The Cold, Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  “Says Freddie Scavanni, the new head of the IRA’s Force Research Unit.”

  Billy shook his head. “We didn’t kill him. We were all hanging out here until midnight. Ask any of the lads. The snooker was on the box and we were hanging out.”

  Shane was looking at me. There was something other than contempt in his eyes.

  He knew that I knew. That he and Tommy had been having an affair.

  If I mentioned this in front of Billy, Billy would have him summarily executed. Was it worth the threat? I wondered if Shane had the wherewithal to be my prime suspect? To turn Queen’s evidence?

  “Let me show you something,” I said.

  I took out my notebook, drew a labyrinth on a piece of paper and passed the notebook across.

  Shane took a gander at it. Not a flicker. Billy took a look. Similar reaction.

  Still, they were lying about something. I could feel it in my cop bones.

  Was Tommy being followed by a suspicious and jealous Walter? Was Freddie lying? Jesus, there were a million possibilities. I needed to talk to Shane on his lonesome. I needed to arrest and get him away from Billy, bring him down to the station under the bright lights.

  My beeper started ringing. “Can I use your phone?” I asked.

  “Be my guest,” Billy muttered.

  I called Carrick station. “You better get back here, Sergeant Duffy. There’s been another incident,” Sergeant Burke said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “The Mount Prospect Pub, Larne. It’s a poofter bar.”

  “When?”

  “Ten minutes ago. The details are still coming in.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  I put the phone down. Looked at them. “Another attack on homosexuals. In Larne,” I said almost to myself.

  Billy grinned. “And this time you’re our alibi.”

  10 p.m. The Mount Prospect Pub, Essex Street, Larne

  Apparently a gay-friendly establishment in a gay-unfriendly town. If port cities are always more cosmopolitan than the hinterland then Larne was either the exception that proved the rule or else the hinterland had quantum tunnelled itself all the way to Iran.

  Larne announced its credentials on every route in to town with massive murals of an equine King Billy crossing the River Boyne on an almost equine horse. The Mount Prospect Pub was a sad little breeze-block building that said nothing about itself or its clientele on any sign, but which must have been a bit of an open secret.

  When I arrived the street was cordoned off and filled with uniformed officers, plain-clothes officers and an army team examining the explosive.

  A young copper filled me in on the details. The bomb had been attached to a grille covering the window, IRA fashion. Two pounds of high explosive packed around nails and screws. One man was dead, sixteen seriously injured.

  Soldiers were picking up the nails where they had found them and peelers were trampling over the bits of brick and broken glass.

  “All right, people! Everybody stop moving! This is a crime scene and you’re all marching around like a herd of bloody elephants!”

  Everyone stopped and turned to look at me.

  “Excuse me, who are you?” a gangly man asked. He was wearing a green gabardine knee-length raincoat, and a brown toupee. He had a moustache, round glasses and a North Down accent but all I could see was that big plank of green.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Duffy. Carrick RUC. This is my investigation,” I said.

  He pushed his glasses up his nose and shook his head.

  “Go back to your work, gentlemen!” he ordered.

  “Don’t listen to this big lump of snot, I’m the gaffer here,” I said and tried to push past him. He put his hand on my shoulder. I grabbed his hand and twisted it back against his wrist.

  “Touch me again and I’ll shoot that thing off your fucking head,” I snarled at him.

  “You’re not in charge any more, Duffy,” the man said in a nasally, civil servanty tone. “You’ve been superseded.”

  The beat coppers and the squaddies turned to look at me.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I asked.

  “I’m Detective Chief Inspector Todd of Special Branch,” he said in a loud voice meant to carry to the end of the street and back.

  “On who’s authority have you—”

  “The Chief Constable’s authority, Sergeant Duffy, the Chief Constable of the RUC. I’ll send an officer over in the morning for your evidence and your report. I expect the full cooperation of you and your team.”

  I stared at him open mouthed.

  “Do you understand, Duffy?”

