The Cold, Cold Ground (30 page)

“What about the evidence we gained illegally?” Crabbie asked.

“What evidence?”

“Breaking into Shane Davidson’s apartment.”

“We didn’t gain any evidence, except about his really quite good musical tastes.”

He had a point though. When I typed my report should I mention the fact that a man I’d had a homosexual dalliance with had implied that Shane also had the occasional homosexual dalliance? Did that mean that Shane was a homosexual? Were Sean and Bobby more than just good friends? Did any of this
have a bearing on the case?

On reflection it probably did, but how to broach it?

“I’ll tell them. I’ll say that I had ‘an opportunity to examine Shane Davidson’s flat and found nothing of interest’. If he asks me how I’ll tell him the stupid wee shite left his door open. Don’t worry, I’ll leave you out of it, Crabbie.”

Crabbie looked hurt. “You don’t have to take the fall for me. I’m old enough and ugly enough to look after myself.”

“Nobody’s taking the fall for anybody. Come, let’s drink up.”

We swallowed our Guinnesses and went back to the station. I closed my office door and laid out the blue paint strips on my desk.
My favourite colour is blue
.

Klein blue. Sapphire. Persian blue. Midnight blue. Columbia blue. Indigo. I lit a cig. I swam in blue. I tripped on blue.

I sat there for a while and then I swiped the strips off my desk into the wastepaper basket.

I typed up my report mentioning that I had “followed Shane to a public lavatory where suspected homosexual cottaging took place”.

My report was nine pages long. I showed it to McCrabban and he thought it was fine. I showed it to Sergeant McCallister and he thought there was a distinct sarcastic tone that I should probably remove.

I faxed it anyway. At lunchtime I saw Todd on BBC Northern Ireland news which was more than I had ever managed to achieve – so perhaps the powers that be were right in firing me.

“His dad’s a viscount,” Sergeant Burke told me over bangers and mash in the Oak. “He has three older brothers and if they all die and he outlives them he’ll become Lord Todd of Ballynure.”

“Seems like the sort of cunt who would do precisely that,” I muttered.

After lunch I went to get a haircut. Anything but work on that bloody Ulster Bank fraud case. After a murder investigation all other cases were anticlimactic.

Carrick was a goddamn mess.

There were two more TO LET signs in empty shop windows, three stores had been boarded up completely and the library had a notice in the window that said “Book Sale! New, Old, Fiction and Non Fiction! Thousands of Books!” which could not be a good thing.

West Street had two competing street preachers, one of whom was saying “Repent for the millennium is at hand and ye are doomed” but the other felt it was the time to “Rejoice now, for Jesus died that we might live!”

Sammy, as usual, was doing a roaring trade. Of course Friday evening was his busy time. Men getting “a little something for the weekend”.

He had three guys lined up in the chairs and another two waiting.

I picked up a paper. The English press was dominated by the Yorkshire Ripper trial. A verdict was expected today.

Sammy looked at me, nodded. “Guilty on all counts,” he said. “It just came through on the wireless.”

Good. That was one less bastard for us coppers to worry about. When it was my turn in the chair, I ordered a short back and sides. Sammy went to work with the scissors. “You like your music, don’t you, Sean? Thought I’d let you know. Town hall. Auction tomorrow morning at nine. The entire stock of CarrickTrax.”

“Paul’s going out of business?”

“Moving to Australia. Selling everything. Three thousand LPs. It’s breaking his heart. Classical. Non-classical. You name it. Rarities. Everything.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

“Aye, me too. You’re not a Beatles fan, are you?”

“No. Not really.”

“Are you more of a Stones fan?”

“Aye.”

“Well, look, if you don’t bid on the Beatles, I won’t bid on the Stones. Ok?”

“Ok.”

“What about Mozart?”

Like ghouls we split up his collection between us and I wondered exactly how much money I had in the bank. A hundred quid? One fifty? I’d saved up six years pay to buy the house for cash. Still, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. CarrickTrax was the deepest and best record shop in East Antrim and had been in business forever. The stuff they might have …

We moved on to other topics. He told me about the record renting shops in Moscow and then he got to talking about the Red Army choir and finally about his father who had been interned by the Japanese. “Fascinating people, the Japs. They say that death is lighter than a feather but duty is heavier than a mountain …”

I had heard the story of his father’s experiences in Burma twice already so I changed the subject. “What do you think of yon girl marrying Princess Charles?”

