The Cold, Cold Ground

accent.
    “Are you sure?”
    “We can say it with 99 per cent confidence.”
    I thanked him and hung up the phone. Billy White did not shoot Tommy Little. At least not with that gun. I drank the vodka and thought about the killer. He’d been so quick to get our attention before with postcards and sawn-off limbs and now nothing: no new victims, no new communications. Surely that meant something. But what?
    I thought about Dermot McCann, a boy I’d known at St Malachy’s. Dermot had been very sexually adventurous even for 1968 … Dermot was now inside doing ten years for bomb making.
    I thought about him from Loughshore Park. Stopped thinking about him. Got annoyed. I opened the front door and left out the milk bottles. I went back in, stripped down to my jeans and T-shirt, got an oil can from the garden shed and pretended to oil the squeaky front gate. If Mrs Campbell came out now and did her “Oh, Mr Duffy, it’s such a shame about the Pope” thing I’d lift her over the fence, carry her into the living room and fuck her goddamn brains out.
    I oiled the gate. The rain came on. Mrs Campbell did not come out.

15: THURSDAY MAY 21 1981
    Tuesday had been a bust. Wednesday had been a bust. Two days of nothing. And then on Thursday all hell broke loose.
    4 a.m. Carrickfergus
    They didn’t phone. Crabbie rang my front-door bell at four in the morning. I was convinced it was an inept terrorist attack and opened the door with my service revolver cocked.
    “Don’t shoot, it’s me,” he said.
    “Oh.”
    “Get a move on, Sean. We’re meeting the Chief in half an hour.”
    “Let me make a cup of tea,” I murmured.
    “No time for tea, the others are waiting in the Land Rover, come on, I’ll help you. Lemme get your kit off.”
    “Don’t touch me! Wait in the living room.”
    I quickly threw on my dress uniform and body armour. “Last night I told a mate in Special Branch my theory about Freddie Scavanni,” I yelled from the bathroom.
    “What did he say to that?” McCrabban asked.
    “He said I was a genius and he sent over the file on Jack the Ripper.”
    “Have you solved that one too?”
    “It was Queen Victoria.”
    “I knew it all along. Easy to conceal a machete under all that crinoline.”
    I grabbed my electric razor and the pair of us went outside.
    “I cleaned that graffiti off the back of the Rover,” Crabbie said.
    I had completely forgotten about that. “Thanks, mate,” I told him.
    “You can go in the front, Sean,” Crabbie said. “I can see you’re fragile today.”
    I got in the passenger’s seat. Sergeant McCallister was driving, McCrabban, Matty and three reservists were in the back. No one had mentioned the name “Thatcher” yet but this had to be about her.
    “We’re to rendezvous at Ballyclare at 04.30 hours,” McCallister said.
    “‘04.30 hours?’ Is that what he told you? Does he think we’re the bloody army?”
    4.30 a.m. Ballyclare
    Brennan was sitting there like Lord Muck in his famous Finn Juhl armchair that he must have transported in the back of the Land Rover. He tapped his watch and grinned at us as we pulled up in front of the Five Corners Public House, which was open and serving Irish coffee to the lads.
    The sun was just coming up over the Slieve Gullion and Lough Neagh and if the big line of black clouds to the north would keep away it might be a fine morning. The landlord of the Five Corners passed an Irish coffee into my hands and I took it gratefully. Brennan was enjoying himself, surrounded by his men, in the wee hours, in his full dress uniform and leather gloves.
    “Men, we are to proceed to Aldergrove Airport in convoy where we are to meet with the brave boys of Ballyclare RUC and establish a roadblock, in co-operation with units of the British Army, on the Ballyrobin Road in Templepatrick so that an unnamed very important person can drive to Belfast,” he said.
    “Why doesn’t she take a helicopter like everybody else?” McCallister wondered.
    “Wrecks her hair, doesn’t it,” Matty offered.
    5 a.m. Templepatrick
    The army had the whole village sewn up and a brigadier general told Brennan that we were surplus to requirements.
    “We were ordered up at four in the morning for this!” Brennan said furiously and after some negotiation we were allowed to set up our three Land Rovers further along the road.
    “They’re on the way! Attention!” one of the squaddies yelled and the soldiers stiffened. We did not. Instead we fidgeted in