The Cold, Cold Ground (11 page)

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 Bohème
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 Bohème
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 Bohème
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?”