The Cold, Cold Ground

Lucy when he knew that that was the reason for our visit to the Maze this morning? Was he so concerned with concealing something important that he decided to conceal everything?”
    “You’ve lost me,” Matty said.
    We finished our excellent lunch, chewed the fat with the peelers at Queen Street cop shop, spent twenty minutes checking the phone records at British Telecom (Scavanni had indeed called Tommy Little on the night of May 12) and arranged an appointment with Billy White.
    We retrieved the Land Rover and drove to Rathcoole Estate in North Belfast.
    This was a Protestant ghetto made up of bland, grim, tower blocks and rows of dismal terraces. There were few services, much concrete, much sectarian graffiti, no jobs, nothing for the kids to do but join a gang.
    They didn’t throw petrol bombs at us as we drove into the estate but from the four iconic tower blocks we got a good helping of eggs and milk cartons.
    We pulled into the strip mall and easily found Billy White’s joint wedged between a Bookies and an Off Licence. It was grandly named the “Rathcoole Loyalists Pool, Snooker and Billiards Hall”.
    The graffiti on the walls all around announced that this was the territory of the UVF, the RHC (the Red Hand Commando, yet another illegal Protestant militia) and the Rathcoole KAI, agroup I hadn’t heard of before.
    The hall had a bullet-proof grille, speed bumps in front of it and half a dozen guys in jeans and denim jackets hanging around outside.
    Matty and I parked the Rover, walked through the riff-raff and went inside the place.
    There were a few pool tables and more men in denim playing darts and snooker.
    “Are you the peelers come to see Billy?” one of them asked, a giant of a man whose skinhead was brushing against the nicotinestained ceiling.
    “Aye,” I said.
    “Let’s see some ID,” he demanded.
    We displayed our warrant cards and were shown into a back room.
    An old geezer was sitting behind an unvarnished pine desk in a scary, claustrophobic little room that would have given the Führerbunker a run for its money. There were UVF posters on the wall and a large what you might call naive art portrait of Queen Elizabeth II sitting on a horse.
    Behind the old man were cases of cigarettes of every conceivable brand.
    The old man was watching a gardening programme on a big TV.
    “Are you Billy?” I asked.
    The old man did not reply.
    I looked at Matty. He shrugged. We sat down in a couple of plastic chairs.
    The old man looked at me suspiciously. “Are you from the taxes?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “From the excise?”
    “We’re from the police, we’ve come to see Billy.”
    “And you’re no here from the missionaries of the apostates?”
    “I don’t even know what that is. Is Billy around?”
    “He’ll be back in five minutes. He’s just getting more petrol for the generator. We had no electricity last night.”
    “Neither had anybody,” Matty said.
    “Would you like some tea?” the old man asked.
    “I wouldn’t mind,” Matty said.
    The old man went out the door and came back a couple of minutes later with three mugs, a bottle of milk, sugar cubes and a packet of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive biscuits. He added milk and sugar to both mugs and stirred them with his nicotinestained forefinger.
    “Ta,” I said when he handed me a cup.
    The old man started nattering away, first about the buses and the football but eventually somehow the trenches and the Great War where, he said, he was the only survivor from a platoon of men in the Ulster Volunteers on day one of the Battle of the Somme. I looked at my watch. This was some five minutes.
    “I’m just going to step outside,” I said.
    I went through the games room, opened the front door and took a breath of God’s free fresh air. It was raining now and all the men in denim were inside waiting their turn at the snooker tables.
    A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.
    Two men got out.
    One of them got a drum of petrol from the boot and began rolling it round the back of the club. He was a young guy, blond hair, about twenty-two. Good-looking imp wearing brown slacks and a plain black T-shirt.
    The other guy lit a cigarette and nodded at me. I knew that this was Billy. His hair was mostly black but with a Sontagian grey mohawk up front. His bluey-green eyes were sunk deep in his head and the lines around his mouth were deeper still. He