Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

I had no appetite. I told her about my ride with Billy.

She was horrified. “How can they just lift you off the street like that? The nerve of them!”

I told her about my pet theory. “Billy and Shane are an item. Shane was seeing Tommy Little on the side. Instead of killing him, Billy has forgiven him. But the rot has to stop here. I had to be threatened with the law and the gun. If the big bugs ever found out that Billy is a queer, minimum he gets kneecapped and exiled and divorced, but more likely they’d just kill him.”

“Do you have any proof of this?” she asked.

“None at all,” I said with a grin.

We drank the wine. Sufficient time had obviously passed: I didn’t need to ask if she wanted to go upstairs. We made love in the double bed.

I lit the paraffin heater and, when the lights went out, the Chess Records guitar shaped oil lamp. We lay in bed. “I can’t believe a man pointed a gun right at you in broad daylight,” she said.

She clearly had no idea the shit I had to deal with on a daily basis.

“How can you live here, among them?” she asked.

“Among who?”

“The Protestants! We’re like Anne Frank and her family up here,” she said.

“It’s not as bad as all that. They’re ok to me.”

“For now. And it’s a question of class too, isn’t it? What’s going to happen when you hear one of them get drunk and start knocking his wife about? What are you going to do then?”

“I’ll stop it,” I said.

“And how do you think they’ll treat you after something like that?”

“I don’t know.”

She shook her head, smiled and kissed my furrowed brow. Her lips were soft and she smelled good .

I kissed between her breasts and I kissed her belly and I kissed her labia and clitoris. She was a woman. I wanted that. I needed that.

We made love until the rain began and the light in the guitar lamp turned yellow, and the bishop on the Chess logo faded and finally guttered out.

Letters. Words. Aren’t you bored looking at them? Line after line. Page after page. Dream me away from the letters and the words. Dream me away even from logic. Take me to a land of alien typography. Away from Ireland, where there’s always a fight, always a duality, never a synthesis. Protestant: Catholic; Green: Orange; Beatles: Stones; Presta valve: Shrader valve. How tedious it all is. How wearying.

One would have to be mad to stay here.

Or indolent. Or masochistic.

What does it matter? What does any of it matter? The girl was dead. Tommy was dead. Andrew was dead. None of it was my business. Truth was something to be debated in philosophy 101.

“Morning,” Laura said.

“Morning,” I replied and kissed her.

“I’ll fix breakfast,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

None of my clothes were clean so I pulled on my jeans and a battered red New York Dolls sweatshirt that I had picked up in America.

We ate and I looked under the BMW for bombs and I drove Laura to the hospital.

I went to the paper shop, listened to Oscar complain about the paramilitaries, scanned the headlines in the newspapers: The Pope was out of hospital, a dress designer had been picked for Lady Di’s wedding, no hunger strikers had died overnight. I rummaged in the glove compartment and found the mix tape I’d made of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, John Lee Hooker and Howlin Wolf.

I put the windows down and drove up into the country to clear the cobwebs. When I finally got back to Carrick police station Matty and Crabbie were expectantly waiting for me in the CID incident room.

Matty was holding something in his hand.

“News,” he said.

“Have we got a break in the bicycle theft case?”

“Better. The letters and postcards Lucy Moore sent to her sister in Dublin.”

“What about them?”

“You asked her sister Claire to send you the letters, right?”

I put on latex gloves and took them to the desk by the windows in the CID incident room. Two letters, two generic white postcards and one picture postcard of the Guinness brewery.

“We read through them a couple of times. She only says the blandest things. ‘I’m doing well, it rained today, I had toast for breakfast,’ that kind of thing,” Crabbie said.

“It’s as if she had someone looking over her shoulder censoring ever single word,” Matty said.

“Here’s a typical one,” McCrabban said. I picked it up and read it:

Dear Claire,

I hope you are good. I am well. Things are nice here. Don’t worry about me. I’m looking after myself. I saw The Horse of The Year Show on TV last night. Your favourite, Eddy Macken was the quare fellow.

That’s all for now.

Lucy

“Ok, so why are you so excited?” I asked. “Fingerprints?”

Matty shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. No prints and I checked the stationery, same as the others, nothing special. I ran the letters under the UV light. Nothing. But then I did the same with the envelopes … I don’t know if you’re still interested, Sean, but have a wee gander at this …”

He handed me one of the envelopes and a copy of the UV photo.

“In visible light there’s nothing on the envelope, but under the UV light you can just see an ‘S’ in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope.”

I was electrified. “How did that get there?”

“In your bog-standard Irish way some diligent person had been writing the return addresses on all the envelopes in a stack. Top left-hand corner, name and address,” Matty said.

“Of course they kept the envelopes that Lucy used free of a return address,” McCrabban added.

“But whoever was writing the return addresses on the regular envelopes leaned all the way through to the envelope that Lucy used for this letter to her sister. Cheapo paper and a heavy hand. Only the ‘S’ though. You can just see traces of the rest of the address, but nothing else is legible.”

I nodded. “So what do you think we have here, lads?” I asked.

“I think we have the first letter of the name of the person Lucy was staying with. You always do the name first. Name and address in the top left-hand corner, that’s what I was taught,” Crabbie said.

I rubbed my chin. I wasn’t entirely convinced and Crabbie could see that.

“I mean, Sean, it’s only the first letter of a first name, but it’s still a lead, isn’t it?” Crabbie insisted.

“It could be that,” I said sceptically.

“Come on, Sean!” Matty said.

“I don’t want to piss on your cornflakes, boys, but the imprint of an ‘S’ in the left-hand corner of an envelope isn’t exactly Nathan Leopold’s glasses prescription, is it? And I know what the Chief’s going to say. He’s going to say that this case is closed, isn’t he?”

“Do you still think Lucy’s death is connected to Tommy Little’s?” Crabbie asked.

Of course I had told them my bullshit theory about the line from La Boheme: “My name is Lucia but everyone calls me Mimi” … Lucia = Lucy?

I shook my head. “Nah. Lucia, Lucy? I was just spouting off, Crabbie. It’s a coincidence,” I insisted, but Crabbie looked me in the eyes and he saw that I wanted to be convinced.

“Let’s just say for the sake of argument that there’s a link between these two cases. These two murders that occurred at approximately the same time, not a million miles away, where does that get us?” Crabbie asked.

“There are two ‘S’s in the Tommy Little case, aren’t there?” Matty said.

“Aye. There are. Freddie Scavanni and Shane Davidson.”

The three of us stared at the envelope. Outside rain was lashing the windows. A coal boat was struggling out of Carrick harbour. An ambulance roared by on the Marine Highway.