The Cold Cold Ground Read online

  “What’s this?”

  “I also recovered this from the victim’s anus and perhaps this was where the subcutaneous stressing came from.”

  “Jesus Christ! That was up his arse?”

  “Yes.”

  “The bag and all?”

  “Just the paper.”

  “I see.”

  “Why don’t you meet me in the hospital cafeteria in ten minutes while I wash up?” she said.

  “Ok,” I replied. I took out my kit and fingerprinted John Doe’s left hand. I went back outside and along the gloomy corridor until I found Hattie Jacques again. “I need to make a phone call,” I said.

  Her eyes bulged as if I had asked for her firstborn but then she directed me to an inner office. I called McCrabban and told him to get over here right away not sparing the horses. I went to the cafeteria, got a pot of tea and waited for both of them at the window seat next to the garden. I examined the bullet: 9mm slug shot at point-blank range. I looked at the bag Dr Cathcart had given me.

  Keeping it within the plastic I unrolled the piece of paper she had recovered.

  “What the fuck?” I said to myself.

  The paper was soiled and faded but it was clearly the first twelve bars of a musical score:

  I examined it for a minute. Some things were obvious. It was for solo tenor and piano but clearly transcribed from an opera score. I hummed it to myself. It was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. The words had been removed from the transcription, which wasn’t that uncommon. I hummed it again. It was something quite famous. Italian. Verdi or Puccini.

  But which opera and what were the words? I needed an expert. While I was thinking Crabbie showed up.

  “Jesus, how did you get here so fast?” I asked him.

  “Out the back doors, over the railway lines. Is one of them teas for me?”

  “No. Here,” I said handing him the bag. “Dr Cathcart found this shoved up the victim’s arse. Get Matty to open it with full forensic caution. When he’s done that, please get him to make me a photocopy of it and get one of those reserve constables to send the photocopy back over here ASAP. Make sure Matty does his best work on this. The killer might not have expected us to find it and he may have been a bit more careless.”

  “This was in the victim’s, uh, behind?”

  “Yeah. Here, take it.”

  “Ok, boss,” Crabbie said taking the plastic bag with distaste.

  “And take this,” I said handing him the fingerprints.

  “What’s this?” Crabbie asked.

  “That hand next to the body last night? It was from somebody else.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Me and Matty missed it. Right eejit I looked in front of the patho.”

  “A different bloke’s hand next to the body? What kind of a case is this?”

  “There’s more.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “He had semen in his arse too. It’s a possibility that he was raped postmortem. Raped, a piece of music shoved up his arse, his hand cut off. We’re into weird territory with this one, Crabbie.”

  His eyes were wide. “If the press get a whiff of this …”

  “But they won’t, Crabbie, will they? Not until we’re ready.”

  “No way, Sean. No way.”

  “Good. Now here’s the slug. Get that up to the ballistics lab. And have that photocopy back here as quick as you can.”

  Crabbie went off looking thoroughly unhappy.

  When he was gone I took out my notebook and wrote: “Shot in the chest. Rape? Musical score. Nineteenth-century opera. Hand removed and kept for trophy? Second victim? Tortured? Informer? Something else made to look like murder of informer?”

  I looked through the cafeteria window at the darkening sky.

  The wind had picked up and it begun to rain. A harsh sea rain from the north east. The flowers in the well-kept hospital garden were getting a battering. I flipped a page of my notebook and sketched them: syringa wolfii, syringa persica – here under the great shadow of the railway embankment May was the month that bred lilacs out of the dead land.

  Dr Cathcart sat down. She’d showered and changed into civvies. A tight, mustard-coloured jumper, black slacks and high heels. Her hair was a long cascading stream of black that fell ever so precisely over her right shoulder. She was the spit of the evil Samantha on Bewitched.

  “Shall I be mother?” she asked, pouring the tea.

  “If I can be the pervy uncle.”

  She made the tea like a surgeon. Milk, then tea, then more milk and your bog-standard two sugars. In the long caesura an army helicopter flew low overhead.

  “Do you have any more questions, Sergeant Duffy?”

  “The semen in the victim’s rectum, is there any way we can use that to help identify the killer?” I wondered.

  “It’s an interesting question. I have read a few papers about this. At the present moment, no, but perhaps in a few years they will be able to do DNA sequencing or something like that. I’ve frozen a sample just in case.”

  I nodded. She was good.

  We sipped our tea.

  “Where’s the music?” she asked. “I thought we could figure it out together.”

  “I gave it to McCrabban. It’s a nineteenth-century opera. Italian. Other than that I have no idea. He’s getting it photocopied, either that or he’s run off screaming to the Witchfinder General. Good lad, McCrabban, but he’s from Ballymena. Different world up there.”

  “And you’re not from up there, are you?”

  “Geographically a little. Spiritually, no.”

  We looked at one another.

  “So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  “How do you know I’m a nice girl?”

  “The Malone Road accent, the fact that you’re a doctor …”

  “What’s your accent?”

