The Cold Cold Ground

16: PATTERNS

Victoria Estate opened her eyes in the morning light. Birdsong. A whistling milkman. The sound of kids throwing milk bottles at brick walls. I went downstairs. Through the living-room window I could see children kicking around a football. Others were playing hopscotch and hide and seek while women with curlers in their hair chatted across the fences.

Lou Reed was on the radio, singing “Sweet Jane”.

Coffee. Toast. Jeans. Sweater. Trainers.

Car. I checked underneath for bombs.

Not today. I drove along Coronation Road. Kids waved, adults nodded. In a council estate or housing project there is a feeling of intimacy, a feeling of togetherness that perhaps can only be replicated among a ship’s crew.

I liked it.

I stopped short.

There was a big plate of wobbly yellow iron placed over a large pothole at the top of Coronation Road. In any other country in the world you just would have driven over it, but here, time and again, coppers had been blown up by explosive devices such as these. You dug a hole in the road, you filled it with C4 and nails, you covered it with a plate of iron to make it look like it had been done by a road crew as a temporary fix. You blew it up by remote. This was Protestant Coronation Road in Protestant Victoria in Protestant Carrickfergus and there was a 99 per cent chance that this really was a temporary fix by a road crew but I wasn’t going to drive over it.

I reversed the car and went south along Coronation Road instead.

Chicken? Sure. Alive? Aye.

I went to the newsagents, collected my free papers from Oscar, told him I’d had a word with Bobby Cameron, which, technically, was true. Oscar was selling paint and hardware now to make ends meet. I took the sample sheets of every shade of blue and drove to the barracks.

Normally I was the first one in but this morning Brennan was waiting for me.

He pointed to his office and when I had sat down, he got up from behind the desk and closed the door. He offered me a whiskey.

“Too early for me, sir,” I said.

He poured himself one.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I agreed.

“I sent off the files, case notes and the physical evidence this morning, but Chief Inspector Todd would appreciate a full report from you,” Brennan said.

“I’ll get working on it straight away,” I said with a neutral tone.

Brennan sipped his whiskey. “Apparently there was some kind of incident last night in Larne?” Brennan asked.

“Sir?”

“Todd says that you yelled at him.”

“That’s not my recollection, sir,” I said.

“You had a week, son. A week is a fucking geologic era in a murder investigation. You had a week and you turned up nothing. You haven’t had one person in here for questioning. Face it, Sean. You were in over your head.”

“I’m not sure I would categorize it quite that way, sir.”

“The killer made a monkey out of you. Sending you postcards, sending you on wild-goose chases up to Belfast to get anonymous notes, writing you codes! That sort of thing doesn’t happen in Northern Ireland.”

“Neither does a gay serial killer, sir.”

“You were being played, son.”

“You may be right, sir, in fact I think that the notes, the list of names, the music score, the murders subsequent to Tommy Little’s may have been a smokescreen to cover an assassination of a high-ranking IRA operative who-”

Brennan held up his hand. “Save it for your report. It’s not your worry any more. Nor mine. It’s that most glorious of things now: someone else’s problem.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s my fault, Sean, I should have reined you in. You’re very young. It was my job to supervise you, to mentor you, to get you to take all this in a more deliberate manner. I thought Sergeant McCallister would help, I thought an experienced man like McCrabban would help. It should have been me.”

“No, sir, if there’s any blame to be apportioned for my handling of this investigation, it’s mine alone.”

“Detective Chief Inspector Todd is a good man. He worked the Shankill Butchers case. He’ll have a couple of inspectors under him and three or four sergeants. An entire forensic team. They’ll find this freak and get it sorted in no time at all.”

I tried a last desperate throw of the dice. “I thought the point of this, sir, was that in these troubled times resources were at a premium. Surely someone of Detective Chief Inspector Todd’s calibre would be best served looking into terrorist-related offences?”

“Not now that the Chief Constable’s taken an interest. Not now that the Secretary of State has been on the blower. Not now that the Sunday World has got involved. This has become big. This has become an embarrassment. It needs to be nipped in the bud.”

“In that case, sir, my team could help with-”

“No!” Brennan exclaimed.

“No, Sergeant Duffy. DCI Todd has his own team and resources and he doesn’t want you cluttering up his investigation. You are not to interview any of the witnesses or interfere with this investigation in any way. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Clearly Todd not only didn’t like me but had utter contempt for the work that I had done so far on this case.

