The Cold Cold Ground Read online

A small two-storey brick affair, surrounded by a blast wall and a high fence for deterring hand grenades and Molotov cocktails.

  I nodded to Ray behind the bulletproof glass. Ray raised the gate barrier and I drove into the police station compound. There was hardly anyone in because everyone had been up the night before on riot duty. I easily found a parking space next to the entrance.

  I got out gingerly. The yard was full of potholes and puddles and since all the police Land Rovers leaked oil, you could really take a nasty spill if you didn’t watch your step. I said “Good morning, Miss Moneypenny,” to Carol and went upstairs. The second floor was open plan with an interview room, an incident room and offices for the senior sergeants and Chief Inspector Brennan.

  CID had all the window desks overlooking Belfast Lough. The view was pleasant and on a clear day you could see Scotland, which was nice if you ever wanted to see Scotland on a clear day. Detective Constable “Crabbie” McCrabban had built an elaborate and paranoid conspiracy theory around these prized window desks. It was his feeling that CID were given this prime position so that we would get it first in the event of an IRA missile or RPG attack, but I chose to believe that Brennan had assigned us these desks as reward for our hard graft day in and day out.

  I sat down in my swivel chair and flicked through the report that Matty had inexpertly typed up:

  Carrickfergus RUC, CID Div. Case #13715/A. Homacide. Barn Field, Taylor’s Avenue, Carrickfergus, 13/5/1981. Srce: anon tip Wed evening. Victim: victim unknown. Victim’s personal effects: none. Other evidence: blood sample, victim’s hair sample, victim’s right hand, CS photographs. Remarks: victim found in abadoned car, one hand severed, prints taken. Victim not yet IDed. Patho Rept: awaiting patho rept. #13715/A CS: Inq to Det Sgt Duffy. 14/5/1981: body devilered to Carrick Hospital c.o. pathologist Dr Cathcart.

  Matty had written nothing about getting prints off the victim’s clothes. I wondered if he’d done it and found nothing or just not done it. It was a toss up.

  I went to the coffee machine and pushed the buttons for white coffee and chocolate simultaneously. Armed with this dubious concoction I went back to my desk. Matty had not left me the photographs but I found them in the darkroom hanging on the drying line. 7x10 glossies of the body, the hand, the car, the pool of blood, the AC/DC jacket, the victim’s face, other aspects of the crime scene and a few of the moon, clouds and grass.

  I gathered the pics and took them to my desk.

  Other officers started to arrive, doing whatever the hell it was that they did around here. I said good morning to Sergeant McCallister and showed him the pics of our boy. It didn’t ring a bell.

  McCrabban appeared twenty minutes later sporting a black eye.

  “Jesus, mate! Where’d you get that shiner?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask,” he replied.

  “Not the missus?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, if that’s all right with you,” he said taciturnly. These Proddies. They never wanted to talk about anything.

  McCrabban was a big, lanky man with a carefully engineered old-school peeler tache, straight ginger hair and pale, bluish skin. With a tan he’d look somewhat like a Duracell battery, but he wasn’t the type to get a tan. He was from farmer stock and he had a down-to-earth conservative millenarian quality that I liked a lot. His Ballymena accent conjured (in my mind at least) Weber’s stolid Protestant work ethic.

  “A big Jock was giving me a hard time about my Beemer. It’s a ‘77 E21. That’s not flashy, is it? You need a reliable car as a cop, don’t you?” I said.

  “Don’t ask me. I have a tractor and an old Land Rover Defender.”

  “Forget it,” I said and showed him the case notes and Matty’s photographs of the victim.

  “Recognize our poor unfortunate?” I asked.

  Crabbie shook his head. “You’re thinking informer, I suppose,” he said.

  “Why, what are you thinking?”

  “Oh, I’m with you, with his right hand cut off? Standard operating procedure.”

  “Do me a favour, take some of the headshots down to Jimmy Prentice and see if he recognizes our boy. I already asked the Chief so I’m a bit sceptical that Jimmy will have an ID but you never know.”

