The Cold, Cold Ground

8.30. I told him about the postcard.
    He read it, asked me if I’d lifted anything from it.
    “You think it’s the real deal?” I asked him.
    “We get a lot of hoaxes on every case, but this, I don’t know, it seems different.”
    “Any ideas about our boy?”
    “He hates queers. Which makes me think that John Doe must be one too. Has to be, right?”
    “Aye.”
    Crabbie typed up a transcript of the note, made photocopies and helped me with my presentation.
    At 8.45, Matty called to say he was running late because of a bomb scare on the Larne–Carrick train.
    “Where are you calling from?” I asked.
    “The train station,” he lied.
    “How come I can hear David Frost in the background?”
    “Uhm.”
    “Get your arse in here, you lazy hallion!” I said and hung up.
    “Youth,” McCrabban said.
    “What about them?”
    “They need more sleep than us,” he said.
    “You know, I don’t think we can do this case with just three people.”
    McCrabban nodded.
    “I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed,” I said.
    Crabbie didn’t like to hear that sort of thing (or anything about anyone’s feelings) and he began furiously filling his pipe to cover his embarrassment.
    He lit the thing, coughed and blew a blue smoke ring out of his mouth.
    “Yes,” he said, which was about as much consolation as I was going to get from that dour visage.
    “Do me a favour and find out who sells postcards of the Andrew Jackson cottage in Carrickfergus and Belfast and ask them if they’ve sold any lately and if so do they remember to whom.”
    “So basically call up every single newsagent in Carrick and Belfast?” McCrabban asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Ok, boss.”
    Matty finally came in and I showed him the postcard and he took it away to do more tests. He did fingerprints and the black light and the UV light. All the prints were smudged except for two sets that he suspected were mine and the postman’s. I told him to send a reserve constable round to Carrick post office to print the mail carrier from Coronation Road.
    At 9.05 I was done typing my presentation and did a dry run in front of the lads. They felt it was ok, although McCrabban made me cut it shorter because Sergeant McCallister had a poor attention span.
    At 9.15 I called up Mike Kernoghan in Special Branch, told him about my anonymous letter writer and asked him if his boy could put a tap on my phone just in case the killer decided to get more intimate.
    Mike thought this was a good idea and said that he’d send a couple of boys round this afternoon “to fix my TV”.
    I told him that I kept the spare key under the cactus plant and he said that his boys didn’t need no key, a rusty nail could get you into a Northern Ireland Housing Executive terraced house – a fact that did not fill me with confidence about my home security.
    I checked again for any faxes from Belfast and I called up the forensics lab just to make sure they were working their arses off ID’ing my John Doe. They claimed that they were and that they had a promising line of inquiry.
    “Really? You’re not just messing with me, are you?”
    “We wouldn’t do that, sir.”
    “When do I get the good word?”
    “We like to confirm these things first, Sergeant Duffy, but I’m reasonably sure that we’ll have a positive hit by the end of the day.”
    “Positive hit?”
    “Yes.”
    “So you know who he is?”
    “We’re fairly certain. We’re in the confirmation process at this moment.”
    “Can you give me a clue? It’s not Lord Lucan, is it? DB Cooper? Lady Di?”
    The forensics guy hung up on me. I called around for a next of kin on Andrew Young but his work colleagues were the best we could come up with.
    When Matty was done with the prints I asked him to start running down any sexual abuse allegations against Young. An enraged former pupil would be a nice go-to guy in a case like this.
    At 9.30 I assembled my team in the CID room, set them up in chairs next to me and put three chairs in front of the white board.
    At 9.35 Sergeants McCallister and Burke came in. Burke was another old-school peeler about fifty-five years old. No nonsense bloke. He was ex-army and military police. He had served in Palestine, Cyprus, Kenya, all over the shop. He looked like someone’s scary father. He didn’t talk much, did Burke, but what he did say was usually the wisdom acquired from a long and interesting life … either that or total bollocks.
    Chief Inspector Brennan came in last. He was