The Cold, Cold Ground Read online

  PRAISE FOR ADRIAN MCKINTY

  Dead I Well May Be

  “McKinty is a cross between Mickey Spillane and Damon Runyon – the toughest, the best. Beware of McKinty” Frank McCourt

  “A darkly thrilling tale of the New York streets with all the hardboiled charm of Chandler and the down and dirty authenticity of closing time … Evocative dialogue, an acute sense of place and a sardonic sense of humour make McKinty one to watch” Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian

  “The story is soaked in the holy trinity of the noir thriller – betrayal, money and murder – but seen through here with a panache and political awareness that gives Dead I Well May Be a keen edge over its rivals” Big Issue

  “Adrian McKinty is a big new talent – for storytelling, for dialogue and for creating believable characters … Dead I Well May Be is a riveting story of revenge and marks the arrival of a distinctive fresh voice” Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph

  “A pacy, assured and thoroughly engaging debut … this is a hard-boiled crime story written by a gifted man with poetry coursing through his veins and thrilling writing dripping from his fingertips” Sunday Independent

  “Careens boisterously from Belfast to the Bronx … McKinty is a storyteller with the kind of style and panache that blur the line between genre and mainstream. Top-drawer” Kirkus Reviews

  The Dead Yard

  “Adrian McKinty has once again harnessed the power of poetry, violence, lust and revenge to forge a sequel to his acclaimed Dead I Well May Be” Irish Post

  “McKinty’s literate, expertly crafted third crime novel confirms his place as one of his generation’s leading talents... McKinty possesses a talent for pace and plot structure that belies his years. Dennis Lehane fans will definitely be pleased” Publisher’s Weekly

  “The Dead Yard is a much-anticipated sequel to Dead I Well May Be and every bit as good. McKinty crackles with raw talent. His dialogue is superb, his characters rich and his plotting tight and seamless. He also writes with a wonderful (and wonderfully humorous) flair for language, raising his work above most crime-genre offerings and bumping right up against literature” San Francisco Chronicle

  The Bloomsday Dead

  “Those who know McKinty will automatically tighten their seat-belts. To newcomers I say: buckle up and get set for a bumpy ride through a very harsh landscape indeed. His antihero Michael Forsythe is as wary, cunning and ruthless as a sewer rat … His journey in some ways parallels that of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom on one day in Dublin, but – trust me – it’s a lot more violent and a great deal more exciting” Matthew Lewin, Guardian

  “A pacey, violent caper … As Forsythe hurtles around the city, McKinty vividly portrays its sleazy, still-menacing underbelly” John Dugdale, Sunday Times

  Falling Glass

  “McKinty is a streetwise, energetic gunslinger of a writer, firing off volleys of sassy dialogue and explosive action that always delivers what it has promised to the reader. The story is skilfully constructed and the pace is always full throttle forwards” David Park, Irish Times

  “Ireland’s more accessible answer to James Ellroy … This is another winner, with pathos, insight, sardonic humour and lyrical descriptions that counterpoint the red-hot sequences to superb effect” Laura Wilson, Guardian

  “A powerful and hugely satisfying read” Sunday Herald Sun, Melbourne

  “This globe-trotting narrative is rendered in McKinty’s trademark muscular prose, which drip-feeds poetic flourishes into hard-boiled noir” Declan Burke, Sunday Business Post

  The Cold Cold Ground

  Adrian McKinty

  “Cold Cold Ground” by Tom Waits © Copyright Native Tongue Music

  Publishing Ltd on behalf of Jalma Music.

  All print rights for Native Tongue Music Publishing Ltd

  administered by Sasha Music Publishing, a division of All Music

  Publishing & Distribution Pty Ltd

  ACN 147 390 814

  www.ampd.com.au

  Used By Permission. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorised

  Reproduction is Illegal.

  A complete catalogue record for this book can

  be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Adrian McKinty to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2012 Adrian McKinty

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by,

  any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

  otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First published in 2012 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  website: www.serpentstail.com

  ISBN 978 1 84668 822 5

  eISBN 978 1 84765 795 4

  Designed and typeset by Crow Books

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Now don’t be a cry baby when there’s wood in the shed,

  There’s a bird in the chimney and a stone in my bed,

  When the road’s washed out they pass the bottle around,

  And wait in the arms of the cold cold ground.

  – Tom Waits, “Cold Cold Ground”, 1987

  It is rumoured that after concluding his song about the

  war in Ilium, Homer sang next of the war between the

  frogs and rats.

  – Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal”, 1949

  1: THE THIN BLUE LINE

  The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.

  And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.

  I watched with the others by the Land Rover on Knockagh Mountain. No one spoke. Words were inadequate. You needed a Picasso for this scene, not a poet.

  The police and the rioters were arranged in two ragged fronts that ran across a dozen streets, the opposing sides illuminated by the flash of newsmen’s cameras and the burning, petrol-filled milk bottles sent tumbling across the no man’s land like votive offerings to the god of curves.

