The Cold, Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  “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?

  “What did you find?” Crabbie asked from outside.

  “No classical. No opera,” I said.

  “I can see his bookcase from here. They’re all comics and Enid Blyton. The guy’s sub-literate.”

  “Let’s do a thorough shakedown before we jump to any conclusions.”

  “You do it. I’ll keep watch.”

  I worked the bedroom and the bathroom. I found some grass, a sheet of acid tabs and a couple of body-building magazines.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  We left the .38 at the ballistics lab in Cultra and told them to match it against the slugs on Tommy Little and Andrew Young and then headed for home.

  We drove back to Carrick and picked up Matty.

  The released perv was one Victor Combs of 41A Milebush Tower, Monkstown. Ex-schoolteacher, currently unemployed. He’d been caught having sex in a park with another man. The other man – a seventeen-year-old – had accused him of rape and the judge had bought it.

  It sounded like he’d gotten the shaft but we drove over to see him anyway.

  Milebush Tower was another of those shit-coloured four-storey concrete blocks of flats that had grown up in the sink estates of Ulster in the ’60s and ’70s. They were damp, cold and seemingly deliberately unlovely. The day the Northern Ireland Housing Executive gave you your key they probably gave you a suicide information leaflet.

  We parked the Land Rover and hoofed it up to 41A.

  Mr Combs was in.

  He was wearing a bathrobe and listening to classical music which got our attention.

  He was heavy, balding, forty-five, but he looked twenty years older and he walked from the door back to the sofa with a cane.

  The flat was as nice as he could make it.

  There were books, records and he kept it clean. He had a cat.

  I let McCrabban run it while I looked through the books and records.

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

  “I was here.”

  “All night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can anyone vouch for that?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Can anyone vouch for the fact that you say you were here all night?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Do you own a car, Mr Combs?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know a man called Tommy Little?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know someone called Andrew Young?”

  “No. What is this about?”

  The records weren’t that impressive. Boring collections of classical music done in the early ’70s by cheapo German firms. No sheet music.

  I looked at Crabbie and he shook his head. Combs certainly didn’t look as if he could get too physical with anyone.

  “Under the terms of your probation I have the right to search these premises for a firearm. I am exercising that right,” I said.

  No gun. No contraband. Nothin
g suspicious.

  But there was the fact that he had no alibi.

  “Why are you still in Northern Ireland, Mr Combs? Aren’t you afraid that you’ll be kneecapped because you’re a sex offender?” I asked.

  Combs’s grey face became greyer. “Let them kneecap me. Let them do anything they want. I don’t care. Let them kill me. I didn’t do anything wrong and they know it. My life’s ruined. Everything’s ruined. My family won’t speak to me. My friends. Fuck it. Let them come. Let them do their fucking worst.”

  “I like the defiance. Do you have anything to back it up? A wee pistol maybe?” I asked.

  “What did you find?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He nodded. “Who’d sell me a piece anyway?”

  “Just about anybody,” Matty said.

  I sat on the sofa and looked at him. “What happened to you, mate?”

  He didn’t reply for a long time.

  “Love happened,” he said at last.

  I looked into his strangely pale eyes.

  “Go on.”

  He shook his head. “It was my mistake. I flew too close to the sun.”

  We took our leave and drove back to Carrick Police Station.

  “Big tubby,” Matty scoffed. “He flew too close to the bun more like.”

  Crabbie laughed and then pointed at me.

  “Remind Matty about Icarus, why don’t you, Sean.”

  “Icarus was the son of Daedalus who was famous for building the labyrinth before he got famous for building wings that didn’t work.”

  “Coincidence,” Matty said.

  “Probably,” I agreed.

  We got to the station. I sent the lads home and I went in and briefed the Chief. Brennan poured me some Jura while he listened to my report.

  “Not much progress, eh, Sean?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, at the least the nutter hasn’t struck again, has he?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “What else is new?” he asked.

  I drank the whiskey. “In my life, sir?”

  “In your life, Sean.”

  “I went to the flicks, saw Chariots of Fire.”

  “Any good?”

  “They go for a run along the beach at the Old Course in St Andrews. I think you’d like that bit, sir.”

  He yawned. “All right. Sally forth! And take my advice and go to bed early. We’ll be needing you before dawn.”

  “What for?”

  He tapped his nose. “Top Secret VIP on her way.”

  Her could only mean Mrs Thatcher or the Queen. Either would be bad news.

  I went home but I couldn’t go to sleep early. Never could. I took some of the EEC bacon, fried it with eggs and potato bread. I ate it in front of the TV. There was a brand new cop show on called Magnum P.I. He was a PI. He was called Magnum. Like Serpico he had an impressive moustache. This, I realized, was my problem.

  I phoned Laura but she told me that she was just on her way out.

  “Who with?”

  “A friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “A friend from college.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Oh, you’re impossible!” she said and hung up.

  I called an old mate of mine, Jack Pougher, from Special Branch intel. I span him my “Freddie Scavanni is a major player” theory. He’d heard nothing about it. He told me I should stick to detecting. I told him I was shite at that. We discussed cop moustaches and agreed that they were on the way out.

  I took a pint glass out of the freezer and made myself a vodka gimlet.

  The phone rang. It was ballistics. “This gun did not fire the bullets that killed your homicide victims,” some fucking Nigel said in a home-counties accent.

  “Are you sure?”

  “We can say it with 99 per cent confidence.”

  I thanked him and hung up the phone. Billy White did not shoot Tommy Little. At least not with that gun. I drank the vodka and thought about the killer. He’d been so quick to get our attention before with postcards and sawn-off limbs and now nothing: no new victims, no new communications. Surely that meant something. But what?

