The first book in the Michael Forsythe series, 2003

No one was dead. For once they’d given a good, long warning and there’d been no fatalities. We arrived after it was all over, and when the forensics officers were done, the policemen raised the yellow tape to let us through. We carried the glass from vans, a sheet at a time, to foremen and builders’ mates who forklifted it up to carpenters on cranes and cherry pickers.

We climbed the stairs, put on our gloves, unloaded the pallets. We caught our breaths and took in the view.

The gray certainty of a December sky. Cold fathoms of paralyzed lough. Sea rain and peat smoke drifting over the shipyards and the town.

We walked back to the huge spindle-sided vehicles and carried more sheets, all of them precut and lying there in sailcloth and plastic, well wrapped, and seemingly long ready for an event such as this.

Sore fingers, aching backs.

We worked hard and drank water and smoked and a man brought beer and chicken-salad sandwiches from Marks and Spencer.

Someone had bombed the Europa Hotel again, no casualties but every window within a half a mile was out. It was the stuff of glaziers’ dreams and the cops were on overtime and the army on foot patrol and the journalists chasing copy for the morning papers. TV crews, radio reporters, still photographers, the gloaming dark, the broken glass like diamond on the leadened streets.