The Cold Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  “What was he doing in here?”

  The kid smiled. “You know what he was doing.”

  “Don’t play games with me, pal, I’ll fucking slap you round the head.”

  “Is that how you get your kicks?”

  “All right, sunshine, enough of the smart remarks. Spread ’em up against the wall,” I said.

  “That’s not the first time I’ve heard that tonight.”

  I pushed his face against the tiles, patted him down and searched him. He had about 100 quid in one of his jacket pockets, a tiny bag of cannabis resin wrapped in cling film in the other. Not enough to get him on a distribution wrap and certainly not worth the hassle of the paperwork.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked him.

  He didn’t reply. I pulled out the .38 again and shoved the barrel against his cheek. “Where did you get it?”

  “From him,” he said. “The one you were talking about.”

  I nodded and put the cannabis in my raincoat pocket.

  “What did he want from you?” I asked.

  The kid turned round and stared at me.

  A long searching look. Even in the darkness his eyes were very blue. He took a step closer and moved the revolver with a finger so that it was no longer pointing at him.

  “The same thing you want,” he said.

  He slipped a hand behind my neck, pushed me forward and kissed me on the lips. I pulled back, startled, horrified. He kept the pressure on the back of my head and kissed me again, gently at first and then deep, letting his fingers caress my scalp.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I hissed.

  “If you want to go, you should go now, copper,” he said.

  Of course I wanted to go. But I stayed where I was.

  He ran his hands under my shirt and over my back.

  He looks like a girl was what I told myself. Except that he didn’t, not at all.

  He explored my mouth with his tongue.

  I was confused, guilty, hungry for more.

  “I’m not a fairy,” I said.

  “Shut up and enjoy yourself,” he said.

  I ran my hand down his spine. I cupped his tight, girlish arse.

  I closed my eyes.

  Let him kiss me.

  Relaxed.

  We caught our breaths for a moment.

  “Well?” he said and leaned his head against my forehead and grinned.

  “This will be something new for my next confessional,” I said.

  He laughed. “A Catholic boy! How charming.”

  “I … I better go,” I muttered.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe next time then.”

  “Maybe.”

  I walked the seven miles back to Carrick along the Shore Road.

  It was lashing. I tried to hail a taxi but none of them stopped and every single phone along the route had been vandalized.

  I went into the Dobbins and got a pint of Guinness and sat steaming by the fire. I was the only customer. I stared at the flames and the black hearth and the peat logs turning grey and then white.

  All the newsagents were closed so I asked Derek behind the bar to sell me some cigarette paper, matches and loose leaf tobacco. I walked to Carrickfergus Castle and found the smugglers steps down to the black lough water. Sheltered by the big eight-hundred-year-old outer castle wall, I took the cigarette paper and crumbled in the tobacco. I removed the cannabis resin from the cellophane, cooked it in the flame of a match and crumbled half of the wad between my thumb and forefinger on top of the tobacco. I stirred it together with my finger and rolled it up.

  I lit the end of the spliff and sat there watching the lough traffic and the occasional army helicopter zipping from crisis to crisis. The cannabis was hardcore skunk and I was toasted when I walked across the harbour car park and over the Marine Highway to Laura’s apartment.

  I knocked on the door. And knocked and knocked.

  It had started to storm now and lightning was hitting the conductors on the County Down side of the lough. The rain was cold and horizontal.

  She opened the door.

  She was wearing an Oriental bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her wet hair in that mysterious way only women can do.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I don’t know … What does anybody want? Heidegger said death is the central fact of life after being. We can’t experience our own death but we can fear it.”

  She was shook her head. “No, Sean, what do you want with me? What are you doing here?”

  A loose strand of wet hair unhooked itself from the towel. She looked beautiful like this. “The movies,” I said. “The one about the chariot race. Let’s go before they firebomb the cinema.”

  She folded her arms across her chest and sniffed.

  “I got your flowers,” she said.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  She shook her head but smiled. “Call me. In a day or two,” she said and closed the door.