  “He mustn’t be local. If Brennan doesn’t know him he isn’t worth knowing,” Crabbie said.

  “If Jimmy draws a blank, fax them up to the Lisburn Road and ask them to cross-reference with all the informers on their books, especially ones that haven’t called in in the last day or two.”

  Crabbie shook his head. “They’ll never tell us about the MI5 boys.”

  “I appreciate that, Crabbie, but they’ll have the army list too, so let’s at least try and narrow the field down a wee bit,” I said with a slight edge in my voice.

  Crabbie grabbed a couple of the face pics and took them downstairs to Jim Prentice who ran all the informers in Carrick. Because of the sensitive nature of his work he was stationed in a locked little office by himself next to the armoury. Prentice was the paymaster for all the touts, informers and grasses in our district so if the victim had ever taken a government shilling for information Jimmy would know it. If not, the fax to Belfast would set the ball rolling on their lists. Crabbie was right about MI5 though. MI5 had its own network of informers, some in deep cover, and because MI5 fundamentally didn’t trust anyone in Northern Ireland the names of their agents were never shared with us even when the eejits got themselves shot.

  Matty appeared shortly before lunch and over coffee and sandwiches the three of us had our first case conference. Matty told us he had done the victim’s clothes but there were no liftable prints. He had fingerprinted the victim’s right hand and faxed the printout to Belfast, but so far nothing had showed up in the RUC database. Crabbie told us that no one had called in a missing person’s report in the last twenty-four hours and Jimmy Prentice had told him that our victim was not one of his lads.

  “Did you find any bullets in your search of the scene?” I asked Matty.

  Matty shook his head.

  “Footprints, hair samples, anything unusual about the victim’s clothing?”

  Matty shook his head. “The T-shirt was a black Marks and Spencer XL, the jeans were Wrangler, the shoes Adidas trainers.”

  “Any claims of responsibility yet?” I asked Crabbie.

  Crabbie shook his head. “No one’s said anything.”

  “So we’ve got no prints, no physical evidence, no recovered slug, no claim of responsibility, no missing person’s filings, absolutely nowt,” I said.

  The other two nodded their heads.

  “Right fool I’ll look going to Brennan with this.”

  “We could put his picture on TV,” Matty said. “Get an artist to fix up a sketch of his face pre-gunshot.”

  “Brennan won’t like it, asking the public for help. Hates that,” Crabbie said.

  “Does he now?” I muttered. He seemed like a man with a yen for the bright lights of a BBC studio, but that was maybe just me projecting, and again it made me think that Prods were different and Prods from East Antrim were even differenter.

  “Aye, he does. He doesn’t want a lot of focus from the powers that be on our wee set-up down here,” Crabbie explained.

  The three of us sat there for a minute looking at a filthy coal boat chugging down the lough. Matty lit a Rothmans. Crabbie began assembling his pipe. I played with a paper clip. I sighed and got to my feet. “Maybe the doc will help, who wants to come?”

  “Will they be cutting him open?” Matty asked.

  “I expect they will.”

  Matty coughed. “You know what? I’ll stay here and chase up on our boy’s prints,” he said.

  “I’ll pass too,” Crabbie muttered.

  “You’re both a couple of yella bellies,” I said and put my coat on.

  Crabbie cleared his throat. “If I could make an observation before you head off, Sean,” he said.

  “Go on.”

  “Very unusual
this for these parts. No prints on anything? Believe me, I know these local hoods and no one in the Carrick UVF or the Carrick UDA is this careful. It gives ya pause for thought,” McCrabban said.

  “Aye, it does,” Matty agreed.

  “And no ‘thirty pieces of silver’ either,” I said. “They usually love that shit.”

  Brennan saw me on the way out and dragged me to the Royal Oak public house next door.

  He ordered two Guinnesses and two Bushmills.

  “That’s some lunch. I’ll have the same,” I told him. He smiled and we took the drinks to the snug.

  My pager was going like the clappers and under Brennan’s withering look I turned it off.

