The Cold Cold Ground

6: THE LONG BAD SATURDAY

I turned off the engine and sat in my little existential prison before going outside into the bigger existential prison of Northern Ireland.

The car park was empty and I checked under the car just to be on the safe side. Nothing, of course.

I said hi to Oscar McDowell and perused the front pages.

“Liz Taylor Collapses” was the headline in the Sun and the Daily Mirror. “Ripper Trial Final Days” was the offering from the Daily Mail. “Royal Wedding Mix Up” was the lead in the Daily Express. A couple of the Irish papers covered the Frankie Hughes riot and were speculating about which of the hunger strikers would die next, while the others led with the ex-Mrs Burton.

“What happened to Liz Taylor?” I asked Oscar.

“Buy the paper and find out,” he said.

I bought a packet of Marlboro Lights, a Mars bar and a Coke instead.

Oscar gave me a funny look with my change.

“What?” I said.

He examined his shoes, cleared his throat.

“You’re a copper, aren’t you, Sean?”

“Yeah,” I said suspiciously.

“Look, is there … is there nothing you can do about the boys?”

“What boys?”

“I’m fed up with it. We barely scrape by here. No one has any money any more. Magazine subscriptions are off by fifty per cent since ICI closed. And you can’t tell them that … You know what I’m talking about.”

I did. He was talking about the protection money he had to pay every week to the paramilitaries. The money he gave straight out of his till to the local hoods so they wouldn’t burn him out.

Oscar was in his sixties. Everything about him radiated exhaustion. He should have sold up and moved to the sun years ago.

“What’s the going rate these days?” I asked.

“Bobby asks for a hundred pound a week. I can’t do it. Not in this economy. It’s impossible! Can you have a word with them, Sean? Make them see sense? Can you?”

I shook my head.

“There’s nothing I can do, Oscar. If you were willing to testify that would be one thing, but you’re not willing to testify, are you?”

He shook his head. “Not on your life!”

“Well then, like I say, nothing I can do.”

“There must be some kind of back channel, Sean, you know, where you can just talk to them. Just tell them that they are charging far too much for this economy. If I go out of business, everybody loses.”

“I can’t meet them. Internal Affairs would say it was collusion.”

“I don’t mean a formal meeting or anything, I’m only saying that in the course of your duties, if you happen to come across those particular gentlemen, perhaps you can drop a wee hint or two.”

I picked up my Mars bar, smokes and Coke.

“I suppose the Bobby you’re referring to is Bobby Cameron on Coronation Road?” I asked.

“You heard no names from me.”

“Ach, I’ll see what I can do.”

Oscar sighed with relief.

“Here, you forgot your papers,” he said, giving me The Times and the Guardian for nothing.

I took them as a matter of course.

I put them on the passenger’s seat and looked at myself in the mirror.

“Your first freebie in your new gig, Sean. This is how it starts. Baby steps,” I said to myself.

Another army checkpoint on the Marine Highway. This time the bloody Paras. They looked at my warrant card and sent me through with a sarcastic thumbs up.

Ray was back in the box at the RUC station and gave me a nod as he raised the barrier to let me into the barracks car park.

I got out into a drizzle and decided to leave the smokes. I was down to two or three bummed ciggies a day. Only bought my own for emergencies.

I went upstairs to the CID evidence room.

I reread the postcard through the evidence bag.

I wrote “eternal duellists/labyrinth/queers” in my notebook.

I checked for any faxes from Belfast.

Nothing.

I put my feet on the chair and had a think.

Two victims. Two hands. Symmetry. Mirrors, opposites, duellists, opponents, key and lock. It was all two.

All except the labyrinth.

“We share the path through the labirinth"

There was only one route through the labyrinth.

One true way. The labyrinth. Built by Daedalus the flyer …

Maybe that meant something.

Daedalus, Icarus, Stephen Daedalus, James Joyce, Dublin …

Nothing.

I rubbed my chin and thought and bounced a pencil off the desk.

I called ballistics.

“Preliminary indications were that the two slugs came from the same gun,” I was told.

I grabbed a typewriter and began work on the presentation. I ate the Mars bar and drank the Coke. McCrabban showed up at 8.30. I told him about the postcard.

He read it, asked me if I’d lifted anything from it.

“You think it’s the real deal?” I asked him.

“We get a lot of hoaxes on every case, but this, I don’t know, it seems different.”

“Any ideas about our boy?”

“He hates queers. Which makes me think that John Doe must be one too. Has to be, right?”

“Aye.”

Crabbie typed up a transcript of the note, made photocopies and helped me with my presentation.

At 8.45, Matty called to say he was running late because of a bomb scare on the Larne-Carrick train.

“Where are you calling from?” I asked.

“The train station,” he lied.

“How come I can hear David Frost in the background?”

“Uhm.”

“Get your arse in here, you lazy hallion!” I said and hung up.

“Youth,” McCrabban said.

“What about them?”

“They need more sleep than us,” he said.

“You know, I don’t think we can do this case with just three people.”

McCrabban nodded.

“I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed,” I said.

Crabbie didn’t like to hear that sort of thing (or anything about anyone’s feelings) and he began furiously filling his pipe to cover his embarrassment.

He lit the thing, coughed and blew a blue smoke ring out of his mouth.