  I walked to the police station. The top floor was dark. I checked my desk. A fax from Special Branch answering Matty’s intel request: they knew nothing about Freddie Scavanni and they had heard no rumours that Tommy Little was involved with the IRA’s Force Research Unit. Geniuses.

  I walked back to Coronation Road across the railway lines.

  I stopped at Barn Halt. I crossed the tracks to the Belfast side.

  Lightning struck the conductor on Kilroot power station’s six-hundred-foot chimney.

  “Her mother’s on the train, looking out the window for Lucy but she doesn’t see her. How the fuck does she not see her? A guy in a car saw her just seconds before.”

  I walked to the little shelter. It was basically just three walls and a roof. You couldn’t hide in there.

  “Did the fucking aliens take her?” I yelled at the storm.

  I stood there getting wet, disgusted at my own denseness.

  I went into the shelter and relit the joint. I sat down on the concrete.

  The boat train came flying through express from Belfast to Larne.

  The boat train. Again. The boat train.

  Of course!

  The reason her mother didn’t see her was because she wasn’t going to Belfast. She’d been on the platform all right – the other platform. The guy in the car had seen her waiting, but she’d been waiting on the other side of the tracks. She had lied to her ma. She wasn’t going to Belfast, she was going to Larne.

  She’d been going to Larne to catch the ferry to Scotland.

  The abortion special.

  What was it she had said? “I might stay over with some friends, but I’ll be back on Christmas morning.”

  Train to Larne. Ferry to Stranraer. Train to Glasgow. Abortion. Overnight in the hospital. Train to Stranraer. Ferry to Larne. Train to Carrickfergus. Home for Christmas. She’d been planning to get an abortion. But something had happened. She had vanished instead. Hmmmm. I threw the stub of the joint onto the railway tracks and walked home along Taylor’s Avenue and the Barn Road.

  Despite the downpour the DUP were electioneering in Victoria Estate. Dr Ian Paisley himself riding atop a coal lorry. “Do not allow the British Government to bow their knee to terrorists! Vote DUP!” Paisley was bellowing in an Old Testament prophet voice. Behind Paisley was Councillor George Seawright, originally from Glasgow and now the most militant and crazy of the DUP’s rising stars. There were dozens of DUP security men walking alongside of the coal lorry. And behind them there was another coal lorry piled high with boxes of foodstuffs and milk that were being given out to anyone who wanted one. The boxes were stamped with the words “EEC Surplus Not For Resale”.

  Bobby Cameron beckoned me over to the lorry. “You like bacon?” he asked.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Fucking Muslims and Jews. Here,” he said. He offered me a box of German bacon. I shook my head. “Take it,” he insisted.

  “Ta,” I said and grabbed
the box. “And Bobby, listen, times are tough so you might want to rethink the rates you’ve been charging for protection around here.”

  “Have people been squealing to you?”

  “Nobody’s been squealing but times are tough.”

  I left him to it and headed for my house. I put the bacon in the fridge, grabbed a book at random, stuck Liege and Lief on the hi-fi, went upstairs, lit the paraffin heater and ran the bath.

  I thought about him. About what had just happened. There was no getting away from it. “What the hell have I done?” I said to myself. Was I a fairy? A homo? A queer? Well … ?

  Unlike those crazy Prods, I needed someone to talk to but there was no one. I lit and crumbled the rest of the cannabis into a tobacco-filled cigarette paper and got in the bath. I smoked the spliff, coasted on the paraffin fumes, and opened the book. It was a volume of German poetry. A birthday gift from an uncle that I’d never opened.

  I read Goethe, Schiller, Novalis.

  Nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg, the poet said.

  Inward goes the way full of mystery.

  Indeed.

  14: THE APARTMENT

  And then … nothing. Twenty-four hours of nothing. Not so unusual in the life of a copper. Action stations, red zone, 100 mph and then zilch. Another reason why you need a good book.

