Page 39 of Hang on St. Christopher

“It’s me.”

“What’s up, Sean?”

“You’ve got to come in to work this morning, mate.”

“I have farm business.”

“This is a priority. We’re on this case. We’re detectives again. We gave our word to the chief inspector.”

“You gave your word.”

“They’re paying us time and a half until Lawson comes back. Double time if it’s after hours like last night. That would buy you your new tractor tires or pitchforks or whatever it is one needs on a farm.”

“It certainly would come in useful. All right, I’ll tell the wife, and if she gives the go-ahead I’ll see you in half an hour.”

“First order of business is probably to investigate this phone box in Dundalk.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“You fancy a trip over the border?”

“No.”

“Well, we’ll discuss it when you come in. See you in a bit, mate.”

I hung up the phone, put on a clean white shirt, pulled on my shoulder holsteravecGlock 17, and a black leather jacket over the top of that.

Out to the Beemer. I looked underneath it for bombs, found zilch, drove up to Victoria, and instead of turning right turned left toward the new housing developments they were building up there.

It was a bold new world up here, left of Coronation Road and past the graveyard. When I’d first moved here, this was all Irish countryside, but now there was a Presbyterian church, scores of brand-new houses, a new road, and even an integrated primary school (Carrick’s first), which had had the radical idea that Protestant and Catholic kids should be educated together.

Also, up here lived a guy we’d lifted for selling stolen paintings. His name was Archie Simmons, and he’d been arrested many times for dealing stolen goods out of his antique shop in Carrick. If he couldn’t get stolen art, he’d forge it himself and pass it off as an original. If you ever wonder why there are just so many George William Russells or Jack B. Yeatses on the market, it’s down to people like Archie. The RUC had been trying to nail him since the 1960s without much success. The most recent case against him had collapsed because the witness who had accepted a “genuine” Marc Chagall burgled from a manor house in County Down had recanted his story at the preliminary hearing, and Archie had had to be freed. This kind of thing happened all the time. In cases of art theft where there was a paramilitary dimension and provenance issues, the case often got dropped to avoid great embarrassment. Few people wanted to admit that they’d had a forgery hanging in their living room for years.

Muddy lane, new housing development, big mock Tudor with a Merc parked outside.

I knocked on the door.

A long pause. I knocked again.

“Who is it?”

“Sean Duffy,” I said.

“The policeman?”

“Aye.”

“What’s this about?”

“Open the door and I’ll tell you.”

He opened the door a crack. He was a tall, skinny old geezer with gray skin, white scruffy beard, and lank white hair. He looked near death, but he had looked like that since the first mug shot I’d seen of him, taken in 1967, so he was probably going to be one of those old dudes who would live forever.

“I haven’t done nothing,” Archie said in a vague English accent that sounded put on.

“I never said you did.”

“Duffy, eh? I heard you jacked it in.”