Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

We finished our cigarettes.

Below us, on the Irish Sea, a tanker was chugging out of Larne Harbour heading for Glasgow, leaving a scarlet line of filth in its wake.

“She ever talk to you about labyrinths?”

“Labyrinths? No.”

“Opera? Rossini, Offenbach?”

“No.”

She looked at me and gave a half sort of smile. “You don’t believe she killed herself, do you?”

I thought about my answer for a long time.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

12 noon. The City of Belfast Crematorium, Rosewood Cemetery, East Belfast

Rows of neat, well-tended graves, gravel paths, trees. Signs of trouble already over the Lagan in the west and north of the city. Smoke curling from a dozen hijacked cars. Army helicopters hovering over potential foci and already that atmosphere that you only ever find in cities on the brink …

I had never been to the crematorium before. Didn’t even know it existed. A worker told me that in England the majority of people now got cremated whereas here they barely got one “customer” per day.

Despite his years of long service Tommy Little had exactly three people at his funeral: me, Walter and a venerable priest that Walter had dug up from somewhere. Not a single gentleman or lady of the press, which was surprising given the sensational nature of Tommy’s death.

The service was brief. The priest mumbled the words.

I watched as the simple pine coffin made its way through a hole in the wall into the fire.

The priest shook Walter’s hand.

And that was that.

The priest nodded as he walked past me and then shuffled out quickly, rushing to get home before the riot started.

Walter stared after the coffin for a moment or two and then turned. He smiled when he saw me. I stood up and offered him my hand.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said, shaking my hand.

We walked outside.

“You couldn’t give me a lift to a train station, could you?” he asked.

“I can take you to Carrick station if you want.”

“Ta.”

I drove the long way back, avoiding the city centre completely, taking Balmoral Avenue and Stockman’s Lane which were in the leafy, comparatively well-off southern suburbs. At Uni I had not only learned that Belfast rioters hated rain but also any neighbourhood that was close to a golf course.

Still we had to drive around hijacked cars and a jack-knifed bus.

I stuck on the radio. The BBC were confirming the bad news. Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara were either both dead or dying. I didn’t know McCreesh but O’Hara was the INLA commander in The Maze so those boys would definitely put on a big show of force in Belfast and even more so in Derry where O’Hara was from.

I turned off the set. Aye. It was going to be bad.

“Why did you come today?” Walter asked. “Hardly to pay your respects.”

“Hardly. How many men do you think Tommy killed? I mean, personally.”

Walter nodded and we drove in silence while I rummaged in the cassette box.

“What’s your feeling about The Kinks?”

“The usual love-hate.”

“Look for something else then. I need to keep my eyes on the road.”

Eventually he stuck in Bessie Smith which was a nice soundtrack to the unfolding Belfast tragedy.

We avoided the worst of the trouble and I pulled in at Carrick railway station.

“Thank you,” Walter said.

He opened the car door but didn’t get out.

“So,” he said.

“Do you have any leads?”

I shook my head. “Not really, but I did learn something today.

If somebody wanted to kill Tommy, mixing him up with a homosexual serial killer was a smart move. Tommy’s the head of the IRA’s internal security wing and not a single comrade shows up? He’s being wiped from history commie style.”

Walter nodded.

We stared at one another. I was waiting for it.

Waiting …

“Do you know Cicero?” I asked.

“They beat him into us in school,” he said.

“Us too. Father Faul made us read his murder trials. His defences of accused killers. Cicero would always start his orations by asking cui bono ? Who benefits? So I’ve been wondering who benefits from Tommy’s death?”

“You tell me,” he said.

“Let me run a few ideas past you. Tommy’s the head of the Force Research Unit and if he dies there are many current FRU investigations that would get suspended. That might buy someone some time.”

Walter shrugged. “What else are you thinking?”

“A rival? Tommy had to have made many enemies and rivals at the top.”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

“The people he interrogated, over the years. Important people. They could hold a grudge.”

“Perhaps.”

Now the time for my ace … “And then there’s Freddie Scavanni, isn’t there? Tommy dies and Freddie Scavanni moves into Tommy’s place.”

He nodded and crucially did not deny that Freddie was next in line.

“But if Tommy Little died when he was on his way over to see Freddie, wouldn’t that set off all the alarm bells in the world? Wouldn’t Freddie get the full Spanish Inquisition from the FRU and the IRA?” I said, airing my doubts as much as asking him. He sighed. “That’s why it can’t have been Freddie.”

“Do me a favour, Walter, tell me again about that phone call Tommy got the night he was killed.”

“He got the phone call. He talked. He hung up. He was on his way out anyway, but … I don’t know … maybe the phone call gave him an added urgency.”

“What precisely did he say to you?”

“He said that he had to, let me think … he had to ‘see Billy White and then he had to take care of some business with Freddie’. Yeah, that’s it.”

I flipped open my notebook and skipped back through the pages. “Previously you said Tommy told you he was going to ‘take care of some business with Billy and then go see Freddie’. Which was it? It’s important, Walter.”

He thought for a moment.

“I don’t remember. It wasn’t important at the time. I didn’t know then that it was the last thing I would ever hear him say.”

“You’ll let me know if anything else occurs to you?”

He nodded, got out of the car and went to catch the train.

2 p.m. Carrickfergus

I was reading the killer’s postcard to me and making no headway with it when the CID phone rang. Daedalus — inventor — Athenian — labyrinth — mirrors — bull worship — Crete — Poseidon. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Will somebody please get that?”

Matty was in the bog again, Crabbie was still out at lunch.

I picked up the phone. “Hello, I’d like to speak to Sergeant Duffy, please,” a Dublin-accented voice said.

“This is Sergeant Duffy.”

“Sergeant Duffy, this is Tony O’Rourke from the Sunday World . We’ve just received a letter on a sheet of A4 here in our Dundalk offices. It’s a hit list. It says above it, ‘Queers who will die soon’. There’s half a dozen names. The first two, Tommy Little and Andrew Young, have been crossed out. The others are all prominent people in Northern Ireland. We’ve photocopied the note and sent the original to the Dundalk peelers.”

“Ok,” I said.

“Listen, we’re going to run the list and the story about the killer in this Sunday’s paper and we were wondering if you had any comment.”

“Wait a minute! You can’t run that. You’ll be putting those people’s lives in danger.”

“You’ve seen it then?”

“Yes. He sent it to us too,” I admitted.

“We’re publishing the list, Sergeant, it’s newsworthy. We just wanted to know if you had any comment.”