The Cold, Cold Ground

period; a “gay bar” had been attacked in Larne …

16: PATTERNS
    Victoria Estate opened her eyes in the morning light. Birdsong. A whistling milkman. The sound of kids throwing milk bottles at brick walls. I went downstairs. Through the living-room window I could see children kicking around a football. Others were playing hopscotch and hide and seek while women with curlers in their hair chatted across the fences.
    Lou Reed was on the radio, singing “Sweet Jane”.
    Coffee. Toast. Jeans. Sweater. Trainers.
    Car. I checked underneath for bombs.
    Not today. I drove along Coronation Road. Kids waved, adults nodded. In a council estate or housing project there is a feeling of intimacy, a feeling of togetherness that perhaps can only be replicated among a ship’s crew.
    I liked it.
    I stopped short.
    There was a big plate of wobbly yellow iron placed over a large pothole at the top of Coronation Road. In any other country in the world you just would have driven over it, but here, time and again, coppers had been blown up by explosive devices such as these. You dug a hole in the road, you filled it with C4 and nails, you covered it with a plate of iron to make it look like it had been done by a road crew as a temporary fix. You blew it up by remote. This was Protestant Coronation Road in Protestant Victoria in Protestant Carrickfergus and there was a99 per cent chance that this really was a temporary fix by a road crew but I wasn’t going to drive over it.
    I reversed the car and went south along Coronation Road instead.
    Chicken? Sure. Alive? Aye.
    I went to the newsagents, collected my free papers from Oscar, told him I’d had a word with Bobby Cameron, which, technically, was true. Oscar was selling paint and hardware now to make ends meet. I took the sample sheets of every shade of blue and drove to the barracks.
    Normally I was the first one in but this morning Brennan was waiting for me.
    He pointed to his office and when I had sat down, he got up from behind the desk and closed the door. He offered me a whiskey.
    “Too early for me, sir,” I said.
    He poured himself one.
    “So,” he said.
    “So,” I agreed.
    “I sent off the files, case notes and the physical evidence this morning, but Chief Inspector Todd would appreciate a full report from you,” Brennan said.
    “I’ll get working on it straight away,” I said with a neutral tone.
    Brennan sipped his whiskey. “Apparently there was some kind of incident last night in Larne?” Brennan asked.
    “Sir?”
    “Todd says that you yelled at him.”
    “That’s not my recollection, sir,” I said.
    “You had a week, son. A week is a fucking geologic era in a murder investigation. You had a week and you turned up nothing. You haven’t had one person in here for questioning. Face it, Sean. You were in over your head.”
    “I’m not sure I would categorize it quite that way, sir.”
    “The killer made a monkey out of you. Sending you postcards,sending you on wild-goose chases up to Belfast to get anonymous notes, writing you codes! That sort of thing doesn’t happen in Northern Ireland.”
    “Neither does a gay serial killer, sir.”
    “You were being played, son.”
    “You may be right, sir, in fact I think that the notes, the list of names, the music score, the murders subsequent to Tommy Little’s may have been a smokescreen to cover an assassination of a high-ranking IRA operative who—”
    Brennan held up his hand. “Save it for your report. It’s not your worry any more. Nor mine. It’s that most glorious of things now: someone else’s problem.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “It’s my fault, Sean, I should have reined you in. You’re very young. It was my job to supervise you, to mentor you, to get you to take all this in a more deliberate manner. I thought Sergeant McCallister would help, I thought an experienced man like McCrabban would help. It should have been me.”
    “No, sir, if there’s any blame to be apportioned for my handling of this investigation, it’s mine alone.”
    “Detective Chief Inspector Todd is a good man. He worked the Shankill Butchers case. He’ll have a couple of inspectors under him and three or four sergeants. An entire forensic team. They’ll find this freak and get it sorted in no time at all.”
    I tried a last desperate throw of the dice. “I thought the point of this, sir, was that in these troubled times resources were at a premium. Surely someone of Detective Chief Inspector Todd’s calibre