The Cold Cold Ground sdt-1

by Adrian McKinty

After the divorce Lucy had moved back in with her parents.

  There had been eight tips about the Moore case on the Confidential Telephone. None of them had come to anything. The IRA had been contacted through surrogates and, convincingly, denied any involvement. The UDA had also denied any connection.

  Then the letters and postcards to her parents and a couple to her sister and brother.

  Where would we be without postcards?

  After the letters came and were authenticated the case was closed. And that was it. The whole file.

  I walked to the station and called up Carrick Hospital to see if Laura was back there yet.

  She wasn’t.

  I talked to McCrabban about the Andrew Jackson postcard the killer had sent to me. Apparently you could buy them anywhere. None of the local newsagents remembered selling one recently.

  At five o’clock my phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Sergeant Duffy?”

  “Yes, who’s this?”

  “This is Ned Armstrong from the Confidential Telephone.”

  “Hello, Ned, what can I do for you?”

  “It’s what I can do for you,” Ned said good-naturedly.

  “All right, Ned, I’m all ears.”

  “A guy called in about ten minutes ago, saying that he quote, had a message for Carrickfergus CID. He said that he had quote killed the two fruits and he was going to kill more if his glorious deeds stayed out of the newspapers.”

  “Hold on a minute, please, Mr Armstrong … Crabbie, pick up line two! … Go on, Ned.”

  “Ok, I’m reading here: the guy said that he wanted the fruits to know that he was coming for them. And this was their first and last warning. He was phoning us from a call box outside the GAA club on Laganville Road, Belfast. And if the peelers went to number 44 Laganville Road they might get a wee surprise.”

  “Did you tape this call?”

  “No, part of the confidentiality of the Confidential Telephone is that we don’t tape or trace calls.”

  “What was the man’s accent?”

  “He had a broad West Belfast accent which sounded a little broader than I had ever heard before, which meant that he was hamming it up for us. People often do that or disguise their voices.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “You’ve been a big help. Thank you very much, Ned.”

  I wrote down the address and hung up.

  The excitement was palpable. There were only half a dozen of us in the station but this was a big break.

  Brennan had gone to make his notification so I sought counsel from Sergeant McCallister. “What do I do, Alan?”

  “You know what you have to do. You’ve got to get up the Laganville Road. Take your team and a couple of boys. Full riot gear, mate, that’s in the bloody Ardoyne off the Crumlin Road, so, you know, if it looks dodgy at all, don’t even hesitate, scramski!”

  We put on riot gear, I grabbed two reserve constables and we signed out a Land Rover.

  Someone had hijacked a bus and set it on fire on the Shore Road so I drove the Land Rover along the back way. We came down into Belfast from the hills through the Protestant district of Ballysillan, which was decorated with murals of masked paramilitaries holding assault rifles and zombie armies holding Union Jacks.

  We drove along the Crumlin Road and turned into the Ardoyne, a staunch Catholic estate just a couple of streets away from a staunch Protestant one — in other words, a real high heat flashpoint area.

  “Does anybody know where Laganville Road is?” I asked.

  Crabbie unfolded a street map and gave me directions.

  We got lost twice but finally made it.

  It turned out to be a small dead-end terrace, with a large graffito running the length of three houses that said, “Don’t Let Them Die!” referring, of course, to the hunger strikers.

  It was teatime on a Saturday night and things looked quiet. The football matches were all over and no one was thinking about going out just yet. Maybe we could creep in and out without ever being noticed.

  I drove past the GAA club where the tipster had made his phone call.

  “Matty, you get out and dust for prints,” I said.

  “Why me?”

  “Cos you’re the bravest.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Just get out. You’re the FO, come on.”

  Matty was reluctant to leave the safety of the Land Rover so I sent one of the reservists with him. He was called Brown, twenty-two, a carpenter in real life. Matty looked shit-scared. Both of them were in full riot gear and twitchily holding their Sterling sub-machine guns. It made me nervous. “Under no circumstances are you to fire those fucking guns, is that understood? We’ll be right at the end of the street. If there’s trouble, point the guns but do not bloody shoot them.”

