The Cold, Cold Ground

Around these parts everyone pitched their tents by the whisky river.
    I hummed Offenbach to myself and waited by the fax machine. The John Doe fingerprints came through at just after six.
    Of course it was an anticlimax.
    The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old guy called Tommy Little, a carpenter originally from Saoirse Street in the Ardoyne. Like everybody else from Saoirse Street he was a player but it looked like a minor one. He was an occasional driver for Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein. He had been interned as an IRA man in 1973 but who hadn’t? He had one conviction for possession of a stolen hand gun in 1975 and had spent nine months in the Kesh for that. He had been accused of public indecency in a Belfast lavatory in 1978 but the case had been dismissed. He was not married, had no kids. The next of kin was not listed in the file. He had no crim rec since ‘78.
    I called Brennan at home and filled him in on the John Doe and the fact that Lucy had been pregnant.
    “Pregnant?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Explains why she ran away, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Good, well that’s one mystery solved. Who’s this Tommy Little’s next of kin?” he asked.
    “There is no next of kin.”
    “You say he was a driver for Sinn Fein?”
    “It says occasional driver. He’s not a major gaffer, sir. Small fry by the looks of it.”
    “Doesn’t matter. Call up Adams and let him know that one of his boys copped it.”
    “Call up Gerry Adams?”
    “Yes. He’ll have to do for the next of kin. Is there anything else?”
    “We went up to Woodburn Forest. We didn’t find the body of Lucy’s baby which might mean good news. Maybe she gave it away and then topped herself.”
    “We can live in hope. Is that everything?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Good work, Duffy. Well done.”
    He hung up. I got myself a coffee and rummaged through the directory until I found Gerry Adams’s home number.
    Someone that wasn’t Adams answered the phone.
    “Who is this?”
    “My name is Sergeant Sean Duffy from Carrickfergus RUC, I’d like to speak to Mr Adams about a matter of some urgency.”
    “Yeah, he’s kind of busy. He’s doing an interview live on the BBC.”
    “When will it be over?”
    “What the fuck do you want, peeler?”
    “A friend of his has been killed and I’ve been instructed to make the notification only to him.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Carrickfergus RUC.”
    “He’ll call you back.”
    I turned on the radio and found the interview.
    Adams: “The demands of the hunger strikers are very reasonable. They want to wear their own clothes, they went political status, they want the right to do prison work or the right to refuse prison work. They want access to educational materials. We don’t understand why the government of Mrs Thatcher will not give us these reasonable demands. The whole world doesn’t understand why she will not give in to these demands.”
    BBC: “Yes, that’s the whole point isn’t it, Mr Adams? She’ll be giving in to terrorists.”
    Adams: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The current Prime Minister of Israel is Menachem Begin and he, if you’ll recall, blew up the King David Hotel. Look at Nelson Mandela. The whole world condemns his imprisonment and—”
    BBC: “The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has said that the demands of the Republican prisoners in the Maze can be looked at as soon as the hunger strike is ended.”
    Adams: “The time to look at these demands is now before more men die needlessly.”
    I turned off the radio.
    I walked around the station looking for food.
    The only people in here now were myself, Ray on the gate and a reservist called Preston.
    “Have you got any sandwiches, Preston?” I asked him.
    He shook his head.
    “I’ll give you five quid for a bag of crisps.”
    He had no crisps. I called up half a dozen Chinese restaurants to see if any of them were open on a Sunday. None were.
    I waited by the phone.
    I got out the whiteboard and wrote a flow chart with labels like “homosexual” and “Daedalus” and “severed hands”. I drewa Venn diagram. I drew a labyrinth.
    My stomach complained.
    The rain outside turned to sleet.
    Finally the phone rang. I pressed line one.
    “Hello, I’d like to speak to Sergeant Duffy,” Adams said. His voice was unmistakable.
    “Mr Adams, I’m sorry to have to inform you about the death of an associate of yours, a Mr Tommy Little. There was no known next of kin on our