  “Yes,” I muttered and – after an insolent pause – added “sir.”

  There was nothing more for me to do here.

  I got in the BMW and drove back to Carrick at 100 mph on the line.

  I kept going until I hit Greenisland and then Monkstown.

  I went to see Victor Combs.

  Up four flights. Screaming wives, screaming children, yelling men.

  I knocked on Combs’s door.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Peelers,” I said.

  He opened the door. He was still in his dressing gown. I walked into the kitchen, opened his fridge, got myself a can of Harp and sat on his sofa.

  “Account for your movements from seven o’clock onwards,” I said.

  He told me the story of the TV shows he’d watched and of a brief phone call to his sick mother.

  “What’s this about?” he asked.

  I finished the beer, crumpled the can, chucked it at the TV set and drove back to Carrick.

  I sped up the Tongue Loanen to Walter Hays’s. He was half drunk and watching the riots on TV. But again he had no alibi.

  I searched the house for musical scores or manual typewriters. Nada on both.

  He offered me a martini. I took it. He offered me another. I went out to the Beemer and drove home.

  11 p.m. Carrickfergus

  I knocked on Laura’s door but she didn’t answer. I drove back to Coronation Road. Kids had spent the day painting the kerb stones red, white and blue.

  “You look as if you’ve had a day of it,” Mrs Campbell said, putting out the milk bottles.

  “Who are you talking to?” a man asked from inside the house.

  “Our neighbour,” she told him and then in a whisper to me, “he’s back.”

  “Haven’t met him. Invite him in,” the voice said.

  “Would you like to come in?” Mrs Campbell asked.

  “No thank you, I better go,” I replied.

  “What’s he say?” Mr Campbell asked.

  “He wants to go home. He hasn’t had his tea,” Mrs Campbell said and smiled.

  “Nonsense! He’ll have tea with us. Sure I’m just sitting down now,” Mr Campbell bellowed.

  Mrs C shook her head at me. “He won’t take no for an answer,” she whispered.

  A very late tea with the Campbells: sausages, fried eggs, chips, beans, fried soda bread.

  Mr Campbell looked like somebody’s dangerous uncle who only came down from the hills to whore and drink and take revenge for petty slights. He had a hedge of black hair, a black beard and a crushing handshake. Easily six six, 250.

  I ate the food and the kids looked at their father for the first time in a couple of months with a mixture of awe, excitement and terror. For this household, tea, especially tea at eleven o’clock, was a time for eating not talking. When we were nearly done Mr Campbell asked me my team. I told him Liverpool. He seemed satisfied with that. One of the kids asked me my favourite colour. I told him it was a tie between red and blue. That also elicited murmurs of approval.

  I finished up, thanked the Campbells, went next door, turned on the midnight news. The riot was still going on. The cops had lost control of the situation and the army had been called in. Eighteen police officers had been injured by petrol bombs. Fifty cars had been hijacked and set alight. Eighty-eight plastic bullets had been f
ired. A helicopter had been forced down by gunshots. A paint factory had been set on fire.

  In other news: Mrs Thatcher had paid a brief visit to the City Hospital in Belfast this morning; Courtaulds were closing down their remaining factories in Northern Ireland putting five hundred people out of work; Harland and Wolff were laying off twelve hundred welders for an indefinite period; a “gay bar” had been attacked in Larne …

  16: PATTERNS

  Victoria Estate opened her eyes in the morning light. Birdsong. A whistling milkman. The sound of kids throwing milk bottles at brick walls. I went downstairs. Through the living-room window I could see children kicking around a football. Others were playing hopscotch and hide and seek while women with curlers in their hair chatted across the fences.

  Lou Reed was on the radio, singing “Sweet Jane”.

  Coffee. Toast. Jeans. Sweater. Trainers.

  Car. I checked underneath for bombs.

