The Cold Cold Ground

“Won’t I?” he replied, grinning.

I shook my head and took a step backwards. “You don’t kidnap peelers from the middle of the street.”

“Don’t fucking test me. Get in the fucking car,” he said.

His eyes were wide and they had a dangerous whiteness to them. I got in the back of the Jaguar. Billy leaned across me and closed the door.

I noticed that Shane was the only person in the car. In the driver’s seat. Where was Billy’s crew? What was this?

Shane’s face was badly bruised. His lip was split. That was the face. The pretty part. What did the rest look like?

I began to panic now. No witnesses. No problems. He wasn’t crazy enough to top a copper in the middle of Carrick, was he? The Jaguar centrally locked.

“Drive!” Billy said and Shane took us out onto the Marine Highway.

“What is this?” I said trying to keep my voice level.

“This is just a couple of friends having a chat,” Billy said. “A little bird tells me that you’ve been kicked off the Tommy Little investigation.”

I said nothing.

“You’ve been kicked off the investigation yet you’ve been slandering young Shane here. You’ve been telling your bosses that he’s been hanging around the toilets in Loughshore Park near Jordanstown. That he’s a fucking poofter! Isn’t that right?”

So he had seen my report. It had been leaked to him. He had connections with the RUC. But then why wouldn’t he? He’d been a copper in Rhodesia, and perhaps dozens of ex-Rhodesian police had joined the RUC.

“You’ve got no proof and if you fucking repeat that lie you’ll be hearing from our solicitors, or worse.”

He waggled the gun. Shane stopped the car at the red light at Carrickfergus Castle and my heart beat quickly until he released the central locking.

I got out of the car.

“And then, of course, there’s the good lady doctor to consider,” Billy said.

“What did you say?”

Billy closed the door, the light went green and the Jaguar drove off. My hands were shaking. I ran to the hospital and sprinted down to Laura’s office. She was eating a sandwich.

“Are you ok?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Has anyone been bothering you?”

“No. What’s going on?”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Billy was bluffing. For now. “It’s probably nothing. Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Can I see you later?”

“Ok,” she said, giving me a funny look.

I went back to the station. The duty officer was Sergeant Burke. I typed up an incident report about my ride with Billy and left it in Sergeant Burke’s in-tray.

Typing.

I had a bit of a brainwave. I got out my notebook and wrote: “The killer sends us a hit list and a letter and types it flawlessly. Freddie Scavanni would have learned to type in journalism school. Where else did you learn to type? The police! And our friend Billy was in the Rhodesian police for four years …”

Food for thought …

I worked the bike theft case and at five I went to the hospital to meet Laura. “Have dinner with me,” I said. “My house, I’m making spaghetti.”

“You can make spaghetti?”

“Lived on it for three years at Uni.”

“That doesn’t sound encouraging, but all right.”

I walked her up Coronation Road where she noted the red, white and blue kerbs with disapproval. I put on Ray Charles and opened a bottle of Italian red that had been out in the garden shed for a month. I cooked the spaghetti with some Parmesan from the cheesemonger. “Delicious,” she said as if she meant it.

I had no appetite. I told her about my ride with Billy.

She was horrified. “How can they just lift you off the street like that? The nerve of them!”

I told her about my pet theory. “Billy and Shane are an item. Shane was seeing Tommy Little on the side. Instead of killing him, Billy has forgiven him. But the rot has to stop here. I had to be threatened with the law and the gun. If the big bugs ever found out that Billy is a queer, minimum he gets kneecapped and exiled and divorced, but more likely they’d just kill him.”

“Do you have any proof of this?” she asked.

“None at all,” I said with a grin.

We drank the wine. Sufficient time had obviously passed: I didn’t need to ask if she wanted to go upstairs. We made love in the double bed.

I lit the paraffin heater and, when the lights went out, the Chess Records guitar shaped oil lamp. We lay in bed. “I can’t believe a man pointed a gun right at you in broad daylight,” she said.

She clearly had no idea the shit I had to deal with on a daily basis.

“How can you live here, among them?” she asked.

“Among who?”

“The Protestants! We’re like Anne Frank and her family up here,” she said.

“It’s not as bad as all that. They’re ok to me.”

“For now. And it’s a question of class too, isn’t it? What’s going to happen when you hear one of them get drunk and start knocking his wife about? What are you going to do then?”

“I’ll stop it,” I said.

“And how do you think they’ll treat you after something like that?”

“I don’t know.”

She shook her head, smiled and kissed my furrowed brow. Her lips were soft and she smelled good.

I kissed between her breasts and I kissed her belly and I kissed her labia and clitoris. She was a woman. I wanted that. I needed that.

We made love until the rain began and the light in the guitar lamp turned yellow, and the bishop on the Chess logo faded and finally guttered out.

19: THE SCARLET LETTER

Letters. Words. Aren’t you bored looking at them? Line after line. Page after page. Dream me away from the letters and the words. Dream me away even from logic. Take me to a land of alien typography. Away from Ireland, where there’s always a fight, always a duality, never a synthesis. Protestant: Catholic; Green: Orange; Beatles: Stones; Presta valve: Shrader valve. How tedious it all is. How wearying.

One would have to be mad to stay here.

Or indolent. Or masochistic.

What does it matter? What does any of it matter? The girl was dead. Tommy was dead. Andrew was dead. None of it was my business. Truth was something to be debated in philosophy 101.

“Morning,” Laura said.

“Morning,” I replied and kissed her.

“I’ll fix breakfast,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”