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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 middleof 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. Infact 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