Adrian McKinty: The Cold Cold Ground

Nice.

I pulled into McDowell’s newsagents.

Oscar was serving two hacks from the Associated Press. You could tell they were hacks from the Associated Press because they were wearing jackets that said “Associated Press” in big yellow letters on the back and because they were trying to buy a couple of Mars bars with a fifty-pound note.

I bought the Guardian and the Daily Mirror . The headlines were about the Pope and the Yorkshire Ripper trial. Nothing about Northern Ireland on the front page of either. The AP men were probably selling their stories to the papers in Boston.

At the bottom of Victoria Road there was an army checkpoint. Three green armour-plated Land Rovers and a bunch of Scottish soldiers smoking Woodbines.

I showed them my warrant card and they lifted their rifles and waved me through.

“Nice Beemer,” a big Jock squaddie said as I drove on. Was he implying that because I was driving a BMW, I was a corrupt cop on the take to the paramilitaries while he was a hard-working son of Caledonia trying to keep the murderous Paddies from killing one another? Maybe, or maybe he just dug the wheels.

I drove south west along the sea front.

Ahead of me Carrickfergus Castle, the town and harbour.

To my right a dismal line of houses and shops, to my left the — always — gun-metal grey waters of Belfast Lough.

The police station was about half a mile along the front.

A small two-storey brick affair, surrounded by a blast wall and a high fence for deterring hand grenades and Molotov cocktails.

I nodded to Ray behind the bulletproof glass. Ray raised the gate barrier and I drove into the police station compound. There was hardly anyone in because everyone had been up the night before on riot duty. I easily found a parking space next to the entrance.

I got out gingerly. The yard was full of potholes and puddles and since all the police Land Rovers leaked oil, you could really take a nasty spill if you didn’t watch your step. I said “Good morning, Miss Moneypenny,” to Carol and went upstairs. The second floor was open plan with an interview room, an incident room and offices for the senior sergeants and Chief Inspector Brennan.

CID had all the window desks overlooking Belfast Lough. The view was pleasant and on a clear day you could see Scotland, which was nice if you ever wanted to see Scotland on a clear day. Detective Constable “Crabbie” McCrabban had built an elaborate and paranoid conspiracy theory around these prized window desks. It was his feeling that CID were given this prime position so that we would get it first in the event of an IRA missile or RPG attack, but I chose to believe that Brennan had assigned us these desks as reward for our hard graft day in and day out.

I sat down in my swivel chair and flicked through the report that Matty had inexpertly typed up:

Carrickfergus RUC, CID Div. Case #13715/A. Homacide. Barn Field, Taylor’s Avenue, Carrickfergus, 13/5/1981. Srce: anon tip Wed evening. Victim: victim unknown. Victim’s personal effects: none. Other evidence: blood sample, victim’s hair sample, victim’s right hand, CS photographs. Remarks: victim found in abadoned car, one hand severed, prints taken. Victim not yet IDed. Patho Rept: awaiting patho rept. #13715/A CS: Inq to Det Sgt Duffy. 14/5/1981: body devilered to Carrick Hospital c.o. pathologist Dr Cathcart.

Matty had written nothing about getting prints off the victim’s clothes. I wondered if he’d done it and found nothing or just not done it. It was a toss up.

I went to the coffee machine and pushed the buttons for white coffee and chocolate simultaneously. Armed with this dubious concoction I went back to my desk. Matty had not left me the photographs but I found them in the darkroom hanging on the drying line. 7x10 glossies of the body, the hand, the car, the pool of blood, the AC/DC jacket, the victim’s face, other aspects of the crime scene and a few of the moon, clouds and grass.

I gathered the pics and took them to my desk.

Other officers started to arrive, doing whatever the hell it was that they did around here. I said good morning to Sergeant McCallister and showed him the pics of our boy. It didn’t ring a bell.

McCrabban appeared twenty minutes later sporting a black eye.

“Jesus, mate! Where’d you get that shiner?” I asked.

“Don’t ask,” he replied.

“Not the missus?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, if that’s all right with you,” he said taciturnly. These Proddies. They never wanted to talk about anything.

McCrabban was a big, lanky man with a carefully engineered old-school peeler tache, straight ginger hair and pale, bluish skin. With a tan he’d look somewhat like a Duracell battery, but he wasn’t the type to get a tan. He was from farmer stock and he had a down-to-earth conservative millenarian quality that I liked a lot. His Ballymena accent conjured (in my mind at least) Weber’s stolid Protestant work ethic.

“A big Jock was giving me a hard time about my Beemer. It’s a ‘77 E21. That’s not flashy, is it? You need a reliable car as a cop, don’t you?” I said.

“Don’t ask me. I have a tractor and an old Land Rover Defender.”

“Forget it,” I said and showed him the case notes and Matty’s photographs of the victim.

“Recognize our poor unfortunate?” I asked.

Crabbie shook his head. “You’re thinking informer, I suppose,” he said.

“Why, what are you thinking?”

“Oh, I’m with you, with his right hand cut off? Standard operating procedure.”

“Do me a favour, take some of the headshots down to Jimmy Prentice and see if he recognizes our boy. I already asked the Chief so I’m a bit sceptical that Jimmy will have an ID but you never know.”

“He mustn’t be local. If Brennan doesn’t know him he isn’t worth knowing,” Crabbie said.

“If Jimmy draws a blank, fax them up to the Lisburn Road and ask them to cross-reference with all the informers on their books, especially ones that haven’t called in in the last day or two.”

Crabbie shook his head. “They’ll never tell us about the MI5 boys.”

“I appreciate that, Crabbie, but they’ll have the army list too, so let’s at least try and narrow the field down a wee bit,” I said with a slight edge in my voice.

Crabbie grabbed a couple of the face pics and took them downstairs to Jim Prentice who ran all the informers in Carrick. Because of the sensitive nature of his work he was stationed in a locked little office by himself next to the armoury. Prentice was the paymaster for all the touts, informers and grasses in our district so if the victim had ever taken a government shilling for information Jimmy would know it. If not, the fax to Belfast would set the ball rolling on their lists. Crabbie was right about MI5 though. MI5 had its own network of informers, some in deep cover, and because MI5 fundamentally didn’t trust anyone in Northern Ireland the names of their agents were never shared with us even when the eejits got themselves shot.

Matty appeared shortly before lunch and over coffee and sandwiches the three of us had our first case conference. Matty told us he had done the victim’s clothes but there were no liftable prints. He had fingerprinted the victim’s right hand and faxed the printout to Belfast, but so far nothing had showed up in the RUC database. Crabbie told us that no one had called in a missing person’s report in the last twenty-four hours and Jimmy Prentice had told him that our victim was not one of his lads.

“Did you find any bullets in your search of the scene?” I asked Matty.

Matty shook his head.

“Footprints, hair samples, anything unusual about the victim’s clothing?”

Matty shook his head. “The T-shirt was a black Marks and Spencer XL, the jeans were Wrangler, the shoes Adidas trainers.”