The Cold, Cold Ground

media and it would be nice if I had one crumb to throw at his fat, dozy face. I may pop in after the wedding but now I have to go,” Brennan said.
    “Yes, sir,” we all replied.
    We skipped lunch and made phone calls. We discussed the postcard and the music but we made no headway.
    Brennan came back from the wedding and demanded progress but we had none to offer him. He went into his office to change.
    I had just finished a conversation with Andrew Young’s boss who denied all knowledge of Andrew’s homosexuality (sensible because he could have been charged as an abetter under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which considered homosexual acts to be “gross indecency”) when a now uniformed Brennan put his big paw on my shoulder and sat down on my desk.
    “Do you know Lucy Moore?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “How long have you been here now, Sean?”
    “Nearly a month, sir.”
    “Lucy O’Neill was her maiden name. Local Republican family, the O’Neills. Big deal in these parts. Fairly well off Catholics. Her dad’s a human rights lawyer, her mum is high up in Trocaire – that big Catholic charity. Ringing a bell now?”
    “I’m afraid not, sir,” I said.
    “They both met the Pope when he came to Ireland in ‘79. Come on, you know who I’m talking about.”
    Brennan had that unfortunate habit of assuming that all Catholics went to the same mass in the same chapel at the same time.
    “Nope.”
    “Ok, well, anyway, Lucy’s husband Seamus goes up to the Maze Prison last year for weapons possession and for one reason and another they get divorced.”
    “He’s IRA?”
    “Of course.”
    “They don’t like it when their wives divorce them and they’re in prison.”
    “No, not in theory. But apparently he didn’t mind too much because Seamus Moore has a wee woman on the side. More than one.”
    “Oh, I see.”
    “Anyway. They’re divorced. He’s up for his stretch. She’s living back with her ma and da and everything’s normal until last Christmas Eve. And then she goes missing. The family can’t find her so they put out feelers in the community and when that doesn’t work they call us.”
    “Seamus had her killed from the inside?”
    “No, no, nothing like that. Seamus doesn’t have the power for that. He’s a pretty minor player. She just goes missing. It’s Christmas time and we’re short-staffed, so I took charge of the investigation.”
    “You were lead?” I asked, a little surprised.
    “It was a defining case. It’s my job to show that we are the cops for both sides in Carrickfergus, Protestant and Catholic. So yes, I was running it and I ran Matty and McCrabban ragged and I pulled out all the stops but we couldn’t bloody find her.”
    “What were the circumstances?”
    “Christmas Eve. Barn Halt. She was waiting for the Belfast train to come and she just vanished.”
    “Poof! Gone! Just like that?”
    “Poof. Gone. Just like that. I was pretty aggrieved that we couldn’t find a trace of her. But then in January the family started getting letters and postcards from her saying she was ok and not to worry about her.”
    “Genuine letters?”
    “Aye. We had the handwriting analysed.”
    “Where were they posted?”
    “Over the border. The Irish Republic: Cork, Dublin, all over.”
    “So she just ran away. No mystery there. Happens all the time. Not a happy ending but not a tragic one either,” I said.
    “That’s what I thought,” Brennan said with a sigh. “That’swhat I told Mrs O’Neill. ‘Don’t worry, she’s run away, I’ve seen it a million times. She’ll be all right’.”
    He got up, walked to the window, leaned his forehead against the glass. His big greying, Viking head of hair mooshed against the pane. He suddenly looked very old.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “She’s been found.”
    “Dead?”
    “Get your team, get a Land Rover and drive up to Woodburn Forest. You’re meeting the ranger there, a man called De Sloot,” he muttered.
    “Yes, sir.”
    In ten minutes we were in the country.
    Rolling hills, small farms, cows, sheep, horses – a world away from the Troubles.
    Another ten minutes and we were at Woodburn Forest, a small deciduous wood surrounded by new plantations of pine and fir. The ranger was meeting us at the south-west entrance.
    “There he is,” I said and pulled in the Land Rover.
    He was a lean, older guy with ruddy red face and close-cropped grey hair. He was wearing a Barbour jacket, hiking boots