  “Cushendun.”

  “Cushendun? Oh, that’s way up there, isn’t it? What primary school did you go to?”

  “Our Lady, Star of the Sea.”

  And just like that she had established that I was a Catholic. Of course I’d known she was a Catholic from the get-go because of the cross around her neck.

  She took another sip of her tea and added a decadent third cube of sugar.

  “No, seriously, you could be earning a fortune over the water,” I said.

  “Does it always have to be about money?”

  “What should it be about?”

  She nodded and tied back her hair. “My parents are here and my dad’s not very well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s his heart. It’s not fatal. Not immediately fatal. And both my little sisters are still here. What about you? Brothers, sisters?”

  “Only child. Parents still up in Cushendun.”

  “Only child?” she asked incredulously. She obviously thought that all country Catholics had twelve children each. The only possible explanation was that something terrible had happened to my mother. She gave me a pitying look that I found adorable.

  “So where did you go to uni, Queen’s?” I asked.

  “No, I was at the University of Edinburgh.”

  “And you still came back?”

  “Yup.”

  She didn’t ask me where I had gone to uni because in general coppers did not bother with college. She was more relaxed now and that lovely smile came back again.

  I was starting to like her.

  “So what do you make of everything that I told you?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “This was a pretty complex killing possibly disguised to look like the simple execution of an informer.”

  “Badly disguised.”

  “Maybe he thought we would never find the paper in the victim’s rectum.”

  “No, it was sticking out. It was quite obvious. And that’s what made me check for signs of rape.”

  “So he’s signposting everything. His working assumption i
s that we’re lazy and incompetent and he needs to underline everything. He put the body where he knew it would be found fairly soon. He’s bold and a bit too sure of himself and he has contempt for us. I imagine he’s had a few dealings with the cops over the years if that’s his attitude.”

  “Is the RUC not noted for its competence?” she asked with a slight sarcastic edge to her voice.

  “Oh, there are worse police forces but it’s not exactly Scotland Yard, is it?”

  “You’re the expert.”

  “When was the last time you’ve seen a male rape in the course of your duty?” I asked.

  “Never.”

  “It’s not in the paramilitaries’ MO, is it?”

  “Not it in my limited experience.”

  “Both sides are extremely conservative. And the normal way they deal with informers is virtually identical.”

  “Is that so?” she asked, her eyebrows arching with interest.

  “There’s really no difference at all between your average IRA man and your average UVF man. The markers are always the same: working class, poor, usually an alcoholic or absent father. You see it time and again. Identical psycho-social profiles except for the fact that one identifies himself as a Protestant and one as a Catholic. A lot of them actually come from mixed religious backgrounds like Bobby Sands. They’re usually the hardcore ones, trying to prove themselves to their co-religionists.”

  “Sorry, you lost me there. Do you want a slice of cake or something? I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  “I’m all right, but you go ahead,” I said. “Seeing John Doe all disembowelled like that has somewhat smothered my appetite.”

  “Speaking of appetites, his last meal was fish and chips.”

  “I hope he enjoyed it.”

  “The fish was cod.”

  “You’re just showing off now, aren’t you?”

  She grinned, got up and came back with two slices of Madeira cake. Despite my protestations she gave me one of them.

  “How come you ended up in the police?” she asked.

  Her real question had been “So what’s a nice, bright, Catholic boy like you doing in the peelers?”

  I thought about what I’d said to Brennan last night. “I just wanted to be part of that thin blue line holding back the chaos.”

  “Thin green line,” she said.

  She was right about that too, bless her: in the nineteenth century British peelers had been given a blue uniform to distinguish them from the Red Coats, but the Royal Irish Constabulary had worn dark (very dark) green uniforms from the start. The successor to the RIC after partition was the Royal Ulster Constabulary, based in Belfast, and the uniform hadn’t changed even though green was a colour associated with Irish nationalism.

  “Thin green line doesn’t really work as a metaphor though, does it?” I said.

  “No,” she agreed. She ate her slice of cake and looked at her watch. “Do you have any more questions or are we about done here?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything. You’d better give me your number though, in case something comes up.”

  “You can reach me here,” she said.

  She hadn’t liked that. It was too sly. Maybe the direct approach: “What are you doing later? Do you want to go out for a drink or anything?” I asked.

  “You’re fast,” she said.

  “Is that a no?”

  She didn’t say anything, just tapped her fingers on the Formica table.

  “Look, I’ll be at the Dobbins from nine o’clock onwards, if you fancy a quick drink, drop in,” I said casually.

  She stood up. Got her bag. Gave me the once over. “Maybe,” she said.

  In an odd, formal gesture, she offered me her hand. I shook it.

  “It was nice meeting you,” she said.

  “Nice meeting you too,” I said and gave her a conspiratorial wink. Here we were: two wee fenian agents in Proddy Carrickfergus.

  I watched her walk into the car park and saw her get into a green Volvo 240.

  I finished my tea and was thinking about the remaining cake when Sergeant McCallister showed up with the photocopy of the musical score from poor John Doe’s arse.

