Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

Crabbie filled his pipe and lit it. “So,” he said.

“So,” I seconded and lit another ciggie.

“What do we do with this?” Matty asked.

“What can we do?” Crabbie asked.

“I don’t know. If I or either of you go near Scavanni or Shane Davidson we’ll get a bollocking.”

Matty jabbed his finger into the envelope. “But we have something here!”

Suddenly the incident-room door was kicked open. Chief Inspector Brennan was standing there larger than life. Eyes wide, fag end drooping from his mouth. I immediately hid the envelope under a sheet of A4.

“Oi, Sergeant Duffy!” Brennan bellowed.

“Yes, sir?”

“Remember in the dim distant past of yesterday you gave me this big fucking speech about how there wouldn’t be any more queer murders? About how the queer angle was only misdirection? A false trail?”

“Yes.”

“Well, wise guy, they just found another dead poofter. You’re fucking brilliant, aren’t ya?”

“Where?”

“Loughshore Park, near Jordanstown. In the bogs. Somebody just called it in.”

Loughshore Park.

The toilets.

“Is there a description of the victim?” I asked.

“Young white male, twenty, Elvis quiff, black hair, what’s it to you?”

I grabbed my leather jacket and my revolver. I pushed past Brennan. He grabbed at me.

“Where the fuck are you going, mate?”

“Loughshore Park.”

“This isn’t your case any more, arsehole!”

I ran down into the car park and reversed the Beemer out of its spot.

I hit 80 on the Shore Road.

I made it to Jordanstown.

Todd was there with his team. Ten officers in all. White boiler suits, photographers, the whole thing. I was impressed.

I showed my warrant card, kept out of Todd’s sightline and went down into the bog.

Of course it was him.

He was lying there in the foetal position with his hands ducttaped behind his back.

Billy and Shane had silenced him.

They’d tortured him first to get any information out of him. He’d been stripped and beaten black and blue. This also was a lesson for Shane. A lesson in the way the world worked.

I walked closer to the body.

His face was bloody but there was no blood pool around the corpse. He hadn’t been shot.

“How did he die?” I asked one of the forensic officers.

“Very unusual,” the nearest FO guy said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. They taped over his mouth and taped his hands behind his back. They killed him by putting a Speedo nose clip over his nostrils. Swimmers use it to stop water going up their nose.”

“So, he suffocated?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the unusual bit.”

“What’s the unusual bit?”

“They cut off his eyelids with a pair of scissors. Don’t know why they did that.”

“So they could watch him die,” I said.

Part of the moral lesson.

Shane was forced to watch the light go out of his eyes.

“What in the name of fuck are you doing here?” DCI Todd said.

“Fuck off,” I snapped and pushed him away from me.

“Did youse see that? He fucking pushed me,” Todd said.

I made a fist. “I’ll fucking do worse if you don’t get out of my fucking way!” I said.

I shouldered him aside and went out.

“I’ll tell your gaffer about this!” Todd screamed after me. “You’ll be giving out parking tickets in Free Derry when I’m done with you!”

I walked to the BMW.

I drove across the four lanes of the Shore Road and up into Rathcoole.

I screamed the Beemer through the estate and hand-braked it to a halt in front of the Rathcoole Loyalists Pool, Snooker and Billiards Hall. I took the police revolver out of my jacket pocket, checked the cylinder, cocked it and stormed inside.

A cocked.38 doesn’t feel the same as an unprimed revolver. The frame tightens differently, the trigger is on a hair and this tension is communicated to you and the people around you.

There were a dozen men playing snooker and pool. They looked at me and looked at the gun. Said nothing. Didn’t move.

I marched to the cigarette room, kicked in the door.

Shane and Billy were having Chinese for lunch. I swiped the food onto the floor and put the barrel of the.38 in Billy’s right eye.

“I’m lifting you. I’m taking you in, fucker!”

“I was expecting you,” Billy said, wincing away from the revolver in his face.

“Like fuck you were. Get on your feet!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Billy said.

I shoved the revolver deeper against his eye.

“You’re going down, Billy. You killed that boy to cover your tracks. Shane and Tommy were having an affair, weren’t they? Shane here can’t keep his dick in his fucking pants, can he?”

“You have some imagination, copper,” Shane said.

“I’m taking you down too. Separate cells, let’s see who cracks first.”

“On what charge?” a voice purred behind me in an Anglo-Irish accent.

I kept the gun in Billy’s eye but turned to see who was talking. A tall, thin, grey-haired man in a black suit.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Anthony Blane, QC, Mr White’s barrister. On what charge are you arresting my client, Sergeant Duffy?”

“Murder with malice aforethought.”

“What evidence do you have linking my client with such a crime?”

I wracked my brain for a second. “I have motive.”

Blane crossed the little room. “Put the gun away, Sergeant, before someone gets hurt,” he said.

I wanted to squeeze the trigger. I wanted to wipe the smile off Billy’s fat fucking face.

I closed my eyes.

I could see blood.

Words.

Letters.

Typography.

I lifted the revolver from Billy’s eye, disarmed it and put it in my pocket.

“Please show me your warrant for entry into this private room and please tell me your grounds for suspecting my client of murder. When I talk to the Chief Constable this evening, I’ll want to have all the facts before me.”

Shane was laughing now. Billy too. Pistol-whip the pair of them. Kill all three of them. Shane. Billy. Mr Tony Blane, QC, mob lawyer to the scum of the earth.

I bit my lip. Shook my head.

“Aye, I thought so,” Shane said.

I slapped his face. Billy was on my back in a second. He rugby-tackled me to the ground and we tumbled out into the snooker hall.

One of the goons raised a pool cue and smacked it down towards my head.

I got my wrist up just in time and the cue smashed into two pieces.

I scrambled to my feet. There were half a dozen guns pointing at my chest.

Billy got up. Still grinning. Still laughing. It drove me mental.

“Yak it up, Billy boy. I’ll find the proof. I’ll muddy the fucking waters. You and Tommy Little. You and Shane! A pair of benders? How will the higher-ups like that? I’ll fucking dig until I find something! And then you’ll be toast!”

Billy looked around the room at his men. Some of them wanted to know what I was talking about.

“Empty threats!” he said. “He’s spouting off. It’s all bollocks, so it is.”

“We’ll see! We’ll fucking see!” I screamed and stormed out to the Beemer.

I put it into gear. I drove. Someone threw a milk carton onto me from one of the tower blocks. It smashed over the windscreen scaring me shitless.

“Shite!” I yelled. “Shite! Shite! Shite!”

The Shore Road. Traffic. My wrist was banjaxed. Hurt like a bastard. And my beeper ringing so insistently that I finally had to turn it off. Whoever it was, I didn’t want to know.

By the time I got to Carrick my wrist was agony. “Might as well go to the hospital,” I said.

I got the end of Laura’s afternoon clinic. “Police business?” Hattie Jacques asked.