The Cold, Cold Ground

said.
    “What is this?” I asked, scared now.
    They pushed me out.
    “What is this?” I asked again, panic clawing at my throat.
    They shoved me to the ground, took out their revolvers.
    “For some reason. For some unearthly reason, they like you, Duffy,” Ginger said.
    “Who likes me?”
    “ They like you and that’s why they’re letting you live,” Ginger said. He pulled the trigger, the cylinder turned, the hammer came down. It was only a mock execution. They should have told me about the reprieve afterwards. I wanted to laugh. They’d botched it.
    “The Moore case is over. Is that understood, Inspector Duffy?” black moustache said with an English accent.
    “Aye, I understand,” I replied.
    “You watch your step, now, ok?” Ginger added.
    They got back in the Capri and drove away.
    The rain pattered my face.
    The tarmac under my back felt reassuringly solid.
    I lay there and watched the clouds drift past a mere hundred yards above my head.
    I got to my feet. Belfast was spread out before me like a great slab of meat in a butcher’s yard.
    Who liked me?
    Why had they let me live?
    Why had they called me Inspector?
    These were things to think about.
    It would keep my mind busy on the long walk home.

Don’t miss book II of Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy trilogy
    I Hear the Sirens in the Street
Look, if it weren’t for the geography, the people and the climate, Belfast would be a great city to do business.
    – John DeLorean, interview, Irish News (1981)
    1: MIDNIGHT MASS
    An afternoon of sun after a long, rainy Ulster winter. After those grim January days when the darkness came at 3 p.m. After the hunger strikes and an IRA bombing campaign and a period when it looked as if Northern Ireland was on the brink of civil war …
    From a small hill in a saffron-yellow barley field, a Coronation Road pastoral:
    Stray dogs sleeping in the middle of the street.
    Feral moggies walking on slate rooves.
    Women with rollers in their hair hanging washing on plastic lines or sitting in deckchairs in backyard sun-traps.
    Men with flat caps and pipes digging in their gardens.
    Children from three streets playing an elaborate game of hide and seek called 123 Kick A Tin. Children who are cute and shoeless and dressed like extras from a World War Two movie, wearing bright woollen clothes that have been handed down for generations.
    I lie on my back among the wild grasses, looking at the cobaltblue Belfast Lough, the green shore of County Down and the distant purple of Scotland nineteen miles across the Irish Sea.
    There are Jersey cows in the lower pasture and Blackface mountain sheep in the upper. Coronation Road is the last street in Greater Belfast before the country begins and this field feels like another world.
    A littoral. A DMZ. An Interzone.
    I put a barley stalk in my mouth and listen to snatches of conversation and the commingling of music from radios and stereos and from far up the lane a piper practising his scale.
    The talk is of local scandal and The Troubles. It isn’t very exciting and my name hasn’t come up – I am no longer a stranger here and I am old news. The music, however, is fascinating. The gable graffiti says “God Save the Queen”, and “No Pope Here”, but on this particular evening in late March of 1982 Coronation Road belongs to neither Queen nor Pope but to a Jewish girl from Brooklyn called Barbra Streisand. The current UK #1 album, Memories , is warbling from a dozen underpowered hi-fi speakers with most of them repeating the title track, but a significant few preferring Streisand’s melancholy duet with Neil Diamond on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”. We could be over-egging the theoretical custard here but for me these torch songs are desperate cries for help from Coronation Road’s female population. Streisand’s mezzo-soprano expressing what they cannot express from their marriage prisons: longings about foreign travel and roads not taken and above all about their men who were once buoyant and funny and now are aged characters brought low by unemployment and sickness and the drink.
    I take off my leather jacket and bunch it under my neck.
    The warmth feels good.
    The piper starts in on “Amazing Grace”.
    Bees flit clumsily among daffodils, bluebells and lilacs so violet to be almost crimson. It’s all terribly soporific and I findmyself dozing a little. Strangely, in these moments I always feel that I am on the verge of some hidden understanding, some secret