The Cold Cold Ground sdt-1

by Adrian McKinty

  “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 is 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 Boheme!” 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 e 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.”

  “I already put the paperwork through that this was a hit on an informer,” Brennan said with a trace of annoyance.

  “I’m not ruling anything out, sir, but at this stage I’m thinking it’s not that.”

  “Let me see that piece of music.”

  I passed across the photocopy under which I had written: “Your tiny hand is frozen. 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.”

  He examined it and shook his head.

  “He’s mocking the victim, sir. And us. He’s taking the piss. He’s telling us that he’s cut the victim’s hand off and he’s taken it somewhere else. He’s making game of us, sir.”

  Brennan shook his head and leaned forward. He took his reading glasses off and set them on the table. “Look, Sean, you’re new around here. I know you want to make a name for yourself. You’re ambitious, I like that. But you can’t go bandying words like ‘serial killer’ around for all and sundry. The shit’s hitting the fan everywhere. You cannae throw a brick out there without clobbering a journalist. They’re all looking for an angle, aren’t they? And believe me, I know Carrick, so I do. Serial killers. Come off it. We don’t do that in these parts. Ok?”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  He smiled in a conciliatory manner. “And besides, for a serial killer you need more than one victim, don’t you?”

  “Our guy in the Barn Field and then the hand from the other bloke. That’s two.”

  Brennan passed the musical score back across the table. He took a sip of cold coffee from a mug on his desk. “Who else have you told about this theory of yours?”

  “McCrabban and Sergeant McCallister. I’ll have to tell Matty too.”

  “Good. Nobody else. What’s the status of your investigation?”

  “We might get a break soon, sir. Now we have two sets of fingerprints working their way through the channels.”

  He nodded and put his glasses back on. I could see that I was being dismissed. I got to my feet. “Do your job, do it well and do it quietly,” Brennan muttered, examining the Daily Mail again.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sean, one more thing.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “‘Idle fellow but he gives us a buzz.’ Thirteen across. Five letters.”

  I thought for a second. “Drone, sir?”

  “Drone? Drone, oh yes. Ok, you may go.”

  I exited. It was late and the place was emptying out.

  I borrowed a couple of ciggies f
rom someone’s table and headed out onto the fire escape to think.

  There was trouble up in Belfast again. Potassium nitrate flares falling through the darkening sky. A Gazelle helicopter flying low over the lough water. Little kids walking past the police station showing each other the best technique for lobbing Molotov cocktails over the fence. Jesus, what a nightmare.

  This was a city crucified under its own blitz.

  This was a city poisoning its own wells, salting its own fields, digging its own grave …

  3: A DIFFERENT MUSIC

  I smoked the fags and when the rain came I climbed back inside, locked the evidence in the CID room and drove home.

  The cows were gone. The cow shit had been scraped up and bagged by entrepreneurs. Mrs Campbell told me all about the great bovine escape and how Arthur’s prized roses had been ruined and how he would be furious when he got back from the North Sea, which wouldn’t, she added, be for two more long, lonely weeks.

  I went into the kitchen and made myself a pint-glass vodka gimlet. I threw frozen chips in the deep fat fryer and dumped a can of beans in a pot. I fried two eggs and ate them with the chips and beans.

  At seven o’clock I shaved and changed into a shirt, my black jeans, leather jacket and DM shoes. I put on a black leather waistcoat. It looked good but there was a slight Han Solo vibe so I hung it back in the cupboard.

  I went out. A stray dog began walking beside me. Black lab. Cheerful looking character. Victoria Estate had dozens of stray dogs and cats, fed, and sometimes adopted, by the local children.

  I was halfway along Barn Road when a guy ran out of his house wearing a white singlet and waving a ten-pound sledgehammer.

  “Now you’re going to get it!” he screamed at me. “You’re really going to get it!”

  “For what?”

  “Your dog just took a dump against my gate. I finally caught you, you dirty bastard! You and your dirty dog. You are going to pay, mate! Oh yes!”

  “That’s not my dog,” I said.

  His consternation and disappointment knew no bounds. I could sympathize: there is nothing, nothing in this world more deflating than the realization that the lumping villain who has been tormenting you is not going to get an arse-kicking after all.

  He asked me if I was sure it was not my dog but I just kept walking.