I Hear the Sirens in the Street

said.
    “Thank you,” she said, and added, “he was a good boy.”

21: FIFTEENS
    Matty started bitching about another “bloody pointless trip to Islandmagee” so I ditched him at the police station and pulled in to Bentham’s shop to get some more smokes. I grabbed a packet of Marlboros from the shelf. Jeff wasn’t there, so running the joint was his daughter, Sonia, a sixth-former still in her school uniform. She was chewing bubblegum and reading something called Interzone Magazine .
    “Where’s your da?” I asked her.
    “I dunno,” she said, without looking up.
    “Are you minding the shop?”
    “Looks like it, don’t it?”
    “What’s news?”
    She put the magazine down and looked at me. “Philip K. Dick is dead.”
    “Who’s that?” I asked.
    She sighed dramatically. “That’ll be two pound for the fags.”
    “Your da gives me a policeman’s discount,” I said, with a smile.
    “Me da’s a buck eejit, then, isn’t he? About the only person guaranteed not to kneecap you is a peeler. That’ll be two pound for the fags and if you don’t like it you can fuck off.”
    I paid the two pounds and was about to drive down to Islandmagee when an incident report came in on the blower about two drunks fighting outside the hospital on Taylor’s Avenue. It wasn’t a detective’s job but it was my manor so I told the controllerthat I’d take care of it. I was there in two minutes. I knew both men. Jimmy McConkey was a fitter at Harland and Wolff until he’d been laid off, Charlie Blair was a hydraulic engineer at ICI until it closed. “For shame. What are you lads doing, blitzed out of your minds, at this time of the day?” I asked them.
    Charlie attempted to shove me and while he was off balance Jimmy pushed him to the ground.
    With difficulty I got them both in the back of the Land Rover and took them home to their long-suffering wives in Victoria Estate, where the women were using a cameo appearance by the sun to hang clothes from lines and chat over the fences. The men behaved themselves when they got out. We had gone from the adolescent male world of pushing and shoving to the feminine universe of washing and talk and order. There would be no more hijinks from them today.
    There was no point writing the incident up. It was nothing. It was just another sad little playlet in the great opera of misery all around us.
    I got back in the Land Rover and drove to Islandmagee in a foul mood.
    There was a gate across the private road. It was chained up and I couldn’t break it without causing trouble for myself so I parked the Land Rover and walked to Mrs McAlpine’s cottage carrying Martin’s stuff in an Adidas bag.
    Cora barked at me, giving Mrs McAlpine plenty of warning.
    She opened the door gingerly.
    There was blood on her hands.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “Hello.”
    “Is that blood?”
    “Aye.”
    “What are you doing?” I asked.
    “This whole question question question thing is very tiresome.”
    “Bad cop habit.”
    “I’m butchering a ewe, if you must know,” she said.
    “Can I come in?”
    “All right.”
    Her hair was redder today. Curlier. I wondered if she’d dyed it or was that a reaction to sunlight and being outdoors. She looked healthier too, ruddier. You would never call her Rubenesque but she’d put on weight and it suited her. Perhaps she was finally getting over Martin’s death. Looking after herself a little better.
    I went inside carrying the green army shoulder bag.
    “Do you mind if I finish up?”
    “Not at all.”
    We walked to the “washhouse” at the back of the farm where a sheep carcass lay spreadeagled on a wooden table. She began sawing and butchering it into various cuts of meat.
    “This’ll last you a while. Do you have a freezer?”
    “Harry does.”
    “I’d help you carry it over, but I’m supposed to stay away from your brother-in-law. I got a shot across my bows from the Chief Constable no less.”
    She laughed at that. “My God. I suppose his Masonic contacts are the only thing left in his arsenal.”
    She cut long strings of sinewy meat from the bone and trimmed the fat and threw it into a box marked “lard”.
    Thwack went the cleaver into bone. Thug went the cleaver into meat and fat.
    “So, uh, let me tell you why I’m here today. I was down at Carrickfergus UDR base and they asked me to take you some of Martin’s things. I brought them in the bag out there.”
    “You shouldn’t have.”
    “It was no trouble. Interesting