The Cold, Cold Ground

of plastic bullet guns.
    Dusk.
    Incendiary-device fires. Searchlights from army helicopters. Confused reports of trouble on the BBC.
    I sent the lads home.
    I put on the news. Yup, it was a bad one.
    I stared at the killer’s note and our accumulated evidence.
    We had nothing.
    I reread the case notes three times until I was sick looking at them and then I went out to my Beemer and drove to Rathcoole.
    9 p.m. Rathcoole
    Billy pacing the snooker room, barking orders. The riots had spread to north Belfast and chez Billy it was crisis mode: gunfire, bombs, riot control; the concrete bunker back room very April ’45.
    “This is a bad time. What do you want, peeler?” Billy asked.
    “Aye, what do you want?” Shane echoed.
    “What happened after Tommy Little left here?” I asked Billy.
    “He dropped Shane off and went about his business. He went wherever he was going next,” Billy said.
    “He never made it there.”
    “Says who?” Shane said.
    “Says Freddie Scavanni, the new head of the IRA’s Force Research Unit.”
    Billy shook his head. “We didn’t kill him. We were all hanging out here until midnight. Ask any of the lads. The snooker was on the box and we were hanging out.”
    Shane was looking at me. There was something other than contempt in his eyes.
    He knew that I knew. That he and Tommy had been having an affair.
    If I mentioned this in front of Billy, Billy would have him summarily executed. Was it worth the threat? I wondered if Shane had the wherewithal to be my prime suspect? To turn Queen’s evidence?
    “Let me show you something,” I said.
    I took out my notebook, drew a labyrinth on a piece of paper and passed the notebook across.
    Shane took a gander at it. Not a flicker. Billy took a look. Similar reaction.
    Still, they were lying about something . I could feel it in my cop bones.
    Was Tommy being followed by a suspicious and jealous Walter? Was Freddie lying? Jesus, there were a million possibilities. I needed to talk to Shane on his lonesome. I needed to arrest and get him away from Billy, bring him down to the station under the bright lights.
    My beeper started ringing. “Can I use your phone?” I asked.
    “Be my guest,” Billy muttered.
    I called Carrick station. “You better get back here, Sergeant Duffy. There’s been another incident,” Sergeant Burke said.
    “Where?” I asked.
    “The Mount Prospect Pub, Larne. It’s a poofter bar.”
    “When?”
    “Ten minutes ago. The details are still coming in.”
    “I’ll be right there.”
    I put the phone down. Looked at them. “Another attack on homosexuals. In Larne,” I said almost to myself.
    Billy grinned. “And this time you’re our alibi.”
    10 p.m. The Mount Prospect Pub, Essex Street, Larne
    Apparently a gay-friendly establishment in a gay-unfriendly town. If port cities are always more cosmopolitan than the hinterland then Larne was either the exception that proved the rule or else the hinterland had quantum tunnelled itself all the way to Iran.
    Larne announced its credentials on every route in to town with massive murals of an equine King Billy crossing the River Boyne on an almost equine horse. The Mount Prospect Pub was a sad little breeze-block building that said nothing about itself or its clientele on any sign, but which must have been a bit of an open secret.
    When I arrived the street was cordoned off and filled with uniformed officers, plain-clothes officers and an army team examining the explosive.
    A young copper filled me in on the details. The bomb had been attached to a grille covering the window, IRA fashion. Two pounds of high explosive packed around nails and screws. One man was dead, sixteen seriously injured.
    Soldiers were picking up the nails where they had found them and peelers were trampling over the bits of brick and broken glass.
    “All right, people! Everybody stop moving! This is a crime scene and you’re all marching around like a herd of bloody elephants!”
    Everyone stopped and turned to look at me.
    “Excuse me, who are you?” a gangly man asked. He was wearing a green gabardine knee-length raincoat, and a brown toupee. He had a moustache, round glasses and a North Down accent but all I could see was that big plank of green.
    “I’m Detective Sergeant Duffy. Carrick RUC. This is my investigation,” I said.
    He pushed his glasses up his nose and shook his head.
    “Go back to your work, gentlemen!” he ordered.
    “Don’t listen to this big lump of snot, I’m the