“Yes,” he said, which was about as much consolation as I was going to get from that dour visage.

“Do me a favour and find out who sells postcards of the Andrew Jackson cottage in Carrickfergus and Belfast and ask them if they’ve sold any lately and if so do they remember to whom.”

“So basically call up every single newsagent in Carrick and Belfast?” McCrabban asked.

“Yeah.”

“Ok, boss.”

Matty finally came in and I showed him the postcard and he took it away to do more tests. He did fingerprints and the black light and the UV light. All the prints were smudged except for two sets that he suspected were mine and the postman’s. I told him to send a reserve constable round to Carrick post office to print the mail carrier from Coronation Road.

At 9.05 I was done typing my presentation and did a dry run in front of the lads. They felt it was ok, although McCrabban made me cut it shorter because Sergeant McCallister had a poor attention span.

At 9.15 I called up Mike Kernoghan in Special Branch, told him about my anonymous letter writer and asked him if his boy could put a tap on my phone just in case the killer decided to get more intimate.

Mike thought this was a good idea and said that he’d send a couple of boys round this afternoon “to fix my TV”.

I told him that I kept the spare key under the cactus plant and he said that his boys didn’t need no key, a rusty nail could get you into a Northern Ireland Housing Executive terraced house — a fact that did not fill me with confidence about my home security.

I checked again for any faxes from Belfast and I called up the forensics lab just to make sure they were working their arses off ID’ing my John Doe. They claimed that they were and that they had a promising line of inquiry.

“Really? You’re not just messing with me, are you?”

“We wouldn’t do that, sir.”

“When do I get the good word?”

“We like to confirm these things first, Sergeant Duffy, but I’m reasonably sure that we’ll have a positive hit by the end of the day.”

“Positive hit?”

“Yes.”

“So you know who he is?”

“We’re fairly certain. We’re in the confirmation process at this moment.”

“Can you give me a clue? It’s not Lord Lucan, is it? DB Cooper? Lady Di?”

The forensics guy hung up on me. I called around for a next of kin on Andrew Young but his work colleagues were the best we could come up with.

When Matty was done with the prints I asked him to start running down any sexual abuse allegations against Young. An enraged former pupil would be a nice go-to guy in a case like this.

At 9.30 I assembled my team in the CID room, set them up in chairs next to me and put three chairs in front of the white board.

At 9.35 Sergeants McCallister and Burke came in. Burke was another old-school peeler about fifty-five years old. No nonsense bloke. He was ex-army and military police. He had served in Palestine, Cyprus, Kenya, all over the shop. He looked like someone’s scary father. He didn’t talk much, did Burke, but what he did say was usually the wisdom acquired from a long and interesting life … either that or total bollocks.

Chief Inspector Brennan came in last. He was wearing a top hat and tails.

“Hurry up, Duffy, I don’t have long,” he said.

“Aye, you don’t want to be late for the play Mr Lincoln,” Sergeant McCallister said and everyone roared.

“Maybe he does a magic act on the side,” Sergeant Burke said.

“I’m off to my niece’s wedding. Get on with it, Duffy!” Brennan snapped.

I read them the presentation. There were seven main points:

1. The as yet unidentified victim in Barn Field had been shot execution-style by a 9mm.

2. He had had a recent homosexual encounter and a piece of music had been inserted in his anus.

3. His right hand had been replaced with the hand of Andrew Young, a known homosexual who had also been murdered in his house in Boneybefore also by a 9mm.

4. The musical score was La Boheme and contained the lines “your tiny hand is frozen” sung by Rudolfo to Mimi.

5. Andrew Young was a music teacher at Carrick Grammar School and ran the Carrick festival. No, he had never done La Boheme at either the school or the festival.

6. The killer had apparently called up Carrick Police Station, found out who the lead detective was and sent me a bizarre postcard (photocopies of which I passed around) that might contain clues or might be a complete distraction.

7. The 9mm slugs from both victims matched.

Brennan and the two sergeants listened to the whole thing without interruption.

“What is your current working hypothesis, Sergeant Duffy?” Brennan asked when I was done.

“Obviously the two murders are linked. Dr Cathcart feels there was a two- or perhaps three-hour delay between the two deaths. She’ll know more precisely when she’s performed an autopsy on Mr Young. Therefore I feel that we have a potential serial murderer on our hands. At this stage I do not see any evidence of a paramilitary link, which would make this the first non-sectarian serial killer in Northern Ireland’s history,” I said.

“Why would he come out of the woodwork now?” McCallister asked.

“I don’t know. Jealousy, perhaps? He’s been watching all the publicity the Yorkshire Ripper trial has been generating and it’s been getting his goat?” I ventured.

“Maybe the chaos of the hunger strikes has given him the cover and opportunity he needs,” McCrabban said.

“Sounds like this old fruit, Young, got someone riled up and that someone went mental and decided to kill some more fruits,” Burke said.

“Matty’s checking to see if there are any allegations against him,” I said.

“And I don’t like this music angle. It’s bloody weird,” Burke said.

“I don’t like it either. There something about it that stinks to high heaven. I’ve read the libretto to La Boheme but nothing jumped out at me,” I said.

“Jesus, what will we do if this Young fella has something up his arse too?” Brennan muttered.

