“Shit,” I said to Gloria and went into the hall.

“Anything wrong?”

“Not a bit of it, get that martini down your neck.”

I opened the front door. “Hello,” I said.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” she said.

She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. Her hair was braided. The T-shirt was tight. She looked fabulous. She was holding something covered in tin foil.

“I made you this, to thank you,” she said.

“Oh, thanks.”

“It is merely brandy snaps. The only thing I can make,” she said.

I took the tin foil off and bit into one. It was like biting into stale bread soaked in rubbing alcohol.

“Amazing,” I said, fighting the gag reflex. “Look, I’d invite you in, but I’m busy.”

She smiled. It was the smile to light up the porch, to light up this whole fucking gloomy street.

“Well, thanks. Maybe another time, we could have a drink or something.”

“I cannot stay long. I have to pack.”

“Pack?”

“I am moving to England.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I have been offered a place at Cambridge University. My father pulled a few strings, as fathers do.”

“Cambridge?”

She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“You’re welcome.”

She turned and walked down the path. I closed the door and went back to the living room.

Gloria was burrowing deep into my extensive, prized record collection.

“Who was that?”

“Just some chick whose life I saved.”

“No, really, who was it?”

I grabbed her round the waist and carried her to the sofa. I kissed those big pouty red American lips. Damn, she tasted good.

“Just some chick whose life I saved,” I insisted.

I made more martinis and played her What’s Going On and Pink Moon. Everything was proceeding according to plan.

“Does he ever play in Ireland?”

“Who?”

“Nick Drake.”

“He’s dead, baby,” I informed her. “He killed himself.”

“Why?”

“I think he was depressed.”

Another round of martinis and I span the Velvets.

She leaned over and kissed me. She tasted wonderful.

She seemed the kind of girl who liked to party. I got the quality hemp from the garden shed. The stars were out. It was dark. Quiet. There was a cold wind from the North Channel. I got some logs I bought from the tinkers: oak and hazel and copper birch. I went back inside, rolled a spliff and put the logs on the fire. The smell from them was fennel and deer spoor and wet earth.

We lay there on the sofa.

She told me stories about America.

I took off her secretary blouse and bra and skirt and marvelled at her perfect, huge, beautiful breasts and luscious hips.

I kissed her neck and between her breasts and she pulled down my jeans.

Nico sang in her tone-deaf monotone and we baked the Moroccan and smoked it neat and fucked on the leather sofa like two people who have witnessed a van getting blown apart and sped through a hostile city under police sirens.

I fucked her and it was me fucking all of America. And we kissed again and finished the Moroccan and slept.

We lay all night there on the living-room sofa until the sun came up over the Scottish coast, rising prismatically over the pink lough, over Leinster and Munster and all of red-handed Ulster, over the DeLorean factory and the McAlpine farm in Islandmagee, over the rubble of Ballycorey RUC station, over Belfast. A pale orange sun rising out of a cobalt dawn that warmed the hearts of innocent men and guilty men and men whose task it was to heal and those whose burden it was to hurt.

The sunlight came in through the back kitchen and woke me on the sofa.

The place smelled good: cannabis and martini and peat logs and woman and coffee.

“Is that you up?” Gloria said.

“What time is it?”

“Lie there. Don’t move. I’m making coffee and toast.”

She made coffee in the cafetiere that was suitably hardcore. We had toasted soda bread and we went upstairs and showered together like people in a French film. Post-shower she was radiant. Belfast people sucked the light from their surroundings black-hole fashion – this woman was giving off about two-thousand candlepower from her smile alone.

I drove her back to the DeLorean plant in Dunmurry and walked her to her desk.

There was a box waiting on her seat with a ribbon around it.

“I love these!” she exclaimed.

She opened the lid.

A box of Irish “fifteens”. With M&Ms in them instead of Smarties.

“Those look good,” I said.

“They’re delicious,” she replied.

“Where do you get them?” I asked.

“Sir Harry brings them in. His sister-in-law makes them.”

“Sir Harry McAlpine?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know Sir Harry?” I asked conversationally.

“I don’t! Not really. Mr DeLorean knows him.”

“How does Mr DeLorean know Sir Harry?

“The factory is on his land. Sir Harry leased it to the DeLorean Motor Corporation at a very generous rate.”

“As an incentive to get DeLorean to set up his factory in Belfast as opposed to Scotland or wherever?”

“Precisely. But over the last year Sir Harry and Mr DeLorean have become fast friends.”

“Have they indeed?” I said.

24: PEOPLE IN GLASS HOUSES

I was feeling good as I drove down the coast road to Islandmagee. I accelerated the Beemer up to seventy and then got it up to a nice 88 mph. I dug out a mix tape and put it in the player.

Plastic Bertrand took me all the way through Carrick, Eden, Islandmagee.

Sir Harry’s estate.

The gate along the private road was closed and there was a man there now, sitting on a stile, wearing a Barbour jacket and holding a shotgun. Old geezer, grizzled, game-keeper type.

“This is private land,” he said in a country accent.

“I’m the police,” I told him.

“You’ll have a warrant then,” he said.

“To drive down this road I’ll need a warrant?”

“This is not the King’s Highway. All these farms, right down to the water, is all Sir Harry McAlpine’s property,” the man insisted.

“Just let me through, mate, I’m the peelers. I’ve been here before.”

“So you say. But we have to careful. We had a murder here last year.”

I got out of the Beemer, opened the gate and showed him my warrant card.

“If you want to shoot me, shoot me, but I’m going to see McAlpine.”

The old geezer nodded.

It was more than his job was worth to get in the way of a determined copper.

I drove past Emma’s farm.

No sign of her.

I followed the dirt trail up the hill to the big house.

The gate down that drive was also closed but there was no chain across it so I got out and opened it. I drove over the cattle grid and down the palm-lined driveway.

The Roller was parked out front.

I rang the bell. Mrs Patton answered the door. I showed her my warrant card.

“Remember me, love?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to le grand fromage.”

“He’s in the greenhouse. I’ll go get him.”

“The empty greenhouse? Don’t trouble yourself, Mrs Patton. I know the way.”

I walked through the house and the kitchen and out into the back garden.

There had been a few changes: the garden looked tidier, neater. There were bags of soil and peat and empty terracotta pots. Sir Harry’s finances must have stabilised some if he could afford a guard down there on the private road and a revamp to his back garden.

And there he was in a ratty brown shirt and brown corduroys.

I knocked on the greenhouse door.

He was pulling a jumper over his head. When the head popped through he turned round, saw me, frowned.

I opened the door and went inside.

It was warm. There was a little humidifier in the corner pumping out steam.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he asked, not even attempting to conceal his dislike, which was certainly un-Irish, but perhaps not un-Anglo-Irish.