The Cold Cold Ground

2: YOUR TINY HAND IS FROZEN

The occasional rumble of riot, gunfire and explosion. Nothing that Carrickfergus’s seasoned sleepers couldn’t handle. But then the comparative quiet was shattered by the apocalyptic turbines of a CH-47 Chinook. Everything began to rattle. A coffee cup fell off my mantelpiece. A picture came down.

The helicopter passed overhead at a height of 200 metres, well below the recommended ceiling. The Magnavox flip clock said 4 a.m. The British army had woken me and half the town in a hubristic display of raw power. Yes, you control the skies. And this, guys, is how you lose the hearts and minds.

I thought about that as I lay there in the big, empty double bed on Coronation Road. And when my anger subsided I thought about the vacuum on Adele’s side of the mattress.

Of course I had asked her if she wanted to come to Carrick with me, but there was no way she was going to “that stinking Proddy hell hole,” was her response. I hadn’t been heartbroken but I had been disappointed. She was a schoolteacher and it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to switch education boards as all the good teachers were going to England and America. The house was paid for, she would have been bringing in the dough, we would have been living high on the hog.

But she didn’t love me and the truth was I didn’t love her either.

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.

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.”

“Any claims of responsibility yet?” I asked Crabbie.

Crabbie shook his head. “No one’s said anything.”

“So we’ve got no prints, no physical evidence, no recovered slug, no claim of responsibility, no missing person’s filings, absolutely nowt,” I said.

The other two nodded their heads.

“Right fool I’ll look going to Brennan with this.”

“We could put his picture on TV,” Matty said. “Get an artist to fix up a sketch of his face pre-gunshot.”

“Brennan won’t like it, asking the public for help. Hates that,” Crabbie said.

“Does he now?” I muttered. He seemed like a man with a yen for the bright lights of a BBC studio, but that was maybe just me projecting, and again it made me think that Prods were different and Prods from East Antrim were even differenter.

“Aye, he does. He doesn’t want a lot of focus from the powers that be on our wee set-up down here,” Crabbie explained.

The three of us sat there for a minute looking at a filthy coal boat chugging down the lough. Matty lit a Rothmans. Crabbie began assembling his pipe. I played with a paper clip. I sighed and got to my feet. “Maybe the doc will help, who wants to come?”

“Will they be cutting him open?” Matty asked.

“I expect they will.”

Matty coughed. “You know what? I’ll stay here and chase up on our boy’s prints,” he said.

“I’ll pass too,” Crabbie muttered.

“You’re both a couple of yella bellies,” I said and put my coat on.

Crabbie cleared his throat. “If I could make an observation before you head off, Sean,” he said.

“Go on.”

“Very unusual this for these parts. No prints on anything? Believe me, I know these local hoods and no one in the Carrick UVF or the Carrick UDA is this careful. It gives ya pause for thought,” McCrabban said.

“Aye, it does,” Matty agreed.

“And no ‘thirty pieces of silver’ either,” I said. “They usually love that shit.”

Brennan saw me on the way out and dragged me to the Royal Oak public house next door.

He ordered two Guinnesses and two Bushmills.

“That’s some lunch. I’ll have the same,” I told him. He smiled and we took the drinks to the snug.

My pager was going like the clappers and under Brennan’s withering look I turned it off.

“What news, kemosabe?” he asked when we’d drunk our chasers.

“Drawing a blank so far, skipper, but I still have the patho to see and the victim’s prints are up in Belfast getting run through the database as we speak.”

“Thought I told you last night to handle this ourselves,” Brennan muttered with a scowl.

“Not the leg work too, surely? Besides, them boys in records have nothing better to do. If I sent Matty up there to do it manually it would take him two hours just to drive through the police road blocks.”

Brennan nodded. He fixed me with his Viking peepers. “And I heard you authorised ‘additional photography’?”

“Yes sir, but I’ll pay for that,” I replied.

“See that you do. I have to account for every penny.”

“There was some thought among the lads that we could go on the BBC and put our mystery man’s face on the telly, but Crabbie has crushed my show-business dreams by saying that’s not your policy? Sir?”