  Not today. I drove along Coronation Road. Kids waved, adults nodded. In a council estate or housing project there is a feeling of intimacy, a feeling of togetherness that perhaps can only be replicated among a ship’s crew.

  I liked it.

  I stopped short.

  There was a big plate of wobbly yellow iron placed over a large pothole at the top of Coronation Road. In any other country in the world you just would have driven over it, but here, time and again, coppers had been blown up by explosive devices such as these. You dug a hole in the road, you filled it with C4 and nails, you covered it with a plate of iron to make it look like it had been done by a road crew as a temporary fix. You blew it up by remote. This was Protestant Coronation Road in Protestant Victoria in Protestant Carrickfergus and there was a 99 per cent chance that this really was a temporary fix by a road crew but I wasn’t going to drive over it.

  I reversed the car and went south along Coronation Road instead.

  Chicken? Sure. Alive? Aye.

  I went to the newsagents, collected my free papers from Oscar, told him I’d had a word with Bobby Cameron, which, technically, was true. Oscar was selling paint and hardware now to make ends meet. I took the sample sheets of every shade of blue and drove to the barracks.

  Normally I was the first one in but this morning Brennan was waiting for me.

  He pointed to his office and when I had sat down, he got up from behind the desk and closed the door. He offered me a whiskey.

  “Too early for me, sir,” I said.

  He poured himself one.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” I agreed.

  “I sent off the files, case notes and the physical evidence this morning, but Chief Inspector Todd would appreciate a full report from you,” Brennan said.

  “I’ll get working on it straight away,” I said with a neutral tone.

  Brennan sipped his whiskey. “Apparently there was some kind of incident last night in Larne?” Brennan asked.

  “Sir?”

  “Todd says that you yelled at him.”

  “That’s not my recollection, sir,” I said.

  “You had a week, son. A week is a fucking geologic era in a murder investigation. You had a week and you turned up nothing. You haven’t had one person in here for questioning. Face it, Sean. You were in over your head.”

  “I’m not sure I would categorize it quite that way, sir.”

  “The killer made a monkey out of you. Sending you postcards, sending you on wild-goose chases up to Belfast to get anonymous notes, writing you codes! That sort of thing doesn’t happen in Northern Ireland.”

  “Neither does a gay serial killer, sir.”

  “You were being played, son.”

  “You may be right, sir, in fact I think that the notes, the list of names, the music score, the murders subsequent to Tommy Little’s may have been a smokescreen to cover an assassination of a high-ranking IRA operative who—”

  Brennan held up his hand. “Save it for your report. It’s not your worry any more. Nor mine. It’s that most glorious of things now: someone else’s problem.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s my fault, Sean, I should have reined you in. You’re very young. It was my job to supervise you, to mentor you, to get you to take all this in a more deliberate manner. I thought Sergeant McCallister would help, I thought an experienced man like McCrabban would help. It should have been me.”

  “No, sir, if there’s any blame to be apportioned for my handling of this investigation, it’s mine alone.”

  “Detective Chief Inspector Todd is a good man. He worked the Shankill Butchers case. He’ll have a couple of inspectors under him and three or four sergeants. An entire forensic team. They’ll find this freak and get it sorted in no time at all.”

  I tried a last desperate throw of the dice. “I thought the point of this, sir, was that in these troubled times resources were at a premium. Surely someone of Detective Chief Inspector Todd’s calibre would be best served looking into terrorist-related offences?”

  “Not now that the Chief Constable’s taken an interest. Not now that the Secretary of State has been on the blower. Not now that the Sunday World has got involved. This has become big. This has become an embarrassment. It needs to be nipped in the bud.”

  “In that case, sir, my team could help with—”

  “No!” Brennan exclaimed.

  “No, Sergeant Duffy. DCI Todd has his own team and resources and he doesn’t want you cluttering up his investigation. You are not to interview any of the witnesses or interfere with this investigation in any way. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Clearly Todd not only didn’t like me but had utter contempt for the work that I had done so far on this case.

