The Cold Cold Ground sdt-1 Read online

  “It’s nasty.”

  I sighed. “Jesus. Not kids?”

  “Not that kind of nasty.”

  “What kind of nasty, then?”

  “They chopped one of his hands off.”

  “Lovely. Whereabouts?”

  “The Barn Field near Taylor’s Avenue. You know it?”

  “Aye. Are you over there now?”

  “I’m calling from a wee lady’s house on Fairymount.”

  “A wee fairy lady?”

  “Just get over here, ya eejit.”

  “I’ll see you there in ten minutes, sir.”

  I hung up the phone. This is where the Serpico moustache would have come in handy. You could look at yourself in the hall mirror, stroke the Serpico moustache and have a ponder.

  Instead I rubbed my stubbly chin while I extemporized. Pretty nice timing for a murder, what with the riot in Belfast and the death of a hunger striker and the poor old Pope halfway between Heaven and Earth. It showed … What? Intelligence? Luck?

  I grabbed my raincoat and opened the front door. Mrs Campbell was still standing there, nattering away to Mrs Bridewell, the neighbour on the other side.

  “Are you away out again?” she asked. “Ach, there’s no rest for the wicked, is there, eh?”

  “Aye,” I said with gravity.

  She looked at me with her green eyes and flicked away the fag ash in her left hand. Something stirred down below.

  “There’s, uh, been a suspected murder on Taylor’s Avenue, I’m away to take a gander,” I said.

  Both women looked suitably shocked which told me that for once in my police career I was actually ahead of the word on the street.

  I left the women and walked down Coronation Road. The rain had become a drizzle and the night was calm — the acoustics so perfect that you could hear the plastic bullet guns all the way from the centre of Belfast.

  I walked south past a bunch of sleekit wee muckers playing football with a patched volleyball. I felt sorry for them with all their fathers out of work. I said, hey, and kept going past the identical rows of terraces and the odd house which had been sold to its tenants and subsequently blossomed into window treatments, extensions and conservatories.

  I turned right on Barn Road and cut through Victoria Primary School.

  The new graffiti on the bike shed walls was jubilant about the Pope: “Turkey 1, Vatican City 0” and “Who Shot JP?” — a none too subtle Dallas reference.

  I slipped over the rear fence and across the Barn Field.

  The black tongue of Belfast Lough was ahead of me now and I could see three army choppers skimming the water, ferrying troops from Bangor to the Ardoyne.

  I crossed a stretch of waste ground and a field with one demented looking sheep. I heard the generator powering the spotlights and then I saw Brennan with a couple of constables I didn’t yet know and Matty McBride, the forensics officer. Matty was dressed in jeans and jumper rather than the new white boiler suits that all FOs had been issued and instructed to wear. I’d have to give the lazy bastard a dressing down for that, but not in front of Brennan or the constables.

  I waved to the lads and they waved back.

  Chief Inspector Tom Brennan was my boss, the man in charge of the entire police station in Carrickfergus. The bigger stations were run by a Superintendent but Carrick was not even a divisional HQ. I, a buck sergeant with two months’ seniority, was in fact the fourth most senior officer in the place. But it was a safe posting and in my fortnight here I’d been impressed by the collegiate atmosphere, if not always with the professionalism of my colleagues.

  I walked across the muddy field and shook Brennan’s hand.

  He was a big man with an oval face, light brown, almost blondish hair and intelligent slate-blue eyes. He didn’t look Irish, nor English, there was probably Viking blood somewhere in that gene pool.

  He was one of those characters who felt that a weak handshake could somehow damage his authority, which meant that every handshake had to bloody hurt.

  I disengaged with a wince and looked about me for a beat or two. Brennan and the constables had done a hell of a job contaminating the crime scene with their big boots and ungloved hands. I gave a little inward sigh.

  “Good to see you, Sean,” Brennan said.

  “Bit surprised to see you, sir. We must be a wee bit short-staffed if you’re the responding officer.”