  I thought about Dermot McCann, a boy I’d known at St Malachy’s. Dermot had been very sexually adventurous even for 1968 … Dermot was now inside doing ten years for bomb making.

  I thought about him from Loughshore Park. Stopped thinking about him. Got annoyed. I opened the front door and left out the milk bottles. I went back in, stripped down to my jeans and T-shirt, got an oil can from the garden shed and pretended to oil the squeaky front gate. If Mrs Campbell came out now and did her “Oh, Mr Duffy, it’s such a shame about the Pope” thing I’d lift her over the fence, carry her into the living room and fuck her goddamn brains out.

  I oiled the gate. The rain came on. Mrs Campbell did not come out.

  15: THURSDAY MAY 21 1981

  Tuesday had been a bust. Wednesday had been a bust. Two days of nothing. And then on Thursday all hell broke loose.

  4 a.m. Carrickfergus

  They didn’t phone. Crabbie rang my front-door bell at four in the morning. I was convinced it was an inept terrorist attack and opened the door with my service revolver cocked.

  “Don’t shoot, it’s me,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “Get a move on, Sean. We’re meeting the Chief in half an hour.”

  “Let me make a cup of tea,” I murmured.

  “No time for tea, the others are waiting in the Land Rover, come on, I’ll help you. Lemme get your kit off.”

  “Don’t touch me! Wait in the living room.”

  I quickly threw on my dress uniform and body armour. “Last night I told a mate in Special Branch my theory about Freddie Scavanni,” I yelled from the bathroom.

  “What did he say to that?” McCrabban asked.

  “He said I was a genius and he sent over the file on Jack the Ripper.”

  “Have you solved that one too?”

  “It was Queen Victoria.”

  “I knew it all along. Easy to conceal a machete under all that crinoline.”

  I grabbed my electric razor and the pair of us went outside.

  “I cleaned that graffiti off the back of the Rover,” Crabbie said.

  I had completely forgotten about that. “Thanks, mate,” I told him.

  “You can go in the front, Sean,” Crabbie said. “I can see you’re fragile today.”

  I got in the passenger’s seat. Sergeant McCallister was driving, McCrabban, Matty and three reservists were in the back. No one had mentioned the name “Thatcher” yet but this had to be about her.

  “We’re to rendezvous at Ballyclare at 04.30 hours,” McCallister said.

  “‘04.30 hours?’ Is that what he told you? Does he think we’re the bloody army?”

  4.30 a.m. Ballyclare

  Brennan was sitting there like Lord Muck in his famous Finn Juhl armchair that he must have transported in the back of the Land Rover. He tapped his watch and grinned at us as we pulled up in front of the Five Corners Public House, which was open and serving Irish coffee to the lads.

  The sun was just coming up over the Slieve Gullion and Lough Neagh and if the big line of black clouds to the north would keep away it might be a fine morning. The landlord of the Five Corners passed an Irish coffee into my hands and I took it gratefully. Brennan was enjoying himself, surrounded by his men, in the wee hours, in his full dress uniform and leather gloves.

  “Men, we are to proceed to Aldergrove Airport in convoy where we are to meet with the brave boys of Ballyclare RUC and establish a roadblock, in co-operation with units of the British Army, on the Ballyrobin Road in Templepatrick so that an unnamed very important person can drive to Belfast,” he said.

  “Why doesn’t she take a helicopter like everybody else?” McCallister wondered.

  “Wrecks her hair, doesn’t it,” Matty offered.

  5 a.m. Templepatrick

  The army had the whole
village sewn up and a brigadier general told Brennan that we were surplus to requirements.

  “We were ordered up at four in the morning for this!” Brennan said furiously and after some negotiation we were allowed to set up our three Land Rovers further along the road.

  “They’re on the way! Attention!” one of the squaddies yelled and the soldiers stiffened. We did not. Instead we fidgeted in our body armour and Crabbie explained to the reserve constables that because this was both out of regular hours and perilous we could claim hardship allowance and danger money at the same time.

  At 5.30 a.m. two police motorcycles were the heralds for two fast-moving army Land Rovers, two equally speedy police Land Rovers and two bullet-proofed Jaguars that presumably contained the Prime Minister and her staff.

  I didn’t see her. All I saw was a blur.

  “Was that it?” Matty asked me. Nobody knew the answer and we got back in the Rovers feeling deflated.

  Fifteen minutes later on the way back to Carrickfergus we were diverted to young Shane Davidson’s muse, the Kilroot Power Station, where there was trouble.

  6.10 a.m. Kilroot

  Two dozen workers backed by another hundred and fifty men from God knows where had formed an illegal picket line in front of the power plant. The shift change was trying to get in and if they couldn’t all the lights in north Belfast and East Antrim would be out, which wouldn’t impress Mrs Thatcher during her news conference about how everything in Ulster was just tickety boo.

  We parked the Land Rovers a hundred metres away.

  “Machine guns away, lads,” Brennan ordered and we advanced with side arms only. In my case this was an easy instruction to obey since my SMG was still back on my hall table in Coronation Road.

  “You lads wait here, I’ll go talk to the fucking scum,” Brennan said with the diplomatic savoir faire we had all grown to know and love.

  “I’ll go with you,” Sergeant Burke said and McCallister gave me the nod. I sighed and joined them. We walked to the picketers who were holding up signs that said “Thatcher = Traitor” and “No Deals With Terrorsits [sic]”.

  The headman was frickin Councillor George frickin Seawright who was rapidly becoming the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of my little drama.