Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“Where’s Straid from here?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s another few miles on up the road.”

“I’d heard of the village of Straid but I had no idea at all that it was so close to Carrickfergus, so close to Woodburn Forest.”

We passed a sign on a gate that said #19 Siskin Road.

“Here!” I said.

She pulled the BMW over and I got out and examined the gate. It had an electronic-locking mechanism that opened by remote control. Freddie could open it without leaving his car, which was the sort of thing you wanted if you were a high-ranking IRA man. A subject getting out of his car, fumbling with his keys in the early morning or the late evening was the ambushers’ dream.

The gate was made of thick, shipyard steel and ran on a roller across the entranceway. A stout high stone wall went all the way around the property and the wall was topped by rotating iron spikes.

Nasty.

“You’re breaking into this guy’s house? Don’t you need a warrant or something?” Laura said.

“Nah, we’ll be fine.”

“We’ll be fine he says. And how are you going to get in there?”

“Easy enough for a resourceful chap like me,” I said.

I took out my lock-picking kit and unscrewed the cover from the remote control box. I fused the exposed wires in the control box and the gate slid open.

“Quick, back in the car before the thing closes again,” I said.

Laura had a disapproving frown. “I’m not sure about this. If he comes back and finds us …”

“When he comes back we’ll be waiting here with half the RUC to arrest him.”

We drove along a short tree-lined gravel drive until we came to Freddie’s house.

It was a large four- or five-bedroom tower house — one of those fortified farmhouses that had been built in the seventeenth century during the Irish and English civil wars. It had thick, white-washed stone walls and one of the sides rose up into a three-storey round tower.

I saw now that the thick exterior wall was a bawn, a badhun — this whole place had been a cattle stronghold in the time of the Plantation. A good place for a player to have as his sanctuary.

The roof was thick slate and there were cast-iron grilles on the windows. The front door was a massive oak affair with an iron lock. I knew from my history that badhuns had large basements for storing food and grain and many of them were built over their own well or spring. You could easily survive a machine-gun or RPG attack and you’d do pretty well in the face of a zombie invasion, comet strike or the apocalypse.

It was the kind of place that cost money. Of course he had his press officer’s salary but what other readies could he be pulling in? Kick-backs from the rackets? Drugs?

“How are you going to get inside? That’s six inches of Irish oak,” she said, examining the front door.

“I’ll just have to pick the lock.”

Laura smiled at me. Her nostrils were flaring and her cheeks were flushed. She was enjoying this. Getting off on it.

I better get us inside then. Old locks were tricky, old seventeenth-century locks might be impossible, but we’d see.

I probed the mechanism with a pick. It was ok. A tension wrench was unnecessary, all I had to do was insert the pick into the bottom part of the keyhole and make sure it slid under the lock bar to act as the bottom of a key. I inserted my next hook pick above the first pick and slid it under the lock bar. I tapped around until I felt resistance, which came in the shape of a series of hanging pins at the back of the pick. I pushed up on the hanging pins to reproduce the top of the key turning.

The door unlocked.

I put on latex gloves and lifted the latch.

“What exactly are we looking for?”

“ I’m looking for. From now on you’re waiting in the car.”

“No fear, not after all this fun and games.”

I knew she wouldn’t listen to reason and she might even be able to help. I gave her another pair of latex gloves. “All right. We’re looking for evidence that Lucy Moore was staying here. Anything. Women’s clothes, baby clothes, any kind of ID. Anything like that! And a manual typewriter. Imperial 55. If you move anything put it back exactly the way it was. He’ll never know anyone was here,” I said.

“Hey, if there are three bowls of porridge can I have the one for baby bear?” she said.

We went inside.

Timber frame. Interior white-washed stone walls. Small windows. Not much light but an undeniable rustic charm. There were watercolours on the wall and when I examined one of them it was a tiny but valuable Jack B Yeats.

A huge living room that contained a piano, two sofas, a big TV.

I went to the piano. There were no books of sheet music, which was a little strange. If you played you always had one or two sheet books lying around, didn’t you? I checked the bookshelf but there were no sheet books there either, and nothing interesting. A lot of Leon Uris.

I went upstairs and searched the bedrooms. They weren’t fancy. Simple, Irish, even minimalist. Wood furniture, whitewashed walls.

Clean. No women’s clothes, no baby’s clothes.

There was a study with a locked roller desk. I picked it open and rummaged through a dull assortment of bills and financial statements. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I went down into the basement but all I found were a few bottles of wine. Probably expensive, but who knew? No old typewriters.

My last port of call was the record collection in the living room.

He was a connoisseur.

After me own heart.

A thousand albums. Easy. Maybe three hundred classical records arranged alphabetically.

“Look at this! Puccini!” I said taking out the 1956 Sir Thomas Beecham recording of La Boheme .

“What does that prove?” Laura asked.

“I don’t know,” I said putting the record back on its bulging shelf. “What have you found?”

“Nothing.”

I was depressed. “It’s a fucking boy scout’s house.”

“Maybe’s he’s innocent.”

“He can’t be. It’s too big a coincidence. Lucy Moore’s body was found in Woodburn Forest. She died the same night as Tommy Little. That piece of music. Your tiny hand is frozen. My name is Lucia but everybody calls me Mimi! It’s a tell. He was rushed. He didn’t know he was doing it. And Eurydice, remember? Eurydice doesn’t make it back! Lucy didn’t make it back! Apollo taught Orpheus to play the lyre. Apollo is the lord of light. Lucia means light. Don’t you see? Ariadne’s thread. The labyrinth leads us right back here!”

Laura folded her arms and sighed, “Jesus, is this how you do your police work? You wouldn’t get away with this in pathology.”

I was babbling and I fucking knew it. And she was right: this wasn’t police work, this was intuition, guesswork. It was feeble.

I went back upstairs, hunted under beds, in the back of cupboards, in the bathroom …

When I came back down, Laura was sitting on the sofa.

“Shall we go?”

She was disappointed. She wasn’t impressed with my detecting skills. Join the club, sister .

“He killed her. He’s the ‘S’ that was seeing Lucy,” I insisted.

I sat next to her on the leather sofa.

“Where’s the evidence that Lucy was here?”

“He got rid of it all.”

“Why would he kill her? What possible motive could there be?”

“She was a hunger striker’s wife. He knocked up a hunger striker’s wife.”

“Ex-wife. And so what?”

“It would look bad. It would hurt his career.”

“Come on. Murder hurts it even more.”

“Maybe they had a fight.”

She squeezed my hand. “There’s nothing here, Sean. He lives near Woodburn Forest? His name begins with ‘S’?”