The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

from the back.
    â€œI don’t really know them,” she replied.
    â€œThey’re the latest thing. What about you, Sean, you like ’em?”
    I tried to come up with a witty answer and after some deliberation I said: “Spandau Ballet are to pop music what the Cretaceous-Tertiary Event was to dinosaur music.”
    Stony silence. Nobody laughed.
    â€œAm I the only one around here that reads
New Scientist
?” I asked.
    Evidently I was. I kept my bake shut after that.
    Boneybefore. A village eaten up by the Carrick expansionsometime in the ‘50s. A white thatched cottage almost on the lough shore. Another unknown young reserve officer standing by the door.
    I parked the Land Rover and we got out.
    â€œWhat are the facts, constable?” I asked the reservist.
    â€œPostman noticed the door was slightly ajar on the second post today. He pushed it open and found the victim. He called us.”
    â€œAnybody touch anything?”
    â€œNope. But I had a wee look in.”
    â€œWhat did you see?”
    â€œI noticed that the victim had been shot and that his hand had been cut off, so I called Crabbie.”
    I put on latex gloves and went inside the cottage.
    The victim had been shot once in the head, probably as he had opened his front door, because he was still lying in the hall. He was a thin, dapper, grey-haired man in shirtsleeves, black tweed trousers and slippers. His hand had been cut off and the hand of – presumably – John Doe had been tossed, almost idly, on his chest.
    I found a wallet on the sideboard and quickly ascertained that the victim was one Andrew Young, a sixty-year-old music teacher at Carrickfergus Grammar School.
    The place was untouched. The killer had come inside only to kill Young and cut his right hand off.
    We did a thorough inspection but Matty agreed with me that the killer had not even entered the rest of the house.
    â€œTime of death?” I asked Laura.
    â€œHe’s been dead about forty hours,” she said, examining the corpse.
    â€œWhich one did he kill first?” I asked.
    â€œIf you put me on the spot I’d say he killed the man in the car first. But only by a few hours,” Laura said.
    Matty began taking photographs and dusting for prints.
    Laura examined the body.
    McCrabban grabbed my sleeve. “Word with you outside, Sean?” he said.
    We stepped out into a salt wind coming off the lough.
    â€œWhat is it, Crabbie?”
    â€œI know this character, Sean. He runs the Carrick festival. He’s headteacher at the school. He met Princess Anne. Upstanding citizen and all that. But …”
    â€œBut what?
    â€œLike I say, decent bloke and everything, but he’s a known poofter.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œAs sure as eggs is eggs.”
    I saw the implications immediately. “So what do you think we have here, Crabbie? Someone going around killing homosexuals?”
    Crabbie shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s beginning to look like it, isn’t it?”
    â€œAnd there’s the bloody music connection again, isn’t there?”
    Crabbie nodded and began filling his pipe.
    Of course homosexuality was illegal in Northern Ireland but that didn’t mean that there were no homosexuals.
    Everybody knew somebody …
    â€œDon’t mention anything for the moment, let’s get the old routine working,” I said.
    We went back inside.
    Photographs.
    Prints.
    Interviews with the neighbours.
    A recovered 9mm stub from the wall.
    I reminded Laura to look for another concealed score when she did her autopsy.
    The day lengthened.
    Waned.
    We drove Laura home and thanked her for her help.
    We had another case conference at the station.
    Of course now that we knew who he was, the first set of finger print data came through from Belfast: Andrew Young DOB 12/3/21. 4 Lough View Way, Boneybefore, Carrickfergus. No known next of kin. No criminal record.
    The second set was