The Cold Cold Ground

corpse and sure enough I found a few drops.

“There’s a blood trail!” I yelled to Matty and he nodded with a lot less excitement than I would have liked. I shrugged, did up my last coat button and went back along Coronation Road. It was well after midnight now and everyone was abed. The rain had turned to sleet and the smell of peat smoke was heady. No people, no cars, not even a stray cat. Dozens of identical, beige Proddy curtains neatly shut.

So all these Jaffa bastards know I’m a Catholic? I thought unhappily. That was the kind of quality information the IRA would pay good money for, if anybody around here was imaginative enough to sell it to them.

I walked up the garden path, went inside, pulled my vermillion curtains, turned on the electric fire, stripped off my clothes in the living room and found an old bath robe. I made myself another pint of vodka and lime. The TV was finished now and it was test cards on all three channels. I put Double Fantasy on the record player. I flipped the lever for repeat, lay down on the leather sofa and closed my eyes.

Darkest Ulster in the Year of our Lord 1981: rain on the gable, helicopters flying along the lough, a riot reduced to the occasional rumble …

The problem with Double Fantasy was the arrangement whereby they alternated John Lennon tracks with Yoko Ono tracks. You couldn’t escape Yoko for more than four minutes at a time. I lowered the volume to two, snuggled under the red sofa comforter and, taking the occasional sip from my vodka gimlet, fell into the kind of deep sleep only experienced by men whose lives, like those of C for Charlie company, are lived on the edge of the line.

2: YOUR TINY HAND IS FROZEN

The occasional rumble of riot, gunfire and explosion. Nothing that Carrickfergus’s seasoned sleepers couldn’t handle. But then the comparative quiet was shattered by the apocalyptic turbines of a CH-47 Chinook. Everything began to rattle. A coffee cup fell off my mantelpiece. A picture came down.

The helicopter passed overhead at a height of 200 metres, well below the recommended ceiling. The Magnavox flip clock said 4 a.m. The British army had woken me and half the town in a hubristic display of raw power. Yes, you control the skies. And this, guys, is how you lose the hearts and minds.

I thought about that as I lay there in the big, empty double bed on Coronation Road. And when my anger subsided I thought about the vacuum on Adele’s side of the mattress.

Of course I had asked her if she wanted to come to Carrick with me, but there was no way she was going to “that stinking Proddy hell hole,” was her response. I hadn’t been heartbroken but I had been disappointed. She was a schoolteacher and it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to switch education boards as all the good teachers were going to England and America. The house was paid for, she would have been bringing in the dough, we would have been living high on the hog.

But she didn’t love me and the truth was I didn’t love her either.

I lay there in the darkness wondering if sleep was an option.

My mind drifted back to the murder victim on Taylor’s Avenue.

The crime scene had been nagging at my unconscious.

I had missed something.

In my haste to get out of the rain I had overlooked a detail.

What was it?

It was something about the body, wasn’t it? Something hadn’t been quite right.

Wind tugged at the gutters. Rain pounded off the window. I shivered. This was evidently going to be another “year without a summer” for Ulster.

For obscure reasons the previous tenants had blocked up the chimney so that you couldn’t light a fire in the upstairs or downstairs grates. I’d reckoned I wouldn’t have to worry about this until November but now I was obviously going to have to get someone in to see about it.

I lay there thinking and the Chief’s question came back to me.

Why had I joined the police?

And for the second time in twenty-four hours I thought about the incident.

Don’t look for it in my shrink reports. And don’t ask any of my old girlfriends.

Never talked about it with anyone.

Not me ma. Not me da. Not even a priest. Unusual for a blabber like yours truly.

It was 2 May 1974. I was two years into my PhD programme. A nice spring day. I was walking past the Rose and Crown Bar on the Ormeau Road just twenty yards from my college digs.

It was the worst year of the Troubles but I hadn’t personally been affected. Not yet. I was still neutral. Trying to keep aloof. Trying to do my own thing. The closest I’d come to assuming a position was after Bloody Sunday when me and Dad had attended the funerals in Derry and I’d thought for twenty-four hours about joining the IRA.

Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?

2 May 1974.

The Rose and Crown was a student joint. I’d been in there for a bevy maybe three hundred times in my years at Queens. It was my local. I knew all the regulars. Normally I would have been at that bar at that time but as it happened I’d been meeting a girl at the Students’ Union and I’d had enough to drink already.

It was a no-warning bomb. The UVF (the Ulster Volunteer Force, an illegal Protestant paramilitary group) claimed responsibility. Later the UDA (the Ulster Defence Association, another Protestant paramilitary group) said they did it. Still later the UVF said it had been an IRA bomb that had exploded prematurely.

I didn’t care about any of that.

The alphabet soup didn’t interest me.

I wasn’t badly hurt. A burst eardrum, abrasions, cuts from fragmenting glass.

Nah, I was ok, but inside the bar was carnage.

A slaughterhouse.

I was the first person through the wreck of the front door.

And that was the moment-

That was the moment when I knew that I wanted to be some small part of ending this madness. It was either get out or do something. I chose the latter.

The police were keen to have me. A university graduate, a psychologist, and that most precious thing of all … a Catholic.

And now seven years later, after a border posting, the CID course, a child kidnapping, a high-profile heroin bust, and several murder investigations, I was a newly promoted Detective Sergeant at the relatively safe RUC station in Carrickfergus. I knew why they’d sent me here. I was here to stay out of harm’s way and I was here to learn …

I sat up in bed and turned on the radio and got the news about the Pope.

Still alive, the tough old bugger. I genuflected and muttered a brief, embarrassed prayer of thanks.

“Why is it so bloody cold!” I said and bundled up the duvet and pillow and carried them to the landing.

I knelt down in front of the paraffin heater.

From the Arctic to the tropics.

I assumed the foetal position on the pine floor. I immediately fell asleep.

Rain.

Such rain. Lugh draws the sun and sea and turns them into rain.

I stirred from a dream of water.

Light.

Heat.

My body floating on the paraffin fumes above the river and the sea.

Next door children’s laughter and then something heavy smashing against the wall. They were always going at it, the Bridewell boys.

I opened my eyes. My throat was dry. The landing was blue because of the indigo flame of the paraffin