I Hear the Sirens in the Street

there’d been a bombing somewhere and the street was full of smoke and soldiers: it was as if the movie had come to life. It took us an hour to get through the checkpoints and the rain. I tried to get Clare to come back to Coronation Road with me but she was a Jesus freak and the flick had messed with her head and all she wanted to do was go home and lie down. I dropped her at a cottage in Knocknagullah and then it was a quiet night in with chicken lo mein, vodka and lime and a quick whizz to Helen Mirren on a repeat Parky talking about the nude scenes in Caligula .
    The next day I asked Crabbie and Matty if there were any developments on any front. When they both said no I told them that the Chief wanted the O’Rourke case killed.
    “ You’re willing to drop this?” McCrabban asked sceptically.
    “Orders is orders,” I said. “As my dear old gran used to say ‘when someone shits on your chips, you have to eat the onion rings.’”
    “What?” McCrabban asked.
    “What do we work on then?” Matty wondered.
    “Theft cases. Stolen cars. Anything,” I said.
    If they’d both objected I would have taken the fight back to the Chief but neither of them kicked up a fuss, so that was that. The O’Rourke murder investigation was suspended indefinitely.
    I wiped the whiteboard, gathered up the materials from the incident room, put them in a box binder and placed it in the filing cabinet in my office. McCrabban was watching me out of the corner of his eye.
    “If the Chief asks you, tell him it’s a cold case now,” I said.
    “I will.”
    We exchanged a look and that look said that he knew that I was far too much of a stubborn arsehole to leave it there.

23: DELOREAN
    The factory was on waste ground in Dunmurry, West Belfast. A big hasty concrete and metal box that had gone up in eighteen months with the blasted city in various states of decay all around. If Coronation Road was the fall of Saigon, this part of Belfast was Hitler’s last days.
    Security was a couple of guys at the gate, but to get up to DeLorean’s office, I had to go through a metal detector, show my warrant card and wait until it was verified by a computer.
    John DeLorean was a very busy man and had his day scheduled out in tight fifteen-minute blocks. Our interview was scheduled from eleven thirty to eleven forty-five on a Monday morning. I could have pushed it but I didn’t want to make waves or have him ask questions of my superiors. I wanted this encounter to be as straightforward and low key as possible.
    On the inside the Dunmurry DeLorean factory dazzled me. Perhaps it was just amazing seeing any kind of industrial activity going on in Ulster. The assembly line was clean and efficient. Raw metal sheets and engines went in one end, aluminium gull-winged DeLorean sports cars came out the other. The administrative offices overlooked the factory floor (DeLorean was big on worker/management cooperation) and I could have stood there all day watching the engines getting mounted and the transmissions going in. It really was incredible. DeLorean had brought a successful industry to Belfast in the heart of theTroubles. He had done what everybody said couldn’t be done and Dunmurry was the only place in Ulster where heavy industry worked, where people actually made things.
    Three thousand men were employed here and maybe twice that in subsidiary trades. That was nine thousand men in West Belfast who wouldn’t join the terrorists.
    Everybody loved DeLorean: the local press, the British Government, the Northern Ireland office, the Irish government … Everybody, that is, except for a few privileged American auto journalists who had actually driven the DeLorean and said that it was clunky, unreliable and sloppily put together by an inexperienced workforce.
    These criticisms had publicly been dismissed by John DeLorean, who trusted his own judgement, not the judgement of “know nothing journalists”. He, after all, was the “man who had single-handedly saved GM” and by implication had therefore saved America.
    On TV his persona was half hard-headed businessman, half televangelist. In person he was trim, handsome, soft spoken, and for our interview he was wearing a conservative, unshowy blue suit.
    His hair was more grey than black. He had an interesting face: a long aquiline nose that didn’t really go with his squat peasant eyebrows and cheeks. It was a tanned, handsome visage that both radiated intelligence and a kind of weary, punchy