I Hear the Sirens in the Street

the green Wellingtons and the accent. He was really an old-school character. I found myself warming to him.
    “Do you ever grow rosary pea in here?”
    “What pea?”
    “Rosary pea.”
    “Never heard of it. What are you doing here? You’ve come to ask me about my garden?”
    “I’ve been up to see John DeLorean.”
    “And?”
    “The car guy. The guy who is going to save Northern Ireland from the abyss.”
    “I know who he is.”
    “Of course you do, Harry. His factory is on a piece of your land. Some old waste ground in Belfast that is now the hub of Ireland’s regeneration project.”
    He put down the pot he was working on and took off his thick gardening gloves. He cleared his throat. “And what exactly has this got to do with anything?”
    “Your brother was an intelligence officer for the UDr He ran a series of informers for them. One of them told him something about a guy asking questions and taking photographs at the DeLorean factory. I went to see Mr DeLorean and he told me that he’s subject to industrial espionage all the time, thatit’s pretty much par for the course, so that’s okay. But you see this tip about Dunmurry was the last entry in your brother’s log book and the informer that gave your brother that tip has gone missing. And of course your brother himself was murdered. I thought perhaps that these incidents were connected somehow and I thought that maybe you might have some insight into them?”
    “What are you implying?”
    “I’m not implying anything. I merely thought that you might possibly have an angle on this that I, as an outsider, would not.”
    “I am not terribly fond of your tone, detective,” Sir Harry said.
    “I’m sorry about that. There was no tone, sir. No offence meant, I assure you.”
    That seemed to mollify him a little.
    He sniffed and sized me up.
    “So you’re still looking into Martin’s death?”
    “I am.”
    He nodded and breathed out slowly. “I take it you think it wasn’t a random IRA hit then?”
    “Oh, no, I haven’t got that far yet. I just want to parse this link a little. You, DeLorean, Martin’s informer … I wanted to see where all this went.”
    “All right, maybe I can help. Come into the house and we’ll discuss it over tea. Have you got some time?”
    “All the time in the world.”
    “That other detective, the one who died … I hate to speak ill of the dead, but, well … I didn’t have much confidence in him.”
    “No.”
    We went into a library on the ground floor.
    Floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with old books. A formal leather sofa worn comfortable by generations of use and repair, use and repair. A few more modern chairs, an oak table, a reading lectern and a nice bay window with an easterly prospect ofthe coast and the Irish Sea only a few hundred yards over the fields.
    Mrs Patton brought the tea.
    It was a Darjeeling. Very strong and over-steeped. Harry didn’t seem to notice. He was much more relaxed now. “So you really think this could be something to do with John DeLorean?” he asked, eagerly.
    “Perhaps. What exactly is the nature of the relationship between you and Mr DeLorean?”
    He shrugged. “Relationship. Ha! The man’s a user. He doesn’t have relationships with people. He uses people.”
    “How did you get to know him in the first place?”
    “Two years ago I started hearing rumours that DeLorean was looking to invest in Northern Ireland. Build a big auto plant for this sports car he was designing. Lots of jobs. The whole thing would be underwritten by the Northern Ireland Office. They’d pump in fifty million. They were desperate to have any kind of investment, actual honest to God money flowing into Northern Ireland. So, as you may or may not know, I’ve been a having a few financial problems of my own. My father died in ’69 and I’m still paying the estates taxes – that’s not hyperbole, by the way, I really am still paying them off. If he’d died one year later it would have been under the Tories, but no, he had to die in 1969, when the rate was through the roof … Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins, asked me to quote, donate, unquote, some land that I had in Dunmurry for a factory site. And I did, and that’s how I know DeLorean. I’m his landlord.”
    That confirmed what I knew, but I didn’t see how it tied into Martin’s death or into anything else.
    “You want to know how much he pays me for all those acres?”
    “How