Adrian McKinty: The Cold Cold Ground

I topped off the pint glass with 80 proof Smirnoff vodka, stirred the drink and grabbed a book at random from the bookcase.

It was Jim Jones’s The Thin Red Line which I’d read on my World War Two jag along with Catch 22, The Naked and the Dead, Gravity’s Rainbow and so on. Every cop usually had a book going on for the waiting between trouble. I didn’t have one at the moment and that was making me nervous. I skimmed through the dog-eared best bits until I found the section where

First Sergeant Welsh of C for Charlie Company just decides to stare at all the men on the troop ship for two full minutes, ignoring their questions and not caring if they thought he was crazy because he was the goddamned First Sergeant and he could do anything he bloody well wanted. Nice. Very nice.

That scene read, I turned on the box, checked that the Pope was still alive and switched to BBC2, which was showing some minor snooker tournament I hadn’t previously heard of. I was just getting a little booze buzz going and quite enjoying the loose match between Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn (both them boys on their fifth pint of beer) when the phone rang.

I counted the rings. Seven, eight, nine. When it reached ten I went into the hall and waited for a couple more.

When it reached fifteen, I finally picked up the receiver.

“Aye?” I said suspiciously.

“There’s good news and bad news,” Chief Inspector Brennan said.

“What’s the good news, sir?” I asked.

“It’s nearby. You can walk from there.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“It’s nasty.”

I sighed. “Jesus. Not kids?”

“Not that kind of nasty.”

“What kind of nasty, then?”

“They chopped one of his hands off.”

“Lovely. Whereabouts?”

“The Barn Field near Taylor’s Avenue. You know it?”

“Aye. Are you over there now?”

“I’m calling from a wee lady’s house on Fairymount.”

“A wee fairy lady?”

“Just get over here, ya eejit.”

“I’ll see you there in ten minutes, sir.”

I hung up the phone. This is where the Serpico moustache would have come in handy. You could look at yourself in the hall mirror, stroke the Serpico moustache and have a ponder.

Instead I rubbed my stubbly chin while I extemporized. Pretty nice timing for a murder, what with the riot in Belfast and the death of a hunger striker and the poor old Pope halfway between Heaven and Earth. It showed … What? Intelligence? Luck?

I grabbed my raincoat and opened the front door. Mrs Campbell was still standing there, nattering away to Mrs Bridewell, the neighbour on the other side.

“Are you away out again?” she asked. “Ach, there’s no rest for the wicked, is there, eh?”

“Aye,” I said with gravity.

She looked at me with her green eyes and flicked away the fag ash in her left hand. Something stirred down below.

“There’s, uh, been a suspected murder on Taylor’s Avenue, I’m away to take a gander,” I said.

Both women looked suitably shocked which told me that for once in my police career I was actually ahead of the word on the street.

I left the women and walked down Coronation Road. The rain had become a drizzle and the night was calm — the acoustics so perfect that you could hear the plastic bullet guns all the way from the centre of Belfast.

I walked south past a bunch of sleekit wee muckers playing football with a patched volleyball. I felt sorry for them with all their fathers out of work. I said, hey, and kept going past the identical rows of terraces and the odd house which had been sold to its tenants and subsequently blossomed into window treatments, extensions and conservatories.

I turned right on Barn Road and cut through Victoria Primary School.

The new graffiti on the bike shed walls was jubilant about the Pope: “Turkey 1, Vatican City 0” and “Who Shot JP?” — a none too subtle Dallas reference.

I slipped over the rear fence and across the Barn Field.

The black tongue of Belfast Lough was ahead of me now and I could see three army choppers skimming the water, ferrying troops from Bangor to the Ardoyne.

I crossed a stretch of waste ground and a field with one demented looking sheep. I heard the generator powering the spotlights and then I saw Brennan with a couple of constables I didn’t yet know and Matty McBride, the forensics officer. Matty was dressed in jeans and jumper rather than the new white boiler suits that all FOs had been issued and instructed to wear. I’d have to give the lazy bastard a dressing down for that, but not in front of Brennan or the constables.

I waved to the lads and they waved back.

Chief Inspector Tom Brennan was my boss, the man in charge of the entire police station in Carrickfergus. The bigger stations were run by a Superintendent but Carrick was not even a divisional HQ. I, a buck sergeant with two months’ seniority, was in fact the fourth most senior officer in the place. But it was a safe posting and in my fortnight here I’d been impressed by the collegiate atmosphere, if not always with the professionalism of my colleagues.

I walked across the muddy field and shook Brennan’s hand.

He was a big man with an oval face, light brown, almost blondish hair and intelligent slate-blue eyes. He didn’t look Irish, nor English, there was probably Viking blood somewhere in that gene pool.

He was one of those characters who felt that a weak handshake could somehow damage his authority, which meant that every handshake had to bloody hurt.

I disengaged with a wince and looked about me for a beat or two. Brennan and the constables had done a hell of a job contaminating the crime scene with their big boots and ungloved hands. I gave a little inward sigh.

“Good to see you, Sean,” Brennan said.

“Bit surprised to see you, sir. We must be a wee bit short-staffed if you’re the responding officer.”

“You said it, mate. Everybody’s away manning checkpoints. You know who’s minding the store?”

“Who?”

“Carol.”

“Carol? Jesus Christ. This would be a fine time for that IRA missile attack we’ve all been promised,” I muttered.

Brennan raised an eyebrow. “You can joke, pal, but I’ve seen the intel. The IRA got crates of them from Libya.”

“If you say so, sir.”

“Do you know Quinn and Davey?” Brennan asked.

I shook the hands of the two reserve constables who, in the nature of things, I might not see again for another month.

“Where’s your gun?” Brennan asked in his scary, flat East Antrim monotone.

I picked up on the quasi-official timbre to his voice.

“I’m sorry, sir, I left my revolver at home,” I replied.

“And what if my call to you had been made under duress and this had been an ambush?” Brennan asked.

“I suppose I’d be dead,” I said stupidly.

“Aye. You would be, wouldn’t ya? Consider this a reprimand.”

“An official reprimand?”

“Of course not. But I don’t take it lightly: they would just love to top you, wouldn’t they, my lad? They’d love it.”

“I suppose they would, sir,” I admitted. Everybody knew the IRA had a bounty on Catholic coppers.

Brennan reached out with his big, gloved, meat-axe fingers and grabbed my cheek. “And we’re not going to let that happen, are we, sunshine?”

“No, sir.”

Brennan give me a squeeze that really hurt and then he let go.

“All right, good, now what do you make of all this?” Brennan said.

Matty was taking photographs of a body propped up in the front seat of a burnt-out car. The car was surrounded by rubbish and in the lee of the massive wall of the old Ambler’s Mill. The vehicle was a Ford Cortina that been had jacked and destroyed years, possibly decades, before. Now it was a rusted sculpture, lacking a windscreen, doors, wheels.