Free In the Morning I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty

rather good, rising above the naive primitivism of most gable murals to become something that was convincingly terrifying.
    I went inside, holding my nose against the stench of urine.
    I found a heavily graffitied floor plan and saw that 4H was a corner flat on the fourth floor.
    I walked jauntily toward the lift. My years of police training were not required to ascertain whether it worked or not. The elevator shaft was a gaping hole with smashed machinery, garbage, and a pram lying at the bottom of it. If there’d been a live or dead baby in the pram I wouldn’t have been surprised.
    We found the stairs and walked to the fourth floor. The architect had assumed that the stairs would be seldom used, for they were narrow and dimly lit through broken windows. They stank of vomit, beer, rotting leaves, and garbage. The occasional black, shoe-sized stain was not the mold I first suspected but, in fact, dead, decaying Norwegian rats.
    Kate had the sense not to say “charming” or anything like that. This transcended her acute English sense of irony.
    We got to level four and took a breather.
    “Are you quite sure MI5 is intercepting the mail for this place? Services seem pretty basic around here to me,” I said to her.
    “If this is Dermot’s mother’s place, I can assure you that we’re reading her post and tapping her phones.”
    “If you say so,” I muttered, and wondered what MI5 agent would have the balls to come out here to INLA central, break into Mrs. McCann’s flat, and install a phone bug—if indeed that was how you installed a phone bug.
    We walked along a dank, dark corridor and knocked on the door of flat 4H.
    “Who is it?” a woman asked.
    “Police,” I said.
    “Fuck off!” the woman said.
    “It’s about Dermot,” I said.
    There was a pause and some discussion and finally the door opened. Dermot’s ma, Maureen, was slight, about five one or two, a fragile wisp of a thing with her hair in a greying black bob. Her eyes were hazel, her lips red, her skin like grease paper. I’d seen screen vampires with more color in their cheeks. She was in her fifties now and clearly she didn’t remember me, although I’d been to Dermot’s old house in Creggy Terrace half a dozen times when I’d been a kid.
    “What about him?” Maureen asked.
    “Could I come in, Mrs. McCann?”
    “What about Dermot? Is he dead? Have youse topped him?”
    “No. We haven’t. Can I come in?”
    “Are you the police right enough?”
    I showed her my warrant card.
    “I’ll give you five minutes of my time and not a minute more.”
    We went inside.
    The flat was large, tidy, and well maintained, but stank of cigarette smoke, booze and quiet desperation. There was a spectacular prospect to the northeast of Donegal, Derry City, and Lough Foyle.
    “Who is it, Ma?” Fiona McCann said from behind an ironing board in the kitchen.
    Fiona was two years older than me, and I remembered her from my visits to Dermot’s old house. Back then she’d been extremely beautiful in a way that other Derry girls weren’t. In a way Irish lasses weren’t. Her complexion was dark and her eyes were dark and her voice had been deliberately modeled on Janis Joplin’s. There had always been something exotic about her (and the whole clan come to that). The exoticism of fallen aristocrats, or exiled royals adrift in a far-off land. Fiona had gone to America for five years, worked as a nurse, had a kid, left her husband, and come back to Derry just as Dermot was going inside, her father was dying of congestive heart failure, and her other brothers and sisters were leaving for anywhere else. Not exactly the brilliant move of the decade that one.
    “It’s the polis, they’ve come to talk about Dermot,” Mrs. McCann said.
    Fiona looked up from the ironing board. Her red hair was streaked with white and there were deep crevasses in her cheeks. She looked fifty or even sixty and I wondered whether she was using the big H. There was a fag-end