The Cold, Cold Ground

everybody, get in the Rover! You drive, Crabbie, I’ll try and reason with the lynch mob.”
    I walked back down the path and was about to leave #44 Laganville Road forever when I noticed that the owners from long ago had put in a US-style mailbox with a little red flag to indicate when there was mail.
    The flag was up. I opened the rusted mail box and sure enough there was a brown envelope inside. I took it out and shoved it between my flak jacket and my sweater.
    Matty and a terrified-looking Constable Brown reached the Land Rover.
    “Did you get the prints?” I asked.
    “Are you fucking joking?” Matty said furiously. “Fucking suicide mission you sent us on.”
    “Ok, calm down. Get in the Land Rover and close the bloody doors, Crabbie, get her started up!”
    I holstered my revolver, reached into the front seat andgrabbed a plastic bullet gun that I loaded and primed.
    I walked towards the rioters.
    They were the kind of kids who hung around the streets and attacked the police or fire brigade whenever they saw them. With tensions running high over the hunger strikes, one solitary Land Rover was an irresistible target.
    Bottles and stones started smashing all around me.
    Crabbie revved the engine and I waited until all the lads were inside before walking in front of the vehicle with the plastic bullet gun.
    When the mob was twenty feet away they started directing all their bricks, bottles and stones at me. If they could put a man down or disable the vehicle they’d scarper and call in the heavy brigade who would show up with grenades and petrol bombs.
    I pointed the plastic bullet gun at them.
    “That’s enough!” I yelled.
    Everyone froze and I knew I had about three seconds.
    “Listen people! We are not DMSU. We are not the riot squad. We are detectives investigating a murder. We are going to leave this street right now and no one is going to get hurt!”
    I kept the plastic bullet gun aimed at the guy on point and moved my way backwards towards the Land Rover. Their leader was an ugly ganch with a skinhead, a Celtic FC shirt and a breeze block in his hand.
    “This is our patch, you fucking peeler bastards!” he said and hurled the breeze block at me. I dodged it but didn’t avoid a couple of stones that caught me in the flak jacket.
    “Get in, Sean!” Crabbie yelled.
    I jumped into the passenger seat of the Land Rover as an impressive hail of assorted objects came hurtling at me.
    “So how did your Gandhi act go down with the locals?” McCrabban asked with dour satisfaction.
    A milk carton exploded on our windscreen.
    I closed the Land Rover door.
    “They have much to learn about the moral authority of nonviolence.”
    “I think we should be leaving now,” Crabbie said.
    He turned the window wipers on, gave the engine big revs and drove slowly through the crowd. Perhaps one of them was our killer. I tried to see their faces but it was impossible through the milk and missiles. Bottles and bricks bounced off the bulletproof glass and the steel plating on the sides. The mob began chanting “SS RUC! SS RUC! SS RUC!” However, after twenty seconds of this we had successfully reached the end of the street without getting a puncture.
    In another five minutes we were on the Crumlin Road and five minutes after that we were safe in Protestant North Belfast.
    “Everybody all right back there?” I asked the lads in the rear.
    “Everybody’s fine,” Matty said, but I could smell shit through the grill. One of the two reservists had keeked a planet in their whips.
    Half an hour later, Matty opened the envelope from #44 in the CID room with myself, McCrabban, Chief Inspector Brennan and Sergeant McCallister looking on.
    It was on standard A4 paper. A typed message single-spaced:
My story still has not appeared in The Belfast Telegraph!!!! You are not taking me seriously!!!!! You have until the Monday edition and then I will kill a queer every night!!!! I will liberate them from this vale of tears. The queers on TV and in the peelers and everywhere!!!! Lee McCrea. Dougal Campbell. Gordon Billingham!!!! Scott McAvenny. I know them all!!! DO NOT TEST ME!!!!! My patience is running thin!!!!
    Matty carried it to the photocopier and made us half a dozen copies before setting to work on his forensic tests. It took himten minutes to discover that the typewriter was an old manual Imperial 55.
    Lee McCrea was a BBC presenter on the late-night local news. Dougal Campbell was a talkshow host on Radio Ulster.