  “What news, kemosabe?” he asked when we’d drunk our chasers.

  “Drawing a blank so far, skipper, but I still have the patho to see and the victim’s prints are up in Belfast getting run through the database as we speak.”

  “Thought I told you last night to handle this ourselves,” Brennan muttered with a scowl.

  “Not the leg work too, surely? Besides, them boys in records have nothing better to do. If I sent Matty up there to do it manually it would take him two hours just to drive through the police road blocks.”

  Brennan nodded. He fixed me with his Viking peepers. “And I heard you authorised ‘additional photography’?”

  “Yes sir, but I’ll pay for that,” I replied.

  “See that you do. I have to account for every penny.”

  “There was some thought among the lads that we could go on the BBC and put our mystery man’s face on the telly, but Crabbie has crushed my show-business dreams by saying that’s not your policy? Sir?”

  Brennan pointed heavenwards. “No. Let’s keep this nice and discreet. Once they start breathing down your neck …”

  “Ok to authorise flyers and a poster of our poor unfortunate on the board outside the station?”

  “One poster and don’t make it grim, let’s not upset the natives.”

  Sergeants Burke and McCallister spotted us and joined us at the table, but I had things to do and couldn’t afford a lunch-time session with them boys. After I finished my Guinness, I went back in the cop shop and got my car. Carrick Hospital was a small Victorian building on the Barn Road, only about three hundred yards from the police station as the crow flew, but the crow could juke over a railway line, a stream and Carrick Rangers FC so it took me ten minutes to get there in the Beemer.

  The waiting room was full of people with runny noses, colds and other complaints. A child was vomiting into a bag. A teenage hood stinking of petrol was holding a singed hand. A man with a face caked with dried blood was wearing a T-shirt that said “No Pope Here”. Considering his present condition, the Pope could consider himself lucky. There were, however, no young men lying on gurneys with their kneecaps shot off, which you always saw in the bigger Belfast hospitals.

  I walked to the reception desk.

  The nurse behind the counter was channelling Hattie Jacques from the Carry On films. She was fidgety, scary and enormous.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked in one of those oldtimey upper-crust English accents.

  “I’d like to see Dr Cathcart,” I said with what I hoped was a winning smile.

  “This is not one of her days.”

  “It’s not? Oh? Where is she?”

  “She’s doing an autopsy, if you must know.”

  “That’s what I wanted to see her about,” I said pulling out my warrant card.

  “You’re Sergeant Duffy? She’s been trying to reach you for the last hour.”

  “I was busy.”

  “We’re all busy.”

  She showed me the way to the morgue along a dim black and white tiled corridor that seemed unchanged since the 1930s.

  A leak was dripping from the ceiling into a large red bucket with the words “Air Raid Precautions” stamped on the side.

  I stopped outside a door marked: “Autopsy. Strictly No Admittance Without Permission of Staff Nurse.”

  I knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” a voice asked from within.

  “Sergeant Duffy from Carrick police.”

  “About time!”

  I pushed the door and went inside.

  An antiseptic, freezing little room. More black and white tiles on the floor, frosted windows, a buzzing strip light, charts from a long time ago on “hospital sanitation” and “the proper disposal of body parts”.

  Dr Cathcart was wearing a mask and a white cotton surgical cap. A little Celtic cross was dangling from her neck and hanging over her surgical gown.

  The star of the show was John Doe from last night who Dr Cathcart had opened up and spread about like a frog on a railway line. There were bits of him in various stainless steel bowls, on scales and even preserved in jars. The rest of him was lying naked on the table uncovered and unconcerned by these multiple violations.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Put on gloves and a mask, please.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to catch anything from us.”

  “Perhaps we’ll catch something from him.”

  “Ok.”

  I put on latex gloves and a surgical mask.

  Cathcart held up the severed right hand. “Were you responsible for fingerprinting this hand?” she asked. Her eyes were blue and I could see the hint of black hair under the cap.

  “One of my officers did it, but I take full responsibility for him. Why, did we do something wrong?”

