The Cold, Cold Ground (26 page)

“Charming,” I said.

“Lovely,” Crabbie added.

“So,” I said.

“Tommy Little.”

“Jesus! Not this again, peeler.”

“Aye, this again. And again and again until we are satisfied,” Crabbie said, not liking Billy’s tone one little bit.

I looked at McCrabban.
You run it, mate
.

“What time did Tommy come by here last Tuesday?” he asked.

“About eight,” Billy said with a sigh.

“Why did he come here?”

Billy looked at Crabbie and then he raised his eyebrows at me. “You can mention the heroin to my colleague,” I said. “We’re not interested in that.”

Billy sighed. “Tommy gave us a couple bags of dope, we chatted about one or two things and then he left. That’s it,” Billy said.

“What things did you chat about?” McCrabban asked.

Billy shrugged. “He was reassuring us that despite the craziness around the hunger strikes all of our bilateral deals would be intact. He said that there would be a lot of rhetoric from
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness but underneath it all we would keep to our arrangements regarding territory, rackets and narcotics. It was standard stuff but it was still good to hear.”

“The conversation would have taken how long? Ten minutes? In which case he left at ten past eight? Eight fifteen?”

“I don’t know, but no later than eight twenty.”

“He got in his car and drove straight away?”

Neither man spoke.

McCrabban and I exchanged a look.

“Well?” McCrabban insisted.

“He didn’t exactly do that,” Billy said.

I felt a little burst of electricity along my spine.

“Go on,” I said.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Shane said.

The Sphinx speaks. Excellent.

“What wasn’t a big deal?” I asked.

“He said he was going to Straid to see someone.”

Freddie Scavanni.

“And?”

“Well, it was lashing and I asked him if he could give me a lift,” Shane said. “I live in a flat out on the Straid Road.”

“You’ve a car though, don’t you, Shane?”

“It was banjaxed.”

Convenient.

“So what happened next, Shane?” I asked.

Shane bit his lower lip and shook his head. “Fuck. This is why I didn’t even want to mention it. Nothing happened. He gave me a lift. He was in a big hurry. I was at the house five minutes later and then he went on his way.”

“This would have been eight thirty?”

“Yeah.”

“He gave you a lift and then he drove off?”

“That’s it. Like I say, he was really pressed for time.”

I let silence sink into the room for thirty seconds or so.

Silence is also a form of conversation.

Billy spoke through his hard man look, Shane through his gaze which never left the floor.

“Why didn’t you lads tell me all this the other day?” I asked.

“There was no point complicating things. If we’d told you, you’d have thought we had something to do with it. And we had nothing to do with it. We wouldn’t be that buck daft,” Billy said.

“And why are you telling us now?” Crabbie asked.

“Shane and I were talking and we wondered what would happen if you found Tommy’s car with Shane’s fingerprints in it,” Billy said. “You might get the wrong idea.”

“Or the right idea,” I said.

Crabbie didn’t know what I knew about Shane. And I wondered for a moment how exactly I could tell him.

“Are you sure Tommy didn’t meet with some kind of unfortunate accident when he was here?” Crabbie asked.

Bobby shook his head. “Come on, peeler. Why would we do that? There’s no angle in it for us.”

“Maybe Detective Constable McCrabban’s on the right lines. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe you were showing Tommy your brand new Glock 9mm when … boom!”

“Wise the bap!” Billy muttered.

I looked at McCrabban. He shrugged. I stood up. “Are the pair of you going to be here for a while? We might have more questions,” I said.

“We’ll be here,” Billy said.

We went back outside to the Land Rover. While we’d been talking some wee shite had graffitied “SS RUC” on the rear door.

“Oh my God,” I said. “If Brennan sees this!”

Crabbie put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t have an eggy fit, Sean. We’ll drive past a garage, get some white spirit and clean it off before we get back to Carrick.”

“Wee fucking shites!” I yelled at the estate and my voice echoed off all the concrete at right angles.

I checked underneath for a mercury tilt bomb and we climbed in and I called up Matty on the radio. They took forever to get him because he was on the bog.

“Yes?” he said.

“Give me the addresses of Billy White and Shane McAtamney and make it sharpish,” I said.

