The Cold Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  I shouldered him aside and went out.

  “I’ll tell your gaffer about this!” Todd screamed after me. “You’ll be giving out parking tickets in Free Derry when I’m done with you!”

  I walked to the BMW.

  I drove across the four lanes of the Shore Road and up into Rathcoole.

  I screamed the Beemer through the estate and hand-braked it to a halt in front of the Rathcoole Loyalists Pool, Snooker and Billiards Hall. I took the police revolver out of my jacket pocket, checked the cylinder, cocked it and stormed inside.

  A cocked .38 doesn’t feel the same as an unprimed revolver. The frame tightens differently, the trigger is on a hair and this tension is communicated to you and the people around you.

  There were a dozen men playing snooker and pool. They looked at me and looked at the gun. Said nothing. Didn’t move.

  I marched to the cigarette room, kicked in the door.

  Shane and Billy were having Chinese for lunch. I swiped the food onto the floor and put the barrel of the .38 in Billy’s right eye.

  “I’m lifting you. I’m taking you in, fucker!”

  “I was expecting you,” Billy said, wincing away from the revolver in his face.

  “Like fuck you were. Get on your feet!”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Billy said.

  I shoved the revolver deeper against his eye.

  “You’re going down, Billy. You killed that boy to cover your tracks. Shane and Tommy were having an affair, weren’t they? Shane here can’t keep his dick in his fucking pants, can he?”

  “You have some imagination, copper,” Shane said.

  “I’m taking you down too. Separate cells, let’s see who cracks first.”

  “On what charge?” a voice purred behind me in an Anglo-Irish accent.

  I kept the gun in Billy’s eye but turned to see who was talking. A tall, thin, grey-haired man in a black suit.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Anthony Blane, QC, Mr White’s barrister. On what charge are you arresting my client, Sergeant Duffy?”

  “Murder with malice aforethought.”

  “What evidence do you have linking my client with such a crime?”

  I wracked my brain for a second. “I have motive.”

  Blane crossed the little room. “Put the gun away, Sergeant, before someone gets hurt,” he said.

  I wanted to squeeze the trigger. I wanted to wipe the smile off Billy’s fat fucking face.

  I closed my eyes.

  I could see blood.

  Words.

  Letters.

  Typography.

  I lifted the revolver from Billy’s eye, disarmed it and put it in my pocket.

  “Please show me your warrant for entry into this private room and please tell me your grounds for suspecting my client of murder. When I talk to the Chief Constable this evening, I’ll want to have all the facts before me.”

  Shane was laughing now. Billy too. Pistol-whip the pair of them. Kill all three of them. Shane. Billy. Mr Tony Blane, QC, mob lawyer to the scum of the earth.

  I bit my lip. Shook my head.

  “Aye, I thought so,” Shane said.

  I slapped his face. Billy was on my back in a second. He rugby-tackled me to the ground and we tumbled out into the snooker hall.

  One of the goons raised a pool cue and smacked it down towards my head.

  I got my wrist up just in time and the cue smashed into two pieces.

  I scrambled to my feet. There were half a dozen guns pointing at my chest.

  Billy got up. Still grinning. Still laughing. It drove me mental.

  “Yak it up, Billy boy. I’ll find the proof. I’ll muddy the fucking waters. You and Tommy Little. You and Shane! A pair of benders? How will the higher-ups like that? I’ll fucking dig until I find something! And then you’ll be toast!”

  Billy looked around the room at his men. Some of them wanted to know what I was talking about.

  “Empty threats!” he said. “He’s spouting off. It’s all bollocks, so it is.”

  “We’ll see! We’ll fucking see!” I screamed and stormed out to the Beemer.

  I put it into gear. I drove. Someone threw a milk carton onto me from one of the tower blocks. It smashed over the windscreen scaring me shitless.

  “Shite!” I yelled. “Shite! Shite! Shite!”

