Free I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty Page A

stinks.”
    â€œWhat stinks? This? It’s a dead end, surely?”
    I stared out at the boggy farm and through the rearview mirror I watched her go back inside the house.
    â€œLet’s get out of here. Let’s see if we can’t dig a little deeper into the late Mr McAlpine’s murder.”
    â€œWhat the hell for?”
    â€œJust get us going, will ya?”
    â€œOkay.”
    We got about a hundred yards down the lane but a farmer was blocking the road with his tractor. It had stalled on the edgeof the sheugh. He climbed down out of the cab to apologise. He had brown eyes under his flat cap. He was about forty-five. He had a pipe. So far so ordinary, but there was something about him I didn’t like. An unblinking quality to those brown eyes that most people didn’t have towards cops.
    â€œSorry lads, won’t be a moment,” he said. “I was turning this baste of a thing and I misjudged the size of the road.”
    A road he’s driven down and turned his tractor around on a thousand times
, I was thinking to myself.
    â€œOh, that’s okay, we’re in no hurry,” Matty said.
    I added nothing.
    â€œJust got to get the front wheel out of the ditch,” the man said, climbing back into the cab and turning the thing on.
    The wheel came out easily and the man pulled the tractor over to let us pass.
    Matty started the Rover and waved.
    â€œWhat do you think that was all about?” I asked as I looked at the tractor in the side mirror.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe man with the tractor.”
    â€œWhat about it?”
    â€œHim fucking with us like that.”
    Matty stared at me and when I didn’t elaborate he looked back down the road.
    â€œSo where to, boss?” he asked.
    â€œLarne RUC,” I insisted.

6: SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM
    We took the shore road past Magheramorne quarry, where the slag heaps ran next to the road and where the fields were a strange John Deere green.
    Radio One decided to torture us by heavily rotating “Making Your Mind Up” to commemorate Bucks Fizz’s triumph in the previous year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Even Matty couldn’t take it and after hunting in vain for another station we rummaged in the Land Rover’s cassette stash and found Joan Armatrading’s
Walk Under Ladders
.
    â€œYou didn’t really think she’d be growing rosary pea in that greenhouse, did you?” Matty asked.
    â€œYou never know, mate, you have to follow up everything.”
    â€œI could have told you it was a waste of time … Sort of like this little journey.”
    â€œYou’re quite the lippy wee character aren’t you, Matthew?”
    â€œI’m on an emotional rollercoaster, mate, someone fired a machine gun at me this morning, not to mention being harassed by a vicious dog.”
    â€œTell Kenny Dalziel you’re putting in for emotional hardship money. That’ll make the bastard’s head explode.”
    Larne RUC station was a massive concrete bunker near the harbour. It was known to be one of the safest cop postings in all of Northern Ireland because the town was small with a population that was over ninety per cent Protestant. The IRA wouldhave few, if any, safe houses in the community and an IRA cell from Belfast could not easily make an escape to a nearby haven. In general the worst the Larne peelers had to deal with was drunkenness on Friday and Saturday nights and the occasional fracas between rival gangs of football supporters heading over or back from the ferry to Scotland. As a result of all this, Larne was known as a place where they dumped lazy, old and problem officers who could cause real difficulties elsewhere.
    The McAlpine murder had been investigated by an Inspector Dougherty, a red-nosed, white-haired old stager with a tremble in his left hand that to the uneducated eye could be Parkinson’s disease or MS or some other malady but which was actually