Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“So basically call up every single newsagent in Carrick and Belfast?” McCrabban asked.

“Yeah.”

“Ok, boss.”

Matty finally came in and I showed him the postcard and he took it away to do more tests. He did fingerprints and the black light and the UV light. All the prints were smudged except for two sets that he suspected were mine and the postman’s. I told him to send a reserve constable round to Carrick post office to print the mail carrier from Coronation Road.

At 9.05 I was done typing my presentation and did a dry run in front of the lads. They felt it was ok, although McCrabban made me cut it shorter because Sergeant McCallister had a poor attention span.

At 9.15 I called up Mike Kernoghan in Special Branch, told him about my anonymous letter writer and asked him if his boy could put a tap on my phone just in case the killer decided to get more intimate.

Mike thought this was a good idea and said that he’d send a couple of boys round this afternoon “to fix my TV”.

I told him that I kept the spare key under the cactus plant and he said that his boys didn’t need no key, a rusty nail could get you into a Northern Ireland Housing Executive terraced house — a fact that did not fill me with confidence about my home security.

I checked again for any faxes from Belfast and I called up the forensics lab just to make sure they were working their arses off ID’ing my John Doe. They claimed that they were and that they had a promising line of inquiry.

“Really? You’re not just messing with me, are you?”

“We wouldn’t do that, sir.”

“When do I get the good word?”

“We like to confirm these things first, Sergeant Duffy, but I’m reasonably sure that we’ll have a positive hit by the end of the day.”

“Positive hit?”

“Yes.”

“So you know who he is?”

“We’re fairly certain. We’re in the confirmation process at this moment.”

“Can you give me a clue? It’s not Lord Lucan, is it? DB Cooper? Lady Di?”

The forensics guy hung up on me. I called around for a next of kin on Andrew Young but his work colleagues were the best we could come up with.

When Matty was done with the prints I asked him to start running down any sexual abuse allegations against Young. An enraged former pupil would be a nice go-to guy in a case like this.

At 9.30 I assembled my team in the CID room, set them up in chairs next to me and put three chairs in front of the white board.

At 9.35 Sergeants McCallister and Burke came in. Burke was another old-school peeler about fifty-five years old. No nonsense bloke. He was ex-army and military police. He had served in Palestine, Cyprus, Kenya, all over the shop. He looked like someone’s scary father. He didn’t talk much, did Burke, but what he did say was usually the wisdom acquired from a long and interesting life … either that or total bollocks.

Chief Inspector Brennan came in last. He was wearing a top hat and tails.

“Hurry up, Duffy, I don’t have long,” he said.

“Aye, you don’t want to be late for the play Mr Lincoln,” Sergeant McCallister said and everyone roared.

“Maybe he does a magic act on the side,” Sergeant Burke said.

“I’m off to my niece’s wedding. Get on with it, Duffy!” Brennan snapped.

I read them the presentation. There were seven main points:

1. The as yet unidentified victim in Barn Field had been shot execution-style by a 9mm.

2. He had had a recent homosexual encounter and a piece of music had been inserted in his anus.

3. His right hand had been replaced with the hand of Andrew Young, a known homosexual who had also been murdered in his house in Boneybefore also by a 9mm.

4. The musical score was La Boheme and contained the lines “your tiny hand is frozen” sung by Rudolfo to Mimi.

5. Andrew Young was a music teacher at Carrick Grammar School and ran the Carrick festival. No, he had never done La Boheme at either the school or the festival.

6. The killer had apparently called up Carrick Police Station, found out who the lead detective was and sent me a bizarre postcard (photocopies of which I passed around) that might contain clues or might be a complete distraction.

7. The 9mm slugs from both victims matched.

Brennan and the two sergeants listened to the whole thing without interruption.

“What is your current working hypothesis, Sergeant Duffy?” Brennan asked when I was done.

“Obviously the two murders are linked. Dr Cathcart feels there was a two- or perhaps three-hour delay between the two deaths. She’ll know more precisely when she’s performed an autopsy on Mr Young. Therefore I feel that we have a potential serial murderer on our hands. At this stage I do not see any evidence of a paramilitary link, which would make this the first non-sectarian serial killer in Northern Ireland’s history,” I said.

“Why would he come out of the woodwork now?” McCallister asked.

“I don’t know. Jealousy, perhaps? He’s been watching all the publicity the Yorkshire Ripper trial has been generating and it’s been getting his goat?” I ventured.

“Maybe the chaos of the hunger strikes has given him the cover and opportunity he needs,” McCrabban said.

“Sounds like this old fruit, Young, got someone riled up and that someone went mental and decided to kill some more fruits,” Burke said.

“Matty’s checking to see if there are any allegations against him,” I said.

“And I don’t like this music angle. It’s bloody weird,” Burke said.

“I don’t like it either. There something about it that stinks to high heaven. I’ve read the libretto to La Boheme but nothing jumped out at me,” I said.

“Jesus, what will we do if this Young fella has something up his arse too?” Brennan muttered.

“Keep our cheeks squeezed together?” McCallister offered and everybody laughed again.

“We’re waiting on the autopsy report on that, sir,” I added when the tittering had died down.

Silence descended, punctuated by a distant rumbling in Belfast that could be anything from a ship unloading in the docks to a coordinated series of bombings.

“What’s your next step, Sergeant Duffy?” Brennan asked.

I told him about the various angles we were chasing down and the fact that we were supposed to finally get the prints on John Doe today.

“And if our letter writer gets in touch again?” Sergeant Burke asked.

I told them about my call to Special Branch.

I could tell Brennan wasn’t too happy about that but he didn’t say anything. And besides he was getting worried about the time and he had one other fish to fry.

“Have you thought about the press?” he asked.

“Uh, obviously, we’ll need to brief the press at some point,” I said. “But we can probably put it off for a bit. It’s not exactly a slow news week.”

Brennan sighed. “This is going to blow up in our faces, Sergeant Duffy. If we don’t go to the papers you can be sure that our anonymous note writer, or one of Mr Young’s neighbours, or someone will. Do you have a media strategy?”

“Uh, no, not as such, not a, uh-” I stammered. I looked at Matty and McCrabban who had both discovered something fascinating about the wall-to-wall carpet.

Brennan looked at McCallister. “What about you, Alan? It’s a bloody thankless task but we need someone and DS Duffy has quite a full plate by the looks of it. You could do a good defensive briefing to a couple of the local hacks. Seen you do it before. “

McCallister smiled at me and shook his head. “No, no, fellas, that’s not the way to handle this at all. No defensiveness. We present this as a triumph. Through clever police work we have linked two murders. We talk about modern forensic techniques and how even during these difficult times we hard-working honest peelers are able to spend due care and attention on every single case.”