Sacrifice of Fools E-Book

Ian McDonald

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 504

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

"A spell-binding tale of intrigue and empathy." —SF Site "A powerful and effective story." —Jo Walton They're ancient, power, enigmatic, and here. Eight million alien Shian have come to Earth. Not as conquerors, or invaders, but as settlers. In exchange for their technology, they're given places to live. One of those places in Northern Ireland, where eighty thousand Shian settlers disrupt the old, poisonous duality of Northern Irish life. The Shian remain aloof from the legacy of violence—until a Shian family is murdered down to the last child. Humans and aliens seem on a collision course, unless Andy Gillespie, ex-con, now Shian translator, can hunt down the killer before they strike again. But that's not so easy in Northern Ireland…

Leseprobe

SACRIFICE OF FOOLS

Copyright © 1996 by Ian McDonald

All rights reserved.

Originally published by Gollancz.

Published as an eBook in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

ISBN 978-1-625674-16-6

Cover design by Dirk Berger

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

March, three years earlier

Monday afternoon–Tuesday night

Wednesday morning–Friday

Saturday morning–Sunday morning

Sunday

Monday-Tuesday morning

Tuesday afternoon-Tuesday night

Wednesday

April

About the Author

Also by Ian McDonald

Bye baby Bunting,

Daddy’s gone a-hunting…

(trad.)

March, three years earlier

HE KNOWS IT’LL BE bad because they’ve stolen him a Ford. Nothing good, not ever, about Fords. Cold, hard to start, drive too fast: just like his life. Skidoo’s first steal: a ’96 Mondeo. Anyone can take a Ford, a five-year-old with half a metre of parcel strapping could, but Skidoo’s proud of his achievement. Fleet car: the clothes hook above the driver’s side rear window is worn shiny. The night before the job he changes the plates and acids out the licence numbers etched into the quarter-light glass. He checks the engine. Slowly, thoroughly. He always checks the motor before a job. If anything goes wrong, it won’t be Andy Gillespie’s wheels. But it’s a Ford, and that’s not good. The bars on the cargo lantern turn the tin garage into a prison of shadows. He mutters mechanic’s charms and prayers as he moves around the naked engine.

There are three doing the job: Big Maun, Soupy and Skidoo. They are waiting around the delivery entrance of the Linfield Supporters’ Club with their sports bags. Glasgow Rangers. Liverpool. Man U. Skidoo has the sawn-off tucked in safe between rolled sports socks. His job is to keep the place quiet while Big Maun and Skidoo do the work. Gillespie picks them off the street on a wet March lunchtime. Skidoo rides up front. He’ll be first in. It’s not a long drive, a mile or so from the Castlereagh Road to the Avenue One Bar, but slow. The traffic is heavy.

‘Lunchtime rush,’ Gillespie says.

‘In this town? Where the hell to?’ Big Maun says. He is a big man, and he acts hard, but Gillespie knows he’s as scared as any of them. Gillespie despises him and all of his kind. All those hard men, all those Big Men. Easy to be big and hard with a gun in your Rangers bag. Gillespie knows Big Maun does not trust him because he suspects Gillespie’s loyalties are not true and pure. Gillespie’s happy about that.

Skidoo is an easy fool. He’ll do anything to please anyone. You talk harder than the hard men, but when the RUC get you in that room up in Strandtown you will tell them everything from the size of your shoe to the length of your cock because it will please them very much. You have it in your face, like a birth mark, and everyone can see it but you. Easy-osy fool. At school, in your family, with your mates, they all knew you’d give them exactly what they wanted: sweets, toy cars, cigarettes, drink, girlfriends, money. Now, a Manchester United bag with a short-barrelled pumper nestled among the jocks and socks.

Teenage mothers push baby buggies over the pedestrian crossing. They form a wide front clearing all before them. Like the war chariot of Cuchulain, Gillespie thinks. They’re yakking, and looking to see who’s looking at them. Gillespie’s looking in his mirror. Job member three. Soup. The inevitable consequence of being born a Campbell. Oh, that rich, rare Ulster humour. Ha fucking ha. But you’re the only one who would understand my thought about the war chariots and the ancient warriors of Ulster. The Big One, the fool follower, the pale, quiet, smart one. The usual clichés. With their driver.

The kid Skidoo has his palms pressed to the side window and is licking the glass, showing off to the teenage mothers. They nudge one another and laugh and give him two fingers. Their thin tops, soaked by March rain, cling to their breasts. Skidoo’s laughing like a mad man.

‘Will you for fuck’s sake sit at fucking peace?’ Soup says. His voice is thin and penetrating like a blade. Skidoo turns and raises a solitary fuck-you finger to him. Soup grabs it, bends it backwards. Skidoo yelps and fumbles for his sports bag and the piece inside.

‘Fuck up, the pair of youse,’ Big Maun says. The crossing lights turn flashing amber. Gillespie accelerates smoothly away. Soup releases the finger. Skidoo redirects his testosterone to the radio.

‘Woo. Digital FM.’ The system scans through fragments from a dozen transmitters.

‘Leave it alone,’ Gillespie says.

‘I only want some fucking music, man.’

The radio drops on to a station.

Dr Coupar: your immediate reaction to the joint statement by the President of the United States and the European leaders. Awe? Fear? Satisfaction?

Well, John, I think mostly it’s the sheer relief of incontrovertible proof that we aren’t alone in the universe. Certainly, this is the most momentous event in human history.

Yes, but there are eight million of them, and they’re as close as Jupiter…

Skidoo hits the scan button. The radio hunts for music. It settles on a local FM station of the kind that have it written into their contracts that they must play a Tina Turner song every hour.

‘I like the mystery record,’ Skidoo says.

‘I was listening to that,’ Gillespie says.

Skidoo is a gum chewer. He loops the wad around his molars and turns his grin on the back seat. The moment of heat with Soup is forgotten.

‘Hey, any of you boys get it last night? Like, you know, night before, special, like? Make it extra good?’

‘Jesus, you didn’t fucking open your mouth to some bitch?’ Soup says. ‘Christ, do we have to have this amateur?’

