The Cold Cold Ground sdt-1

by Adrian McKinty

  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 res
ponsibility 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. “Shall 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.

  “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 shove
d 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.