  Sometimes one side charged and the two lines touched for a time before decoupling and returning to their original positions.

  The smell was the stench of civilization: gunpowder, cordite, slow match, kerosene.

  It was perfect.

  It was Giselle.

  It was Swan Lake.

  And yet …

  And yet we had the feeling that we had seen better.

  In fact we had seen better only last week when, in the hospital wing of The Maze Prison, IRA commander Bobby Sands had finally popped his clogs.

  Bobby was a local lad from Newtownabbey and a poster boy for the movement, having never killed anyone and coming from a mixed Protestant-Catholic background. And bearded, he was a good Jesus, which didn’t hurt either.

  Bobby Sands was the maitreya, the world teacher, the martyr who would redeem mankind through his suffering.

  When Bobby finally died on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike the Catholic portions of the city had erupted with spontaneous anger and frustration.

  But that was a week ago and Fran
kie Hughes, the second hunger striker to die, had none of Bobby’s advantages. No one thought Frankie was Jesus. Frankie enjoyed killing and was very good at it. Frankie shed no tears over dead children. Not even for the cameras.

  And the riots for his death felt somewhat … orchestrated.

  Perhaps on the ground it seemed like the same chaos and maybe that’s what they would print tomorrow in newspapers from Boston to Beijing … But up here on the Knockagh it was obvious that the peelers had the upper hand. The rioters had been cornered into a small western portion of the city between the hills and the Protestant estates. They faced a thousand fulltime peelers, plus two or three hundred police reserve, another two hundred UDR and a battalion-strength unit of British Army regulars in close support. The Brits on this occasion were the Black Watch who, notoriously, were full of Glaswegian roughnecks looking for any chance of a rumble. There were hundreds of rioters – not the thousands that had been predicted: this hardly represented a general uprising of even the Catholic population and as for the promised “revolution” … well, not tonight.

  “It looks bad,” young Constable Price offered as a conversational opener.

  “Ach, it’s half-hearted at best for this lad,” Detective Constable McCrabban replied in his harsh, sibilant, Ballymena-farmer accent.

  “It’s no fun being the second hunger striker to croak it. Everybody remembers the first one, number two is no good at all. They won’t be writing folk songs for him,” Sergeant McCallister agreed.

  “What do you think, Duffy?” Constable Price asked me.

  I shrugged. “Crabbie’s right. It’s never gonna be as big for number two. And the rain didn’t help him.”

  “The rain?” McCallister said sceptically. “Forget the rain! It’s the Pope. It was bad luck for Frankie to kick the bucket just a few hours before somebody tried to kill the Pope.”

  I’d done an analysis of Belfast riots from 1870–1970 which showed an inverse proportion between rain and rioting. The heavier the downpour the less likely there was to be trouble, but I kept my trap shut about that – nobody else up here had gone to University and there was no gain to be had from rubbing in my book-learning. And big Sergeant McCallister did have a point about John Paul II. It wasn’t every news cycle that someone shot the Holy Father.

  “He was a scumbag was Frankie Hughes. A rare ‘un. It was his ASU that killed Will Gordon and his wee girl,” Sergeant McCallister added.

  “I thought it was the wee boy who was killed,” McCrabban said.

  “Nah. The wee boy lived. The bomb was in the car. The wee lad was severely injured. Will and his young daughter were blown to bits,” McCallister explained.

  There was a silence after that punctuated by a far-off discharge of baton rounds.

  “Fenian bastards,” Price said.

  Sergeant McCallister cleared his throat. Price wondered what that meant for a beat or two and then he remembered me.

  “Oh, no offence, Duffy,” he muttered, his thin lips and pinched face even thinner and pinchier.

  “No offence, Detective Sergeant Duffy,” Sergeant McCallister said to put the new constable in his place.

  “No offence, Sergeant Duffy,” Price repeated petulantly.

  “None taken, son. I’d love to see things from your point of view but I can’t get my head that far up my arse.”

  Everybody laughed and I used this as my exit line and went inside the Land Rover to read the Belfast Telegraph.

  It was all about the Pope. His potential assassin was a man called Mehmed Ali Agca, a Turk, who had shot him in St Peter’s Square. The Telegraph didn’t have much more information at this stage but they padded out the story with the shocked opinions of local people and politicians and a few right-wing Protestant nuts, like Councillor George Seawright who felt that this was an “important blow against the Anti-Christ”.

  Sergeant McCallister poked his big puffy face and classic alky nose round the back of the Land Rover.

  “You’re not taking the huff at Price, are you, Sean?” he asked in a kindly manner.

  “Jesus no. I was just getting out of the rain,” I replied.

  Sergeant McCallister grinned with relief. One of those infectious grins that I had not been blessed with myself. “That’s good. Well, look, I was thinking, do you want to call it a day? No one is going to be needing us. They’re more than covered down there in the riot. They’ve got redundancy in spades. Shall we bog off?”

  “You’re the senior sergeant. It’s your call.”

  “I’ll log us in to midnight, but we’ll skip, what say you?”

