The Cold Cold Ground Read online

  “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, après 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?”

  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.

  I tapped the side of my head.

  “I’d love to help, mate, but I’m an ideas man, I’d be no use to you.”

  Matty bit his tongue and said nothing.

  “You’re in charge of the scene now, Constable McBride,” I said in a loud, official voice.

  “Ok.”

  “No shortcuts,” I added in a lower tone and turned and walked back to Taylor’s Avenue where the police Land Rover was parked with its back doors open. There was a driver inside: another reserve constable that I didn’t know, sitting on his fat arse reading a newspaper. I rapped the glass and the startled constable looked up. “Oi, you, Night of the Living Dead! Close them rear doors, and look alive, pal, you’re a sitting duck here for an ambush.”

  “Yes, sergeant,” the unknown constable said.

  An idea occurred to me. “Shine your headlights onto the field, will ya?”

  He put the headlights on full beam giving Matty even more light. I looked for a blood trail from the road to the corpse and sure enough I found a few drops.

  “There’s a blood trail!” I yelled to Matty and he nodded with a lot less excitement than I would have liked. I shrugged, did up my last coat button and went back along Coronation Road. It was well after midnight now and everyone was abed. The rain had turned to sleet and the smell of peat smoke was heady. No people, no cars, not even a stray cat. Dozens of identical, beige Proddy curtains neatly shut.

  So all these Jaffa bastards know I’m a Catholic? I thought unhappily. That was the kind of quality information the IRA would pay good money for, if anybody around here was imaginative enough to sell it to them.

  I walked up the garden path, went inside, pulled my vermillion curtains, turned on the electric fire, stripped off my clothes in the living room and found an old bath robe. I made myself another pint of vodka and lime. The TV was finished now and it was test cards on all three channels. I put Double Fantasy on the record player. I flipped the lever for repeat, lay down on the leather sofa and closed my eyes.

  Darkest Ulster in the Year of our Lord 1981: rain on the gable, helicopters flying along the lough, a riot reduced to the occasional rumble …

  The problem with Double Fantasy was the arrangement whereby they alternated John Lennon tracks with Yoko Ono tracks. You couldn’t escape Yoko for more than four minutes at a time. I lowered the volume to two, snuggled under the red sofa comforter and, taking the occasional sip from my vodka gimlet, fell into the kind of deep sleep only experienced by men whose lives, like those of C for Charlie company, are lived on the edge of the line.

  2: YOUR TINY HAND IS FROZEN

  The occasional rumble of riot, gunfire and explosion. Nothing that Carrickfergus’s seasoned sleepers couldn’t handle. But then the comparative quiet was shattered by the apocalyptic turbines of a CH-47 Chinook. Everything began to rattle. A coffee cup fell off my mantelpiece. A picture came down.

  The helicopter passed overhead at a height of 200 metres, well below the recommended ceiling. The Magnavox flip clock said 4 a.m. The British army had woken me and half the town in a hubristic display of raw
power. Yes, you control the skies. And this, guys, is how you lose the hearts and minds.

  I thought about that as I lay there in the big, empty double bed on Coronation Road. And when my anger subsided I thought about the vacuum on Adele’s side of the mattress.

  Of course I had asked her if she wanted to come to Carrick with me, but there was no way she was going to “that stinking Proddy hell hole,” was her response. I hadn’t been heartbroken but I had been disappointed. She was a schoolteacher and it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to switch education boards as all the good teachers were going to England and America. The house was paid for, she would have been bringing in the dough, we would have been living high on the hog.

  But she didn’t love me and the truth was I didn’t love her either.

  I lay there in the darkness wondering if sleep was an option.

  My mind drifted back to the murder victim on Taylor’s Avenue.

  The crime scene had been nagging at my unconscious.

  I had missed something.

  In my haste to get out of the rain I had overlooked a detail.

  What was it?

  It was something about the body, wasn’t it? Something hadn’t been quite right.