“Keep our cheeks squeezed together?” McCallister offered and everybody laughed again.

“We’re waiting on the autopsy report on that, sir,” I added when the tittering had died down.

Silence descended, punctuated by a distant rumbling in Belfast that could be anything from a ship unloading in the docks to a coordinated series of bombings.

“What’s your next step, Sergeant Duffy?” Brennan asked.

I told him about the various angles we were chasing down and the fact that we were supposed to finally get the prints on John Doe today.

“And if our letter writer gets in touch again?” Sergeant Burke asked.

I told them about my call to Special Branch.

I could tell Brennan wasn’t too happy about that but he didn’t say anything. And besides he was getting worried about the time and he had one other fish to fry.

“Have you thought about the press?” he asked.

“Uh, obviously, we’ll need to brief the press at some point,” I said. “But we can probably put it off for a bit. It’s not exactly a slow news week.”

Brennan sighed. “This is going to blow up in our faces, Sergeant Duffy. If we don’t go to the papers you can be sure that our anonymous note writer, or one of Mr Young’s neighbours, or someone will. Do you have a media strategy?”

“Uh, no, not as such, not a, uh-” I stammered. I looked at Matty and McCrabban who had both discovered something fascinating about the wall-to-wall carpet.

Brennan looked at McCallister. “What about you, Alan? It’s a bloody thankless task but we need someone and DS Duffy has quite a full plate by the looks of it. You could do a good defensive briefing to a couple of the local hacks. Seen you do it before. “

McCallister smiled at me and shook his head. “No, no, fellas, that’s not the way to handle this at all. No defensiveness. We present this as a triumph. Through clever police work we have linked two murders. We talk about modern forensic techniques and how even during these difficult times we hard-working honest peelers are able to spend due care and attention on every single case.”

Brennan nodded. “I like it.”

“We won’t get TV because of all the other nonsense going on but we can call in some of our pals from the Belfast Telegraph, the Carrickfergus Advertiser, the Irish News and the Newsletter and let them have it. Maybe your woman Saoirse Neeson from Crime Beat on Downtown Radio.”

Brennan looked at me. I shrugged. When I’d thought this was a nothing case I was keen for the telly but now it had got more complicated there was, at the very least, an element of stage fright; however, if big Alan McCallister wanted to help out. “If Alan wants to do it, that’s great,” I said.

“Ok, we’ll defer everything to Sergeant McCallister,” Brennan said.

Hold the phone. Defer everything? What did he mean by that?

Fortunately Alan saw my face and did his best Uri Geller: “Nope. I’m not CID. This is not my case, it’s Duffy’s. Run everything through Sergeant Duffy. I’ll only be his press officer. He tells me what to say and I’ll say it and that’s that.”

“Well said, Alan. These CID boys are flighty, sensitive creatures who don’t like their toes stepped on,” Brennan said. He got up and put his arm around me. “What kind of a loony are we dealing with here, son?”

“We’re dealing with a type none of us have encountered before in an Ulster context. A careful, intelligent, non-sectarian, serial murderer.”

“A total freak psycho,” Burke said.

“Not in the way you think. Sociopaths tend to have no regard or empathy for the feelings of others but they may in fact be personally charming with considerable charisma. I expect that our boy (and I’m pretty sure he’s a boy) will challenge us, but we’ll get the bastard, I’m confident of that,” I said and looked Brennan in the eye.

“That’s good to hear,” Brennan said. “But let me just say something here. Sean, I want you to tell me if you think we’re in over our heads. It’s not a weakness to admit the truth. You yourself were saying it the other night. You’re relatively new at all this and we are understaffed … we can always get a real expert in from Special Branch or even someone from over the water …”

The thought of having this case snatched from under me sent a chill down my spine. Because Carrickfergus was a Protestant town most of the mischief was expected to come from the Loyalist paramilitaries who were not as efficient at carrying out attacks as the IRA and who, anyway, were unlikely to attack the cops. As safe postings went, there were only four or five better ones in Northern Ireland, which is why I had initially not been that excited to end up here, a relative backwater. If you wanted to make your name you had to be in Belfast or Derry, but it would be worse if they were going to take all the good cases away from me …

“You yourself told me that resources are stretched thin. Belfast needs every available man until the hunger strikes and the riots are over. And running to mummy in England would be embarrassing for the whole RUC. No, I think we can handle this here in Carrick, sir, we really can.”

“Ok,” he said, not completely convinced. “I won’t ask you again. I’ll trust you to come to me.”

“I will, sir.”

“Any other comments?” Brennan asked but nobody could think of anything.

Brennan whispered something in Matty’s ear and he got up and came back with a bottle of Jura single malt. He poured us all a healthy dose in plastic cups and raised his glass.

“Unlike some stations that have been radically transformed with fairy gold from London, we’re still a small barracks, a small barracks with a family atmosphere, and this is going to be a challenge, but we can handle it if we all pull together. Can’t we, fellas? Can’t we, Sean?”

“We’ll have to, chief.”

We drank our whiskeys. It was the good stuff and it tasted of salt, sea, rain, wind and the Old Testament.

