The Cold, Cold Ground (9 page)

“Aye.”

I hung up the phone and went back to the Reading Area.

She saw my face. No poker player me.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I have to go. The other shoe dropped.”

Her eyes widened. “The second victim?” she asked.

I nodded.

She got to her feet. “Walk you out?” she asked.

“I’ve no objection to that.”

Outside the library the preacher was gone and over Belfast there was a pall of heavy black smoke that looked like an evil genie emerging from a lamp.

“Listen, I’m at a bit of a loose end today. I’ll walk you out the Quarter too, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.”

We walked past a funeral home, half a dozen houses for sale and a boarded-up ice cream shop. I thought she was going to talk but she had nothing to say.

I offered some remarks about the weather and such but she wasn’t biting on those either.

“Hey, you said you were at a loose end. You wanna come? We could do with your expertise,” I suggested and that was the hook she was looking for.

“To the murder scene?” she asked. “Am I allowed?”

“Of course you’re allowed. I’m the big Gorgonzola in these parts. Although fair warning, it might be on the grim side.”

“You don’t know grim, pal, trust me … Still, I’m not really dressed for it,” she said.

She was wearing a wool coat, slacks, heels, and a white blouse.

“Go home, get changed.”

“All right,” she said, perking up. “It’ll take my mind off things. Meet me at the flat in fifteen minutes?”

“Ok.”

She turned and walked briskly in the other direction.

It’s all on/off off/on with that lass, I thought.

I went inside the barracks. Matty had the Land Rover out of
its parking spot and Crabbie was standing next to it raring to go.

“Jump in, Sean,” Crabbie said.

“Hold your horses lads. With Chief Inspector Brennan gone to Belfast and with Burke and McCallister away too I’m senior officer here. I can’t just tear out of Dodge. We’ve got to go organize things.”

On the way inside Carol stopped me.

Wonderful woman Carol. Ageless. Thin, stooped, piercing blue eyes, hard as an iron bar. Had worked in Carrick station since 1941. On her second week on the job the barracks had been bombed by the Luftwaffe. A big Heinkel 111 who saw a target of opportunity near the railway station. The Luftwaffe! You gotta love it.

“Mr Sean?” she said.

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if I could go home early today, I wanted to watch that programme about Lady Diana on BBC2.”

“That’s fine, Carol,” I told her. I couldn’t really spare her but I knew better than to come between the great British public and Lady Di. The world could be going to hell in a handbasket but the Royal Wedding was in two months and that’s all that mattered.

I went upstairs and asked which of the reservists had the most seniority.

A trainee dentist called Jameson, who looked about eleven, put his hand up. He’d been in the force since ’79 which would have to do. I told him to call Inspector Mitchell who was technically Brennan’s deputy but in fact was almost never here because he more or less single-handedly ran the RUC substation in Whitehead.

“Tell Mitchell that I’ve had to leave, maybe for the day and he probably should close Whitehead station and get up here. It’s his call, of course.”

“And if he doesn’t come?” Jameson asked nervously.

“Then you’re it, mate. The skipper’s gone and the sergeants are gone and now Carol’s gone. “

He opened his mouth to speak, didn’t know what to say and closed his gob again. He looked petrified.

“Out with it, man!” I ordered him.

“Well, uh, I was just wondering what I should do if the IRA attack us while you’re away?”

“Break out the machine guns and return fire. And don’t kill any tax-paying customers. Ok?”

He nodded.

“You know where the armoury key is?”

“No.”

“On the hook next to the fire extinguisher. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” I muttered as I went back downstairs. If I was an IRA mole in the RUC, this would be my moment to shine …

I got in the Land Rover and kicked Matty out of the driver’s seat.

I drove out of the station and over the series of speed bumps that were supposed to be a deterrent for a drive-by attack. I got into second gear and finally third and took the heavy vehicle along the Marine Highway.

“We’re going to pick up Dr Cathcart on the way, lads,” I said.

Neither Matty nor McCrabban seemed fazed by this.

We stopped outside her place and she was already changed into Wellington boots and a white forensic boiler suit. “What does she look like!” Crabbie muttered.

