The Cold, Cold Ground

if you changed seats in an armoured Land Rover you were sure to cop it during the next rocket-propelled grenade attack while the person you switched with would escape completely unscathed. Why the jinx would only apply to you, and not him, was a secret known only to the elect.
    “Come on lads, move it!” I had to say again and they got in back, grumbling. I opened the passenger door and Laura climbed up and in.
    “Morning, Dr Cathcart,” I said stiffly.
    “Oh, good morning, Sergeant Duffy,” she replied. “Where are we going?”
    “Boneybefore.”
    “Stick on the radio for us, will ya?” Crabbie said from the back.
    I turned on Downtown Radio but they were in some kind of conspiracy to make Juice Newton a millionaire. I switched to Radio 1 and we listened to Spandau Ballet as I drove us along the Marine Highway and the Larne Road.
    “Do you like Spandau Ballet, Dr Cathcart?” Matty asked from the back.
    “I don’t really know them,” she replied.
    “They’re the latest thing. What about you, Sean, you like ’em?”
    I tried to come up with a witty answer and after some deliberation I said: “Spandau Ballet are to pop music what the Cretaceous-Tertiary Event was to dinosaur music.”
    Stony silence. Nobody laughed.
    “Am I the only one around here that reads New Scientist ?” I asked.
    Evidently I was. I kept my bake shut after that.
    Boneybefore. A village eaten up by the Carrick expansionsometime in the ‘50s. A white thatched cottage almost on the lough shore. Another unknown young reserve officer standing by the door.
    I parked the Land Rover and we got out.
    “What are the facts, constable?” I asked the reservist.
    “Postman noticed the door was slightly ajar on the second post today. He pushed it open and found the victim. He called us.”
    “Anybody touch anything?”
    “Nope. But I had a wee look in.”
    “What did you see?”
    “I noticed that the victim had been shot and that his hand had been cut off, so I called Crabbie.”
    I put on latex gloves and went inside the cottage.
    The victim had been shot once in the head, probably as he had opened his front door, because he was still lying in the hall. He was a thin, dapper, grey-haired man in shirtsleeves, black tweed trousers and slippers. His hand had been cut off and the hand of – presumably – John Doe had been tossed, almost idly, on his chest.
    I found a wallet on the sideboard and quickly ascertained that the victim was one Andrew Young, a sixty-year-old music teacher at Carrickfergus Grammar School.
    The place was untouched. The killer had come inside only to kill Young and cut his right hand off.
    We did a thorough inspection but Matty agreed with me that the killer had not even entered the rest of the house.
    “Time of death?” I asked Laura.
    “He’s been dead about forty hours,” she said, examining the corpse.
    “Which one did he kill first?” I asked.
    “If you put me on the spot I’d say he killed the man in the car first. But only by a few hours,” Laura said.
    Matty began taking photographs and dusting for prints.
    Laura examined the body.
    McCrabban grabbed my sleeve. “Word with you outside, Sean?” he said.
    We stepped out into a salt wind coming off the lough.
    “What is it, Crabbie?”
    “I know this character, Sean. He runs the Carrick festival. He’s headteacher at the school. He met Princess Anne. Upstanding citizen and all that. But …”
    “But what?
    “Like I say, decent bloke and everything, but he’s a known poofter.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “As sure as eggs is eggs.”
    I saw the implications immediately. “So what do you think we have here, Crabbie? Someone going around killing homosexuals?”
    Crabbie shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s beginning to look like it, isn’t it?”
    “And there’s the bloody music connection again, isn’t there?”
    Crabbie nodded and began filling his pipe.
    Of course homosexuality was illegal in Northern Ireland but that didn’t mean that there were no homosexuals.
    Everybody knew somebody …
    “Don’t mention anything for the moment, let’s get the old routine working,” I said.
    We went back inside.
    Photographs.
    Prints.
    Interviews with the neighbours.
    A recovered 9mm stub from the wall.
    I reminded Laura to look for another concealed score when she did her autopsy.
    The day lengthened.
    Waned.
    We drove Laura home and thanked her for her help.
    We had another case conference at the station.
    Of course now that we knew who