  “Alan, I think that’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard since we bloody came up here.”

  On the way back down the mountain McCallister put a cassette in the player and we listened to his personal mix tape of Crystal Gayle, Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton. They dropped me first on Coronation Road, Carrickfergus. “Is this your new manor?” McCrabban asked, looking at the fresh paint job on number 113.

  “Aye, I just moved in couple of weeks ago, no time yet for a house-warming party or anything,” I said quickly.

  “You own it?” Sergeant McCallister asked.

  I nodded. Most people still rented in Victoria Estate, but a few people were buying their council houses from the Northern Ireland Housing Executive under Mrs Thatcher’s privatization plans. I had bought the place vacant for only £10,000. (The family that had lived here had owed two year’s rent and one night just upped and vanished. To America, some said, but nobody really knew.)

  “You painted it pink?” Price asked with a grin.

  “That’s lavender, you colour-blind eejit,” I said.

  McCallister saw that Price clearly hadn’t got the message yet. “Hey lads, you know why Price nearly failed the police entrance exam? He thought a polygon was a dead parrot.”

  The lads chuckled dutifully and somebody punched Price on the shoulder.

  McCallister winked at me. “We have to head, mate,” he announced and with that they closed the back doors of the Rover.

  “See you!” I shouted after them as they drove off, but it was unlikely they heard me through the bulletproofing and armour plate.

  I stood there looking ridiculous with my full riot gear, helmet and Sterling sub-machine gun.

  A wee lad was gawping at me. “Is that a real gun, mister?” he asked.

  “I certainly hope so,” I said, opened my gate and walked down the garden path. It wasn’t a bad house: a neat job in the middle of the terrace, built in the 1950s, like the rest of Victoria Estate, Carrickfergus for the Protestant working poor. Of course these days hardly anybody was working. The ICI textile plant had closed last year, in the autumn of 1980, and they had employed one in every four men in Carrick. Now the town had an unemployment rate of twenty per cent and it would have been worse but for emigration to England and Australia and the brand new DeLorean factory that had just opened in Dunmurray. If people bought DeLoreans in anything like the numbers predicted then Carrickfergus and Northern Ireland had a chance. Otherwise …

  “Busy night?” Mrs Campbell asked from next door.

  Mrs Campbell … I smiled and said nothing. Best not to. She was trouble. Thirty-two. Red hair. Looker. Husband away on the North Sea oil rigs. Two weans under ten. There was no way.

  “You know, what with the riots and everything?” she insisted while I hunted for my keys.

  “Aye,” I said.

  “I suppose you heard about the Pope?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could find about a dozen suspects on this street,” she said with a cackle.

  “I’m sure you could,” I agreed.

  “Personally, mind, I find it shocking, really shocking,” she said.

  I blinked a couple of times and looked straight ahead. This statement worried me. It meant that she was trying to show empathy, which led me to the inescapable conclusion that she probably fancied me and that she (and everybody else on the street) knew that I was a Catholic.

>   I hadn’t been here three weeks, barely spoken to anyone. What had I done in this time to give myself away? Was it the way I pronounced the letter “H” or was it just that I was marginally less sour than Coronation Road’s dour Protestant population?

  I put the key in the lock, shook my head and went inside. I hung up my coat, took off my bulletproof vest and unbuckled the handgun. In case we’d been needed for riot duty I’d also been issued with a CS gas canister, a billy club and that scary World War Two machine gun – presumably to deal with an IRA ambush en route. I carefully put all these weapons on the hall table.

  I hung my helmet on the hook and went upstairs.

  There were three bedrooms. I used two for storage and had taken the front one for myself as it was the biggest and came with a fireplace and a nice view across Coronation Road to the Antrim Hills beyond.

  Victoria Estate lay at the edge of Carrickfergus and hence at the edge of the Greater Belfast Urban Area. Carrick was gradually being swallowed up by Belfast but for the moment it still possessed some individual character: a medieval town of 13,000 people with a small working harbour and a couple of now empty textile factories.

  North of Coronation Road you were in the Irish countryside, south and east you were in the city. I liked that. I had a foot in both camps too. I’d been born in 1950 in Cushendun when that part of rural Northern Ireland was like another planet. No phones, no electricity, people still using horses to get around, peat for cooking and heating, and on Sundays some of the crazier Protestants rowing or sailing across the North Channel in little doreys to attend the kirk in Scotland.

  Aye, I’d been whelped a country boy but in 1969, right as the Troubles were kicking off, I’d gone to Queen’s University Belfast on a full scholarship to study psychology. I’d loved the city: its bars, its alleys, its character and, at least for a while, the university area was immune to the worst of the violence.

  It was the era of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and QUB was a little candle of light held up against the gathering dark.

  And I’d done well there if I say so myself. Nobody was doing psychology in those days and I’d shone. Not much competition, I suppose, but still. I’d gained a first-class degree, fell in and out of love a couple of times, published a little paper on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in the Irish Journal of Criminology and perhaps I would have stayed an academic or gotten a job across the water but for the incident.