The Cold, Cold Ground (27 page)

“Just about anybody,” Matty said.

I sat on the sofa and looked at him. “What
happened
to you, mate?”

He didn’t reply for a long time.

“Love happened,” he said at last.

I looked into his strangely pale eyes.

“Go on.”

He shook his head. “It was my mistake. I flew too close to the sun.”

We took our leave and drove back to Carrick Police Station.

“Big tubby,” Matty scoffed. “He flew too close to the bun more like.”

Crabbie laughed and then pointed at me.

“Remind Matty about Icarus, why don’t you, Sean.”

“Icarus was the son of Daedalus who was famous for building the labyrinth before he got famous for building wings that didn’t work.”

“Coincidence,” Matty said.

“Probably,” I agreed.

We got to the station. I sent the lads home and I went in and briefed the Chief. Brennan poured me some Jura while he listened to my report.

“Not much progress, eh, Sean?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, at the least the nutter hasn’t struck again, has he?”

“Not that we know of.”

“What else is new?” he asked.

I drank the whiskey. “In my life, sir?”

“In your life, Sean.”

“I went to the flicks, saw
Chariots of Fire
.”

“Any good?”

“They go for a run along the beach at the Old Course in St Andrews. I think you’d like that bit, sir.”

He yawned. “All right. Sally forth! And take my advice and go to bed early. We’ll be needing you before dawn.”

“What for?”

He tapped his nose. “Top Secret VIP on her way.”

Her
could only mean Mrs Thatcher or the Queen. Either would be bad news.

I went home but I couldn’t go to sleep early. Never could. I took some of the EEC bacon, fried it with eggs and potato bread. I ate it in front of the TV. There was a brand new cop show on called
Magnum P.I
. He was a PI. He was called Magnum. Like Serpico he had an impressive moustache. This, I realized, was my problem.

I phoned Laura but she told me that she was just on her way out.

“Who with?”

“A friend.”

“What friend?”

“A friend from college.”

“Man or woman?”

“Oh, you’re impossible!” she said and hung up.

I called an old mate of mine, Jack Pougher, from Special Branch intel. I span him my “Freddie Scavanni is a major player” theory. He’d heard nothing about it. He told me I should stick to detecting. I told him I was shite at that. We discussed cop moustaches and agreed that they were on the way out.

I took a pint glass out of the freezer and made myself a vodka gimlet.

The phone rang. It was ballistics. “This gun did not fire the bullets that killed your homicide victims,” some fucking Nigel said in a home-counties accent.

“Are you sure?”

“We can say it with 99 per cent confidence.”

I thanked him and hung up the phone. Billy White did not shoot Tommy Little. At least not with that gun. I drank the vodka and thought about the killer. He’d been so quick to get our attention before with postcards and sawn-off limbs and now nothing: no new victims, no new communications. Surely that meant something. But what?

I thought about Dermot McCann, a boy I’d known at St Malachy’s. Dermot had been very sexually adventurous even for 1968 … Dermot was now inside doing ten years for bomb making.

I thought about
him
from Loughshore Park. Stopped thinking about him. Got annoyed. I opened the front door and left out the milk bottles. I went back in, stripped down to my jeans and T-shirt, got an oil can from the garden shed and pretended to oil the squeaky front gate. If Mrs Campbell came out now and did her “Oh, Mr Duffy, it’s such a shame about the Pope” thing I’d lift her over the fence, carry her into the living room and fuck her goddamn brains out.

I oiled the gate. The rain came on. Mrs Campbell did not come out.

15: THURSDAY MAY 21 1981

Tuesday had been a bust. Wednesday had been a bust. Two days of nothing. And then on Thursday all hell broke loose.

4 a.m. Carrickfergus

They didn’t phone. Crabbie rang my front-door bell at four in the morning. I was convinced it was an inept terrorist attack and opened the door with my service revolver cocked.

“Don’t shoot, it’s me,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Get a move on, Sean. We’re meeting the Chief in half an hour.”

“Let me make a cup of tea,” I murmured.

“No time for tea, the others are waiting in the Land Rover, come on, I’ll help you. Lemme get your kit off.”

