The Cold, Cold Ground Read Online Free PDF

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 the IRA.
    Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?
    2 May 1974.
    The Rose and Crown was a student joint. I’d been in there for a bevy maybe three hundred times in my years at Queens. It was my local. I knew all the regulars. Normally I would have been at that bar at that time but as it happened I’d been meeting a girl at the Students’ Union and I’d had enough to drink already.
    It was a no-warning bomb. The UVF (the Ulster Volunteer Force, an illegal Protestant paramilitary group) claimed responsibility. Later the UDA (the Ulster Defence Association, another Protestant paramilitary group) said they did it. Still later the UVF said it had been an IRA bomb that had exploded prematurely.
    I didn’t care about any of that.
    The alphabet soup didn’t interest me.
    I wasn’t badly hurt. A burst eardrum, abrasions, cuts from fragmenting glass.
    Nah, I was ok, but inside the bar was carnage.
    A slaughterhouse.
    I was the first person through the wreck of the front door.
    And that was the moment—
    That was the moment when I knew that I wanted to be some small part of ending this madness. It was either get out or do something. I chose the latter.
    The police were keen to have me. A university graduate, a psychologist, and that most precious thing of all … a Catholic.
    And now seven years later, after a border posting, the CID course, a child kidnapping, a high-profile heroin bust, and several murder investigations, I was a newly promoted Detective Sergeant at the relatively safe RUC station in Carrickfergus. I knew why they’d sent me here. I was here to stay out of harm’s way and I was here to learn …
    I sat up in bed and turned on the radio and got the news about the Pope.
    Still alive, the tough old bugger. I genuflected and muttered a brief, embarrassed prayer of thanks.
    “Why is it so bloody cold!” I said and bundled up the duvet and