And who knew? Maybe he was right. Maybe I had cocked this whole thing up through lack of experience.

Brennan and I stared at one another.

“You’re not being reprimanded or anything. Don’t get that idea. This is just a simple reassignment. And in case you’re wondering, I did fight for you, Sean. But this thing has just become … The names in the Sunday World … It’s just another distraction. You’re right. We’re stretched very thin here. Very thin indeed. We need to close the book on this nut. And then focus on, you know, preventing a bloody civil war.”

“Yes, sir. But I can still help, sir, I’ve got a lot of ideas.”

He coughed and looked uneasy. “I’ll be blunt, Sean. Todd was furious at you last night. He wanted me to put you on report. I put him straight on that but he doesn’t want you poking your nose in. He wants you to forward all tips and evidence straight to his team at Special Branch.”

I nodded. I had heard enough. I had heard enough and I was desperate to get out of here. “Of course … So what do you want me to do now, sir?”

“You’re to type up your report on Tommy Little and Andrew Young, fax it off to Todd’s team at Special Branch and when that’s done … Well, when that’s done, you can go back to your work on the Ulster bank fraud. They’re all important. Every case.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you can stick Matty and Crabbie on those bike thefts from Paddington’s Warehouse.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, go. Type that report. Don’t mope! And get your bloody hair cut!”

“Yes, sir.”

I left the office and took a deep a breath. I sat down at my desk.

Crabbie and Matty were looking at me through the door.

“Do you already know?” I asked them.

Crabbie nodded.

“It’s probably for the best,” Matty said. “I mean, who wants to be known as the detective who solved the Belfast Queer Murders? It’s not like catching the Yorkshire Ripper, is it?”

“No, I suppose it isn’t … Listen, lads, I have this report to type up and you two are to get onto that bicycle theft case … ach, fuck it, who fancies a pint?”

We retired next door to the Royal Oak, waited until the bar opened, got three pints of Guinness and sat near the fire.

“Seawright was in Larne yesterday,” Matty said as he lit up a smoke.

“Tell Todd. You’re to forward all tips or information to his team at Special Branch,” I said.

“What about the evidence we gained illegally?” Crabbie asked.

“What evidence?”

“Breaking into Shane Davidson’s apartment.”

“We didn’t gain any evidence, except about his really quite good musical tastes.”

He had a point though. When I typed my report should I mention the fact that a man I’d had a homosexual dalliance with had implied that Shane also had the occasional homosexual dalliance? Did that mean that Shane was a homosexual? Were Sean and Bobby more than just good friends? Did any of this have a bearing on the case?

On reflection it probably did, but how to broach it?

“I’ll tell them. I’ll say that I had ‘an opportunity to examine Shane Davidson’s flat and found nothing of interest’. If he asks me how I’ll tell him the stupid wee shite left his door open. Don’t worry, I’ll leave you out of it, Crabbie.”

Crabbie looked hurt. “You don’t have to take the fall for me. I’m old enough and ugly enough to look after myself.”

“Nobody’s taking the fall for anybody. Come, let’s drink up.”

We swallowed our Guinnesses and went back to the station. I closed my office door and laid out the blue paint strips on my desk. My favourite colour is blue.

Klein blue. Sapphire. Persian blue. Midnight blue. Columbia blue. Indigo. I lit a cig. I swam in blue. I tripped on blue.

I sat there for a while and then I swiped the strips off my desk into the wastepaper basket.

I typed up my report mentioning that I had “followed Shane to a public lavatory where suspected homosexual cottaging took place”.

My report was nine pages long. I showed it to McCrabban and he thought it was fine. I showed it to Sergeant McCallister and he thought there was a distinct sarcastic tone that I should probably remove.

I faxed it anyway. At lunchtime I saw Todd on BBC Northern Ireland news which was more than I had ever managed to achieve — so perhaps the powers that be were right in firing me.

“His dad’s a viscount,” Sergeant Burke told me over bangers and mash in the Oak. “He has three older brothers and if they all die and he outlives them he’ll become Lord Todd of Ballynure.”

“Seems like the sort of cunt who would do precisely that,” I muttered.

After lunch I went to get a haircut. Anything but work on that bloody Ulster Bank fraud case. After a murder investigation all other cases were anticlimactic.