  “What do we do?” Matty asked.

  “Come running down to us if there’s real bother, ok?” I told them.

  Brown and Matty nodded.

  We drove down to #44.

  It was derelict with the windows boarded up and the front door kicked in. I parked the Land Rover and McCrabban, myself and the other reservist got out.

  “I’m going in, lads. Keep an eye out for booby traps. He said we’d get a surprise and this would be perfect for a concealed explosive device.”

  “In that case, I’ll go first, Sean,” Crabbie said.

  “How come you always get to be John Wayne?” I said. “You just hold here, Crabbie. Stay well behind me, the pair of you. And if I’m killed, all my albums are to go to Matty, he’s the only one that will appreciate them.”

  “I’ll take the country albums and any of the non-poncy classical,” Crabbie said.

  “Fair enough. Now stay back, both of you.”

  I was being flippant but dozens of police officers had been killed in booby traps over the years. It was a classic IRA tactic. You call in a tip about a murder, the police go to investigate and they trip a booby trap or the provos remotely detonate a landmine or pipe bomb. Sometimes they place a time-delayed device in a car in the street so they can get the rescue workers too.

  I walked down the front path.

  The smell of shit and piss hit me straight away.

  I looked for wires, loose paving stones or any obvious trips.

  Nothing.

  So far.

  I drew my revolver, turned on the flashlight and walked into the house.

  It was completely gutted. Holes in the roof that leaked water, a few hypodermic syringes.

  The stairs were wrecked and the stench of mildew was overpowering.

  “Everything all right?” McCrabban shouted from out in the street.

  I walked into the downstairs living room and the kitchen. More garbage, drug paraphernalia, water dripping down from the ceiling. I tracked through the entire ground floor and the back yard. I couldn’t get upstairs because of the destroyed staircase but it was obvious that no one had been in here for some time.

  So why had he sent us here? Just because he could? A power trip? Was he watching us from a location across the street, laughing?

  “There’s nothing here!” I yelled back.

  “Let’s get back to the Land Rover then. There’s trouble!” McCrabban said.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Bunch of lads outside the GAA club.”

  I went back outside. Matty and Brown were running down the street towards us. They were being chased by a dozen lads with hurley sticks and bottles.

  “Don’t run, you pair of eejits,” McCrabban was muttering to himself.

  “Ok, everybody, get in the Rover! You drive, Crabbie, I’ll try and reason with the lynch mob.”

  I walked back down the path and was about to leave #44 Laganville Road forever when I noticed that the owners from long ago had put in a US-style mailbox with a little red flag to indicate when there was mail.

  The flag was up. I opened the rusted mail box and su
re enough there was a brown envelope inside. I took it out and shoved it between my flak jacket and my sweater.

  Matty and a terrified-looking Constable Brown reached the Land Rover.

  “Did you get the prints?” I asked.

  “Are you fucking joking?” Matty said furiously. “Fucking suicide mission you sent us on.”

  “Ok, calm down. Get in the Land Rover and close the bloody doors, Crabbie, get her started up!”

  I holstered my revolver, reached into the front seat and grabbed a plastic bullet gun that I loaded and primed.

  I walked towards the rioters.

  They were the kind of kids who hung around the streets and attacked the police or fire brigade whenever they saw them. With tensions running high over the hunger strikes, one solitary Land Rover was an irresistible target.

  Bottles and stones started smashing all around me.

  Crabbie revved the engine and I waited until all the lads were inside before walking in front of the vehicle with the plastic bullet gun.

  When the mob was twenty feet away they started directing all their bricks, bottles and stones at me. If they could put a man down or disable the vehicle they’d scarper and call in the heavy brigade who would show up with grenades and petrol bombs.

  I pointed the plastic bullet gun at them.

