Page 44 of Hang on St. Christopher

“Cows are good. You get up to anything in the wee hours?” he replied.

“Actually I did. I wrote a poem,” I said.

“About what?”

“A Viking king our ancestors murdered around this neck of the woods.”

“You want to tell me some of it?”

“No chance.”

Newry.

The stark, beautiful Mourne Mountains and then the stark, unlovely border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, which was swarming with soldiers and police. This was the main crossing point between Belfast and Dublin, and it was always a bloody nightmare.

If there had been any kind of express lane, I could have driven up it, flashed my warrant card, and driven on. But there was no express lane, and we had to wait in the queue with all the frigging civilians.

When we finally got to the front of the line, a soldier with a rifle asked to see my driver’s license. I showed him my warrant card.

“DI Sean Duffy, Carrick RUC,” I said.

“What’s the purpose of your visit to the Irish Republic?”

“Official police business,” I said.

“But what is it?”

“It’s confidential, sonny,” I said hoping that he wouldn’t fuck with me. But he was a pale English squaddie shitting himself to be on the border, and only seventeen years old, and he wasn’t going to fuck with anybody.

“Okay, over you go,” he said.

I drove the Beemer south on the N1 until we got to the outskirts of Dundalk. I got a road map from the back seat, and we examined the town map of Dundalk until we found the Garda Siochana station on the Crescent, right in the center of town.

You could tell we were in the Republic of Ireland now because the police station wasn’t surrounded by a bloody great antimissile wall or a sixty-foot fence that was supposed to deter the casual Molotov-cocktail thrower. This was how police stations were supposed to be. An unarmored, inoffensive little red-brick building sandwiched between the distillery and the grammar school. If your cat went missing or you had a break-in, you could just walk into the friendly police station, and the friendly unarmed police officers would help you with your problems. On our side of the border, it was an entirely different story. The police stations were all bunkers, and you had to be searched going in and out, which probably kept many punters away and—silver lining—the crime stats down.

I parked the Beemer, and we went inside (without being buzzed in or searched) and found the desk sergeant, who was not behind bulletproof glass but was, charmingly, behind an actual desk. Friendly ginger-beardy guy in glasses. They were playing music over the speakers, an easy-listening station from Dublin that was currently spinning “’74–’75” by the Connells, a song that always made me kind of depressed since 1975 was my first year in the police—the sort of life change from which there was no stepping back.

“What can I do for you gents?” the desk sergeant asked.

I showed him my warrant card and explained who I was.

“You’ll be wanting the RUC liaison officer,” the sergeant said in a friendly manner. “I’ll take you to him.”

Upstairs to the office of the RUC LO, an Inspector Thomas O’Neill, a confident, bullish mustachioed man in his forties. He sat us down in his office and, when the sergeant had gone, asked what this was all about.

I explained about our John Doe and the phone calls to the mysterious phone box on Point Road. He showed no reaction of any kind to our information, and I thought that maybe I was barking up the wrong tree with this angle.

“Does any of this mean anything to you at all?” I asked a little desperately.

“Hold on a minute,” O’Neill said. He got up from behind his desk, walked across the room, and closed his office door. He sat back down at his desk and picked up the phone. “Kathy, no calls, please,” he said.

“Did you drive out to Point Road this morning at all to have a look at the phone box?”

“No, we came to see you first.”

“Good. That’s very good. There’s a house on Point Road that we have under more or less constant surveillance. I wouldn’t want two RUC officers and their northern-reg car becoming part of our operation.”

“Sorry, what operation? Who are you surveilling?”