Brennan pointed heavenwards. “No. Let’s keep this nice and discreet. Once they start breathing down your neck …”

“Ok to authorise flyers and a poster of our poor unfortunate on the board outside the station?”

“One poster and don’t make it grim, let’s not upset the natives.”

Sergeants Burke and McCallister spotted us and joined us at the table, but I had things to do and couldn’t afford a lunch-time session with them boys. After I finished my Guinness, I went back in the cop shop and got my car. Carrick Hospital was a small Victorian building on the Barn Road, only about three hundred yards from the police station as the crow flew, but the crow could juke over a railway line, a stream and Carrick Rangers FC so it took me ten minutes to get there in the Beemer.

The waiting room was full of people with runny noses, colds and other complaints. A child was vomiting into a bag. A teenage hood stinking of petrol was holding a singed hand. A man with a face caked with dried blood was wearing a T-shirt that said “No Pope Here”. Considering his present condition, the Pope could consider himself lucky. There were, however, no young men lying on gurneys with their kneecaps shot off, which you always saw in the bigger Belfast hospitals.

I walked to the reception desk.

The nurse behind the counter was channelling Hattie Jacques from the Carry On films. She was fidgety, scary and enormous.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked in one of those oldtimey upper-crust English accents.

“I’d like to see Dr Cathcart,” I said with what I hoped was a winning smile.

“This is not one of her days.”

“It’s not? Oh? Where is she?”

“She’s doing an autopsy, if you must know.”

“That’s what I wanted to see her about,” I said pulling out my warrant card.

“You’re Sergeant Duffy? She’s been trying to reach you for the last hour.”

“I was busy.”

“We’re all busy.”

She showed me the way to the morgue along a dim black and white tiled corridor that seemed unchanged since the 1930s.

A leak was dripping from the ceiling into a large red bucket with the words “Air Raid Precautions” stamped on the side.

I stopped outside a door marked: “Autopsy. Strictly No Admittance Without Permission of Staff Nurse.”

I knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” a voice asked from within.

“Sergeant Duffy from Carrick police.”

“About time!”

I pushed the door and went inside.

An antiseptic, freezing little room. More black and white tiles on the floor, frosted windows, a buzzing strip light, charts from a long time ago on “hospital sanitation” and “the proper disposal of body parts”.

Dr Cathcart was wearing a mask and a white cotton surgical cap. A little Celtic cross was dangling from her neck and hanging over her surgical gown.

The star of the show was John Doe from last night who Dr Cathcart had opened up and spread about like a frog on a railway line. There were bits of him in various stainless steel bowls, on scales and even preserved in jars. The rest of him was lying naked on the table uncovered and unconcerned by these multiple violations.

“Hello,” I said.

“Put on gloves and a mask, please.”

“I don’t think he’s going to catch anything from us.”

“Perhaps we’ll catch something from him.”

“Ok.”

I put on latex gloves and a surgical mask.

Cathcart held up the severed right hand. “Were you responsible for fingerprinting this hand?” she asked. Her eyes were blue and I could see the hint of black hair under the cap.

“One of my officers did it, but I take full responsibility for him. Why, did we do something wrong?”

“Yes, you did. Your officer cleaned the fingers in white spirit before taking fingerprints from this hand. We therefore lost any evidence that may have been under the victim’s nails.”

“Oh dear, sorry about that.”

“Sorry doesn’t fix things, does it?” she said sternly in what I realized now was some kind of posh South Belfast accent.

I really didn’t like her tone at all. “Love, in a murder investigation getting the fingerprints is a priority so that we can establish who the victim was and hopefully trace their final movements and question witnesses when things are fresh in their minds.”

She pulled down her mask. Her cheeks were pink and her lips a dark red camellia. Her eyes were a vivid azure and her gaze icy and disturbing. She was imperious, attractive and she probably knew it.

“I prefer ‘Dr Cathcart’ rather than ‘love’ if you don’t mind, sergeant.”

Now I felt even more like an eejit.

