The Cold, Cold Ground

office into the wet battleship-grey Rathcoole afternoon. “Back in the Rover?” Matty asked.
    “Let’s walk for a bit, clear our heads.”
    We walked among the drab tenements and crumbling 1960s tower blocks. Everything was achromatic and in ruins less than twenty years after it had gone up. A massive social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong. “Where do you think thewomen are, Matty?” I asked. “It’s all men, here. No women, no kids.”
    “Inside washing the clothes, hitting the weans, cooking the chips.”
    I stopped at a twenty-foot-tall graffito: Look Out, Look Out, The Rathcoole KAI’s About. “What does KAI stand for?”
    “Kill All Irish.”
    “Kill All Irish. Nice. Rathcoole is from the Irish Rath Cuile meaning ‘in the centre of the ring fort’. Once this was a royal palace for the kings of the Ulaidh. Now look at it. Concrete towers and row upon row of soulless terraces.”
    “If it was a palace these scumbags would still have messed it up, believe me,” Matty said.
    I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock. Where had the day gone? “We should go home,” Matty said. “If Tommy Little was Force Research Unit, The Angel of Death wouldn’t go near him with a ten-foot pole. This is obviously the wrong angle. These boys are not that stupid.”
    “Aye, I know. All right. All right, we’ll get back in the Rover. We’ll head off, but I want you to drop me round the corner away from the prying eyes in the tower blocks.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “I am going to go round the back of those derelict tenements and I’m going to sneak into one of them and wait for our boy to come out.”
    “Billy?”
    “I’m going to wait for Billy’s wee friend, Shane. I think he knows something he’s not saying.”
    “Everybody in Belfast knows something they’re not saying.”
    We got in the Land Rover. Matty drove me to a doomed basketball court that was now a rubbish dump filled with skips, shopping trolleys, prams and the odd burnt-out, hijacked car. I got out of the passenger side and put my gun in my raincoat pocket. “You be careful, Sean, ok?” Matty said.
    “Careful is my middle name. That and Aloysius but you don’t need to tell anybody that.”
    He smiled and I walked through the swirling circles of garbage to the abandoned terrace.

13: HE KISSED ME AND IT FELT LIKE A HIT
    I waited in a gutted living room among the rats and human excrement, drug paraphernalia and dead pigeons. Outside the rain was pouring so hard it was as if hate rather than gravity was sucking it down to Rathcoole.
    I had a perfect view of the snooker hall and the sad little strip mall. Only the bookie was doing any business but that wasn’t surprising with the Derby coming up and the beautiful bay stallion Shergar, even at 1-6, a horse to bet your pension on.
    Evening.
    The scene at the snooker hall began to wind down and Billy drove off in his Merc at seven on the zero zero. Shane came out at 7.01 with a leather jacket over his head in lieu of a raincoat. I turned up the collar on my mac and followed him at a discreet distance, into the estate, along the Doagh Road, through Abbots Cross (the very place where Bobby Sands had been born) past Whiteabbey Hospital and down the Station Road.
    He stopped at the station bar for a drink. I followed him inside and got a whiskey against the cold. The local news was on. The murder of Tommy Little and Andrew Young was now the sixth lead. No one was interested. I wondered if that would piss off our killer. Perhaps he’d go bigger or perhaps he’d take his game over the water where it would play better. The story ran for less than a minute and that included another incendiary remark from Councillor George Seawright who said that homo-sexualsshould be shipped to an island in the Atlantic and left to starve to death.
    Shane finished his drink, bought a book of matches and left by the side door.
    I waited ten beats and went out after him.
    Several times Shane looked back to see if he was being tailed, but he never checked the far side of the street, two hundred yards behind. There were many ways to shake a tail and he knew none of them. “Who do you think’s after you, Shane, my lad? Or is just the dark you’re afeared of?”
    He turned left on the Shore Road and walked a good quarter of a mile to Loughshore Park, a pleasant little bit of greenery right on the water. We were nearly at the University of Ulster now but instead of doing the obvious and