He took his sweet time about it. “18 Queens Parade, Rathcoole and, uhm, number 4, 134 Straid Road, Whiteabbey. Oh, and I’ve got a bit of news,” he said at last.

“What news?”

“Your man, Seawright. Back in his Glasgow days, him and a bunch of welders allegedly beat up a couple of transvestite hookers. Beat them near to death,” Matty said.

“Cheers, Matt,” I said.

I looked at Crabbie. “What was that you were saying about fishing expeditions?” I added.

“Back to Belfast, talk it over with Seawright?” McCrabban wondered.

I shook my head. “Nah, I don’t really see it, mate. He’s hardly going to go on the BBC calling for death to the queers if he’s actually out killing queers.”

“What was it your man on the telly says: the only two things that are infinite are the universe and human stupidity.”

“It’s a fair point.”

“Oi, lads, I’m not done yet!” Matty said over the radio.

“There’s more?” I asked.

“There’s more.”

“Go on then.”

“I cross-tabbed all the pervs and kiddie fiddlers that have been released from prison in the last year. The probation office tells me that every one of them has left Northern Ireland except for three. Lad called Jeremy McNight who is in Musgrave Park Hospital with terminal lung cancer, a guy called Andy Templeton who was killed in a house fire. Suspicious house fire,
I might add. And finally after a lot of gruelling leg work and—”

“Just get on with it.”

“One name. Could be our boy. Got four years for homosexual rape. Released two months ago.”

“Better not give his name out over the airwaves,” I said.

“Of course not! I’m not a total eejit. Give you it back at the station.”

“Ok. Good work, mate.”

We turned off the radio.

“Where to then, kemosabe?” Crabbie asked.

“Billy’s first. 18 Queens Parade. We’ve got a wee window here.”

We drove about half a mile to an end terrace with a big mural of King William crossing the Boyne on the gable wall. It was a modest home. A council house, which made me think that Billy had all his money in a secret bank account – either that or he had lost it all down the bookies like every other medium-level crook. Which reminded me: 100 quid on Shergar for the win even if it meant an overdraft.

We walked along the path and rang the bell. While we were waiting we heard an explosion in Belfast. “Two hundred pounder by the sound of it,” Crabbie said.

A woman opened the door. She was an attractive, skinny blonde in a denim skirt and a union jack T-shirt. She had a cigarette dangling out the corner of her mouth, a glass of gin in one hand and a crying baby in the other. I assumed this must be Caitlin.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asked.

“We’re the Old Bill,” I said.

“He’s not in.”

“That’s why we’re here,” I said.

We brazened our way inside. I sent Crabbie upstairs to get the gun Billy no doubt kept under his pillow, while I hunted downstairs. The place was filled with boxes of cigarettes, crates
of Jameson whiskey and two or three dozen Atari Video Game consoles. I ignored all of this and went to the record collection.

Sinatra, Dean Martin, Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, more Sinatra.

The baby screamed.

The TV blared.

I looked in the laundry basket for bloody clothes and I looked for traces of blood in the washer/dryer. Nothing.

Caitlin followed me with the screaming baby, saying nothing, looking anxious.

I went into the back garden and examined the clothes on the line. No blood-stained items there either.

Back inside. Crabbie came downstairs and showed me the piece, a Saturday Night Special, snub-nosed .38. He was holding it on the end of a pencil. I slipped it into an evidence bag.

“Well take this,” I said. “And you might want to give your wee girl there something to eat.”

We drove to 134 Straid Road, #4.

It was a small square apartment complex. A dozen flats, each with a little balcony. It could have been nice but for the fact that they’d painted the exterior a kind of sheep-shit brown.

The front door was open and we walked up one flight of steps to #4.

“Now what?” McCrabban said.

“Now this, me old mucker,” I said and took out my lock-pick kit.

Crabbie put his hand on my arm. “Sean, get a grip! We can’t break in!”

“I shall note your protest in the log,” I said doing an English naval officer’s accent.

McCrabban shook his head. In Protestant Ballymena such things were not tolerated. It was one thing to take the occasional carton of ciggies from a paramilitary, but a man’s house was sacred.