“Sorry, Dr Cathcart … look, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot, I mean, uhm, just because we’re police officers, it doesn’t mean that we’re total idiots.”

“That remains to be seen. This hand, for example,” she said, picking up the severed right hand.

“What about it?”

“It seems that none of you noticed that this hand does not belong to the victim. It’s from a completely different person.”

Shit.

That was what my subconscious had been trying to tell me all night.

“Nope, we missed that,” I admitted.

“Hmmm.”

“What else have you found out?” I asked.

She put the hand back on the autopsy table and gave me a plastic bag containing a bullet slug.

“You’ll want this,” she said. “Recovered from his chest.”

“Thank you.”

She read her notes. “The victim is a white male around twenty-eight years old. His hair has been dyed blond but it was originally brown. The lack of compression of the blood vessels in the arm or ligature marks on the wrists leads me to the conclusion that the victim’s right hand was cut off postmortem. After he was murdered.”

“We prefer the term ‘unlawful killing’ at this stage, Dr Cathcart. It’s the mens rea of the killer that determines if he or she is guilty of murder as opposed to some other kind of unlawful homicide,” I said to get a bit of my own back and annoy her — which I could see was mission accomplished.

Dr Cathcart sniffed. “Shall I continue?”

“Please.”

“Another man’s hand was placed at the scene. This man was considerably older than the victim. Perhaps sixty. For what it’s worth this hand shows evidence of callusing on the fingers in a pattern which suggests that he played the guitar. Perhaps professionally.”

“How long ago was this hand removed? Days ago? Weeks ago?”

“It is difficult to say. However there is no evidence of freezing and thawing in the blood or skin cells so I would assume that it was removed around the same time as the victim was killed.”

“When was the victim killed?”

She picked up her notes and read: “Between 8 and 11 pm on 12/5/81.”

“The cause of death was the gunshot wound?”

“The chest wound probably killed the victim but he was then shot in the head, execution style.”

“Anything else?”

“The victim had had sexual intercourse with a male before or after he was killed.”

“How can you tell that?”

“The victim’s exterior sphincter was stressed and I found semen in his rectum.”

“Was this consensual intercourse?”

“If the sexual encounter was also postmortem then I would hazard a non-consensual encounter.”

This was beginning to look a little less like your ordinary run-of-the-mill execution of an informer.

“Leaving aside the sexual episode, the chronology of the murder seems to have been this: the victim was shot in the chest, shot in the head, there was an interval of some time and then the assailant removed the right hand with a hack saw,” she continued. She stifled a yawned.

“Tired or already jaded by death?”

“Sorry. Helicopters woke me up last night. Couldn’t get back to sleep. We couldn’t possibly do the rest of this outside, could we?”

“Certainly. Over a cup of tea or something?” I asked.

“That would be nice,” she said and smiled.

“I’ll just need to fingerprint this character. Is that ok? We’ve got the prints from the other hand working their way through the system.”

“Yes, that’s fine. But I should show you this first.”

She went to one of the stainless steel bowls and I winced involuntarily as she reached inside and gave me something large and slippery. I opened my eyes and was relieved to see that it was merely a plastic bag with a curled-up piece of paper inside.

“What’s this?”

“I also recovered this from the victim’s anus and perhaps this was where the subcutaneous stressing came from.”

“Jesus Christ! That was up his arse?”

“Yes.”

“The bag and all?”

“Just the paper.”

“I see.”

“Why don’t you meet me in the hospital cafeteria in ten minutes while I wash up?” she said.

“Ok,” I replied. I took out my kit and fingerprinted John Doe’s left hand. I went back outside and along the gloomy corridor until I found Hattie Jacques again. “I need to make a phone call,” I said.

Her eyes bulged as if I had asked for her firstborn but then she directed me to an inner office. I called McCrabban and told him to get over here right away not sparing the horses. I went to the cafeteria, got a pot of tea and waited for both of them at the window seat next to the garden. I examined the bullet: 9mm slug shot at point-blank range. I looked at the bag Dr Cathcart had given me.

Keeping it within the plastic I unrolled the piece of paper she had recovered.

“What the fuck?” I said to myself.

