The Cold Cold Ground sdt-1

by Adrian McKinty

  She shook her head but smiled. “Call me. In a day or two,” she said and closed the door.

  I walked to the police station. The top floor was dark. I checked my desk. A fax from Special Branch answering Matty’s intel request: they knew nothing about Freddie Scavanni and they had heard no rumours that Tommy Little was involved with the IRA’s Force Research Unit. Geniuses.

  I walked back to Coronation Road across the railway lines.

  I stopped at Barn Halt. I crossed the tracks to the Belfast side.

  Lightning struck the conductor on Kilroot power station’s six-hundred-foot chimney.

  “Her mother’s on the train, looking out the window for Lucy but she doesn’t see her. How the fuck does she not see her? A guy in a car saw her just seconds before.”

  I walked to the little shelter. It was basically just three walls and a roof. You couldn’t hide in there.

  “Did the fucking aliens take her?” I yelled at the storm.

  I stood there getting wet, disgusted at my own denseness.

  I went into the shelter and relit the joint. I sat down on the concrete.

  The boat train came flying through express from Belfast to Larne.

  The boat train. Again. The boat train.

  Of course!

  The reason her mother didn’t see her was because she wasn’t going to Belfast. She’d been on the platform all right — the other platform. The guy in the car had seen her waiting, but she’d been waiting on the other side of the tracks. She had lied to her ma. She wasn’t going to Belfast, she was going to Larne.

  She’d been going to Larne to catch the ferry to Scotland.

  The abortion special.

  What was it she had said? “I might stay over with some friends, but I’ll be back on Christmas morning.”

  Train to Larne. Ferry to Stranraer. Train to Glasgow. Abortion. Overnight in the hospital. Train to Stranraer. Ferry to Larne. Train to Carrickfergus. Home for Christmas. She’d been planning to get an abortion. But something had happened. She had vanished instead. Hmmmm. I threw the stub of the joint onto the railway tracks and walked home along Taylor’s Avenue and the Barn Road.

  Despite the downpour the DUP were electioneering in Victoria Estate. Dr Ian Paisley himself riding atop a coal lorry. “Do not allow the British Government to bow their knee to terrorists! Vote DUP!” Paisley was bellowing in an Old Testament prophet voice. Behind Paisley was Councillor George Seawright, originally from Glasgow and now the most militant and crazy of the DUP’s rising stars. There were dozens of DUP security men walking alongside of the coal lorry. And behind them there was another coal lorry piled high with boxes of foodstuffs and milk that were being given out to anyone who wanted one. The boxes were stamped with the words “EEC Surplus Not For Resale”.

  Bobby Cameron beckoned me over to the lorry. “You like bacon?” he asked.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Fucking Muslims and Jews. Here,” he said. He offered me a box of German bacon. I shook my head. “Take it,” he insisted.

  “Ta,” I said and grabbed the box. “And Bobby, listen, times are tough so you might want to rethink the rates you’ve been charging for protection around here.”

  “Have people been squealing to you?”

  “Nobody’s been squealing but times are tough.”

  I left him to it and headed for my house. I put the bacon in the fridge, grabbed a book at random, stuck Liege and Lief on the hi-fi, went upstairs, lit the paraffin heater and ran the bath.

  I thought about him. About what had just happened. There was no getting away from it. “What the hell have I done?” I said to myself. Was I a fairy? A homo? A queer? Well …?

  Unlike those crazy Prods, I needed someone to talk to but there was no one. I lit and crumbled the rest of the cannabis into a tobacco-filled cigarette paper and got in the bath. I smoked the spliff, coasted on the paraffin fumes, and opened the book. It was a volume of German poetry. A birthday gift from an uncle that I’d never opened.

  I read Goethe, Schiller, Novalis.

  Nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg, the poet said.

  Inward goes the way full of mystery.

  Indeed.

  14: THE APARTMENT

  And then … nothing. Twenty-four hours of nothing. Not so unusual in the life of a copper. Action stations, red zone, 100 mph and then zilch. Another reason why you need a good book.