‘I didn’t say nothing,’ Skidoo whines. ‘What you think I am? But I picked up this girl at the club, and it was like, because I knew I was going to do it today, I could do anything, and she like knew it too. Wanted it as much as I did. Bet none of youse ever made a bitch cry like, a cat. Like a big fucking alley cat, on my bed.’

Soup rolls his eyes in disgust.

‘You should keep yourself in,’ Big Maun says. ‘Keep pure before a job. Like them athletes; they keep away from women before a race. Sucks out your power.’

‘Just trying to make conversation, like.’

‘Dirty wee shite,’ Soup mutters.

The song ends and the DJ announces in his strange Ulster-American twang that they’ll be rolling the mystery record over to tomorrow because IRN is doing an extended bulletin at the top of the hour about this thing they’ve found out at Jupiter.

‘Fuck,’ Skidoo says and draws his leg up and stamps at the radio with the heel of his boot.

‘Hey hey hey,’ Gillespie says, checking in his rear-view that the big Montgomery Transport artic really is flashing him into the right-turn lane.

‘Sure we’re going to torch the fucking thing anyway, afterwards,’ Skidoo says petulantly.

‘Let him drive,’ Big Maun says.

He drives. The rain turns the Victorian red brick of the upper Templemore Avenue the colour of blood. That’d be about right. Dark day: the lights behind the ugly plastic shop signs on the Albertbridge Road are switched on. Across this junction, and it’s there at the bottom of Templemore Avenue. He surveyed the run a week ago. Lines, exits, traffic density. The bar is on the corner, the entrance is on Templemore Avenue, but there are lights on to the Newtownards Road. He won’t be waiting on the main road either: no, he’ll go for the delivery alley down the side that opens on to the entry behind the houses on Tower Street. Across Tower Street another entry leads to Madrid Street. They’ll go this way. No one would imagine a Loyalist hit squad escaping into republican Short Strand. Gillespie drives past the bar, turns left at the lights and pulls into a recently vacated bus stop.

‘Right, lads.’ Sound of sports bags unzipping. Gillespie sees the shake of Skidoo’s hand. He can smell fear on his breath. It smells like sick. Gillespie knows then for certain that it’s going to be bad. Skidoo sees that Gillespie sees this fear.

‘All right, let’s do it!’ he says, rattling off the safeties on the pumper to show how brave and full of spunk he is.

‘Just a wee moment.’ Big Maun closes his eyes and clasps his hands. ‘Lord,’ he whispers, ‘we know that you hate all evil-doers and punish the sinner in your sight. We know that drugs, well, they’re just about the most evil ever came out of the pit of Satan and we thank you that you appointed us to be your righteousness. Be with us when we’re in that bar, Lord. Stand beside us. Remind us that it’s your work we’re doing. Don’t let us mess it up. Amen.’ He pauses for the response. Nothing. ‘Right. You know the drill. Keep your bags high, throw them away once you get your piece out. Skidoo, make sure you’re out of the way when Soup and me open up. Gillespie’ll wait five minutes at the pick up. Miss him and you make your own way on foot. Any questions?’

Shakes of the head.

‘Right, lads.’

Gillespie waits until they are around the corner on to Templemore Avenue. Three more blatant hoods it would be hard to imagine. Instead of the names of football teams on their bags, they should read ‘Loyalist Hit Squad’.

He parks in Tower Street facing the entry to Madrid Street. Students from the further education college come and go. The girls look denimy. Gillespie rear-views them for something to do. The clock says top of the hour. They should be doing it. He doesn’t much want to think about it, so he fiddles with the radio. It works despite Skidoo’s boot.

… envoys appointed by the United Nations to conduct negotiations with the extra-terrestrial fleet in parking orbit in the shadow of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Negotiations are expected to concentrate on granting settling rights in exchange for technology.

Jesus God. They aren’t making this up. April Fool’s three weeks off. They exist. They’re here and we’re asking Jesus to bless us blow away some kid peddling smack in our parish.

The movement in the rear-view grabs his attention. Running figures. Already? Too early. It’s too soon. Something wrong. He starts the car. As he leans across to open the doors, he notices in the wing-mirror there are only two men running down the alley, dodging the grey plastic wheelie bins. Gillespie reverses into the entry. Over his shoulder he sees new figures appear in the rectangle of light at the far end of the alley. Shouts. The rearmost of the two running men turns, lifts his weapon.

Shots.

The figure falls. The other men come running down the alley, guns held high trying to get a shot, but Soup is in the rear seat and Gillespie is burning across Tower Street. Denimy girls scatter. File binders flap and flop like poisoned crows.

‘Set-up, it was a fucking set-up,’ Soup yells. Gillespie guns down the entry, pushing a wedge of trapped wheelie bins in front of him. If anyone steps out of a back gate now, it’s sure death. ‘They were waiting inside. Skidoo’s down, Big Maun got us out.’

‘He’s down too,’ Gillespie says, wing-mirrors scraping old Belfast brick. Tiny scrolls of plastic swarf flutter from the mirror housings. That close. ‘I saw him go down.’

‘Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess.’

The woo-woos have started: to the right, to the left, behind. Hunting. Closing down the bolt-holes. Rabbits in a warren. The Ford plunges out of the brick mouth of the alley on to Madrid Street. Gillespie throws a handbrake left. He misses a BT van by millimetres. The vanguard of bins slews across the road. Baby-buggy pushers, old women out on sticks, wee lads with no jobs: every head turns. The woo-woos are closing fast, but not fast enough. Hadn’t reckoned on us running right across your own fat laps. The Ford touches sixty-five past the Munster-mansion pile of Mountpottinger police station, bristling with radio masts behind its wire-mesh blast shields. Fort Apache in the alien nation of Short Strand. Long Troubles, slow peace.

Gillespie sees the lights go orange thirty yards from the junction and floors the pedal. The cross traffic starts to move, then stops in a flurry of screeches and horns as the Ford comes through. Something to point out on the teatime news when they get home and say, ‘I was there’. Except today I think the schedules will be taken up with something else. The left-turn light is still red but Gillespie goes on to the footway to undertake the stationary traffic and turns on to Woodstock Link in front of a City bus.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Soup shouts.

‘They knew we were doing the job, they’ll know where we’re going. I’m going to dump this thing up off My Lady’s Road, burn it, walk away. Catch a bus. They won’t look for us on buses.’