The paper was soiled and faded but it was clearly the first twelve bars of a musical score:

I examined it for a minute. Some things were obvious. It was for solo tenor and piano but clearly transcribed from an opera score. I hummed it to myself. It was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. The words had been removed from the transcription, which wasn’t that uncommon. I hummed it again. It was something quite famous. Italian. Verdi or Puccini.

But which opera and what were the words? I needed an expert. While I was thinking Crabbie showed up.

“Jesus, how did you get here so fast?” I asked him.

“Out the back doors, over the railway lines. Is one of them teas for me?”

“No. Here,” I said handing him the bag. “Dr Cathcart found this shoved up the victim’s arse. Get Matty to open it with full forensic caution. When he’s done that, please get him to make me a photocopy of it and get one of those reserve constables to send the photocopy back over here ASAP. Make sure Matty does his best work on this. The killer might not have expected us to find it and he may have been a bit more careless.”

“This was in the victim’s, uh, behind?”

“Yeah. Here, take it.”

“Ok, boss,” Crabbie said taking the plastic bag with distaste.

“And take this,” I said handing him the fingerprints.

“What’s this?” Crabbie asked.

“That hand next to the body last night? It was from somebody else.”

“Seriously?”

“Me and Matty missed it. Right eejit I looked in front of the patho.”

“A different bloke’s hand next to the body? What kind of a case is this?”

“There’s more.”

“I’m listening.”

“He had semen in his arse too. It’s a possibility that he was raped postmortem. Raped, a piece of music shoved up his arse, his hand cut off. We’re into weird territory with this one, Crabbie.”

His eyes were wide. “If the press get a whiff of this …”

“But they won’t, Crabbie, will they? Not until we’re ready.”

“No way, Sean. No way.”

“Good. Now here’s the slug. Get that up to the ballistics lab. And have that photocopy back here as quick as you can.”

Crabbie went off looking thoroughly unhappy.

When he was gone I took out my notebook and wrote: “Shot in the chest. Rape? Musical score. Nineteenth-century opera. Hand removed and kept for trophy? Second victim? Tortured? Informer? Something else made to look like murder of informer?”

I looked through the cafeteria window at the darkening sky.

The wind had picked up and it begun to rain. A harsh sea rain from the north east. The flowers in the well-kept hospital garden were getting a battering. I flipped a page of my notebook and sketched them: syringa wolfii, syringa persica — here under the great shadow of the railway embankment May was the month that bred lilacs out of the dead land.

Dr Cathcart sat down. She’d showered and changed into civvies. A tight, mustard-coloured jumper, black slacks and high heels. Her hair was a long cascading stream of black that fell ever so precisely over her right shoulder. She was the spit of the evil Samantha on Bewitched.

“Shall I be mother?” she asked, pouring the tea.

“If I can be the pervy uncle.”

She made the tea like a surgeon. Milk, then tea, then more milk and your bog-standard two sugars. In the long caesura an army helicopter flew low overhead.

“Do you have any more questions, Sergeant Duffy?”

“The semen in the victim’s rectum, is there any way we can use that to help identify the killer?” I wondered.

“It’s an interesting question. I have read a few papers about this. At the present moment, no, but perhaps in a few years they will be able to do DNA sequencing or something like that. I’ve frozen a sample just in case.”

I nodded. She was good.

We sipped our tea.

“Where’s the music?” she asked. “I thought we could figure it out together.”

“I gave it to McCrabban. It’s a nineteenth-century opera. Italian. Other than that I have no idea. He’s getting it photocopied, either that or he’s run off screaming to the Witchfinder General. Good lad, McCrabban, but he’s from Ballymena. Different world up there.”

“And you’re not from up there, are you?”

“Geographically a little. Spiritually, no.”

We looked at one another.

“So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

“How do you know I’m a nice girl?”

“The Malone Road accent, the fact that you’re a doctor …”

“What’s your accent?”

“Cushendun.”

“Cushendun? Oh, that’s way up there, isn’t it? What primary school did you go to?”

“Our Lady, Star of the Sea.”

