The Cold, Cold Ground (7 page)

“Did you hear about the rape?”

“I got Crabbie to tell me everything. Different hands? Pieces of music? Queer sex? This thing’s far too complicated already,” McCallister muttered darkly.

McCallister was close to fifty, a twenty-five-year man with a lot of experience both before and after the Troubles.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I asked.

“No, I haven’t and I don’t like it.”

“Me neither.”

“Are you eating that cake?”

Alan walked me back to my car and I drove to the centre of Carrickfergus.

A bunch of kids were walking around aimlessly. There was nothing for them to do with school cancelled except that there was always potential for a rumble since the Proddy kids were easily identifiable by their red, white and blue school uniforms and the Catholics by their uniforms of green, white and gold.

There were few actual shoppers. Since ICI had shut down
the centre of Carrick had withered. The bookshop had closed, the shoe shop had closed, the baby clothes shop had closed …

I easily found a parking place on West Street and dandered past a boarded-up grocers before I came to Sammy McGuinn, my chain-smoking, short-arsed, Marxist barber.

He’d given me two good haircuts since I’d come here which was a high batting average for Ulster and probably why he was still in business.

I went in and sat down in the waiting area.

He was finishing work on a man in a brown suit with a ridiculous comb-over. Sammy was only five five and he had lowered his customer practically to floor level.

“Nationalism is a plot by international capitalism to keep the working classes from uniting. Irish independence separated the working classes of Dublin, Liverpool and Glasgow which destroyed the union movement forever in these islands just when capitalism was entering its crisis stage …” he was saying.

I tuned him out and read the cinema reviews in
Socialist Worker
.

Raiders of the Lost Ark
sounded promising despite “its patronizing caricatures of third-world manual labourers”.

When Sammy was finished with his customer I showed him the musical score.

As well as being Carrick’s only remaining barber Sammy was a violinist with the Ulster Orchestra and had two thousand classical records in his flat above the shop. A collection he had shown me when he’d found out from Paul at CarrickTrax that I bought the occasional classical record and that I’d done ten years of piano. Ten years of piano under protest.

“What do you make of that?” I asked him, showing him the photocopy of the music.

“What about it?”

“What is it?”

“Surprised at you, Sean. I thought you knew your onions,” he said, with an irritating sneer.

Like a lot of barbers, Sammy was completely bald and that chrome dome really invited a Benny Hill slap right about now.

His lips were tightly shut. He wanted the words:

“No, I really don’t know,” I said.

“Puccini,
La Bohème
!” he announced with a laugh.

“Aye, I thought it was Puccini,” I said.

“You say that now. Anybody could say it now.”

“The words are missing, aren’t they? It’s not the overture, is it?”

“No.”

“You don’t happen to know what the missing words are, by any chance?”

“Of course,” he said with an eye roll.

“Go on then!”

“
Che gelida manina, se la lasci riscaldar. Cercar che giova? Al buio non si trova. Ma per fortuna é una notte di luna, e qui la luna, l abbiamo vicina
,” he sang in a surprisingly attractive baritone.

“Very nice.”

“Do you need a translation?”

“Uhm, something about hands, fortune, the moon?”

“Your little hand is freezing. Let me warm it for you. What’s the use of looking? We won’t find it in the dark. But luckily it’s a moonlit night, and the moon is close to us.”

I got out a pencil and made him say it again and wrote it down in my notebook.

“What’s this all about?” he asked.

“Nothing important,” I said and drove back to the police station.

I knocked on Chief Inspector Brennan’s door.

“Enter!” he said.

He looked up from the
Daily Mail
crossword. “You seem worried, what’s going on, Sean?” he asked.

“We may be in trouble,” I said.

“How so?”

“I think we have a sexual murderer on our hands, perhaps even a nascent serial killer.”

“Have a seat.”

I closed the door. His cheeks were ruddy and he was a little the worse for drink.

“What makes you think that?” he asked in a cold burr, leaning back in his pricey Finn Juhl armchair. I filled him in on all the details but he was sceptical of my thesis. “Northern Ireland’s never had a serial killer,” he said.

