The Cold Cold Ground

and one for the Belfast line. The shelters were tiny and you couldn’t get ten people in on a wet day. The one on this side of the tracks smelled of piss and was covered with the usual sectarian graffiti.

There was an iron footbridge to the other side but at this time of night you could safely cut across the railway lines.

I stepped over the sleepers and climbed up onto the other platform.

Another stinking little shelter. More sectarian graffiti.

Lucy would have been on the Belfast side so I recrossed the tracks and paced along the small platform.

Why did no one see Lucy get on the train? Did she get on the train? If not, what did she do? Walk back to Taylor’s Avenue? Cross the iron footbridge?

I walked to the south end of the platform where a six-foot wall prevented you from climbing over into Elizabeth Avenue. She didn’t get out that way and the other end of the platform led to a steep, exposed railway embankment where she surely would have been seen.

Her mother’s looking for her out the window and she doesn’t see her? Where is she? I asked myself. And that guy in the car sees her just a minute or two before the train comes. Where could she have gone in a minute? Not back to Taylor’s Avenue. The car driver would have seen her. Not over the footbridge, the passengers getting off at Barn Halt would have noticed her. Not across the railway lines themselves because there was a train in the way. At one end of the platform there’s a wall, at the other end there’s a railway embankment … Is she hiding in the shelter? Why would she be hiding?

The rain was bouncing hard off the concrete.

I turned up the collar on my coat and stepped inside the shelter.

I lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall.

Of course it was busy, it was Christmas Eve. People had other things on their minds. Perhaps you could easily get on and off a train and no one would notice. The great general public were notorious for letting you down when it came to eyewitness testimony.

I finished the ciggie just as the 4.30 Stranraer boat train came rushing by, running express from Belfast to Larne and really clipping it. The train’s four carriages were packed and I looked at the brief, flashing, happy faces of people leaving Northern Ireland, perhaps forever.

“Ach, I’m getting nowhere with this,” I muttered but I didn’t want to think about the other case because that stank too. Stank to high heaven. It was too gothic for Ulster. The Chief was right — we didn’t do serial killers in these parts. Even the Shankill Butchers had had the sense to join the Protestant paramilitaries first.

I yawned and ran back across the tracks and walked a minute along the sea front to the police station. I showed my warrant card to the unknown constable at the entrance. “It’s the early bird that catches the worm, sir,” he said.

“Aye.”

I checked to see if that fingerprint evidence had come in yet but of course it hadn’t. I reread the killer’s postcard and the tip from the Confidential Telephone. Nothing leapt out at me.

I couldn’t think what else to do so I took my sleeping bag from out of my locker, lay down on the ancient sofa in the CID room and slept like a log until morning.

8: ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD

McCrabban and McCallister’s faces staring at me. McCrabban holding a mug of coffee.

“Thank you,” I said, sitting up in the sleeping bag and taking it. “What time is it?”

“Nine,” McCallister said.

“What day is it?” I asked.

“Sunday,” Crabbie said.

“You two came in on a Sunday? Why?” I wondered.

“Well, I have a press conference to prepare for tomorrow and Crabbie and you are on an active murder investigation,” McCallister said.

Crabbie grinned. “And we’re all on time and a half!” he announced with glee.

“I’ve been here since four.”

“Sleeping time doesn’t count,” McCallister said.

I sipped the machine coffee. “I was just resting my eyes,” I muttered.

McCallister rubbed my head. “Back to the coalface for me,” he said.

Crabbie was wearing a suit today. As a detective he normally wore his own clothes which consisted of various outlandish jackets, shirts and ties. I hadn’t seen him in a proper suit before.

“What gives with the threads?” I asked.

“Had church this morning. And this evening. You wanna come? Leave aside your Romish superstition and follow the one true faith,” he said with a glint in his eyes — the only sign of a gag in his Spock-like visage.

I had been to an Ulster Presbyterian church service before. It was a masterclass in boredom. The building itself was deliberately bland with no ornament or accoutrements, merely simple wooden benches and a pulpit upon which a picture of the burning bush had been draped. There was no kneeling, incense, overly stimulating hymns, or raised voices. The sermons were long and focused on obscure passages of the Bible.

“I think I’ll give it a miss, mate,” I said.

Crabbie’s shrug seemed to convey the notion that one hour of tedium was a small price to pay to avoid eternity in the hellfire.

“Where’s Matty?” I asked.

“Fishing in Fermanagh,” Crabbie said.

“Doesn’t he care about this fabled time and a half?”

“Nothing messes with his Sunday fishing.”

I yawned and stretched. “Is there anything going on in the world?” I asked.

“The rumour is that the power-station workers are going to go on strike.”

“Any more hunger strikers die?”

“Nope.”

“Did we ever get that fax from Belfast about John Doe’s ID?” Crabbie shook his head. “We were supposed to get it yesterday morning. You know what I think?” he said.

“What?”

“I think it’s being repressed. I think John Doe is somebody important and Belfast is scrambling to lay the groundwork before releasing the information to us.”

“You’re paranoid,” I scoffed and then reconsidered. “Although William Burroughs said that a paranoid is somebody who knows what is actually going on.”

“Billy Burroughs said that? The guy that runs the fish shop?”

I drank the rest of the coffee and stood up. “Let’s go round the hospital and see if our patho has made any progress,” I said.

“All right.”

It was only drizzling so we walked to Carrick Hospital along Taylor’s Avenue and over the railway bridge at Barn Halt. I stopped when we were halfway over.

“I was here last night,” I said. “Checking out Lucy Moore’s vanishing act. I don’t see how she did it. A guy sees her waiting at the halt two minutes before the train is due to arrive. The train pulls in, her ma’s leaning out the window looking for her and she’s not there? How?”

“Maybe somebody abducted her.”

“Impossible. The platform was full of people.”

“Maybe she got on the train but her mum missed her.”

“It was only three carriages long and her ma looked in every one.”

Crabbie shrugged. “Well, that’s all moot now, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yeah, I suppose it is.”

We went on. The rain and the fact that it was Sunday had deterred all but the hardiest of cases and the