The Cold Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  “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 crispy 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.

  When asked how we knew that both killings had been done by the same person he said that there were forensic similarities and certain markers that we did not wish to reveal at his stage.

  The press turn-out was slightly disappointing.

  None of the American hacks had showed up and only three Brits from the Sun, the Guardian and the Daily Mail.

  We still had the locals: the Belfast Telegraph, the Irish News, the Newsletter and the Carrickfergus Advertiser; and from Dublin: the Irish Independent and the Irish Times.

  We had our own diesel generator in the basement so the power outage didn’t bother us. I listened to McCallister talk and gazed out the window at the massive grey Kilroot Power Station, one mile up the coast, which for the first time since I’d come to Carrick was not belching out black smoke from its six hundred foot chimney.

  “Why do you think the Yanks didn’t show up?” Matty whispered as McCrabban showed the hacks the location of the two killings on a map.

  “I suppose that two murders hardly makes a ‘serial killer’ in US terms,” Brennan whispered back.

  I had a different view. I reckoned the Yanks hadn’t come because this little incident was an unnecessary layer of complication compared to a simple story of peace-loving Irish patriots starving themselves to drive out the evil British imperialists.

  That would have been my view too if I’d gone to New York and stayed there.

  Felt a bit like that sometimes anyway.

  “ … will be handled by Sergeant Duffy, who is an experienced detective and is actively pursuing several leads at the moment.”

  “Can we ask Sergeant Duffy any questions?” the guy from the Belfast Telegraph piped up.

  I reddened and looked at my polished DM shoes.

  “Sergeant Duffy is busy with the case, but I assure you gentlemen that if there are any major developments you will be kept informed …”

  There were a few more questions and the guy from the Daily Mail wondered if homosexuality’s illegality in Northern Ireland would affect our investigation.

  “Keeping pigeons without a licence is illegal as well, but we can’t have people going round shooting pigeon-keepers, can we? It is the job of the RUC to enforce the law in Northern Ireland, not paramilitary groups, not vigilantes, not ‘concerned citizens’, it’s our responsibility and ours alone,” McCallister said which made me proud of him. Not quite tears-in-eyes but maybe warm-glow-in-tummy.

  No one could think of any more questions.

  “Ok, gentlemen, I think that’s enough for this morning,” McCallister said.

  I gave Alan the thumbs up and he gave me a broad wink back.

  I got my team together in the CID evidence room. Tommy Little’s current address had finally come through, not from RUC intelligence, but the friggin tax office. He lived off the Falls Road which would mean another hairy visit to West Belfast.

  “Ok, first things first,” I began. “Lucy Moore. Patho says suicide and no doubt the coroner will too,
but I slept on this last night and I’ve decided that I want you to keep the file open. We’ve a lot on our plate, boys, but any spare moment you get, I want you to hunt down leads where she might have been living, who she was seeing and what happened to her bairn.”

  McCrabban stuck a finger up and flipped open his notebook. “Fourteen babies left at the St Jude Mission, the Royal Victoria Hospital, Whiteabbey Hospital, the City Hospital and the Mater Hospital in the last week. Apparently that’s a pretty standard number. Similar number the week before. All anonymous dropins, of course.”

  “Good. I’m going to go and see her parents and her ex husband tomorrow and see if they offer us any insights. At the very least, I’d just like to close the book on this.”

  Crabbie’s mouth opened and closed in amazement. “Did you say that you’re going to go see the husband?” he asked.

  “Aye.”

  “You know he’s on hunger strike, right? In the Maze.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re going to go into all that madness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Count me out of that mess,” Crabbie said, shaking his head.

  “All right, I’ll go by myself.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Matty said.

  I pointed at Matty and looked at Crabbie. “See? The lad’s a thinker. Who’s going to have the better story for his memoirs?”

  “He’ll need to learn to type first,” McCrabban said.

  “Ok, down to the main business. We’ll need to find this Tommy Little character’s car. Matty, will you get working on that?”

  “Aye.”

  “And we’ll definitely need to visit his house. Today. Did he live alone? With a boyfriend? A cat? What? We’ll need to check that out. Crabbie, call up whatever the local barracks is and get a uniform over there to protect the evidence.”

  “They won’t like it.”

  “But you’ll make them do it.”

  “Aye,” he said and made the call.

  “Now let’s go through what we’ve got so far …”

  We reread the patho reports as a team and went through the physical evidence. We discussed motivations and theories. I was the only one who knew anything about serial killers and I gave them some of the standard feeders – childhood trauma, witnessing violence, peer rejection – which unfortunately covered about half the citizenry of Belfast. Another feeder, of course, was juvenile or adult detention – that also covered a healthy percentage of the population.

  “Somebody who hates queers probably had a bad experience with one when they were a kid,” Crabbie offered, and gave me a quick glance under his eyelids. It was, I knew, the common perception among Protestants that all Catholic altar boys had been raped by priests in their childhood. I saw that there was no point trying to argue so I decided that logic might be a better tack: “I think that kind of anger would be directed at the individual, not at random targets,” I said and then a thought occurred to me. “If these are random targets.”

  McCrabban nodded. “They’re linked by the hands and the bullets. Could they be linked some other way?”

  “Good point. Matty, will you look into that?”

  Matty nodded.

  Sergeant McCallister popped his head in through the door. “Mind if I sit in, lads? I won’t open my bake.”

  “Alan, mate, any contributions you could offer would be greatly appreciated.”

  McCallister sat down next to me. I sipped my coffee and continued: “I don’t know what you lads think but I think the key to this investigation so far is victim number one. Tommy Little. Where was he killed, when was he killed, who was he living with?”

