The Cold Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How are you getting on with the Ulster Bank Fraud?”

  “Oh, we solved that easily enough. It was a guy over the water. He didn’t think we Micks would have had the wherewithal to check into the offshore deposits.”

  Brennan sniffed and took a draw on his ciggie. He did not seem particularly jubilant about our success. “What are you working on now?”

  “The bicycle thefts.”

  “Any leads?”

  “A couple, sir.”

  He nodded. “Do me a favour, Duffy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Stay the hell away from Freddie Scavanni and anybody else who has access to a scary team of barristers, or hit men, ok?”

  I nodded. He waved his hand at me. “Be fruitful and multiply.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I was being dismissed but I didn’t move.

  “I was telling you to fuck off in a jocular manner, Duffy,” Brennan said.

  “I know that, sir. But I have a question.”

  “Quickly.”

  “Have DCI Todd’s team made any progress on the homosexual murders? I’m only asking because I’ve heard nothing. I was taken off the case after a week because I had made no progress and they’ve had it since Thursday and …”

  “You take things personally, Duffy, that’s your trouble. I suppose it’s some kind of Catholic thing. Now, please, get out of my office before I bloody kick you out.”

  “With respect, sir, they’ve made no progress because they may be looking in the wrong place. The list of names, the attacks. Why hasn’t there been an attack since last Thursday? Because he doesn’t need to do any more attacks. The scent trail has been sufficiently laid now. We’re off and running. I think there won’t be any more attacks because—”

  “Did you not hear me? Get out of my fucking office!”

  I skulked back to my desk. Again my cheeks were burning. I’d always been an A student. A good pupil. House Captain. Deputy Head Boy. I had never so much as been sent to the Principal. This was humiliating. Humiliating and I knew that every motherfucker in here was looking at me. Constable bloody Price was positively beaming: that’s taken the uppity fenian down a peg or two.

  At lunchtime I went to see Laura at the hospital but she was busy at her surgery.

  From the phone box on Barn Road I called my mum. I told her I was well.

  “When are you coming to see us? It’s been a month.”

  “Next weekend, I promise.”

  “Are you sure you’re well? You sound like you’ve got a bit of cold.”

  “Nah, nah, I’m fine. Tell Dad I was asking for him.”

  I turned up the collar on my coat and walked back out into the rain. A car pulled up next to me with a screech of brakes. Black E Type Jag. Tinted windows. I looked in my raincoat pocket for my service revolver but of course I’d left it at the station.

  Billy White opened the rear door and pointed a 9mm at me.

  “Let’s go for a ride, Duffy,” he said.

  “You’re not going to shoot me in broad daylight,” I said.

  “Won’t I?” he replied, grinning.

  I shook my head and took a step backwards. “You don’t kidnap peelers from the middle of the street.”

  “Don’t fucking test me. Get in the fucking car,” he said.

  His eyes were wide and they had a dangerous whiteness to them. I got in the back of the Jaguar. Billy leaned across me and closed the door.

  I noticed that Shane was the only person in the car. In the driver’s seat. Where was Billy’s crew? What was this?

  Shane’s face was badly bruised. His lip was split. That was the face. The pretty part. What did the rest look like?

  I began to panic now. No witnesses. No problems. He wasn’t crazy enough to top a copper in the middle of Carrick, was he? The Jaguar centrally locked.

  “Drive!” Billy said and Shane took us out onto the Marine Highway.

  “What is this?” I said trying to keep my voice level.

  “This is just a couple of friends having a chat,” Billy said. “A little bird tells me that you’ve been kicked off the Tommy Little investigation.”

  I said nothing.

  “You’ve been kicked off the investigation yet you’ve been slandering young Shane here. You’ve been telling your bosses that he’s been hanging around the toilets in Loughshore Park near Jordanstown. That he’s a fucking poofter! Isn’t that right?”