  “You said it, mate. Everybody’s away manning checkpoints. You know who’s minding the store?”

  “Who?”

  “Carol.”

  “Carol? Jesus Christ. This would be a fine time for that IRA missile attack we’ve all been promised,” I muttered.

  Brennan raised an eyebrow. “You can joke, pal, but I’ve seen the intel. The IRA got crates of them from Libya.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “Do you know Quinn and Davey?” Brennan asked.

  I shook the hands of the two reserve constables who, in the nature of things, I might not see again for another month.

  “Where’s your gun?” Brennan asked in his scary, flat East Antrim monotone.

  I picked up on the quasi-official timbre to his voice.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I left my revolver at home,” I replied.

  “And what if my call to you had been made under duress and this had been an ambush?” Brennan asked.

  “I suppose I’d be dead,” I said stupidly.

  “Aye. You would be, wouldn’t ya? Consider this a reprimand.”

  “An official reprimand?”

  “Of course not. But I don’t take it lightly: they would just love to top you, wouldn’t they, my lad? They’d love it.”

  “I suppose they would, sir,” I admitted. Everybody knew the IRA had a bounty on Catholic coppers.

  Brennan reached out with his big, gloved, meat-axe fingers and grabbed my cheek. “And we’re not going to let that happen, are we, sunshine?”

  “No, sir.”

  Brennan give me a squeeze that really hurt and then he let go.

  “All right, good, now what do you make of all this?” Brennan said.

  Matty was taking photographs of a body propped up in the front seat of a burnt-out car. The car was surrounded by rubbish and in the lee of the massive wall of the old Ambler’s Mill. The vehicle was a Ford Cortina that been had jacked and destroyed years, possibly decades, before. Now it was a rusted sculpture, lacking a windscreen, doors, wheels.

  A shock of mid-length yellow hair was visible from here.

  I walked closer.

  The cliche of every cops and robbers show — the dead blonde in the garbage tip. Course the blonde was always a bird, not what we had before us: some chubby guy with yellow tips in a denim AC/DC jacket.

  He was sitting in the driver’s seat, his head tilted to one side, the back of his skull gone, his face partially caved in. He was youngish, perhaps thirty, wearing jeans, that jacket, a black T-shirt and Doc Marten boots. His blond locks were caked with filth and matted blood. There was a bruise just to the right of his nose. His eyes were closed and his cheeks were paler than typing paper.

  The car was on a rise above the high grass and wild blackberry bushes and only a few yards from a popular short cut across the Barn Field itself which I myself had used on occasion.

  I pinched the skin on the corpse’s neck.

  The flesh was cold and the skin stiff.

  Rigor was on the gallop. This boy was killed some time ago. Most likely the wee hours of the morning or even late last night.

  They had either marched him here and shot him or shot him and dragged him here from their vehicle on Taylor’s Avenue. Good place for it. There would be no one here late to witness a killing or a body dumping, yet someone would find the corpse soon enough in the daylight hours. Ten more minutes up the road would have brought you into the countryside but you couldn’t be too careful with the Army throwing checkpoints up all over the place.

  I looked again for footprints. Dozens. Matty, Tom and t
he two reserve constables had come over for a look-see at the body. They didn’t know any better, God love them, but I made a mental note to hold a little seminar on “contaminating the crime scene” perhaps in a week or two when everyone knew who I was.

  I circled away from the car and walked up to the high mill wall, which, with the broad limbs of an oak tree, formed a little protected area. It was obviously some kind of former druggie or teenage hang-out. There was a mattress on the ground. A sofa. An old reclining chair. Garbage. Freezer bags by the score. Hypodermics. Condoms. I picked up one of the freezer bags, opened it with difficulty and sniffed. Glue. Nothing was fresh. Everything looked a couple of months old. The teenagers had obviously found an abandoned house in which to get high and create a new generation.

  I checked the sight lines.

  You could see the car from the road and from the Barley Field short cut.

  They — whoever they were — wanted the body to be found.

  I walked back to the vehicle and took a second look at the corpse.

