The Cold Cold Ground sdt-1

by Adrian McKinty

  “Something’s been troubling me, Freddie. Tommy Little was the head of the Force Research Unit. He was coming over to see you the night he was murdered. If I’m an ordinary foot soldier and the head of the FRU is coming to see me I’d be shitting my pants. I’d be on a plane to fucking Indochina. But not you. Why is that, Freddie?”

  “I called him. About cars. Remember?”

  “The story about the homosexual serial killer didn’t break for two full days after Tommy went missing. That’s two days in which the IRA knows one fact and one fact only: Tommy Little, the head of their internal security branch, is on his way to see you. Why aren’t you dead, Freddie? Why didn’t they torture you and kill you?”

  He sighed. “I’m assuming these are not rhetorical questions.”

  They had been twenty minutes ago but they weren’t now. If you were setting up a press office why have Councillor Seawright from the DUP in the same building? Surely office space in Belfast wasn’t that precious, was it? Why share a building with Seawright? I suppose the real question was why not? What have you got to fear if you’re FRU? If you’re FRU everybody else better watch out, not you. You certainly don’t fear a punk like Seawright.

  I smiled, leaned back in the chair and tried another bluff: “I know who you are, Freddie. You’re FRU too, aren’t you? More than that. You were Tommy Little’s deputy, you were the second in command of the FRU.”

  “Brilliant!” he said and laughed.

  “Why was Tommy coming to see you? It crossed my mind that you and Tommy were having an affair. You’re a good looking guy, but that can’t be it, can it? If you’re homosexual you wouldn’t still be in this job, would you? There’s a purge going on right now to distance the IRA from this nasty business.”

  “You have quite the imagination, officer. You’re clearly wasted in the RUC.”

  “And Tommy wasn’t coming over to brace you, was he? If he was coming over on orders from the IRA Army Council he would have brought an entire team, wouldn’t he? Nah, he was coming over to consult you about something. The reason you’re not dead, Freddie, is because you’re still a valued member of the team, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe he’s the one who’s leading the investigation into Tommy Little’s death? Maybe he’s the one bracing other people?” Crabbie said, jumping on the bandwagon. I liked that and I grinned at him.

  “All this, the new job, the new office with the DUP just one floor below. Seawright’s UVF isn’t he? Seawright’s UVF, Billy White is UDA and you’re the brand new head of FRU and the new liaison between the loyalist paramilitaries and the IRA,” I said.

  Freddie folded his hands across his lap and chuckled. “That’s a very good story. You boys should turn pro.”

  “You want to hear a story? How about this? You wanted Tommy’s job so you fucking topped him and then you went and shot some random gay guy that you knew about. And you did this because the IRA army are a conservative bunch and they’d buy any old shite about poofters killing each other or a lunatic running around killing homosexuals,” I said.

  Freddie grinned at me. He looked at McCrabban. “You must have a great time keeping up with him, I’ll bet you lads don’t even need TV down the station.”

  “Do you like opera, Freddie?”

  “Some.”

  “Do you play an instrument?” I asked.

  “A piano,” Scavanni said with an open easy grin. “Where the hell are you going with any of this?”

  “What about Greek? Do you know Greek, Freddie?” I asked quietly.

  “Ancient Greek?”

  “Yes.”

  “I studied it in school.”

  “You know the story of Ariadne?”

  “The Minotaur, of course.”

  He didn’t deny it. He didn’t hum and ha. He just sat there, amused by me. Fifteen seconds went past. His grin widened a little.

  I began to think that I was the one lost in the labyrinth.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think.

  The secretary said: “Mr Scavanni, the calls are stacked up, if you’re through here …”

  “Gentlemen please, I’m really jam-packed today,” Freddie said.

  I opened my eyes, got to my feet. “Let’s go, Crabbie,” I said and, turning to Scavanni, I added, “You and I will be talking again.”

  “The next time you try and barge in here you better have a warrant, Sergeant Duffy. Some of us have work to do.”