“Ok, boys, get that dram down your neck and get out there. Get working! I’ll have to tell Superintendent Hollis before I tell the media and it would be nice if I had one crumb to throw at his fat, dozy face. I may pop in after the wedding but now I have to go,” Brennan said.

“Yes, sir,” we all replied.

We skipped lunch and made phone calls. We discussed the postcard and the music but we made no headway.

Brennan came back from the wedding and demanded progress but we had none to offer him. He went into his office to change.

I had just finished a conversation with Andrew Young’s boss who denied all knowledge of Andrew’s homosexuality (sensible because he could have been charged as an abetter under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which considered homosexual acts to be “gross indecency”) when a now uniformed Brennan put his big paw on my shoulder and sat down on my desk.

“Do you know Lucy Moore?” he asked.

“No.”

“How long have you been here now, Sean?”

“Nearly a month, sir.”

“Lucy O’Neill was her maiden name. Local Republican family, the O’Neills. Big deal in these parts. Fairly well off Catholics. Her dad’s a human rights lawyer, her mum is high up in Trocaire — that big Catholic charity. Ringing a bell now?”

“I’m afraid not, sir,” I said.

“They both met the Pope when he came to Ireland in ‘79. Come on, you know who I’m talking about.”

Brennan had that unfortunate habit of assuming that all Catholics went to the same mass in the same chapel at the same time.

“Nope.”

“Ok, well, anyway, Lucy’s husband Seamus goes up to the Maze Prison last year for weapons possession and for one reason and another they get divorced.”

“He’s IRA?”

“Of course.”

“They don’t like it when their wives divorce them and they’re in prison.”

“No, not in theory. But apparently he didn’t mind too much because Seamus Moore has a wee woman on the side. More than one.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Anyway. They’re divorced. He’s up for his stretch. She’s living back with her ma and da and everything’s normal until last Christmas Eve. And then she goes missing. The family can’t find her so they put out feelers in the community and when that doesn’t work they call us.”

“Seamus had her killed from the inside?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Seamus doesn’t have the power for that. He’s a pretty minor player. She just goes missing. It’s Christmas time and we’re short-staffed, so I took charge of the investigation.”

“You were lead?” I asked, a little surprised.

“It was a defining case. It’s my job to show that we are the cops for both sides in Carrickfergus, Protestant and Catholic. So yes, I was running it and I ran Matty and McCrabban ragged and I pulled out all the stops but we couldn’t bloody find her.”

“What were the circumstances?”

“Christmas Eve. Barn Halt. She was waiting for the Belfast train to come and she just vanished.”

“Poof! Gone! Just like that?”

“Poof. Gone. Just like that. I was pretty aggrieved that we couldn’t find a trace of her. But then in January the family started getting letters and postcards from her saying she was ok and not to worry about her.”

“Genuine letters?”

“Aye. We had the handwriting analysed.”

“Where were they posted?”

“Over the border. The Irish Republic: Cork, Dublin, all over.”

“So she just ran away. No mystery there. Happens all the time. Not a happy ending but not a tragic one either,” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” Brennan said with a sigh. “That’s what I told Mrs O’Neill. ‘Don’t worry, she’s run away, I’ve seen it a million times. She’ll be all right’.”

He got up, walked to the window, leaned his forehead against the glass. His big greying, Viking head of hair mooshed against the pane. He suddenly looked very old.

“What is it?” I asked.

“She’s been found.”

“Dead?”

“Get your team, get a Land Rover and drive up to Woodburn Forest. You’re meeting the ranger there, a man called De Sloot,” he muttered.

“Yes, sir.”

In ten minutes we were in the country.

Rolling hills, small farms, cows, sheep, horses — a world away from the Troubles.

Another ten minutes and we were at Woodburn Forest, a small deciduous wood surrounded by new plantations of pine and fir. The ranger was meeting us at the south-west entrance.

“There he is,” I said and pulled in the Land Rover.

He was a lean, older guy with ruddy red face and close-cropped grey hair. He was wearing a Barbour jacket, hiking boots and a flat cap.

“Everybody out!” I said to Crabbie in the front and Matty in the back.

“I’m De Sloot,” the ranger said with a Dutch accent. We did the handshakes and I helped Matty unpack his gear.

De Sloot was all business. “This way, if you please,” he said.

We followed him through a cutting in the wood up a steep hill and into one of the older sections of the pine forest.

The trees were tall and densely packed together. So dense in fact that the forest floor was a dark, inert wasteland of pine needles and little else. As we went deeper we had to turn on our flashlights. The hill was north-facing and it was a good five or six degrees colder than the temperature outside the wood. In hollows and against rock faces there were even patches of snow that had survived the spring rains.

“Who found the body?” I asked De Sloot.

“I did. Or rather my dogs did. A fox had been reported attacking sheep and I thought they had found him or a badger, but of course I was mistaken.”

“You saw the fox?”

“No, it was a report.”

“Who reported it?” I asked.

“A man,” De Sloot said.

“What man?” I insisted.

“I don’t know. I got a phone call this morning that a fox had been attacking sheep and it had gone into Woodburn Forest.”

“Describe the man’s voice.”

“Northern Irish? I think. Male.”

“What else? How old?”

“I don’t know.”

“What exactly did he say?”

De Sloot thought for a moment.

