“Just don’t put in for triple-time, that wee shite Dalziel will be all over you.”

“I’ve been working on the case, too,” he said, without much enthusiasm.

“What are your thoughts?”

“Not just thoughts. I just spoke to your man. The FBI guy. Special Agent Anthony Grimm.”

“How?” I said stupidly.

“The time zones. They’re five hours behind.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Nothing new about O’Rourke. War hero. Adjusted well to civilian life. Good civil servant. There were a couple of other speeding tickets that weren’t in the file. Thirty years in the IRS.”

“Anything controversial? Did he ever audit the wrong guy?”

“Nothing controversial. He was a mid-level IRS inspector. He wouldn’t have been a prosecutor or have made any enemies.”

“What was this Grimm like? Weird tone of voice, evasive, anything like that?”

“Nothing that I noticed. Happy to speak to me, it seemed like. Broke the routine. Sounded a bit bored by his lot.”

Not what I was hoping for.

“There was one thing …” McCrabban said.

“Yes?”

“Well, when I called up the FBI’s number in Virginia and asked to speak to Special Agent Anthony Grimm, I was put on hold and then the operator said that she was transferring me to the Secret Service.”

“The Secret Service? Shite! What’s that all about? Aren’t they the ones that protect the President?”

“I asked Grimm and he laughed and he said that it wasn’t as dramatic as it sounded. He’d just been seconded to the currency protection department of the US Treasury. The most boring possible assignment in the entire FBI, he said. Even more boring than preparing data sheets on dead IRS inspectors. I don’t think that really means anything, but I thought you’d like to know.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll write that down. As long as he sounded legit?”

“He did.”

“Okay. Good. So where are we, Crabbie?”

“I think we can rule out anything from O’Rourke’s past. He was a model citizen. He paid his taxes, he didn’t have a record, looked after his wife.”

“I had no idea he was a serial killer, he was a very quiet man, he kept to himself,” I said in a Yorkshire accent.

“Stop it, Sean. He’s no ripper. I really feel for the bloke. His missus dies and he takes a bloody holiday to Ireland to get over his grief and while he’s here some bastard tops him. It all seems very random to me.”

“Random except for the fact that A) he was poisoned and B) the murderer chopped up the body, froze it for an unknown amount of time and then dumped it in a suitcase. That is not your standard mugging gone wrong, is it, Crabbie?”

“No.”

“And then there’s all the distractions, as you call them. The women and the note, the deal with the widow McAlpine …” I said, and took a big drink of the vodka gimlet.

“Ach, mate, the note’s a prank, and I never thought the McAlpine angle would get us anywhere.”

“You should have told me that before I went down to Islandmagee twice,” I said.

“You’re the inspector and I’m the detective constable.”

“All right, Crabbie, thanks. Go home now, okay?”

“Aye. Okay, bye, Sean.”

“Stay frosty and drive safe.”

“I will.”

I hung up and rummaged in the bookshelf for my King James Bible. I made myself another pint of lime and vodka and put on Radio Albania. A five-minute rant about Ronald Reagan and the evils of American capitalism. A rant about the Soviet Union and the decadence of the Brezhnev regime. Praise only for Pol Pot, a true friend of the workers in Cambodia.

It was midnight and I was only two sips into the new vodka gimlet when somebody started banging the front door.

“Will this madness ever end?” I said, storming down the hall.

I opened the door to Bobby Cameron, who had come by with a lynch mob.

18: NOT EXACTLY SCOUT FINCH

There were a dozen of them wearing balaclavas, ski masks or scarves; they were carrying cricket bats, sticks and baseball bats – the last always an impressive get in a country that didn’t play the game.

They had banged the front door rather than smashing the windows, so that gave me the feeling that they weren’t here to kill me.

“This is your last chance. If you want to prevent violence, you’ll have to fucking come, Duffy,” Bobby Cameron said in his unmistakable burr.

“Why don’t you take that thing off your face and we’ll talk like civilised men,” I said, pointing at the bandana over his mouth.

“Come with us, Duffy, or it’ll be on your conscience,” Bobby replied.

I liked that – whatever they were about to do was somehow going to be my fault.

“All right. Hold on a minute,” I said.

I closed the door in their faces, ran upstairs, got the .38 from under my pillow, shoved it down the front of my jeans and pulled my Ramones T-shirt over the grip. I grabbed a leather jacket and went outside onto the porch.

“I love the kit, but I think you’re all a little late for ski season, gentlemen,” I said.

No one laughed.

“We have to draw a line in the fucking sand,” someone said. It sounded like Mr Cullen who once had been a shop steward at Harland and Wolff shipyard and now, like nearly everybody else, was unemployed.

“It’s bad enough with the fucking fenians out-breeding us. And now this? It’s a fucking disaster,” someone else said.

“It’s a question of jobs,” Bobby said.

“What’s going on, lads?” I asked.

“We want you, Duffy, because you can explain it to them, nice, like. This doesn’t have to end in tears,” Bobby said.

“What doesn’t have to end in tears?” I asked.

“This way,” Bobby said.

Cameron led the way and we followed him out onto Coronation Road. The street was deserted. Cleared. No drunks, no passers by, no witnesses. What the hell were they doing?

And I was sober now, too. And a little scared.

Two of the men were carrying vodka bottles with rags sticking out the end.

“Down here,” Bobby said.

He stopped at the last house on Coronation Road, just before Victoria Road began. He turned to me.

“Now, you go in and tell them that we’re reasonable men. We don’t want any nonsense. Nobody has to get hurt. We’ll give them half an hour to get their stuff and go. But if they don’t go I won’t be responsible for what happens to them,” Bobby said.

I was still clueless. I had no idea who lived in this house. In fact I had thought it was vacant. Was it a child molester? What?

It was a red-brick terraced council house, identical to mine, except that I had purchased mine from the Housing Executive under Mrs Thatcher’s home ownership scheme and done it up a bit.

I opened the gate and walked down the path.

The previous renters had cemented over the garden, but the new occupant or occupants had placed half a dozen rose bushes in little pots over the raw concrete.

I knocked on the front door.

“Who is it?” a voice asked from inside.

“It’s one of your neighbours,” I said. “Sean Duffy from down the street.”

“Just a minute.”

The door opened a few seconds later. It was the African woman. She was wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and she was clutching a handbag. She looked at me and looked at the mob waiting in the street.

“What is happening?” she asked, trembling, terrified.

“These men have come to intimidate you out of your house,” I told her.

“What have I done?” she asked. Her accent was East African, educated.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t I ask them.”

I turned to face the men milling on Coronation Road.

“She wants to know what’s she done,” I said.

“She just has to go! Carrick’s no place for her. There’s no jobs for outsiders!” someone yelled.

“We don’t want any niggers in our town!” someone else shouted. Billy Took, by the sound of his high-pitched voice.

“Where do you think you are, Billy? Alabama?” I said to him.

“This is our country!” someone else said.