The Cold, Cold Ground

Why I’d joined the peelers in the first place .
    I stripped off the last of my police uniform and hung it in the cupboard. Under all that webbing I had sweated like a Proddy at a High Mass, so I had a quick shower to rinse out the peeler stink. I dried myself and looked at my naked body in the mirror.
    5’ 10”. 11 stone. Rangy, not muscled. Thirty years old but I looked thirty unlike my colleagues on sixty cigs a day. Dark complexion, dark curly hair, dark blue eyes. My nose was an un-Celtic aquiline and when I worked up a tan a few people initially took me as some kind of French or Spanish tourist (not that there were many of those rare birds in these times). As far as I could tell there wasn’t a drop of French or Spanish blood in my background but there were always those dubious sounding local stories in Cushendun about survivors from the wreck of the Spanish Armada …
    I counted the grey hairs.
    Fourteen now.
    I thought about the Serpico moustache. Again dismissed it.
    I raised an eyebrow at myself. “Mrs Campbell, it must be awful lonely with your husband away on the North Sea …” I said, for some reason doing a Julio Iglesias impersonation.
    “Oh, it’s very lonely and my house is so cold …” Mrs Campbell replied.
    I laughed and perhaps as a tribute to this mythical Iberian inheritance I sought out my Che Guevara T-shirt, which Jim Fitzpatrick had personally screenprinted for me. I found an old pair of jeans and my Adidas trainers. I lit the upstairs paraffin heater and went back downstairs.
    I turned on the lights, went into the kitchen, took a pint glass from the freezer and filled it half full with lime juice. I added a few ice cubes and carried it to the front room: the good room, the living room, the lounge. For some arcane Proddy reason no one in Coronation Road used this room. It was where they kept the piano and the family Bible and the stiff chairs only to be brought out for important visitors like cops and ministers.
    I had no toleration for any of that nonsense. I’d set up the TV and stereo in here and although I still had some decorating to do, I was pleased with what I’d achieved. I’d painted the walls a very un-Coronation Road Mediterranean blue and put up some original – mostly abstract – art that I’d got from the Polytech Design School. There was a bookcase filled with novels and art books and a chic looking lamp from Sweden. I had a whole scheme in mind. Not my scheme admittedly, but a scheme none the less. Two years back I’d stayed with Gresha, a friend from Cushendun, who had fled war-torn Ulster in the early ‘70s for New York City. She’d apparently become quite the professional little blagger and hanger-on, name-dropping Warhol, Ginsberg, Sontag. None of that had turned my head but I’d done a bit of experimenting and I’d gone apeshit for her pad on St Mark’s Place; I imagine I had consciously tried to capture some of its aesthetic here. There were limits to what one could do in a terraced house in a Jaffa sink estate in far-flung Northern Ireland, however, but if you closed the curtains and turned up the music …
    I topped off the pint glass with 80 proof Smirnoff vodka, stirred the drink and grabbed a book at random from the bookcase.
    It was Jim Jones’s The Thin Red Line which I’d read on my World War Two jag along with Catch 22, The Naked and the Dead, Gravity’s Rainbow and so on. Every cop usually had a book going on for the waiting between trouble. I didn’t have one at the moment and that was making me nervous. I skimmed through the dog-eared best bits until I found the section where
    First Sergeant Welsh of C for Charlie Company just decides to stare at all the men on the troop ship for two full minutes, ignoring their questions and not caring if they thought he was crazy because he was the goddamned First Sergeant and he could do anything he bloody well wanted. Nice. Very nice.
    That scene read, I turned on the box, checked that the Pope was still alive and switched to BBC2, which was showing some minor snooker tournament I hadn’t previously heard of. I was just getting a little booze buzz going and quite enjoying the loose match between Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn (both them boys on their fifth pint of beer) when the phone rang.
    I counted the rings. Seven, eight, nine. When it reached ten I went into the hall and waited for a couple more.
    When it reached fifteen, I finally picked up the receiver.
    “Aye?” I said