Page 90 of Hang on St. Christopher

“Will we take my car?” I suggested.

“Brought a police Land Rover. You’ll probably need to put some shoes on,” Crabbie said coldly.

I grabbed a pair of sneakers and got in the front of the Land Rover with him while the new trainee detective sat in the back. Crabbie said nothing. He approved of Beth. She was a Presbyterian, a schoolteacher. She had given me a beautiful, precocious daughter. She had cooked dinner for him and his wife. She had invited him to her house, and we had all broken bread together there. And even if none of that had been true, it wouldn’t have mattered. He liked her.

I caught his eyes in the rearview mirror, and he looked away immediately.

I’d never seen him so pissed off at me.

“Mind if I turn on the radio?” I said meekly.

“Suit yourself.”

I found Radio 3 and got the last bars of the Shostakovich, which was sublime stuff but it didn’t cheer me up one bit. Made it worse, in fact. Turned it off.

Silence all the way to the caravan site, and then the rain came on again.

The other trainee detectives were waiting for us, standing outside in the wet like bloody idiots. The one with the glasses looked as if they’d fished her out of the river.

I got out and took a hit off my inhaler.

The rain immediately pouring down the neck of my leather jacket.

“Evening, all,” I said to the trainees. They were all so young, none of them got the Dixon of Dock Green reference.

“This way, Detective Inspector Duffy,” Crabbie said, and I followed him across the muddy campsite to Locke’s caravan.

“You found something that the FO team missed?” I asked, amazed.

“Young Jamie found it,” Crabbie said.

“In the toaster. He kept it in the toaster,” the one with the soul patch said.

Kept what? I wondered, but when I got into the caravan Crabbie showed it to me next to the toaster, nice and safe inside an evidence bag.

It was a piece of A4 paper on which a dozen names and addresses had been written.

I recognized several of the names as senior Republican players, politicians, and activists. Most of them were either IRA or ex-IRA. Some were very prominent people indeed, including ****** ********** and ***** ***** and ***** ******.

“What is this?” one of the trainees asked.

“It’s a kill list,” I said.

Crabbie nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”

“Ask the kids to go wait in the Land Rover,” I said.

Crabbie ushered them to the Land Rover and came back to the caravan, where I was sitting down at the Formica table.

“This will have to go to Special Branch,” I said. “They will have to warn everyone on this list that a possible IRA hit man has their name and address.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“You know what Special Branch are like. They might subsume our entire investigation.”

“So be it.”

“What I mean is, they’ll take over and we’ll be back to the part-time reserve.”