The Cold Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  “Carrick Hospital,” I told Matty.

  We parked the Rover and walked to reception with the flowers.

  Hattie Jacques. Unsmiling.

  I gave her the flowers.

  “These are for Dr Cathcart,” I said.

  “I’ll make sure she gets them,” Hattie said.

  “Is she in at all?” I asked.

  Hattie gave me a severe look. “Dr Cathcart has given me explicit instructions not to let you or any policeman into the surgery area. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to work to do.”

  Matty grinned, slapped me on the back and steered me back outside into the rain.

  “That’s harsh, brother, the good doctor is not a fan. You were shot down, mate! Shot down like the Red Baron,” Matty said.

  “The Red Baron shot the other people down.”

  “Not in the end, Sean. Not in the end!”

  “Shut up! Shut up and drive us to Lucy Moore’s house. I wrote the address out on the map.”

  “Will do boss, will do,” he said and laughed again.

  Lucy’s parents lived on a large farm not far from Carrickfergus. Her father Edward O’Neill had been an old-school Nationalist, one of the few Catholic MPs in the Stormont Assembly and he was still well respected in Republican circles. There had been two girls, Lucy and Claire, and a son, Thomas. Claire was a contracts lawyer based in Dublin and New York. Thomas was a barrister in London. Lucy must have been the black sheep marrying a ne’er do well like Seamus Moore.

  We parked the Land Rover and were shown in to the conservatory by Daphne O’Neill, a prematurely aged, grey-haired lady.

  Edward was sitting by the window with a blanket over his knees. He was a big man brought low, like an exiled king or politician.

  We drank tea.

  Talked.

  Neither Lucy’s mother nor father had anything to add. They were in mourning for a lost girl.

  The worst thing in the world that could happen had happened.

  Chief Inspector Brennan had already informed them about the baby.

  They were bereft. Adrift in a sea of grief. They showed us the postcards and letters Lucy had sent from the Irish Republic. We, of course, had the photostats in our file and the originals gave us nothing new.

  “Did Lucy drop any hint at all that she might have been pregnant to either of you or possibly to Claire?”

  Lucy’s mother shook her head. She had high, arched cheekbones and a dignified white bun. Tears had been pouring down her face and she was somehow extremely beautiful in all that pain.

  “Not a peep and she wasn’t showing or I would have noticed at Christmas.”

  “Was she seeing anyone? A boyfriend or anyone new?”

  “No! Not that we knew of. After finally divorcing Seamus? No. She had a lot of friends in the Sinn Fein crowd, but we all thought she’d lay low for a while. Oh Lucy, my darling, darling girl. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it at all!”

  “Is the baby still alive?” Mr O’Neill asked.

  I was choking and I looked at Matty for help.

  “We have every reason to think that it might be,” he said hesitantly. “Certainly we found no traces of a body in Woodburn Forest. Nearly two dozen infants have been left at hospitals and missions in the last week.”

  The room grew quiet. Mr O’Neill cleared his throat and stared out the window. The long seconds became a minute.

  “I know what some people say. They say it’s an Irish tradition. That it’s an ironic commentary on the famine. I don’t find anything ironic about it. Do you, sergeant?”

  I was genuinely baffled. “Sir?”

  “In India the Jains starve themselves to death to obtain purity in the next life. The philosopher Atticus starved himself in Rome because he had become sick and wanted to hasten the end. In Ireland there has never been honour in such a course. I don’t know how this so-called tradition got imported into our country!”

  I had no answers for him. Clearly he blamed the hunger strikers for guilting Lucy into killing herself.

  “Mr O’Neill, if we could find out where she’d been staying for the last six months it would help us a lot to piece together—”

  “We don’t know!” Mr O’Neill snapped. “I wish we had known.”

  “Perhaps one of Lucy’s friends would know?” I asked.

  “We’ve asked everybody again and again!” Mr O’Neill said, banging his fist into the flat of his hand to emphasise his words.