  So he had seen my report. It had been leaked to him. He had connections with the RUC. But then why wouldn’t he? He’d been a copper in Rhodesia, and perhaps dozens of ex-Rhodesian police had joined the RUC.

  “You’ve got no proof and if you fucking repeat that lie you’ll be hearing from our solicitors, or worse.”

  He waggled the gun. Shane stopped the car at the red light at Carrickfergus Castle and my heart beat quickly until he released the central locking.

  I got out of the car.

  “And then, of course, there’s the good lady doctor to consider,” Billy said.

  “What did you say?”

  Billy closed the door, the light went green and the Jaguar drove off. My hands were shaking. I ran to the hospital and sprinted down to Laura’s office. She was eating a sandwich.

  “Are you ok?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Has anyone been bothering you?”

  “No. What’s going on?”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Billy was bluffing. For now. “It’s probably nothing. Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Can I see you later?”

  “Ok,” she said, giving me a funny look.

  I went back to the station. The duty officer was Sergeant Burke. I typed up an incident report about my ride with Billy and left it in Sergeant Burke’s in-tray.

  Typing.

  I had a bit of a brainwave. I got out my notebook and wrote: “The killer sends us a hit list and a letter and types it flawlessly. Freddie Scavanni would have learned to type in journalism school. Where else did you learn to type? The police! And our friend Billy was in the Rhodesian police for four years …”

  Food for thought …

  I worked the bike theft case and at five I went to the hospital to meet Laura. “Have dinner with me,” I said. “My house, I’m making spaghetti.”

  “You can make spaghetti?”

  “Lived on it for three years at Uni.”

  “That doesn’t sound encouraging, but all right.”

  I walked her up Coronation Road where she noted the red, white and blue kerbs with disapproval. I put on Ray Charles and opened a bottle of Italian red that had been out in the garden shed for a month. I cooked the spaghetti with some Parmesan from the cheesemonger. “Delicious,” she said as if she meant it.

  I had no appetite. I told her about my ride with Billy.

  She was horrified. “How can they just lift you off the street like that? The nerve of them!”

  I told her about my pet theory. “Billy and Shane are an item. Shane was seeing Tommy Little on the side. Instead of killing him, Billy has forgiven him. But the rot has to stop here. I had to be threatened with the law and the gun. If the big bugs ever found out that Billy is a queer, minimum he gets kneecapped and exiled and divorced, but more likely they’d just kill him.”

  “Do you have any proof of this?” she asked.

  “None at all,” I said with a grin.

  We drank the wine. Sufficient time had obviously passed: I didn’t need to ask if she wanted to go upstairs. We made love in the double bed.

  I lit the paraffin heater and, when the lights went out, the Chess Records guitar shaped oil lamp. We lay in bed. “I can’t believe a man pointed a gun right at you in broad daylight,” she said.

  She clearly had no idea the shit I had to deal with on a daily basis.

  “How can you live here, among them?” she asked.

  “Among who?”

  “The Protestants! We
’re like Anne Frank and her family up here,” she said.

  “It’s not as bad as all that. They’re ok to me.”

  “For now. And it’s a question of class too, isn’t it? What’s going to happen when you hear one of them get drunk and start knocking his wife about? What are you going to do then?”

  “I’ll stop it,” I said.

  “And how do you think they’ll treat you after something like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She shook her head, smiled and kissed my furrowed brow. Her lips were soft and she smelled good.

  I kissed between her breasts and I kissed her belly and I kissed her labia and clitoris. She was a woman. I wanted that. I needed that.

  We made love until the rain began and the light in the guitar lamp turned yellow, and the bishop on the Chess logo faded and finally guttered out.

  19: THE SCARLET LETTER

  Letters. Words. Aren’t you bored looking at them? Line after line. Page after page. Dream me away from the letters and the words. Dream me away even from logic. Take me to a land of alien typography. Away from Ireland, where there’s always a fight, always a duality, never a synthesis. Protestant:Catholic; Green:Orange; Beatles:Stones; Presta valve:Shrader valve. How tedious it all is. How wearying.

