The Cold, Cold Ground (32 page)

19: THE SCARLET LETTER

Letters. Words. Aren’t you bored looking at them? Line after line. Page after page. Dream me away from the letters 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 Pope
was 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 imprint
of an ‘S’ in the left-hand corner of an envelope isn’t exactly Nathan Leopold’s glasses prescription, is it? And I know what the Chief’s going to say. He’s going to say that this case is closed, isn’t he?”

“Do you still think Lucy’s death is connected to Tommy Little’s?” Crabbie asked.

Of course I had told them my bullshit theory about the line from
La Bohème:
“My name is Lucia but everyone calls me Mimi” … Lucia = Lucy?

I shook my head. “Nah. Lucia, Lucy? I was just spouting off, Crabbie. It’s a coincidence,” I insisted, but Crabbie looked me in the eyes and he saw that I wanted to be convinced.

“Let’s just say for the sake of argument that there’s a link between these two cases. These two murders that occurred at approximately the same time, not a million miles away, where does that get us?” Crabbie asked.

“There are two ‘S’s in the Tommy Little case, aren’t there?” Matty said.

“Aye. There are. Freddie Scavanni and Shane Davidson.”

The three of us stared at the envelope. Outside rain was lashing the windows. A coal boat was struggling out of Carrick harbour. An ambulance roared by on the Marine Highway.

Crabbie filled his pipe and lit it. “So,” he said.

“So,” I seconded and lit another ciggie.

“What do we do with this?” Matty asked.

“What can we do?” Crabbie asked.

“I don’t know. If I or either of you go near Scavanni or Shane Davidson we’ll get a bollocking.”

Matty jabbed his finger into the envelope. “But we have something here!”

Suddenly the incident-room door was kicked open. Chief Inspector Brennan was standing there larger than life. Eyes wide, fag end drooping from his mouth. I immediately hid the envelope under a sheet of A4.

“Oi, Sergeant Duffy!” Brennan bellowed.

“Yes, sir?”

“Remember in the dim distant past of yesterday you gave me this big fucking speech about how there wouldn’t be any more queer murders? About how the queer angle was only misdirection? A false trail?”

“Yes.”

“Well, wise guy, they just found another dead poofter. You’re fucking brilliant, aren’t ya?”

“Where?”

“Loughshore Park, near Jordanstown. In the bogs. Somebody just called it in.”

Loughshore Park.

The toilets.

“Is there a description of the victim?” I asked.

“Young white male, twenty, Elvis quiff, black hair, what’s it to you?”

I grabbed my leather jacket and my revolver. I pushed past Brennan. He grabbed at me.

“Where the fuck are you going, mate?”

“Loughshore Park.”

“This isn’t your case any more, arsehole!”

I ran down into the car park and reversed the Beemer out of its spot.

I hit 80 on the Shore Road.

I made it to Jordanstown.

Todd was there with his team. Ten officers in all. White boiler suits, photographers, the whole thing. I was impressed.

I showed my warrant card, kept out of Todd’s sightline and went down into the bog.

Of course it was him.

He was lying there in the foetal position with his hands ducttaped behind his back.

Billy and Shane had silenced him.

They’d tortured him first to get any information out of him. He’d been stripped and beaten black and blue. This also was a lesson for Shane. A lesson in the way the world worked.

I walked closer to the body.

His face was bloody but there was no blood pool around the corpse. He hadn’t been shot.

“How did he die?” I asked one of the forensic officers.

“Very unusual,” the nearest FO guy said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. They taped over his mouth and taped his hands behind his back. They killed him by putting a Speedo nose clip over his nostrils. Swimmers use it to stop water going up their nose.”

“So, he suffocated?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the unusual bit.”

“What’s the unusual bit?”

“They cut off his eyelids with a pair of scissors. Don’t know why they did that.”

“So they could watch him die,” I said.

Part of the moral lesson.

Shane was forced to watch the light go out of his eyes.

“What in the name of fuck are you doing here?” DCI Todd said.

“Fuck off,” I snapped and pushed him away from me.

“Did youse see that? He fucking pushed me,” Todd said.

I made a fist. “I’ll fucking do worse if you don’t get out of my fucking way!” I said.

I shouldered him aside and went out.

“I’ll tell your gaffer about this!” Todd screamed after me. “You’ll be giving out parking tickets in Free Derry when I’m done with you!”

I walked to the BMW.

I drove across the four lanes of the Shore Road and up into Rathcoole.