  Zilch in our case meant no leads, no further developments, no witnesses, no tips to the CID or the Confidential Telephone. The gay angle was probably hurting us. No one wanted to leave a tip about a homosexual murder. Not everybody in Ulster was George Seawright crazy but this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692. If they knew anything about such things it probably meant that they were queer too.

  Procedure keeps you going. I checked for bombs under my car and drove to work. We tabbed the files, filed the reps. I called up the DMV and found out that Shane drove a VW Beetle. I pestered Special Branch about Tommy Little until a chief super came on the blower to tell me that I was barking up the wrong tree, that the police’s intelligence was very good and that if Tommy Little was a player he was a minor actor in the play.

  We interviewed Lucy Moore’s pals in person and got nothing from them. We examined the Boneybefore postcard and the only prints were mine and the letter carrier. We looked and looked again for any links between the victims but there were none that we could find. We checked for Tommy Little’s missing Ford Granada but came up empty. I examined the music scores and played the records. I looked at the “hit list” and asked Crabbie to see if there were any links between the people there. Again none beyond the obvious. The inferences we drew from our inquiries took us down several blind alleys just like in a real labyrinth.

  On Tuesday afternoon we got a fax from the coroner’s office. Sir David Fitzhughes, the Coroner for East Antrim, had read Dr Cathcart’s pathology report and our notes and had issued a preliminary finding of death by suicide on Lucy Moore. The full inquest would be in November but this preliminary finding was enough to have Brennan breathing down my neck to bin the case.

  On the one hand we didn’t know where Lucy had been staying since Christmas. On the other hand hiding a pregnant woman wasn’t a crime. Not even in Belfast. Brennan wanted my full attention on the murders. The patho said Lucy killed herself, the coroner said Lucy killed herself, the papers said Lucy killed herself.

  I wasn’t that happy about it. I agreed to suspend the investigation but not close the case. I wrote “Possible suicide” on the file.

  I completed my psych profile of the killer. It was standard stuff from the Wrigley-Carmichael index: A white male, 25–45, moderately high IQ, almost certainly an ex-prisoner, and almost certainly a sex offender of some type. We ran the names through the database. We got twenty-three matches but no one who was still around. Every single one of them was living in England, Scotland or further afield. As soon as they got out of prison sex offenders fled Northern Ireland because they knew that sooner or later they would be kneecapped or murdered by a paramilitary chieftain looking to make a name for himself.

  In a normal society that’s where you’d look for your leads.

  But this was not a normal society.

  No leads. Brick walls. And then there was Shane. Shane boy was as bent as a five-bob note. Billy and Shane jungled up together? Or was Shane a heroic loner in a murderously intolerant world? If Shane and Tommy Little were having an affair, Shane might have killed him to cover it up. Anything could have happened: lovers’ quarrel, fear of exposure, you name it. Sure he talked the talk about incurring the wrath of God from the IRA but in the heat of a fight you don’t think of such things.

  The problem with Shane was his alibi. After Tommy Little left he said that he played snooker with Billy and the other lads until midnight. They would cover for him as a matter of course.

  I thought about the angles. Shane didn’t seem like the type who embraced
opera and Greek culture, but you never knew, did ya? It would be nice to have a nosey around his place …

  On Tuesday night Laura and I went to see Chariots of Fire. It was about running. The two British guys won. I had a feeling they might. No one, however, blew up the cinema and there were no bomb scares.

  Laura asked me about Heather. I told her part of the truth. A reserve constable who was a little drunk and freaked out after a riot in Belfast had briefly come on to me. She was, I added, married.

  “You’ve every right to see whoever you want, we’re not really going out,” she said.

  “I’m not going to see anybody else,” I told her.

  I walked her to her apartment door but she wouldn’t let me in for a coffee. I didn’t mind. She kissed me on the cheek and said something about the weekend.

  I said something in reply.

  I was distracted.

  I was thinking about that other kiss.

  Trying to get it the fuck out of my mind.

