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left me the photographs but I found them in the darkroom hanging on the drying line. 7x10 glossies of the body, the hand, the car, the pool of blood, the AC/DC jacket, the victim’s face, other aspects of the crime scene and a few of the moon, clouds and grass.
    I gathered the pics and took them to my desk.
    Other officers started to arrive, doing whatever the hell it was that they did around here. I said good morning to Sergeant McCallister and showed him the pics of our boy. It didn’t ring a bell.
    McCrabban appeared twenty minutes later sporting a black eye.
    “Jesus, mate! Where’d you get that shiner?” I asked.
    “Don’t ask,” he replied.
    “Not the missus?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it, if that’s all right with you,” he said taciturnly. These Proddies. They never wanted to talk about anything.
    McCrabban was a big, lanky man with a carefully engineered old-school peeler tache, straight ginger hair and pale, bluish skin. With a tan he’d look somewhat like a Duracell battery, but he wasn’t the type to get a tan. He was from farmer stock and he had a down-to-earth conservative millenarian quality that I liked a lot. His Ballymena accent conjured (in my mind at least) Weber’s stolid Protestant work ethic.
    “A big Jock was giving me a hard time about my Beemer. It’s a ‘77 E21. That’s not flashy, is it? You need a reliable car as a cop, don’t you?” I said.
    “Don’t ask me. I have a tractor and an old Land Rover Defender.”
    “Forget it,” I said and showed him the case notes and Matty’s photographs of the victim.
    “Recognize our poor unfortunate?” I asked.
    Crabbie shook his head. “You’re thinking informer, I suppose,” he said.
    “Why, what are you thinking?”
    “Oh, I’m with you, with his right hand cut off? Standard operating procedure.”
    “Do me a favour, take some of the headshots down to Jimmy Prentice and see if he recognizes our boy. I already asked the Chief so I’m a bit sceptical that Jimmy will have an ID but you never know.”
    “He mustn’t be local. If Brennan doesn’t know him he isn’t worth knowing,” Crabbie said.
    “If Jimmy draws a blank, fax them up to the Lisburn Road and ask them to cross-reference with all the informers on theirbooks, especially ones that haven’t called in in the last day or two.”
    Crabbie shook his head. “They’ll never tell us about the MI5 boys.”
    “I appreciate that, Crabbie, but they’ll have the army list too, so let’s at least try and narrow the field down a wee bit,” I said with a slight edge in my voice.
    Crabbie grabbed a couple of the face pics and took them downstairs to Jim Prentice who ran all the informers in Carrick. Because of the sensitive nature of his work he was stationed in a locked little office by himself next to the armoury. Prentice was the paymaster for all the touts, informers and grasses in our district so if the victim had ever taken a government shilling for information Jimmy would know it. If not, the fax to Belfast would set the ball rolling on their lists. Crabbie was right about MI5 though. MI5 had its own network of informers, some in deep cover, and because MI5 fundamentally didn’t trust anyone in Northern Ireland the names of their agents were never shared with us even when the eejits got themselves shot.
    Matty appeared shortly before lunch and over coffee and sandwiches the three of us had our first case conference. Matty told us he had done the victim’s clothes but there were no liftable prints. He had fingerprinted the victim’s right hand and faxed the printout to Belfast, but so far nothing had showed up in the RUC database. Crabbie told us that no one had called in a missing person’s report in the last twenty-four hours and Jimmy Prentice had told him that our victim was not one of his lads.
    “Did you find any bullets in your search of the scene?” I asked Matty.
    Matty shook his head.
    “Footprints, hair samples, anything unusual about the