  Those pale cheeks, a pierced ear, no earring.

  The victim’s left hand was by his side, but his right was detached from the body and lying at his feet on the accelerator pedal. He’d been shot in the chest first and then in the back of the head. There wasn’t much blood around the hand which probably meant that it had been cut off after the victim’s heart had stopped pumping. Severing a limb while he still lived implied at least two men. One to hold him down, one wielding the bone saw. But shooting him and then cutting off his hand was easy enough to do on your own.

  I looked for the customary plastic bag containing thirty sixpences or fifty-pence pieces but I didn’t find it. They didn’t always leave thirty pieces of silver when they shot informers but often they did.

  Here’s the hand that took the dirty money and here’s the Judas’s bargain.

  The right hand looked small and pathetic lying there on the accelerator. The left had scars over the knuckles from many a bout of fisticuffs.

  There was something about the other hand that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t see what it was just at the moment.

  I took a breath, nodded to myself, and stood up.

  “Well?” Brennan asked.

  “It’s my belief, sir, that this was no ordinary car accident,” I said.

  Brennan laughed and shook his head. “Why is it that every eejit in the CID thinks they’re a bloody comedian?”

  “Probably to cover up some deep insecurity, sir.”

  “All right what have you got, Sean? First impressions.”

  “I’d say our victim was a low-ranking paramilitary informer. They found out he was snitching for us or the Brits and they killed him. In typical melodramatic fashion they cut off his right hand after they topped him and then they left the body in a place where he could easily be found so the message would go out quickly. I’d say the time of death was sometime around midnight last night.”

  “Why low-ranking?”

  “Well, neither you nor Matty nor I recognized him so he’ll just be some crappy low-level hood from the Estates; also this place, bit out of the way, so the killer will be somebody local too. Somebody Carrick at least. I’ll bet Sergeant McCallister can ID our stiff, and I’ll bet you we find out who ordered the killing through the usual channels. Who called it in?”

  “Anonymous tip.”

  “The killer?”

  “Nah, some old lady out walking her dog. Unless you think the terrorists are using old lady hit men?”

  “What time was the call?”

  “Six fifteen this evening.”

  I nodded. “That’s a bit later than our killers wanted but he was seen in the end. I’m sure we’ll have the prints by tomorrow. I’d be very surprised indeed if this boy doesn’t have a record.”

  Brennan slapped me hard on the back. “So, you’re happy enough to take this as lead?”

  “What about the Ulster Bank fraud?”

  “White-collar crime is going to have to wait until we’re back from the edge of the abyss.”

  “Nice way of putting it.”

  “It’s going to get worse before it gets better, don’t you think?”

  I nodded. “Aye, I do.”

  “Have you handled a murder before, Sean?”

  “Three.”

  “A triple murder or three separate murder investigations?”

  “Three separate.”

  “What, may I ask, were the results of those murder inquiries?”

  I winced. “Well, I found out who did it on all three of them.”

  “Prosecutions?”

  “Zero. We had good eyewitness testimony on two but no one would testify.”

  Brennan took a step backwards and regarded me for a second. He opened my raincoat. “Is that bloody Che Guevara?”

  “It is, sir.”

  “You’re a big pochle, aren’t ya? You turn up at a crime scene with no gun, wearing trainers and a Che Guevara T-shirt? I mean, what’s the world coming to?”

  “A sticky end more than likely, sir.”

  He grinned and then shook his head. “I don’t get you, Duffy. Why did a smart aleck like you join the peelers?”

  “The snazzy uniforms? The thrilling prospect of being murdered on the way to work every morning?”

  Brennan sighed. “Well, I suppose I should leave you to it.” He tapped his watch. “I might be able to get a wee Scotch and soda at the golf club.”

  “Before you go, sir, I’ve one question. Who will I get to work this one with me?”

  “You can have the entire resources of the CID.”

  “What, all three of us?” I asked with a trace of sarcasm.

  “All three of you,” he said stiffly, not liking my tone at all.