It was a Yale standard and I had keyed the mechanism in under a minute.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said.

“I’m not going in,” Crabbie said petulantly.

“Yeah, you are.”

“No, I’m bloody not.”

I flipped on the light switch with a knuckle. A small two-bedroom apartment with a neat two-person leather sofa, bean bags, red-painted walls and several framed posters of boxers: there was Ali versus Frazier back in the glory days; there was Joe Louis versus Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium.

The apartment had a 22-inch TV, a Betamax video recorder and a dozen tapes:
The Godfather
,
The Sting
,
Close Encounters of The Third Kind
, etc.

Shane had a sensitive side: in perhaps an echo of Katsushika Hokusai’s
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
he had done half a dozen watercolours of Kilroot Power Station. The last two weren’t bad although a magenta sunset was somewhat fanciful.

It was the laundry bin and the record collection that I was after.

Laundry first: briefs, T-shirts, a pair of jeans. No blood.

Records next. I put on a pair of latex gloves and looked through them. Shane’s tastes were similar to mine: David Bowie, Led Zep, Queen, The Police, Blondie, The Ramones, Floyd, The Stones. What did they say about the pair of us?

“What did you find?” Crabbie asked from outside.

“No classical. No opera,” I said.

“I can see his bookcase from here. They’re all comics and Enid Blyton. The guy’s sub-literate.”

“Let’s do a thorough shakedown before we jump to any conclusions.”

“You do it. I’ll keep watch.”

I worked the bedroom and the bathroom. I found some grass, a sheet of acid tabs and a couple of body-building magazines.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

We left the .38 at the ballistics lab in Cultra and told them to match it against the slugs on Tommy Little and Andrew Young and then headed for home.

We drove back to Carrick and picked up Matty.

The released perv was one Victor Combs of 41A Milebush Tower, Monkstown. Ex-schoolteacher, currently unemployed. He’d been caught having sex in a park with another man. The other man – a seventeen-year-old – had accused him of rape and the judge had bought it.

It sounded like he’d gotten the shaft but we drove over to see him anyway.

Milebush Tower was another of those shit-coloured four-storey concrete blocks of flats that had grown up in the sink estates of Ulster in the ’60s and ’70s. They were damp, cold and seemingly deliberately unlovely. The day the Northern Ireland Housing Executive gave you your key they probably gave you a suicide information leaflet.

We parked the Land Rover and hoofed it up to 41A.

Mr Combs was in.

He was wearing a bathrobe and listening to classical music which got our attention.

He was heavy, balding, forty-five, but he looked twenty years older and he walked from the door back to the sofa with a cane.

The flat was as nice as he could make it.

There were books, records and he kept it clean. He had a cat.

I let McCrabban run it while I looked through the books and records.

“Where were you on the night of May twelfth?”

“I was here.”

“All night?”

“Yes.”

“Can anyone vouch for that?”

“What’s this about?”

“Can anyone vouch for the fact that you say you were here all night?”

“Not really, no.”

“Do you own a car, Mr Combs?”

“No.”

“Do you know a man called Tommy Little?”

“No.”

“Do you know someone called Andrew Young?”

“No. What is this about?”

The records weren’t that impressive. Boring collections of classical music done in the early ’70s by cheapo German firms. No sheet music.

I looked at Crabbie and he shook his head. Combs certainly didn’t look as if he could get too physical with anyone.

“Under the terms of your probation I have the right to search these premises for a firearm. I am exercising that right,” I said.

No gun. No contraband. Nothing suspicious.

But there was the fact that he had no alibi.

“Why are you still in Northern Ireland, Mr Combs? Aren’t you afraid that you’ll be kneecapped because you’re a sex offender?” I asked.

Combs’s grey face became greyer. “Let them kneecap me. Let them do anything they want. I don’t care. Let them kill me. I didn’t do anything wrong and they know it. My life’s ruined. Everything’s ruined. My family won’t speak to me. My friends. Fuck it. Let them come. Let them do their fucking worst.”

“I like the defiance. Do you have anything to back it up? A wee pistol maybe?” I asked.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He nodded. “Who’d sell me a piece anyway?”