  “We’d like to talk to them anyway,” I said.

  Mrs O’Neill calmed her husband down and they gave us half a dozen names, all of whom Carrick CID – that is, Matty and Crabbie – had interviewed after the initial disappearance.

  Still we went back to the station and made the calls. Nobody had heard from Lucy since her disappearance, nobody had any insights into boyfriends or a pregnancy. The friends were Catholics, we were the police … it was a brick wall.

  “Where to now?” Matty asked.

  I looked at my watch. “I suppose we’ll go see our new friend Freddie Scavanni.”

  We drove into Belfast along the M5. Burnt-out buses. A wrecked Saracen. A post-office van on fire. Soldiers walking in single file.

  We parked the Land Rover at Queen’s Street RUC station.

  Because of endemic fire bombs, blast bombs and bomb scares the roads into the city centre had been blocked. No cars were allowed into the heart of Belfast and all shoppers and civilians were searched at one of a dozen hastily built “search huts”.

  A long line of uniformed civilian searchers patted you down, looked into your bag and waved you on past the canine officers. Once through the search huts you were free to walk the area around the City Hall.

  This inner area was still heavily patrolled by the police and the army and with all these precautions it meant that the square mile of Belfast City Centre was one of the safest shopping precincts in the world. Bombers couldn’t get in and muggers, rapists and shoplifters couldn’t get out. Still, the search huts were a major fucking hassle and sometimes it took fifteen minutes to get through.

  Of course plain-clothes detectives could just show their warrant cards and skip to the head of the line.

  We heard “fucking pigs” and “SS RUC” behind us as we pushed through.

  The civilian searchers were usually women and usually attractive young women at that, so it was a mixed blessing avoiding their attentions. The reason they were universally called civilian searchers was so that they could be distinguished from the agents of British Imperialism: the police, the army and prison officers. It was hoped that the IRA would never issue a communiqué designating them as “legitimate targets” and so far they had not. Unlike Matty and me, of course, who could be killed with impunity.

  We walked to Bradbury Place and found Bradbury House in a cobbled street near Pottinger’s Entry. It was an older building that had recently been renovated and divided into various subunits: an optician, a travel agency, a hairdresser.

  Suite #11 was on the second floor.

  It was packed with chippies and painters and men in white boiler suits laying down phone lines.

  Scavanni was standing there with one of the sparks examining a complicated fuse box that must have been put in shortly after World War Two.

  He saw us and came over with a hand out although he looked annoyed as if he hadn’t really expected us to actually show up. I shook the hand.

  “Mr Scavanni, if we could just steal you away for a few moments,” I said.

  He sighed. “All right, Sergeant Dougherty, this way.”

  “Fucker forgot your name,” Matty muttered as we followed him along a pastel-shaded corridor.

  I shook my head. “No. He didn’t,” I replied.

  Scavanni’s office was new and had nothing in it apart from a phone, a desk and a few plastic chairs.

  He sat behind the desk, took his watch off and set it on the table.

  “You have fifteen minutes,” he said.

  Behind
him there was a view of the Cornmarket where they had executed Henry Joy McCracken and the other leaders of the northern branch of the United Irishmen during the 1798 rebellion. That rising had been the last time when Protestants and Catholics had been on the same side; since then it had been divide and conquer in spades.

  “The clock’s ticking,” Scavanni said.

  “What is all this?” I asked pointing at the offices.

  “It is an adjunct press office for Sinn Fein. We’re getting a thousand calls a day for interviews and quotes. We just couldn’t cope on the Falls Road.”

  “And what do you do for Sinn Fein, Mr Scavanni?”

  “I’m just a lowly paid staffer.”

  “And what do you do for the IRA?

  He rolled his eyes at me. “Sergeant, I have absolutely nothing to do with the IRA.”

  “Why was Tommy Little coming to see you the night he disappeared?”