Gillespie pulls a ninety degree right across the face of an oncoming Peugeot hatchback down a sudden entry. The Peugeot stops in a smoke of tyres. He knows the secret of getting any other car to stop for you: it’s communicating that you are not, ever, going to stop for it. You’re not going to think of even slowing down. It’s not bin day in Woodstock ward. Gillespie takes a child’s bicycle left lying in the entry and smashes it flat. That’ll learn you for leaving your toys lying around. The end of the entry leaps towards him. Beyond, the waste ground littered with the charred debris of Twelfth bonfires, where the trouble boys go to smash things. Bonfire coming early this year.

And the red wedge nose of a Ford MPV blocks the square of light. A line of mutual recognition and realization connects Gillespie with the little girl in the back seat. You could be my daughter, my Stacey. Do I look like your dad, is that the expression on your face, or is it that you recognize the inevitability of impact? It is slow, it is perfectly timed. He can shove in the clutch and stand on the brakes, but it won’t matter because it’s all predestined. He may as well take his hands off the wheel, his feet off the pedals and surrender to it. He does. The glide in to impact is slow and smooth and serene. Front left to back right. Metal, glass, plastic, rubber, detonate. The stolen Ford tail-spins. The MPV slides end first away from the explosion in a shatter of glass. All the back windows have gone. Through the spray of sugar-cube glass comes sailing the little girl.

Gillespie does not see where or how she falls to earth.

The stolen Mondeo has been spun around to face down the entry from which it came. There is nothing left of the front. The windscreen is out. Soup is lying in his seat belt, blinking and gasping. Gillespie steps out of the wreck into the glass-strewn street. The MPV stands in the middle of the road. Its rear end is gone. The woman driver is wailing. People are coming from the houses to help, but the distances seem too great and their movements too slow ever to get here.

How strange your days have turned out, Gillespie finds he’s thinking. In your early spring afternoon — weather acceptable — two cars smash without permission or explanation or warning. Wailing woman at the wheel: you pick your daughter up, taking her shopping, maybe to the doctor’s, maybe to a relative’s; you couldn’t foresee that it’ll end in smash and the breaking of your life and your daughter in intensive care. Me: Andy Gillespie. You start the day planning the murder of a drugs dealer; you will end it in a police cell. Nation: world: you begin with breakfast shows and cereals and rush to work, you end with new neighbours, other lives from somewhere else, without permission or explanation or warning.

The sirens are closer now, only streets away.

Monday afternoon-Tuesday night

THE SUIT IS THREE years out of fashion, but he wears it. He does have another one but it’s only a year out of date: too soon for the great wheel of style to have come round to it again. He re-knots the tie — the first was too small, like a blood-clot on his throat — but he still looks like a spiv. Outside in Eglantine Avenue the taxi hoots. It’s only a few metres’ dash from the door, but enough to soak his number two suit through. Wet March. Wet February before it; wet January, wet December, wet November. Wet April to follow; probably wet May. Used to be weather in this country. Now all we have is climate. Plenty of theories, from global warming to atmospheric damage stirred up by Outsider gravity fields. Can’t hoist theories over your head, like an umbrella.

‘Where to?’

‘Magistrates’ court.’

Court is one destination on which taxi drivers won’t quiz you. He makes one comment, on Great Victoria Street, passing a humped-back microbus with a cab company number on the door and roof sign.

‘That’s what I’m getting, when I get money. Run for ever on tap water. Amazing.’

‘They call it something like zero-point energy, but don’t ask me how it works. Shouldn’t work at all, scientists say.’

The taxi bus draws alongside. Steam wisps from its tail piece.

‘Oil companies are going to hate it. Surprised they didn’t try to buy it up and bury it, like the everlasting light bulb.’

The traffic barriers are long gone but the security boxes remain, last legacy of the slow war. They look like a concrete cruet. They incongruously frame the New Concert Hall, jewel in the crown of the Laganside Project — if London can do it with Docklands, Belfast has to do it with Dame Milly Putridia Lagan. The thing looks like a nuclear power station, Gillespie thinks. The signs and symbols have changed in the three years since he last went up the steps to the magistrates’ court — two flags clinging damply to their poles, red white and blue, green white and gold; two crests above the porch, lion and unicorn, harp and St Patrick’s cross; two names in two languages. The schizophrenia of Joint Sovereignty.

He shivers as he passes through the revolving doors. Inside, cigarette smoke and damp male. Same as it ever was. The usual suspects in this year’s sports fashion, laid out along the wooden benches like a team of sent-off footballers. The lawyers sit facing them in plastic chairs. They all have expressions of exasperation on their faces. The floor is cratered with cigarette stub-outs. The walls are graffitied with felt-markered names, fuck-yous and political acronyms.

His case stands head and shoulders above the rest. The humans leave space around it. Even the solicitor looks uncomfortable, chain-smoking, briefcase on her knees.

‘Aileen McKimmis?’

Her glasses are too big for her thin face. They slip down her nose and she has to stare at him over them. That’s right. A man.

‘Are you from the Welcome Centre?’ she says.

‘Yes. Andy Gillespie.’

She doesn’t take the offered hand.

‘I thought they would be sending ah…’

‘An Outsider? No. They send their apologies. They’ve a longstanding appointment with some people from the Joint Authority about political representation, and this did come up kind of unexpected. So they sent me.’ You’re still looking at me over those glasses, lawyer. You see a squat brick of a man, grey-stubbled, cannon-ball head; three years out-of-date suit splattered dark with rain. But you don’t see the inside. There’re things you’ll never know how to do, in there. ‘My Narha is idiomatic; the Centre would not have sent me if they didn’t have complete confidence in my ability.’

His hand is taken.

‘Could I have a wee word with your client?’ he asks.

They say it about the Chinese, or the blacks, or the Asians. Catholics probably said it about the Protestant planters, Celts about Anglo-Normans; late Neolithics about Bronze-agers; every established group about new immigrants. And laughed. Ach, they all look the same to me. Can’t tell them apart.

