Read Online The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty - Free Book Online

message.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œThey hung up.”
    â€œThe press?”
    â€œMy advice: don’t give them anything.”
    â€œDid you hear about the rape?”
    â€œI got Crabbie to tell me everything. Different hands? Pieces of music? Queer sex? This thing’s far too complicated already,” McCallister muttered darkly.
    McCallister was close to fifty, a twenty-five-year man with a lot of experience both before and after the Troubles.
    â€œHave you ever seen anything like this before?” I asked.
    â€œNo, I haven’t and I don’t like it.”
    â€œMe neither.”
    â€œAre you eating that cake?”
    Alan walked me back to my car and I drove to the centre of Carrickfergus.
    A bunch of kids were walking around aimlessly. There was nothing for them to do with school cancelled except that there was always potential for a rumble since the Proddy kids were easily identifiable by their red, white and blue school uniforms and the Catholics by their uniforms of green, white and gold.
    There were few actual shoppers. Since ICI had shut downthe centre of Carrick had withered. The bookshop had closed, the shoe shop had closed, the baby clothes shop had closed …
    I easily found a parking place on West Street and dandered past a boarded-up grocers before I came to Sammy McGuinn, my chain-smoking, short-arsed, Marxist barber.
    He’d given me two good haircuts since I’d come here which was a high batting average for Ulster and probably why he was still in business.
    I went in and sat down in the waiting area.
    He was finishing work on a man in a brown suit with a ridiculous comb-over. Sammy was only five five and he had lowered his customer practically to floor level.
    â€œNationalism is a plot by international capitalism to keep the working classes from uniting. Irish independence separated the working classes of Dublin, Liverpool and Glasgow which destroyed the union movement forever in these islands just when capitalism was entering its crisis stage …” he was saying.
    I tuned him out and read the cinema reviews in
Socialist Worker
.
    Raiders of the Lost Ark
sounded promising despite “its patronizing caricatures of third-world manual labourers”.
    When Sammy was finished with his customer I showed him the musical score.
    As well as being Carrick’s only remaining barber Sammy was a violinist with the Ulster Orchestra and had two thousand classical records in his flat above the shop. A collection he had shown me when he’d found out from Paul at CarrickTrax that I bought the occasional classical record and that I’d done ten years of piano. Ten years of piano under protest.
    â€œWhat do you make of that?” I asked him, showing him the photocopy of the music.
    â€œWhat about it?”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œSurprised at you, Sean. I thought you knew your onions,” he said, with an irritating sneer.
    Like a lot of barbers, Sammy was completely bald and that chrome dome really invited a Benny Hill slap right about now.
    His lips were tightly shut. He wanted the words:
    â€œNo, I really don’t know,” I said.
    â€œPuccini,
La Bohème
!” he announced with a laugh.
    â€œAye, I thought it was Puccini,” I said.
    â€œYou say that now. Anybody could say it now.”
    â€œThe words are missing, aren’t they? It’s not the overture, is it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou don’t happen to know what the missing words are, by any chance?”
    â€œOf course,” he said with an eye roll.
    â€œGo on then!”
    â€œ
Che gelida manina, se la lasci riscaldar. Cercar che giova? Al buio non si trova. Ma per fortuna é una notte di luna, e qui la luna, l abbiamo vicina
,” he sang in a surprisingly attractive baritone.
    â€œVery nice.”
    â€œDo you need a translation?”
    â€œUhm, something about hands, fortune, the moon?”
    â€œYour little hand is freezing. Let me