  “That’s enough!” I yelled.

  Everyone froze and I knew I had about three seconds.

  “Listen people! We are not DMSU. We are not the riot squad. We are detectives investigating a murder. We are going to leave this street right now and no one is going to get hurt!”

  I kept the plastic bullet gun aimed at the guy on point and moved my way backwards towards the Land Rover. Their leader was an ugly ganch with a skinhead, a Celtic FC shirt and a breeze block in his hand.

  “This is our patch, you fucking peeler bastards!” he said and hurled the breeze block at me. I dodged it but didn’t avoid a couple of stones that caught me in the flak jacket.

  “Get in, Sean!” Crabbie yelled.

  I jumped into the passenger seat of the Land Rover as an impressive hail of assorted objects came hurtling at me.

  “So how did your Gandhi act go down with the locals?” McCrabban asked with dour satisfaction.

  A milk carton exploded on our windscreen.

  I closed the Land Rover door.

  “They have much to learn about the moral authority of nonviolence.”

  “I think we should be leaving now,” Crabbie said.

  He turned the window wipers on, gave the engine big revs and drove slowly through the crowd. Perhaps one of them was our killer. I tried to see their faces but it was impossible through the milk and missiles. Bottles and bricks bounced off the bulletproof glass and the steel plating on the sides. The mob began chanting “SS RUC! SS RUC! SS RUC!” However, after twenty seconds of this we had successfully reached the end of the street without getting a puncture.

  In another five minutes we were on the Crumlin Road and five minutes after that we were safe in Protestant North Belfast.

  “Everybody all right back there?” I asked the lads in the rear.

  “Everybody’s fine,” Matty said, but I could smell shit through the grill. One of the two reservists had keeked a planet in their whips.

  Half an hour later, Matty opened the envelope from #44 in the CID room with myself, McCrabban, Chief Inspector Brennan and Sergeant McCallister looking on.

  It was on standard A4 paper. A typed message single-spaced:

  My story still has not appeared in The Belfast Telegraph!!!! You are not taking me seriously!!!!! You have until the Monday edition and then I will kill a queer every night!!!! I will liberate them from this vale of tears. The queers on TV and in the peelers and everywhere!!!! Lee McCrea. Dougal Campbell. Gordon Billingham!!!! Scott McAvenny. I know them all!!! DO NOT TEST ME!!!!! My patience is running thin!!!!

  Matty carried it to the photocopier and made us half a dozen copies before setting to work on his forensic tests. It took him ten minutes to discover that the typewriter was an old manual Imperial 55.

  Lee McCrea was a BBC presenter on the late-night local news. Dougal Campbell was a talkshow host on Radio Ulster. Gordon Billingham, a sports reporter on UTV. Scott McAvenny ran Scott’s Place, the only decent restaurant in Belfast. Of course they were all gay men, not out as such, but well known.

  “What’s the verdict, gentlemen?” I asked.

  “He’s a nutter!” Matty said.

  “A nutter who can type without making a single mistake,” I said.

  Brennan looked at me. “That’s good, Sean, what else jumps out at you?”

  “It’s not a very comprehensive list, is it? Four pretty obvious homosexuals.”

  “Aye, plus the two he’s already topped,” McCallister added.

  “I suppose we better have that press conference on Monday morning,” Brennan said.

  “And we better give those boys protection,” I suggested.

  “I’ll call Special Branch,” Brennan said wearily.

  I reread the note and sat down. I had a splitting headache. I had been hit by a dozen stones and half bricks, one right off the top of my riot helmet.

  I looked out the window at the lights of ships moving down the black lough into Belfast’s deep water channel.

  Brennan was talking to me but I didn’t hear him.

  I watched as the pilot boat put out from under the castle to bring a cargo vessel into Carrick’s much smaller and trickier harbour.

  “ … go on home,” Brennan finished.

  “What?”

  “I said you look like Elvis at his 1977 CBS special, why don’t you go on home?”

