“Carol? Jesus Christ. This would be a fine time for that IRA missile attack we’ve all been promised,” I muttered.
Brennan raised an eyebrow. “You can joke, pal, but I’ve seen the intel. The IRA got crates of them from Libya.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“Do you know Quinn and Davey?” Brennan asked.
I shook the hands of the two reserve constables who, in the nature of things, I might not see again for another month.
“Where’s your gun?” Brennan asked in his scary, flat East Antrim monotone.
I picked up on the quasi-official timbre to his voice.
“I’m sorry, sir, I left my revolver at home,” I replied.
“And what if my call to you had been made under duress and this had been an ambush?” Brennan asked.
“I suppose I’d be dead,” I said stupidly.
“Aye. You would be, wouldn’t ya? Consider this a reprimand.”
“An official reprimand?”
“Of course not. But I don’t take it lightly: they would just love to top you, wouldn’t they, my lad? They’d love it.”
“I suppose they would, sir,” I admitted. Everybody knew the IRA had a bounty on Catholic coppers.
Brennan reached out with his big, gloved, meat-axe fingers and grabbed my cheek. “And we’re not going to let that happen, are we, sunshine?”
“No, sir.”
Brennan give me a squeeze that really hurt and then he let go.
“All right, good, now what do you make of all this?” Brennan said.
Matty was taking photographs of a body propped up in the front seat of a burnt-out car. The car was surrounded by rubbish and in the lee of the massive wall of the old Ambler’s Mill. The vehicle was a Ford Cortina that been had jacked and destroyed years, possibly decades, before. Now it was a rusted sculpture, lacking a windscreen, doors, wheels.
A shock of mid-length yellow hair was visible from here.
I walked closer.
The cliche of every cops and robbers show — the dead blonde in the garbage tip. Course the blonde was always a bird, not what we had before us: some chubby guy with yellow tips in a denim AC/DC jacket.
He was sitting in the driver’s seat, his head tilted to one side, the back of his skull gone, his face partially caved in. He was youngish, perhaps thirty, wearing jeans, that jacket, a black T-shirt and Doc Marten boots. His blond locks were caked with filth and matted blood. There was a bruise just to the right of his nose. His eyes were closed and his cheeks were paler than typing paper.
The car was on a rise above the high grass and wild blackberry bushes and only a few yards from a popular short cut across the Barn Field itself which I myself had used on occasion.
I pinched the skin on the corpse’s neck.
The flesh was cold and the skin stiff.
Rigor was on the gallop. This boy was killed some time ago. Most likely the wee hours of the morning or even late last night.
They had either marched him here and shot him or shot him and dragged him here from their vehicle on Taylor’s Avenue. Good place for it. There would be no one here late to witness a killing or a body dumping, yet someone would find the corpse soon enough in the daylight hours. Ten more minutes up the road would have brought you into the countryside but you couldn’t be too careful with the Army throwing checkpoints up all over the place.
I looked again for footprints. Dozens. Matty, Tom and the two reserve constables had come over for a look- see at the body. They didn’t know any better, God love them, but I made a mental note to hold a little seminar on “contaminating the crime scene” perhaps in a week or two when everyone knew who I was.
I circled away from the car and walked up to the high mill wall, which, with the broad limbs of an oak tree, formed a little protected area. It was obviously some kind of former druggie or teenage hang-out. There was a mattress on the ground. A sofa. An old reclining chair. Garbage. Freezer bags by the score. Hypodermics. Condoms. I picked up one of the freezer bags, opened it with difficulty and sniffed. Glue. Nothing was fresh. Everything looked a couple of months old. The teenagers had obviously found an abandoned house in which to get high and create a new generation.
I checked the sight lines.
You could see the car from the road and from the Barley Field short cut.
They — whoever
I walked back to the vehicle and took a second look at the corpse.
Those pale cheeks, a pierced ear, no earring.
The victim’s left hand was by his side, but his right was detached from the body and lying at his feet on the accelerator pedal. He’d been shot in the chest first and then in the back of the head. There wasn’t much blood around the hand which probably meant that it had been cut off after the victim’s heart had stopped pumping. Severing a limb while he still lived implied at least two men. One to hold him down, one wielding the bone saw. But shooting him and then cutting off his hand was easy enough to do on your own.
I looked for the customary plastic bag containing thirty sixpences or fifty-pence pieces but I didn’t find it. They didn’t always leave thirty pieces of silver when they shot informers but often they did.
The right hand looked small and pathetic lying there on the accelerator. The left had scars over the knuckles from many a bout of fisticuffs.
There was something about the other hand that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t see what it was just at the moment.
I took a breath, nodded to myself, and stood up.
“Well?” Brennan asked.
“It’s my belief, sir, that this was no ordinary car accident,” I said.
Brennan laughed and shook his head. “Why is it that every eejit in the CID thinks they’re a bloody comedian?”
“Probably to cover up some deep insecurity, sir.”
“All right what have you got, Sean? First impressions.”
“I’d say our victim was a low-ranking paramilitary informer. They found out he was snitching for us or the Brits and they killed him. In typical melodramatic fashion they cut off his right hand after they topped him and then they left the body in a place where he could easily be found so the message would go out quickly. I’d say the time of death was sometime around midnight last night.”
“Why low-ranking?”
“Well, neither you nor Matty nor I recognized him so he’ll just be some crappy low-level hood from the Estates; also this place, bit out of the way, so the killer will be somebody local too. Somebody Carrick at least. I’ll bet Sergeant McCallister can ID our stiff, and I’ll bet you we find out who ordered the killing through the usual channels. Who called it in?”
“Anonymous tip.”
“The killer?”
“Nah, some old lady out walking her dog. Unless you think the terrorists are using old lady hit men?”
“What time was the call?”
“Six fifteen this evening.”
I nodded. “That’s a bit later than our killers wanted but he was seen in the end. I’m sure we’ll have the prints by tomorrow. I’d be very surprised indeed if this boy doesn’t have a record.”
Brennan slapped me hard on the back. “So, you’re happy enough to take this as lead?”
“What about the Ulster Bank fraud?”
“White-collar crime is going to have to wait until we’re back from the edge of the abyss.”
