Adrian McKinty: The Cold Cold Ground

I lay there in the darkness wondering if sleep was an option.

My mind drifted back to the murder victim on Taylor’s Avenue.

The crime scene had been nagging at my unconscious.

I had missed something.

In my haste to get out of the rain I had overlooked a detail.

What was it?

It was something about the body, wasn’t it? Something hadn’t been quite right.

Wind tugged at the gutters. Rain pounded off the window. I shivered. This was evidently going to be another “year without a summer” for Ulster.

For obscure reasons the previous tenants had blocked up the chimney so that you couldn’t light a fire in the upstairs or downstairs grates. I’d reckoned I wouldn’t have to worry about this until November but now I was obviously going to have to get someone in to see about it.

I lay there thinking and the Chief’s question came back to me.

Why had I joined the police?

And for the second time in twenty-four hours I thought about the incident .

Don’t look for it in my shrink reports. And don’t ask any of my old girlfriends.

Never talked about it with anyone.

Not me ma. Not me da. Not even a priest. Unusual for a blabber like yours truly.

It was 2 May 1974. I was two years into my PhD programme. A nice spring day. I was walking past the Rose and Crown Bar on the Ormeau Road just twenty yards from my college digs.

It was the worst year of the Troubles but I hadn’t personally been affected. Not yet. I was still neutral. Trying to keep aloof. Trying to do my own thing. The closest I’d come to assuming a position was after Bloody Sunday when me and Dad had attended the funerals in Derry and I’d thought for twenty-four hours about joining the IRA.

Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?

2 May 1974.

The Rose and Crown was a student joint. I’d been in there for a bevy maybe three hundred times in my years at Queens. It was my local. I knew all the regulars. Normally I would have been at that bar at that time but as it happened I’d been meeting a girl at the Students’ Union and I’d had enough to drink already.

It was a no-warning bomb. The UVF (the Ulster Volunteer Force, an illegal Protestant paramilitary group) claimed responsibility. Later the UDA (the Ulster Defence Association, another Protestant paramilitary group) said they did it. Still later the UVF said it had been an IRA bomb that had exploded prematurely.

I didn’t care about any of that.

The alphabet soup didn’t interest me.

I wasn’t badly hurt. A burst eardrum, abrasions, cuts from fragmenting glass.

Nah, I was ok, but inside the bar was carnage.

A slaughterhouse.

I was the first person through the wreck of the front door.

And that was the moment-

That was the moment when I knew that I wanted to be some small part of ending this madness. It was either get out or do something. I chose the latter.

The police were keen to have me. A university graduate, a psychologist, and that most precious thing of all … a Catholic.

And now seven years later, after a border posting, the CID course, a child kidnapping, a high-profile heroin bust, and several murder investigations, I was a newly promoted Detective Sergeant at the relatively safe RUC station in Carrickfergus. I knew why they’d sent me here. I was here to stay out of harm’s way and I was here to learn …

I sat up in bed and turned on the radio and got the news about the Pope.

Still alive, the tough old bugger. I genuflected and muttered a brief, embarrassed prayer of thanks.

“Why is it so bloody cold!” I said and bundled up the duvet and pillow and carried them to the landing.

I knelt down in front of the paraffin heater.

From the Arctic to the tropics.

I assumed the foetal position on the pine floor. I immediately fell asleep.

Rain.

Such rain. Lugh draws the sun and sea and turns them into rain .

I stirred from a dream of water.

Light.

Heat.

My body floating on the paraffin fumes above the river and the sea.

Next door children’s laughter and then something heavy smashing against the wall. They were always going at it, the Bridewell boys.

I opened my eyes. My throat was dry. The landing was blue because of the indigo flame of the paraffin heater. The heater had been a gift from my parents when I first moved to Belfast and I had lugged it to Armagh, Tyrone and lastly to Carrickfergus. Even now the gorgeous, heady kerosene aroma time-travelled me across the decades to my childhood in Cushendun.

For five minutes I lay there listening to the rain pouring off the roof and then, reluctantly, I went downstairs.

I made tea and toast with butter and marmalade. I showered, dressed in a sober black polo-neck sweater, black jeans, black shoes. I put on a dark sports jacket and my raincoat. I put the revolver in my coat pocket and left the ridiculous machine gun on the hall table.

I went outside.

Grey sky that began fifty feet above my head. Drizzle. There was a cow munching at the roses in Mrs Bridewell’s garden. Another was taking a shit in Mrs Campbell’s yard.

When I looked to the left and right I could see other cows further along the street wandering stupidly to and fro. I’d been here three weeks and this was the second time the cows had escaped from the field next to Coronation Road. It would never have happened in Cushendun. These Carrick eejits were not good cattle farmers. I walked down the garden path ignoring Mrs Campbell’s cow and buttoning my coat. There was a frost in the high hills and my breath followed me like a reluctant taibhse .

I checked under the BMW for car bombs, didn’t find any, looked a second time just to be sure, turned the key in the lock, flinched in expectation of a booby trap, opened the door and got inside.

I did not fasten my seat belt. Four police officers had died in car accidents this year, nine police officers had been shot while trapped in their vehicles by their seat belts. The statistical department of the RUC felt that, on balance, it was better not to wear a seat belt and a memo had been sent around for comments. This memo had obviously been seen by someone in the Chief Constable’s office and quick as a flash it had become a standing order.

I stuck on Downtown Radio and got the local news.

Riots in Belfast, Derry, Cookstown, Lurgan and Strabane. An incendiary attack on a paint factory in Newry. A bomb on the Belfast to Dublin railway line. A strike by the Antrim Ulsterbus drivers in protest at a series of hijackings.

“Because of the Ulsterbus strike schools in Belfast, Newtownabbey, Carrickfergus, Ballymena, Ballyclare, Coleraine and Larne will be closed today. Now a little George Jones to soothe your morning,” Candy Devine said.

I flipped to Radio 1 and drove up Coronation Road listening to Blondie.

“It’s like bloody India,” the milkman said to me coming down the street in his electric float. “Aye and without the cuisine,” I muttered and drove slowly to avoid killing a cow and thus incurring an unfavourable incarnation in the next life.

I turned right on Victoria Road and saw a bunch of teenagers in school uniform waiting for a bus that was never going to come. I wound the window down.

“School’s off, I just heard it on the radio!” I yelled across to them.

“Piss off, ya pervert!” a seventeen-year-old slapper yelled back, flipping me the bird as she did so.

“I’m the bloody peelers, ya wee shite!” I thought about replying but when you’re in an insult contest with a bunch of weans at 7.58 in the morning your day really is heading for the crapper.

I wound the window back up and drove on to the sound of jeers.

Two hundred yards further on I went past a Twelfth of July bonfire which was already two storeys high and stacked with pallets, boxes and tyres. On the top someone had a stuck an effigy of the Pope wearing a blood-stained bed sheet.