  Zilch in our case meant no leads, no further developments, no witnesses, no tips to the CID or the Confidential Telephone. The gay angle was probably hurting us. No one wanted to leave a tip about a homosexual murder. Not everybody in Ulster was George Seawright crazy but this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692. If they knew anything about such things it probably meant that they were queer too.

  Procedure keeps you going. I checked for bombs under my car and drove to work. We tabbed the files, filed the reps. I called up the DMV and found out that Shane drove a VW Beetle. I pestered Special Branch about Tommy Little until a chief super came on the blower to tell me that I was barking up the wrong tree, that the police’s intelligence was very good and that if Tommy Little was a player he was a minor actor in the play.

  We interviewed Lucy Moore’s pals in person and got nothing from them. We examined the Boneybefore postcard and the only prints were mine and the letter carrier. We looked and looked again for any links between the victims but there were none that we could find. We checked for Tommy Little’s missing Ford Granada but came up empty. I examined the music scores and played the records. I looked at the “hit list” and asked Crabbie to see if there were any links between the people there. Again none beyond the obvious. The inferences we drew from our inquiries took us down several blind alleys just like in a real labyrinth.

  On Tuesday afternoon we got a fax from the coroner’s office. Sir David Fitzhughes, the Coroner for East Antrim, had read Dr Cathcart’s pathology report and our notes and had issued a preliminary finding of death by suicide on Lucy Moore. The full inquest would be in November but this preliminary finding was enough to have Brennan breathing down my neck to bin the case.

  On the one hand we didn’t know where Lucy had been staying since Christmas. On the other hand hiding a pregnant woman wasn’t a crime. Not even in Belfast. Brennan wanted my full attention on the murders. The patho said Lucy killed herself, the coroner said Lucy killed herself, the papers said Lucy killed herself.

  I wasn’t that happy about it. I agreed to suspend the investigation but not close the case. I wrote “Possible suicide” on the file.

  I completed my psych profile of the killer. It was standard stuff from the Wrigley-Carmichael index: A white male, 25-45, moderately high IQ, almost certainly an ex-prisoner, and almost certainly a sex offender of some type. We ran the names through the database. We got twenty-three matches but no one who was still around. Every single one of them was living in England, Scotland or further afield. As soon as they got out of prison sex offenders fled Northern Ireland because they knew that sooner or later they would be kneecapped or murdered by a paramilitary chieftain looking to make a name for himself.

  In a normal society that’s where you’d look for your leads.

  But this was not a normal society.

  No leads. Brick walls. And then there was Shane. Shane boy was as bent as a five-bob note. Billy and Shane jungled up together? Or was Shane a heroic loner in a murderously intolerant world? If Shane and Tommy Little were having an affair, Shane might have killed him to cover it up. Anything could have happened: lovers’ quarrel, fear of exposure, you name it. Sure he talked the talk about incurring the wrath of God from the IRA but in the heat of a fight you don’t think of such things.

  The problem with Shane was his alibi. After Tommy Little left he said that he played snooker with Billy and the other lads until midnight. They would cover for him as a matter of course.

  I thought about the angles. Shane didn’t seem like the type who embraced opera and Greek culture, but you never knew, did ya? It would be nice to have a nosey around his place …

  On Tuesday night Laura and I went to see Chariots of Fire. It was about running. The two British guys won. I had a feeling they might. No one, however, blew up the cinema and there were no bomb scares.

  Laura asked me about Heather. I told her part of the truth. A reserve constable who was a little drunk and freaked out after a riot in Belfast had briefly come on to me. She was, I added, married.

  “You’ve every right to see whoever you want, we’re not really going out,” she said.

  “I’m not going to see anybody else,” I told her.

  I walked her to her apartment door but she wouldn’t let me in for a coffee. I didn’t mind. She kissed me on the cheek and said something about the weekend.

  I said something in reply.

  I was distracted.

  I was thinking about that other kiss.

  Trying to get it the fuck out of my mind.