  I nodded, but did not reply.

  We went outside and walked back to Queen’s Street police station.

  In the cop shop we ate sandwiches and I found their local Special Branch rep and asked him if there was any intel at all on Freddie Scavanni. He pulled the folders. Freddie had a file, of course, but he’d been out of the game for at least six or seven years and had restricted his activity purely to the political side.

  “Not a player?”

  “Not a player.”

  In the Land Rover back to Carrick Crabbie put on Downtown Radio and we listened to Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. When we got through the roadblocks and army checkpoints McCrabban turned to me in the passenger’s seat.

  “I’m surprised you’re not seasick, Sean,” he said.

  “Oh, aye? Why’s that?”

  “After that fishing expedition.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “No, that was really something.”

  “You don’t think Scavanni’s holding out on us?”

  “He’s definitely holding out on us. But even if he is FRU it means what exactly? We’re looking for Tommy Little’s killer and if Freddie Scavanni was that man, he’d be dead by now, wouldn’t he?”

  “You may have a point.”

  “You want me to drive us home?”

  I shook my head. “Let’s take this old trawler to Rathcoole and see if we can piss off Billy White and his dashing young assistant Shane the same way we pissed off Freddie.”

  North Belfast. The Shore Road. The M5 motorway. Rathcoole Estate. All the previous beats: Drizzle, tower blocks, terraces, murals of masked gunmen proudly displaying that icon of the second half of the twentieth century: the AK-47.

  Stray dogs. Stray cats. No women. No cars. Rain and oil separating into strange colours and patterns by a process of organic chromatography.

  The snooker hall. The back room.

  The boxes of ciggies and UDA posters. Billy pouring over a ledger filled with accounts. Shane reading a comic book.

  “You again?” Billy said, looking vaguely disappointed.

  “What? You thought you’d bought me off with two cartons of cigarettes?”

  “I thought you weren’t going to bother me since I was so nice as to answer all your questions.”

  Shane was looking at me over the top of the comic.

  Batman.

  Do you have a secret identity, Shane my lad? What do you get up to after dark?

  “Are you a married man, Billy?” I asked conversationally.

  “Aye, two kids.”

  “Boys? Girls?”

  “One of each, Caitlin, two, Ian, four. You want to see pictures?”

  “Love to,” I said.

  We saw the pictures. They’d been taken on a pilgrimage to the site of the Battle of the Boyne in County Meath.

  “Charming,” I said.

  “Lovely,” Crabbie added.

  “So,” I said.

  “Tommy Little.”

  “Jesus! Not this again, peeler.”

  “Aye, this again. And again and again until we are satisfied,” Crabbie said, not liking Billy’s tone one little bit.

  I looked at McCrabban. You run it, mate.

  “What time did Tommy come by here last Tuesday?” he asked.

  “About eight,” Billy said with a sigh.

  “Why did he come here?”

  Billy looked at Crabbie and then he raised his eyebrows at me. “You can mention the heroin to my colleague,” I said. “We’re not interested in that.”

  Billy sighed. “Tom
my gave us a couple bags of dope, we chatted about one or two things and then he left. That’s it,” Billy said.

  “What things did you chat about?” McCrabban asked.

  Billy shrugged. “He was reassuring us that despite the craziness around the hunger strikes all of our bilateral deals would be intact. He said that there would be a lot of rhetoric from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness but underneath it all we would keep to our arrangements regarding territory, rackets and narcotics. It was standard stuff but it was still good to hear.”

  “The conversation would have taken how long? Ten minutes? In which case he left at ten past eight? Eight fifteen?”

  “I don’t know, but no later than eight twenty.”

  “He got in his car and drove straight away?”

  Neither man spoke.

  McCrabban and I exchanged a look.

  “Well?” McCrabban insisted.

  “He didn’t exactly do that,” Billy said.

  I felt a little burst of electricity along my spine.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” Shane said.

  The Sphinx speaks. Excellent.