With this final wave of newcomers, it’s true. They do all look the same. We see their height, and their thinness, and the skin the colour of new terracotta, and the three fingers on the hands and the oval slits in the eyes and the flat wide nose and the tight buds of ears low and far back on the skull and the strips of dark crimson fur over the top of the scalp tapering into a line down the spine; we see the odd jointings and body postures that make their ease seem discomfort to us; and we think, well, they’re not that different, really. Then we look for the sex identifiers, the absolute basis of how we deal with each other: the body shape, the build, the bulges, the breasts or the balls, and they’re not there. Is it male, female, man, woman? We look at another one, maybe there’ll be some difference, then we can tell. It’s important. We have to get these things before we know how to deal with them. They look exactly the same.

Jesus, this is weird. Do they have men and women? How do they tell?

They see with more than eyes, that’s how.

The client stands up to greet Andy Gillespie. It’s dressed in a men’s business suit, way too short in the legs and sleeves, worn over a high-neck green body; a Long Tall Sally label sticks up at the back of the neck. Gillespie takes a long, deep sniff. A female. He shrugs his eyebrows. The client returns the gesture, a flicker of the thin line of dark fur on either side of the central strip. Gillespie offers a hand, palm up. The client bends down and licks it.

The whole room has gone quiet.

She offers Gillespie her hand. He touches the tip of his tongue to the soft centre of her palm. The Outsider tastes of herbs, honey, vagina, rust, hay, incense and pot. Her unique chemical identity. Her name, in perfume.

Aileen McKimmis’s eyes are wide behind her too-big glasses.

I bet you smiled, Gillespie thinks, like they taught you in client relations. Put the client at her ease. Except you did the exact opposite. Bared teeth are a threat. You smile to these people by blinking slowly. Like this.

— I’m Andy Gillespie, he says in Narha. The Welcome Centre sent me. —

— I was expecting a Harridi, the client says. Her voice is a low contralto, her accent unplaceable; strange yet familiar. The aliens in the movies never have accents, except the ones with boomy Big Brother voices. Echoey. Jehovah speaks. This Outsider talks like music.

— Like I was saying to —

— I heard what you said to my advocate.

— I’m here in the capacity of an expert witness. Advocate McKimmis has explained to you that we’re here… Gillespie breaks off. — Could we continue this in English? Narha doesn’t have the words for the legal processes. Your law is too different.

‘Certainly, Mr Gillespie.’

‘I know that by your law you did nothing wrong, but this is a very serious charge and the prosecution — that’s the lawyer who represents the state whose laws you’ve broken — will try to have you sent to prison until the full trial because they think you might attempt to leave the country.’

‘Why should I do that? Do you people not respect your own law?’

‘In a word, no.’

The Outsider screws up her nose: incomprehension.

‘I would have preferred one of our own knight-advocates, a genro,’ she says.

‘Our courts don’t recognize them. You’ve got me, you’ve got Mizz McKimmis; we’ll keep you out of jail.’

You do not want to be there. I’ve seen what it’s like for your people. And I don’t ever want to see what happened there happen again. You won’t go to jail, none of you will go to jail, while I have strength in me.

The door to court one opens.

‘Case twelve,’ calls a short usher in a black gown. ‘Case twelve.’

Aileen McKimmis stands up, tucks her briefcase under her arm and dusts cigarette ash off her skirt.

‘Show time.’

She leaves another butt-end impact crater behind her in the waiting room floor.

Above the magistrates’ bench the shiny new harp and cross shoulder in on the chipped lion and unicorn, like a scam merchant with a deal to offer. There’s a new name for the prosecution. It’s not the Crown versus any more. It’s the Joint Justices. Gillespie can’t believe that the name made it all the way to statute without anyone getting the joke. Double the civil servants, half the irony.

Defence and Joint Justices confer. Back on their home bench, the prosecution consults palmtops. The defendant comes up into the dock. The court goes very quiet. All rise. The magistrates are in. All persons having business, all that. Then again, in Irish. Case number 451279, Joint Justices versus Fff. Fff… Fidiki… The magistrates look at the usher. The usher looks at the prosecution. The prosecution looks at the defendant.

‘Fidikihana Kusarenjajonk,’ she says, very slowly. She takes the usher through it twice.

Andy Gillespie’s loving it.

You are Fidikihana Kusarenjajonk, of Occasionally Plentiful Hunting Hold, Tullynagarry Road, Carryduff?

‘I am.’

The charge is the attempted murder of Christopher and John Beattie, of Wordsworth Gardens, Carryduff, aged fourteen and sixteen, and of Andrew Coey, of Shelley Rise, Carryduff, age fifteen, on the evening of March the first, 2004. How do you plead?

The Outsider flicks her eyes to her defence brief. Aileen McKimmis nods. No, you don’t do that. And Gillespie catches Fidikihana’s eye, flicks his head back. Yes.

‘I am not guilty.’

She doesn’t even understand what that means.

The charge of the prosecution: that the accused did confront the above-mentioned Christopher and John Beattie and Andrew Coey while they were playing football in Wordsworth Gardens, pour an inflammable liquid — petrol — over them and set them alight with intent of murder.

And what is the condition of the brothers Beattie and Andrew Coey?

Second and third degree burns to thirty per cent of the body surface. The victims are undergoing treatment at the specialist burns unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital. They are very seriously ill. In view of the extremely violent nature of the assault, on young children, the prosecution recommends custody.

The bench is inclined to agree. This is a most heinous allegation. Ms McKimmis; have you anything to say in defence of your client?

‘I’d like to call Mr Andrew Gillespie. Mr Gillespie is employed by the Shian Welcome Centre in University Street, and is qualified to speak on matters of Shian psychology and physiology pertinent to our defence.’ The look over the glasses says, you had better be.

He does the thing with the book and the hand and the wee note card in the box in case you can’t remember the oath.

‘Mr Gillespie, could you tell us about the work of the Shian Welcome Centre?’

‘Certainly. It’s mostly a contact service for gensoons; those are young, single Outsiders, who’ve come into the country looking for Holds — the big Shian extended families — to join. The way their society operates, adolescents leave their birth families and travel widely until they are accepted into another. The Centre has lists of Holds in Ireland, and also assesses the suitability of newcomers for particular Holds.’

‘A sort of dating agency?’ the magistrate on the left asks.