  Wind tugged at the gutters. Rain pounded off the window. I shivered. This was evidently going to be another “year without a summer” for Ulster.

  For obscure reasons the previous tenants had blocked up the chimney so that you couldn’t light a fire in the upstairs or downstairs grates. I’d reckoned I wouldn’t have to worry about this until November but now I was obviously going to have to get someone in to see about it.

  I lay there thinking and the Chief’s question came back to me.

  Why had I joined the police?

  And for the second time in twenty-four hours I thought about the incident.

  Don’t look for it in my shrink reports. And don’t ask any of my old girlfriends.

  Never talked about it with anyone.

  Not me ma. Not me da. Not even a priest. Unusual for a blabber like yours truly.

  It was 2 May 1974. I was two years into my PhD programme. A nice spring day. I was walking past the Rose and Crown Bar on the Ormeau Road just twenty yards from my college digs.

  It was the worst year of the Troubles but I hadn’t personally been affected. Not yet. I was still neutral. Trying to keep aloof. Trying to do my own thing. The closest I’d come to assuming a position was after Bloody Sunday when me and Dad had attended the funerals in Derry and I’d thought for twenty-four hours about joining the IRA.

  Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?

  2 May 1974.

  The Rose and Crown was a student joint. I’d been in there for a bevy maybe three hundred times in my years at Queens. It was my local. I knew all the regulars. Normally I would have been at that bar at that time but as it happened I’d been meeting a girl at the Students’ Union and I’d had enough to drink already.

  It was a no-warning bomb. The UVF (the Ulster Volunteer Force, an illegal Protestant paramilitary group) claimed responsibility. Later the UDA (the Ulster Defence Association, another Protestant paramilitary group) said they did it. Still later the UVF said it had been an IRA bomb that had exploded prematurely.

  I didn’t care about any of that.

  The alphabet soup didn’t interest me.

  I wasn’t badly hurt. A burst eardrum, abrasions, cuts from fragmenting glass.

  Nah, I was ok, but inside the bar was carnage.

  A slaughterhouse.

  I was the first person through the wreck of the front door.

  And that was the moment—

  That was the moment when I knew that I wanted to be some small part of ending this madness. It was either get out or do something. I chose the latter.

  The police were keen to have me. A university graduate, a psychologist, and that most precious thing of all … a Catholic.

  And now seven years later, after a border posting, the CID course, a child kidnapping, a high-profile heroin bust, and several murder investigations, I was a newly promoted Detective Sergeant at the relatively safe RUC station in Carrickfergus. I knew why they’d sent me here. I was here to stay out of harm’s way and I was here to learn …

  I sat up in bed and turned on the radio and got the news about the Pope.

  Still alive, the tough old bugger. I genuflected and muttered a brief, embarrassed prayer of thanks.

  “Why is it so bloody cold!” I said and bundled up the duvet and pillow and carried them to the landing.

  I knelt down in front of the paraffin heater.

  From the Arctic to the tropics.

  I assumed the foetal position on the pine floor. I immediately fell asleep.

  Rain.

  Such rain. Lugh draws the sun and sea and turns them into rain.

  I stirred from a dream of water.

  Light.

  Heat.

  My body floating on the paraffin fumes above the river and the sea.

  Next door children’s laughter and then something heavy smashing against the wall. They were always going at it, the Bridewell boys.

  I opened my eyes. My throat was dry. The landing was blue because of the indigo flame of the paraffin heater. The heater had been a gift from my parents when I first moved to Belfast and I had lugged it to Armagh, Tyrone and lastly to Carrickfergus. Even now the gorgeous, heady kerosene aroma time-travelled me across the decades to my childhood in Cushendun.

  For five minutes I lay there listening to the rain pouring off the roof and then, reluctantly, I went downstairs.

  I made tea and toast with butter and marmalade. I showered, dressed in a sober black polo-neck sweater, black jeans, black shoes. I put on a dark sports jacket and my raincoat. I put the revolver in my coat pocket and left the ridiculous machine gun on the hall table.

