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stickers and Star Trek collections. What we want to sell them, the trinkets and tack of our racial Home Shopping Channel, they don’t need.
    It’s hard, sitting on your fiddle-backed chair at your scratched repro Victorian pedestal table in your Sittingbourne in Cotswold Close, to believe in eight million settlers from a world sixty light years away, one hundred thousand of whom are in these six wee counties of North East Ireland.
    Mikey has got Louise settled. She’s going off.
    And Roisin Dunbar’s mobile rings.
    Mikey looks thunder at her as Louise screws up her face for the inevitable explosion.
    It’s Willich. Her boss. At this time of night, this has to be big shit. It is. There’s been an incident down on University Street. A major incident. He needs everyone in CID there, now. Seems someone walked into the Shian Welcome Centre and blew five Outsiders clean away.
    DCI Willich whispered the secret key of all police work to Roisin Dunbar the day she was promoted to DS. Everything is either a fucking mess, or a bloody fucking mess.
    Holds good for life in general, DS Dunbar’s found.
    Three ambulances, five patrol cars and a bike: this is a bloody fucking mess. Plus most of CID: she recognizes, in addition to the SOCOs’ evil little black van, Richard Crawford’s Nissan, Darren Healey’s bashed Ford, Tracey Agnew’s scarlet lady VW — the ultimate girlie-mobile — Ian Cochrane’s white Toyota. New alloys. Flash git.
    ‘Police. Let me through, please. Police.’
    The crowd of gawkers parts guiltily. Bad consciences about being here at all. She notices the salarymen leaning out the windows of the Holiday Inn. One of them has a camcorder. She points him out to a uniform. The officer goes over to shout up at him to turn that bloody thing off. Old paranoias cling. In the old days, the camera could steal much more than your soul.
    There’s an Outsider leaning against the side of an ambulance, shaking violently. Tracey Agnew is offering it a cup of tea and trying to coax forth information. She’s wearing aerobics gear under her raincoat.
    Detective Chief Inspector Bob Willich is in the hall. He looks like cinders.
    ‘Bloody fucking mess, boss?’
    ‘Bloody fucking mess, Rosh.’
    She goes into the room. Walls, ceiling, floor, things on the floor swim for a moment. She grasps the door frame, one, two, three slow, deep breaths. Steady. You’re all right.
    Barbara Hendron the pathologist is crouching by the side of the first body in her scrubs and rubber. She looks up from her work, nods to Roisin. Dunbar’s never been able to see her without her imagination dressing her up in Middle European evening dress, cloak and plastic fangs. She must have seen Christopher Lee look up from a drained corpse in exactly that way, once upon a Saturday night Horror double bill. There’s a man with her, vaguely familiar; tall, tweedy, Gerry Adams beard. His hair could have been painted on with black vinyl silk.
    ‘Who’s this?’
    ‘Dr Robert Littlejohn, Department of Xenology in Queen’s,’ Barbara Hendron says, poking at something with sharp steel. ‘I called him in. I’m out of my depth here. I need someone who knows what should be where, and what shouldn’t. And he only lives around the corner.’
    Dunbar knows where she knows him from. All those Outsider Specials they did on BBC Northern Ireland when we discovered we’d been volunteered to billet an entire shipload of aliens: that calm, reasonable, slightly smug voice telling us everything was going to be all right, they were just like us, really, no more different than Chinese or Indians or anything else.
    Ah hah.
    Dr Robert Littlejohn stands up, wipes his fingers on his green plastic pinafore, offers a hand to Roisin Dunbar.
    ‘You ever hear those urban legends about old Californian spinsters who shampooed their poodles and then put them in the microwave to dry?’ he says.
    Ian Cochrane of the new alloy wheels looks up from what he’s doing with the computer,