The Cold Cold Ground sdt-1

by Adrian McKinty

  “And I’ll check the missions and the hospitals,” McCrabban added.

  “This might be a better explanation of why she killed herself: you give birth, your baby dies …” I said.

  “Why did you think she killed herself?” Laura asked.

  “Well, her ex-husband just joined the hunger strike last week and we were thinking guilt or something. But this is more concrete,” I said.

  “And it’s probably why she ran away! At Christmas she would have been — what, three months gone?” Crabbie asked.

  “She’d know at three months but she might not be showing,” Laura said.

  “Pregnant! At least this is one case we can start closing the book on, eh Sean?” Crabbie said.

  He was dead right. Everybody in Ireland understood this particular trope. Girl gets pregnant out of wedlock, runs away, gives birth, kills herself. Happened all the time. Abortion was illegal on both sides of the Irish border. There were few places a girl could turn. Of course Lucy was a little different in that she was slightly older and she had already been married, but with her ex locked up in the H Blocks and already a Republican hero, there would be just as much pressure, perhaps more …

  She was probably too guilty to even write a note explaining herself.

  Sad. Sad. Sad.

  “Gentlemen, I really should …” Laura said quietly.

  “Yes, yes, of course, Dr Cathcart. Anything else suspicious here?” I asked.

  “I’ve been told that she’s been missing since before Christmas,” Laura said.

  “That’s right,” McCrabban agreed.

  “There were no bruises on her wrists or ankles, no signs of malnutrition or torture or abuse. Her muscles had not atrophied, her vitamin D levels were high. Which means that she was eating just fine and that she was getting plenty of sunlight,” Laura said.

  “So she wasn’t somebody’s prisoner,” Crabbie said.

  “I think you can infer that,” Laura replied.

  “Everyone thought she was down South because of the postcards and letters she sent home. Can you tell if she was living down there?” Crabbie asked.

  Laura shook her head. “No. She’d eaten fried egg on toast which I imagine you can get on both sides of the border.”

  “That’s a hell of a last meal,” I said.

  “I like fried egg on toast!” Crabbie said. “I make it for the missus sometimes.”

  “So, is that everything?” I asked before Crabbie could further depress me with his culinary exploits.

  “It’s all in the autopsy,” Laura explained.

  “Good,” I said.

  “There is one thing,” Laura added hesitantly.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t want either of you to make a big thing about this because it’s probably nothing …”

  Crabbie and I exchanged a look.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, she died by strangulation, of course: the rope choked off the oxygen supply to her brain and she asphyxiated.”

  “We saw that,” Crabbie said. “She thought it would be quick and it wasn’t.”

  Laura nodded. “And she got a finger between the rope and her neck but it didn’t do any good.”

  “No, it didn’t,” I agreed.

  “Well, it’s just that … I’m not entirely happy with the bruises on her neck,” Laura said.

  Her eyes were narrowed. She was tapping a pencil off the desk. I leaned back in the chair and folded my hands across my lap. “We’re all ears.”

  “The bruising of the rope was the primary cause of contusion on her neck. And there were bruises just in front of the thyroid cartilage from where she’d wedged her forefinger between the rope and her throat, but it seems to me that one of those bruises looked something like a thumb, a thumb that was much bigger than Lucy’s. A thumb that pressed directly on her larynx. I should stress that this is only a possibility and it would not stand up in court. I included this observation only in the appendix of the autopsy report and I put no particular stress upon it. The bruising of the rope was considerable and it’s possible that this thumb-shaped bruise was either caused by the rope or by Lucy herself. When the coroner asks me the cause of death at the inquest I will say it’s almost certainly a suicide.”

  “Although if this bruise was the result of Lucy being choked, prior to the noose being placed around her neck …” I said.

  “It would be murder.”

  McCrabban and I weren’t happy. We had enough on our plate with a lunatic going around shooting homosexuals. We didn’t need someone murdering hunger strikers’ ex-wives as well.

  “You’re going to tell the coroner that it was death by suicide?” I said frostily.

  “That’s what I believe,” Laura said.

  “That’s what we’ll put in our report then. That’s what we’ll tell the family,” I replied.

  “Fine. Gentlemen, I really must go to my clinic,” she said. We all stood.

  Crabbie and I walked back to the station in silence.

  We were both thinking about Lucy. “You don’t like it, do you, Sean?” Crabbie asked.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “It would be the old faithful, wouldn’t it? The murder by hanging disguised to look like a suicide …”

  “Aye.”

  “Or, as the good lady doctor says, it could just be a common or garden suicide.”

  I nodded.

  “You can’t let it sidetrack you though, mate,” Crabbie insisted.

  “I know.”

  We went back inside the barracks, sat at our desks and carried on work on the serial killer case. I read up about Orpheus and Offenbach in the station’s 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nothing leapt out at me. I called Special Branch to check that the men on the killer’s hit list were getting protection.

  They were.

  I called the forensic lab in Belfast to see about those fingerprints and was told that it was only a skeleton crew on the weekend and not to expect anything.

  I went to see McCallister and he read the patho report on Lucy Moore and told me that it looked like a suicide to him. I told him about Dr Cathcart’s concern.

