Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“Jump in, Sean,” Crabbie said.

“Hold your horses lads. With Chief Inspector Brennan gone to Belfast and with Burke and McCallister away too I’m senior officer here. I can’t just tear out of Dodge. We’ve got to go organize things.”

On the way inside Carol stopped me.

Wonderful woman Carol. Ageless. Thin, stooped, piercing blue eyes, hard as an iron bar. Had worked in Carrick station since 1941. On her second week on the job the barracks had been bombed by the Luftwaffe. A big Heinkel 111 who saw a target of opportunity near the railway station. The Luftwaffe! You gotta love it.

“Mr Sean?” she said.

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if I could go home early today, I wanted to watch that programme about Lady Diana on BBC2.”

“That’s fine, Carol,” I told her. I couldn’t really spare her but I knew better than to come between the great British public and Lady Di. The world could be going to hell in a handbasket but the Royal Wedding was in two months and that’s all that mattered.

I went upstairs and asked which of the reservists had the most seniority.

A trainee dentist called Jameson, who looked about eleven, put his hand up. He’d been in the force since ’79 which would have to do. I told him to call Inspector Mitchell who was technically Brennan’s deputy but in fact was almost never here because he more or less single-handedly ran the RUC substation in Whitehead.

“Tell Mitchell that I’ve had to leave, maybe for the day and he probably should close Whitehead station and get up here. It’s his call, of course.”

“And if he doesn’t come?” Jameson asked nervously.

“Then you’re it, mate. The skipper’s gone and the sergeants are gone and now Carol’s gone. “

He opened his mouth to speak, didn’t know what to say and closed his gob again. He looked petrified.

“Out with it, man!” I ordered him.

“Well, uh, I was just wondering what I should do if the IRA attack us while you’re away?”

“Break out the machine guns and return fire. And don’t kill any tax-paying customers. Ok?”

He nodded.

“You know where the armoury key is?”

“No.”

“On the hook next to the fire extinguisher. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” I muttered as I went back downstairs. If I was an IRA mole in the RUC, this would be my moment to shine …

I got in the Land Rover and kicked Matty out of the driver’s seat.

I drove out of the station and over the series of speed bumps that were supposed to be a deterrent for a drive-by attack. I got into second gear and finally third and took the heavy vehicle along the Marine Highway.

“We’re going to pick up Dr Cathcart on the way, lads,” I said.

Neither Matty nor McCrabban seemed fazed by this.

We stopped outside her place and she was already changed into Wellington boots and a white forensic boiler suit. “What does she look like!” Crabbie muttered.

“ Clockwork Orange ,” Matty concurred.

“We all should be wearing them things to avoid contamination,” I said. “Do you boys ever go to the training seminars?”

“What training seminars?” Matty asked.

“You wouldn’t catch me dead in one of them,” Crabbie said, although his orange shirt, paisley tie and beige jacket weren’t exactly Savile Row.

“You lads get in the back. Our guest can ride up front with me.”

There was an ancient police superstition that if you changed seats in an armoured Land Rover you were sure to cop it during the next rocket-propelled grenade attack while the person you switched with would escape completely unscathed. Why the jinx would only apply to you, and not him, was a secret known only to the elect.

“Come on lads, move it!” I had to say again and they got in back, grumbling. I opened the passenger door and Laura climbed up and in.

“Morning, Dr Cathcart,” I said stiffly.

“Oh, good morning, Sergeant Duffy,” she replied. “Where are we going?”

“Boneybefore.”

“Stick on the radio for us, will ya?” Crabbie said from the back.

I turned on Downtown Radio but they were in some kind of conspiracy to make Juice Newton a millionaire. I switched to Radio 1 and we listened to Spandau Ballet as I drove us along the Marine Highway and the Larne Road.

“Do you like Spandau Ballet, Dr Cathcart?” Matty asked from the back.

“I don’t really know them,” she replied.

“They’re the latest thing. What about you, Sean, you like ’em?”

I tried to come up with a witty answer and after some deliberation I said: “Spandau Ballet are to pop music what the Cretaceous-Tertiary Event was to dinosaur music.”

Stony silence. Nobody laughed.

“Am I the only one around here that reads New Scientist ?” I asked.

Evidently I was. I kept my bake shut after that.

Boneybefore. A village eaten up by the Carrick expansion sometime in the ‘50s. A white thatched cottage almost on the lough shore. Another unknown young reserve officer standing by the door.

I parked the Land Rover and we got out.

“What are the facts, constable?” I asked the reservist.

“Postman noticed the door was slightly ajar on the second post today. He pushed it open and found the victim. He called us.”

“Anybody touch anything?”

“Nope. But I had a wee look in.”

“What did you see?”

“I noticed that the victim had been shot and that his hand had been cut off, so I called Crabbie.”

I put on latex gloves and went inside the cottage.

The victim had been shot once in the head, probably as he had opened his front door, because he was still lying in the hall. He was a thin, dapper, grey-haired man in shirtsleeves, black tweed trousers and slippers. His hand had been cut off and the hand of — presumably — John Doe had been tossed, almost idly, on his chest.

I found a wallet on the sideboard and quickly ascertained that the victim was one Andrew Young, a sixty-year-old music teacher at Carrickfergus Grammar School.

The place was untouched. The killer had come inside only to kill Young and cut his right hand off.

We did a thorough inspection but Matty agreed with me that the killer had not even entered the rest of the house.

“Time of death?” I asked Laura.

“He’s been dead about forty hours,” she said, examining the corpse.

“Which one did he kill first?” I asked.

“If you put me on the spot I’d say he killed the man in the car first. But only by a few hours,” Laura said.

Matty began taking photographs and dusting for prints.

Laura examined the body.

McCrabban grabbed my sleeve. “Word with you outside, Sean?” he said.

We stepped out into a salt wind coming off the lough.

“What is it, Crabbie?”

“I know this character, Sean. He runs the Carrick festival. He’s headteacher at the school. He met Princess Anne. Upstanding citizen and all that. But …”

“But what?

“Like I say, decent bloke and everything, but he’s a known poofter.”

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as eggs is eggs.”

I saw the implications immediately. “So what do you think we have here, Crabbie? Someone going around killing homosexuals?”

Crabbie shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s beginning to look like it, isn’t it?”

“And there’s the bloody music connection again, isn’t there?”

Crabbie nodded and began filling his pipe.

Of course homosexuality was illegal in Northern Ireland but that didn’t mean that there were no homosexuals.

Everybody knew somebody …

“Don’t mention anything for the moment, let’s get the old routine working,” I said.

We went back inside.

Photographs.