Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“I think I’ll give it a miss, mate,” I said.

Crabbie’s shrug seemed to convey the notion that one hour of tedium was a small price to pay to avoid eternity in the hellfire.

“Where’s Matty?” I asked.

“Fishing in Fermanagh,” Crabbie said.

“Doesn’t he care about this fabled time and a half?”

“Nothing messes with his Sunday fishing.”

I yawned and stretched. “Is there anything going on in the world?” I asked.

“The rumour is that the power-station workers are going to go on strike.”

“Any more hunger strikers die?”

“Nope.”

“Did we ever get that fax from Belfast about John Doe’s ID?” Crabbie shook his head. “We were supposed to get it yesterday morning. You know what I think?” he said.

“What?”

“I think it’s being repressed. I think John Doe is somebody important and Belfast is scrambling to lay the groundwork before releasing the information to us.”

“You’re paranoid,” I scoffed and then reconsidered. “Although William Burroughs said that a paranoid is somebody who knows what is actually going on.”

“Billy Burroughs said that? The guy that runs the fish shop?”

I drank the rest of the coffee and stood up. “Let’s go round the hospital and see if our patho has made any progress,” I said.

“All right.”

It was only drizzling so we walked to Carrick Hospital along Taylor’s Avenue and over the railway bridge at Barn Halt. I stopped when we were halfway over.

“I was here last night,” I said. “Checking out Lucy Moore’s vanishing act. I don’t see how she did it. A guy sees her waiting at the halt two minutes before the train is due to arrive. The train pulls in, her ma’s leaning out the window looking for her and she’s not there? How?”

“Maybe somebody abducted her.”

“Impossible. The platform was full of people.”

“Maybe she got on the train but her mum missed her.”

“It was only three carriages long and her ma looked in every one.”

Crabbie shrugged. “Well, that’s all moot now, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yeah, I suppose it is.”

We went on. The rain and the fact that it was Sunday had deterred all but the hardiest of cases and the waiting room was empty except for one crazy-looking guy with his arm wrapped up in a DIY bandage made of toilet paper.

Hattie Jacques saw us come in. “Good afternoon, gents. You’ll have to hurry if you want to see Dr Cathcart. Her office is along the corridor and the last door on the right.”

We walked along the gloomy corridor. I looked at my watch. It was nearly ten and my stomach was rumbling.

“I’m starving,” I said.

“You want half a Mars bar?” McCrabban asked.

“Kill for one.”

He fished a Mars bar out of his pocket, broke it in two and gave half to me. We ate it outside her door. Inside we could hear her singing along to “Heart of Glass” by Blondie. She was off key by a country mile.

I smiled at McCrabban and he grinned back.

We knocked on the door.

The radio was abruptly switched off.

“Come in!” she said.

Her office was small and dark, packed with books, files and a couple of anatomy charts. There were no feminine or homely touches. The impression she was clearly trying to convey was business, nothing but business.

We said our hellos and sat down. The view behind her head was of the hospital wall and the Knockagh mountain beyond.

She looked stunning today. Her lips were red, her cheeks rosy, her hair cascaded, her face shone. I don’t know how I had missed it before. She was gorgeous.

There was a graduation picture of her with her class at the University of Edinburgh and even in her robes and mortar-board she stood out from all the others. The camera loved her. Something about her elfin eyes maybe or those pert, full, downy lips.

“I was going to have these sent over to you,” she said, interrupting my reverie and handing across two cardboard files. Her desk was an old cast-iron job with three drawers and a wonky top. You could see through to her legs. She was wearing boots. Riding boots and black jeans and a figure-hugging black sweater. She was trim and athletic in that get-up and I knew that I was going to have difficulty concentrating on the serious business at hand.

“Any surprises?” I asked.

She nodded. “Oh yes. It was all surprises.”

“Really?” McCrabban said.

“Listen, we’ll have to be quick about this. It’s my Sunday morning clinic in ten minutes.”

I opened up the topmost file and set it on the desk so McCrabban could see too. We began reading it together. It was her autopsy of Andrew Young.

“And you’ll need this,” she said, passing across another musical score in a plastic bag.

“This one was rolled up in his hand.”

I flattened it out on the desk and peered at the score which had been ripped from a music book with a lot less care than the previous one.

This piece I recognized immediately. It was “the Galop” from Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld , Act 2 Scene 2. I had played it on the piano for my Grade 4.

“Shit,” I said.

“You know it?” Laura and McCrabban asked simultaneously.

“We all know it. It’s ‘the Galop’ from Orpheus in the Underworld . A sort of musical joke. A spoof. Offenbach was having a bit of fun at the expense of the more highbrow music lovers.”

“I don’t know it,” Crabbie said.

“Later on in the nineteenth century they called it the Can-can and played it in various musical revues.”

“So what does that tell us?” McCrabban asked.

“I don’t know. Orpheus in the Underworld is all about being punished and condemned to Hades. Maybe Young is being punished for being gay? You would have thought Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd or Death in Venice would have been more appropriate for that, wouldn’t you?”

“I’ll take your word for it, mate.”

I looked at the score and shook my head. “Or it could just be that he’s mocking us again. The Can-can is a famous musical pisstake. Perhaps the most famous musical joke apart from Mozart’s K.522.”

“Do you want to read the rest of the report?” Dr Cathcart said.

We read the autopsy.

Young had been shot execution-style in the forehead. The bullet had killed him instantly. His hand had then been cut off and John Doe’s thrown on his chest. That was it. He was sixty years old, in good health. His body had not been abused or violated. The score had been shoved into his left fist before rigor had set in.

“How long do you think this whole thing would have taken?” I asked Laura. “You know, shooting him, cutting his hand off?”

Laura shrugged. “If you came equipped with a bone saw-”

“Door opens, silenced 9mm in the brain, killer closes the door, cuts off Young’s hand and bags it, leaves the musical score in the other hand and gets out of there in, say, under five minutes?”

“It’s possible.”

I turned to Crabbie. “And the rest of the house was untouched. No trophies taken, no money, nothing like that.”

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I think this was all done in a hurry. I think John Doe was killed first in a more premeditated manner and then Andrew Young was murdered because he was a well-known homosexual. The killer shot Young as he opened the door. There was no conversation, no demands, nothing. He knew he had to kill him fast, cut off the hand and get in and out as speedily as possible.”

“Why?” Laura asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know, yet.”

We sat there for a minute while thunder rolled across the lough from a storm in County Down.

Laura gave an apologetic look and pointed at her watch. “I have my clinic,” she said.