The Cold, Cold Ground

to you.”
    Matty bit his tongue and said nothing.
    “You’re in charge of the scene now, Constable McBride,” I said in a loud, official voice.
    “Ok.”
    “No shortcuts,” I added in a lower tone and turned and walked back to Taylor’s Avenue where the police Land Rover was parked with its back doors open. There was a driver inside: another reserve constable that I didn’t know, sitting on his fat arse reading a newspaper. I rapped the glass and the startled constable looked up. “Oi, you, Night of the Living Dead! Close them rear doors, and look alive, pal, you’re a sitting duck here for an ambush.”
    “Yes, sergeant,” the unknown constable said.
    An idea occurred to me. “Shine your headlights onto the field, will ya?”
    He put the headlights on full beam giving Matty even more light. I looked for a blood trail from the road to the 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