  “What wasn’t a big deal?” I asked.

  “He said he was going to Straid to see someone.”

  Freddie Scavanni.

  “And?”

  “Well, it was lashing and I asked him if he could give me a lift,” Shane said. “I live in a flat out on the Straid Road.”

  “You’ve a car though, don’t you, Shane?”

  “It was banjaxed.”

  Convenient.

  “So what happened next, Shane?” I asked.

  Shane bit his lower lip and shook his head. “Fuck. This is why I didn’t even want to mention it. Nothing happened. He gave me a lift. He was in a big hurry. I was at the house five minutes later and then he went on his way.”

  “This would have been eight thirty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He gave you a lift and then he drove off?”

  “That’s it. Like I say, he was really pressed for time.”

  I let silence sink into the room for thirty seconds or so.

  Silence is also a form of conversation.

  Billy spoke through his hard man look, Shane through his gaze which never left the floor.

  “Why didn’t you lads tell me all this the other day?” I asked.

  “There was no point complicating things. If we’d told you, you’d have thought we had something to do with it. And we had nothing to do with it. We wouldn’t be that buck daft,” Billy said.

  “And why are you telling us now?” Crabbie asked.

  “Shane and I were talking and we wondered what would happen if you found Tommy’s car with Shane’s fingerprints in it,” Billy said. “You might get the wrong idea.”

  “Or the right idea,” I said.

  Crabbie didn’t know what I knew about Shane. And I wondered for a moment how exactly I could tell him.

  “Are you sure Tommy didn’t meet with some kind of unfortunate accident when he was here?” Crabbie asked.

  Bobby shook his head. “Come on, peeler. Why would we do that? There’s no angle in it for us.”

  “Maybe Detective Constable McCrabban’s on the right lines. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe you were showing Tommy your brand new Glock 9mm when … boom!”

  “Wise the bap!” Billy muttered.

  I looked at McCrabban. He shrugged. I stood up. “Are the pair of you going to be here for a while? We might have more questions,” I said.

  “We’ll be here,” Billy said.

  We went back outside to the Land Rover. While we’d been talking some wee shite had graffitied “SS RUC” on the rear door.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “If Brennan sees this!”

  Crabbie put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t have an eggy fit, Sean. We’ll drive past a garage, get some white spirit and clean it off before we get back to Carrick.”

  “Wee fucking shites!” I yelled at the estate and my voice echoed off all the concrete at right angles.

  I checked underneath for a mercury tilt bomb and we climbed in and I called up Matty on the radio. They took forever to get him because he was on the bog.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Give me the addresses of Billy White and Shane McAtamney and make it sharpish,” I said.

  He took his sweet time about it. “18 Queens Parade, Rathcoole and, uhm, number 4, 134 Straid Road, Whiteabbey. Oh, and I’ve got a bit of news,” he said at last.

  “What news?”

  “Your man, Seawright. Back in his Glasgow days, him and a bunch of welders allegedly beat up a couple of transvestite hookers. Beat them near to death,” Matty said.

  “Cheers, Matt,” I said.

  I looked at Crabbie. “What was that you were saying about fishing expeditions?” I added.

  “Back to Belfast, talk it over with Seawright?” McCrabban wondered.

  I shook my head. “Nah, I don’t really see it, mate. He’s hardly going to go on the BBC calling for death to the queers if he’s actually out killing queers.”

  “What was it your man on the telly says: the only two things that are infinite are the universe and human stupidity.”

  “It’s a fair point.”

  “Oi, lads, I’m not done yet!” Matty said over the radio.

  “There’s more?” I asked.

  “There’s more.”

  “Go on then.”

  “I cross-tabbed all the pervs and kiddie fiddlers that have been released from prison in the last year. The probation office tells me that every one of them has left Northern Ireland except for three. Lad called Jeremy McNight who is in Musgrave Park Hospital with terminal lung cancer, a guy called Andy Templeton who was killed in a house fire. Suspicious house fire, I might add. And finally after a lot of gruelling leg work and-”

  “Just get on with it.”