‘In a sense. And a bit like a employment agency as well, in that it sets individuals up with groups. The Centre also provides a liaison service with organizations employing Shian; industry, shops, restaurants, things like that. There’s a lot of room for misunderstandings between the two species.’

The prosecution harumph.

‘My job is mostly in the field of human-Shian relations and I do quite a bit of translation work as well. I speak idiomatic Narha; that’s the lingua franca of the Shian Nations. The Centre also serves as a base for the Shian political organization, such as it is. You’ve probably been hearing about it on the news lately. I don’t have much to do with that.’

‘So you’re something of a Shian expert, Mr Gillespie?’

‘Well, no one can really claim to be an expert on these people. But I think I know them as well as any human can.’

‘Could you explain, then, Ms Kusarenjajonk’s actions?’

‘The primary motivation in Shian society is the preservation of the children. Family lines, bloodlines, are very, very important to them. The Shian law allows any action in defence of a child; including killing. The case notes state that the children of Occasionally Plentiful Hunting Hold had been taunted and bullied by youths from the estate that backs on to their farm. There are at least five complaints from the Hold to the police, none of which were followed up. The police don’t want to get involved in Outsider affairs.’

‘Police competence is not in question here, Mr Gillespie,’ says the magistrate on the right.

‘The Welcome Centre had been informed that there was friction between the two communities, and we were attempting some kind of mediation. The boys; John and Chris Beattie and Andrew Coey, had harassed and beaten up Fidikihana Kusarenjajonk’s young son Mushedsen on several occasions, and just before the incident, had attacked him on this street, stolen his bicycle and threatened him that if he told anyone they’d come back and kill him. Fidikihana Kusarenjajonk took what she considered appropriate action to end the threat to her child. It may seem extreme to us, but by Shian law, by the customs of her species, she did nothing wrong. By her standards, she showed incredible restraint. In fact, not to have done what she did would have been wrong; it would have been seen as criminal negligence of her child by Shian law.’

The magistrate in the middle twiddles with his pencil.

‘Yes, Mr Gillespie, but it is human law, specifically the law of the Joint Authority, that has jurisdiction in this court.’

‘In your opinion, is Ms Kusarenjajonk a danger to the community?’ Aileen McKimmis asks.

‘No more than any Shian is.’

‘If she is released on bail, is she likely to seek further vengeance on these boys?’

‘No. She’s removed the threat. They won’t be going near her child again. Anything else would be a violation of their individual rights, which is a separate issue in Shian law.’

‘Thank you, Mr Gillespie.’

It’s the prosecution’s turn now.

‘Mr Gillespie, are you a qualified xenologist? Degrees? Diplomas? Certification with our fine new Department of Xenology in Queen’s University?’

‘Well, not qualified.’

‘So you don’t have any accreditation for your expertise on Outsider affairs?’

‘No.’

‘I see. You speak Narha idiomatically. Where did you learn the language?’

You fucking fuck of a smug bastard.

‘Mr Gillespie?’

‘The Maze Prison.’

‘Where you were serving a term for conspiracy to murder. I’m glad to see you spent your time constructively.’

Aileen’s on her feet.

‘I must object to the relevance of this line of questioning. This is not a trial.’

‘But Mr Gillespie’s qualification as an expert witness is surely highly relevant here.’

Middle magistrate does the pencil thing again.

‘It really is a bit cheeky bringing up Mr Gillespie’s prison record, Mr Magrory,’ he says. His colleagues nod. ‘Where Mr Gillespie learned his— Narha? Is that is? — is hardly relevant.’

‘No further questions. Thank you, Mr Gillespie.’ Smug fucking fuck bastard Magrory sums up. Then Aileen’s on her feet.

‘What we have here is a clash of cultures. I don’t deny that a very serious act took place, that severe injuries were inflicted on these three boys. What is in question is my client’s state of mind, which the bench must recognize is very, very different from our mind-set. In my client’s view, she has committed no crime. Had she killed those boys, she would still have committed no crime. She has no sense of having done wrong; in fact, she has done right. Like very young children are assumed to have no conception of right and wrong and can’t be held morally accountable for their actions, Shian morality, and their concepts of right and wrong, are equally alien to us, and must be taken into account. These are the early days of contact between our species; there must be a certain amount of leeway in dealings between us, a period of mutual adjustment. I sympathize with the sufferings of the victims, and the anguish of their families, but I do not think the law, justice, or relations between humans and Outsiders would be served by custody.’

The magistrates look at each other. They mutter. They nod. Then the middle magistrate says, ‘This is a nasty, vicious attack on three vulnerable members of society. The victims will in all likelihood bear the scars of this attack for the rest of their lives. Such an offence, if proven, would normally warrant custody. However, there are unique features to this case that demand special consideration. We find ourselves in a delicate state of rapprochement between two markedly different cultures, and while the Outsiders must recognize that their law has no remit in our society, deeply ingrained cultural and social beliefs can only be changed over time. Ms Kusarenjajonk, I believe you are convinced that you have done nothing wrong and that you acted in the best interests of your child, but you must reflect that in defending him you have caused suffering to the parents of other children. I am also inclined to believe Mr Gillespie’s testimony that you are unlikely to pose a threat in future, and I am persuaded by counsel’s argument that community relations would not be improved by sending you to prison. Therefore I am remanding you on bail of three thousand pounds to appear for trial on the fifteenth of May in the Crown Court.’

Yes! Result!

‘Central Court of Justice, your Honour,’ smug bastard Magrory interjects.

‘Yes. Exactly. The Central Court of Justice. It takes me a while to get used to these new names. Who is tendering bail?’

‘The Welcome Centre’s putting it up,’ Gillespie whispers to McKimmis. He slips the plastic out of his wallet.

‘The Shian Welcome Centre, your Honour,’ Aileen says.

Back in the waiting room Aileen McKimmis thanks Gillespie.

‘Sorry about the prosecution. That was underhand.’

‘It’s not where you’ve been, it’s where you’re going to. That’s what I tell myself. Most of the time I believe it.’

— Thank you, Gillespie, though I am not quite sure what it is you prevented me experiencing, Fidikihana says in Narha. My Hold will recompense the Welcome Centre as soon as possible.

