I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty Page A

list of American citizens who had entered Northern Ireland in the previous year finally came in at eleven on Monday morning it was longer than we’d been expecting. Six hundred names. Five hundred of whom were men. Northern Ireland during the Troubles was not a popular tourist destination but the hunger strikes had sucked in scores of American journos, protesters, politicians and rubberneckers.
    â€œHow are we going to tackle this?” McCrabban asked dourly. His default method of asking anything.
    â€œWe’ll break the list into three and we’ll start making phone calls. We’ll begin with the over-forties first,” I said.
    Fortunately each visitor to Northern Ireland had to fill out a full information card giving his or her home address, phone number, emergency contact, etc.
    There were three hundred and twenty American men over forty who had entered the Province in the previous twelve months.
    â€œAll these calls to America are going to cost us a fortune,” Matty said. “The Chief won’t like it.”
    â€œHe’s going to have to lump it,” I told him. “And let’s hope that our boy hasn’t been frozen for years.”
    â€œWait,” McCrabban said. “I’ve thought of another problem.”
    â€œWhat?” I said, somewhat irritated because I was keen to get started.
    â€œWe can’t make any phone calls before one o’clock. They’refive hours behind, remember?”
    â€œShite,” I said, slapping my forehead. He was right. It wasn’t decent to call people up first thing in the morning.
    â€œSo what are we going to do in the meantime?” Matty asked.
    â€œDo what everyone else does around here. Pretend to work,” I said.
    Matty opened up some files and spread them on his desk, but read the
Daily Mail
. The
Mail
and every other paper was all Falklands all the time. The country was mad for the war. Thirty years since the last good one, not counting what had been going on in our little land.
    McCrabban took out his notebooks and started studying for his sergeant’s exam.
    I looked through a couple of theft cases to see if anything would leap out at me. Nothing did. Theft cases rarely got solved.
    On a hunch I called up every life insurance company in the book to see if there had been any payouts on anyone called McAlpine in the last four months.
    Nope.
    At eleven the phone rang.
    â€œHello?” I said.
    â€œHello, is this Inspector Duffy?” a voice asked.
    â€œYes.”
    The voice was Scottish, older. I immediately thought that something had happened to Laura in Edinburgh and she’d put me down as her emergency contact.
    â€œIs this about Laura?” I asked breathlessly.
    â€œWell, yes and no,” the voice said.
    â€œGo on.”
    â€œI’m Dr Hagan, Laura, er, Dr Cathcart’s replacement at Carrickfergus Clinic. I was reading over Dr Cathcart’s report on the torso in morgue number 2.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œThe John Doe torso.”
    How many torsos did he think we got in a week?
    â€œYes?”
    â€œWell, something occurred to me that I thought I should share with you.”
    â€œGo on, Dr Hagan.”
    â€œWell, Laura has written down in her notes ‘victim frozen, time and date of death unknown’.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œBut, she’s also written down that the victim’s last meal was a Chicken Tikka Pot Noodle.”
    â€œSo I read.”
    â€œIn case you don’t know, Sergeant Duffy, that was a really quite extraordinary bit of forensic medicine. She must have analysed the stomach contents and then compared them with a list of ingredients for every Pot Noodle that Golden Wonder make.”
    I wasn’t really in the mood to hear Laura praised to the skies.
    â€œOkay, so she was extremely diligent at her job – how does this help me, Dr Hagan?”
    â€œIt helps you because it considerably narrows down the