“
Clockwork Orange
,” Matty concurred.

“We all should be wearing them things to avoid contamination,” I said. “Do you boys ever go to the training seminars?”

“What training seminars?” Matty asked.

“You wouldn’t catch me dead in one of them,” Crabbie said, although his orange shirt, paisley tie and beige jacket weren’t exactly Savile Row.

“You lads get in the back. Our guest can ride up front with me.”

There was an ancient police superstition that if you changed seats in an armoured Land Rover you were sure to cop it during the next rocket-propelled grenade attack while the person you switched with would escape completely unscathed. Why the jinx would only apply to you, and not him, was a secret known only to the elect.

“Come on lads, move it!” I had to say again and they got in back, grumbling. I opened the passenger door and Laura climbed up and in.

“Morning, Dr Cathcart,” I said stiffly.

“Oh, good morning, Sergeant Duffy,” she replied. “Where are we going?”

“Boneybefore.”

“Stick on the radio for us, will ya?” Crabbie said from the back.

I turned on Downtown Radio but they were in some kind of conspiracy to make Juice Newton a millionaire. I switched to Radio 1 and we listened to Spandau Ballet as I drove us along the Marine Highway and the Larne Road.

“Do you like Spandau Ballet, Dr Cathcart?” Matty asked from the back.

“I don’t really know them,” she replied.

“They’re the latest thing. What about you, Sean, you like ’em?”

I tried to come up with a witty answer and after some deliberation I said: “Spandau Ballet are to pop music what the Cretaceous-Tertiary Event was to dinosaur music.”

Stony silence. Nobody laughed.

“Am I the only one around here that reads
New Scientist
?” I asked.

Evidently I was. I kept my bake shut after that.

Boneybefore. A village eaten up by the Carrick expansion
sometime in the ‘50s. A white thatched cottage almost on the lough shore. Another unknown young reserve officer standing by the door.

I parked the Land Rover and we got out.

“What are the facts, constable?” I asked the reservist.

“Postman noticed the door was slightly ajar on the second post today. He pushed it open and found the victim. He called us.”

“Anybody touch anything?”

“Nope. But I had a wee look in.”

“What did you see?”

“I noticed that the victim had been shot and that his hand had been cut off, so I called Crabbie.”

I put on latex gloves and went inside the cottage.

The victim had been shot once in the head, probably as he had opened his front door, because he was still lying in the hall. He was a thin, dapper, grey-haired man in shirtsleeves, black tweed trousers and slippers. His hand had been cut off and the hand of – presumably – John Doe had been tossed, almost idly, on his chest.

I found a wallet on the sideboard and quickly ascertained that the victim was one Andrew Young, a sixty-year-old music teacher at Carrickfergus Grammar School.

The place was untouched. The killer had come inside only to kill Young and cut his right hand off.

We did a thorough inspection but Matty agreed with me that the killer had not even entered the rest of the house.

“Time of death?” I asked Laura.

“He’s been dead about forty hours,” she said, examining the corpse.

“Which one did he kill first?” I asked.

“If you put me on the spot I’d say he killed the man in the car first. But only by a few hours,” Laura said.

Matty began taking photographs and dusting for prints.

Laura examined the body.

McCrabban grabbed my sleeve. “Word with you outside, Sean?” he said.

We stepped out into a salt wind coming off the lough.

“What is it, Crabbie?”

“I know this character, Sean. He runs the Carrick festival. He’s headteacher at the school. He met Princess Anne. Upstanding citizen and all that. But …”

“But what?

“Like I say, decent bloke and everything, but he’s a known poofter.”

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as eggs is eggs.”

I saw the implications immediately. “So what do you think we have here, Crabbie? Someone going around killing homosexuals?”

Crabbie shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s beginning to look like it, isn’t it?”

“And there’s the bloody music connection again, isn’t there?”

Crabbie nodded and began filling his pipe.

Of course homosexuality was illegal in Northern Ireland but that didn’t mean that there were no homosexuals.

Everybody knew somebody …

“Don’t mention anything for the moment, let’s get the old routine working,” I said.

