The Cold, Cold Ground

further along the street wandering stupidly to and fro. I’d been here three weeks and this was the second time the cows had escaped from the field next to Coronation Road. It would never have happened in Cushendun. These Carrick eejits were not good cattle farmers. I walked down the garden path ignoring Mrs Campbell’s cow and buttoning my coat. There was a frost in the high hills and my breath followed me like a reluctant taibhse .
    I checked under the BMW for car bombs, didn’t find any, looked a second time just to be sure, turned the key in the lock, flinched in expectation of a booby trap, opened the door and got inside.
    I did not fasten my seat belt. Four police officers had died in car accidents this year, nine police officers had been shot while trapped in their vehicles by their seat belts. The statistical department of the RUC felt that, on balance, it was better not to wear a seat belt and a memo had been sent around for comments. This memo had obviously been seen by someone in the Chief Constable’s office and quick as a flash it had become a standing order.
    I stuck on Downtown Radio and got the local news.
    Riots in Belfast, Derry, Cookstown, Lurgan and Strabane. An incendiary attack on a paint factory in Newry. A bomb on the Belfast to Dublin railway line. A strike by the Antrim Ulsterbus drivers in protest at a series of hijackings.
    “Because of the Ulsterbus strike schools in Belfast, Newtownabbey, Carrickfergus, Ballymena, Ballyclare, Coleraine and Larne will be closed today. Now a little George Jones to soothe your morning,” Candy Devine said.
    I flipped to Radio 1 and drove up Coronation Road listening to Blondie.
    “It’s like bloody India,” the milkman said to me coming down the street in his electric float. “Aye and without the cuisine,” I muttered and drove slowly to avoid killing a cow and thus incurring an unfavourable incarnation in the next life.
    I turned right on Victoria Road and saw a bunch of teenagers in school uniform waiting for a bus that was never going to come. I wound the window down.
    “School’s off, I just heard it on the radio!” I yelled across to them.
    “Piss off, ya pervert!” a seventeen-year-old slapper yelled back, flipping me the bird as she did so.
    “I’m the bloody peelers, ya wee shite!” I thought about replying but when you’re in an insult contest with a bunch of weans at 7.58 in the morning your day really is heading for the crapper.
    I wound the window back up and drove on to the sound of jeers.
    Two hundred yards further on I went past a Twelfth of July bonfire which was already two storeys high and stacked with pallets, boxes and tyres. On the top someone had a stuck an effigy of the Pope wearing a blood-stained bed sheet.
    Nice.
    I pulled into McDowell’s newsagents.
    Oscar was serving two hacks from the Associated Press. You could tell they were hacks from the Associated Press because they were wearing jackets that said “Associated Press” in big yellow letters on the back and because they were trying to buy a couple of Mars bars with a fifty-pound note.
    I bought the Guardian and the Daily Mirror . The headlines were about the Pope and the Yorkshire Ripper trial. Nothing about Northern Ireland on the front page of either. The AP men were probably selling their stories to the papers in Boston.
    At the bottom of Victoria Road there was an army checkpoint. Three green armour-plated Land Rovers and a bunch of Scottish soldiers smoking Woodbines.
    I showed them my warrant card and they lifted their rifles and waved me through.
    “Nice Beemer,” a big Jock squaddie said as I drove on. Was he implying that because I was driving a BMW, I was a corrupt cop on the take to the paramilitaries while he was a hard-working son of Caledonia trying to keep the murderous Paddies from killing one another? Maybe, or maybe he just dug the wheels.
    I drove south west along the sea front.
    Ahead of me Carrickfergus Castle, the town and harbour.
    To my right a dismal line of houses and shops, to my left the – always – gun-metal grey waters of Belfast Lough.
    The police station was about half a mile along the front.
    A small two-storey brick affair, surrounded by a blast wall and a high fence for deterring hand grenades and Molotov cocktails.
    I nodded to Ray behind the bulletproof glass. Ray raised the gate barrier and I drove into the police station compound. There was hardly anyone in because everyone had been up the night before on riot