Free I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty

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 .
    “You didn’t really think she’d be growing rosary pea in that greenhouse, did you?” Matty asked.
    “You never know, mate, you have to follow up everything.”
    “I could have told you it was a waste of time … Sort of like this little journey.”
    “You’re quite the lippy wee character aren’t you, Matthew?”
    “I’m on an emotional rollercoaster, mate, someone fired a machine gun at me this morning, not to mention being harassed by a vicious dog.”
    “Tell 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 the eleven o’clock shakes. At lunch time he’d slip out to the nearest pub and after a couple of triple vodkas he’d be right as rain again.
    We met him in a large book-lined office overlooking the harbour and ferry terminal. The books were mostly thrillers and detective fiction which I found encouraging, but they were all from the ’60s and early ’70s, which wasn’t such a good sign. At some juncture in the last decade he’d lost interest in reading – had lost interest in everything probably. There was no wedding ring on his left hand, but many Presbyterians didn’t wear a ring because they considered it a Papist affectation. Even so, the room stank of divorce, failure and alcoholism – the standard troika for many a career RUC officer.
    We were both the same rank, detective inspector, but he’d been on the force twenty years longer than me, which made me wonder what the hell he had been doing all that time, and whether I was destined to go the same route.
    The rain was still pelting the windows and Scotland was a blue smudge to the east.
    “Gentlemen, have a seat,” he said. “Cup of tea or coffee?”
    “Thanks but no, we’re all tea’d out this morning,” I replied, with as decent an apologetic smile as I could muster.
    Dougherty folded his hands across his ample belly. He was wearing a white shirt and a brown suit that he’d obviously had for quite a few years, which, as he sat down, bunched at the sleeves and gave him an unfortunate comic air. A peeler could be a lot of things: a drunk, a thug, an idiot, a sociopath, but as long as you looked the part it was usually fine. Even in Larne Dougherty would have a hard time currying respect.
    “So what brings you gentlemen down from Carrick?” he asked.
    “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the McAlpine murder,” I said, all business.
    “The what?”
    “Martin McAlpine. He was a part-time UDR captain who was shot at his farm on Islandmagee last December.”
    “Ah, yes, I