  The Shore Road. Traffic. My wrist was banjaxed. Hurt like a bastard. And my beeper ringing so insistently that I finally had to turn it off. Whoever it was, I didn’t want to know.

  By the time I got to Carrick my wrist was agony. “Might as well go to the hospital,” I said.

  I got the end of Laura’s afternoon clinic. “Police business?” Hattie Jacques asked.

  “This time I’m a customer.”

  Laura saw me in her surgery. “What happened to you?”

  I told her the truth. She was appalled. She gave me an x-ray and it turned out that there was a micro-fracture in the ulna.

  “I’m afraid there’s very little we can do about that,” she said.

  “It hurts like hell,” I said.

  “I’ll prescribe anti-inflammatories and codeine.”

  We got the medicine and went back to Coronation Road. She drove the Beemer through the biblical rain. I self-medicated with vodka until the codeine finally kicked in. We ate the rest of the spaghetti and lit the fire and listened to Etta James.

  She had news. Good news, she said, but I saw it differently. She told me that her parents were buying her a house. She was leaving Carrick but she wouldn’t be too far away.

  “Leaving? Where will you be?” I asked groggily.

  “Five minutes up the road in Straid. It’s my great-aunt’s house.

  We’re buying it from her. It’s lovely. It backs onto Woodburn Forest. She wants to move to Tenerife. Have you ever been to Tenerife? Black sand. And the mountain with snow on it even in summer. You go up to the top – they give you hot chocolate with brandy in it.”

  “Don’t go. Move in with me.”

  “Here? In this house?”

  “Yes. It’s bought and paid for. Move in with me.”

  “I can’t. I can’t live here with all these … I can’t live here.”

  “They don’t bite.”

  “Not so far.”

  We went upstairs to bed. I lay on the mattress and I was so beat she made love to me in the cowgirl and swan positions with my cock deep inside her and she grinding with her hips and knees. We came together and she lay beside me laughing.

  “All that riding was good for something,” she said. I lit the paraffin heater and took a couple more codeine to help me sleep. And the rain came and the wind blew.

  “It’s all going to be all right, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Aye,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.”

  20: WHO KILLED LUCY MOORE?

  Dreams. Dreams of labyrinths. A labyrinth is not a maze. There are no dead ends. All paths lead inexorably to the centre. All paths lead from the outside in. From the inside out. Daedalus was no genius. Only a joiner. Only a chippie in the yard.

  Labyrinths are shaped like nooses.

  Lucy Moore’s finger was in the noose. She wished to see the baby again. She wished to live. The man wished death upon her. Motherless child, you have no protector. I am your voice. I am your avenger.

  The darkness.

  Falling, tumbling, into that black pit.

  The falling will never stop. The numbers will go on counting until the end of time. The integers are infinite. The spaces between the integers are infinite. Let me tell you about the trees, Lucy. We climbed out of the trees. We walked away from the trees. Trees are a step backwards.

  Everyone calls me Mimi, I don’t know why because my name is Lucia.

  Straid.

  The woods. Woodburn Forest.

  The letter S.

  The labyrinth.

  He killed her.

  He was the man.

  I opened
my eyes wide. Rain had flooded the gutters. Liquid skitter clinging to the windows like a beaten wife clinging to a bad marriage.

  I bolted out of bed.

  Laura looked frightened.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Where did you say you were moving to?”

  “Straid.”

  “What did you say about the forest?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said something about your grandmother’s house backing onto the forest!” I said, grabbing her by the shoulders.

  “You’re scaring me, Sean.”

  I let her go. “You said something about the house backing onto the forest.”

  “Oh … yes. I said that her house was nice because it backs onto Woodburn Forest.”

  I grabbed my jeans and fell over trying to put them on. My wrist had swollen to the size of a marrow.

  “Help me get dressed!”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Please!” I yelled at her.

  “All right, all right, keep your hair on.”

  She pulled up my jeans and buttoned them and I grabbed a black sweater.

  I went out onto the landing and down the stairs.

