The Cold, Cold Ground Read Free Page A

toleration for any of that nonsense. I’d set up the TV and stereo in here and although I still had some decorating to do, I was pleased with what I’d achieved. I’d painted the walls a very un-Coronation Road Mediterranean blue and put up some original – mostly abstract – art that I’d got from the Polytech Design School. There was a bookcase filled with novels and art books and a chic looking lamp from Sweden. I had a whole scheme in mind. Not my scheme admittedly, but a scheme none the less. Two years back I’d stayed with Gresha, a friend from Cushendun, who had fled war-torn Ulster in the early ‘70s for New York City. She’d apparently become quite the professional little blagger and hanger-on, name-dropping Warhol, Ginsberg, Sontag. None of that had turned my head but I’d done a bit of experimenting and I’d gone apeshit for her pad on St Mark’s Place; I imagine I had consciously tried to capture some of its aesthetic here. There were limits to what one could do in a terraced house in a Jaffa sink estate in far-flung Northern Ireland, however, but if you closed the curtains and turned up the music …
    I topped off the pint glass with 80 proof Smirnoff vodka, stirred the drink and grabbed a book at random from the bookcase.
    It was Jim Jones’s The Thin Red Line which I’d read on my World War Two jag along with Catch 22, The Naked and the Dead, Gravity’s Rainbow and so on. Every cop usually had a book going on for the waiting between trouble. I didn’t have one at the moment and that was making me nervous. I skimmed through the dog-eared best bits until I found the section where
    First Sergeant Welsh of C for Charlie Company just decides to stare at all the men on the troop ship for two full minutes, ignoring their questions and not caring if they thought he was crazy because he was the goddamned First Sergeant and he could do anything he bloody well wanted. Nice. Very nice.
    That scene read, I turned on the box, checked that the Pope was still alive and switched to BBC2, which was showing some minor snooker tournament I hadn’t previously heard of. I was just getting a little booze buzz going and quite enjoying the loose match between Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn (both them boys on their fifth pint of beer) when the phone rang.
    I counted the rings. Seven, eight, nine. When it reached ten I went into the hall and waited for a couple more.
    When it reached fifteen, I finally picked up the receiver.
    “Aye?” I said suspiciously.
    “There’s good news and bad news,” Chief Inspector Brennan said.
    “What’s the good news, sir?” I asked.
    “It’s nearby. You can walk from there.”
    “What’s the bad news?”
    “It’s nasty.”
    I sighed. “Jesus. Not kids?”
    “Not that kind of nasty.”
    “What kind of nasty, then?”
    “They chopped one of his hands off.”
    “Lovely. Whereabouts?”
    “The Barn Field near Taylor’s Avenue. You know it?”
    “Aye. Are you over there now?”
    “I’m calling from a wee lady’s house on Fairymount.”
    “A wee fairy lady?”
    “Just get over here, ya eejit.”
    “I’ll see you there in ten minutes, sir.”
    I hung up the phone. This is where the Serpico moustache would have come in handy. You could look at yourself in the hallmirror, stroke the Serpico moustache and have a ponder.
    Instead I rubbed my stubbly chin while I extemporized. Pretty nice timing for a murder, what with the riot in Belfast and the death of a hunger striker and the poor old Pope halfway between Heaven and Earth. It showed … What? Intelligence? Luck?
    I grabbed my raincoat and opened the front door. Mrs Campbell was still standing there, nattering away to Mrs Bridewell, the neighbour on the other side.
    “Are you away out again?” she asked. “Ach, there’s no rest for the wicked, is there, eh?”
    “Aye,” I said with gravity.
    She looked at me with her green eyes and flicked away the fag ash in her left hand. Something stirred down