The Cold, Cold Ground

while I hunted downstairs. The place was filled with boxes of cigarettes, cratesof Jameson whiskey and two or three dozen Atari Video Game consoles. I ignored all of this and went to the record collection.
    Sinatra, Dean Martin, Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, more Sinatra.
    The baby screamed.
    The TV blared.
    I looked in the laundry basket for bloody clothes and I looked for traces of blood in the washer/dryer. Nothing.
    Caitlin followed me with the screaming baby, saying nothing, looking anxious.
    I went into the back garden and examined the clothes on the line. No blood-stained items there either.
    Back inside. Crabbie came downstairs and showed me the piece, a Saturday Night Special, snub-nosed .38. He was holding it on the end of a pencil. I slipped it into an evidence bag.
    “Well take this,” I said. “And you might want to give your wee girl there something to eat.”
    We drove to 134 Straid Road, #4.
    It was a small square apartment complex. A dozen flats, each with a little balcony. It could have been nice but for the fact that they’d painted the exterior a kind of sheep-shit brown.
    The front door was open and we walked up one flight of steps to #4.
    “Now what?” McCrabban said.
    “Now this, me old mucker,” I said and took out my lock-pick kit.
    Crabbie put his hand on my arm. “Sean, get a grip! We can’t break in!”
    “I shall note your protest in the log,” I said doing an English naval officer’s accent.
    McCrabban shook his head. In Protestant Ballymena such things were not tolerated. It was one thing to take the occasional carton of ciggies from a paramilitary, but a man’s house was sacred.
    It was a Yale standard and I had keyed the mechanism in under a minute.
    “Don’t touch anything,” I said.
    “I’m not going in,” Crabbie said petulantly.
    “Yeah, you are.”
    “No, I’m bloody not.”
    I flipped on the light switch with a knuckle. A small two-bedroom apartment with a neat two-person leather sofa, bean bags, red-painted walls and several framed posters of boxers: there was Ali versus Frazier back in the glory days; there was Joe Louis versus Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium.
    The apartment had a 22-inch TV, a Betamax video recorder and a dozen tapes: The Godfather , The Sting , Close Encounters of The Third Kind , etc.
    Shane had a sensitive side: in perhaps an echo of Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji he had done half a dozen watercolours of Kilroot Power Station. The last two weren’t bad although a magenta sunset was somewhat fanciful.
    It was the laundry bin and the record collection that I was after.
    Laundry first: briefs, T-shirts, a pair of jeans. No blood.
    Records next. I put on a pair of latex gloves and looked through them. Shane’s tastes were similar to mine: David Bowie, Led Zep, Queen, The Police, Blondie, The Ramones, Floyd, The Stones. What did they say about the pair of us?
    “What did you find?” Crabbie asked from outside.
    “No classical. No opera,” I said.
    “I can see his bookcase from here. They’re all comics and Enid Blyton. The guy’s sub-literate.”
    “Let’s do a thorough shakedown before we jump to any conclusions.”
    “You do it. I’ll keep watch.”
    I worked the bedroom and the bathroom. I found some grass, a sheet of acid tabs and a couple of body-building magazines.
    “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
    We left the .38 at the ballistics lab in Cultra and told them to match it against the slugs on Tommy Little and Andrew Young and then headed for home.
    We drove back to Carrick and picked up Matty.
    The released perv was one Victor Combs of 41A Milebush Tower, Monkstown. Ex-schoolteacher, currently unemployed. He’d been caught having sex in a park with another man. The other man – a seventeen-year-old – had accused him of rape and the judge had bought it.
    It sounded like he’d gotten the shaft but we drove over to see him anyway.
    Milebush Tower was another of those shit-coloured four-storey concrete blocks of flats that had grown up in the sink estates of Ulster in the ’60s and ’70s. They were damp, cold and seemingly deliberately unlovely. The day the Northern Ireland Housing Executive gave you your key they probably gave you a suicide information leaflet.
    We parked the Land Rover and hoofed it up to 41A.
    Mr Combs was in.
    He was wearing a bathrobe and listening to classical music which got our attention.
    He was heavy, balding, forty-five, but he looked twenty years older and he