“He asked me if I was the ranger for Woodburn Forest. I said that I was. He said ‘A fox has been worrying sheep. I saw him go into Woodburn Forest.’ That was all. Then he hung up.”

“What time was this at?” Crabbie asked.

“Around ten o’clock, perhaps ten thirty.”

“And what time did you find the body?”

“Some time after two. It’s quite deep into the forest, as you can see.”

“Yes.”

“Aye, how much bloody further?” Matty asked, struggling with his lights and sample kit.

“Gimme something,” I said, taking one of his bags.

“Quite a bit yet,” De Sloot said cheerfully.

The trees were even more tightly packed here and it was so dark that we’d have been hard pressed to find our way without the flashlights.

The incline increased.

I wondered how high we were up now.

A thousand feet? Twelve hundred?

I was glad that I was in plain clothes today. The polyester cop uniforms were murder in any kind of extreme temperature. I took off my jacket and draped it over my shoulder.

We stopped for a breather and De Sloot offered us water from his canteen. We took a drink, thanked him, soldiered on. On, through the dark, lifeless carpet of rotting pine needles before De Sloot finally called a halt. “Here,” he said, pointing to a snow-filled hollow in the lee of a particularly massive tree.

“Where?” I asked.

I couldn’t see anything.

“Near that grey rock,” De Sloot said.

I shone my flashlight and then I saw her.

She was fully clothed, hanging under the limb of an oak tree. She had set up the noose, put her head in it, stepped off a tree stump and then regretted it.

Almost every person who hanged themselves did it wrong.

The noose is supposed to break your neck not choke you to death.

Lucy had tried desperately to claw through the rope, had even managed to get a finger between the rope and her throat. It hadn’t done any good.

She was blue. Her left eye was bulging out of its socket, her right eyeball had popped onto her cheek.

Apart from that and the lifeless way the breeze played with her brown hair she did not look dead. The birds hadn’t found her yet.

She was early twenties, five two or three, pale and once, not too long ago, she had been beautiful.

“She left her driver’s licence on the tree stump over there,” De Sloot said.

“Any note?” Crabbie asked.

“No.”

In a situation like this what saves you is the routine. There is something about process and procedure that distances you from the reality. We were professionals with a job to do. That’s also why you’re supposed to look under your car every morning — it isn’t just the possibility of finding a bomb, it’s the heightened sense of awareness that that routine is supposed to give you for the rest of the day.

Process, procedure and professionalism.

“Everybody stay here. Matty, get your camera and start snapping. Mr De Sloot, have you moved anything at all?”

“No,” De Sloot said. “I read the driver’s licence and then I went back home and called the police. I kept the dogs away.”

We set up the battery-powered spotlights. I spread the team out and we combed the immediate area for footprints, forensic proofs or anything unusual.

Nothing.

Matty took the pictures and I made sure that his camera strategies were formal and correct.

The body was clean and there was no sign of anyone else having been here.

I looked at Matty. “Are you happy with the protocols? Shall we close the circle?”

“Aye. We’ve plenty of coverage. At least three rolls of film on just the wide shots.”

“Good. Keep snapping and damn the torpedoes,” I said.

I let Matty finish his photography.

“Better not fingerprint her just yet, or we’ll have to deal with Cathcart,” I said.

“Do you know the woman?” De Sloot asked.

“Lucy Moore, nee O’Neill. Missing since last Christmas,” I said.

“Until now,” McCrabban muttered.

“Until now,” I agreed.

We stood there in the dark understory. It began to get very cold.

“I think we’re done here, boss,” Matty said.

“Cut her down, have them take her to the patho,” I said.

“Have who take her? You’ll never get an undertaker to come out here,” McCrabban said.

“We’ll bloody do it then!” I said.

We cut the body down, Matty took a hair sample and we carried her back to the Land Rover.

Thank God I wasn’t in the back with her.

We drove to Carrick Hospital and left the body for Laura but the nurse told us that it would take a while because Dr Cathcart had finally been called away to Belfast to help autopsy with the burn victims from The Peacock Room.

When we returned to the barracks it was early evening and Brennan was waiting for me at my desk.

“Was it her?” he asked.

“It was,” I said. “She looked like her picture on the driver’s licence anyway. The patho will tell us for certain when she gets a chance.”

“Suicide?”

“Seems like it.”

Brennan looked cosmically sad. “I think I know why she may have topped herself.”

“Why?”

“Her ex-husband joined the Maze hunger strike on Monday.”

“He goes on hunger strike and she’s all guilty about divorcing him and she hangs herself?”

“Must be.”

“It’s possible,” I said and rubbed my chin dubiously.

“Hunger striker’s ex-wife tops herself! Oh my God, the media are gonna love this one too, aren’t they?” Brennan said.

“We can do the old ‘no details released because we are respecting the wishes of the family’ routine.”

“Aye and speaking of that, I suppose we better go and tell the family. Her poor ma,” Brennan said.

I knew what he was angling at but there was no friggin way I was going with him. “Yes, I suppose you should go, sir. It was your case after all and you know how busy I am,” I said.

He sighed again.

“I’d appreciate it if you looked at the case file to see if there was anything that I missed,” he said as he departed.

“Not a problem, sir.”