  “What do you think?” he asked me.

  “I’d keep an open mind but I’m thinking suicide. A note would have been the clincher.”

  “Aye. Suicide.”

  I went out for some air. Carrickfergus on a Sunday was a ghost town. Everything was closed. Even the paper shops and the petrol stations shut at noon.

  There was no traffic on the lough and I walked along the shore to Carrickfergus Castle. I was going to actually go in and check it out but it too was closed.

  I returned to the police station.

  “You want to go back to Woodburn Forest?” I asked McCrabban.

  He looked up from his paperwork and nodded.

  We rustled up Constable Price who was our canine officer.

  The dog was a sensible looking lab/border collie cross called Skolawn.

  We drove to the forest in the Land Rover and found the tree where we’d cut down Lucy.

  We did a sight line box scan and found nothing suspicious.

  We let Skolawn go. After an hour he had failed to find any human remains but he had managed to kill an endangered red squirrel.

  “It would be helpful if we could find out where she’d been living for the last five months,” I said.

  “With all the other stuff we have to do, you want us to look into that?” Crabbie complained.

  I nodded.

  “All right. I’ll ask around,” he said.

  “Do either of you want to drive up to forensic lab with me and get our fingerprint results on John Doe?” I asked.

  “Don’t go there, Sean. Not on a Sunday. There’s no point making waves,” Crabbie said.

  He was as impatient as I was but maybe he was right.

  We drove back to the station. I poured myself a Johnnie Walker which was the general libation used to liven up the office tea. Johnn
ie Walker in the tea, Jim Beam in the coffee. Around these parts everyone pitched their tents by the whisky river.

  I hummed Offenbach to myself and waited by the fax machine. The John Doe fingerprints came through at just after six.

  Of course it was an anticlimax.

  The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old guy called Tommy Little, a carpenter originally from Saoirse Street in the Ardoyne. Like everybody else from Saoirse Street he was a player but it looked like a minor one. He was an occasional driver for Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein. He had been interned as an IRA man in 1973 but who hadn’t? He had one conviction for possession of a stolen hand gun in 1975 and had spent nine months in the Kesh for that. He had been accused of public indecency in a Belfast lavatory in 1978 but the case had been dismissed. He was not married, had no kids. The next of kin was not listed in the file. He had no crim rec since ‘78.

  I called Brennan at home and filled him in on the John Doe and the fact that Lucy had been pregnant.

  “Pregnant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Explains why she ran away, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good, well that’s one mystery solved. Who’s this Tommy Little’s next of kin?” he asked.

  “There is no next of kin.”

  “You say he was a driver for Sinn Fein?”

  “It says occasional driver. He’s not a major gaffer, sir. Small fry by the looks of it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Call up Adams and let him know that one of his boys copped it.”

  “Call up Gerry Adams?”

  “Yes. He’ll have to do for the next of kin. Is there anything else?”

  “We went up to Woodburn Forest. We didn’t find the body of Lucy’s baby which might mean good news. Maybe she gave it away and then topped herself.”

  “We can live in hope. Is that everything?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good work, Duffy. Well done.”

  He hung up. I got myself a coffee and rummaged through the directory until I found Gerry Adams’s home number.

  Someone that wasn’t Adams answered the phone.

  “Who is this?”

  “My name is Sergeant Sean Duffy from Carrickfergus RUC, I’d like to speak to Mr Adams about a matter of some urgency.”

  “Yeah, he’s kind of busy. He’s doing an interview live on the BBC.”

  “When will it be over?”

  “What the fuck do you want, peeler?”

  “A friend of his has been killed and I’ve been instructed to make the notification only to him.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Carrickfergus RUC.”

  “He’ll call you back.”

  I turned on the radio and found the interview.

  Adams: “The demands of the hunger strikers are very reasonable. They want to wear their own clothes, they went political status, they want the right to do prison work or the right to refuse prison work. They want access to educational materials. We don’t understand why the government of Mrs Thatcher will not give us these reasonable demands. The whole world doesn’t understand why she will not give in to these demands.”

  BBC: “Yes, that’s the whole point isn’t it, Mr Adams? She’ll be giving in to terrorists.”

  Adams: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The current Prime Minister of Israel is Menachem Begin and he, if you’ll recall, blew up the King David Hotel. Look at Nelson Mandela. The whole world condemns his imprisonment and-”

  BBC: “The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has said that the demands of the Republican prisoners in the Maze can be looked at as soon as the hunger strike is ended.”

  Adams: “The time to look at these demands is now before more men die needlessly.”

  I turned off the radio.

  I walked around the station looking for food.

  The only people in here now were myself, Ray on the gate and a reservist called Preston.

  “Have you got any sandwiches, Preston?” I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll give you five quid for a bag of crisps.”

  He had no crisps. I called up half a dozen Chinese restaurants to see if any of them were open on a Sunday. None were.

  I waited by the phone.

  I got out the whiteboard and wrote a flow chart with labels like “homosexual” and “Daedalus” and “severed hands”. I drew a Venn diagram. I drew a labyrinth.

  My stomach complained.

  The rain outside turned to sleet.