And just like that she had established that I was a Catholic. Of course I’d known she was a Catholic from the get-go because of the cross around her neck.

She took another sip of her tea and added a decadent third cube of sugar.

“No, seriously, you could be earning a fortune over the water,” I said.

“Does it always have to be about money?”

“What should it be about?”

She nodded and tied back her hair. “My parents are here and my dad’s not very well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s his heart. It’s not fatal. Not immediately fatal. And both my little sisters are still here. What about you? Brothers, sisters?”

“Only child. Parents still up in Cushendun.”

“Only child?” she asked incredulously. She obviously thought that all country Catholics had twelve children each. The only possible explanation was that something terrible had happened to my mother. She gave me a pitying look that I found adorable.

“So where did you go to uni, Queen’s?” I asked.

“No, I was at the University of Edinburgh.”

“And you still came back?”

“Yup.”

She didn’t ask me where I had gone to uni because in general coppers did not bother with college. She was more relaxed now and that lovely smile came back again.

I was starting to like her.

“So what do you make of everything that I told you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “This was a pretty complex killing possibly disguised to look like the simple execution of an informer.”

“Badly disguised.”

“Maybe he thought we would never find the paper in the victim’s rectum.”

“No, it was sticking out. It was quite obvious. And that’s what made me check for signs of rape.”

“So he’s signposting everything. His working assumption is that we’re lazy and incompetent and he needs to underline everything. He put the body where he knew it would be found fairly soon. He’s bold and a bit too sure of himself and he has contempt for us. I imagine he’s had a few dealings with the cops over the years if that’s his attitude.”

“Is the RUC not noted for its competence?” she asked with a slight sarcastic edge to her voice.

“Oh, there are worse police forces but it’s not exactly Scotland Yard, is it?”

“You’re the expert.”

“When was the last time you’ve seen a male rape in the course of your duty?” I asked.

“Never.”

“It’s not in the paramilitaries’ MO, is it?”

“Not it in my limited experience.”

“Both sides are extremely conservative. And the normal way they deal with informers is virtually identical.”

“Is that so?” she asked, her eyebrows arching with interest.

“There’s really no difference at all between your average IRA man and your average UVF man. The markers are always the same: working class, poor, usually an alcoholic or absent father. You see it time and again. Identical psycho-social profiles except for the fact that one identifies himself as a Protestant and one as a Catholic. A lot of them actually come from mixed religious backgrounds like Bobby Sands. They’re usually the hardcore ones, trying to prove themselves to their co-religionists.”

“Sorry, you lost me there. Do you want a slice of cake or something? I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

“I’m all right, but you go ahead,” I said. “Seeing John Doe all disembowelled like that has somewhat smothered my appetite.”

“Speaking of appetites, his last meal was fish and chips.”

“I hope he enjoyed it.”

“The fish was cod.”

“You’re just showing off now, aren’t you?”

She grinned, got up and came back with two slices of Madeira cake. Despite my protestations she gave me one of them.

“How come you ended up in the police?” she asked.

Her real question had been “So what’s a nice, bright, Catholic boy like you doing in the peelers?”

I thought about what I’d said to Brennan last night. “I just wanted to be part of that thin blue line holding back the chaos.”

“Thin green line,” she said.

She was right about that too, bless her: in the nineteenth century British peelers had been given a blue uniform to distinguish them from the Red Coats, but the Royal Irish Constabulary had worn dark (very dark) green uniforms from the start. The successor to the RIC after partition was the Royal Ulster Constabulary, based in Belfast, and the uniform hadn’t changed even though green was a colour associated with Irish nationalism.

“Thin green line doesn’t really work as a metaphor though, does it?” I said.

“No,” she agreed. She ate her slice of cake and looked at her watch. “Do you have any more questions or are we about done here?”

I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything. You’d better give me your number though, in case something comes up.”

“You can reach me here,” she said.

She hadn’t liked that. It was too sly. Maybe the direct approach: “What are you doing later? Do you want to go out for a drink or anything?” I asked.

“You’re fast,” she said.

“Is that a no?”