  “Can I put in a secondment request for a couple of constables f-”

  “No, you cannot! We’re tighter than a choir boy’s arse around here. You’ve got your team and that’s your lot. In case you hadn’t noticed, mate, civil war is a bloody heartbeat away, apres nous the friggin flood, we are the little Dutch boys with our fingers in the dyke, we are the … the, uh …”

  “Thin blue line, sir?”

  “The thin blue line! Exactly!”

  He poked me in the middle of Che’s face. “And until the hunger strikes are over, matey-boy, you’ll get no help from Belfast either. But you can handle it, can’t you, Detective Sergeant Duffy?”

  “Yes sir, I can handle it.”

  “Aye, you better or I’ll bloody get somebody who can.”

  He yawned, tired out by his own bluster. “Well, I’ll leave this in your capable hands, then. I have a feeling this one is not going to cover us in glory, but we have to file them all.”

  “That we do, sir.”

  “All right then.”

  Brennan waved and walked back to his Ford Granada parked behind the police Land Rover. When the Granada had gone, I called Matty over.

  “What do you make of it?” I asked him.

  Matty McBride was a twenty-three-year-old second-gen cop from East Belfast. He was a funny-looking character with his curly brown hair, pencil thin body, flappy ears. He was little was Matty, maybe five five. Wee and cute. He was wearing latex gloves and his nose was red, giving him a slight evil-clown quality. He’d joined the peelers right out of high school and was obviously smart enough to have gotten himself into CID but still, I had grave doubts about his focus and attention to detail. He had a dreamy side. He wasn’t fussy or obsessed, which was a severe handicap in an FO. And when I had politely suggested that he look into the part-time degrees in Forensic Science at the Open University, Matty had scoffed at the very notion. He was young, though, perhaps he could be moulded yet.

  “Informer? Loyalist feud? Something like that?” Matty suggested.

  “Aye, my take too. Do you think they shot him here?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “March him out here and then chop his paw off with him screaming for all and sundry?”

&n
bsp; Matty shrugged. “Ok, so they killed him somewhere else.”

  “But if they did that, why do you think they carried the body all the way over here from the road?”

  “I don’t know,” Matty said wearily.

  “It was to display him, Matty. They wanted him found quickly.”

  Matty grunted, unwilling to buy into the pedagogical nature of our relationship.

  “Have you done the hair samples, prints?” I asked.

  “Nah, I’ll do all that once I’m done with the photos.”

  “Who’s our patho?”

  “Dr Cathcart.”

  “Is he good?”

  “She. Cathcart’s a she.”

  I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t heard of a female patho before.

  “She’s not bad,” Matty added.

  We stood there looking into the burnt-out car listening to the rain pitter-patter on the rusted roof.

  “I suppose I better get back to it,” Matty said.

  “Aye,” I agreed.

  “Is the cavalry coming down from Belfast at all?” Matty asked as he took more pictures.

  I shook my head. “Nah, just you and me, mate. Cosier that way.”

  “Jesus, I have to do this all by myself?” Matty protested.

  “Get plod and sod over there to help you,” I said.

  Matty seemed sceptical. “Them boys aren’t too brilliant at the best of times. Question for ya: skipper says to go easy on the old snaps. Do you need close-ups? If not I’ll skip them.”

  “Go easy on the snaps? Why?”

  “The expense, like, you know? Two pound for every roll we process. And it’s just a topped informer, isn’t it?”

  I was annoyed by this. It was typical of the RUC to waste millions on pointless new equipment that would rot in warehouses but pinch pennies in a homicide investigation.

  “Take as many rolls of film as you like. I’ll bloody pay for it. A man has been murdered here!” I said.

  “All right, all right! No need to shout,” Matty protested.

  “And get that evidence lifted before the rain washes it all away. Get those empty suits to help you.”

  I buttoned my coat and turned up the collar. The rain was heavier now and it was getting cold.

  “You could stay and help if you want, I’ll give you some latex gloves,” Matty said.