“Would you stop shooting, you bloody eejit! We are the police!” he yelled before I even had the chance to catch my breath.

There was an impressive dissonance as the last of the shotgun’s echo died away, and then an even more impressive silence.

Asbestos was coating my leather jacket and I pulled my black polo neck sweater over my mouth.

The pigeons began to settle.

Wind made the girders creek.

A distant bell was ringing.

It was like being in a symphony by Arvo Pärt. But he wasn’t the composer of the melody still playing between my ears. Who was that now? Somebody French.

Another shotgun blast.

The security guard had taken the time to reload and was determined to have more fun.

“Stop shooting!” McCrabban demanded again.

“Get out of here!” a voice replied. “I’ve had enough of you hoodlums!”

It was a venerable voice, from another Ireland, from the ’30s or even earlier, but age gave it no weight or assurance – only a frail, impatient, dangerous doubt.

This, every copper knew, was how it would end, not fighting the good fight but in a random bombing or a police chase gone wrong or shot by a half senile security guard in a derelict factory in north Belfast. It was April 1st. Not a good day to die.

“We’re the police!” McCrabban insisted.

“The what?”

“The police!”

“I’ll call the police!”

“We are the police!”

“You are?”

I lit a cigarette, sat down and leaned against the outer shell of the big turbine.

This room in fact was one enormous turbine hall. A huge space built for the generation of electricity because the engineers who’d constructed the textile factory had decided that autarchy was the best policy when dealing with Northern Ireland’s inadequate and dodgy power supplies. I would like to have to seen this place in its heyday, when light was pouring in through the clear windows and the cathedral of turbines was humming at maximum rev. This whole factory must have been some scene with its cooling towers and its chemical presses and its white-coated alchemist employees who knew the secret of turning petroleum into clothes.

But not any more. No textiles, no workers, no product. And it would never come back. Heavy manufacturing in Ireland had always been tentative at best and had fled the island just as rapidly as it had arrived.

“If you’re the police how come you’re not in uniform?” the security guard demanded.

“We’re detectives! Plain-clothes detectives. And listen, mate, you’re in a lot of trouble. You better put down that bloody gun,” I yelled.

“Who’s going to make me?” the security guard asked.

“We are!” McCrabban shouted.

“Oh, aye?” he yelled back. “You and whose army?”

“The bloody British Army!” McCrabban and I yelled together.

A minute of parley and the security guard agreed that perhaps he had been a bit hasty. Crabbie, who’d recently become a father of twin boys, was seething and I could tell he was for throwing the book at him but the guard was an old geezer with watery eyes in a blue polyester uniform that perhaps presaged our own post-peeler careers. “Let’s cut him a break,” I said. “It will only mean paperwork.”

“If you say so,” Crabbie reluctantly agreed.

The security guard introduced himself as Martin Barry and we told him that we had come here to investigate a blood trail that had been discovered by the night watchman.

“Oh, that? I saw that on my walk around. I didn’t think too much about it,” Mr Barry said. He looked as if he hadn’t thought too much about anything over the last thirty years.

“Where is it?” McCrabban asked him.

“It’s out near the bins, I wonder Malcolm didn’t leave a wee note for me that he had already called that in,” Mr Barry said.

“If it was blood, why didn’t you call it in?” Crabbie asked.

“Some rascal breaks in here and cuts himself and I’m supposed to call the peelers about it? I thought you gentlemen had better things to do with your days.”

That did not bode well for it being something worth our trouble.

“Can you show us what you’re talking about?” I asked.

“Well, it’s outside,” Mr Barry said reluctantly.

He was still waving his antique twelve-gauge around and Crabbie took the shotgun out of his hands, broke it open, removed the shells and gave it back again.

“How did you get in here, anyway?” Mr Barry asked.

“The gate was open,” Crabbie said.

“Aye, the hoodlums broke the lock, they’re always coming in here to nick stuff.”

“What stuff?” McCrabban asked, looking at the mess all around us.

“They’re going to ship the rest of that turbine to Korea some day. It’s very valuable,” Mr Barry explained.

I finished my cigarette and threw the stub into a puddle. “Shall we go see this alleged blood trail?” I asked.

“All right then, aye.”

We went outside.

It was snowing now.

Real snow, not an asbestos simulacrum.

There was a quarter of an inch of the stuff on the ground which meant that the trains would grind to a halt, the motorway would be closed and the rush-hour commute would become chaotic. Crabbie looked at the sky and sniffed. “The old woman is certainly plucking the goose today,” he said stentoriously.

“You should put those in a book,” I said, grinning at him.

“There’s only one book I need,” Crabbie replied dourly, tapping the Bible in his breast pocket.

“Aye, me too,” Mr Barry agreed and the two obvious Presbyterians gave each other a knowing glance.

This kind of talk drove me mental. “What about the phone book? What if you need to look up somebody’s phone number. You won’t find that in your King James,” I muttered.

“You’d be surprised,” Mr Barry said, but before he could explain further his method of divining unknown telephone numbers using the kabbala I raised a finger and walked to a dozen large, rusting skips filled with rubbish.

“Is this where you’re talking about?”

“Aye, over there’s where the wee bastards climb over,” he said, pointing to a spot where the fence had been pulled down so that it was only a few feet high.

“Not very secure, is it?” McCrabban said, turning up the collar on his raincoat.

“That’s why I have this!” Mr Barry exclaimed, patting his shotgun like a favoured reptile.

“Just show us the blood, please,” I said.

“Over here, if it is blood. If it is human blood,” Mr Barry said, with such an ominous twinge in his voice that it almost cracked me up.

He showed us a dried, thin reddish brown trail that led from the fence to the bins.

“What do you make of that?” I asked Crabbie.

“I’ll tell you what I make of it! The kids were rummaging in the skip, one of them wee beggars cuts hisself, heaven be praised, and then they run to the fence, jump over and go home crying to their mamas,” Mr Barry said.

Crabbie and I shook our heads. Neither of us could agree with that interpretation.

“I’ll explain what happened to Mr Barry while you start looking in the skip,” I said.

“I’ll explain it while you start looking in the skip,” Crabbie countered.

“Explain what?” Mr Barry asked.

“The blood trail gets thinner and narrower the further away from the fence you get.”

“Which means?” Mr Barry asked.

“Which means that unless we have a Jackson Pollock fan among our local vandal population then something or someone has been dragged to one of those dumpsters and tossed in.”

I looked at McCrabban. “Go on then, get in there, mate,” I said.

He shook his head.

I pointed at the imaginary pips on my shoulder which would have signified the rank of inspector if I hadn’t been in plain clothes.

It cut no ice with him. “I’m not going in there. No way. These trousers are nearly new. The missus would skin me alive.”

“I’ll flip you for it. Heads or tails?”

“You pick. It’s a little too much like gambling for my taste.”