I went to the CID filing cabinet and dug out the binder on Lucy Moore’s disappearance and carried it down to The Oak. My stomach was grumbling but someone had blown up their chef’s bus and he couldn’t get in. I ordered a Bushmills and a pint of the black and a bowl of Irish.

I opened the file. Thin. Lucy had told her mother that she was going to go to Barn Halt in Carrickfergus to catch the 11.58 a.m. train to Belfast on Christmas Eve 1980. Her mother had not been planning to go with her but after Lucy left the house she had changed her mind and got a lift to Downshire Halt (the stop before) so she could meet her daughter on the train. At 11.54 she had gotten on the train at Downshire Halt. It was a four-minute ride to Barn Halt.

A man called Cyril Peters had been driving over the Horseshoe Railway Bridge at 11.56 a.m. He had seen a woman exactly matching Lucy’s description waiting for the train at Barn Halt.

Then …

Zero.

The train came on time but Lucy had not got on.

Her mother had looked out the train window to see if she was at the halt. She not seen Lucy and then she had walked the length of the train searching for her. There were only three carriages and it didn’t take long to ascertain that she was not on board. No one had seen her. The driver hadn’t remembered if there were was anyone waiting on the platform and the passengers who had got off hadn’t remembered seeing her either.

Between 11.56 and 11.58 she had disappeared.

Lucy had said “I might stay over with some friends in Belfast, but I’ll be back on Christmas morning.”

All the friends were called. Lucy wasn’t there.

There had been no ransom demand, no confirmed sightings, no physical evidence at Barn Halt or anywhere else.

Absolutely nothing for ten days until the first of the postcards had arrived with a Cork postmark on it. It was in Lucy’s handwriting and explained that she “wanted to go find myself”. She begged her parents not to send anyone to look for her and she promised she would keep in touch with them.

She had kept in touch, sending a simple letter or plain postcard every fortnight. Brennan had kept a photocopy of several of these postcards. Some of them referred to contemporary events but none of them revealed her whereabouts, what she was doing or who she was living with. Somewhere down South from the stamps.

The postcards closed the case for the RUC because Lucy was twenty-two and therefore an adult. If she wanted to run away to parts unknown that was her business.

I read the psych. assessment, the bio and the case summary. She’d been an easy-going, fairly happy girl in her first year of an English degree at QUB when she’d met Seamus Moore. They’d got married quickly (obviously knocked up), she’d had a miscarriage and he’d almost immediately gotten arrested for weapons possession and been sent up for four years in the Kesh.

He’d joined the IRA wing as a fairly low-level prisoner.

She’d gone to see him once a week until she had bumped into Seamus’s mistress, one Margaret Tanner and there had been a blazing round right there in the visitors’ hall. Hair pulling, screaming — the prison officers must have loved it.

Divorce proceedings had been initiated.

After the divorce Lucy had moved back in with her parents.

There had been eight tips about the Moore case on the Confidential Telephone. None of them had come to anything. The IRA had been contacted through surrogates and, convincingly, denied any involvement. The UDA had also denied any connection.

Then the letters and postcards to her parents and a couple to her sister and brother.

Where would we be without postcards?

After the letters came and were authenticated the case was closed. And that was it. The whole file.

I walked to the station and called up Carrick Hospital to see if Laura was back there yet.

She wasn’t.

I talked to McCrabban about the Andrew Jackson postcard the killer had sent to me. Apparently you could buy them anywhere. None of the local newsagents remembered selling one recently.

At five o’clock my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is this Sergeant Duffy?”

“Yes, who’s this?”

“This is Ned Armstrong from the Confidential Telephone.”

“Hello, Ned, what can I do for you?”

“It’s what I can do for you,” Ned said good-naturedly.

“All right, Ned, I’m all ears.”

“A guy called in about ten minutes ago, saying that he quote, had a message for Carrickfergus CID. He said that he had quote killed the two fruits and he was going to kill more if his glorious deeds stayed out of the newspapers.”

“Hold on a minute, please, Mr Armstrong … Crabbie, pick up line two! … Go on, Ned.”

“Ok, I’m reading here: the guy said that he wanted the fruits to know that he was coming for them. And this was their first and last warning. He was phoning us from a call box outside the GAA club on Laganville Road, Belfast. And if the peelers went to number 44 Laganville Road they might get a wee surprise.”

“Did you tape this call?”

“No, part of the confidentiality of the Confidential Telephone is that we don’t tape or trace calls.”

“What was the man’s accent?”

“He had a broad West Belfast accent which sounded a little broader than I had ever heard before, which meant that he was hamming it up for us. People often do that or disguise their voices.”

“Anything else?”

“Not at the moment.”

“You’ve been a big help. Thank you very much, Ned.”

I wrote down the address and hung up.

The excitement was palpable. There were only half a dozen of us in the station but this was a big break.

Brennan had gone to make his notification so I sought counsel from Sergeant McCallister. “What do I do, Alan?”

“You know what you have to do. You’ve got to get up the Laganville Road. Take your team and a couple of boys. Full riot gear, mate, that’s in the bloody Ardoyne off the Crumlin Road, so, you know, if it looks dodgy at all, don’t even hesitate, scramski!”

We put on riot gear, I grabbed two reserve constables and we signed out a Land Rover.