Gillespie tilts his head from left to right, an Outsider gesture of dismissal. — Don’t worry about it. The Harridis have more money than they know what to do with. But I wouldn’t count on that defence working in the real trial.

The usher’s out again, moving through the hard lads and their briefs, frantic in his little black gown. ‘Case sixteen,’ he’s crying. ‘Case sixteen.’

It’s only a stud-wall box he shares with the photocopier and sixteen boxes of old gold A4 (they like old gold, they do everything on old gold), but it’s more home than his flat over on Eglantine Avenue. He still despises suits and shirts who’ll tell you their real home is the office; they say it because it’s where their families aren’t. For him this office is home because it’s where his family is.

Seyamang and Vrenanka are chasing each other around the desk legs on their tricycles. When they get bored with that they’ll come and stick their faces in the photocopier or climb up the stacked old gold. Seyoura is on the phone — hers is the next stud-wall box to Gillespie’s — trying to get some kid who’s had his money lifted in the bus station a place for the night in their Transients’ House on Palestine Street. Senkajou is in deep communion with the computer — Gillespie’ll never understand how that direct chemical interface works, looks too much like snorting cocaine to him — and Muskravhat is making an appointment to see someone from one of the big Holds in London’s Docklands.

Senkajou’s out of the machine and pops his head into the Gillespie box.

‘Excellent result, Andy.’

‘Cost you three grand.’

Senkajou does the Shian shrug, which is a flexing of the shoulders back and a slight opening of the mouth. It’s money, that’s all. It won’t bother them if the Kusarenjajonks don’t give it to them. These people have no idea of the value of money. They’ve built starships, colonized ten planets across one hundred light years without a functioning economy.

‘I am most impressed, Andy,’ says Muskravhat, stopping on his way to the downstairs kitchen to make something for the kids to eat. He’s not their father; neither is Senkajou. It’s the Shian way.

Gillespie blinks slowly. It’s taken him three months to unlearn the automatic human greeting smile.

‘How was the meeting?’

‘Most satisfactory. The British and Irish Joint Authority Directorate is prepared to recognize us as a distinct political entity and negotiate on an equal status as the main Unionist and Nationalist parties.’

‘The Chinese and the Indians’ll be wanting their own parties next.’

‘Of course. They should have had them long before we arrived, but the Unionists and Nationalists insist that there is no such thing as ethnic identities outside their own. There is no Chinese political identity. There is no Shian political identity. If we wish political representation it should be within the framework of the existing parties.’

‘You’re either a Nationalist Chinese or a Unionist Chinese. Nationalist Shian or Unionist Shian. Can’t just be Shian or Chinese, or Indian. Bastards have to divide everything between them. You’re either one or the other. Can’t be neither. Can’t be just for yourselves. That’s sitting on the fucking fence. You know why I haven’t voted in ten years? Because these wankers aren’t worth my vote. If you’re not one, then you must be the other.’

‘Neither side trusts us. The Nationalists suspect us of being planted by the British government to dilute the Catholic population; the Unionists suspect we have been settled by the Irish government to minoritize the Protestant population. The truth is that we have been settled here by both governments to introduce a third element into this country’s political dynamics. But we have land. We have space. And soon we shall have a say in how we live in this land. The real problem is not with the Unionists or the Nationalists, however, but with our own people. There is a strong tide of opinion that we should not involve ourselves in human affairs, or at least not yet. Persuading the Nations to participate as one species will be the great challenge. But that will have to wait until after the season is ended.’

Everything bows to kesh, the spring and autumn seasons. It’s less than a week now to the first moon; the Welcome Centre has been working at a soft scream, like an ant-hill doing speed. Traditionally, all affairs must be set in order before Shian culture effectively shuts down for five weeks. But there’s a more intimate urgency, an inner compulsion. Gillespie’s caught momentary electric tingles of otherness in the air; the chemicals, the pheromones, are stirring. The heat is coming. Gillespie tries to think of it like a big holiday, like Orangemen’s Day and Christmas and New Year and birthdays put end to end, and then end to end again, like summer holidays were when he was a kid. But it’s not. It’s nothing like that. It’s sex. It’s the mating season. It’s the rut. It’s the time that the Shian become alien even to themselves.

There’s an old joke. There’s some psychologist doing a sex survey. First of all he asks, how many do it three times a week? About half stick their hands up. All right, twice a week? About a third. Once a week? All the rest, except one wee old man sitting in the corner, grinning away like an eejit to himself. Once a month? the shrink asks. The wee old man just sits there, but he’s looking ever happier. Once every two months? No. The old boy’s looking ecstatic. Once every six months? Once a year? The wee man sticks his hand up. He can hardly keep himself still. ‘Why are you looking so happy?’ the shrink asks. ‘You only have sex once a year.’ ‘Yes,’ the wee man says, ‘but tonight’s the night!’

The Shian have built an entire civilization around that joke. Only it’s twice a year, and for five weeks at a time. Other times, nothing. Sexless as a nun. Sexlesser. There’re lots of old jokes about nuns and candles. Sexless as a baby. But when it’s on, it’s on.

How can they live that way?

They probably think the same about us. Neither hot nor cold, just this lukewarm half-passion, how can they live that way?

At least someone will be getting sex. For Andy Gillespie it’ll be five weeks of sitting staring out at the rain and the red brick cliff-face of the Holiday Inn with its hundred black-plumaged businessmen nesting in its eighty-pound-per-night ledges, answering the phones and saying, hello, you’re through to Andy Gillespie at the Shian Welcome Centre. Normal service has been suspended during the spring season, but if there’s any way I can help you…

‘Incidentally,’ Muskravhat adds, ‘I have had a call from a Mr Sinnot, who is the manager of McDonald’s drive-thru at Sprucefield shopping centre. Could you talk to him?’

Gillespie phones him back. Mr Sinnot’s relieved to be talking to someone with a Belfast accent, with a Belfast vocabulary to match. The Outsiders learned their English by chemical interface with the brain; they have the words but the idiom you learn from experience. It’s this Outsider employee he’s been sent. She’s refusing to follow company policy of smiling at the customers. Gillespie makes an appointment to visit and sort it out, then Seyoura puts her head around the door.