  I looked at the kitchen clock. 8.45. I waited until 9 and called up the Sinn Fein press annex in Bradbury House.

  “Hi, this is Mike Smith from the New York Times, I’d like to speak to Freddie Scavanni, please,” I said.

  “Just one moment,” his secretary replied.

  “Hello?” Freddie said.

  Freddie was at work. Good for him. I hung up. I called Jack Pougher in Special Branch. “Hi, this is Duffy from Carrickfergus RUC. You couldn’t do me a favour and find out Freddie Scavanni’s home address, could you? It’s never been in our files but I assume you boys must know, cos you boys know everything.”

  Jack didn’t see through the compliment and after a minute he came back on: “This is a weird file, Sean. Lots of blank pages and I’m not supposed to give out Scavanni’s home address to anyone beneath the rank of Superintendent.”

  “That’s all right, Jack, I’ll get it from a mate of mine in army intelligence. Those boys are always a wee bit better at giving you stuff.”

  Of course I had no mate in army intelligence and even if I had they’d give me shit. Jack didn’t know that though. “Hold your horses, Sean. You’ll owe me a favour, all right?”

  “I’ll owe you a favour.”

  “All right then. 19 Siskin Road, Straid and you didn’t hear it from me.”

  I hung up, opened the drawer under the phone, grabbed the ordnance survey map of East Antrim and looked for the village of Straid. I found it and then I looked for Siskin Road. It ran parallel to Woodburn Forest

  I got my raincoat and checked that the .38 was in the pocket.

  I pulled on my Converse Hi-Tops and looked for my car keys.

  “Oh, no, you’re not driving anywhere with that wrist,” Laura said, snatching the keys out of my hand.

  “Gimme the keys!”

  “No way. You’re not driving. Doctor’s orders,” she said. Her eyes were firm.

  “I need the car,” I said in a quieter tone.

  “Get one of your constables to drive you.”

  “Impossible. I can’t involve them in this. I’m not supposed to be looking at these cases any more. They’d be up the shite sheugh with me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Siskin Road, Straid, near Woodburn Forest.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Answers, goddamit!”

  “Calm down, Sean.”

  Calm? We should be out in the street screaming: Death is coming. For ever and ever. And there’s nothing we can do.

  Nothing we can do, but bring down his disciples.

  “Sean, what—”

  “He killed Lucy Moore, I don’t know why, but he did and I’m going to take him in for it.”

  “Who?”

  “Freddie Scavanni.”

  “What?”

  I grabbed my car keys from her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “His house near Woodburn Forest.”

  She had performed the autopsy. She had never been completely happy with her report.

  “I’ll drive you,” she said.

  “No way!”

  “I’ll drive you or you don’t go. Let me tie up your laces while you think about it.”

  She tied my laces while I thought about it.

  “You’ll do as I say, if it looks dodgy, you’ll wait in the friggin car.”

  “You’re so butch! I like it,” she said, mocking me.

  We got in the Beemer and we drove down Coronation Road as far as Taylor’s Avenue when I screamed, “Hit the brakes!”

  The BMW screeched to a halt.

  I got out and looked underneath for a mercury tilt bomb but didn’t find one.

  “Ok, let’s head on.”

  We drove up the Prospect Road to the New Line and along Councillors’ Road to the Siskin Road. For the last half mile of our journey the forest ran alongside the road. That familiar dense, exterior pine forest and the older deciduous wood behind.

  “Where’s Straid from here?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s another few miles on up the road.”

  “I’d heard of the village of Straid but I had no idea at all that it was so close to Carrickfergus, so close to Woodburn Forest.”

  We passed a sign on a gate that said #19 Siskin Road.

  “Here!” I said.

  She pulled the BMW over and I got out and examined the gate. It had an electronic-locking mechanism that opened by remote control. Freddie could open it without leaving his car, which was the sort of thing you wanted if you were a high-ranking IRA man. A subject getting out of his car, fumbling with his keys in the early morning or the late evening was the ambushers’ dream.