  On the way home from the station I met Sammy, my Marxist barber, walking his bulldog. He told me that I looked depressed. I said that I was. He said that it wasn’t surprising because the collapse of capitalism was imminent. He said that this was a reason for celebration, not anxiety, and that I should start listening to Radio Albania on the shortwave.

  I went home, made myself a vodka gimlet and found Radio Free Albania. Sammy was right — it did cheer me up. The Americans were denounced, the Russians were denounced, Mao was praised, Comrade Enver Hoxha’s achievements at chess, athletics, in research physics, agricultural innovation were all saluted …

  Wednesday morning: I checked under the car for bombs, drove to the cop shop and sat staring at McCrabban’s ugly mug from 9 until 10.

  “Crabbie, you want to go up to Belfast with me?”

  “What for?”

  “Let’s go see Scavanni.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to get your take on him, Crabbie. I didn’t like him and I think he’s hiding something.”

  Crabbie yawned. “Aye, why not? I’ve just been pretending to work.”

  We signed out a Land Rover and drove up the Shore Road. We passed the Loughshore Park in Newtownabbey. There was no point telling either McCrabban or Matty about Shane. Not yet. Not until I knew something.

  The rain was heavy, the traffic light.

  We drove past a fresh bombsite that was, with ruthless efficiency, being bulldozed into a car park. Soon Belfast would be the only city in the world with more parking spaces than cars.

  We left Queen’s Street RUC and walked through the search gates into the centre of town.

  “Oi, chief, I’m starving, I had no breakfast this morning, can we get something to eat?” Crabbie said.

  “No breakfast?” I said, staring at the ghost of his black eye. “Are you sure everything’s sweetness and light at chez McCrabban?”

  “The, uh … she’s been a bit … Pregnant, you know.”

  This, I felt, was a major breakthrough in my attempt to get him to open up.

  “My treat. Breakfast. Question is where?”

  Because of the sky-high insurance rates there were no major chains in Belfast: no McDonald’s, no Burger King, no Kentucky Fried Chicken, nothing.

  “Anywhere.”

  We found a greasy spoon off Anne Street and I got the cornflakes. Crabbie got the Ulster fry and I waited while he scarfed: pancakes, potato bread, soda bread, sausages, bacon, egg, black pudding, white pudding — all of it fried in lard. A heart-attack special.

  We walked over to the Cornmarket and found Bradbury House.

  The painters were in doing the lobby in Mental Hospital Beige.

  “Scavanni’s in a new Sinn Fein press office up on the second floor,” I was explaining when I noticed on the directory that the offices of Councillor George Seawright were on the ground floor.

  That was interesting. It was like finding Rommel and Montgomery sharing the same tent.

  I pointed it out to Crabbie.

  “I’ve heard rumours about him,” McCrabban said.

  “About who? Seawright?”

  “They say he’s tight with the paramilitaries.”

  “Let’s go pay him a visit.”

  “What for?” Crabbie asked.

  “He hates homos, doesn’t he? Let’s see what he was doing on the night Tommy got himself topped.”

  “You’re reaching, mate,” Crabbie said.

  “Exactly the sort of thing you do when you have no leads.”

  I was wearing my black polo neck and leather jacket and Crabbie was in his orange shirt and tie so Seawright’s secretary had to be convinced that we were peelers by our warrant cards. She showed us into his office which, like Scavanni’s, also overlooked Cornmarket Street where they had hanged the United Irishmen, the last time Protestants and Catholics had ever come together to fight the blah, blah, blah …

  Unlike Scavanni’s digs, however, Seawright’s office was adorned by several Union Flags and boxes and boxes of a little DUP pamphlet entitled Proof The Bible Is True. Seawright was a big guy with a mop of greasy hair and thick 1970s glasses. He was wearing a grey checked suit that was a size too small. The Napoleon haircut and the suit gave him a comedic air and in truth he wasn’t that funny.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked after his secretary showed us in.

  I told him that we were from Carrick RUC and were investigating the murders of Tommy Little and Andrew Young.

  “The two fruits? That guy should get a medal, so he should,” he said with a hideous grin.

  “Where were you on the night of Tuesday the twelfth?”

  “I was in bed with my wife, so I was.”

