Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

The wind had picked up and it begun to rain. A harsh sea rain from the north east. The flowers in the well-kept hospital garden were getting a battering. I flipped a page of my notebook and sketched them: syringa wolfii, syringa persica — here under the great shadow of the railway embankment May was the month that bred lilacs out of the dead land.

Dr Cathcart sat down. She’d showered and changed into civvies. A tight, mustard-coloured jumper, black slacks and high heels. Her hair was a long cascading stream of black that fell ever so precisely over her right shoulder. She was the spit of the evil Samantha on Bewitched .

“Shall I be mother?” she asked, pouring the tea.

“If I can be the pervy uncle.”

She made the tea like a surgeon. Milk, then tea, then more milk and your bog-standard two sugars. In the long caesura an army helicopter flew low overhead.

“Do you have any more questions, Sergeant Duffy?”

“The semen in the victim’s rectum, is there any way we can use that to help identify the killer?” I wondered.

“It’s an interesting question. I have read a few papers about this. At the present moment, no, but perhaps in a few years they will be able to do DNA sequencing or something like that. I’ve frozen a sample just in case.”

I nodded. She was good.

We sipped our tea.

“Where’s the music?” she asked. “I thought we could figure it out together.”

“I gave it to McCrabban. It’s a nineteenth-century opera. Italian. Other than that I have no idea. He’s getting it photocopied, either that or he’s run off screaming to the Witchfinder General. Good lad, McCrabban, but he’s from Ballymena. Different world up there.”

“And you’re not from up there, are you?”

“Geographically a little. Spiritually, no.”

We looked at one another.

“So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

“How do you know I’m a nice girl?”

“The Malone Road accent, the fact that you’re a doctor …”

“What’s your accent?”

“Cushendun.”

“Cushendun? Oh, that’s way up there, isn’t it? What primary school did you go to?”

“Our Lady, Star of the Sea.”

And just like that she had established that I was a Catholic. Of course I’d known she was a Catholic from the get-go because of the cross around her neck.

She took another sip of her tea and added a decadent third cube of sugar.

“No, seriously, you could be earning a fortune over the water,” I said.

“Does it always have to be about money?”

“What should it be about?”

She nodded and tied back her hair. “My parents are here and my dad’s not very well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s his heart. It’s not fatal. Not immediately fatal. And both my little sisters are still here. What about you? Brothers, sisters?”

“Only child. Parents still up in Cushendun.”

“Only child?” she asked incredulously. She obviously thought that all country Catholics had twelve children each. The only possible explanation was that something terrible had happened to my mother. She gave me a pitying look that I found adorable.

“So where did you go to uni, Queen’s?” I asked.

“No, I was at the University of Edinburgh.”

“And you still came back?”

“Yup.”

She didn’t ask me where I had gone to uni because in general coppers did not bother with college. She was more relaxed now and that lovely smile came back again.

I was starting to like her.

“So what do you make of everything that I told you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “This was a pretty complex killing possibly disguised to look like the simple execution of an informer.”

“Badly disguised.”

“Maybe he thought we would never find the paper in the victim’s rectum.”

“No, it was sticking out. It was quite obvious. And that’s what made me check for signs of rape.”

“So he’s signposting everything. His working assumption is that we’re lazy and incompetent and he needs to underline everything. He put the body where he knew it would be found fairly soon. He’s bold and a bit too sure of himself and he has contempt for us. I imagine he’s had a few dealings with the cops over the years if that’s his attitude.”

“Is the RUC not noted for its competence?” she asked with a slight sarcastic edge to her voice.

“Oh, there are worse police forces but it’s not exactly Scotland Yard, is it?”

“You’re the expert.”

“When was the last time you’ve seen a male rape in the course of your duty?” I asked.

“Never.”

“It’s not in the paramilitaries’ MO, is it?”

“Not it in my limited experience.”

“Both sides are extremely conservative. And the normal way they deal with informers is virtually identical.”

“Is that so?” she asked, her eyebrows arching with interest.

“There’s really no difference at all between your average IRA man and your average UVF man. The markers are always the same: working class, poor, usually an alcoholic or absent father. You see it time and again. Identical psycho-social profiles except for the fact that one identifies himself as a Protestant and one as a Catholic. A lot of them actually come from mixed religious backgrounds like Bobby Sands. They’re usually the hardcore ones, trying to prove themselves to their co-religionists.”

“Sorry, you lost me there. Do you want a slice of cake or something? I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

“I’m all right, but you go ahead,” I said. “Seeing John Doe all disembowelled like that has somewhat smothered my appetite.”

“Speaking of appetites, his last meal was fish and chips.”

“I hope he enjoyed it.”

“The fish was cod.”

“You’re just showing off now, aren’t you?”

She grinned, got up and came back with two slices of Madeira cake. Despite my protestations she gave me one of them.

“How come you ended up in the police?” she asked.

Her real question had been “So what’s a nice, bright, Catholic boy like you doing in the peelers?”

I thought about what I’d said to Brennan last night. “I just wanted to be part of that thin blue line holding back the chaos.”

“Thin green line,” she said.

She was right about that too, bless her: in the nineteenth century British peelers had been given a blue uniform to distinguish them from the Red Coats, but the Royal Irish Constabulary had worn dark (very dark) green uniforms from the start. The successor to the RIC after partition was the Royal Ulster Constabulary, based in Belfast, and the uniform hadn’t changed even though green was a colour associated with Irish nationalism.

“Thin green line doesn’t really work as a metaphor though, does it?” I said.

“No,” she agreed. She ate her slice of cake and looked at her watch. “Do you have any more questions or are we about done here?”

I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything. You’d better give me your number though, in case something comes up.”

“You can reach me here,” she said.

She hadn’t liked that. It was too sly. Maybe the direct approach: “What are you doing later? Do you want to go out for a drink or anything?” I asked.

“You’re fast,” she said.

“Is that a no?”

She didn’t say anything, just tapped her fingers on the Formica table.

“Look, I’ll be at the Dobbins from nine o’clock onwards, if you fancy a quick drink, drop in,” I said casually.

She stood up. Got her bag. Gave me the once over. “Maybe,” she said.

In an odd, formal gesture, she offered me her hand. I shook it.