The Cold Cold Ground

that that routine is supposed to give you for the rest of the day.

Process, procedure and professionalism.

“Everybody stay here. Matty, get your camera and start snapping. Mr De Sloot, have you moved anything at all?”

“No,” De Sloot said. “I read the driver’s licence and then I went back home and called the police. I kept the dogs away.”

We set up the battery-powered spotlights. I spread the team out and we combed the immediate area for footprints, forensic proofs or anything unusual.

Nothing.

Matty took the pictures and I made sure that his camera strategies were formal and correct.

The body was clean and there was no sign of anyone else having been here.

I looked at Matty. “Are you happy with the protocols? Shall we close the circle?”

“Aye. We’ve plenty of coverage. At least three rolls of film on just the wide shots.”

“Good. Keep snapping and damn the torpedoes,” I said.

I let Matty finish his photography.

“Better not fingerprint her just yet, or we’ll have to deal with Cathcart,” I said.

“Do you know the woman?” De Sloot asked.

“Lucy Moore, nee O’Neill. Missing since last Christmas,” I said.

“Until now,” McCrabban muttered.

“Until now,” I agreed.

We stood there in the dark understory. It began to get very cold.

“I think we’re done here, boss,” Matty said.

“Cut her down, have them take her to the patho,” I said.

“Have who take her? You’ll never get an undertaker to come out here,” McCrabban said.

“We’ll bloody do it then!” I said.

We cut the body down, Matty took a hair sample and we carried her back to the Land Rover.

Thank God I wasn’t in the back with her.

We drove to Carrick Hospital and left the body for Laura but the nurse told us that it would take a while because Dr Cathcart had finally been called away to Belfast to help autopsy with the burn victims from The Peacock Room.

When we returned to the barracks it was early evening and Brennan was waiting for me at my desk.

“Was it her?” he asked.

“It was,” I said. “She looked like her picture on the driver’s licence anyway. The patho will tell us for certain when she gets a chance.”

“Suicide?”

“Seems like it.”

Brennan looked cosmically sad. “I think I know why she may have topped herself.”

“Why?”

“Her ex-husband joined the Maze hunger strike on Monday.”

“He goes on hunger strike and she’s all guilty about divorcing him and she hangs herself?”

“Must be.”

“It’s possible,” I said and rubbed my chin dubiously.

“Hunger striker’s ex-wife tops herself! Oh my God, the media are gonna love this one too, aren’t they?” Brennan said.

“We can do the old ‘no details released because we are respecting the wishes of the family’ routine.”

“Aye and speaking of that, I suppose we better go and tell the family. Her poor ma,” Brennan said.

I knew what he was angling at but there was no friggin way I was going with him. “Yes, I suppose you should go, sir. It was your case after all and you know how busy I am,” I said.

He sighed again.

“I’d appreciate it if you looked at the case file to see if there was anything that I missed,” he said as he departed.

“Not a problem, sir.”

I went to the CID filing cabinet and dug out the binder on Lucy Moore’s disappearance and carried it down to The Oak. My stomach was grumbling but someone had blown up their chef’s bus and he couldn’t get in. I ordered a Bushmills and a pint of the black and a bowl of Irish.

I opened the file. Thin. Lucy had told her mother that she was going to go to Barn Halt in Carrickfergus to catch the 11.58 a.m. train to Belfast on Christmas Eve 1980. Her mother had not been planning to go with her but after Lucy left the house she had changed her mind and got a lift to Downshire Halt (the stop before) so she could meet her daughter on the train. At 11.54 she had gotten on the train at Downshire Halt. It was a four-minute ride to Barn Halt.

A man called Cyril Peters had been driving over the Horseshoe Railway Bridge at 11.56 a.m. He had seen a woman exactly matching Lucy’s description waiting for the train at Barn Halt.

Then …

Zero.

The train came on time but Lucy had not got on.

Her mother had looked out the train window to see if she was at the halt. She not seen Lucy and then she had walked the length of the train searching for her. There were only three carriages and it didn’t take long to ascertain that she was not on board. No one had seen her. The driver hadn’t remembered if there were was anyone waiting on the platform and the passengers who had got off hadn’t remembered seeing her either.

Between 11.56 and 11.58 she had disappeared.

Lucy had said “I might stay over with some friends in Belfast, but I’ll be back on Christmas morning.”

All the friends were called. Lucy wasn’t there.

There had been no ransom demand, no confirmed sightings, no physical evidence at Barn Halt or anywhere else.

Absolutely nothing for ten days until the first of the postcards had arrived with a Cork postmark on it. It was in Lucy’s handwriting and explained that she “wanted to go find myself”. She begged her parents not to send anyone to look for her and she promised she would keep in touch with them.

She had kept in touch, sending a simple letter or plain postcard every fortnight. Brennan had kept a photocopy of several of these postcards. Some of them referred to contemporary events but none of them revealed her whereabouts, what she was doing or who she was living with. Somewhere down South from the stamps.

The postcards closed the case for the RUC because Lucy was twenty-two and therefore an adult. If she wanted to run away to parts unknown that was her business.

I read the psych. assessment, the bio and the case summary. She’d been an easy-going, fairly happy girl in her first year of an English degree at QUB when she’d met Seamus Moore. They’d got married quickly (obviously knocked up), she’d had a miscarriage and he’d almost immediately gotten arrested for weapons possession and been sent up for four years in the Kesh.

He’d joined the IRA wing as a fairly low-level prisoner.

She’d gone to see him once a week until she had bumped into Seamus’s mistress, one Margaret Tanner and there had been a blazing round right there in the visitors’ hall. Hair pulling, screaming — the prison officers must have loved it.

Divorce proceedings had been initiated.

After the divorce Lucy had moved back in with her parents.

There had been eight tips about the Moore case on the Confidential Telephone. None of them had come to anything. The IRA had been contacted through surrogates and, convincingly, denied any involvement. The UDA had also denied any connection.

Then the letters and postcards to her parents and a couple to her sister and brother.

Where would we be without postcards?

After the letters came and were authenticated the case was closed. And that was it. The whole file.