Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I don’t know … What does anybody want? Heidegger said death is the central fact of life after being. We can’t experience our own death but we can fear it.”

She was shook her head. “No, Sean, what do you want with me? What are you doing here?”

A loose strand of wet hair unhooked itself from the towel. She looked beautiful like this. “The movies,” I said. “The one about the chariot race. Let’s go before they firebomb the cinema.”

She folded her arms across her chest and sniffed.

“I got your flowers,” she said.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

She shook her head but smiled. “Call me. In a day or two,” she said and closed the door.

I walked to the police station. The top floor was dark. I checked my desk. A fax from Special Branch answering Matty’s intel request: they knew nothing about Freddie Scavanni and they had heard no rumours that Tommy Little was involved with the IRA’s Force Research Unit. Geniuses.

I walked back to Coronation Road across the railway lines.

I stopped at Barn Halt. I crossed the tracks to the Belfast side.

Lightning struck the conductor on Kilroot power station’s six-hundred-foot chimney.

“Her mother’s on the train, looking out the window for Lucy but she doesn’t see her. How the fuck does she not see her? A guy in a car saw her just seconds before.”

I walked to the little shelter. It was basically just three walls and a roof. You couldn’t hide in there.

“Did the fucking aliens take her?” I yelled at the storm.

I stood there getting wet, disgusted at my own denseness.

I went into the shelter and relit the joint. I sat down on the concrete.

The boat train came flying through express from Belfast to Larne.

The boat train. Again. The boat train .

Of course!

The reason her mother didn’t see her was because she wasn’t going to Belfast. She’d been on the platform all right — the other platform. The guy in the car had seen her waiting, but she’d been waiting on the other side of the tracks. She had lied to her ma. She wasn’t going to Belfast, she was going to Larne.

She’d been going to Larne to catch the ferry to Scotland.

The abortion special.

What was it she had said? “I might stay over with some friends, but I’ll be back on Christmas morning.”

Train to Larne. Ferry to Stranraer. Train to Glasgow. Abortion. Overnight in the hospital. Train to Stranraer. Ferry to Larne. Train to Carrickfergus. Home for Christmas. She’d been planning to get an abortion. But something had happened. She had vanished instead. Hmmmm. I threw the stub of the joint onto the railway tracks and walked home along Taylor’s Avenue and the Barn Road.

Despite the downpour the DUP were electioneering in Victoria Estate. Dr Ian Paisley himself riding atop a coal lorry. “Do not allow the British Government to bow their knee to terrorists! Vote DUP!” Paisley was bellowing in an Old Testament prophet voice. Behind Paisley was Councillor George Seawright, originally from Glasgow and now the most militant and crazy of the DUP’s rising stars. There were dozens of DUP security men walking alongside of the coal lorry. And behind them there was another coal lorry piled high with boxes of foodstuffs and milk that were being given out to anyone who wanted one. The boxes were stamped with the words “EEC Surplus Not For Resale”.

Bobby Cameron beckoned me over to the lorry. “You like bacon?” he asked.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Fucking Muslims and Jews. Here,” he said. He offered me a box of German bacon. I shook my head. “Take it,” he insisted.

“Ta,” I said and grabbed the box. “And Bobby, listen, times are tough so you might want to rethink the rates you’ve been charging for protection around here.”

“Have people been squealing to you?”

“Nobody’s been squealing but times are tough.”

I left him to it and headed for my house. I put the bacon in the fridge, grabbed a book at random, stuck Liege and Lief on the hi-fi, went upstairs, lit the paraffin heater and ran the bath.

I thought about him. About what had just happened. There was no getting away from it. “What the hell have I done?” I said to myself. Was I a fairy? A homo? A queer? Well …?

Unlike those crazy Prods, I needed someone to talk to but there was no one. I lit and crumbled the rest of the cannabis into a tobacco-filled cigarette paper and got in the bath. I smoked the spliff, coasted on the paraffin fumes, and opened the book. It was a volume of German poetry. A birthday gift from an uncle that I’d never opened.

I read Goethe, Schiller, Novalis.

Nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg , the poet said.

Inward goes the way full of mystery.

Indeed.

And then … nothing. Twenty-four hours of nothing. Not so unusual in the life of a copper. Action stations, red zone, 100 mph and then zilch. Another reason why you need a good book.

Zilch in our case meant no leads, no further developments, no witnesses, no tips to the CID or the Confidential Telephone. The gay angle was probably hurting us. No one wanted to leave a tip about a homosexual murder. Not everybody in Ulster was George Seawright crazy but this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692. If they knew anything about such things it probably meant that they were queer too.

Procedure keeps you going. I checked for bombs under my car and drove to work. We tabbed the files, filed the reps. I called up the DMV and found out that Shane drove a VW Beetle. I pestered Special Branch about Tommy Little until a chief super came on the blower to tell me that I was barking up the wrong tree, that the police’s intelligence was very good and that if Tommy Little was a player he was a minor actor in the play.

We interviewed Lucy Moore’s pals in person and got nothing from them. We examined the Boneybefore postcard and the only prints were mine and the letter carrier. We looked and looked again for any links between the victims but there were none that we could find. We checked for Tommy Little’s missing Ford Granada but came up empty. I examined the music scores and played the records. I looked at the “hit list” and asked Crabbie to see if there were any links between the people there. Again none beyond the obvious. The inferences we drew from our inquiries took us down several blind alleys just like in a real labyrinth.

On Tuesday afternoon we got a fax from the coroner’s office. Sir David Fitzhughes, the Coroner for East Antrim, had read Dr Cathcart’s pathology report and our notes and had issued a preliminary finding of death by suicide on Lucy Moore. The full inquest would be in November but this preliminary finding was enough to have Brennan breathing down my neck to bin the case.

On the one hand we didn’t know where Lucy had been staying since Christmas. On the other hand hiding a pregnant woman wasn’t a crime. Not even in Belfast. Brennan wanted my full attention on the murders. The patho said Lucy killed herself, the coroner said Lucy killed herself, the papers said Lucy killed herself.

I wasn’t that happy about it. I agreed to suspend the investigation but not close the case. I wrote “Possible suicide” on the file.

I completed my psych profile of the killer. It was standard stuff from the Wrigley-Carmichael index: A white male, 25–45, moderately high IQ, almost certainly an ex-prisoner, and almost certainly a sex offender of some type. We ran the names through the database. We got twenty-three matches but no one who was still around. Every single one of them was living in England, Scotland or further afield. As soon as they got out of prison sex offenders fled Northern Ireland because they knew that sooner or later they would be kneecapped or murdered by a paramilitary chieftain looking to make a name for himself.