  Matty picked up a piece of a paper. “According to the notes there was no next of kin in Ireland. Older brother in Australia. He worked for Sinn Fein as a driver and quote security guard unquote. Bit of a loner, I imagine.”

  “Yes, but we’ll need to find out his movements somehow, won’t we? A neighbour, a friend. Somebody must know something,” I said.

  “No one will speak to us. And we’ll be lynched if we go up there. He lived on the Falls Road,” Matty said.

  “He’s right. They have a policy with the peelers: whatever you say, say nothing,” Crabbie said.

  I shook my head. “One of their own was killed by some nut. I think they’ll cooperate.”

  Alan put his hand on my arm. “If I may, Sean … the IRA find out one of their own was killed in some kind of sordid homosexual encounter? I think they’re going to brush the whole thing under the rug and pretend he never existed. What if the money men in Massachusetts find out that their hard-earned dollars are going to a bunch of poofs? No, no, no. If you go up there you’ll be meeting the stone wall.”

  He had a point. But if we didn’t pursue the Tommy Little angle we didn’t have much of anything. Andrew Young was killed in his house with no witnesses and no forensic evidence. Young’s record was clean, no abuse allegations, no complaints against him. He may have been a gay man but he was sixty years old and seemed to live a largely celibate life style. Of course we would follow any and all leads on Andrew Young but it would be foolish not to hunt down everything we could on Little, even if it meant another visit to bandit country.

  “We’ve got nothing else. We have to follow up on this,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not going back into West Belfast after what happened last time. We’re sitting ducks. I’ll go with you to the Maze but not West Belfast,” Matty said.

  “Didn’t you hear what Sean said about your memoirs? Could be a whole chapter in this,” Crabbie said.

  “If I’m writing a book it’ll be about fly fishing. I am not going to the Falls Road.”

  Crabbie went to the machine to get us coffees. When he came back he had news. “The uniform we sent to Little’s house says he thinks it’s empty. Good for us if it is. Don’t need a warrant for a vacant property.”

  “Great for us. I mean, think about it lads, what if there’s a note on his fridge: ‘Off to see X, hope he doesn’t murder me’.”

  Alan laughed.

  “He was probably going to some well-known poofter place,” Crabbie said.

  “Aye, but where? Where do you go if you’re a poofter in Carrickfergus or Belfast? Is there a hangout? Is there a cottaging area?”

  Both Matty and McCrabban looked embarrassed by the very idea.

  And they were – or claimed to be – utterly clueless.

  “Do you know any benders, either of you?”

  “No thanks!” Crabbie said.

  “It doesn’t make you queer if you know a queer,” I said.

  “It doesn’t help, does it?”

  “Well, ask around, will ya?” I said.

  “Ask who?” Matty wondered.

  “I don’t know. Use your imagination! Go to the public toilets and ask some of the pervs hanging about.”

  “They’ll think I’m a perv!” Matty said, horrified.

  “And let’s pull out the stops on finding Tommy’s car, there’s bound to be forensic in it,” I said.

  When everyone had finished writing in their notebooks I got to my feet. “Ok lads, so we’re agreed, we’re going to go up to Tommy Little’s house on the Falls Road. Matty, you can either check out the toilets or you can come with us.”

  “Fine, I’ll do the bloody toilets. You boys are old. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. I’m not going back to West Belfast after last time.”

  “What happened last time?” Alan asked.

  “Ach, it was nothing, some wee lads threw a couple of bottles at us. No big deal,” I said.

  Alan looked grave. Of course I hadn’t written about this in the logbook which only made it seem worse.

  “I’ll go with you and I’ll drive and we’ll bring a couple of cannon fodder just for the laugh of it,” Alan said.

  I looked at Crabbie. “I’d take his offer, boss. Sergeant McCallister is the best driver in the station,” Crabbie said.

  “Up the Shankill and down the Falls for the poo
r wee peeler it’s a kick in the balls,” Matty sang cheerfully.

  “Let’s hope not,” Crabbie said with a worried look on his beetle brows.

  10: SITTING DUCKS

  We suited up in riot gear and all the boys checked their Sterling sub-machine guns out of the armoury, except for me, naturally, because I still hadn’t managed to return mine from Coronation Road.

  On the way out the door Chief Inspector Brennan saw us.

  “Where are you boys headed like it’s fucking Christmas?” he asked.

  “The Falls, we’re going to do a drop on Tommy Little’s house.”

  “Tommy Little is?”

  “Victim number one.”

  “Oh yeah. You wouldn’t mind if I tagged along, would you? Bit of a fug now after all the excitement of the press this morning,” Brennan said.

  “Nah, sir, better not, be a bit of a tight squeeze,” I replied, unwilling for this to become even more of a charabanc ride to the circus.

  Brennan was not to be deterred. “Won’t be a tight squeeze for me. I’ll be sitting in the front.”

  Cut to twenty minutes later: McCallister driving, Brennan next to him in the bird-dog seat, me, Crabbie and two gormless constables in riot gear, sweltering in the back. One of the constables was a woman. First one I’d seen in Carrick. Her name was Heather Fitzgerald and her cheeks were so red it was like they were on fire. Nice looking wee lass with her emerald eyes and curly black hair, timid as a mouse, too; it would be a real shame if we all copped it in some roadside bomb and she got that pretty face blown to smithereens.

  “What’s the address?” McCallister asked as we hit West Belfast.

  “33 Falls Court off the Falls Road,” I said.

  Falls Road was not as bad as we’d been expecting. Sure there was a mad press scrum outside the Sinn Fein advice centre and there were police checkpoints and a couple of army helicopters up, but most people were just getting on with their business, going to the grocers, the butchers, the milk shop and of course the pub and the bookies.

  Falls Court was another one of those murderous dead-end streets that peelers hated and number 33, naturally, was right at the end.