s clothes pushing her empty wheelchair along the pavement. He saw us waiting by the Land Rover. “Bloody peelers, they should crucify the lot of you,” he said as he picked up our discarded cigarette butts.
    “Sean, come on, this is serious. It’s an appointment with the patho,” Crabbie insisted.
    He didn’t know that Laura and I had been avoiding one another.
    I didn’t know that we had been avoiding one another.
    A fortnight ago she’d gone to Edinburgh to do a presentation for a couple of days and after she’d returned she said that she was swamped with catch-up work.
    That was the official party line. In fact I knew that something was up. Something that had been in the wind for months.
    Maybe something that had been in the wind since we had met.
    This was her third trip to Edinburgh this year. Had she met someone else? My instincts said no, but even a detective could be blindsided. Perhaps detectives in particular could be blind-sided.
    For some time now I’d had the feeling that I had trapped her. By putting us in a life and death situation, by getting myself shot. How could she do anything but stay with me through the process of my recovery. She couldn’t possibly leave a man who had fallen into a coma and awoken to find that he had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal.
    She had protected herself to some extent. She had refused to move in with me on Coronation Road, because, she said, the Protestant women gave her dirty looks.
    She had bought herself a house in Straid. There had been no talk of marriage. Neither of us had said ‘I love you’.
    Before the recent absences we had seen each other two or three times a week.
    What were we? Boyfriend and girlfriend? It hardly seemed so much.
    But what then?
    I had no idea.
    Crabbie looked at me with those half closed, irritated brown eyes, and tapped his watch.
    “It’s nine fifteen,” he said in that voice of moral authority which came less from being a copper and more from his status as a sixth generation elder in the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. “The message, Sean, was to come at nine. We’re late.”
    “All right, all right, keep your wig on. Let’s go in,” I said.
    Cut to the hospital: scrubbed surfaces. Lowered voices. A chemical odour of bleach and carpet cleaner. Django Reinhardt’s “Tears” seeping through an ancient Tannoy system.
    The new nurse at reception looked at us sceptically. She was a classic specimen of the brisk, Irish, pretty, no nonsense nursey type.
    “There’s no smoking in here, gentlemen,” she said.
    I stubbed the fag in the ashtray. “We’re here to see Dr Cathcart,” I said.
    “And who are you?”
    “Detective Inspector Duffy, Carrick RUC, and this is my spiritual coach DC McCrabban.”
    “You can go through.”
    We stopped outside the swing doors of the Autopsy Room and knocked on the door.
    “Who is it?” she asked.
    “DI Duffy, DC McCrabban,” I said.
    “Come in.”
    Familiar smells. Bright overhead lights. Stainless steel bowls filled with intestines and internal organs. Glittering precision instruments laid out in neat rows. And the star of the show: ourold friend from yesterday lying on a gurney.
    Laura’s face was behind a mask, which I couldn’t help thinking was wonderfully metaphoric.
    “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said.
    “Good morning, Dr Cathcart,” Crabbie uttered automatically.
    “Hi,” I replied cheerfully.
    Our eyes met.
    She held my look for a couple of seconds and then smiled under the mask.
    It was hard to tell but it didn’t seem to be the look of a woman who was leaving you for another man.
    “So, what can you tell us about our victim, Dr Cathcart?” I asked.
    She picked up her clipboard. “He was a white male, about sixty, with grey, canescent hair. He was tall, six four or maybe six five.