Page 78 of Hang on St. Christopher

“Hasn’t taken any notice at all. Officially. Yet.”

“But unofficially, he was up here with his gang, taking all his guns back.”

“That’s certainly a possibility,” Crabbie agreed.

“The NIO want those bloody Picassos, don’t they?”

“I imagine they do.”

“They’ll end up in some bloated civil servant’s office in London, you mark my words,” I grumbled.

“Where are they now?”

“I took them home. I found them on the bloody floor of the incident room. Someone had knocked them over.”

“If they get nicked out of your home, Sean, the NIO is going to have your guts for garters.”

“I know.”

The chief inspector was at a conference, so in his absence we didn’t have to present a case progress report and could get some real work done.

I called Detective O’Neill in Dundalk. He was a good lad who’d followed through on our conversation. He’d been around to Brendan O’Roarke’s house and apprised him of my desire to have a chat. O’Roarke had said he’d think about it.

“Can’t we just arrest him and drag him down to an interview room?”

“On what charge?”

“Make something up.”

“We don’t do that down here,” O’Neill said somewhat sniffily.

“All right, mate. Well, thanks.”

Another day waned.

Time strayed into the offices and nooks and crannies of Carrickfergus RUC and lingered there. Early 1990s time that hadn’t quite shaken off the vibe of the 1980s yet. The Tories still ruled in London, the Republicans still owned the White House, Fianna Fáil still ruled in Dublin, and in Belfast those loudmouthed demagogues Paisley and Adams still represented the people of Ulster.

At five o’clock, I said goodbye to McCrabban and drove home to Coronation Road. The sun was out, and kids were playing kerby in the middle of the street.

Yeah, what I’d told Rachel was kosher. Coronation Road was a safe street now. There had been two attacks on my house in seven years, and that was two too many for Bobby Cameron, the local paramilitary commander. This was his neighborhood, and assassins didn’t come onto his street without his say-so. He had pulled strings, and one day the council had shown to set up speed bumps every few hundred yards on Coronation Road. No more boy racers or potential drive-bys now. And after the speed bumps came the new one-way system. You could enter the street only at Victoria Primary School and you could leave it only at the top of Victoria Road. It was a lot more secure, but no system was ever foolproof. When I was staying here, I still looked under my car every morning for mercury tilt switch bombs, and I still left a thin sliver of paper wedged in the bottom of the front and back doors to see if anyone had opened one without my knowledge and was waiting for me inside.

When the paper in the front door wasn’t there, I would immediately ask Mrs. Campbell if she’d been over to leave off a parcel, and the like. The five or six times I’d come back to find the sliver of paper missing from the front door had always coincided with Mrs. Campbell letting in a delivery man or the gas man or answering a persistent telephone caller.

Mrs. Campbell, however,nevercame in the back door. Her key was to the front, and she had no need or interest in coming in around the back. Since I’d been living here by myself on my part-time days, I’dalwayscome back to Coronation Road andalwaysfound that little sliver of paper stuck in the bottom of the back door.

But not tonight.

Tonight, when I went into the washhouse at the back of the house to get some turf for the fire, the little sliver of paper I’d wedged in the door wasn’t there.

“What the hell?”

I tried the back door. The door was locked, but the sliver of paper was gone. I examined the washhouse floor.

Nope.

The precautions you take to get you through life: always check under your car, embed a lock pick in your jacket sleeve, never sit with your back to a door or a window, and always check the house for break-ins.

I opened the back door, and sure enough, the paper was lying there in the garden. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t looking for it, but I noticed it because Iwaslooking for it. I picked it up and examined the piece of paper. Just a random strip pulled from theBelfast Telegraph. Could a dog somehow have gotten into the back garden and worried out the paper from the doorjamb?