  One would have to be mad to stay here.

  Or indolent. Or masochistic.

  What does it matter? What does any of it matter? The girl was dead. Tommy was dead. Andrew was dead. None of it was my business. Truth was something to be debated in philosophy 101.

  “Morning,” Laura said.

  “Morning,” I replied and kissed her.

  “I’ll fix breakfast,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  None of my clothes were clean so I pulled on my jeans and a battered red New York Dolls sweatshirt that I had picked up in America.

  We ate and I looked under the BMW for bombs and I drove Laura to the hospital.

  I went to the paper shop, listened to Oscar complain about the paramilitaries, scanned the headlines in the newspapers: The Pope was out of hospital, a dress designer had been picked for Lady Di’s wedding, no hunger strikers had died overnight. I rummaged in the glove compartment and found the mix tape I’d made of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, John Lee Hooker and Howlin Wolf.

  I put the windows down and drove up into the country to clear the cobwebs. When I finally got back to Carrick police station Matty and Crabbie were expectantly waiting for me in the CID incident room.

  Matty was holding something in his hand.

  “News,” he said.

  “Have we got a break in the bicycle theft case?”

  “Better. The letters and postcards Lucy Moore sent to her sister in Dublin.”

  “What about them?”

  “You asked her sister Claire to send you the letters, right?”

  I put on latex gloves and took them to the desk by the windows in the CID incident room. Two letters, two generic white postcards and one picture postcard of the Guinness brewery.

  “We read through them a couple of times. She only says the blandest things. ‘I’m doing well, it rained today, I had toast for breakfast,’ that kind of thing,” Crabbie said.

  “It’s as if she had someone looking over her shoulder censoring ever single word,” Matty said.

  “Here’s a typical one,” McCrabban said. I picked it up and read it:

  Dear Claire,

  I hope you are good. I am well. Things are nice here. Don’t worry about me. I’m looking after myself. I saw The Horse of The Year Show on TV last night. Your favourite, Eddy Macken was the quare fellow.

  That’s all for now.

  Lucy

  “Ok, so why are you so excited?” I asked. “Fingerprints?”

  Matty shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. No prints and I checked the stationery, same as the others, nothing special. I ran the letters under the UV light. Nothing. But then I did the same with the envelopes … I don’t know if you’re still interested, Sean, but have a wee gander at this …”

  He handed me one of the envelopes and a copy of the UV photo.

  “In visible light there’s nothing on the envelope, but under the UV light you can just see an ‘S’ in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope.”

  I was electrified. “How did that get there?”

  “In your bog-standard Irish way some diligent person had been writing the return addresses on all the envelopes in a stack. Top left-hand corner, name and address,” Matty said.

  “Of course they kept the envelopes that Lucy used free of a return address,” McCrabban added.

  “But whoever was writing the return addresses on the regular envelopes leaned all the way through to the envelope that Lucy used for this letter to her sister. Cheapo paper and a heavy hand. Only the ‘S’ though. You can just see traces of the rest of the address, but nothing else is legible.”

  I nodded. “So what do you think we have here, lads?” I asked.

  “I think we have the first letter of the name of the person Lucy was staying with. You always do the name first. Name and address in the top left-hand corner, that’s what I was taught,” Crabbie said.

  I rubbed my chin. I wasn’t entirely convinced and Crabbie could see that.

  “I mean, Sean, it’s only the first letter of a first name, but it’s still a lead, isn’t it?” Crabbie insisted.

  “It could be that,” I said sceptically.

  “Come on, Sean!” Matty said.

  “I don’t want to piss on your cornflakes, boys, but the imprint of an ‘S’ in the left-hand corner of an envelope isn’t exactly Nathan Leopold’s glasses prescription, is it? And I know what the Chief’s going to say. He’s going to say that this case is closed, isn’t he?”