“When I think of that wee lassie in the clutches of that corrupt family of decadent imperialists …”

When I left the rain was heavier. I crossed the railway lines at Barn Halt and channelled Lucy Moore again.

“Your mother didn’t see you, Lucy, because you were on the Larne side of the tracks waiting for the Larne train to get you to the ferry. Isn’t that right? You and your boyfriend were going to Glasgow to get an abortion. But you got cold feet. You decided to have the baby and live with your boyfriend until it was born. Decent enough plan. What went wrong, Lucy?”

What went wrong? I stood there getting soaked. Walked home. Heated soup. Drank vodka and lime. I put on
La Bohème
again. This time the classic 1956 Sir Thomas Beeching version.

Read the lyrics as I listened. Mimi’s solo aria.

“My name is Lucia. But everyone calls me Mimi. I don’t know why.
Ma quando vien lo sgelo
.
Il primo sole è mio
. When the thaw comes, the sun’s first kiss is mine.”

I lifted the needle and put it down on the record and played it again. And again. I’d heard it before but this time it struck a nerve. Lucia = Lucy? Was that a stretch? Could Lucy Moore’s death have something to do with the murders of Tommy Little, Andrew Young and the others? A deliberate or even a subconscious link?

I listened to the record over and over, getting drunker and drunker. At midnight I played
Orpheus in the Underworld
. I began to see patterns there too. Eurydice is a daughter of Apollo, the lord of light. Lucia means light. The more I listened I began to see links everywhere, in everything. In Mozart, in Schubert, in Bowie.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It’s part of our DNA. That’s why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

The more I delved the clearer it all became. DC Todd was in on it. Brennan was in on it. It was the masons. It was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Yeats was in on it. All the crazy Prods were in on it. I drank so much vodka that I made myself sick. I kept on drinking. The one smart thing I did was unplug the phone lest I call Laura or my ma. I climbed upstairs and hugged the toilet. Alcohol poisoning. Pathetic. What was I? Sixteen? I began to cry. Eventually the power went off and I closed my eyes and fell asleep dry heaving.

17: ARIADNE’S THREAD

I woke on the bathroom floor sometime after first light. I was a sorry spectacle in the mirror, and the house was worse.

I put on the Ramones, cleaned up the vomit, had a cold shower, brushed my teeth, made a Nescafé, drank the coffee, replugged the phone and called Laura.

“You wanna get breakfast and go to an auction?” I asked her.

“I have my clinic in the afternoon.”

“This is at nine. Come on. We’ll get breakfast at the Old Tech and bid on some records.”

The Old Tech. I couldn’t face the Ulster fry so I just got a cup of tea instead.

Laura got pancakes.

We talked and read the papers.

The headlines on all the tabs were the same: GUILTY over a picture of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. The broadsheets too were obsessed by the Ripper with his trial and the verdict occupying most of their front pages with a little bit about the hunger strikes. According to
The Times
, senior figures in the Tory party were speaking about “compromise” and “new ideas” but Thatcher was having none of it; she had come to Ulster to stiffen the resolve of the troops: the lady would not negotiate with terrorists, the lady was not for turning.

Only the local papers, the
Irish News
and the
Newsletter
had the attack on the gay pub in Larne.

One dead. Twenty hospitalised.

The report was done in a restrained,
let’s not talk too much about this
, style.

The killer had used a tried and true terrorist grille-bomb method. Had Todd seen that? Maybe I should call him?

No.

I shouldn’t.

I went to the cashier and asked if she had any aspirin.

She said that she did and I popped a couple and splashed my face in the bathroom and went back to Laura who was reading a fold-out special on Lady Di’s wedding plans from the
Daily Mail
.

I didn’t tease her.

We finished our breakfast and went round to the auction in the town hall.

The place was packed.

Word had got out and the vultures had come in from high and low. Only Paul himself had not come by to watch his valuable records gets sold to the hoi polloi.

