Matty comes back with McCallister’s brandy. Burke grabs it and swallows half of it. He wipes his mouth and nods.

“Knew that would sort me,” he says, with a unpleasant smile.

He goes back inside on unsteady legs.

When he’s gone I whisper to Matty: “You and me a few years from now, if we don’t watch out.”

“I’ve got fishing, what have you got, mate?” Matty asks.

“Uh …”

“You should get a pet. A tortoise is good. They’re lots of fun. You can paint stuff on their shells. My sister’s looking to get rid of hers. Twenty quid. It’s got a great personality.”

“A tortoise isn’t my idea of—”

“Hey, boy! Does your warrant cover the back garden?” McFarlane yells at Matty from the kitchen window.

“Show him the warrant, will you, DC McBride? And tell him that if he calls you boy again you’ll lift him and bring the fucker in for a comprehensive cavity search.”

Matty shows McFarlane the legalese and yells back to me: “Inspector Duffy, it sounds like somebody’s not keen for us to investigate his back yard.”

“Aye, I wonder what we’ll find,” I say.

What we find is a back garden which is a dumping ground for assorted garbage: old beds, old tyres, mattresses. In many places thin reed trees and ferns are growing through a thicket of grass. Along the wall there seems to be an ancient motorbike; but more importantly, there in the north-west corner, there’s a greenhouse.

We open the door and go inside. It’s clean, humid, well-maintained and all the windows are intact. There are a dozen boxes of healthy tomato plants growing in pots along the south-facing glass.

“Tomatoes,” Matty says.

Matty puts on his latex gloves and begins digging through them to see if there’s anything else growing in there, but in pot after pot he comes up only with soil.

“Nowt,” Matty says.

“Look through those bags of fertilizer.”

Nothing in there either. We stand there looking at the rain running down the thirty-degree angled roof in complicated rivulets.

He looks at me.

“You’re feeling it, too?” I ask him.

“What?”

“A feeling that we’re missing something?”

“No.”

“What were you looking at me like that for?”

“I just noticed all those grey hairs above your ears.”

“You’re an eejit.” I examine the plants, but Matty’s right: these really are genuine tomato plants and there is nothing secreted in the pots.

McFarlane gurns at us through the glass before going back towards the house.

“He’s lying about something, Matty, but what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s Lord Lucan. Maybe he shot someone once from a grassy knoll. Do we head now? The Chief’s getting shirty,” Matty asks.

I walk outside the greenhouse and do a thorough three-sixty perimeter scan – and low and behold, between the greenhouse and the wall I spot a plant pot sitting on a compost heap: red plastic, hastily thrown away. There’s no plant in it now but clearly there once was and perhaps residue remains.

“What do we have here?”

“What is it?”

“Gimme a bag, quick,” I tell him.

We put the plant pot in a large Ziploc to protect it from the rain.

We march back into the house.

“What have you got?” the Chief asks.

“Evidence, boss!” Matty says with an unconcealed note of triumph.

I look at McFarlane.

His face is blank.

The complaining, however, has dried up, which can only be a good sign.

I thank Mrs McFarlane for the tea and her hospitality.

We file outside.

A crowd.

A rent-a-mob. Three dozen youths in denim jackets.

The reserve constables looking nervous.

“SS RUC!” a kid yells and the chant is half-heartedly taken up by the others. Someone from the back throws a stone.

“Time to head, gentlemen, these fenian scum will make it hairy in a minute or two,” Brennan says.

These fenian scum.

The word throws me. Gives me a strange out-of-body dissonance for the second time today. How did it happen that I’m on the side of the Castle, on the side of the Brits? One of the oppressors, not the oppressed …

“Come on lads, let’s go!” Chief Inspector Brennan says.

We get back into the vehicles as a hail of bricks, bottles and stones came raining down on the Land Rover’s steel roof.

We make straight for the M2 motorway, the shore road, Carrickfergus Police Station.

“What now, boss?” Matty asks.

“Take a Land Rover and a driver and get this plant pot up to the lab. I want it examined by the best forensic boys on the force and I want you to stay with those fuckers until the job is done. If they find any rosary pea material in here at all it’ll be enough to hang McFarlane.”

Matty takes the plant pot and streaks off like Billy Whizz.

The rest of us head home.

#113 Coronation Road.

I put on “For Your Pleasure” by Roxy Music.

I fry some bacon and onions.

I eat my dinner and listen to both sides of the LP which I haven’t played in seven or eight years.

When it’s over I put on my raincoat walk back down to the station to wait for Matty. He shows up at nine.

“Good news?”

He shakes his head. “The only organic material in that pot was a withered tomato plant.”

“Are you sure?”

“The lads were 100 per cent sure. A dead tomato plant. Nothing else.”

“No rosary pea or indeed anything weird?”

“No.”

“Shit.”

“Sorry, boss.”

“Thanks, Matty.”

No rosary pea. No Abrin.

“Do you want to go next door to the pub?” I ask him.

“Is that an order?”

“No.”

“Well, in that case I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

“All right, I’ll catch you another time. I’ll go myself.”

I juke next door and order a pint of Guinness and a double Scotch. A redhead called Kerry asks me if I will buy her a drink. She drinks a blackcurrant snakebite, which apparently is equal parts lager and cider with a dash of blackcurrant in a pint glass. After two she’s toast. I tell her the joke about the monkey and the pianist in the bar. She thinks it’s hilarious. She asks what I do for a living and I let slip that I’m a copper … And that, my friend, is it. She’s either Catholic or has your bog standard hatred of the police. When I come back from the toilet she’s gone. She’s been through my wallet, but she’s only taken a twenty-pound note to get a taxi, which, when you think about it, isn’t so bad.

I order a double Bush for the road, hit it and walk back through the rain.

My head’s splitting. I stop to urinate outside the Presbyterian Church and an old lady walking her mutt tells me that I’m a sorry excuse for a human being. “I agree with you, love,” I say but when I turn round to make the argument there’s no one there at all.

12: A MESSAGE

A week went by without any developments. Like the majority of murder cases in Northern Ireland this one was starting to die. No new information from America. No eyewitness testimony. No calls on the Confidential Telephone. Mr O’Rourke had last been seen in Dunmurry. He’d got some Irish money, checked out of his crummy B&B and then he’d turned up dead. In another week or so the Chief would tell me to put the O’Rourke case on the back burner. A week after that, we’d move it to the yellow folders: open but not actively pursuing …

It was a Wednesday. The rain was hard and cold and coming at a forty-five-degree angle from the mountains. The sound of shotguns somewhere up country woke me at seven. I listened for a moment or two but there was no return fire and it was probably just a farmer going after foxes.

I put on the radio.

The local news was bad. An army base in Lurgan had been attacked with mortars, a firebomb had destroyed a bus depot in Armagh and an off-duty police reservist had been shot dead at the wheel of his tractor in Fermanagh.

The national news was about the Falklands War. Ships were still sailing south, the Pope wanted a peaceful resolution, the Americans were doing something, the EEC was calling for sanctions against Argentina.