I completely understood. She would leave Northern Ireland and she would never come back. I mean, who tries to get back on board the Titanic?

Furthermore her sisters were out of high school and her parents were in the process of moving abroad. The only thing keeping Laura here were her ties to this shitty job and to me and both of those were severable.

“When are thinking of heading?” I asked.

“Monday.”

“So soon?”

“I signed a lease on an apartment. I need to get furniture.”

“What about your house in Straid?”

“My mum will look after it.”

“What about the hospital? Who’s covering for you here?”

“The other doctors can pick up the slack in the clinic and I’ve asked one of my old teachers to do my autopsy work in the interim. Dr Hagan. He’s coming out of retirement to do me this favour. Very experienced. He worked for Scotland Yard for years and he taught at the Royal Free. He says he’ll be happy to cover me for a few months. He’ll be much better at this kind of work than me.”

“I doubt that.”

She smiled.

And then there was silence. I could hear a kid crying all the way back at Reception.

“Will you have dinner with me this weekend?”

“I’ll be very busy. Packing and all that.”

So that’s the way it was. Well, I wasn’t going to beg. “If you change your mind give me a call.”

“I will.”

I got up. I blinked and looked at her. Her gaze was steady. Resolved. Even relaxed. “Bye, Laura.”

“Bye, Sean. It’s only for a term. Ten weeks,” she said. She wanted to add something else, but her mouth trembled for a moment and then closed.

I nodded and to avoid a scene left it there. I gave her a little nod as I left the office and half slammed her door. “Heart of Glass” by Blondie was my exit music from the hospital reception.

I went out into the car park and said “Shite! Shite! Shite!” before lighting a fag. I tried to think of a curse but Irish articulacy had clearly declined since the days of Wilde and Yeats, Synge and Shaw. Three ‘shites’ and a ciggie, that was what we could come up with in these diminished times.

I walked over the railway bridge.

A stiff sea breeze was sending foam over the cars on the Belfast Road and there were white caps from here to Scotland. On the Scotch Quarter, outside the Gospel Hall, a wild-haired American evangelist with a walking stick was entertaining a crowd of pensioners with the promise that the end was nigh and the dying earth was in its final days. I listened for a while and found him pretty convincing. Before I could be “saved”, however, a freak wave drenched me and another late arrival and the old folks laughed at this perverse joke of Providence.

The Royal Oak was just opening for the day and was already full of sturdy alcoholics and peelers eager to make good on the police discount.

Alex, the barkeep, was dressed in a tie-dye shirt, furry boots and a full-length velvet cape. Clearly he had discovered a time portal to 1972 or he was off to see Elton John. Neither interested me that much.

I said hello and ordered a stiff Scotch.

“Women or work?” Alex asked.

“Is it always one or the other?” I asked.

“Aye, it is,” he said thoughtfully.

“Women then,” I said.

“In that case, mate, I’ll make it a double on the house,” he said compassionately.

3: THE BIG RED ONE

I was tempted to order another double whiskey and a Guinness and make this a proper session but it was a Friday which meant that the lunch special was deep-fried pizza and that stuff reeked of the cardiac ward.

I said hello to Sergeant Burke on the desk, complimented him on his throwback Zapata moustache, and went straight upstairs to the incident room.

“Jesus! Where did you come from?” Matty said, caught throwing darts at the dartboard.

“At the nineteenth level of Zen Buddhism you learn how to teleport – now put them darts away, we’ve work to do,” I said irritably.

Matty threw the final dart and sat at his desk.

He was getting on my nerves, Matty. He had let his hair grow and because of his natural Mick frizz it had gotten wide. He had a pinky ring and he’d taken to wearing white jackets over white T-shirts. I’m not sure what this look was supposed to be exactly but I didn’t like it, even ironically.

He and McCrabban were staring at me with gormless expressions on their faces.

“Missing persons reports?” I asked.

“None so far, Sean.”

“Any luck on that motto?”

“Not yet,” McCrabban replied mournfully.

“Keep at it! Remember what Winston Churchill said, ‘there’ll be plenty of time for wanking when the boats are back from Dunkirk’, right?”

“I don’t think Churchill ever said any such—”

“And you, Matty, my lad, get on the blower to garden centres and ask about rosary pea.”

We phone-called for an hour.

Not a single garden centre in Northern Ireland stocked the rosary pea. I phoned the Northern Ireland Horticultural Society but that too drew a blank. No one they knew had ever shown or grown it. But you’d definitely need a greenhouse they said.

“The killer probably has a greenhouse. Write that on the whiteboard,” I said.

Crabbie added that to our list of boxes and arrows on the incident-room whiteboard.

“Keep the calls going. I’m off to the library,” I said.

I walked back along the Scotch Quarter. A tinker was selling a dangerous-looking goat from the back of his Ford Transit. “Goat For Sale. Temper. All Offers Considered,” his sign said.

“No thanks, mate,” I said and as it began to hail I hustled into Carrickfergus Library and said good afternoon to Mrs Clemens.

“They say it’ll be a lovely day later,” I added conversationally.

“Who said this?” she demanded suspiciously.

I liked Mrs Clemens very much. She was going on seventy-five. She had lost an eye to cancer and wore an eye patch instead of a glass bead. I dug that – it gave her a piratical air. She was dyspeptic and knew the library backwards and hated anybody borrowing anything.

“Plants, horticulture, botany?” I asked.

“581,” she said. “There are some good encyclopaedias at the beginning of the section.”

“Thank you.”

I went to 581 and looked up the rosary pea:

ABRUS PRECATORIUS

,

known commonly as Jequirity, Crab’s Eye, Rosary Pea, John Crow Bead, Precatory Bean, Indian Liquorice, Akar Saga, Giddee Giddee or Jumbie Bead in Trinidad & Tobago, is a slender, perennial climber that twines around trees, shrubs, and hedges. It is a legume with long, pinnate-leafleted leaves. The plant is native to Indonesia and grows in tropical and subtropical areas of the world where it has been introduced. It has a tendency to become weedy and invasive. In India the seeds of the Rosary Pea are often used in percussion instruments.

“Interesting,” I said to myself. I photocopied the page and, with Mrs Clemens’s help, found a book on poisons. The listing I needed was under ‘Jequirity Seed’:

The Jequirity Seed contains the highly toxic poison Abrin, a close relative to the well known poison, Ricin. It is a dimer consisting of two protein sub units, termed A and B. The B chain facilitates Abrin’s entry into a cell by bonding to certain transport proteins on cell membranes, which then transport the toxin inside the cell. Once inside the cell membrane, the A chain prevents protein synthesis by inactivating the 26S sub unit of the ribosome. One molecule of Abrin will inactivate up to 1,500 ribosomes per second. Symptoms are identical to those of Ricin, save that Abrin is more toxic by several orders of magnitude. Weaponised high toxicity Abrin will cause liver failure, pulmonary edema and death shortly after ingestion. There is no known antidote for Abrin poisoning.

I photocopied that page too and jogged back to the station through the hail. The place was deserted apart from a tubby, annoying new reservist called McDowell who had come up to me on his first day and asked me point blank if “it was true that I was really a fenian” and it was a lucky break for me that it had been raining just then because I was able to dramatically take off my wool cap and ask him to look for horns. The place had erupted in laughter and Inspector McCallister was gagging so hard he nearly threw a hernia. McDowell had avoided me ever since.