Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“I’m Detective Sergeant Duffy. Carrick RUC. This is my investigation,” I said.

He pushed his glasses up his nose and shook his head.

“Go back to your work, gentlemen!” he ordered.

“Don’t listen to this big lump of snot, I’m the gaffer here,” I said and tried to push past him. He put his hand on my shoulder. I grabbed his hand and twisted it back against his wrist.

“Touch me again and I’ll shoot that thing off your fucking head,” I snarled at him.

“You’re not in charge any more, Duffy,” the man said in a nasally, civil servanty tone. “You’ve been superseded.”

The beat coppers and the squaddies turned to look at me.

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked.

“I’m Detective Chief Inspector Todd of Special Branch,” he said in a loud voice meant to carry to the end of the street and back.

“On who’s authority have you-”

“The Chief Constable’s authority, Sergeant Duffy, the Chief Constable of the RUC. I’ll send an officer over in the morning for your evidence and your report. I expect the full cooperation of you and your team.”

I stared at him open mouthed.

“Do you understand, Duffy?”

“Yes,” I muttered and — after an insolent pause — added “sir.”

There was nothing more for me to do here.

I got in the BMW and drove back to Carrick at 100 mph on the line.

I kept going until I hit Greenisland and then Monkstown.

I went to see Victor Combs.

Up four flights. Screaming wives, screaming children, yelling men.

I knocked on Combs’s door.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Peelers,” I said.

He opened the door. He was still in his dressing gown. I walked into the kitchen, opened his fridge, got myself a can of Harp and sat on his sofa.

“Account for your movements from seven o’clock onwards,” I said.

He told me the story of the TV shows he’d watched and of a brief phone call to his sick mother.

“What’s this about?” he asked.

I finished the beer, crumpled the can, chucked it at the TV set and drove back to Carrick.

I sped up the Tongue Loanen to Walter Hays’s. He was half drunk and watching the riots on TV. But again he had no alibi.

I searched the house for musical scores or manual typewriters. Nada on both.

He offered me a martini. I took it. He offered me another. I went out to the Beemer and drove home.

11 p.m. Carrickfergus

I knocked on Laura’s door but she didn’t answer. I drove back to Coronation Road. Kids had spent the day painting the kerb stones red, white and blue.

“You look as if you’ve had a day of it,” Mrs Campbell said, putting out the milk bottles.

“Who are you talking to?” a man asked from inside the house.

“Our neighbour,” she told him and then in a whisper to me, “he’s back.”

“Haven’t met him. Invite him in,” the voice said.

“Would you like to come in?” Mrs Campbell asked.

“No thank you, I better go,” I replied.

“What’s he say?” Mr Campbell asked.

“He wants to go home. He hasn’t had his tea,” Mrs Campbell said and smiled.

“Nonsense! He’ll have tea with us. Sure I’m just sitting down now,” Mr Campbell bellowed.

Mrs C shook her head at me. “He won’t take no for an answer,” she whispered.

A very late tea with the Campbells: sausages, fried eggs, chips, beans, fried soda bread.

Mr Campbell looked like somebody’s dangerous uncle who only came down from the hills to whore and drink and take revenge for petty slights. He had a hedge of black hair, a black beard and a crushing handshake. Easily six six, 250.

I ate the food and the kids looked at their father for the first time in a couple of months with a mixture of awe, excitement and terror. For this household, tea, especially tea at eleven o’clock, was a time for eating not talking. When we were nearly done Mr Campbell asked me my team. I told him Liverpool. He seemed satisfied with that. One of the kids asked me my favourite colour. I told him it was a tie between red and blue. That also elicited murmurs of approval.

I finished up, thanked the Campbells, went next door, turned on the midnight news. The riot was still going on. The cops had lost control of the situation and the army had been called in. Eighteen police officers had been injured by petrol bombs. Fifty cars had been hijacked and set alight. Eighty-eight plastic bullets had been fired. A helicopter had been forced down by gunshots. A paint factory had been set on fire.

In other news: Mrs Thatcher had paid a brief visit to the City Hospital in Belfast this morning; Courtaulds were closing down their remaining factories in Northern Ireland putting five hundred people out of work; Harland and Wolff were laying off twelve hundred welders for an indefinite period; a “gay bar” had been attacked in Larne …

Victoria Estate opened her eyes in the morning light. Birdsong. A whistling milkman. The sound of kids throwing milk bottles at brick walls. I went downstairs. Through the living-room window I could see children kicking around a football. Others were playing hopscotch and hide and seek while women with curlers in their hair chatted across the fences.

Lou Reed was on the radio, singing “Sweet Jane”.

Coffee. Toast. Jeans. Sweater. Trainers.

Car. I checked underneath for bombs.

Not today. I drove along Coronation Road. Kids waved, adults nodded. In a council estate or housing project there is a feeling of intimacy, a feeling of togetherness that perhaps can only be replicated among a ship’s crew.

I liked it.

I stopped short.

There was a big plate of wobbly yellow iron placed over a large pothole at the top of Coronation Road. In any other country in the world you just would have driven over it, but here, time and again, coppers had been blown up by explosive devices such as these. You dug a hole in the road, you filled it with C4 and nails, you covered it with a plate of iron to make it look like it had been done by a road crew as a temporary fix. You blew it up by remote. This was Protestant Coronation Road in Protestant Victoria in Protestant Carrickfergus and there was a 99 per cent chance that this really was a temporary fix by a road crew but I wasn’t going to drive over it.

I reversed the car and went south along Coronation Road instead.

Chicken? Sure. Alive? Aye.

I went to the newsagents, collected my free papers from Oscar, told him I’d had a word with Bobby Cameron, which, technically, was true. Oscar was selling paint and hardware now to make ends meet. I took the sample sheets of every shade of blue and drove to the barracks.

Normally I was the first one in but this morning Brennan was waiting for me.

He pointed to his office and when I had sat down, he got up from behind the desk and closed the door. He offered me a whiskey.

“Too early for me, sir,” I said.

He poured himself one.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I agreed.

“I sent off the files, case notes and the physical evidence this morning, but Chief Inspector Todd would appreciate a full report from you,” Brennan said.

“I’ll get working on it straight away,” I said with a neutral tone.

Brennan sipped his whiskey. “Apparently there was some kind of incident last night in Larne?” Brennan asked.

“Sir?”

“Todd says that you yelled at him.”

“That’s not my recollection, sir,” I said.

“You had a week, son. A week is a fucking geologic era in a murder investigation. You had a week and you turned up nothing. You haven’t had one person in here for questioning. Face it, Sean. You were in over your head.”

“I’m not sure I would categorize it quite that way, sir.”