I nodded to Sammy.

He nodded back.

I ignored the first few lots which were ’30s-’40s Americana.

I bought some ’60s Motown and a mint condition, first pressing of
Dusty in Memphis
for a pound, which was an absolute sin.

It was when we were into the classical section that I noticed our old friend Freddie Scavanni in the audience.

He was buying early Italian stuff with not much competition.

I watched him bid and buy.

He was initially cautious but eventually he lost his patience and jumped on the things he wanted like everybody else. I let Sammy take most of the Mozart. I bought the Schubert.

I bought some knick-knacks too: some anti-static cloths, an oil lamp from Chess Records in the shape of a guitar, Beatles pencil sharpeners.

None of it was terribly interesting and I could see that Laura was bored out her mind. I had spent about ten quid but had gotten enough records that I was going to have trouble getting them home.

“Do you want to head?” I asked her.

She nodded.

I went to the auctioneer’s assistant, gave him my lots, paid my money and got my discs. The
Dusty in Memphis
album turned out to be number eleven of a limited edition signed by Dusty Springfield and Jerry Wexler. Karmically there was no way I could keep it. “Laura, here, this is for you,” I said, giving her the album.

We were leaving when I saw that a low-key bidding war was going on between Freddie Scavanni and Sammy.

They were both after a pressing of Richard Strauss’s
Ariadne auf Naxos
by Karl Bohm and the Vienna State Orchestra that had been recorded live for Strauss’s eightieth birthday on 11 June 1944 in the presence of many top Nazis. It was a very rare record indeed but the bidding was only going up in twenty-pence increments and now stood at two pounds sixty.

I was disgusted and sad for Paul. I went outside with Laura.

“Do you want to go back to my place for a cup of tea?” she asked.

It was a good idea. I could leave the records at her house and come back for them when I had the car.

We went to her flat and she put the kettle on. I hadn’t been there since we’d made love. Nothing had changed. Except spiritually. Emotionally.

I sat in the easy chair and looked at the harbour.

“Thank you so much for this album,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ve never heard her before.”

“You’re going to love it.”

“Why don’t you put it on?”

I went to the turntable, cleaned the record with my antistatic cloth and put on the B-side, which begins with the Randy Newman song “Just One Smile”.

“You probably shouldn’t play this too much, it’s very valuable,” I told her as Dusty’s breathy vocals competed with the heavy strings on what was really a subpar song.

“How do you take your tea again?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. It suddenly hit me. Richard Strauss.
Ariadne auf Naxos
. After they kill the Minotaur in the labyrinth, Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos; bewailing her fate, she mourns her lost love and longs for death. Three nymphs, Naiad, Dryad and Echo then announce the arrival of a stranger on the island. Ariadne thinks it’s death’s ambassador but it is in fact the god Bacchus. He falls in love with Ariadne and promises to set her in the heavens as a constellation.

I remembered the killer and his talk of labyrinths. And here we had Freddie Scavanni bidding on Richard Strauss. Was this a coincidence? He wasn’t a stupid man but, my God, there were getting to be a lot of coincidences in this case.

I stood up. “I’ve got to go to the auction. I won’t be long,” I yelled. I jogged across the harbour car park to the town hall.

The auction was over now and I found Freddie Scavanni getting help with his purchases. Loading milk crates full of records into the back of a Ford Transit van. Even on a Saturday he was wearing a suit and tie. A rather nice cashmere blue suit. A rather nice silk tie.

“Hello, Freddie,” I said.

He squinted his eyes as if trying to recall who I was.

“Sergeant Duffy, Carrick CID,” I said.

“Oh yes, of course. I meet so many people, as you can imagine.”

“Did you get the Richard Strauss?” I asked.

“No, I was outbid,” he said cheerfully. “But I got plenty of other stuff.”

“Interesting record that. Ariadne conquers the labyrinth with
Theseus but then Theseus shows his gratitude by abandoning her on an island where he leaves her to die.”

Scavanni shrugged. “Well … yes. If that’s your thing, sure, great. But with that record it’s more the rarity of the recording, isn’t it?”