“Don’t touch me! Wait in the living room.”

I quickly threw on my dress uniform and body armour. “Last night I told a mate in Special Branch my theory about Freddie Scavanni,” I yelled from the bathroom.

“What did he say to that?” McCrabban asked.

“He said I was a genius and he sent over the file on Jack the Ripper.”

“Have you solved that one too?”

“It was Queen Victoria.”

“I knew it all along. Easy to conceal a machete under all that crinoline.”

I grabbed my electric razor and the pair of us went outside.

“I cleaned that graffiti off the back of the Rover,” Crabbie said.

I had completely forgotten about that. “Thanks, mate,” I told him.

“You can go in the front, Sean,” Crabbie said. “I can see you’re fragile today.”

I got in the passenger’s seat. Sergeant McCallister was driving, McCrabban, Matty and three reservists were in the back. No one had mentioned the name “Thatcher” yet but this had to be about her.

“We’re to rendezvous at Ballyclare at 04.30 hours,” McCallister said.

“‘04.30 hours?’ Is that what he told you? Does he think we’re the bloody army?”

4.30 a.m. Ballyclare

Brennan was sitting there like Lord Muck in his famous Finn Juhl armchair that he must have transported in the back of the Land Rover. He tapped his watch and grinned at us as we pulled up in front of the Five Corners Public House, which was open and serving Irish coffee to the lads.

The sun was just coming up over the Slieve Gullion and Lough Neagh and if the big line of black clouds to the north would keep away it might be a fine morning. The landlord of the Five Corners passed an Irish coffee into my hands and I took it gratefully. Brennan was enjoying himself, surrounded by his men, in the wee hours, in his full dress uniform and leather gloves.

“Men, we are to proceed to Aldergrove Airport in convoy where we are to meet with the brave boys of Ballyclare RUC and establish a roadblock, in co-operation with units of the British Army, on the Ballyrobin Road in Templepatrick so that an unnamed very important person can drive to Belfast,” he said.

“Why doesn’t she take a helicopter like everybody else?” McCallister wondered.

“Wrecks her hair, doesn’t it,” Matty offered.

5 a.m. Templepatrick

The army had the whole village sewn up and a brigadier general told Brennan that we were surplus to requirements.

“We were ordered up at four in the morning for this!” Brennan said furiously and after some negotiation we were allowed to set up our three Land Rovers further along the road.

“They’re on the way! Attention!” one of the squaddies yelled and the soldiers stiffened. We did not. Instead we fidgeted in our body armour and Crabbie explained to the reserve constables that because this was both out of regular hours and perilous we could claim hardship allowance and danger money at the same time.

At 5.30 a.m. two police motorcycles were the heralds for two fast-moving army Land Rovers, two equally speedy police Land Rovers and two bullet-proofed Jaguars that presumably contained the Prime Minister and her staff.

I didn’t see her. All I saw was a blur.

“Was that it?” Matty asked me. Nobody knew the answer and we got back in the Rovers feeling deflated.

Fifteen minutes later on the way back to Carrickfergus we were diverted to young Shane Davidson’s muse, the Kilroot Power Station, where there was trouble.

6.10 a.m. Kilroot

Two dozen workers backed by another hundred and fifty men from God knows where had formed an illegal picket line in front of the power plant. The shift change was trying to get in and if they couldn’t all the lights in north Belfast and East Antrim would be out, which wouldn’t impress Mrs Thatcher during her
news conference about how everything in Ulster was just tickety boo.

We parked the Land Rovers a hundred metres away.

“Machine guns away, lads,” Brennan ordered and we advanced with side arms only. In my case this was an easy instruction to obey since my SMG was still back on my hall table in Coronation Road.

“You lads wait here, I’ll go talk to the fucking scum,” Brennan said with the diplomatic
savoir faire
we had all grown to know and love.

“I’ll go with you,” Sergeant Burke said and McCallister gave me the nod. I sighed and joined them. We walked to the picketers who were holding up signs that said “Thatcher = Traitor” and “No Deals With Terrorsits [
sic
]”.

The headman was frickin Councillor George frickin Seawright who was rapidly becoming the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of my little drama.

