Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

I nodded.

“All right. I’ll ask around,” he said.

“Do either of you want to drive up to forensic lab with me and get our fingerprint results on John Doe?” I asked.

“Don’t go there, Sean. Not on a Sunday. There’s no point making waves,” Crabbie said.

He was as impatient as I was but maybe he was right.

We drove back to the station. I poured myself a Johnnie Walker which was the general libation used to liven up the office tea. Johnnie Walker in the tea, Jim Beam in the coffee. Around these parts everyone pitched their tents by the whisky river.

I hummed Offenbach to myself and waited by the fax machine. The John Doe fingerprints came through at just after six.

Of course it was an anticlimax.

The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old guy called Tommy Little, a carpenter originally from Saoirse Street in the Ardoyne. Like everybody else from Saoirse Street he was a player but it looked like a minor one. He was an occasional driver for Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein. He had been interned as an IRA man in 1973 but who hadn’t? He had one conviction for possession of a stolen hand gun in 1975 and had spent nine months in the Kesh for that. He had been accused of public indecency in a Belfast lavatory in 1978 but the case had been dismissed. He was not married, had no kids. The next of kin was not listed in the file. He had no crim rec since ‘78.

I called Brennan at home and filled him in on the John Doe and the fact that Lucy had been pregnant.

“Pregnant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Explains why she ran away, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, well that’s one mystery solved. Who’s this Tommy Little’s next of kin?” he asked.

“There is no next of kin.”

“You say he was a driver for Sinn Fein?”

“It says occasional driver. He’s not a major gaffer, sir. Small fry by the looks of it.”

“Doesn’t matter. Call up Adams and let him know that one of his boys copped it.”

“Call up Gerry Adams?”

“Yes. He’ll have to do for the next of kin. Is there anything else?”

“We went up to Woodburn Forest. We didn’t find the body of Lucy’s baby which might mean good news. Maybe she gave it away and then topped herself.”

“We can live in hope. Is that everything?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good work, Duffy. Well done.”

He hung up. I got myself a coffee and rummaged through the directory until I found Gerry Adams’s home number.

Someone that wasn’t Adams answered the phone.

“Who is this?”

“My name is Sergeant Sean Duffy from Carrickfergus RUC, I’d like to speak to Mr Adams about a matter of some urgency.”

“Yeah, he’s kind of busy. He’s doing an interview live on the BBC.”

“When will it be over?”

“What the fuck do you want, peeler?”

“A friend of his has been killed and I’ve been instructed to make the notification only to him.”

“Where are you?”

“Carrickfergus RUC.”

“He’ll call you back.”

I turned on the radio and found the interview.

Adams: “The demands of the hunger strikers are very reasonable. They want to wear their own clothes, they went political status, they want the right to do prison work or the right to refuse prison work. They want access to educational materials. We don’t understand why the government of Mrs Thatcher will not give us these reasonable demands. The whole world doesn’t understand why she will not give in to these demands.”

BBC: “Yes, that’s the whole point isn’t it, Mr Adams? She’ll be giving in to terrorists.”

Adams: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The current Prime Minister of Israel is Menachem Begin and he, if you’ll recall, blew up the King David Hotel. Look at Nelson Mandela. The whole world condemns his imprisonment and-”

BBC: “The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has said that the demands of the Republican prisoners in the Maze can be looked at as soon as the hunger strike is ended.”

Adams: “The time to look at these demands is now before more men die needlessly.”

I turned off the radio.

I walked around the station looking for food.

The only people in here now were myself, Ray on the gate and a reservist called Preston.

“Have you got any sandwiches, Preston?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“I’ll give you five quid for a bag of crisps.”

He had no crisps. I called up half a dozen Chinese restaurants to see if any of them were open on a Sunday. None were.

I waited by the phone.

I got out the whiteboard and wrote a flow chart with labels like “homosexual” and “Daedalus” and “severed hands”. I drew a Venn diagram. I drew a labyrinth.

My stomach complained.

The rain outside turned to sleet.

Finally the phone rang. I pressed line one.

“Hello, I’d like to speak to Sergeant Duffy,” Adams said. His voice was unmistakable.

“Mr Adams, I’m sorry to have to inform you about the death of an associate of yours, a Mr Tommy Little. There was no known next of kin on our files so we thought it best to call you.”

“How did he die?”

I filled him in on the details that we were prepared to reveal at this stage: Tommy had been shot and he was possibly the victim of a serial killer targeting homosexuals. I kept back the things I wasn’t prepared to reveal yet: the switched hands, the musical scores, the killer’s hit list, the postcard to me and the message to the Confidential Telephone.

“You say this was in Carrickfergus?” Adams asked.

“Yes, the Barn Field in Carrickfergus.”

“What would Tommy be doing there?”

“That’s not where he was murdered. He was murdered somewhere else and dumped there.”

“And you think it’s a multiple murderer doing this? A serial killer? With all that’s going on?”

“This would be an ideal time to do it, Mr Adams, with police resources stretched so thin.”

“Someone’s going around killing homosexuals?”

“That’s our working hypothesis. Did you know that Mr Little was a homosexual?”

“Well, we, uh … we don’t pry into people’s private lives.”

“Is there anything you can tell me about Mr Little’s movements or acquaintances or …”

“No, I can’t. Thank you for getting in touch, Sergeant Duffy,” Adams said and hung up.

“That was a little abrupt, wasn’t it, Gerry?” I said to myself. I got out my notebook and wrote: “Adams … what does he know that he’s not saying.”

Not that I would ever get a chance to interview him.

“All right, I’m out of here!” I informed Preston and told him to man the ship until Sergeant Burke came in at eight o’clock.

I drove home but when I got back to Coronation Road I remembered that there was no food in the fridge and I went to Mrs Bridewell to beg a can of soup and some bread. Mrs Bridewell looked like Joan Bakewell from off the telly. The “thinking man’s crumpet” — short black bob, cheekbones, blue eyes. Her husband had been laid off by ICI and like half the male population was currently looking for work.

She asked if I wanted to join them for Sunday roast.

“No, I just want some soup if you’ve got any. All the supermarkets are closed.”

“Join us!” she insisted.

I told her I didn’t want to impose but she dragged me in.

“Sit down back down, everyone!” Mr Bridewell said in an old-fashioned country accent that you didn’t really hear any more. Everyone sat. There were two kids and a granny. The granny looked at me, pursed her deathly pale lips and shook her head. She was wearing a long black taffeta dress that had gone out of fashion with the passing of the late Queen Mary.