‘I have just had a call from Occasionally Plentiful Hunting; they wish to pass their thanks and congratulations to you for helping Fidikihana. You have the makings of a genro in you, Andy.’

‘Wrong species, I think.’

‘Rights are rights whatever your native species, Andy. Otherwise they are not rights at all. There is no bar to us practising your law, if we can understand this idea of law; so why should you not study ours?’

‘This is not a great country for upholding individual rights.’

‘You are making excuses, Andy. Yes. A thing. By way of thanking you for your contribution, we have arranged a small celebration later this evening, upstairs, in our apartment. We would be much honoured if you accepted this invitation.’

‘A party? For me?’

‘That’s correct. Your facial expression indicates a possible negative reaction. Have I given offence?’

‘No, I’m just surprised. I hadn’t expected this.’ Upstairs. Home. Into the fold of the Hold. Accepted. Family. ‘Thank you, I’d love to.’

‘Very good. If you wish alcohol, you should bring your own.’

Andy Gillespie catches a movement in the corner of his eye. He moves too slow: Seyamang brings down the big stack of old gold A4. Thud, wail. Seyoura consoles and licks bruises. Vrenanka’s out the back, stalking the cat from the other side of the entry.

Then it is quitting time and the kids are rounded upstairs and as he’s putting on his coat Gillespie decides that he won’t go back to the flat, he’ll grab something to eat down Botanic Avenue. On the way out the door, as he arms the alarm and waits for the confirmation message, he imagines he feels something brush past him, a touch, nothing more. Imagination. Nothing. The roofs and church spires stir the wind up to all sorts of weird things down this street.

The staff in the diner are all dressed in denim and try to move him to a smaller table in case a group comes in but Gillespie folds his arms and looks them his three-years-in-the-Maze-terrorist-related-offence look and they go and pick on someone safer. The service is fucking awful. He wasn’t going to leave a tip anyway. He plays strip-mines and slag-heaps with the sugar in the sugar bowl and decides that the music is too loud and the food is average and the serving staff are getting their own back on him, but it’s better than going back to that flat. Too many nights he sits with tinnies and Chinese and the remote control in the dark, smelly living room, looking at his pictures of Stacey and Talya on the mantelpiece. But he’s thinking about Seyoura and Muskravhat and Senkajou and Seyamang and Vrenanka Harridi, folded and curled together in their little suite of rooms upstairs.

In the bright loud eatery, Andy Gillespie thinks about families, human and Shian. There’s something great and sane to Andy Gillespie about the Hold, the amorphous social unit of the Shian species. Two or two hundred, great roofs or small, lives packed close together under them. Lives come, lives go, lives pass through, the Hold endures. Less than a marriage, more than a friendship or a club. Communal. Dirty word. Nasty word. Discredited word. We’ve forgotten how to be communal. We’ve exalted the individual over the corporate. We’re afraid of others. We are ourselves, we are independent, individual, we live our own lives and we are free. And we end up in our separate rooms with our tinnies and our takeaways and our remote controls individual and independent and apart.

A family, Andy Gillespie has concluded, is what works. A functioning arrangement. Blood is not enough.

He’s brought copies of the photographs of his daughters into his office. They sit on a shelf above the photocopier. They should get to know this new family. Maybe someday they’ll all be part of it.

The staff are cleaning his table around him now, and taking the salt and pepper away to be refilled. OK, OK, I’m going. He turns his collar up against the dark and the rain. Girl students huddle past under umbrellas; the boys in their wee bum-freezer jackets just get wet. It’s a machismo thing. The cafés and diners are bright and loud and busy.

You’d almost think you weren’t in Belfast.

Sirens. Woo-woos. Always something to bring you back. They sound close. He hates the sound of sirens. There is nothing good in them, ever.

In the offie he buys two six packs of Guinness. He’s missed the chemist by five minutes, but the all-night Spar by the station does a wide range of aspirins. It always makes him smile, the aspirin thing. What a great cheap way to get out of your head. You have to have a Shian physiology, though. They’re as knowledgeable about different brands as wine connoisseurs about clarets. There’s a new soluble aspirin-codeine out that’s the thing at the moment. Chemists can’t keep it in stock. The Spar doesn’t do it, but it’s got Junior Disprin, which is almost as sought after. Some day the pharmaceutical companies are going to wise up to this and start putting out their own designer brands. Shortly after that governments’ll be slapping tax on them.

He’ll stick to the black stuff. Each to their own poison.

He’s early so he goes the long way through student land. The old East Belfast Woodstock Road thing was that you couldn’t live over here, it was uninhabitable, it wasn’t proper Belfast. Students and Chinkies and fags and republicans lived over there. Weird Outsiders. Not real people. Now he wouldn’t live in any other part of town. He likes living among students and Chinkies and fags and republicans and weird Outsiders. They’re real. It’s the Woodstock Road, East Belfast Wee Ulster mentality that’s uninhabitable. Fake people living by fakes rules and fake principles. Fake lives. Everything sacrificed to playing the role, being the man, doing the things. Do the friends, do the family, do the wife and kids and house bit. What if it isn’t right? What if it isn’t what you want? Doesn’t matter. It’s the way. You follow it, or you don’t exist.

So, Gillespie, is being what you want to be worth the price of family, friends, wife, kids?

The question makes him falter as he comes round the corner of Wellesley Street on to University Street.

And he stops dead.

There are five police cars, one police motorbike and three ambulances outside the Shian Welcome Centre.

Those woo-woos…

There are police in yellow jackets and paramedics in green coveralls. There are people in suits and coats. Blue lights pulse; uniforms are pushing back bystanders and stringing up Police Incident: Do Not Cross tape.

Andy Gillespie starts to run. It all goes very slow. It all goes very smooth, very soft, very pure and distant. As he crosses University Street he notices how a policewoman has the traffic stopped, and that every bedroom window in the Holiday Inn is open and a salaryman is leaning out into the rain. He’s under the tape and past the uniforms. The coat and suit cops turn —they’re shouting something — but they’re too slow. They’ll never catch him. There’s a Shian leaning against the side of an ambulance, a blanket around his shoulders. A woman in a beige raincoat is offering him a foam styrene cup of something. The Shian is shivering.