  I went outside.

  Grey sky that began fifty feet above my head. Drizzle. There was a cow munching at the roses in Mrs Bridewell’s garden. Another was taking a shit in Mrs Campbell’s yard.

  When I looked to the left and right I could see other cows further along the street wandering stupidly to and fro. I’d been here three weeks and this was the second time the cows had escaped from the field next to Coronation Road. It would never have happened in Cushendun. These Carrick eejits were not good cattle farmers. I walked down the garden path ignoring Mrs Campbell’s cow and buttoning my coat. There was a frost in the high hills and my breath followed me like a reluctant taibhse.

  I checked under the BMW for car bombs, didn’t find any, looked a second time just to be sure, turned the key in the lock, flinched in expectation of a booby trap, opened the door and got inside.

  I did not fasten my seat belt. Four police officers had died in car accidents this year, nine police officers had been shot while trapped in their vehicles by their seat belts. The statistical department of the RUC felt that, on balance, it was better not to wear a seat belt and a memo had been sent around for comments. This memo had obviously been seen by someone in the Chief Constable’s office and quick as a flash it had become a standing order.

  I stuck on Downtown Radio and got the local news.

  Riots in Belfast, Derry, Cookstown, Lurgan and Strabane. An incendiary attack on a paint factory in Newry. A bomb on the Belfast to Dublin railway line. A strike by the Antrim Ulsterbus drivers in protest at a series of hijackings.

  “Because of the Ulsterbus strike schools in Belfast, Newtownabbey, Carrickfergus, Ballymena, Ballyclare, Coleraine and Larne will be closed today. Now a little George Jones to soothe your morning,” Candy Devine said.

  I flipped to Radio 1 and drove up Coronation Road listening to Blondie.

  “It’s like bloody India,” the milkman said to me coming down the street in his electric float. “Aye and without the cuisine,” I muttered and drove slowly to avoid killing a cow and thus incurring an unfavourable incarnation in the next life.

  I turned right on Victoria Road and saw a bunch of teenagers
in school uniform waiting for a bus that was never going to come. I wound the window down.

  “School’s off, I just heard it on the radio!” I yelled across to them.

  “Piss off, ya pervert!” a seventeen-year-old slapper yelled back, flipping me the bird as she did so.

  “I’m the bloody peelers, ya wee shite!” I thought about replying but when you’re in an insult contest with a bunch of weans at 7.58 in the morning your day really is heading for the crapper.

  I wound the window back up and drove on to the sound of jeers.

  Two hundred yards further on I went past a Twelfth of July bonfire which was already two storeys high and stacked with pallets, boxes and tyres. On the top someone had a stuck an effigy of the Pope wearing a blood-stained bed sheet.

  Nice.

  I pulled into McDowell’s newsagents.

  Oscar was serving two hacks from the Associated Press. You could tell they were hacks from the Associated Press because they were wearing jackets that said “Associated Press” in big yellow letters on the back and because they were trying to buy a couple of Mars bars with a fifty-pound note.

  I bought the Guardian and the Daily Mirror. The headlines were about the Pope and the Yorkshire Ripper trial. Nothing about Northern Ireland on the front page of either. The AP men were probably selling their stories to the papers in Boston.

  At the bottom of Victoria Road there was an army checkpoint. Three green armour-plated Land Rovers and a bunch of Scottish soldiers smoking Woodbines.

  I showed them my warrant card and they lifted their rifles and waved me through.

  “Nice Beemer,” a big Jock squaddie said as I drove on. Was he implying that because I was driving a BMW, I was a corrupt cop on the take to the paramilitaries while he was a hard-working son of Caledonia trying to keep the murderous Paddies from killing one another? Maybe, or maybe he just dug the wheels.

  I drove south west along the sea front.

  Ahead of me Carrickfergus Castle, the town and harbour.

  To my right a dismal line of houses and shops, to my left the – always – gun-metal grey waters of Belfast Lough.

  The police station was about half a mile along the front.