The Cold, Cold Ground Read Online Free PDF

living room and found an old bath robe. I made myself another pint of vodka and lime. The TV was finished now and it was test cards on all three channels. I put
Double Fantasy
on the record player. I flipped the lever for repeat, lay down on the leather sofa and closed my eyes.
    Darkest Ulster in the Year of our Lord 1981: rain on the gable, helicopters flying along the lough, a riot reduced to the occasional rumble …
    The problem with
Double Fantasy
was the arrangement whereby they alternated John Lennon tracks with Yoko Ono tracks. You couldn’t escape Yoko for more than four minutes at a time. I lowered the volume to two, snuggled under the red sofa comforter and, taking the occasional sip from my vodka gimlet, fell into the kind of deep sleep only experienced by men whose lives, like those of C for Charlie company, are lived on the edge of the line.

2: YOUR TINY HAND IS FROZEN
    The occasional rumble of riot, gunfire and explosion. Nothing that Carrickfergus’s seasoned sleepers couldn’t handle. But then the comparative quiet was shattered by the apocalyptic turbines of a CH-47 Chinook. Everything began to rattle. A coffee cup fell off my mantelpiece. A picture came down.
    The helicopter passed overhead at a height of 200 metres, well below the recommended ceiling. The Magnavox flip clock said 4 a.m. The British army had woken me and half the town in a hubristic display of raw power. Yes, you control the skies. And this, guys, is how you lose the hearts and minds.
    I thought about that as I lay there in the big, empty double bed on Coronation Road. And when my anger subsided I thought about the vacuum on Adele’s side of the mattress.
    Of course I had asked her if she wanted to come to Carrick with me, but there was no way she was going to “that stinking Proddy hell hole,” was her response. I hadn’t been heartbroken but I had been disappointed. She was a schoolteacher and it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to switch education boards as all the good teachers were going to England and America. The house was paid for, she would have been bringing in the dough, we would have been living high on the hog.
    But she didn’t love me and the truth was I didn’t love her either.
    I lay there in the darkness wondering if sleep was an option.
    My mind drifted back to the murder victim on Taylor’s Avenue.
    The crime scene had been nagging at my unconscious.
    I had missed something.
    In my haste to get out of the rain I had overlooked a detail.
    What was it?
    It was something about the body, wasn’t it? Something hadn’t been quite right.
    Wind tugged at the gutters. Rain pounded off the window. I shivered. This was evidently going to be another “year without a summer” for Ulster.
    For obscure reasons the previous tenants had blocked up the chimney so that you couldn’t light a fire in the upstairs or downstairs grates. I’d reckoned I wouldn’t have to worry about this until November but now I was obviously going to have to get someone in to see about it.
    I lay there thinking and the Chief’s question came back to me.
    Why
had
I joined the police?
    And for the second time in twenty-four hours I thought about
the incident
.
    Don’t look for it in my shrink reports. And don’t ask any of my old girlfriends.
    Never talked about it with anyone.
    Not me ma. Not me da. Not even a priest. Unusual for a blabber like yours truly.
    It was 2 May 1974. I was two years into my PhD programme. A nice spring day. I was walking past the Rose and Crown Bar on the Ormeau Road just twenty yards from my college digs.
    It was the worst year of the Troubles but I hadn’t personally been affected. Not yet. I was still neutral. Trying to keep aloof. Trying to do my own thing. The closest I’d come to assuming a position was after Bloody Sunday when me and Dad had attended the funerals in Derry and I’d thought for twenty-four hours about joining