  And who knew? Maybe he was right. Maybe I had cocked this whole thing up through lack of experience.

  Brennan and I stared at one another.

  “You’re not being reprimanded or anything. Don’t get that idea. This is just a simple reassignment. And in case you’re wondering, I did fight for you, Sean. But this thing has just become … The names in the Sunday World … It’s just another distraction. You’re right. We’re stretched very thin here. Very thin indeed. We need to close the book on this nut. And then focus on, you know, preventing a bloody civil war.”

  “Yes, sir. But I can still help, sir, I’ve got a lot of ideas.”

  He coughed and looked uneasy. “I’ll be blunt, Sean. Todd was furious at you last night. He wanted me to put you on report. I put him straight on that but he doesn’t want you poking your nose in. He wants you to forward all tips and evidence straight to his team at Special Branch.”

  I nodded. I had heard enough. I had heard enough and I was desperate to get out of here. “Of course … So what do you want me to do now, sir?”

  “You’re to type up your report on Tommy Little and Andrew Young, fax it off to Todd’s team at Special Branch and when that’s done … Well, when that’s done, you can go back to your work on the Ulster bank fraud. They’re all important. Every case.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you can stick Matty and Crabbie on those bike thefts from Paddington’s Warehouse.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, go. Type that report. Don’t mope! And get your bloody hair cut!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I left the office and took a deep a breath. I sat down at my desk.

  Crabbie and Matty were looking at me through the door.

  “Do you already know?” I asked them.

  Crabbie nodded.

  “It’s probably for the best,” Matty said. “I mean, who wants to be known as the detective who solved the Belfast Queer Murders? It’s not like catching the Yorkshire Ripper, is it?”

  “No, I suppose it isn’t … Listen, lads, I have this report to type up and you two are to get onto that bicycle theft case … ach, fuck it, who fancies a pint?”

  We retired next door to the Royal Oak, waited until the bar opened, got three pints of Guinne
ss and sat near the fire.

  “Seawright was in Larne yesterday,” Matty said as he lit up a smoke.

  “Tell Todd. You’re to forward all tips or information to his team at Special Branch,” I said.

  “What about the evidence we gained illegally?” Crabbie asked.

  “What evidence?”

  “Breaking into Shane Davidson’s apartment.”

  “We didn’t gain any evidence, except about his really quite good musical tastes.”

  He had a point though. When I typed my report should I mention the fact that a man I’d had a homosexual dalliance with had implied that Shane also had the occasional homosexual dalliance? Did that mean that Shane was a homosexual? Were Sean and Bobby more than just good friends? Did any of this have a bearing on the case?

  On reflection it probably did, but how to broach it?

  “I’ll tell them. I’ll say that I had ‘an opportunity to examine Shane Davidson’s flat and found nothing of interest’. If he asks me how I’ll tell him the stupid wee shite left his door open. Don’t worry, I’ll leave you out of it, Crabbie.”

  Crabbie looked hurt. “You don’t have to take the fall for me. I’m old enough and ugly enough to look after myself.”

  “Nobody’s taking the fall for anybody. Come, let’s drink up.”

  We swallowed our Guinnesses and went back to the station. I closed my office door and laid out the blue paint strips on my desk. My favourite colour is blue.

  Klein blue. Sapphire. Persian blue. Midnight blue. Columbia blue. Indigo. I lit a cig. I swam in blue. I tripped on blue.

  I sat there for a while and then I swiped the strips off my desk into the wastepaper basket.

  I typed up my report mentioning that I had “followed Shane to a public lavatory where suspected homosexual cottaging took place”.

  My report was nine pages long. I showed it to McCrabban and he thought it was fine. I showed it to Sergeant McCallister and he thought there was a distinct sarcastic tone that I should probably remove.

  I faxed it anyway. At lunchtime I saw Todd on BBC Northern Ireland news which was more than I had ever managed to achieve – so perhaps the powers that be were right in firing me.