Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“Under the terms of your probation I have the right to search these premises for a firearm. I am exercising that right,” I said.

No gun. No contraband. Nothing suspicious.

But there was the fact that he had no alibi.

“Why are you still in Northern Ireland, Mr Combs? Aren’t you afraid that you’ll be kneecapped because you’re a sex offender?” I asked.

Combs’s grey face became greyer. “Let them kneecap me. Let them do anything they want. I don’t care. Let them kill me. I didn’t do anything wrong and they know it. My life’s ruined. Everything’s ruined. My family won’t speak to me. My friends. Fuck it. Let them come. Let them do their fucking worst.”

“I like the defiance. Do you have anything to back it up? A wee pistol maybe?” I asked.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He nodded. “Who’d sell me a piece anyway?”

“Just about anybody,” Matty said.

I sat on the sofa and looked at him. “What happened to you, mate?”

He didn’t reply for a long time.

“Love happened,” he said at last.

I looked into his strangely pale eyes.

“Go on.”

He shook his head. “It was my mistake. I flew too close to the sun.”

We took our leave and drove back to Carrick Police Station.

“Big tubby,” Matty scoffed. “He flew too close to the bun more like.”

Crabbie laughed and then pointed at me.

“Remind Matty about Icarus, why don’t you, Sean.”

“Icarus was the son of Daedalus who was famous for building the labyrinth before he got famous for building wings that didn’t work.”

“Coincidence,” Matty said.

“Probably,” I agreed.

We got to the station. I sent the lads home and I went in and briefed the Chief. Brennan poured me some Jura while he listened to my report.

“Not much progress, eh, Sean?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, at the least the nutter hasn’t struck again, has he?”

“Not that we know of.”

“What else is new?” he asked.

I drank the whiskey. “In my life, sir?”

“In your life, Sean.”

“I went to the flicks, saw Chariots of Fire .”

“Any good?”

“They go for a run along the beach at the Old Course in St Andrews. I think you’d like that bit, sir.”

He yawned. “All right. Sally forth! And take my advice and go to bed early. We’ll be needing you before dawn.”

“What for?”

He tapped his nose. “Top Secret VIP on her way.”

Her could only mean Mrs Thatcher or the Queen. Either would be bad news.

I went home but I couldn’t go to sleep early. Never could. I took some of the EEC bacon, fried it with eggs and potato bread. I ate it in front of the TV. There was a brand new cop show on called Magnum P.I . He was a PI. He was called Magnum. Like Serpico he had an impressive moustache. This, I realized, was my problem.

I phoned Laura but she told me that she was just on her way out.

“Who with?”

“A friend.”

“What friend?”

“A friend from college.”

“Man or woman?”

“Oh, you’re impossible!” she said and hung up.

I called an old mate of mine, Jack Pougher, from Special Branch intel. I span him my “Freddie Scavanni is a major player” theory. He’d heard nothing about it. He told me I should stick to detecting. I told him I was shite at that. We discussed cop moustaches and agreed that they were on the way out.

I took a pint glass out of the freezer and made myself a vodka gimlet.

The phone rang. It was ballistics. “This gun did not fire the bullets that killed your homicide victims,” some fucking Nigel said in a home-counties accent.

“Are you sure?”

“We can say it with 99 per cent confidence.”

I thanked him and hung up the phone. Billy White did not shoot Tommy Little. At least not with that gun. I drank the vodka and thought about the killer. He’d been so quick to get our attention before with postcards and sawn-off limbs and now nothing: no new victims, no new communications. Surely that meant something. But what?

I thought about Dermot McCann, a boy I’d known at St Malachy’s. Dermot had been very sexually adventurous even for 1968 … Dermot was now inside doing ten years for bomb making.

I thought about him from Loughshore Park. Stopped thinking about him. Got annoyed. I opened the front door and left out the milk bottles. I went back in, stripped down to my jeans and T-shirt, got an oil can from the garden shed and pretended to oil the squeaky front gate. If Mrs Campbell came out now and did her “Oh, Mr Duffy, it’s such a shame about the Pope” thing I’d lift her over the fence, carry her into the living room and fuck her goddamn brains out.

I oiled the gate. The rain came on. Mrs Campbell did not come out.

Tuesday had been a bust. Wednesday had been a bust. Two days of nothing. And then on Thursday all hell broke loose.

4 a.m. Carrickfergus

They didn’t phone. Crabbie rang my front-door bell at four in the morning. I was convinced it was an inept terrorist attack and opened the door with my service revolver cocked.

“Don’t shoot, it’s me,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Get a move on, Sean. We’re meeting the Chief in half an hour.”

“Let me make a cup of tea,” I murmured.

“No time for tea, the others are waiting in the Land Rover, come on, I’ll help you. Lemme get your kit off.”

“Don’t touch me! Wait in the living room.”

I quickly threw on my dress uniform and body armour. “Last night I told a mate in Special Branch my theory about Freddie Scavanni,” I yelled from the bathroom.

“What did he say to that?” McCrabban asked.

“He said I was a genius and he sent over the file on Jack the Ripper.”

“Have you solved that one too?”

“It was Queen Victoria.”

“I knew it all along. Easy to conceal a machete under all that crinoline.”

I grabbed my electric razor and the pair of us went outside.

“I cleaned that graffiti off the back of the Rover,” Crabbie said.

I had completely forgotten about that. “Thanks, mate,” I told him.

“You can go in the front, Sean,” Crabbie said. “I can see you’re fragile today.”

I got in the passenger’s seat. Sergeant McCallister was driving, McCrabban, Matty and three reservists were in the back. No one had mentioned the name “Thatcher” yet but this had to be about her.

“We’re to rendezvous at Ballyclare at 04.30 hours,” McCallister said.

“‘04.30 hours?’ Is that what he told you? Does he think we’re the bloody army?”

4.30 a.m. Ballyclare

Brennan was sitting there like Lord Muck in his famous Finn Juhl armchair that he must have transported in the back of the Land Rover. He tapped his watch and grinned at us as we pulled up in front of the Five Corners Public House, which was open and serving Irish coffee to the lads.

The sun was just coming up over the Slieve Gullion and Lough Neagh and if the big line of black clouds to the north would keep away it might be a fine morning. The landlord of the Five Corners passed an Irish coffee into my hands and I took it gratefully. Brennan was enjoying himself, surrounded by his men, in the wee hours, in his full dress uniform and leather gloves.

“Men, we are to proceed to Aldergrove Airport in convoy where we are to meet with the brave boys of Ballyclare RUC and establish a roadblock, in co-operation with units of the British Army, on the Ballyrobin Road in Templepatrick so that an unnamed very important person can drive to Belfast,” he said.

“Why doesn’t she take a helicopter like everybody else?” McCallister wondered.