  “I’ve things to do.”

  “Just go. Have a drink, have a bath. Might be the last one you take for a while, I heard the power-station workers are going on strike.

  “I can’t. I’m still waiting for the prints on John Doe.”

  “I’ll wait. You go on. That’s an order, Sean.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I decided to walk home. A mistake. A downpour caught me on Victoria Road. Heavy, cold rain from a long looping depression over Iceland.

  Coronation Road.

  The quintessential Irish smell of peat smoke rising up to meet the rain.

  Light and fear and existential depression leaking through the net curtains.

  #113.

  I turned the key and went inside. I had forgotten about the phone tap and was surprised to see a black box next to my telephone. Kernoghan’s boys hadn’t left any trace apart from that. I stripped off my clothes, went into the kitchen and opened the empty fridge. Half a can of Heinz beans. Some yellow cheese. I ate beans and toast and lit the upstairs paraffin heater and went to bed.

  I found myself dreaming of the girl hanging in the forest.

  It was dusk and the stars were coming out over western Scotland and eastern Ireland and the sunken realm between the two. I’ve never liked the woods. My grandmother told me that the forest was an opening to someplace else. Where things lurked, things we could only half see. Older beings. Shees. Shades of creatures that once walked the natural world, redundant now, awaiting tasks, awaiting their work in dreams.

  “Le do thoil,” I said to them in Irish, but they wouldn’t listen, calling my name from behind oaks and fairy trees, mocking me, teasing me until 3 a.m. when I awoke to the sound of sirens.

  7: SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING

  I found that I wasn’t in bed. I was sleeping on the landing in front of the paraffin heater. This was becoming my foetal space. I was wearing a Thin Lizzy T-shirt and grey sweat pants. I had no memory of putting them on.

  I went downstairs and opened the front door.

  The whole street was out.

  I walked to the end of the garden path. Number 79 was on fire. The Clawsons’ house. I joined the gawkers because who can resist a fire? A wee milly in a dirty frock filled me in on the details. “Chip pan fire. Whole kitchen went up.”

 
With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they’d be cooking chips at this hour was anyone’s guess.

  The crowd grew and I saw people that I vaguely recognized from as far away as the Barn Road. The kitchen burned and despite the best efforts of the brigade it spread to the rest of the house.

  Mrs Clawson screamed about her fish tank and when a second fire tender equipped with foam arrived one of the firemen went in and rescued the fish.

  When the blaze was finally contained the crowd erupted into spontaneous applause and tea and biscuits were pressed into the hands of the crew — which had to be nicer than getting bricked in the Catholic estates. They kept pumping in foam and it began to fill the street, taking to the air in huge tufts, blowing this way and that.

  We were in the snow again.

  Mrs Clawson was wailing now, standing there, half tore, in her dressing gown with no knickers.

  The kids were playing in the artificial snow and the firemen were flirting with the single women and some of the lonely married women whose husbands were over the water.

  I yawned and checked my watch.

  3.20. Time to head back. I began to walk in that direction.

  Someone grabbed my shirt from behind.

  I turned. Big guy, 6’9” with a gut, a Zapata moustache, a white wifebeater T-shirt and blue jeans. He was fifty or thereabouts and on his head was what could only be a wig although you’d have had a tough job getting up there to check it out.

  “Where’s your fancy car now, fenian?” he said.

  I ignored him and kept on walking.

  He pushed me and I stumbled but recovered my balance in time to see a haymaker coming at me.

  Mrs Bridewell and Mrs Campbell both screamed.

  “Look out, Mr Duffy!” Mrs Campbell yelled, her hand at her throat.

  Several people turned to look. The haymaker made its painfully slow arc across the air between us. It missed me by nine inches without me having to do anything.

  “What’s your problem, pal?” I asked.

  “What about those people at the Peacock Room, you fucking fenian bastard, what chance did you give them, ya taig piece of shit!” the big ganch said and swung another punch which also missed.