I screamed the Beemer through the estate and hand-braked
it to a halt in front of the Rathcoole Loyalists Pool, Snooker and Billiards Hall. I took the police revolver out of my jacket pocket, checked the cylinder, cocked it and stormed inside.

A cocked .38 doesn’t feel the same as an unprimed revolver. The frame tightens differently, the trigger is on a hair and this tension is communicated to you and the people around you.

There were a dozen men playing snooker and pool. They looked at me and looked at the gun. Said nothing. Didn’t move.

I marched to the cigarette room, kicked in the door.

Shane and Billy were having Chinese for lunch. I swiped the food onto the floor and put the barrel of the .38 in Billy’s right eye.

“I’m lifting you. I’m taking you in, fucker!”

“I was expecting you,” Billy said, wincing away from the revolver in his face.

“Like fuck you were. Get on your feet!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Billy said.

I shoved the revolver deeper against his eye.

“You’re going down, Billy. You killed that boy to cover your tracks. Shane and Tommy were having an affair, weren’t they? Shane here can’t keep his dick in his fucking pants, can he?”

“You have some imagination, copper,” Shane said.

“I’m taking you down too. Separate cells, let’s see who cracks first.”

“On what charge?” a voice purred behind me in an Anglo-Irish accent.

I kept the gun in Billy’s eye but turned to see who was talking. A tall, thin, grey-haired man in a black suit.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Anthony Blane, QC, Mr White’s barrister. On what charge are you arresting my client, Sergeant Duffy?”

“Murder with malice aforethought.”

“What evidence do you have linking my client with such a crime?”

I wracked my brain for a second. “I have motive.”

Blane crossed the little room. “Put the gun away, Sergeant, before someone gets hurt,” he said.

I wanted to squeeze the trigger. I wanted to wipe the smile off Billy’s fat fucking face.

I closed my eyes.

I could see blood.

Words.

Letters.

Typography.

I lifted the revolver from Billy’s eye, disarmed it and put it in my pocket.

“Please show me your warrant for entry into this private room and please tell me your grounds for suspecting my client of murder. When I talk to the Chief Constable this evening, I’ll want to have all the facts before me.”

Shane was laughing now. Billy too. Pistol-whip the pair of them. Kill all three of them. Shane. Billy. Mr Tony Blane, QC, mob lawyer to the scum of the earth.

I bit my lip. Shook my head.

“Aye, I thought so,” Shane said.

I slapped his face. Billy was on my back in a second. He rugby-tackled me to the ground and we tumbled out into the snooker hall.

One of the goons raised a pool cue and smacked it down towards my head.

I got my wrist up just in time and the cue smashed into two pieces.

I scrambled to my feet. There were half a dozen guns pointing at my chest.

Billy got up. Still grinning. Still laughing. It drove me mental.

“Yak it up, Billy boy. I’ll find the proof. I’ll muddy the fucking waters. You and Tommy Little. You and Shane! A pair of benders? How will the higher-ups like that? I’ll fucking dig until I
find something! And then you’ll be toast!”

Billy looked around the room at his men. Some of them wanted to know what I was talking about.

“Empty threats!” he said. “He’s spouting off. It’s all bollocks, so it is.”

“We’ll see! We’ll fucking see!” I screamed and stormed out to the Beemer.

I put it into gear. I drove. Someone threw a milk carton onto me from one of the tower blocks. It smashed over the windscreen scaring me shitless.

“Shite!” I yelled. “Shite! Shite! Shite!”

The Shore Road. Traffic. My wrist was banjaxed. Hurt like a bastard. And my beeper ringing so insistently that I finally had to turn it off. Whoever it was, I didn’t want to know.

By the time I got to Carrick my wrist was agony. “Might as well go to the hospital,” I said.

I got the end of Laura’s afternoon clinic. “Police business?” Hattie Jacques asked.

“This time I’m a customer.”

Laura saw me in her surgery. “What happened to you?”

I told her the truth. She was appalled. She gave me an x-ray and it turned out that there was a micro-fracture in the ulna.

“I’m afraid there’s very little we can do about that,” she said.

“It hurts like hell,” I said.

“I’ll prescribe anti-inflammatories and codeine.”

We got the medicine and went back to Coronation Road. She drove the Beemer through the biblical rain. I self-medicated with vodka until the codeine finally kicked in. We ate the rest of the spaghetti and lit the fire and listened to Etta James.