  “Admin stuff. Nothing that interesting.”

  “It might have been a wee bit interesting. It was a sudden change of plans, wasn’t it? We’ve been told that Tommy was on his way to see a certain Billy White and then he got a phone call and then he said had to come see you too.”

  Freddie didn’t flinch. “Talking to Walter, were you? Yes. I called him. I just wanted to have a chat about getting more cars. Tommy was one of our drivers and we’ve been having to double and triple up on cars for American journalists.”

  “You called him? To talk about cars?”

  “Yes. Check the phone records.”

  “We will,” Matty said.

  “So was this a long conversation?”

  “As far as I recall we settled the whole thing in about a minute. I asked him if he could make more cars available for the US media and he said he’d take care of it.”

  “So if it was all settled why was he coming to your house?”

  “I have no idea why Walter told you that he was coming over to see me, but I do know that he never made it.”

  “Did you see him at all on Tuesday night?”

  “No.”

  “Do you not find that a bit strange, that he said he was coming to see you but then he didn’t?”

  “Yeah, it would be strange if he hadn’t been shot in the head somewhere between Belfast and my house.”

  “Where do you live, Mr Scavanni?”

  “Straid.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Near Ballynure,” Matty said.

  “And you’ve no idea why Tommy felt the urge to come and see you in person?”

  “None at all. I asked him if he could sort out more cars for the American hacks and he said that he’d take care of it. I thought the matter was settled.”

  “What did Tommy do for the IRA?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. I know very little about the IRA. I’m a press officer for Sinn Fein,” Scavanni said.

  “Will you be going to Tommy’s funeral?”

  Scavanni shrugged. “I’m very busy. And I didn’t know him that well.”

  “We’ve been told that Tommy’s death is something of an embarrassment. No military honours, no firing squad, nothing like that,” I said.

  “There’s no point asking me. I have no clue.”

  I was getting nowhere with this character. I looked at Matty and gave him a kick under the desk.

  “You father came over from Italy?” Matty asked.

  “He did.”

  That was it.

  There was no follow up.

  Jesus, Matty.

  “How do you feel about homosexuals, Mr Scavanni?” I asked.

  “I think they’re great. More women for the rest of us,” he said sarcastically.

  “How does Sinn Fein feel about homosexuals?”

  He laughed. “We don’t have a policy.”

  “Where were you on the evening of May twelfth?”

  “I was at home watching TV.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone.”

  “What time did you go to bed?”

  “I don’t know. Eleven?”

  “What were you doing the whole night?”

  “Watching TV.”

  “And you went straight to bed?”

  “Yup.”

  “And you fell asleep?”

  “Almost immediately.”

  I frowned and bit my lip.

  “Frankie Hughes was dying on May twelfth. Hunger striker number two. All of Sinn Fein must have been abuzz with excitement and you just went to bed?”

  “There was nothing I could do for Frankie. And I knew that the Wednesday was going to be an emotional and busy day. And busy it was, I can tell you that.”

  Freddie pointed at his watch.

  “Look, I’m sorry but … time, gentlemen, please.”

  We got to our feet and on the way out I did one more question Columbo style: “You didn’t know Lucy Moore, did you?”

  “Lucy who?” he asked with a blank face.

  “Seamus’s wife.”

  “The wee doll who topped herself?”

  “Aye.”

  “’Fraid not. What’s she got to do with anything?”

  “Sweet Fanny Adams, by the looks of it,” Matty grumbled.

  “You speak Italian, Mr Scavanni?”

  “Of course.”

  “Che gelida manina … you know what that means?”

  “Well, obviously the dialect is important … something to do with hands?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pointed at his watch again. “Officers, please, it’s been fifteen minutes.”

  He gestured to the door with a look that told us that if we had any more questions we shouldn’t hesitate to “fucking get lost”.

