Page 33 of Hang on St. Christopher

“Black. Loud.”

“How tall was this guy?”

“Your height. No, taller.”

“Fat? Thin?”

“I don’t know. Normal. Lemme go!”

That, I knew, was all I was going to get out of him. It was a miracle that I’d gotten so much. It was clever of the murderer to make the killing look like a carjacking gone wrong, it was clever of him to dump the car on this street in this neighborhood where no one would talk... and it was just his bad fucking luck that this wee shite had fired a ball bearing at me, and I’d gotten him away from his peers in the madding crowd.

“All right, sonny, one other question: who put that fucking Nazi flag up?”

“Jonty Reed. He’s big into the Nazis, so he is.”

“Where does he live?”

“Number four. House with the blue door.”

I reached into my wallet and gave the wee shite a five-pound note. He took it greedily.

“No more shooting catapults at policemen. You could get yourself shot by some of my more excitable colleagues.”

I turned and walked back across the field and down the muddy lane.

When I got back to Glenfield Close, Crabbie and the chief inspector were visibly relieved to see me.

“Sean, thank God, are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” I said.

“Let’s go, for God’s sake!” McArthur said.

“One more wee bit of business first, sir,” I said.

I took another discreet hit on my asthma inhaler and marched across the street to number bloody four. I rapped on the door, angry-peeler fashion. I could see that the TV was on in the living room, its blue light casting ghostly images onto the living room wall. What was on at this time of night? Some foreign film on channel four? The Open University?

“Who is it?” a cautious voice asked.

“The Old Bill.”

“The who?”

“The peelers!”

“Hold on.”

A white, lardy slab of a man opened the door in pajama bottoms and a white singlet. He had thick black glasses and wild brown curly hair and fading swastika tattoos. He was taller than I by about six inches, and he must have been eighteen stone. An intimidating guy if you were easily intimidated.

Behind him in the hall were a dozen new rectangular boxes markedJVCandSONY. Video cameras and VCRs.

“What do you want?” he said, grinning dementedly like Bingo fromThe Banana Splits.

“Did you put that SS flag up there?”

“Who are you?”

“Detective Inspector Sean Duffy, Carrick RUC. Did you put that flag up?”

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