She didn’t say anything, just tapped her fingers on the Formica table.

“Look, I’ll be at the Dobbins from nine o’clock onwards, if you fancy a quick drink, drop in,” I said casually.

She stood up. Got her bag. Gave me the once over. “Maybe,” she said.

In an odd, formal gesture, she offered me her hand. I shook it.

“It was nice meeting you,” she said.

“Nice meeting you too,” I said and gave her a conspiratorial wink. Here we were: two wee fenian agents in Proddy Carrickfergus.

I watched her walk into the car park and saw her get into a green Volvo 240.

I finished my tea and was thinking about the remaining cake when Sergeant McCallister showed up with the photocopy of the musical score from poor John Doe’s arse.

“What are you doing here, Alan? I asked Crabbie to send this over via some useless ganch.”

Alan took off his hat and fixed his thin thatch of greyish brown hair.

“No, Sean, no reserve constables this time. You’re going to have to be more careful about the protocols, mate. Looks like you’ve got yourself a freaky one.”

“Aye, you’re right,” I thought, slightly chastened. The reserve constables were all chatty bastards.

“There’s been two phone calls already this morning asking for the head of Carrick CID.”

“Shit.”

“Carol said that Sergeant Duffy was not available and could she take a message.”

“And?”

“They hung up.”

“The press?”

“My advice: don’t give them anything.”

“Did you hear about the rape?”

“I got Crabbie to tell me everything. Different hands? Pieces of music? Queer sex? This thing’s far too complicated already,” McCallister muttered darkly.

McCallister was close to fifty, a twenty-five-year man with a lot of experience both before and after the Troubles.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I asked.

“No, I haven’t and I don’t like it.”

“Me neither.”

“Are you eating that cake?”

Alan walked me back to my car and I drove to the centre of Carrickfergus.

A bunch of kids were walking around aimlessly. There was nothing for them to do with school cancelled except that there was always potential for a rumble since the Proddy kids were easily identifiable by their red, white and blue school uniforms and the Catholics by their uniforms of green, white and gold.

There were few actual shoppers. Since ICI had shut down the centre of Carrick had withered. The bookshop had closed, the shoe shop had closed, the baby clothes shop had closed …

I easily found a parking place on West Street and dandered past a boarded-up grocers before I came to Sammy McGuinn, my chain-smoking, short-arsed, Marxist barber.

He’d given me two good haircuts since I’d come here which was a high batting average for Ulster and probably why he was still in business.

I went in and sat down in the waiting area.

He was finishing work on a man in a brown suit with a ridiculous comb-over. Sammy was only five five and he had lowered his customer practically to floor level.

“Nationalism is a plot by international capitalism to keep the working classes from uniting. Irish independence separated the working classes of Dublin, Liverpool and Glasgow which destroyed the union movement forever in these islands just when capitalism was entering its crisis stage …” he was saying.

I tuned him out and read the cinema reviews in Socialist Worker.

Raiders of the Lost Ark sounded promising despite “its patronizing caricatures of third-world manual labourers”.

When Sammy was finished with his customer I showed him the musical score.

As well as being Carrick’s only remaining barber Sammy was a violinist with the Ulster Orchestra and had two thousand classical records in his flat above the shop. A collection he had shown me when he’d found out from Paul at CarrickTrax that I bought the occasional classical record and that I’d done ten years of piano. Ten years of piano under protest.

“What do you make of that?” I asked him, showing him the photocopy of the music.

“What about it?”

“What is it?”

“Surprised at you, Sean. I thought you knew your onions,” he said, with an irritating sneer.

Like a lot of barbers, Sammy was completely bald and that chrome dome really invited a Benny Hill slap right about now.

His lips were tightly shut. He wanted the words:

“No, I really don’t know,” I said.

“Puccini, La Boheme!” he announced with a laugh.

“Aye, I thought it was Puccini,” I said.

“You say that now. Anybody could say it now.”

“The words are missing, aren’t they? It’s not the overture, is it?”

“No.”

“You don’t happen to know what the missing words are, by any chance?”

“Of course,” he said with an eye roll.