  “Do you still think Lucy’s death is connected to Tommy Little’s?” Crabbie asked.

  Of course I had told them my bullshit theory about the line from La Bohème: “My name is Lucia but everyone calls me Mimi” … Lucia = Lucy?

  I shook my head. “Nah. Lucia, Lucy? I was just spouting off, Crabbie. It’s a coincidence,” I insisted, but Crabbie looked me in the eyes and he saw that I wanted to be convinced.

  “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that there’s a link between these two cases. These two murders that occurred at approximately the same time, not a million miles away, where does that get us?” Crabbie asked.

  “There are two ‘S’s in the Tommy Little case, aren’t there?” Matty said.

  “Aye. There are. Freddie Scavanni and Shane Davidson.”

  The three of us stared at the envelope. Outside rain was lashing the windows. A coal boat was struggling out of Carrick harbour. An ambulance roared by on the Marine Highway.

  Crabbie filled his pipe and lit it. “So,” he said.

  “So,” I seconded and lit another ciggie.

  “What do we do with this?” Matty asked.

  “What can we do?” Crabbie asked.

  “I don’t know. If I or either of you go near Scavanni or Shane Davidson we’ll get a bollocking.”

  Matty jabbed his finger into the envelope. “But we have something here!”

  Suddenly the incident-room door was kicked open. Chief Inspector Brennan was standing there larger than life. Eyes wide, fag end drooping from his mouth. I immediately hid the envelope under a sheet of A4.

  “Oi, Sergeant Duffy!” Brennan bellowed.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Remember in the dim distant past of yesterday you gave me this big fucking speech about how there wouldn’t be any more queer murders? About how the queer angle was only misdirection? A false trail?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, wise guy, they just found another dead poofter. You’re fucking brilliant, aren’t ya?”

  “Where?”

  “Loughshore Park, near Jordanstown. In the bogs. Somebody just called it in.”

  Loughshore Park.

 
The toilets.

  “Is there a description of the victim?” I asked.

  “Young white male, twenty, Elvis quiff, black hair, what’s it to you?”

  I grabbed my leather jacket and my revolver. I pushed past Brennan. He grabbed at me.

  “Where the fuck are you going, mate?”

  “Loughshore Park.”

  “This isn’t your case any more, arsehole!”

  I ran down into the car park and reversed the Beemer out of its spot.

  I hit 80 on the Shore Road.

  I made it to Jordanstown.

  Todd was there with his team. Ten officers in all. White boiler suits, photographers, the whole thing. I was impressed.

  I showed my warrant card, kept out of Todd’s sightline and went down into the bog.

  Of course it was him.

  He was lying there in the foetal position with his hands ducttaped behind his back.

  Billy and Shane had silenced him.

  They’d tortured him first to get any information out of him. He’d been stripped and beaten black and blue. This also was a lesson for Shane. A lesson in the way the world worked.

  I walked closer to the body.

  His face was bloody but there was no blood pool around the corpse. He hadn’t been shot.

  “How did he die?” I asked one of the forensic officers.

  “Very unusual,” the nearest FO guy said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. They taped over his mouth and taped his hands behind his back. They killed him by putting a Speedo nose clip over his nostrils. Swimmers use it to stop water going up their nose.”

  “So, he suffocated?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the unusual bit.”

  “What’s the unusual bit?”

  “They cut off his eyelids with a pair of scissors. Don’t know why they did that.”

  “So they could watch him die,” I said.

  Part of the moral lesson.

  Shane was forced to watch the light go out of his eyes.

  “What in the name of fuck are you doing here?” DCI Todd said.

  “Fuck off,” I snapped and pushed him away from me.

  “Did youse see that? He fucking pushed me,” Todd said.

  I made a fist. “I’ll fucking do worse if you don’t get out of my fucking way!” I said.