Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

Behind the old man were cases of cigarettes of every conceivable brand.

The old man was watching a gardening programme on a big TV.

“Are you Billy?” I asked.

The old man did not reply.

I looked at Matty. He shrugged. We sat down in a couple of plastic chairs.

The old man looked at me suspiciously. “Are you from the taxes?” he asked.

“No.”

“From the excise?”

“We’re from the police, we’ve come to see Billy.”

“And you’re no here from the missionaries of the apostates?”

“I don’t even know what that is. Is Billy around?”

“He’ll be back in five minutes. He’s just getting more petrol for the generator. We had no electricity last night.”

“Neither had anybody,” Matty said.

“Would you like some tea?” the old man asked.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Matty said.

The old man went out the door and came back a couple of minutes later with three mugs, a bottle of milk, sugar cubes and a packet of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive biscuits. He added milk and sugar to both mugs and stirred them with his nicotinestained forefinger.

“Ta,” I said when he handed me a cup.

The old man started nattering away, first about the buses and the football but eventually somehow the trenches and the Great War where, he said, he was the only survivor from a platoon of men in the Ulster Volunteers on day one of the Battle of the Somme. I looked at my watch. This was some five minutes.

“I’m just going to step outside,” I said.

I went through the games room, opened the front door and took a breath of God’s free fresh air. It was raining now and all the men in denim were inside waiting their turn at the snooker tables.

A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.

Two men got out.

One of them got a drum of petrol from the boot and began rolling it round the back of the club. He was a young guy, blond hair, about twenty-two. Good-looking imp wearing brown slacks and a plain black T-shirt.

The other guy lit a cigarette and nodded at me. I knew that this was Billy. His hair was mostly black but with a Sontagian grey mohawk up front. His bluey-green eyes were sunk deep in his head and the lines around his mouth were deeper still. He had a square Celtic face, which reminded me a bit of Fred Flintstone or Ian McKellen.

“Are you the peeler who’s been ringing up looking for me?” he asked.

“Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy from Carrick RUC,” I replied.

“Is that a Catholic name?”

“Yes.”

He laughed a nasty wee laugh. “Ok, so what’s this all about?”

“Tommy Little.”

“Let me guess, you interviewed Walter Hays and he said that Tommy was coming over to see me? Is that right?” he said with animal cunning.

“That’s right.”

“You want to know how I know that?”

“You have telepathic abilities?”

“Because the IRA has already been on the phone to me, asking me when I saw Tommy last. Very polite they were too.”

Of course the IRA and the UVF were sworn enemies who in theory tried to kill each other at every opportunity. In practice, however, there were many contacts between the two organizations. They cooperated to reduce friction between the two communities and to facilitate the distribution and the collection of protection money.

“When did you see Tommy last?”

“Tommy came over here about eight o’clock the night he was topped. The Tuesday.”

“Why?”

“We had business to iron out.”

“What business?”

“It’s not relevant, copper,” Billy said with menace.

Like with Gerry Adams and Freddie Scavanni I knew where the power lay here. It was all with him. I had to go softly softly: he could terminate this interview any time he wanted and I’d never get another chance to talk to him again.

“Was it about drugs?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“I’m homicide, not a narc,” I said.

“Off the record then?”

“Off the record.”

“Swear it on the fucking Pope’s life.”

“I swear on the Pope’s life.”

“All right. Well, I can tell you’re dying to know so I’ll put you out of your misery. Some very bad lads had killed an enterprising young man up in Andy town who we had given a safe conduct to; and I was a bit concerned about this and I was also wondering what had happened to the three bags of brown tar heroin that this young man had been carrying.”

My mind was racing. Brown tar heroin? A safe conduct? What had Tommy Little to do with all of this?

“And what did Tommy say to that?” I said placidly.

“He didn’t say much of anything. We went into my office and he gave me two of the three bags and asked me if I was happy with that and I said that I was.”

“What time was this at exactly?”

“Like, I say, about eight.”

“How long did your meeting last?”

“Two minutes.”

“And then he was gone?”

“And then he was gone.”

“And you never saw him again?”

Billy shook his head but didn’t speak.

“You never saw Tommy again?”

“No.”

Billy was dressed in a red tracksuit, with Adidas sneakers and a golden chain around his neck. He had a spiderweb tattoo on one side of his neck and a red hand of Ulster on the other. It was very much the look of your middle echelon Protestant paramilitary, and yet there was something about it that didn’t quite fit.

This was the external. This was the image he was projecting. But there was more going on underneath. Billy was clever and his accent wasn’t Rathcoole at all. There was more than a hint of Southern Africa still.

“You were a copper too for a bit, weren’t you, Billy? In Rhodesia?”

“Copper? Is that what your file says? Give us some credit. We were practically running that country. Only thing holding it together. Those were days. High times! That place could have been paradise. Look at it now! We should have killed Mugabe when we had the chance and we did have the chance, believe me.”

I could imagine some of those high times: prison beatings, raids into Mozambique, torching villages, burning crops …

“How many people did you kill in Rhodesia, Billy?”

“More than enough, copper. More than enough,” he said chillingly.

I rubbed my chin. Was any of this relevant? He was a stone-cold killer but I knew that already. “You ever hear of a wee girl called Lucy Moore?”

“Who?”

“Do you know who Orpheus is?”

“What?”

“Are you a music lover, Billy?”

“Of course.”

“Do you like the opera?”

“The what?”

“Opera. Wagner. Puccini.”

“No fear.”

“Not your line?”

“Not my line.”

We looked at one another while Billy lit himself a cigarette. He offered me one and I took it. A plane was landing at the Belfast Harbour Airport and I watched it stick rigidly to its landing vector along the shore of Belfast Lough.

“Let me get this straight. Tommy Little came over to see you on Tuesday night at about eight o’clock. He was defusing a potentially serious dispute about who owned the heroin of a dead drug dealer. He stayed here for five minutes and then he left and you never saw him again.”

“That’s about right,” Billy said and again there was that look in his eyes that I didn’t quite like. If this was the truth it was not the whole truth.

“What did you do after Tommy left?”

“I played snooker until about twelve and then I went on home.”

“Witnesses?”

“Everybody in the club.”

“They’d swear on oath that you were the Shah of Iran.”

“That they would,” Billy laughed.