The Cold, Cold Ground

had been baptized and confirmed.
    “Lucy Mary Patricia O’Neill,” the Priest said.
    They had given her double protection. The mother of God. The patron saint of Ireland. It hadn’t helped. About fifty people were crammed into the chapel.
    I watched and listened. Prayed.
    The service ended in tears.
    She was waked at The Harp and Thistle four doors down the street. I went there and took a cup of tea and a sandwich and sat by myself.
    I wasn’t going to impose. This wasn’t the appropriate venue. Claire, the sister, came to me. I didn’t go to Claire.
    “You’re the peeler?” she asked.
    I nodded.
    “Let’s talk outside.”
    We walked round the back of the pub. Sheep fields and Larne Lough and the North Channel and Scotland again.
    “Kill for a ciggie,” she said.
    I gave her one of mine and lit it for her.
    She was a chubby, attractive lass, about thirty, with dirty-blonde hair in a Lady Di haircut.
    She pointed back at the chapel. “We had to get special dispensation because of the suicide thing.”
    I knew what she meant.
    We smoked and didn’t say anything.
    “Go on, ask the questions you’ve been asking everyone else,” she said.
    “Did she ever confide in you about the baby? Make you promise not to tell your parents?”
    “Nope. We weren’t that close. Big age gap. But still, a thing like that …”
    “After she went away did she ever call you?”
    “No.”
    “When was the last time you got any communication from her?”
    “About a month ago. A wee letter. More of a note really. Posted in the north. I looked at it yesterday. There were a few others before that. They don’t really tell you anything except that she was alive.”
    “She never mentioned that she was pregnant in any of them?” I asked.
    “Not once. I still can’t really believe that.”
    “She was pregnant. And she did give birth.”
    “Then why? Why would she kill herself?” Claire said.
    “I don’t know. I’d like to see those letters, especially the later ones. When you get back to Dublin, you couldn’t send them on to me at Carrickfergus RUC?”
    “Of course … I don’t think they’ll help you though. There was nothing odd in any of them. Except of course that the whole thing was odd. Running off. Running off to the Republic. And why wouldn’t she mention that she was up the spout? To me? Her sister?”
    “Because she knew she was going to have to give the baby away. She wasn’t going to have the abortion, but for some reason she couldn’t keep the baby.”
    “What reason?”
    “I don’t know.”
    We finished our cigarettes.
    Below us, on the Irish Sea, a tanker was chugging out of Larne Harbour heading for Glasgow, leaving a scarlet line of filth in its wake.
    “She ever talk to you about labyrinths?”
    “Labyrinths? No.”
    “Opera? Rossini, Offenbach?”
    “No.”
    She looked at me and gave a half sort of smile. “You don’t believe she killed herself, do you?”
    I thought about my answer for a long time.
    “No,” I said. “I don’t.”
    12 noon. The City of Belfast Crematorium, Rosewood Cemetery, East Belfast
    Rows of neat, well-tended graves, gravel paths, trees. Signs of trouble already over the Lagan in the west and north of the city. Smoke curling from a dozen hijacked cars. Army helicopters hovering over potential foci and already that atmosphere that you only ever find in cities on the brink …
    I had never been to the crematorium before. Didn’t even know it existed. A worker told me that in England the majority of people now got cremated whereas here they barely got one “customer” per day.
    Despite his years of long service Tommy Little had exactly three people at his funeral: me, Walter and a venerable priest that Walter had dug up from somewhere. Not a single gentleman or lady of the press, which was surprising given the sensational nature of Tommy’s death.
    The service was brief. The priest mumbled the words.
    I watched as the simple pine coffin made its way through a hole in the wall into the fire.
    The priest shook Walter’s hand.
    And that was that.
    The priest nodded as he walked past me and then shuffled out quickly, rushing to get home before the riot started.
    Walter stared after the coffin for a moment or two and then turned. He smiled when he saw me. I stood up and offered him my hand.
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
    “Thank you,” he said, shaking my hand.
    We walked outside.
    “You couldn’t give me a lift to a train station, could