“No. Anyone with that mindset has always been able to join one side or the other. Torture and kill with abandon while still being part of the ‘cause’. But this seems different, doesn’t it? The sexual nature of the crime, the note. This is not something we’ve encountered before.”

“I already put the paperwork through that this was a hit on an informer,” Brennan said with a trace of annoyance.

“I’m not ruling anything out, sir, but at this stage I’m thinking it’s not that.”

“Let me see that piece of music.”

I passed across the photocopy under which I had written: “Your tiny hand is frozen. Let me warm it for you. What’s the use of looking? We won’t find it in the dark. But luckily it’s a moonlit night and the moon is close to us.”

He examined it and shook his head.

“He’s mocking the victim, sir. And us. He’s taking the piss. He’s telling us that he’s cut the victim’s hand off and he’s taken it somewhere else. He’s making game of us, sir.”

Brennan shook his head and leaned forward. He took his reading glasses off and set them on the table. “Look, Sean, you’re new around here. I know you want to make a name for yourself. You’re ambitious, I like that. But you can’t go bandying words like ‘serial killer’ around for all and sundry. The shit’s hitting the fan everywhere. You cannae throw a brick out there without clobbering a journalist. They’re all looking for an angle, aren’t they? And believe me, I know Carrick, so I do. Serial killers. Come off it. We don’t do that in these parts. Ok?”

“If you say so, sir.”

He smiled in a conciliatory manner. “And besides, for a serial killer you need more than one victim, don’t you?”

“Our guy in the Barn Field and then the hand from the other bloke. That’s two.”

Brennan passed the musical score back across the table. He took a sip of cold coffee from a mug on his desk. “Who else have you told about this theory of yours?”

“McCrabban and Sergeant McCallister. I’ll have to tell Matty too.”

“Good. Nobody else. What’s the status of your investigation?”

“We might get a break soon, sir. Now we have two sets of fingerprints working their way through the channels.”

He nodded and put his glasses back on. I could see that I was being dismissed. I got to my feet. “Do your job, do it well and do it quietly,” Brennan muttered, examining the
Daily Mail
again.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sean, one more thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“‘Idle fellow but he gives us a buzz.’ Thirteen across. Five letters.”

I thought for a second. “Drone, sir?”

“Drone? Drone, oh yes. Ok, you may go.”

I exited. It was late and the place was emptying out.

I borrowed a couple of ciggies from someone’s table and headed out onto the fire escape to think.

There was trouble up in Belfast again. Potassium nitrate flares falling through the darkening sky. A Gazelle helicopter flying low over the lough water. Little kids walking past the police station showing each other the best technique for lobbing Molotov cocktails over the fence. Jesus, what a nightmare.

This was a city crucified under its own blitz.

This was a city poisoning its own wells, salting its own fields, digging its own grave …

3:
A DIFFERENT MUSIC

I smoked the fags and when the rain came I climbed back inside, locked the evidence in the CID room and drove home.

The cows were gone. The cow shit had been scraped up and bagged by entrepreneurs. Mrs Campbell told me all about the great bovine escape and how Arthur’s prized roses had been ruined and how he would be furious when he got back from the North Sea, which wouldn’t, she added, be for two more long, lonely weeks.

I went into the kitchen and made myself a pint-glass vodka gimlet. I threw frozen chips in the deep fat fryer and dumped a can of beans in a pot. I fried two eggs and ate them with the chips and beans.

At seven o’clock I shaved and changed into a shirt, my black jeans, leather jacket and DM shoes. I put on a black leather waistcoat. It looked good but there was a slight Han Solo vibe so I hung it back in the cupboard.

I went out. A stray dog began walking beside me. Black lab. Cheerful looking character. Victoria Estate had dozens of stray dogs and cats, fed, and sometimes adopted, by the local children.

I was halfway along Barn Road when a guy ran out of his house wearing a white singlet and waving a ten-pound sledgehammer.

“Now you’re going to get it!” he screamed at me. “You’re really going to get it!”

“For what?”

