The Cold, Cold Ground Read Free

anyone. What had I done in this time to give myself away? Was it the way I pronounced the letter “H” or was it just that I was marginally less sour than Coronation Road’s dour Protestant population?
    I put the key in the lock, shook my head and went inside. I hung up my coat, took off my bulletproof vest and unbuckled the handgun. In case we’d been needed for riot duty I’d alsobeen issued with a CS gas canister, a billy club and that scary World War Two machine gun – presumably to deal with an IRA ambush en route. I carefully put all these weapons on the hall table.
    I hung my helmet on the hook and went upstairs.
    There were three bedrooms. I used two for storage and had taken the front one for myself as it was the biggest and came with a fireplace and a nice view across Coronation Road to the Antrim Hills beyond.
    Victoria Estate lay at the edge of Carrickfergus and hence at the edge of the Greater Belfast Urban Area. Carrick was gradually being swallowed up by Belfast but for the moment it still possessed some individual character: a medieval town of 13,000 people with a small working harbour and a couple of now empty textile factories.
    North of Coronation Road you were in the Irish countryside, south and east you were in the city. I liked that. I had a foot in both camps too. I’d been born in 1950 in Cushendun when that part of rural Northern Ireland was like another planet. No phones, no electricity, people still using horses to get around, peat for cooking and heating, and on Sundays some of the crazier Protestants rowing or sailing across the North Channel in little doreys to attend the kirk in Scotland.
    Aye, I’d been whelped a country boy but in 1969, right as the Troubles were kicking off, I’d gone to Queen’s University Belfast on a full scholarship to study psychology. I’d loved the city: its bars, its alleys, its character and, at least for a while, the university area was immune to the worst of the violence.
    It was the era of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and QUB was a little candle of light held up against the gathering dark.
    And I’d done well there if I say so myself. Nobody was doing psychology in those days and I’d shone. Not much competition, I suppose, but still. I’d gained a first-class degree, fell inand out of love a couple of times, published a little paper on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in the
Irish Journal of Criminology
and perhaps I would have stayed an academic or gotten a job across the water but for the incident.
    The incident
.
    Why I was here now. Why I’d joined the peelers in the first place
.
    I stripped off the last of my police uniform and hung it in the cupboard. Under all that webbing I had sweated like a Proddy at a High Mass, so I had a quick shower to rinse out the peeler stink. I dried myself and looked at my naked body in the mirror.
    5’ 10”. 11 stone. Rangy, not muscled. Thirty years old but I looked thirty unlike my colleagues on sixty cigs a day. Dark complexion, dark curly hair, dark blue eyes. My nose was an un-Celtic aquiline and when I worked up a tan a few people initially took me as some kind of French or Spanish tourist (not that there were many of those rare birds in these times). As far as I could tell there wasn’t a drop of French or Spanish blood in my background but there were always those dubious sounding local stories in Cushendun about survivors from the wreck of the Spanish Armada …
    I counted the grey hairs.
    Fourteen now.
    I thought about the Serpico moustache. Again dismissed it.
    I raised an eyebrow at myself. “Mrs Campbell, it must be awful lonely with your husband away on the North Sea …” I said, for some reason doing a Julio Iglesias impersonation.
    â€œOh, it’s very lonely and my house is so cold …” Mrs Campbell replied.
    I laughed and perhaps as a tribute to this mythical Iberian inheritance I sought