Up the steps. Into the hall. Into the office. He’s still got the bag of Guinness cans in his left hand, the aspirins in his right. The room is full of suits in coats and baggy white bodies with rubber gloves. They turn with a communal squeak.

‘Get him out of here!’ a voice shouts.

‘I fucking work here!’ he shouts. ‘These are my friends!’

Uniforms lunge like monsters in a cheap Hammer Horror, tackle him, wrestle him back to the door. A camera flashes. By its brief light, he sees it all.

There’s one body in the middle of the room. It’s lying on its back, its hands are balled into fists, folded on its chest. He can’t tell whose body it is. It has no face. It has no head. Blood fans out from the severed neck across the carpet. Shian blood is dark as venison; it smells very strongly. There is more blood around the groin, a mess of it. The second body is against the far wall, by the fireplace, underneath the year planner. It lies in the same position as the first, it has no head. Its groin has been mutilated. The third is to the left, in the short corridor beside Gillespie’s office, lying on its back, fists on its chest, cut open below. Beyond, in the back room, are two smaller headless bodies, curled around each other.

All this he sees with absolute clarity and precision in the white lightning of the camera flash.

Detective Sergeant Roisin and Mr Michael Dunbar of Cotswold Close, Dunmurry, are celebrating the arrival of a new dining room suite. It was delivered at seventeen thirty-five by Gribben Weir Reproductions of Dunmurry Lane. It is reproduction Victorian, six fiddle-back chairs and a circular pedestal table in real, but sustainably forested, mahogany veneer, seating four, extendable to six. While manoeuvring it into the cramped dining recess of the Dunbars’ Frazer Homes C5 ‘Sittingbourne’, the delivery men contrived to put a six-inch scratch on the table top. Detective Sergeant and Mr Michael Dunbar are considerably fucked off about this. Gribben Weir have admitted liability and will send a French polisher, but the problem is whether the job will be done by the weekend when the Dunbars plan to host a dinner to baptize their new table. At present, they are sitting on their fiddle-back chairs around the scratch, which is shaped like a tick on Nike sportswear, playing Fantasy Dinner Guest League.

‘Thing is, if it’s one police, it has to be all police,’ Michael is saying.

‘No it doesn’t,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘You just think that my friends aren’t compatible with your friends.’

‘I thought we were talking police, not friends.’

‘There’s Darren Healey.’

‘You can’t stand him.’

‘He’s all right. He’s good crack, when he loosens up a bit. His wife’s nice.’

‘His wife’s about to give birth. Anyway, I remember you saying that he cooled off towards you when you made sergeant over him.’

‘Well then, who do you think we should have?’

‘There’re a couple of clients I’d like to invite. Potential clients.’

‘I thought we were talking friends, not clients.’

‘My clients are my friends.’

‘Who then?’

‘John and Kylie, for a start.’

‘Jesus, not them, they’ll sit around and talk about that bloody twenty-four-hour golfing range all night.’

‘That bloody twenty-four-hour golfing range’s worth five grand a year if I can steal John away from his current accountants.’

‘The idea is to have a decent dinner, couple of bottles of wine — each — general conviviality and crack; not discuss how home working and the information revolution can cut so many hundred a month off accountancy fees. I don’t want to talk shop the whole evening.’

‘Same goes, Rosh, for the Northern Ireland Police Service.’

‘All right, no police, no clients. Who then?’

‘Conrad and Pat.’

‘They’re gay.’

‘Things have moved on a little in this country since they chained the playground swings up on Sundays. We’re supposed to be tolerant, a multi-cultural, rainbow nation. There are aliens living down the road, for God’s sake.’

‘We’ll have Louise here.’

‘It’s not an infection, it’s not like whooping cough or meningitis. She’s not going to be scandalized or have her emergent sexuality warped. And they’re good crack.’

‘OK. Conrad and Pat. Who would go with them? What about Sean and Donna?’

‘Sean and Donna. This is going to be an alternative lifestyles evening, I can see. We’ll be the boring bourgeois farts.’

‘Next problem,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘What will you cook?’

At the moment Louise, aged six months and eight days, decides she’s bored with Coronation Street and starts to grizzle in her plastic baby carrier. Roisin Dunbar and Michael dive simultaneously to attend to her. Within seconds they’re disagreeing over which end of Louise is causing the distress and who’s to do the picking up and cooing and rocking thing. And that, Roisin Dunbar thinks, watching Michael jiggling his daughter and singing songs and snatches from Gilbert and Sullivan, is the un-problem underlying the trivialities of who to invite and who not to invite and what to feed them.

Babies change things. They’d warned her, she didn’t believe them. She’d thought she could be police and mother. She’d opted for the shortest maternity leave because there was promotion dangled at the other end of it, and this affirmation of her abilities would slop over into the rest of her life, turn her into wonder-mother, -wife, -supporter while Mikey got his consultancy airborne, — social Rosh, — everything. But you can’t be police and mother; you can’t be police and anything; wife, lover, supporter, friend. It won’t let you. You’re police, and you’re police.

Louise had been more than a baby. She’d been a career opportunity for both of them. Somebody had to stay at home and do the parent thing, and Mikey had wanted to get out of Renswick Bart and do it on his own, one man, one accountancy package, one Internet connection, freeing Roisin to go back to three stripes on the sleeve of her detective’s beige trench coat. Except she knows that the parent thing is more time-consuming and boring and schedule-disrupting than Mikey’s saying. Louise is sitting in her trug and waving her fists and smiling and bringing it down around him. She knows he’s lost one client because of a missed deadline. He’s never said. He never will. Like he never will say that he’s jealous she’s moving on and he’s running to stand still. Maybe not even standing still any more. Watching her pull away from him.

Jesus, Mikey. You should tell me this. Communicate with me. You spend three hundred quid a month on connecting with the infosphere through that white box on the study floor, but you won’t connect with me, for free. Or is that what you want, contact without communion? The great lie of the network age, that connection is communication.

The Communication Age is great and dandy while it’s just ourselves to talk to. Suddenly there’s another voice to answer back, and we realize we’ve never really had very much to say. What we have on show doesn’t impress them, our scrap-books and fetishes and football 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.’