“Your dog just took a dump against my gate. I finally caught you, you dirty bastard! You and your dirty dog. You are going to
pay, mate! Oh yes!”

“That’s not my dog,” I said.

His consternation and disappointment knew no bounds. I could sympathize: there is nothing,
nothing
in this world more deflating than the realization that the lumping villain who has been tormenting you is not going to get an arse-kicking after all.

He asked me if I was sure it was not my dog but I just kept walking.

I went by a DeLorean broken down on the Scotch Quarter, gull wings askew, steam coming from its rear engine, which did not bode well.

The Dobbins was deserted and I got a seat next to the massive sixteenth-century fireplace. I ordered a Guinness, took out my notebook and looked over my bullet points from the day. Twelve pages of notes. Lots of questions marks and exclamation points. This was a case already spiralling out of control.

I nursed my pint until 9.30.

She didn’t show.

“The hell with it!” I said, got up and began walking home along West Street.

“Sergeant Duffy!” she called out.

I turned. She was wearing old jeans and a red blouse, ratty sneakers. She hadn’t dressed up and her hair was wet. Spur of the moment decision?

We went back in. I got her a gin and tonic. Another pint for me.

“Look, it’s a wee bit late in the game to ask this but …” I began.

“Yes?”

“What’s your name?”

She laughed. “I must have told you.”

“Nope.”

“Laura.”

“Mine’s Sean.”

“I know. Although I bet they all call you the fenian or the left footer or something, don’t they?”

“Who? The other cops?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not like that. At least not to my face. The constables call me ‘Duffy’ or ‘Sergeant Duffy’. I’m Sean to everybody else except Carol who calls me Mr Sean cos she’s from Fermanagh. I’m only mildly exotic. Catholic hiring has gone up since Mrs Thatcher seized the reins. Even the dyed-in-the-wool bigots are going to have to get used to us soon enough.”

She seemed unconvinced.

“I’m CID,” I further explained. “Believe me, that’s more of an issue. Some divisions are more important than others and detective versus beat cop is
the
historic peeler schism.”

“If you say so.”

“Did you have any trouble being an RC in medical school?”

“You knew I was a Catholic? My name’s Laura, I’m a doctor, how could you—”

I pointed to her crucifix. “Proddies don’t wear those unless they’ve got a morbid fear of vampires.”

“You don’t see many Catholic policemen. Your father was a peeler?”

“God, no. A clerk, then a country solicitor. Yours?”

“Country doctor.”

She had taken precisely one sip of her gin and tonic when her pager went.

She found a telephone.

She came back ashen.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The Peacock Room Restaurant, South Belfast,” she said, her voice trembling.

“A bomb?”

“Incendiary.”

“How many?”

“Six burned alive. A dozen more in the Royal Victoria Hospital. The coroner asked me if I would help ID the victims
in the morning.”

“What did you say?”

“What can you say?”

She downed her gin and tonic. I took her hand to stop it shaking. It was cold.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

Back on West Street it was drizzling and we could hear the sound of rioting in Belfast again, distant and ominous.

“Walk me home,” she said.

I walked her to one of the new flats on Governor’s Place opposite the castle. We put on the TV news. All three channels were carrying it. It was a blast bomb that had been placed next to an oil drum filled with petrol and sugar – IRA napalm. The victims hadn’t had a chance.

After five minutes she turned off the tube.

“I’ve been to that restaurant,” she said.

She began to cry.

I held her.

“Will you stay?” she asked.

I stayed.

Later. Her bedroom overlooking the harbour. Laura, asleep in the moonlight. The harbour lights dead on the black water. A Soviet coal boat tied up along the wharf. Six people. Six people trying to seize a piece of normality in an abnormal world. Burned alive by incendiaries.

Tiocfadh ar la
. Up the revolution. Our day will come.

I wondered why that particular target. Maybe they hadn’t been paying their protection money? Maybe they had but it had been full of Belfast’s high society and it was just too tempting to pass up. And then there was the whole business of the oil drum, manoeuvring that into place implied careful planning and possibly someone on the inside …

I sighed – all these were questions for a different team of detectives. I had my own problems. The sheet had fallen off