  I took Matty to the Crown Bar and we got a fantastic pork rib stew and Guinness for lunch. A couple of lasses were sawing away on fiddle and acoustic guitar giving us Irish standards about the famine, horses, the evil Brits …

  “What do you think, chief?” Matty asked.

  “About Scavanni?”

  “Aye.”

  I took a sip of the Guinness. “I think he’s hiding something,” I said.

  “My vibe too.”

  “Did you notice the typewriters? All electric.”

  “Aye. Did you hear what he said about Tommy? ‘I have no idea why Tommy told Walter that he was coming over to see me.’ What’s the implication behind that?”

  “That Walter is lying?”

  “Or maybe that Tommy was lying to Walter? And what was with his wee bit of cluelessness about Lucy when he knew that that was the reason for our visit to the Maze this morning? Was he so concerned with concealing something important that he decided to conceal everything?”

  “You’ve lost me,” Matty said.

  We finished our excellent lunch, chewed the fat with the peelers at Queen Street cop shop, spent twenty minutes checking the phone records at British Telecom (Scavanni had indeed called Tommy Little on the night of May 12) and arranged an appointment with Billy White.

  We retrieved the Land Rover and drove to Rathcoole Estate in North Belfast.

  This was a Protestant ghetto made up of bland, grim, tower blocks and rows of dismal terraces. There were few services, much concrete, much sectarian graffiti, no jobs, nothing for the kids to do but join a gang.

  They didn’t throw petrol bombs at us as we drove into the estate but from the four iconic tower blocks we got a good helping of eggs and milk cartons.

  We pulled into the strip mall and easily found Billy White’s joint wedged between a Bookies and an Off Licence. It was grandly named the “Rathcoole Loyalists Pool, Snooker and Billiards Hall”.

  The graffiti on the walls all around announced that this was the territory of the UVF, the RHC (the Red Hand Commando, yet another illegal Protestant militia) and the Rathcoole KAI, a group I hadn’t heard of before.

  The hall had a bullet-proof grille, speed bumps in front of it and half a dozen guys in jeans and denim jackets hanging around outside.

  Matty and
I parked the Rover, walked through the riff-raff and went inside the place.

  There were a few pool tables and more men in denim playing darts and snooker.

  “Are you the peelers come to see Billy?” one of them asked, a giant of a man whose skinhead was brushing against the nicotinestained ceiling.

  “Aye,” I said.

  “Let’s see some ID,” he demanded.

  We displayed our warrant cards and were shown into a back room.

  An old geezer was sitting behind an unvarnished pine desk in a scary, claustrophobic little room that would have given the Führerbunker a run for its money. There were UVF posters on the wall and a large what you might call naive art portrait of Queen Elizabeth II sitting on a horse.

  Behind the old man were cases of cigarettes of every conceivable brand.

  The old man was watching a gardening programme on a big TV.

  “Are you Billy?” I asked.

  The old man did not reply.

  I looked at Matty. He shrugged. We sat down in a couple of plastic chairs.

  The old man looked at me suspiciously. “Are you from the taxes?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “From the excise?”

  “We’re from the police, we’ve come to see Billy.”

  “And you’re no here from the missionaries of the apostates?”

  “I don’t even know what that is. Is Billy around?”

  “He’ll be back in five minutes. He’s just getting more petrol for the generator. We had no electricity last night.”

  “Neither had anybody,” Matty said.

  “Would you like some tea?” the old man asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Matty said.

  The old man went out the door and came back a couple of minutes later with three mugs, a bottle of milk, sugar cubes and a packet of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive biscuits. He added milk and sugar to both mugs and stirred them with his nicotinestained forefinger.

  “Ta,” I said when he handed me a cup.

  The old man started nattering away, first about the buses and the football but eventually somehow the trenches and the Great War where, he said, he was the only survivor from a platoon of men in the Ulster Volunteers on day one of the Battle of the Somme. I looked at my watch. This was some five minutes.