  “She’ll vouch for that?”

  “She better.”

  “Did you know either Tommy Little or Andrew Young?”

  Seawright leaned back in his chair. “Your investigation must be in a sorry way if you’ve come to question me just because I’ve said a few things about the queers. I mean, excuse me, officer Duffy, but isn’t being queer still illegal in Northern Ireland?”

  “Being homosexual isn’t, homosexual acts are, but there is an interesting case up before the European Court of Human Rights that-”

  “Fucking Europe. The fucking whore of Babylon will bring about the apocalypse. Sixteen years, Sergeant Duffy, 1997. Not 2000, no. The fenians got the calendar wrong. 1997, that’s the Millennium. That’s when our Lord Jesus Christ will return and cleanse this world of the idolaters and fenians and queers and all the mockers of the holy Bible.”

  “Any particular day I should keep clear?” I asked him.

  “August twenty-ninth,” he said immediately. I was a little thrown by that and I glanced at Crabbie and he asked Seawright if any of his followers had been bragging about the murders. Seawright denied that they had.

  Seawright’s secretary spoke through the intercom: “Councillor, I’m afraid you have another appointment.”

  Crabbie gave me a “Why are we wasting our time here?” look.

  I nodded and got to my feet.

  “If any of your followers do feel the urge to hasten the work of the Millennium I hope you’ll dissuade them, Councillor Seawright. Murder is a crime too,” I said and left my card on his desk.

  I picked up one of the Proof The Bible Is True pamphlets and walked out into the reception area. It would be an understatement to say that I was surprised to see Freddie Scavanni talking good-naturedly to Councillor Seawright’s secretary. He was wearing a tailored black silk suit with a black shirt and a black tie. Anywhere else you wouldn’t have given Freddie a second look but in Northern Ireland terms Scavanni was a bit of a dandy.

  “Hello, Freddie,” I said cheerfully, “We were just coming to see you. Fancy you hanging out here. With Councillor Seawright of all people. That’s interesting isn’t it, Detective McCrabban?”

  “Very interesting,” McCrabban agreed.

  “What do you want see me about?” Scavanni asked, cl
early irritated.

  “We’ll wait for you upstairs and then we’ll talk,” I said, winked at him and we went up.

  Freddie’s office was buzzing with earnest young men with beards and bell-bottomed corduroys. The women were in miniskirts and tight Aran sweaters and looked as if they’d bang you at the drop of a hat if you said you were on the run from the Johnnie Law.

  I nodded at Scavanni’s secretary and waltzed into his office.

  “Don’t worry, Freddie’s expecting us,” I said.

  McCrabban lit his pipe and I read Proof The Bible Is True until Freddie came in fifteen minutes later.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, apparently in a better mood.

  I passed him across the DUP pamphlet. “Fascinating stuff, Freddie. Your buddy Seawright down there thinks the fossils were placed under the ground by God to test our faith. Is that what you think?”

  Freddie took the pamphlet and dropped it in the trash can.

  “I don’t have time for games. As you can see, we are very busy at the moment.”

  “What were you doing hanging with George Seawright? Aren’t you supposedly mortal enemies or something?”

  “Don’t be naive, peeler.”

  I nodded. Yeah. I had been naive. Freddie had something that Seawright didn’t. An aura, a charisma, an arrogance. He was relaxed. Too relaxed. Two detectives had come to see him about a murdered man and he didn’t even break a sweat. He was cool as a goddamned Irish summer.

  When people like Freddie came into a room the gravity changed. You could feel it. Freddie had presence, like Billy Wright and Gerry Adams. Perhaps all players had it. Was that what Freddie was … a player?

  I thought about it for a heartbeat or two.

  “This job is largely a front isn’t it?” I suggested.

  “What?”

  “A front, a cover, a beard.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You work for the Force Research Unit too don’t you, Freddie?”

  McCrabban looked at me in amazement.

  “Never heard of them,” Freddie said.

  “The FRU, the ‘nutting squad’, the IRA internal security unit.”

  “I have no idea what you’re going on about,” he said with a shake of the head.