  “What are you doing here, Alan? I asked Crabbie to send this over via some useless ganch.”

  Alan took off his hat and fixed his thin thatch of greyish brown hair.

  “No, Sean, no reserve constables this time. You’re going to have to be more careful about the protocols, mate. Looks like you’ve got yourself a freaky one.”

  “Aye, you’re right,” I thought, slightly chastened. The reserve constables were all chatty bastards.

  “There’s been two phone calls already this morning asking for the head of Carrick CID.”

  “Shit.”

  “Carol said that Sergeant Duffy was not available and could she take a message.”

  “And?”

  “They hung up.”

  “The press?”

  “My advice: don’t give them anything.”

  “Did you hear about the rape?”

  “I got Crabbie to tell me everything. Different hands? Pieces of music? Queer sex? This thing’s far too complicated already,” McCallister muttered darkly.

  McCallister was close to fifty, a twenty-five-year man with a lot of experience both before and after the Troubles.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I asked.

  “No, I haven’t and I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Are you eating that cake?”

  Alan walked me back to my car and I drove to the centre of Carrickfergus.

  A bunch of kids were walking around aimlessly. There was nothing for them to do with school cancelled except that there was always potential for a rumble since the Proddy kids were easily identifiable by their red, white and blue school uniforms and the Catholics by their uniforms of green, white and gold.

  There were few actual shoppers. Since ICI had shut down the centre of Carrick had withered. The bookshop had closed, the shoe shop had closed, the baby clothes shop had closed …

  I easily found a parking place on West Street and dandered past a boarded-up grocers before I came to Sammy McGuinn, my chain-smoking, short-arsed, Marxist barber.

  He’d given me two good haircuts since I’d come here which was a high batting average for Ulster and probably why he was still in business.

  I went in and sat down in the waiting area.

  He was finishing work on a man in a brown suit with a ridiculous comb-over. Sammy was only five five and he had lowered his customer practically to floor level.

  “Nationalism is a plot by international capitalism to keep the working classes from uniting. Irish independence separated the working classes of Dublin, Liverpool and Glasgow which destroyed the union movement forever in these islands just when capitalism was entering its crisis stage …” he was saying.

  I tuned him out and read the cinema reviews in Socialist Worker.

  Raiders of the Lost Ark sounded promising despite “its patronizing caricatures of third-world manual labourers”.

  When Sammy was finished with his customer I showed him the musical score.

  As well as being Carrick’s only remaining barber Sammy was a violinist with the Ulster Orchestra and had two thousand classical records in his flat above the shop. A collection he had shown me when he’d found out from Paul at CarrickTrax that I bought the occasional classical record and that I’d done ten years of piano. Ten years of piano under protest.

  “What do you make of that?” I asked him, showing him the photocopy of the music.

  “What about it?”

  “What is it?”

  “Surprised at you, Sean. I thought you knew your onions,” he said, with an irritating sneer.

  Like a lot of barbers, Sammy was completely bald and that chrome dome really invited a Benny Hill slap right about now.

  His lips were tightly shut. He wanted the words:


  “No, I really don’t know,” I said.

  “Puccini, La Bohème!” he announced with a laugh.

  “Aye, I thought it was Puccini,” I said.

  “You say that now. Anybody could say it now.”

  “The words are missing, aren’t they? It’s not the overture, is it?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t happen to know what the missing words are, by any chance?”

  “Of course,” he said with an eye roll.

  “Go on then!”

  “Che gelida manina, se la lasci riscaldar. Cercar che giova? Al buio non si trova. Ma per fortuna é una notte di luna, e qui la luna, l abbiamo vicina,” he sang in a surprisingly attractive baritone.

  “Very nice.”

  “Do you need a translation?”

  “Uhm, something about hands, fortune, the moon?”

  “Your little hand is freezing. Let me warm it for you. What’s the use of looking? We won’t find it in the dark. But luckily it’s a moonlit night, and the moon is close to us.”

  I got out a pencil and made him say it again and wrote it down in my notebook.

  “What’s this all about?” he asked.

  “Nothing important,” I said and drove back to the police station.

  I knocked on Chief Inspector Brennan’s door.

  “Enter!” he said.

  He looked up from the Daily Mail crossword. “You seem worried, what’s going on, Sean?” he asked.

  “We may be in trouble,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “I think we have a sexual murderer on our hands, perhaps even a nascent serial killer.”

  “Have a seat.”

  I closed the door. His cheeks were ruddy and he was a little the worse for drink.

  “What makes you think that?” he asked in a cold burr, leaning back in his pricey Finn Juhl armchair. I filled him in on all the details but he was sceptical of my thesis. “Northern Ireland’s never had a serial killer,” he said.

  “No. Anyone with that mindset has always been able to join one side or the other. Torture and kill with abandon while still being part of the ‘cause’. But this seems different, doesn’t it? The sexual nature of the crime, the note. This is not something we’ve encountered before.”