Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“Yes sir, I can handle it.”

“Aye, you better or I’ll bloody get somebody who can.”

He yawned, tired out by his own bluster. “Well, I’ll leave this in your capable hands, then. I have a feeling this one is not going to cover us in glory, but we have to file them all.”

“That we do, sir.”

“All right then.”

Brennan waved and walked back to his Ford Granada parked behind the police Land Rover. When the Granada had gone, I called Matty over.

“What do you make of it?” I asked him.

Matty McBride was a twenty-three-year-old second-gen cop from East Belfast. He was a funny-looking character with his curly brown hair, pencil thin body, flappy ears. He was little was Matty, maybe five five. Wee and cute. He was wearing latex gloves and his nose was red, giving him a slight evil-clown quality. He’d joined the peelers right out of high school and was obviously smart enough to have gotten himself into CID but still, I had grave doubts about his focus and attention to detail. He had a dreamy side. He wasn’t fussy or obsessed, which was a severe handicap in an FO. And when I had politely suggested that he look into the part-time degrees in Forensic Science at the Open University, Matty had scoffed at the very notion. He was young, though, perhaps he could be moulded yet.

“Informer? Loyalist feud? Something like that?” Matty suggested.

“Aye, my take too. Do you think they shot him here?”

“Looks like it.”

“March him out here and then chop his paw off with him screaming for all and sundry?”

Matty shrugged. “Ok, so they killed him somewhere else.”

“But if they did that, why do you think they carried the body all the way over here from the road?”

“I don’t know,” Matty said wearily.

“It was to display him, Matty. They wanted him found quickly.”

Matty grunted, unwilling to buy into the pedagogical nature of our relationship.

“Have you done the hair samples, prints?” I asked.

“Nah, I’ll do all that once I’m done with the photos.”

“Who’s our patho?”

“Dr Cathcart.”

“Is he good?”

“She. Cathcart’s a she.”

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t heard of a female patho before.

“She’s not bad,” Matty added.

We stood there looking into the burnt-out car listening to the rain pitter-patter on the rusted roof.

“I suppose I better get back to it,” Matty said.

“Aye,” I agreed.

“Is the cavalry coming down from Belfast at all?” Matty asked as he took more pictures.

I shook my head. “Nah, just you and me, mate. Cosier that way.”

“Jesus, I have to do this all by myself?” Matty protested.

“Get plod and sod over there to help you,” I said.

Matty seemed sceptical. “Them boys aren’t too brilliant at the best of times. Question for ya: skipper says to go easy on the old snaps. Do you need close-ups? If not I’ll skip them.”

“Go easy on the snaps? Why?”

“The expense, like, you know? Two pound for every roll we process. And it’s just a topped informer, isn’t it?”

I was annoyed by this. It was typical of the RUC to waste millions on pointless new equipment that would rot in warehouses but pinch pennies in a homicide investigation.

“Take as many rolls of film as you like. I’ll bloody pay for it. A man has been murdered here!” I said.

“All right, all right! No need to shout,” Matty protested.

“And get that evidence lifted before the rain washes it all away. Get those empty suits to help you.”

I buttoned my coat and turned up the collar. The rain was heavier now and it was getting cold.

“You could stay and help if you want, I’ll give you some latex gloves,” Matty said.

I tapped the side of my head.

“I’d love to help, mate, but I’m an ideas man, I’d be no use to you.”

Matty bit his tongue and said nothing.

“You’re in charge of the scene now, Constable McBride,” I said in a loud, official voice.

“Ok.”

“No shortcuts,” I added in a lower tone and turned and walked back to Taylor’s Avenue where the police Land Rover was parked with its back doors open. There was a driver inside: another reserve constable that I didn’t know, sitting on his fat arse reading a newspaper. I rapped the glass and the startled constable looked up. “Oi, you, Night of the Living Dead! Close them rear doors, and look alive, pal, you’re a sitting duck here for an ambush.”

“Yes, sergeant,” the unknown constable said.

An idea occurred to me. “Shine your headlights onto the field, will ya?”

He put the headlights on full beam giving Matty even more light. I looked for a blood trail from the road to the corpse and sure enough I found a few drops.

“There’s a blood trail!” I yelled to Matty and he nodded with a lot less excitement than I would have liked. I shrugged, did up my last coat button and went back along Coronation Road. It was well after midnight now and everyone was abed. The rain had turned to sleet and the smell of peat smoke was heady. No people, no cars, not even a stray cat. Dozens of identical, beige Proddy curtains neatly shut.

So all these Jaffa bastards know I’m a Catholic? I thought unhappily. That was the kind of quality information the IRA would pay good money for, if anybody around here was imaginative enough to sell it to them.

I walked up the garden path, went inside, pulled my vermillion curtains, turned on the electric fire, stripped off my clothes in the living room and found an old bath robe. I made myself another pint of vodka and lime. The TV was finished now and it was test cards on all three channels. I put Double Fantasy on the record player. I flipped the lever for repeat, lay down on the leather sofa and closed my eyes.

Darkest Ulster in the Year of our Lord 1981: rain on the gable, helicopters flying along the lough, a riot reduced to the occasional rumble …

The problem with Double Fantasy was the arrangement whereby they alternated John Lennon tracks with Yoko Ono tracks. You couldn’t escape Yoko for more than four minutes at a time. I lowered the volume to two, snuggled under the red sofa comforter and, taking the occasional sip from my vodka gimlet, fell into the kind of deep sleep only experienced by men whose lives, like those of C for Charlie company, are lived on the edge of the line.

The occasional rumble of riot, gunfire and explosion. Nothing that Carrickfergus’s seasoned sleepers couldn’t handle. But then the comparative quiet was shattered by the apocalyptic turbines of a CH-47 Chinook. Everything began to rattle. A coffee cup fell off my mantelpiece. A picture came down.

The helicopter passed overhead at a height of 200 metres, well below the recommended ceiling. The Magnavox flip clock said 4 a.m. The British army had woken me and half the town in a hubristic display of raw power. Yes, you control the skies. And this, guys, is how you lose the hearts and minds.

I thought about that as I lay there in the big, empty double bed on Coronation Road. And when my anger subsided I thought about the vacuum on Adele’s side of the mattress.

Of course I had asked her if she wanted to come to Carrick with me, but there was no way she was going to “that stinking Proddy hell hole,” was her response. I hadn’t been heartbroken but I had been disappointed. She was a schoolteacher and it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to switch education boards as all the good teachers were going to England and America. The house was paid for, she would have been bringing in the dough, we would have been living high on the hog.

But she didn’t love me and the truth was I didn’t love her either.