  The gate was made of thick, shipyard steel and ran on a roller across the entranceway. A stout high stone wall went all the way around the property and the wall was topped by rotating iron spikes.

  Nasty.

  “You’re breaking into this guy’s house? Don’t you need a warrant or something?” Laura said.

  “Nah, we’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll be fine he says. And how are you going to get in there?”

  “Easy enough for a resourceful chap like me,” I said.

  I took out my lock-picking kit and unscrewed the cover from the remote control box. I fused the exposed wires in the control box and the gate slid open.

  “Quick, back in the car before the thing closes again,” I said.

  Laura had a disapproving frown. “I’m not sure about this. If he comes back and finds us …”

  “When he comes back we’ll be waiting here with half the RUC to arrest him.”

  We drove along a short tree-lined gravel drive until we came to Freddie’s house.

  It was a large four- or five-bedroom tower house – one of those fortified farmhouses that had been built in the seventeenth century during the Irish and English civil wars. It had thick, white-washed stone walls and one of the sides rose up into a three-storey round tower.

  I saw now that the thick exterior wall was a bawn, a badhun – this whole place had been a cattle stronghold in the time of the Plantation. A good place for a player to have as his sanctuary.

  The roof was thick slate and there were cast-iron grilles on the windows. The front door was a massive oak affair with an iron lock. I knew from my history that badhuns had large basements for storing food and grain and many of them were built over their own well or spring. You could easily survive a machine-gun or RPG attack and you’d do pretty well in the face of a zombie invasion, comet strike or the apocalypse.

  It was the kind of place that cost money. Of course he had his press officer’s salary but what other readies could he be pulling in? Kick-backs from the rackets? Drugs?

  “How are you going to get inside? That’s six inches of Irish oak,” she said
, examining the front door.

  “I’ll just have to pick the lock.”

  Laura smiled at me. Her nostrils were flaring and her cheeks were flushed. She was enjoying this. Getting off on it.

  I better get us inside then. Old locks were tricky, old seventeenth-century locks might be impossible, but we’d see.

  I probed the mechanism with a pick. It was ok. A tension wrench was unnecessary, all I had to do was insert the pick into the bottom part of the keyhole and make sure it slid under the lock bar to act as the bottom of a key. I inserted my next hook pick above the first pick and slid it under the lock bar. I tapped around until I felt resistance, which came in the shape of a series of hanging pins at the back of the pick. I pushed up on the hanging pins to reproduce the top of the key turning.

  The door unlocked.

  I put on latex gloves and lifted the latch.

  “What exactly are we looking for?”

  “ I’m looking for. From now on you’re waiting in the car.”

  “No fear, not after all this fun and games.”

  I knew she wouldn’t listen to reason and she might even be able to help. I gave her another pair of latex gloves. “All right. We’re looking for evidence that Lucy Moore was staying here. Anything. Women’s clothes, baby clothes, any kind of ID. Anything like that! And a manual typewriter. Imperial 55. If you move anything put it back exactly the way it was. He’ll never know anyone was here,” I said.

  “Hey, if there are three bowls of porridge can I have the one for baby bear?” she said.

  We went inside.

  Timber frame. Interior white-washed stone walls. Small windows. Not much light but an undeniable rustic charm. There were watercolours on the wall and when I examined one of them it was a tiny but valuable Jack B Yeats.

  A huge living room that contained a piano, two sofas, a big TV.

  I went to the piano. There were no books of sheet music, which was a little strange. If you played you always had one or two sheet books lying around, didn’t you? I checked the bookshelf but there were no sheet books there either, and nothing interesting. A lot of Leon Uris.

  I went upstairs and searched the bedrooms. They weren’t fancy. Simple, Irish, even minimalist. Wood furniture, whitewashed walls.

  Clean. No women’s clothes, no baby’s clothes.

  There was a study with a locked roller desk. I picked it open and rummaged through a dull assortment of bills and financial statements. Nothing out of the ordinary.