  On the way home from the station I met Sammy, my Marxist barber, walking his bulldog. He told me that I looked depressed. I said that I was. He said that it wasn’t surprising because the collapse of capitalism was imminent. He said that this was a reason for celebration, not anxiety, and that I should start listening to Radio Albania on the shortwave.

  I went home, made myself a vodka gimlet and found Radio Free Albania. Sammy was right – it did cheer me up. The Americans were denounced, the Russians were denounced, Mao was praised, Comrade Enver Hoxha’s achievements at chess, athletics, in research physics, agricultural innovation were all saluted …

  Wednesday morning: I checked under the car for bombs, drove to the cop shop and sat staring at McCrabban’s ugly mug from 9 until 10.

  “Crabbie, you want to go up to Belfast with me?”

  “What for?”

  “Let’s go see Scavanni.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to get your take on him, Crabbie. I didn’t like him and I think he’s hiding something.”

  Crabbie yawned. “Aye, why not? I’ve just been pretending to work.”

  We signed out a Land Rover and drove up the Shore Road. We passed the Loughshore Park in Newtownabbey. There was no point telling either McCrabban or Matty about Shane. Not yet. Not until I knew something.

  The rain was heavy, the traffic light.

  We drove past a fresh bombsite that was, with ruthless efficiency, being bulldozed into a car park. Soon Belfast would be the only city in the world with more parking spaces than cars.

  We left Queen’s Street RUC and walked through the search gates into the centre of town.

  “Oi, chief, I’m starving, I had no breakfast this morning, can we get something to eat?” Crabbie said.

  “No breakfast?” I said, staring at the ghost of his black eye. “Are you sure everything’s sweetness and light at chez McCrabban?”

  “The, uh … she’s been a bit … Pregnant, you know.”

  This, I felt, was a major breakthrough in my attempt to get him to open up.

  “My treat.
Breakfast. Question is where?”

  Because of the sky-high insurance rates there were no major chains in Belfast: no McDonald’s, no Burger King, no Kentucky Fried Chicken, nothing.

  “Anywhere.”

  We found a greasy spoon off Anne Street and I got the cornflakes. Crabbie got the Ulster fry and I waited while he scarfed: pancakes, potato bread, soda bread, sausages, bacon, egg, black pudding, white pudding – all of it fried in lard. A heart-attack special.

  We walked over to the Cornmarket and found Bradbury House.

  The painters were in doing the lobby in Mental Hospital Beige.

  “Scavanni’s in a new Sinn Fein press office up on the second floor,” I was explaining when I noticed on the directory that the offices of Councillor George Seawright were on the ground floor.

  That was interesting. It was like finding Rommel and Montgomery sharing the same tent.

  I pointed it out to Crabbie.

  “I’ve heard rumours about him,” McCrabban said.

  “About who? Seawright?”

  “They say he’s tight with the paramilitaries.”

  “Let’s go pay him a visit.”

  “What for?” Crabbie asked.

  “He hates homos, doesn’t he? Let’s see what he was doing on the night Tommy got himself topped.”

  “You’re reaching, mate,” Crabbie said.

  “Exactly the sort of thing you do when you have no leads.”

  I was wearing my black polo neck and leather jacket and Crabbie was in his orange shirt and tie so Seawright’s secretary had to be convinced that we were peelers by our warrant cards. She showed us into his office which, like Scavanni’s, also overlooked Cornmarket Street where they had hanged the United Irishmen, the last time Protestants and Catholics had ever come together to fight the blah, blah, blah …

  Unlike Scavanni’s digs, however, Seawright’s office was adorned by several Union Flags and boxes and boxes of a little DUP pamphlet entitled Proof The Bible Is True. Seawright was a big guy with a mop of greasy hair and thick 1970s glasses. He was wearing a grey checked suit that was a size too small. The Napoleon haircut and the suit gave him a comedic air and in truth he wasn’t that funny.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked after his secretary showed us in.