The Cold, Cold Ground

he was, the first set of finger print data came through from Belfast: Andrew Young DOB 12/3/21. 4 Lough View Way, Boneybefore, Carrickfergus. No known next of kin. No criminal record.
    The second set was still being processed.
    We bagged the evidence.
    I sent the lads on.
    It was midnight when I got home. After I’d gone back out to Boneybefore to supervise the removal of the body to Carrick hospital by a private firm of undertakers because the police were overstretched. After I had changed into a shirt and tie and went to make the notification to Young’s employer Jack Cook, the headmaster of Carrickfergus Grammar.
    “Andrew? I can’t believe it! Andrew was one of our best teachers. He was a terrific man. How? When? No, he had no enemies. Are you joking? Everybody loved Andrew.”
    Midnight and I poured myself a vodka gimlet and listened to the bad news on the radio and put on La Bohème .
    A 78. Toscanini’s own hurried, strange 1946 version.
    When I got to Mimi’s famous first aria I picked up the lyric sheet and read along: “My name is Lucia. But everyone calls me Mimi. I don’t know why. Ma quando vien lo sgelo. Il primo sole è mio . When the thaw comes, the sun’s first kiss is mine.”
    I read and listened until I fell asleep but no great revelation was at hand.
    No, that wouldn’t come until the first post in the morning.

5: MERCURY TILT
    The tinker rag-and-bone man woke me up calling out “Tuppence for rags! Tuppence for rags!” I listened to the clip-clop of his ancient horse and then I heard those other heralds of a society attempting to keep order: the milkman, the postman, the bread man.
    I’d fallen asleep in the living room under a thin duvet and I was freezing.
    La Bohème had been playing on repeat all night and I’d probably ruined the grooves on what was a very rare recording.
    I lifted the stylus and examined the 78. It seemed ok. I blew off dust and put it carefully back into its sleeve.
    I padded into the kitchen and turned the kettle on. I flipped on Radio Ulster for the news: “Our headlines at a quarter past the hour. Fresh rioting rocked sections of Belfast last night as hunger striker Frankie Hughes was laid to rest. A police reservist was shot dead outside his house in Bangor in the early hours of the morning. A police station in County Tyrone was attacked by rockets and mortars …”
    I turned off the radio and walked into the hall.
    That absurd Sterling sub-machine gun was still sitting there on the hall table.
    “If someone breaks in and steals that thing Brennan will have my guts for garters,” I said to myself.
    I wondered if I could sign the gun back in on a weekend whenthe armoury officer was off duty.
    I grabbed the post from the hall floor and opened the front door to take in the milk before the starlings got at it. Mrs Campbell was bringing in her milk. She was holding her dressing gown closed with one hand, picking up the bottles with the other. I could see the curve of both breasts.
    “Morning, Mr Duffy,” she said.
    “Morning, Mrs Campbell,” I replied.
    “Did the filthy tinkers wake you too?” she asked.
    “No, Mrs Campbell, I was already up,” I lied to pre-empt a racist rant about “tinkers”, “gypsies” and the like. She smoothed a loose strand of red hair back onto her scalp, smiled and went inside.
    Up in the fields beyond the cow pasture I could hear the crack crack crack of repeated clapping. Perhaps a local virtuoso was practising a modernist piece by Steve Reich, I thought sardonically … Sardonically because, of course, it was in fact someone shooting at targets with a .22 pistol.
    A couple of annoyed starlings flew onto the porch looking for milk bottles to vandalise and rob but I had out-generalled them this morning.
    I closed the front door and carried the milk and the post to the kitchen.
    I lifted up a brown electricity bill and underneath saw a postcard. I picked it up. It was a picture of the Andrew Jackson presidential homestead in Boneybefore.
    A little white-washed cottage not unlike that of …
    I flipped it over.
    A first-class stamp. Posted yesterday.
    I read it.
    A note.
    For me.
    From the killer.
    In lower-case letters: “I found out your name, Duffy. You areyoung, careful. Your circumspection mirrors my own. Perhaps we are opposites who share the path through the λαβρινθος. Perhaps we are not true opponents, but key and lock, eternal duellists forced into the fray by rules of which we have no