The Cold Cold Ground Read online

  The incident.

  Why I was here now. Why I’d joined the peelers in the first place.

  I stripped off the last of my police uniform and hung it in the cupboard. Under all that webbing I had sweated like a Proddy at a High Mass, so I had a quick shower to rinse out the peeler stink. I dried myself and looked at my naked body in the mirror.

  5’ 10”. 11 stone. Rangy, not muscled. Thirty years old but I looked thirty unlike my colleagues on sixty cigs a day. Dark complexion, dark curly hair, dark blue eyes. My nose was an un-Celtic aquiline and when I worked up a tan a few people initially took me as some kind of French or Spanish tourist (not that there were many of those rare birds in these times). As far as I could tell there wasn’t a drop of French or Spanish blood in my background but there were always those dubious sounding local stories in Cushendun about survivors from the wreck of the Spanish Armada …

  I counted the grey hairs.

  Fourteen now.

  I thought about the Serpico moustache. Again dismissed it.

  I raised an eyebrow at myself. “Mrs Campbell, it must be awful lonely with your husband away on the North Sea …” I said, for some reason doing a Julio Iglesias impersonation.

  “Oh, it’s very lonely and my house is so cold …” Mrs Campbell replied.

  I laughed and perhaps as a tribute to this mythical Iberian inheritance I sought out my Che Guevara T-shirt, which Jim Fitzpatrick had personally screenprinted for me. I found an old pair of jeans and my Adidas trainers. I lit the upstairs paraffin heater and went back downstairs.

  I turned on the lights, went into the kitchen, took a pint glass from the freezer and filled it half full with lime juice. I added a few ice cubes and carried it to the front room: the good room, the living room, the lounge. For some arcane Proddy reason no one in Coronation Road used this room. It was where they kept the piano and the family Bible and the stiff chairs only to be brought out for important visitors like cops and ministers.

  I had no toleration for any of that nonsense. I’d set up the TV and stereo in here and although I still had some decorating to do, I was pleased with what I’d achieved. I’d painted the walls a very un-Coronation Road Mediterranean blue and put up some original – mostly abstract – art that I’d got from the Polytech Design School. There was a bookcase filled with novels and art books and a chic looking lamp from Sweden. I had a whole scheme in mind. Not my scheme admittedly, but a scheme none the less. Two years back I’d stayed with Gresha, a friend from Cushendun, who had fled war-torn Ulster in the early ‘70s for New York City. She’d apparently become quite the professional little blagger and hanger-on, name-dropping Warhol, Ginsberg, Sontag. None of that had turned my head but I’d done a bit of experimenting and I’d gone apeshit for her pad on St Mark’s Place; I imagine I had consciously tried to capture some of its aesthetic here. There were limits to what one could do in a terraced house in a Jaffa sink estate in far-flung Northern Ireland, however, but if you closed the curtains and turned up the music …

  I topped off the pint glass with 80 proof Smirnoff vodka, stirred the drink and grabbed a book at random from the bookcase.

  It was Jim Jones’s The Thin Red Line which I’d read on my World War Two jag along with Catch 22, The Naked and the Dead, Gravity’s Rainbow and so on. Every cop usually had a book going on for the waiting between trouble. I didn’t have one at the moment and that was making me nervous. I skimmed through the dog-eared best bits until I found the section where

  First Sergeant Welsh of C for Charlie Company just decides to stare at all the men on the troop ship for two full minutes, ignoring their questions and not caring if they thought he was crazy because he was the goddamned First Sergeant and he could do anything he bloody well wanted. Nice. Very nice.

  That scene read, I turned on the box, checked that the Pope was still alive and switched to BBC2, which was showing some minor snooker tournament I hadn’t previously heard of. I was just getting a little booze buzz going and quite enjoying the loose match between Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn (both them boys on their fifth pint of beer) when the phone rang.

  I counted the rings. Seven, eight, nine. When it reached ten I went into the hall and waited for a couple more.

  When it reached fifteen, I finally picked up the receiver.

  “Aye?” I said suspiciously.

  “There’s good news and bad news,” Chief Inspector Brennan said.

  “What’s the good news, sir?” I asked.

  “It’s nearby. You can walk from there.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “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 fourt
h 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 cliché 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 the 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, so
me 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.”