Someone had hijacked a bus and set it on fire on the Shore Road so I drove the Land Rover along the back way. We came down into Belfast from the hills through the Protestant district of Ballysillan, which was decorated with murals of masked paramilitaries holding assault rifles and zombie armies holding Union Jacks.

We drove along the Crumlin Road and turned into the Ardoyne, a staunch Catholic estate just a couple of streets away from a staunch Protestant one — in other words, a real high heat flashpoint area.

“Does anybody know where Laganville Road is?” I asked.

Crabbie unfolded a street map and gave me directions.

We got lost twice but finally made it.

It turned out to be a small dead-end terrace, with a large graffito running the length of three houses that said, “Don’t Let Them Die!” referring, of course, to the hunger strikers.

It was teatime on a Saturday night and things looked quiet. The football matches were all over and no one was thinking about going out just yet. Maybe we could creep in and out without ever being noticed.

I drove past the GAA club where the tipster had made his phone call.

“Matty, you get out and dust for prints,” I said.

“Why me?”

“Cos you’re the bravest.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Just get out. You’re the FO, come on.”

Matty was reluctant to leave the safety of the Land Rover so I sent one of the reservists with him. He was called Brown, twenty-two, a carpenter in real life. Matty looked shit-scared. Both of them were in full riot gear and twitchily holding their Sterling sub-machine guns. It made me nervous. “Under no circumstances are you to fire those fucking guns, is that understood? We’ll be right at the end of the street. If there’s trouble, point the guns but do not bloody shoot them.”

“What do we do?” Matty asked.

“Come running down to us if there’s real bother, ok?” I told them.

Brown and Matty nodded.

We drove down to #44.

It was derelict with the windows boarded up and the front door kicked in. I parked the Land Rover and McCrabban, myself and the other reservist got out.

“I’m going in, lads. Keep an eye out for booby traps. He said we’d get a surprise and this would be perfect for a concealed explosive device.”

“In that case, I’ll go first, Sean,” Crabbie said.

“How come you always get to be John Wayne?” I said. “You just hold here, Crabbie. Stay well behind me, the pair of you. And if I’m killed, all my albums are to go to Matty, he’s the only one that will appreciate them.”

“I’ll take the country albums and any of the non-poncy classical,” Crabbie said.

“Fair enough. Now stay back, both of you.”

I was being flippant but dozens of police officers had been killed in booby traps over the years. It was a classic IRA tactic. You call in a tip about a murder, the police go to investigate and they trip a booby trap or the provos remotely detonate a landmine or pipe bomb. Sometimes they place a time-delayed device in a car in the street so they can get the rescue workers too.

I walked down the front path.

The smell of shit and piss hit me straight away.

I looked for wires, loose paving stones or any obvious trips.

Nothing.

So far.

I drew my revolver, turned on the flashlight and walked into the house.

It was completely gutted. Holes in the roof that leaked water, a few hypodermic syringes.

The stairs were wrecked and the stench of mildew was overpowering.

“Everything all right?” McCrabban shouted from out in the street.

I walked into the downstairs living room and the kitchen. More garbage, drug paraphernalia, water dripping down from the ceiling. I tracked through the entire ground floor and the back yard. I couldn’t get upstairs because of the destroyed staircase but it was obvious that no one had been in here for some time.

So why had he sent us here? Just because he could? A power trip? Was he watching us from a location across the street, laughing?

“There’s nothing here!” I yelled back.

“Let’s get back to the Land Rover then. There’s trouble!” McCrabban said.

“What kind of trouble?”

“Bunch of lads outside the GAA club.”

I went back outside. Matty and Brown were running down the street towards us. They were being chased by a dozen lads with hurley sticks and bottles.

“Don’t run, you pair of eejits,” McCrabban was muttering to himself.

“Ok, everybody, get in the Rover! You drive, Crabbie, I’ll try and reason with the lynch mob.”

I walked back down the path and was about to leave #44 Laganville Road forever when I noticed that the owners from long ago had put in a US-style mailbox with a little red flag to indicate when there was mail.

The flag was up. I opened the rusted mail box and sure enough there was a brown envelope inside. I took it out and shoved it between my flak jacket and my sweater.

Matty and a terrified-looking Constable Brown reached the Land Rover.

“Did you get the prints?” I asked.

“Are you fucking joking?” Matty said furiously. “Fucking suicide mission you sent us on.”

“Ok, calm down. Get in the Land Rover and close the bloody doors, Crabbie, get her started up!”

I holstered my revolver, reached into the front seat and grabbed a plastic bullet gun that I loaded and primed.

I walked towards the rioters.

They were the kind of kids who hung around the streets and attacked the police or fire brigade whenever they saw them. With tensions running high over the hunger strikes, one solitary Land Rover was an irresistible target.

Bottles and stones started smashing all around me.

Crabbie revved the engine and I waited until all the lads were inside before walking in front of the vehicle with the plastic bullet gun.

When the mob was twenty feet away they started directing all their bricks, bottles and stones at me. If they could put a man down or disable the vehicle they’d scarper and call in the heavy brigade who would show up with grenades and petrol bombs.

I pointed the plastic bullet gun at them.

“That’s enough!” I yelled.

Everyone froze and I knew I had about three seconds.