  “Yes, you did. Your officer cleaned the fingers in white spirit before taking fingerprints from this hand. We therefore lost any evidence that may have been under the victim’s nails.”

  “Oh dear, sorry about that.”

  “Sorry doesn’t fix things, does it?” she said sternly in what I realized now was some kind of posh South Belfast accent.

  I really didn’t like her tone at all. “Love, in a murder investigation getting the fingerprints is a priority so that we can establish who the victim was and hopefully trace their final movements and question witnesses when things are fresh in their minds.”

  She pulled down her mask. Her cheeks were pink and her lips a dark red camellia. Her eyes were a vivid azure and her gaze icy and disturbing. She was imperious, attractive and she probably knew it.

  “I prefer ‘Dr Cathcart’ rather than ‘love’ if you don’t mind, sergeant.”

  Now I felt even more like an eejit.

  “Sorry, Dr Cathcart … look, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot, I mean, uhm, just because we’re police officers, it doesn’t mean that we’re total idiots.”

  “That remains to be seen. This hand, for example,” she said, picking up the severed right hand.

  “What about it?”

  “It seems that none of you noticed that this hand does not belong to the victim. It’s from a completely different person.”

  Shit.

  That was what my subconscious had been trying to tell me all night.

  “Nope, we missed that,” I admitted.

  “Hmmm.”

  “What else have you found out?” I asked.

  She put the hand back on the autopsy table and gave me a plastic bag containing a bullet slug.

  “You’ll want this,” she said. “Recovered from his chest.”

  “Thank you.”

  She read her notes. “The victim is a white male around twenty-eight years old. His hair has been dyed blond but it was originally brown. The lack of compression of the blood vessels in the arm or ligature marks on the wrists leads me to the conclusion that the victim’s right hand was cut off postmortem. After he was murdered.”

  “We prefer the term ‘unlawful killing’ at this stage, Dr Cathcart. It’s the mens rea of the killer that determines if he or she is guilty of murder as opposed to some other kind of unlawful homicide,” I said to get a bit of my own back and annoy her – which I could see was mission accomplished.

  Dr Cathcart sniffed. “Sh
all I continue?”

  “Please.”

  “Another man’s hand was placed at the scene. This man was considerably older than the victim. Perhaps sixty. For what it’s worth this hand shows evidence of callusing on the fingers in a pattern which suggests that he played the guitar. Perhaps professionally.”

  “How long ago was this hand removed? Days ago? Weeks ago?”

  “It is difficult to say. However there is no evidence of freezing and thawing in the blood or skin cells so I would assume that it was removed around the same time as the victim was killed.”

  “When was the victim killed?”

  She picked up her notes and read: “Between 8 and 11 pm on 12/5/81.”

  “The cause of death was the gunshot wound?”

  “The chest wound probably killed the victim but he was then shot in the head, execution style.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The victim had had sexual intercourse with a male before or after he was killed.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “The victim’s exterior sphincter was stressed and I found semen in his rectum.”

  “Was this consensual intercourse?”

  “If the sexual encounter was also postmortem then I would hazard a non-consensual encounter.”

  This was beginning to look a little less like your ordinary run-of-the-mill execution of an informer.

  “Leaving aside the sexual episode, the chronology of the murder seems to have been this: the victim was shot in the chest, shot in the head, there was an interval of some time and then the assailant removed the right hand with a hack saw,” she continued. She stifled a yawned.

  “Tired or already jaded by death?”

  “Sorry. Helicopters woke me up last night. Couldn’t get back to sleep. We couldn’t possibly do the rest of this outside, could we?”

  “Certainly. Over a cup of tea or something?” I asked.

  “That would be nice,” she said and smiled.

  “I’ll just need to fingerprint this character. Is that ok? We’ve got the prints from the other hand working their way through the system.”

  “Yes, that’s fine. But I should show you this first.”

  She went to one of the stainless steel bowls and I winced involuntarily as she reached inside and gave me something large and slippery. I opened my eyes and was relieved to see that it was merely a plastic bag with a curled-up piece of paper inside.