Carrick was a goddamn mess.

There were two more TO LET signs in empty shop windows, three stores had been boarded up completely and the library had a notice in the window that said “Book Sale! New, Old, Fiction and Non Fiction! Thousands of Books!” which could not be a good thing.

West Street had two competing street preachers, one of whom was saying “Repent for the millennium is at hand and ye are doomed” but the other felt it was the time to “Rejoice now, for Jesus died that we might live!”

Sammy, as usual, was doing a roaring trade. Of course Friday evening was his busy time. Men getting “a little something for the weekend”.

He had three guys lined up in the chairs and another two waiting.

I picked up a paper. The English press was dominated by the Yorkshire Ripper trial. A verdict was expected today.

Sammy looked at me, nodded. “Guilty on all counts,” he said. “It just came through on the wireless.”

Good. That was one less bastard for us coppers to worry about. When it was my turn in the chair, I ordered a short back and sides. Sammy went to work with the scissors. “You like your music, don’t you, Sean? Thought I’d let you know. Town hall. Auction tomorrow morning at nine. The entire stock of CarrickTrax.”

“Paul’s going out of business?”

“Moving to Australia. Selling everything. Three thousand LPs. It’s breaking his heart. Classical. Non-classical. You name it. Rarities. Everything.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

“Aye, me too. You’re not a Beatles fan, are you?”

“No. Not really.”

“Are you more of a Stones fan?”

“Aye.”

“Well, look, if you don’t bid on the Beatles, I won’t bid on the Stones. Ok?”

“Ok.”

“What about Mozart?”

Like ghouls we split up his collection between us and I wondered exactly how much money I had in the bank. A hundred quid? One fifty? I’d saved up six years pay to buy the house for cash. Still, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. CarrickTrax was the deepest and best record shop in East Antrim and had been in business forever. The stuff they might have …

We moved on to other topics. He told me about the record renting shops in Moscow and then he got to talking about the Red Army choir and finally about his father who had been interned by the Japanese. “Fascinating people, the Japs. They say that death is lighter than a feather but duty is heavier than a mountain …”

I had heard the story of his father’s experiences in Burma twice already so I changed the subject. “What do you think of yon girl marrying Princess Charles?”

“When I think of that wee lassie in the clutches of that corrupt family of decadent imperialists …”

When I left the rain was heavier. I crossed the railway lines at Barn Halt and channelled Lucy Moore again.

“Your mother didn’t see you, Lucy, because you were on the Larne side of the tracks waiting for the Larne train to get you to the ferry. Isn’t that right? You and your boyfriend were going to Glasgow to get an abortion. But you got cold feet. You decided to have the baby and live with your boyfriend until it was born. Decent enough plan. What went wrong, Lucy?”

What went wrong? I stood there getting soaked. Walked home. Heated soup. Drank vodka and lime. I put on La Boheme again. This time the classic 1956 Sir Thomas Beeching version.

Read the lyrics as I listened. Mimi’s solo aria.

“My name is Lucia. But everyone calls me Mimi. I don’t know why. Ma quando vien lo sgelo. Il primo sole e mio. When the thaw comes, the sun’s first kiss is mine.”

I lifted the needle and put it down on the record and played it again. And again. I’d heard it before but this time it struck a nerve. Lucia = Lucy? Was that a stretch? Could Lucy Moore’s death have something to do with the murders of Tommy Little, Andrew Young and the others? A deliberate or even a subconscious link?

I listened to the record over and over, getting drunker and drunker. At midnight I played Orpheus in the Underworld. I began to see patterns there too. Eurydice is a daughter of Apollo, the lord of light. Lucia means light. The more I listened I began to see links everywhere, in everything. In Mozart, in Schubert, in Bowie.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It’s part of our DNA. That’s why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

The more I delved the clearer it all became. DC Todd was in on it. Brennan was in on it. It was the masons. It was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Yeats was in on it. All the crazy Prods were in on it. I drank so much vodka that I made myself sick. I kept on drinking. The one smart thing I did was unplug the phone lest I call Laura or my ma. I climbed upstairs and hugged the toilet. Alcohol poisoning. Pathetic. What was I? Sixteen? I began to cry. Eventually the power went off and I closed my eyes and fell asleep dry heaving.