“Go on then!”

“Che gelida manina, se la lasci riscaldar. Cercar che giova? Al buio non si trova. Ma per fortuna e una notte di luna, e qui la luna, l abbiamo vicina,” he sang in a surprisingly attractive baritone.

“Very nice.”

“Do you need a translation?”

“Uhm, something about hands, fortune, the moon?”

“Your little hand is freezing. Let me warm it for you. What’s the use of looking? We won’t find it in the dark. But luckily it’s a moonlit night, and the moon is close to us.”

I got out a pencil and made him say it again and wrote it down in my notebook.

“What’s this all about?” he asked.

“Nothing important,” I said and drove back to the police station.

I knocked on Chief Inspector Brennan’s door.

“Enter!” he said.

He looked up from the Daily Mail crossword. “You seem worried, what’s going on, Sean?” he asked.

“We may be in trouble,” I said.

“How so?”

“I think we have a sexual murderer on our hands, perhaps even a nascent serial killer.”

“Have a seat.”

I closed the door. His cheeks were ruddy and he was a little the worse for drink.

“What makes you think that?” he asked in a cold burr, leaning back in his pricey Finn Juhl armchair. I filled him in on all the details but he was sceptical of my thesis. “Northern Ireland’s never had a serial killer,” he said.

“No. Anyone with that mindset has always been able to join one side or the other. Torture and kill with abandon while still being part of the ‘cause’. But this seems different, doesn’t it? The sexual nature of the crime, the note. This is not something we’ve encountered before.”

“I already put the paperwork through that this was a hit on an informer,” Brennan said with a trace of annoyance.

“I’m not ruling anything out, sir, but at this stage I’m thinking it’s not that.”

“Let me see that piece of music.”

I passed across the photocopy under which I had written: “Your tiny hand is frozen. Let me warm it for you. What’s the use of looking? We won’t find it in the dark. But luckily it’s a moonlit night and the moon is close to us.”

He examined it and shook his head.

“He’s mocking the victim, sir. And us. He’s taking the piss. He’s telling us that he’s cut the victim’s hand off and he’s taken it somewhere else. He’s making game of us, sir.”

Brennan shook his head and leaned forward. He took his reading glasses off and set them on the table. “Look, Sean, you’re new around here. I know you want to make a name for yourself. You’re ambitious, I like that. But you can’t go bandying words like ‘serial killer’ around for all and sundry. The shit’s hitting the fan everywhere. You cannae throw a brick out there without clobbering a journalist. They’re all looking for an angle, aren’t they? And believe me, I know Carrick, so I do. Serial killers. Come off it. We don’t do that in these parts. Ok?”

“If you say so, sir.”

He smiled in a conciliatory manner. “And besides, for a serial killer you need more than one victim, don’t you?”

“Our guy in the Barn Field and then the hand from the other bloke. That’s two.”

Brennan passed the musical score back across the table. He took a sip of cold coffee from a mug on his desk. “Who else have you told about this theory of yours?”

“McCrabban and Sergeant McCallister. I’ll have to tell Matty too.”

“Good. Nobody else. What’s the status of your investigation?”

“We might get a break soon, sir. Now we have two sets of fingerprints working their way through the channels.”

He nodded and put his glasses back on. I could see that I was being dismissed. I got to my feet. “Do your job, do it well and do it quietly,” Brennan muttered, examining the Daily Mail again.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sean, one more thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“‘Idle fellow but he gives us a buzz.’ Thirteen across. Five letters.”

I thought for a second. “Drone, sir?”

“Drone? Drone, oh yes. Ok, you may go.”

I exited. It was late and the place was emptying out.

I borrowed a couple of ciggies from someone’s table and headed out onto the fire escape to think.

There was trouble up in Belfast again. Potassium nitrate flares falling through the darkening sky. A Gazelle helicopter flying low over the lough water. Little kids walking past the police station showing each other the best technique for lobbing Molotov cocktails over the fence. Jesus, what a nightmare.

This was a city crucified under its own blitz.

This was a city poisoning its own wells, salting its own fields, digging its own grave …