“Sir?”

“‘Naples in Naples’, three down, six letters.”

“Napoli, sir.”

“Huh?”

“In Naples, Naples is Napoli.”

“Oh, I get it, all right, bugger off.”

On the way back to Coronation Road I stopped in at McCaffrey’s, examined the cake, which was a typical Irish birthday cake layered with sponge, cream, rum, jam and sugar. I explained the Chief Inspector’s preferences and Annie said that that wouldn’t be a problem: she’d make the icing half an inch thick if we wanted. I told her that that would be great and made a mental note to have the defib kit on hand.

I drove on through Carrickfergus’s blighted shopping precincts, past boarded-up shops and cafes, vandalised parks and playgrounds. Bored ragamuffin children of the type you often saw in Pulitzer-Prize-winning books of photography were sitting glumly on the wall over the railway lines waiting to drop objects down onto the Belfast train.

I stopped at the heavily armoured Mace Supermarket which was covered with sectarian and paramilitary graffiti and a fading and unlikely claim that “Jesus Loves The Bay City Rollers!”

I waded through the car park’s usual foliage of chip papers, plastic bags and crisp packets.

Halfway through my shop the piece of music that had been playing in my head began over the speakers. I must have heard it last week when I’d been in here. I got cornflakes, a bottle of tequila and Heinz tomato soup and went to the checkout.

“What is this music? It’s been in my head all day,” I asked the fifteen-year-old girl operating the till.

“I have no idea, love. It’s bloody horrible, isn’t it?”

I paid and went to the booth, startling Trevor, the assistant manager who was reading Outlaw of Gor with a wistful look on his basset-hound face. He didn’t know what the music was either.

“I don’t pick the tapes, I just do what I’m told,” he said defensively.

I asked him if I could check out his play box. He didn’t mind. I rummaged through the tapes and found the cassette currently on the go. Light Classical Hits IV. I looked down through the list of tracks and found the one it had to be: “The Aquarium” from Carnival of the Animals by Saint Saens.

It was an odd piece, popular among audiences but not among musicians. The melody was carried by a glass harmonica, a really weird instrument that reputedly made its practitioners go mad. I nodded and put the cassette box down.

“I won’t play it again, if you don’t like it, Inspector, you’re not the first to complain,” Trevor said.

“No, actually, I’m a fan of Saint Saens,” I was going to say, but Trev was already changing the tape to Contemporary Hits Now!

When I came out of the Mace smoke from a large incendiary bomb was drifting across the lough from Bangor and you could hear fire engines and ambulances on the grey, oddly pitching air.

From the external supermarket speakers Paul Weller’s reedy baritone begin singing the first few bars of “A Town Called Malice” and I had to admit that the choice of song was depressingly appropriate.

2: THE DYING EARTH

We stood there looking at north Belfast three miles away over the water. The sky a kind of septic brown, the buildings rain-smudged rectangles on the grim horizon. Belfast was not beautiful. It had been built on mudflats and without rock foundations nothing soared. Its architecture had been Victorian red-brick utilitarian and sixties brutalism before both of those tropes had crashed headlong into the Troubles. A thousand car bombs later and what was left was surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire and a steel security fence to keep the bombers out.

Here in the north Belfast suburbs we only got sporadic terrorist attacks, but economic degradation and war had frozen the architecture in outmoded utilitarian schools whose chief purpose seemed to be the disheartening of the human soul. Optimistic colonial officials were always planting trees and sponsoring graffiti clearance schemes but the trees never lasted long and it was the brave man who dared clean paramilitary graffiti off his own house never mind in communal areas of the town.

I lit a second cigarette. I was thinking about architecture because I was trying not to think about Laura.

I hadn’t seen her in nearly a week.

“Should we go in?” Crabbie asked.

“Steady on, mate. I just lit me fag. Let me finish this first.”

“Your head. She won’t be happy to be kept waiting,” Crabbie prophesied.

Drizzle.

A stray dog.

A man called McCawley wearing his dead wife’s clothes pushing her empty wheelchair along the pavement. He saw us waiting by the Land Rover. “Bloody peelers, they should crucify the lot of you,” he said as he picked up our discarded cigarette butts.

“Sean, come on, this is serious. It’s an appointment with the patho,” Crabbie insisted.

He didn’t know that Laura and I had been avoiding one another.

I didn’t know that we had been avoiding one another.

A fortnight ago she’d gone to Edinburgh to do a presentation for a couple of days and after she’d returned she said that she was swamped with catch-up work.

That was the official party line. In fact I knew that something was up. Something that had been in the wind for months.

Maybe something that had been in the wind since we had met.

This was her third trip to Edinburgh this year. Had she met someone else? My instincts said no, but even a detective could be blindsided. Perhaps detectives in particular could be blind-sided.

For some time now I’d had the feeling that I had trapped her. By putting us in a life and death situation, by getting myself shot. How could she do anything but stay with me through the process of my recovery. She couldn’t possibly leave a man who had fallen into a coma and awoken to find that he had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal.

She had protected herself to some extent. She had refused to move in with me on Coronation Road, because, she said, the Protestant women gave her dirty looks.

She had bought herself a house in Straid. There had been no talk of marriage. Neither of us had said ‘I love you’.

Before the recent absences we had seen each other two or three times a week.

What were we? Boyfriend and girlfriend? It hardly seemed so much.

But what then?

I had no idea.

Crabbie looked at me with those half closed, irritated brown eyes, and tapped his watch.

“It’s nine fifteen,” he said in that voice of moral authority which came less from being a copper and more from his status as a sixth generation elder in the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. “The message, Sean, was to come at nine. We’re late.”

“All right, all right, keep your wig on. Let’s go in,” I said.

Cut to the hospital: scrubbed surfaces. Lowered voices. A chemical odour of bleach and carpet cleaner. Django Reinhardt’s “Tears” seeping through an ancient Tannoy system.

The new nurse at reception looked at us sceptically. She was a classic specimen of the brisk, Irish, pretty, no nonsense nursey type.

“There’s no smoking in here, gentlemen,” she said.

I stubbed the fag in the ashtray. “We’re here to see Dr Cathcart,” I said.

“And who are you?”

“Detective Inspector Duffy, Carrick RUC, and this is my spiritual coach DC McCrabban.”

“You can go through.”

We stopped outside the swing doors of the Autopsy Room and knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“DI Duffy, DC McCrabban,” I said.

“Come in.”

Familiar smells. Bright overhead lights. Stainless steel bowls filled with intestines and internal organs. Glittering precision instruments laid out in neat rows. And the star of the show: our old friend from yesterday lying on a gurney.

Laura’s face was behind a mask, which I couldn’t help thinking was wonderfully metaphoric.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said.