Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“33 Falls Court off the Falls Road,” I said.

Falls Road was not as bad as we’d been expecting. Sure there was a mad press scrum outside the Sinn Fein advice centre and there were police checkpoints and a couple of army helicopters up, but most people were just getting on with their business, going to the grocers, the butchers, the milk shop and of course the pub and the bookies.

Falls Court was another one of those murderous dead-end streets that peelers hated and number 33, naturally, was right at the end.

“Alan, when you get to the house, turn us round, keep the engine on, me and the constables will deploy and prepare to give covering fire while Crabbie and Sean can go inside and do their fancy-pants detecting,” Brennan said.

“Sounds good to me,” I concurred.

“And if you hear shooting, come out,” Brennan added with a grin.

He was enjoying this, the old goat.

The Land Rover stopped and Brennan and the two reserve constables disembarked, pointing their Sterlings at the cardinal points of the compass.

Crabbie and I walked over to #33. It was the last house in a typical red-brick terrace which had a huge new mural of Bobby Sands and Frankie Hughes on the gable wall and above them in big white letters Patrick Pearse’s quote from 1915: “The fools, the fools, they have given us our fenian dead!”

Crabbie and I looked at the mural and each other. We both were thinking the same thing: aye, this is how you grow a movement.

There were two men sitting on plastic chairs outside #33: short hair, spiderweb tats, denim jackets, white T-shirts, drainpipe thin bleached jeans, DM boots. They were IRA enforcers and they were probably packing heat. If we’d wanted to we could have arrested them for that but why give ourselves the aggravation?

I didn’t know why they were sitting there or why the front door of the house was open.

The constable I had sent over had put up some yellow “Police Evidence: Do Not Enter” tape on the front door, tape which was now lying in a heap at the men’s feet.

“Is this Tommy Little’s house?” I asked.

“What the fuck do you want, peeler?” one of the men asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, world peace, an explanation for why they stopped making Puffa Puffa Rice, news that Led Zeppelin have finally got a replacement drummer for Bonzo … that kind of thing,” I said.

The IRA men were unimpressed by the banter. “You’re not welcome around here and if I were you I’d tootle on home,” the other man said, a greasy character with quite the face full of zits.

I pulled out my service revolver. “Let me be clear about this, sunshine, I don’t tootle anywhere!” I said and went inside.

I heard the other IRA man stifle a guffaw.

Crabbie followed me in.

We saw immediately that we were too late.

The house had been completely stripped. No furniture, no carpets, no pictures on the wall, nothing. It was as if Tommy Little had never existed.

We went upstairs but that was stripped too.

They had already sold or burned Tommy’s stuff, no doubt distancing themselves from every aspect of his life. Nobody wanted the complication of being mixed up with a gay serial killer just when they were getting their biggest propaganda victory in decades.

“It’s like Trotsky. They’re erasing him from history,” I said.

We went back downstairs to Flunky #1 and Flunky #2.

“What did you do with Tommy’s gear? The Salvation Army?” I asked.

Flunky #2 shook his head. “We dumped it all at a Proddy bonfire.”

“Does he have any next of kin apart from the brother in Oz? Kids, nephews, nieces?” I asked. Nothing had come up in the files but there was no harm in asking.

“Tommy wasn’t the fucking parental type, was he?” Flunky #1 said.

“No friends, family, nothing like that?” I asked.

“Tommy’s fucking dead to us! Fucking queer got what was coming,” Flunky #1 muttered.

“These lads are no help. Let’s get out of here, mate,” Crabbie said.

“Tommy was murdered by some nutcase and I want to find out who killed him, so if either of you can think of something, give me a call, please.”

I handed them each one of my cards which had my name and the number of Carrick CID.

Flunky #1 looked at the card and looked at me.

“Are you a Catholic?” he asked.

“Yeah, I am. Well spotted.”

He spat on the ground. “You’re a fucking traitor, that’s what you are. Taking the fucking King’s shilling. How do you sleep at night?”

I leaned in close so that my nose was an inch from his pointy neb.

“Usually on my left-hand side, with a big, fluffy pillow and my favourite Six Million Dollar Man pyjamas,” I said in a gravelly Clint Eastwood voice.

Flunky #2 and Crabbie both laughed.

We walked back to the Land Rover and everyone got inside.

“Any information?” Brennan asked.

“A total bust,” Crabbie said. “They’ve stripped the house and are moving somebody else in already.”

Brennan raised his eyebrows at me. “What did I tell you?” he said.

“You were right, sir,” I replied.

“All right, Alan, take us back to Carrick, warp factor 7,” Brennan said.

We drove back onto the Falls Road proper. Brennan made us stop at a paper shop to buy the early edition of the Belfast Telegraph . Disappointingly our press conference hadn’t made the front page, which was dominated by the headline: “Four More Join Hunger Strike”.

We did make page 3 though and there was a nice picture of Sergeant McCallister under the headline “RUC Investigate Homosexual Double Murder”.

“They could have given us more coverage,” Brennan complained. “I mean it’s nice to have a real crime for once. A normal everyday non-sectarian murder. That’s man bites dog around these parts. That’s news. I have half a mind to call their editor”.

We were nearly at the junction of the Falls Road and the new dual carriageway when McCallister slammed on the brakes.

I looked through the windscreen and saw a hijacked Ulsterbus on fire, parked laterally across the lanes and blocking the road. It must have been set alight in the last five minutes because we were the first cops on the scene and it hadn’t even been reported yet on the police radio.

Suddenly there were four massive bangs on the steel plate of the Land Rover’s right-hand side.

The two reserve constables yelped.

I looked through the peephole. Someone was shooting at us from the two-hundred-foot high Divis Tower, which in a city built on mud flats, was the fifth tallest structure in Belfast.

Two more heavy bangs on the side of the Land Rover and stray bullets dinging into the pavement. Originally Divis Tower and the whole Divis Flats complex around it had been a model slum-clearance project but it quickly degenerated into a high-rise ghetto completely controlled by the IRA.

“What the fuck is that?” Brennan yelled.

“Fifty calibre machine gun, sir,” Sergeant McCallister replied placidly. “Seen ‘em in the army, unmistakable.”

“Jesus! Can it punch a hole in the armour plate?” Brennan asked.

“Maybe. I don’t really know,” McCallister replied.

Brennan turned round to look at the four of us in the back. His eyes were wild with excitement. I didn’t like it.

“All right, lads and lasses, we’ll deploy out the back, train your fire on the muzzle bursts, that’ll give the bastards something to think about!” Brennan said as more of the fifty-cal tore up the road all around us (difficult to aim those things, I would imagine).

Sergeant McCallister looked at me and shook his head.

He didn’t want to say anything but he hoped I would.

“Uh, sir, I don’t think that’s a good idea. They’re probably waiting with an RPG. As soon as we open these back doors they’ll fire it and we’re all cooked,” I said, thinking that one of us had to say something.