I Hear the Sirens in the Street

gone through troubles with his missus last year and had never said one word about it.
    I investigated the robbery and of course there were no witnesses, but an informant our agent handler knew called Jackdaw told us some good information.
    A guy called Gus Plant had bought everyone a round of drinks in the Borough Arms on Saturday night and boasted to everyone that he was going to get himself a new motor. Crabbie and I got a warrant and went to Gus’s house in Castlemara Estate. He’d had the stolen money under his bed.
    It was pathetic.
    We cuffed him and his wife screamed at him all the way outside. She’d told him that that was the first place the cops would look and he hadn’t listened because he never listened.
    “Prison’ll be good for you, mate. Anything to get away from that racket,” I told him in the back of the Rover.
    It wasn’t The Mystery of the Yellow Room but it was a case solved and it kept the Chief off our backs for a couple of days.
    I called Tony McIlroy and asked him about the Dougherty murder.
    For a moment he was baffled.
    “We yellowed that file. It’s going nowhere,” he said.
    “You interviewed the widow?”
    “Aye, I did. You didn’t tell me she was a good-looking lass.”
    “And?”
    “And what?”
    “And what are your impressions? Did she have something to do with Dougherty’s death?”
    “Fuck, no.”
    “That’s it? A simple no? She had no alibi.”
    “Or motive, or weapon, or cojones, or experience … Hey, I’ve another call, I’ll call you back.”
    He didn’t call me back.
    Days.
    Nights.
    Rain through the kitchen window. Thin daffodils. Fragile lilacs. Gulls flopping sideways into the wind. An achromatic vacancy to the sky.
    I canvassed for witnesses, tried to nail down Bill O’Rourke’s last movements, but nobody knew anything. Nobody had seen him after he left the Dunmurry Country Inn.
    One morning the Chief Inspector had us up to his office. “Lads, listen, I’m putting the name and number of the divisional psychiatrist up on the noticeboard. I suggest you tell the lads to avail themselves of his services. The bottle is not the answer,” he said, finishing a double whiskey chaser.
    April marched on.
    We put the O’Rourke case in a yellow binder, which meant that it was open but not actively being pursued.
    This represented yet another personal defeat. Half a dozen murder investigations under my belt and not one of them had resulted in a successful prosecution.
    This time we hadn’t even found out who’d done it.
    A man mourning his wife had come on holiday to Ireland and someone had poisoned him, chopped up the body, frozen him and dumped him like trash.
    “It’s sickening,” I told Matty and McCrabban over a hot whiskey at the Dobbins.
    “It’s part of the job, mate,” Crabbie said philosophically. “You’ll drive yourself mad if you’re after a hundred per cent clearance rate.”
    He was right about that, but wasn’t it also possible that I justwasn’t a very good copper? Perhaps I lacked focus or attention to detail or maybe I just didn’t have the right stuff to be a really good detective. Or even a half-decent detective.
    A wet, frigid, Monday morning we got a call about a break-in at the rugby club on the Woodburn Road. Trophies had been stolen. The thieves had come in through a skylight. None of us could face going up onto the rugby club roof in this weather so we drew straws. Matty and I got the short ones.
    We drove up the Woodburn Road, climbed a rickety ladder, got on the roof and gathered evidence while rain came down in buckets and a caretaker kept saying “It’s not safe up there, be careful, now.”
    We heroically dusted for prints and found nothing. A pigeon shat on Matty’s back. We climbed back down, wrote a description of the missing articles and said we’d put the word out. We had a courtesy pint in the club and we were about to drive home when I noticed that the rugby club was right next to Carrickfergus UDR base.
    The UDR barracks was even more heavily defended than the police station. A twenty-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire was in front of a thick blast-wall made of reinforced concrete.
    It was an ugly structure: utilitarian, grim, Soviet. I had never been inside. You’d think that there were would be a lot of cooperation between the police and the UDr The Ulster Defence Regiment was the locally recruited regiment of the British Army and there were often joint RUC/UDR patrols, but in fact