The Cold, Cold Ground

shook my head. “Let’s take this old trawler to Rathcoole and see if we can piss off Billy White and his dashing young assistant Shane the same way we pissed off Freddie.”
    North Belfast. The Shore Road. The M5 motorway. Rathcoole Estate. All the previous beats: Drizzle, tower blocks, terraces, murals of masked gunmen proudly displaying that icon of the second half of the twentieth century: the AK-47.
    Stray dogs. Stray cats. No women. No cars. Rain and oil separating into strange colours and patterns by a process of organic chromatography.
    The snooker hall. The back room.
    The boxes of ciggies and UDA posters. Billy pouring over a ledger filled with accounts. Shane reading a comic book.
    “You again?” Billy said, looking vaguely disappointed.
    “What? You thought you’d bought me off with two cartons of cigarettes?”
    “I thought you weren’t going to bother me since I was so nice as to answer all your questions.”
    Shane was looking at me over the top of the comic.
    Batman.
    Do you have a secret identity, Shane my lad? What do you get up to after dark?
    “Are you a married man, Billy?” I asked conversationally.
    “Aye, two kids.”
    “Boys? Girls?”
    “One of each, Caitlin, two, Ian, four. You want to see pictures?”
    “Love to,” I said.
    We saw the pictures. They’d been taken on a pilgrimage to the site of the Battle of the Boyne in County Meath.
    “Charming,” I said.
    “Lovely,” Crabbie added.
    “So,” I said.
    “Tommy Little.”
    “Jesus! Not this again, peeler.”
    “Aye, this again. And again and again until we are satisfied,” Crabbie said, not liking Billy’s tone one little bit.
    I looked at McCrabban. You run it, mate .
    “What time did Tommy come by here last Tuesday?” he asked.
    “About eight,” Billy said with a sigh.
    “Why did he come here?”
    Billy looked at Crabbie and then he raised his eyebrows at me. “You can mention the heroin to my colleague,” I said. “We’re not interested in that.”
    Billy sighed. “Tommy gave us a couple bags of dope, we chatted about one or two things and then he left. That’s it,” Billy said.
    “What things did you chat about?” McCrabban asked.
    Billy shrugged. “He was reassuring us that despite the craziness around the hunger strikes all of our bilateral deals would be intact. He said that there would be a lot of rhetoric fromGerry Adams and Martin McGuinness but underneath it all we would keep to our arrangements regarding territory, rackets and narcotics. It was standard stuff but it was still good to hear.”
    “The conversation would have taken how long? Ten minutes? In which case he left at ten past eight? Eight fifteen?”
    “I don’t know, but no later than eight twenty.”
    “He got in his car and drove straight away?”
    Neither man spoke.
    McCrabban and I exchanged a look.
    “Well?” McCrabban insisted.
    “He didn’t exactly do that,” Billy said.
    I felt a little burst of electricity along my spine.
    “Go on,” I said.
    “It wasn’t a big deal,” Shane said.
    The Sphinx speaks. Excellent.
    “What wasn’t a big deal?” I asked.
    “He said he was going to Straid to see someone.”
    Freddie Scavanni.
    “And?”
    “Well, it was lashing and I asked him if he could give me a lift,” Shane said. “I live in a flat out on the Straid Road.”
    “You’ve a car though, don’t you, Shane?”
    “It was banjaxed.”
    Convenient.
    “So what happened next, Shane?” I asked.
    Shane bit his lower lip and shook his head. “Fuck. This is why I didn’t even want to mention it. Nothing happened. He gave me a lift. He was in a big hurry. I was at the house five minutes later and then he went on his way.”
    “This would have been eight thirty?”
    “Yeah.”
    “He gave you a lift and then he drove off?”
    “That’s it. Like I say, he was really pressed for time.”
    I let silence sink into the room for thirty seconds or so.
    Silence is also a form of conversation.
    Billy spoke through his hard man look, Shane through his gaze which never left the floor.
    “Why didn’t you lads tell me all this the other day?” I asked.
    “There was no point complicating things. If we’d told you, you’d have thought we had something to do with it. And we had nothing to do with it. We wouldn’t be that buck daft,” Billy said.
    “And why are you telling us now?” Crabbie asked.
    “Shane and I were talking and we wondered what would happen if you found Tommy’s car with Shane’s