The sun came out and the day brightened to such an extent that a few us spilled out onto the fire escape and started slipping rum into the Coke. A pretty female reservist with a tiny waist and a weird Geordieland accent asked me if it was true that “I had killed three men with my bare hands”.

She was creeping me out so I made myself scarce, gave Carol a kiss, said goodnight to the lads, locked up the office and headed home.

Coronation Road in Victoria Housing Estate was in one of its rare moments of serenity: stray dogs sleeping in the middle of the street, feral moggies walking on slate roofs, women with rollers in their hair hanging washing on plastic lines, men with flat caps and pipes digging in their gardens. Children from three streets were playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek called 123 Kick A Tin. Children who were adorable and shoeless and dressed like extras from a ’50s movie.

I parked the BMW outside my house, nodded a hello to the neighbours and went inside.

I made a vodka gimlet in a pint glass, stuck on a random tin of soup and with infinitely more care picked out a selection of records that would get me through the evening: “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division, “Bryter Layter” by Nick Drake and Neil Young’s “After The Goldrush”. Yeah, I was in that kind of mood.

I lay on the leather sofa and watched the clock. The children’s game ended. The lights come on all over Belfast. The army helicopters took to the skies.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is this Duffy?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I was looking for you at work, Duffy, but apparently you’d left already. Lucky for some, eh?”

It was the weasly Kenny Dalziel from clerical.

“What’s the matter, Kenny?”

“The situation is a disaster. A total disaster. I’ve been pulling my hair out. You don’t happen to know who started all this, do you?”

“Gavrilo Princip?”

“What?”

“What’s this about, Kenny?”

“It’s yet another problem with your department, Inspector Duffy. Specifically Detective Constable Matty McBride’s claim for overtime in the last pay period. It’s tantamount to fraud.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Constable McBride cannot claim for time and a half danger money while also claiming overtime! That would be triple time and believe me, Duffy, nobody, and I mean nobody, is getting triple time on my watch …”

I stopped paying attention. When the conversation reached a natural conclusion I told him that I understood his concern and hung up the phone. I switched on the box. A preacher on one side, thought for the day on the other. This country was Bible mad.

Half an hour later Dick Savage called me with info about Abrin. It was an extremely rare poison that he said had never been used in any murder case anywhere in the British Isles. He thought that maybe it had been used in a couple of incidents in America and I might want to look into that.

I thanked him and called Laura, but she didn’t pick up the phone.

I made myself another vodka gimlet, drank it, turned off the soup, and put “Bryter Layter” on album repeat and then changed my mind. Nick Drake, like heroin or Marmite, was best in small doses.

As was typical of Ulster’s spring weather systems, a hard horizontal rain was lashing the kitchen windows now so I switched the record player to its 78 mode and after some rummaging I found “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” by The Ink Spots with Ella Fitzgerald.

I tolerated the Ink Spot guy singing the first verse but when Ella came on I just about lost it.

The phone startled me.

“Hello?”

“You know the way you’re always saying that I’m a lazy bastard and that I don’t take this job seriously?”

It was Matty.

“I don’t believe that I’ve ever said any such thing, Matty. In fact I was just defending your honour to that hatchet-faced goblin, Dalziel, in clerical,” I said.

“That sounds like a bold-faced lie.”

“You’re paranoid, mate.” I told him.

“Well, while all you lot were copping off with female reservists and buggering away home I’ve been burning the midnight whale blubber.”

“And?”

“I’ve only gone and made a breakthrough, so I have.”

“Go on.”

“What’s that racket in the background?”

“That ‘racket’ is Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Never heard of him.”

“What’s going on, mate? Have you really found something out?”

“I’ve only gone and cracked the bloody case, so I have,” he said.

“Our John Doe in the suitcase?”

“What else?”

“Go on then, you’re killing me.”

“Well, I was on the late shift anyway to cover the station, so I thought instead of breaking out the old stash of Penthouses and having a wank I’d do something useful and get back on that suitcase …”

“Yes . . ?”

“No forensics at all. No liftable prints. Blood belongs to our boy. But you know the wee plastic window where people write their addresses?”

“McCrabban already checked that window – there was no address card in there. No one would be that much of an eejit.”

“That’s what I thought too, but I cut it open and I noticed a wee sliver of card scrunched up in the bottom of the window. You couldn’t possibly have seen it unless you cut open the plastic and shone a torch down into the gap.”

“Shite.”

“Shite is right, mate.”

“It was an old address card?”

“I got a pair of tweezers, pulled it out, unscrunched it and lo and behold I’ve only gone and got the name and address of the person who owned the suitcase!”

“Who was it?”

“Somebody local. A bloke called Martin McAlpine, Red Hall Cottage, The Mill Bay Road, Ballyharry, Islandmagee. What do you think about that?”

“So it wasn’t the dead American’s suitcase, then?”

“Doesn’t look like it, does it? It’s like you always say, Sean, the concept of the master criminal is a myth. Most crooks are bloody eejits.”

“You’re a star, Matty, my lad.”

“An underappreciated star. What’s our next move, boss?”

“I think, Matty, that you and me will be paying Mr McAlpine a wee visit first thing in the morning.”

“Tomorrow? It’s a Saturday.”

“So?”

He groaned.

“Nothing. Sounds like a plan.”

“See you at the barracks. Seven sharp.”

“Can’t we go later?”

“Can’t go later, mate. I’m having me portrait done by Lucian Freud and then I’m off to Anfield, playing centre back for Liverpool on account of Alan Hansen’s injury.”

“Come on, Sean, I like to sleep in on a Saturday.”

“Nah, mate, we’ll go early, get the drop on him. It’ll be fun.”

“All right.”

“And well done again, pal. You did good.”

I hung up the phone. Funny how things turned out. Just like that, very quickly indeed, this potentially tricky investigation was breaking wide open.

4: MACHINE GUN SILHOUETTE

The alarm was set to Sports Talk on Downtown Radio which was a nice non-threatening way to start the day. The conversation this morning was about Northern Ireland’s chances in the 1982 World Cup. The topic, as usual, had gotten round to George Best and whether the thirty-five-year-old had any game left in him. The last I had heard of Best was his notorious stint playing with Hibernian when he was more famous for out-drinking the entire French rugby team and seducing the reigning Misses World and Universe in the same weekend.

I turned off the radio, made coffee, dressed in a black polo neck sweater, jeans and DM shoes, went outside. I checked under the BMW for any mercury tilt explosives but didn’t find any. Right about now seven thousand RUC men and women were all doing the same thing. One or two of them would find a bomb and after shitting their pants they’d be on the phone to the bomb squad, thanking their lucky stars that they’d kept to their morning routine.

I stuck on the radio and listened to Brian Eno on the short drive to the barracks. Wasn’t a big fan of Eno but it was either that or the news and I couldn’t listen to the news. Who could, apart from those longing for the end times.