  “One name. Could be our boy. Got four years for homosexual rape. Released two months ago.”

  “Better not give his name out over the airwaves,” I said.

  “Of course not! I’m not a total eejit. Give you it back at the station.”

  “Ok. Good work, mate.”

  We turned off the radio.

  “Where to then, kemosabe?” Crabbie asked.

  “Billy’s first. 18 Queens Parade. We’ve got a wee window here.”

  We drove about half a mile to an end terrace with a big mural of King William crossing the Boyne on the gable wall. It was a modest home. A council house, which made me think that Billy had all his money in a secret bank account — either that or he had lost it all down the bookies like every other medium-level crook. Which reminded me: 100 quid on Shergar for the win even if it meant an overdraft.

  We walked along the path and rang the bell. While we were waiting we heard an explosion in Belfast. “Two hundred pounder by the sound of it,” Crabbie said.

  A woman opened the door. She was an attractive, skinny blonde in a denim skirt and a union jack T-shirt. She had a cigarette dangling out the corner of her mouth, a glass of gin in one hand and a crying baby in the other. I assumed this must be Caitlin.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she asked.

  “We’re the Old Bill,” I said.

  “He’s not in.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” I said.

  We brazened our way inside. I sent Crabbie upstairs to get the gun Billy no doubt kept under his pillow, while I hunted downstairs. The place was filled with boxes of cigarettes, crates of Jameson whiskey and two or three dozen Atari Video Game consoles. I ignored all of this and went to the record collection.

  Sinatra, Dean Martin, Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, more Sinatra.

  The baby screamed.

  The TV blared.

  I looked in the laundry basket for bloody clothes and I looked for traces of blood in the washer/dryer. Nothing.

  Caitlin followed me with the screaming baby, saying nothing, looking anxious.

  I
went into the back garden and examined the clothes on the line. No blood-stained items there either.

  Back inside. Crabbie came downstairs and showed me the piece, a Saturday Night Special, snub-nosed.38. He was holding it on the end of a pencil. I slipped it into an evidence bag.

  “Well take this,” I said. “And you might want to give your wee girl there something to eat.”

  We drove to 134 Straid Road, #4.

  It was a small square apartment complex. A dozen flats, each with a little balcony. It could have been nice but for the fact that they’d painted the exterior a kind of sheep-shit brown.

  The front door was open and we walked up one flight of steps to #4.

  “Now what?” McCrabban said.

  “Now this, me old mucker,” I said and took out my lock-pick kit.

  Crabbie put his hand on my arm. “Sean, get a grip! We can’t break in!”

  “I shall note your protest in the log,” I said doing an English naval officer’s accent.

  McCrabban shook his head. In Protestant Ballymena such things were not tolerated. It was one thing to take the occasional carton of ciggies from a paramilitary, but a man’s house was sacred.

  It was a Yale standard and I had keyed the mechanism in under a minute.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I said.

  “I’m not going in,” Crabbie said petulantly.

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “No, I’m bloody not.”

  I flipped on the light switch with a knuckle. A small two-bedroom apartment with a neat two-person leather sofa, bean bags, red-painted walls and several framed posters of boxers: there was Ali versus Frazier back in the glory days; there was Joe Louis versus Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium.

  The apartment had a 22-inch TV, a Betamax video recorder and a dozen tapes: The Godfather, The Sting, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, etc.

  Shane had a sensitive side: in perhaps an echo of Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji he had done half a dozen watercolours of Kilroot Power Station. The last two weren’t bad although a magenta sunset was somewhat fanciful.

  It was the laundry bin and the record collection that I was after.

  Laundry first: briefs, T-shirts, a pair of jeans. No blood.

  Records next. I put on a pair of latex gloves and looked through them. Shane’s tastes were similar to mine: David Bowie, Led Zep, Queen, The Police, Blondie, The Ramones, Floyd, The Stones. What did they say about the pair of us?