The Cold, Cold Ground

duty. I easily found a parking space next to the entrance.
    I got out gingerly. The yard was full of potholes and puddles and since all the police Land Rovers leaked oil, you could really take a nasty spill if you didn’t watch your step. I said “Good morning, Miss Moneypenny,” to Carol and went upstairs. The second floor was open plan with an interview room, an incident room and offices for the senior sergeants and Chief Inspector Brennan.
    CID had all the window desks overlooking Belfast Lough. The view was pleasant and on a clear day you could see Scotland, which was nice if you ever wanted to see Scotland on a clear day. Detective Constable “Crabbie” McCrabban had built an elaborate and paranoid conspiracy theory around these prized window desks. It was his feeling that CID were given this prime position so that we would get it first in the event of an IRA missile or RPG attack, but I chose to believe that Brennan hadassigned us these desks as reward for our hard graft day in and day out.
    I sat down in my swivel chair and flicked through the report that Matty had inexpertly typed up:
Carrickfergus RUC, CID Div. Case #13715/A. Homacide. Barn Field, Taylor’s Avenue, Carrickfergus, 13/5/1981. Srce: anon tip Wed evening. Victim: victim unknown. Victim’s personal effects: none. Other evidence: blood sample, victim’s hair sample, victim’s right hand, CS photographs. Remarks: victim found in abadoned car, one hand severed, prints taken. Victim not yet IDed. Patho Rept: awaiting patho rept. #13715/A CS: Inq to Det Sgt Duffy. 14/5/1981: body devilered to Carrick Hospital c.o. pathologist Dr Cathcart.
    Matty had written nothing about getting prints off the victim’s clothes. I wondered if he’d done it and found nothing or just not done it. It was a toss up.
    I went to the coffee machine and pushed the buttons for white coffee and chocolate simultaneously. Armed with this dubious concoction I went back to my desk. Matty had not left me the photographs but I found them in the darkroom hanging on the drying line. 7x10 glossies of the body, the hand, the car, the pool of blood, the AC/DC jacket, the victim’s face, other aspects of the crime scene and a few of the moon, clouds and grass.
    I gathered the pics and took them to my desk.
    Other officers started to arrive, doing whatever the hell it was that they did around here. I said good morning to Sergeant McCallister and showed him the pics of our boy. It didn’t ring a bell.
    McCrabban appeared twenty minutes later sporting a black eye.
    “Jesus, mate! Where’d you get that shiner?” I asked.
    “Don’t ask,” he replied.
    “Not the missus?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it, if that’s all right with you,” he said taciturnly. These Proddies. They never wanted to talk about anything.
    McCrabban was a big, lanky man with a carefully engineered old-school peeler tache, straight ginger hair and pale, bluish skin. With a tan he’d look somewhat like a Duracell battery, but he wasn’t the type to get a tan. He was from farmer stock and he had a down-to-earth conservative millenarian quality that I liked a lot. His Ballymena accent conjured (in my mind at least) Weber’s stolid Protestant work ethic.
    “A big Jock was giving me a hard time about my Beemer. It’s a ‘77 E21. That’s not flashy, is it? You need a reliable car as a cop, don’t you?” I said.
    “Don’t ask me. I have a tractor and an old Land Rover Defender.”
    “Forget it,” I said and showed him the case notes and Matty’s photographs of the victim.
    “Recognize our poor unfortunate?” I asked.
    Crabbie shook his head. “You’re thinking informer, I suppose,” he said.
    “Why, what are you thinking?”
    “Oh, I’m with you, with his right hand cut off? Standard operating procedure.”
    “Do me a favour, take some of the headshots down to Jimmy Prentice and see if he recognizes our boy. I already asked the Chief so I’m a bit sceptical that Jimmy will have an ID but you never know.”
    “He mustn’t be local. If Brennan doesn’t know him he isn’t worth knowing,” Crabbie said.
    “If Jimmy draws a blank, fax them up to the Lisburn Road and ask them to cross-reference with all the informers on theirbooks, especially ones that haven’t called in in the last day or two.”
    Crabbie shook his head. “They’ll never tell us about the MI5 boys.”
    “I appreciate that, Crabbie, but they’ll have the army list too, so let’s at least try and narrow the