Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“How do you feel about queers, Billy?”

“Me personally?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t give a fuck. Who cares what people get up to in their own bloody home.”

“Very enlightened. What would you do if you found out one of your boys was a queer?”

“You know what we’d do.”

“You’d kill him?”

“We’d have to. The higher-ups would demand it.”

The drizzle turned to rain.

“Are there any more questions?” Billy asked.

“One or two,” I said.

“Then we better go inside.”

We went to the stuffy back room. Billy turned off the TV and kicked out his grandfather. He sat behind the desk.

“Shane, get in here!” he called and his young, blond-haired assistant came in. Shane sat down next to Billy, facing us. He was winsome and pretty and annoying and perhaps there was even a shade of Jupiter and Gannymede. Perhaps .

“You are?” I asked Shane.

“Shane Davidson. Davidson with a D.”

“Sergeant Duffy wants to know if Tuesday night was the last we ever saw of Tommy Little?” Billy said.

Shane’s eyes narrowed. “Of course it is,” Shane said, looking at Billy with a glance I could not interpret. Matty saw it too and gave me the minutest nod.

“Holy shit, lads! You didn’t have a falling out with Tommy and fucking shoot him, did you?”

“Don’t you read the papers, mate? Tommy was killed by some nutcase doing in queers. Although I say nutcase, but the truth is, I’ll bet you most people think he’s doing everybody a favour,” Billy said.

“And besides, we know better than to fuck with Tommy Little!” Shane said.

“Aye, we do. The Great White Chiefs would kill us before the IRA ever did,” Billy added.

“What exactly did Tommy do for the IRA? What was his position?” I asked

Billy laughed and slapped his hand on the table. “Yon boy’s been dead four days and you don’t even know who he was? Christ, are you the Keystone Cops or what?”

“What was Tommy Little’s job for the IRA?” I insisted.

“You really don’t know?” Shane said again, sending his boss into hysterics.

“No.”

“Tommy Little was the head of the FRU,” Billy said.

“Tommy Little was the head of the IRA’s Force Research Unit?” I said incredulously.

“That he was.”

“That’s an Army Council position,” Matty gasped.

“So, you can see why anybody who killed Tommy would have to be a nutcase, wouldn’t you?” Billy said.

Yeah I could.

All the other angles had collapsed.

Tommy Little was the head of the FRU — the IRA’s internal security unit. The FRU was responsible for uncovering police informers and MI5 moles within the organization. They were the most feared group of men on the island of Ireland. Scarier than any of the paramilitaries, Special Branch or the SAS.

When the IRA got you, they’d kneecap you or shoot you in the head. When the FRU got you and they suspected that you were a police informer or a double agent the fun could last for a week. Torture with arc-welding gear, with hammers, drills, acid, electric shocks. Castration. Blinding. Dismemberment. These were the methods the FRU used to get at the truth.

No one but a lunatic would ever fuck with the FRU’s big cheese.

The blow back would be swift and terrible.

You’d have to be crazy .

I got to my feet. Matty stood next to me.

“Here, gents, take your poison,” Billy said offering us half a dozen cartons of cigarettes each.

I shook my head.

“Go on, lads, they’ve called a dock strike. Ciggies are all gonna be out of the shops by morning,” Billy said.

“Fuck it,” I said in a daze and took a carton of Marlboro. Matty took one of Benson and Hedges and we got a case of Virginia pipe tobacco for McCrabban. We walked out of the office into the wet battleship-grey Rathcoole afternoon. “Back in the Rover?” Matty asked.

“Let’s walk for a bit, clear our heads.”

We walked among the drab tenements and crumbling 1960s tower blocks. Everything was achromatic and in ruins less than twenty years after it had gone up. A massive social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong. “Where do you think the women are, Matty?” I asked. “It’s all men, here. No women, no kids.”

“Inside washing the clothes, hitting the weans, cooking the chips.”

I stopped at a twenty-foot-tall graffito: Look Out, Look Out, The Rathcoole KAI’s About. “What does KAI stand for?”

“Kill All Irish.”

“Kill All Irish. Nice. Rathcoole is from the Irish Rath Cuile meaning ‘in the centre of the ring fort’. Once this was a royal palace for the kings of the Ulaidh. Now look at it. Concrete towers and row upon row of soulless terraces.”

“If it was a palace these scumbags would still have messed it up, believe me,” Matty said.

I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock. Where had the day gone? “We should go home,” Matty said. “If Tommy Little was Force Research Unit, The Angel of Death wouldn’t go near him with a ten-foot pole. This is obviously the wrong angle. These boys are not that stupid.”

“Aye, I know. All right. All right, we’ll get back in the Rover. We’ll head off, but I want you to drop me round the corner away from the prying eyes in the tower blocks.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I am going to go round the back of those derelict tenements and I’m going to sneak into one of them and wait for our boy to come out.”

“Billy?”

“I’m going to wait for Billy’s wee friend, Shane. I think he knows something he’s not saying.”

“Everybody in Belfast knows something they’re not saying.”

We got in the Land Rover. Matty drove me to a doomed basketball court that was now a rubbish dump filled with skips, shopping trolleys, prams and the odd burnt-out, hijacked car. I got out of the passenger side and put my gun in my raincoat pocket. “You be careful, Sean, ok?” Matty said.

“Careful is my middle name. That and Aloysius but you don’t need to tell anybody that.”

He smiled and I walked through the swirling circles of garbage to the abandoned terrace.

I waited in a gutted living room among the rats and human excrement, drug paraphernalia and dead pigeons. Outside the rain was pouring so hard it was as if hate rather than gravity was sucking it down to Rathcoole.

I had a perfect view of the snooker hall and the sad little strip mall. Only the bookie was doing any business but that wasn’t surprising with the Derby coming up and the beautiful bay stallion Shergar, even at 1–6, a horse to bet your pension on.

Evening.

The scene at the snooker hall began to wind down and Billy drove off in his Merc at seven on the zero zero. Shane came out at 7.01 with a leather jacket over his head in lieu of a raincoat. I turned up the collar on my mac and followed him at a discreet distance, into the estate, along the Doagh Road, through Abbots Cross (the very place where Bobby Sands had been born) past Whiteabbey Hospital and down the Station Road.

He stopped at the station bar for a drink. I followed him inside and got a whiskey against the cold. The local news was on. The murder of Tommy Little and Andrew Young was now the sixth lead. No one was interested. I wondered if that would piss off our killer. Perhaps he’d go bigger or perhaps he’d take his game over the water where it would play better. The story ran for less than a minute and that included another incendiary remark from Councillor George Seawright who said that homo-sexuals should be shipped to an island in the Atlantic and left to starve to death.

Shane finished his drink, bought a book of matches and left by the side door.