“You have to let the day shift in. This is an illegal picket!” Brennan said in a voice that you could have heard at the top of the power station’s six-hundred-foot chimney.

“We will not countenance deals with the blackguards in the H Blocks! Mrs Thatcher and the British government will know our wrath as the Amalekites knew the wrath of the Lord! Just as the Sodomites have tasted the fruits of their evil ways. Just as the Antichrist in Rome felt the wrath of the Lord’s divine justice!” Seawright yelled in his apocalyptic Glaswegian accent.

Chief Inspector Brennan hooked his thumbs under the Velcro straps of his flak jacket. “I just saw Mrs Thatcher. We were part of the honour guard at the airport and after telling us what a lovely day it was she assured us all to a man that no deal would ever be done with IRA terrorists!”

There was a cheer from some of the picketers. Seawright seemed to waver and Brennan grabbed the initiative. “Ok, lads, you’ve had your fun, now let these hard-working lads through
to do their job!”

“Aye, let them though,” someone yelled from the crowd.

I walked over to the first car waiting beyond the picket line.

The driver was a thin, jumpy young man with tissue paper plastered over his shaving cuts.

“Drive in, mate, don’t stop and you’ll be fine,” I told him.

“It’s me mother-in-law’s car. She’ll go ape if they break me windows.”

“Didn’t I just say you’d be fine? Drive, or
I’ll
bust your bloody windows.”

He set off and the others followed behind. And with that the night shift went in and day shift came out and heat and light and power flowed to the citizens of Ulster and for once the Amalekites were triumphant.

7 a.m. Carrickfergus

Back in the RUC station we began hearing rumours that not one but two hunger strikers had been given extreme unction (or as the Proddies insisted upon calling it – the last rites).

Two hunger strikers on the same day. Jesus. Already shops and businesses in Belfast were telling their staff to stay away in anticipation of a massive riot.

Mrs Thatcher had planned a full day of events but at 8.15 she flew out on an RAF aircraft to London, which could only mean one thing: the rumours were bloody true.

I somehow kept my eyes open until 9.15 and then I walked home, checked under the Beemer for bombs and drove to Ballycarry.

10.30 a.m. Ballycarry

A country chapel overlooking Larne Lough and Islandmagee and beyond that the North Channel and the blue, hazy outline of Scotland.

Lucy’s Moore’s coffin just in front of the font where, presumably, she had been baptized and confirmed.

“Lucy Mary Patricia O’Neill,” the Priest said.

They had given her double protection. The mother of God. The patron saint of Ireland. It hadn’t helped. About fifty people were crammed into the chapel.

I watched and listened. Prayed.

The service ended in tears.

She was waked at The Harp and Thistle four doors down the street. I went there and took a cup of tea and a sandwich and sat by myself.

I wasn’t going to impose. This wasn’t the appropriate venue. Claire, the sister, came to me. I didn’t go to Claire.

“You’re the peeler?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Let’s talk outside.”

We walked round the back of the pub. Sheep fields and Larne Lough and the North Channel and Scotland again.

“Kill for a ciggie,” she said.

I gave her one of mine and lit it for her.

She was a chubby, attractive lass, about thirty, with dirty-blonde hair in a Lady Di haircut.

She pointed back at the chapel. “We had to get special dispensation because of the suicide thing.”

I knew what she meant.

We smoked and didn’t say anything.

“Go on, ask the questions you’ve been asking everyone else,” she said.

“Did she ever confide in you about the baby? Make you promise not to tell your parents?”

“Nope. We weren’t that close. Big age gap. But still, a thing like that …”

“After she went away did she ever call you?”

“No.”

“When was the last time you got any communication from her?”

“About a month ago. A wee letter. More of a note really. Posted in the north. I looked at it yesterday. There were a few others before that. They don’t really tell you anything except that she was alive.”

“She never mentioned that she was pregnant in any of them?” I asked.

“Not once. I still can’t really believe that.”

“She
was
pregnant. And she did give birth.”

“Then why? Why would she kill herself?” Claire said.

“I don’t know. I’d like to see those letters, especially the later ones. When you get back to Dublin, you couldn’t send them on to me at Carrickfergus RUC?”