I Hear the Sirens in the Street

thirty feet above the surf and probably on rough days the spray would come right up. We walked through what once had been the living room and the kitchen. There were sodden newspapers and ciggies in the hearth. “One of Harry’s cousins used to live here. But he upped and left for Canada,” she said. “It’s one of my secret places, like the old salt mine.”
    This one wasn’t so secret. My cop’s eyes took in discarded syringes, furniture broken up for firewood and an old piano which someone had taken a hammer to. The back garden led to the cliff path right down to the shore. The stone slabs were slippery and I almost went arse over tit in my gutties.
    “So, you’re from around here, aren’t you?” I asked.
    “Yeah, I’m from Mill Bay, just a few miles up the road.”
    “Any family still there?”
    “No. Folks are in Spain, older sister’s in San Francisco. She wants me to come over to America. I suppose I should. There’s nothing for me now in Ireland. Nothing for any of us here, really.”
    “That’s what everybody says.”
    We reached the bottom of the track. There were more abandoned cottages down here, much older dwellings. “These are from the famine?” I asked, pointing towards them.
    She nodded. “Harry says that this valley used to be bunged with people. Now it’s all sheep and a few of his loyal retainers.”
    We stepped onto the stony beach and she gathered mussels and whelks.
    “Are you making a soup?” I asked, helping her.
    “No, no, you just boil them up in a little chicken stock with some garlic. Delicious.”
    “Really?”
    “Don’t sound so sceptical.”
    In ten minutes her basket was half full. “I think that’s enough,” she said. “We’ll take a shortcut back through the forest.”
    We walked along the beach past a long rusting jetty sticking out into the water.
    “Harry’s?” I asked pointing at it.
    “Yeah, he keeps talking about renovating it, turning it into a marina, but he never will. All talk. Big plans.”
    We trudged back up the hill along another trail.
    “Initially I got the impression that your brother-in-law wasn’t too impressed with me,” I said.
    “Has he come around?”
    “A little bit, I think.”
    “Its not anything personal. This part of Islandmagee has never been fond of the law. Around here it’s always been aboutpoaching and cattle raiding and rustling stolen cattle over to Scotland.”
    We reached the edge of the wood. The trees were enormous and warped by age into strange patterns. Big elms and ashes, beeches and huge old oaks, living statues meditating in the rain. I smiled and I found to my surprise that she was holding my hand.
    “They’re talking to us,” she said.
    “The trees?”
    “You know what they’re saying?”
    “What?”
    “Every leaf is a miracle. Every leaf on Earth is a miracle machine that keeps us all alive.”
    “I think they’re saying, ‘ooh, me aching back, from standing here all day’.”
    She hit me on the shoulder. “You’re all the same, aren’t you?”
    “Who? Cops? Men?”
    There was a glint in her eye that I couldn’t decipher. “Hey, do you want see something really interesting, Inspector Duffy?”
    “Sure.”
    “This way.”
    We followed the woodland trail up a hill, catching the odd glimpse here and there of the motionless sea and beyond that, startlingly close, the Scottish coast.
    “Down here,” she said, and led me to a hazel grove where one solitary oak was standing by itself. It was clearly very old, and covered with moss and mistletoe. Prayers and petitions had been placed in plastic bags and hung from the lower branches. Little offerings and notes were leaning against the trunk. Coins, keys, lockets, photographs, at least a dozen plastic baby dolls, wooden boxes, tea cups, a silver spoon, an intricately carved woman with a belly swollen by pregnancy.
    A breeze stirred the notes and photographs.
    “Do you know what this is?” she asked.
    “Sure I do, it’s a fairy tree.”
    “You’re not totally ignorant.”
    “I’m from the Glens, love, I speak the Irish. I know things.”
    “You’re a Catholic?”
    “You didn’t know?”
    “No.”
    She nodded to herself. “Yeah, I can see it now … come on, let’s get back.”
    We walked back across the boggy pasture.
    “Were Martin and Harry close?” I asked.
    “I don’t know about close. There was an age difference, but they respected each other. Martin admired Harry for taking on the debts and the burdens of