We went back inside.

Photographs.

Prints.

Interviews with the neighbours.

A recovered 9mm stub from the wall.

I reminded Laura to look for another concealed score when she did her autopsy.

The day lengthened.

Waned.

We drove Laura home and thanked her for her help.

We had another case conference at the station.

Of course now that we knew who he was, the first set of finger print data came through from Belfast: Andrew Young DOB 12/3/21. 4 Lough View Way, Boneybefore, Carrickfergus. No known next of kin. No criminal record.

The second set was still being processed.

We bagged the evidence.

I sent the lads on.

It was midnight when I got home. After I’d gone back out to Boneybefore to supervise the removal of the body to Carrick hospital by a private firm of undertakers because the police were overstretched. After I had changed into a shirt and tie and went to make the notification to Young’s employer Jack Cook, the headmaster of Carrickfergus Grammar.

“Andrew? I can’t believe it! Andrew was one of our best teachers. He was a terrific man. How? When? No, he had no enemies. Are you joking? Everybody loved Andrew.”

Midnight and I poured myself a vodka gimlet and listened to the bad news on the radio and put on
La Bohème
.

A 78. Toscanini’s own hurried, strange 1946 version.

When I got to Mimi’s famous first aria I picked up the lyric sheet and read along: “My name is Lucia. But everyone calls me Mimi. I don’t know why.
Ma quando vien lo sgelo. Il primo sole è mio
. When the thaw comes, the sun’s first kiss is mine.”

I read and listened until I fell asleep but no great revelation was at hand.

No, that wouldn’t come until the first post in the morning.

5:
MERCURY TILT

The tinker rag-and-bone man woke me up calling out “Tuppence for rags! Tuppence for rags!” I listened to the clip-clop of his ancient horse and then I heard those other heralds of a society attempting to keep order: the milkman, the postman, the bread man.

I’d fallen asleep in the living room under a thin duvet and I was freezing.

La Bohème
had been playing on repeat all night and I’d probably ruined the grooves on what was a very rare recording.

I lifted the stylus and examined the 78. It seemed ok. I blew off dust and put it carefully back into its sleeve.

I padded into the kitchen and turned the kettle on. I flipped on Radio Ulster for the news: “Our headlines at a quarter past the hour. Fresh rioting rocked sections of Belfast last night as hunger striker Frankie Hughes was laid to rest. A police reservist was shot dead outside his house in Bangor in the early hours of the morning. A police station in County Tyrone was attacked by rockets and mortars …”

I turned off the radio and walked into the hall.

That absurd Sterling sub-machine gun was still sitting there on the hall table.

“If someone breaks in and steals that thing Brennan will have my guts for garters,” I said to myself.

I wondered if I could sign the gun back in on a weekend when
the armoury officer was off duty.

I grabbed the post from the hall floor and opened the front door to take in the milk before the starlings got at it. Mrs Campbell was bringing in
her
milk. She was holding her dressing gown closed with one hand, picking up the bottles with the other. I could see the curve of both breasts.

“Morning, Mr Duffy,” she said.

“Morning, Mrs Campbell,” I replied.

“Did the filthy tinkers wake you too?” she asked.

“No, Mrs Campbell, I was already up,” I lied to pre-empt a racist rant about “tinkers”, “gypsies” and the like. She smoothed a loose strand of red hair back onto her scalp, smiled and went inside.

Up in the fields beyond the cow pasture I could hear the crack crack crack of repeated clapping. Perhaps a local virtuoso was practising a modernist piece by Steve Reich, I thought sardonically …
Sardonically
because, of course, it was in fact someone shooting at targets with a .22 pistol.

A couple of annoyed starlings flew onto the porch looking for milk bottles to vandalise and rob but I had out-generalled them this morning.

I closed the front door and carried the milk and the post to the kitchen.

I lifted up a brown electricity bill and underneath saw a postcard. I picked it up. It was a picture of the Andrew Jackson presidential homestead in Boneybefore.

A little white-washed cottage not unlike that of …

I flipped it over.

A first-class stamp. Posted yesterday.