  Finally the phone rang. I pressed line one.

  “Hello, I’d like to speak to Sergeant Duffy,” Adams said. His voice was unmistakable.

  “Mr Adams, I’m sorry to have to inform you about the death of an associate of yours, a Mr Tommy Little. There was no known next of kin on our files so we thought it best to call you.”

  “How did he die?”

  I filled him in on the details that we were prepared to reveal at this stage: Tommy had been shot and he was possibly the victim of a serial killer targeting homosexuals. I kept back the things I wasn’t prepared to reveal yet: the switched hands, the musical scores, the killer’s hit list, the postcard to me and the message to the Confidential Telephone.

  “You say this was in Carrickfergus?” Adams asked.

  “Yes, the Barn Field in Carrickfergus.”

  “What would Tommy be doing there?”

  “That’s not where he was murdered. He was murdered somewhere else and dumped there.”

  “And you think it’s a multiple murderer doing this? A serial killer? With all that’s going on?”

  “This would be an ideal time to do it, Mr Adams, with police resources stretched so thin.”

  “Someone’s going around killing homosexuals?”

  “That’s our working hypothesis. Did you know that Mr Little was a homosexual?”

  “Well, we, uh … we don’t pry into people’s private lives.”

  “Is there anything you can tell me about Mr Little’s movements or acquaintances or …”

  “No, I can’t. Thank you for getting in touch, Sergeant Duffy,” Adams said and hung up.

  “That was a little abrupt, wasn’t it, Gerry?” I said to myself. I got out my notebook and wrote: “Adams … what does he know that he’s not saying.”

  Not that I would ever get a chance to interview him.

  “All right, I’m out of here!” I informed Preston and told him to man the ship until Sergeant Burke came in at eight o’clock.

  I drove home but when I got back to Coronation Road I remembered that there was no food in the fridge and I went to Mrs Bridewell to beg a can of soup and some bread. Mrs Bridewell looked like Joan Bakewell from off the telly. The “thinking man’s crumpet” — short black bob, cheekbones, blue eyes. Her husband had been laid off by ICI and like half the male population was currently looking for work.

  She asked if I wanted to join them for Sunday roast.

  “No, I just want some soup if you’ve got any. All the supermarkets are closed.”

  “Join us!” she insisted.

  I told her I didn’t want to impose but she dragged me in.

  “Sit down back down, everyone!” Mr Bridewell said in an old-fashioned country accent that you didn’t really hear any more. Everyone sat. There were two kids and a granny. The granny looked at me, pursed her deathly pale lips and shook her head. She was wearing a long black taffeta dress that had gone out of fashion with the passing of the late Queen Mary.

  We said Proddy grace.

  No wine, of course, but a pot roast, potatoes and mashed carrot and parsnip. I wondered how they could afford such a spread on Mr B.’s unemployment benefit but he explained that the meat was a free gift from the European Economic Community and there was plenty of it. I’d seen Bobby Cameron distributing this European meat — it was yet another way the paramilitaries got their hooks into people.

  Dessert was bread and butter pudding with custard — gooey and c
rispy and fabulous.

  After dinner I played a quick game of chess with their older boy, Martin and tried to lose in a way that didn’t look condescending. My condescension quickly turned into a serious asskicking from him, as he knocked off my major pieces one by one and forced me to resign.

  I went home and flipped through the contemporary section of my record collection. What did I need? Led Zeppelin, The Undertones, The Clash, The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, AC/DC, Motorhead? Nah, I wasn’t in that kind of mood. Carole King, Joan Baez, Joan Armatrading, Bowie? I flipped the sleeves and wondered if Tapestry might be ok to listen to. I stuck it on, made myself a vodka gimlet and lay on the sofa with the window open.

  Carole King reinterpreted her own song “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” that she had originally written for the Shirelles. King’s was the better version.

  Bobby Cameron pulled into the spot in front of his house. He was driving a white transit van. When he got out of it he was wearing a rolled-up balaclava. I could have arrested him on the spot for that. His sixth sense kicked in and he realised that someone was looking at him. He checked both sides of the street. He examined the terrace and spotted the open window.

  He saw that the watcher was only me. He gave me a finger wave and I gave him the slightest nod in return.

  I made myself another vodka gimlet and switched on the TV. At eleven o’clock the snooker was interrupted by a BBC news bulletin. Time-delayed incendiary devices were exploding all over Belfast and shops were on fire in Great Victoria Street, Cornmarket and the York Road. Key holders were being urged to return to their premises, off-duty firemen were being told to report to their nearest available station.

  The snooker came back on but I didn’t get to see who won because, at exactly midnight, the street lights went off and the TV died.

  The power-station workers had, as anticipated, come out on strike.

  9: THE FOURTH ESTATE

  Sergeant McCallister was a bluff, old-fashioned copper not au fait with the new forensic methods and clinical police work and because of this I tended to underestimate him.

  I saw that now as I watched his press briefing. It was masterful stuff. He handled the questions with aplomb and was charming but firm. He played down the sensational aspects of the case and told the media merely that we were dealing with a person who had killed two suspected homosexuals and had threatened to kill more. That was all we knew at this stage.