“Listen people! We are not DMSU. We are not the riot squad. We are detectives investigating a murder. We are going to leave this street right now and no one is going to get hurt!”

I kept the plastic bullet gun aimed at the guy on point and moved my way backwards towards the Land Rover. Their leader was an ugly ganch with a skinhead, a Celtic FC shirt and a breeze block in his hand.

“This is our patch, you fucking peeler bastards!” he said and hurled the breeze block at me. I dodged it but didn’t avoid a couple of stones that caught me in the flak jacket.

“Get in, Sean!” Crabbie yelled.

I jumped into the passenger seat of the Land Rover as an impressive hail of assorted objects came hurtling at me.

“So how did your Gandhi act go down with the locals?” McCrabban asked with dour satisfaction.

A milk carton exploded on our windscreen.

I closed the Land Rover door.

“They have much to learn about the moral authority of nonviolence.”

“I think we should be leaving now,” Crabbie said.

He turned the window wipers on, gave the engine big revs and drove slowly through the crowd. Perhaps one of them was our killer. I tried to see their faces but it was impossible through the milk and missiles. Bottles and bricks bounced off the bulletproof glass and the steel plating on the sides. The mob began chanting “SS RUC! SS RUC! SS RUC!” However, after twenty seconds of this we had successfully reached the end of the street without getting a puncture.

In another five minutes we were on the Crumlin Road and five minutes after that we were safe in Protestant North Belfast.

“Everybody all right back there?” I asked the lads in the rear.

“Everybody’s fine,” Matty said, but I could smell shit through the grill. One of the two reservists had keeked a planet in their whips.

Half an hour later, Matty opened the envelope from #44 in the CID room with myself, McCrabban, Chief Inspector Brennan and Sergeant McCallister looking on.

It was on standard A4 paper. A typed message single-spaced:

My story still has not appeared in The Belfast Telegraph!!!! You are not taking me seriously!!!!! You have until the Monday edition and then I will kill a queer every night!!!! I will liberate them from this vale of tears. The queers on TV and in the peelers and everywhere!!!! Lee McCrea. Dougal Campbell. Gordon Billingham!!!! Scott McAvenny. I know them all!!! DO NOT TEST ME!!!!! My patience is running thin!!!!

Matty carried it to the photocopier and made us half a dozen copies before setting to work on his forensic tests. It took him ten minutes to discover that the typewriter was an old manual Imperial 55.

Lee McCrea was a BBC presenter on the late-night local news. Dougal Campbell was a talkshow host on Radio Ulster. Gordon Billingham, a sports reporter on UTV. Scott McAvenny ran Scott’s Place, the only decent restaurant in Belfast. Of course they were all gay men, not out as such, but well known.

“What’s the verdict, gentlemen?” I asked.

“He’s a nutter!” Matty said.

“A nutter who can type without making a single mistake,” I said.

Brennan looked at me. “That’s good, Sean, what else jumps out at you?”

“It’s not a very comprehensive list, is it? Four pretty obvious homosexuals.”

“Aye, plus the two he’s already topped,” McCallister added.

“I suppose we better have that press conference on Monday morning,” Brennan said.

“And we better give those boys protection,” I suggested.

“I’ll call Special Branch,” Brennan said wearily.

I reread the note and sat down. I had a splitting headache. I had been hit by a dozen stones and half bricks, one right off the top of my riot helmet.

I looked out the window at the lights of ships moving down the black lough into Belfast’s deep water channel.

Brennan was talking to me but I didn’t hear him.

I watched as the pilot boat put out from under the castle to bring a cargo vessel into Carrick’s much smaller and trickier harbour.

“ … go on home,” Brennan finished.

“What?”

“I said you look like Elvis at his 1977 CBS special, why don’t you go on home?”

“I’ve things to do.”

“Just go. Have a drink, have a bath. Might be the last one you take for a while, I heard the power-station workers are going on strike.

“I can’t. I’m still waiting for the prints on John Doe.”

“I’ll wait. You go on. That’s an order, Sean.”

“Yes, sir.”

I decided to walk home. A mistake. A downpour caught me on Victoria Road. Heavy, cold rain from a long looping depression over Iceland.

Coronation Road.

The quintessential Irish smell of peat smoke rising up to meet the rain.

Light and fear and existential depression leaking through the net curtains.

#113.

I turned the key and went inside. I had forgotten about the phone tap and was surprised to see a black box next to my telephone. Kernoghan’s boys hadn’t left any trace apart from that. I stripped off my clothes, went into the kitchen and opened the empty fridge. Half a can of Heinz beans. Some yellow cheese. I ate beans and toast and lit the upstairs paraffin heater and went to bed.

I found myself dreaming of the girl hanging in the forest.

It was dusk and the stars were coming out over western Scotland and eastern Ireland and the sunken realm between the two. I’ve never liked the woods. My grandmother told me that the forest was an opening to someplace else. Where things lurked, things we could only half see. Older beings. Shees. Shades of creatures that once walked the natural world, redundant now, awaiting tasks, awaiting their work in dreams.

“Le do thoil,” I said to them in Irish, but they wouldn’t listen, calling my name from behind oaks and fairy trees, mocking me, teasing me until 3 a.m. when I awoke to the sound of sirens.