The Cold, Cold Ground

and the words. Dream me away even from logic. Take me to a land of alien typography. Away from Ireland, where there’s always a fight, always a duality, never a synthesis. Protestant:Catholic; Green:Orange; Beatles:Stones; Presta valve:Shrader valve. How tedious it all is. How wearying.
    One would have to be mad to stay here.
    Or indolent. Or masochistic.
    What does it matter? What does any of it matter? The girl was dead. Tommy was dead. Andrew was dead. None of it was my business. Truth was something to be debated in philosophy 101.
    “Morning,” Laura said.
    “Morning,” I replied and kissed her.
    “I’ll fix breakfast,” she said.
    “You don’t have to.”
    “I want to.”
    None of my clothes were clean so I pulled on my jeans and a battered red New York Dolls sweatshirt that I had picked up in America.
    We ate and I looked under the BMW for bombs and I drove Laura to the hospital.
    I went to the paper shop, listened to Oscar complain about the paramilitaries, scanned the headlines in the newspapers: The Popewas out of hospital, a dress designer had been picked for Lady Di’s wedding, no hunger strikers had died overnight. I rummaged in the glove compartment and found the mix tape I’d made of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, John Lee Hooker and Howlin Wolf.
    I put the windows down and drove up into the country to clear the cobwebs. When I finally got back to Carrick police station Matty and Crabbie were expectantly waiting for me in the CID incident room.
    Matty was holding something in his hand.
    “News,” he said.
    “Have we got a break in the bicycle theft case?”
    “Better. The letters and postcards Lucy Moore sent to her sister in Dublin.”
    “What about them?”
    “You asked her sister Claire to send you the letters, right?”
    I put on latex gloves and took them to the desk by the windows in the CID incident room. Two letters, two generic white postcards and one picture postcard of the Guinness brewery.
    “We read through them a couple of times. She only says the blandest things. ‘I’m doing well, it rained today, I had toast for breakfast,’ that kind of thing,” Crabbie said.
    “It’s as if she had someone looking over her shoulder censoring ever single word,” Matty said.
    “Here’s a typical one,” McCrabban said. I picked it up and read it:
    Dear Claire,
I hope you are good. I am well. Things are nice here. Don’t worry about me. I’m looking after myself. I saw The Horse of The Year Show on TV last night. Your favourite, Eddy Macken was the quare fellow.
    That’s all for now.
    Lucy
    “Ok, so why are you so excited?” I asked. “Fingerprints?”
    Matty shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. No prints and I checked the stationery, same as the others, nothing special. I ran the letters under the UV light. Nothing. But then I did the same with the envelopes … I don’t know if you’re still interested, Sean, but have a wee gander at this …”
    He handed me one of the envelopes and a copy of the UV photo.
    “In visible light there’s nothing on the envelope, but under the UV light you can just see an ‘S’ in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope.”
    I was electrified. “How did that get there?”
    “In your bog-standard Irish way some diligent person had been writing the return addresses on all the envelopes in a stack. Top left-hand corner, name and address,” Matty said.
    “Of course they kept the envelopes that Lucy used free of a return address,” McCrabban added.
    “But whoever was writing the return addresses on the regular envelopes leaned all the way through to the envelope that Lucy used for this letter to her sister. Cheapo paper and a heavy hand. Only the ‘S’ though. You can just see traces of the rest of the address, but nothing else is legible.”
    I nodded. “So what do you think we have here, lads?” I asked.
    “I think we have the first letter of the name of the person Lucy was staying with. You always do the name first. Name and address in the top left-hand corner, that’s what I was taught,” Crabbie said.
    I rubbed my chin. I wasn’t entirely convinced and Crabbie could see that.
    “I mean, Sean, it’s only the first letter of a first name, but it’s still a lead, isn’t it?” Crabbie insisted.
    “It could be that,” I said sceptically.
    “Come on, Sean!” Matty said.
    “I don’t want to piss on your cornflakes, boys, but the imprintof an ‘S’ in the left-hand corner of an envelope isn’t