Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

NI Forensic Mortuary, security cam (ext.), 7:10 p.m., 25/05/13

The undertaker backs the Mercedes hearse to the entrance. The black tin coffin is slid onto the morgue gurney. The footage is flickering. The speeds are always wrong. Everything’s silent-move era. The undertaker’s a gothic villain in a top hat. Death’s attendants coming for you at ten frames per second.

NI Forensic Mortuary, postmortem suite 4, 9:03 a.m., 26/05/13

The camera is high-definition. Nothing is to escape the lens here. This is not the place for difficult-to-piece-together recollections, the lyric fragments of the street traffic and retail security cams. There is to be no room for error. These are the forensics. The bloodwork. The pathologist and his female assistant make a Y-shaped incision in Lorna’s torso.

They record the organs as healthy. They record no evidence of recent sexual activity. They record several depressed fractures to the cranium consistent with blows from a heavy object. Bone fragments are removed from the brain. They record that there is no water in the lungs. They observe that Lorna was dead before being placed in the water. They record that her hair colour is black. They record that her eye colour is green.

Interflora, security cam, Lisburn Road, 3:44 p.m., 20/05/13

Lorna’s workplace. The manager says they don’t normally keep the security camera footage but there is some from the previous Saturday. McCaul watches her moving behind the counter. There was a grace which McCaul had not expected. Good at the job. The shop manager said she was a natural. Knew the Latin names of the flowers. This seemed important to her, the manager said. Putting names to the flowers. The night blooms.

Donegall Pass PSNI Station, interview suite intercam, 9:28 a.m., 26/05/13

CID says don’t talk to the parents at home. CID says bring them in. Did she drown? Norman says. There will be water in her lungs if she drowned, he says. Then he smiles. You never think you’re going to ask if there was water in your daughter’s lungs, do you? You never think you’re going to put that into a sentence. I know what happens when someone drowns, he says. Kay gets up and walks about the room with a sideways gait as though something is about to fall on her head. Will fall on her head if she doesn’t keep moving.

McCaul keeps trying to see Norman’s arm. He’s trying to make out the tattoo. Two flowers interlaced, he thinks. He can see the petals.

Castlecourt Shopping Centre car park, L2 cam, 11:43 a.m., 26/05/13

Norman and Kay’s car is parked on level two. Norman has reversed into the space. Edging the car between the concrete trusses. Blue Renault Megane, Reg. No. BOI 3655. He’s attentive to her. Taking her arm as they walk toward the car. Opening the door.

Westlink, traffic cam #7, 3:50 a.m., 21/05/13

Going back over the footage from the night Lorna went missing. Traffic light on the Westlink. Trucks heading south and west off the late ferries. Taxis going west. Focussing on the northbound traffic, running the registrations through number plate recognition. What are you looking for? the traffic controller asks.

I’ll know it when I see it, McCaul says. He asks the controller to scroll back on the reg numbers. The controller says that he’s been doing this job too long and does McCaul think six years with a joystick between your finger and thumb watching night traffic is long enough. Zoom. Freeze. Rewind. You wouldn’t believe what comes off the ferries. Eastern Europeans. Asylum seekers. Prostitutes from countries you couldn’t even pronounce. Bartered. Trafficked. This is a haunted road. Sometimes I’m afraid to even look at it. I can’t sleep at night.

McCaul sends the night’s data to DVLA. Checks the night traffic against the Registered Keeper and Owner database.

There’s many a man out there like me, the controller says. Watchers of the night. Legions of us.

Surface car park, security cam, Howard Street, 6:45 p.m., 27/05/13

The Latvian bartender is standing by McCaul’s car. Michaela. He crosses the car park. She’s wearing knee boots and a coat with a fur collar pulled up round her face. The defence team will later ask to view the tape. CID says that evidence from it will be inadmissible.

She tells him that she remembers seeing the girl now. She thinks she was talking to one of the regulars but she can’t remember who it was.

When she leaves McCaul seizes the car park tape. Watches it in the station. He sees himself approaching Michaela. It looks illicit. It looks like some furtive assignation in an occupied city of long ago. You could see tramlines in the car park surface. The grid lines of long-gone streets. Men in belted coats standing at intersections, drab-suited kapos. Cold War phantoms. Letting you know you’d come under their remit. Their ghost authority. He remembers how she’d looked. Her breath in the cold air. Her blue eyes. The harshness of her accent. Her wintry gaze.

DVLA comes back. They’ve cross-checked. They’ve found a blue Renault Megane ROI 3655 registered to Norman Donnelly.

CID says Lorna made two complaints about Norman. Withdrew both complaints. Child protection was consulted. What was involved? McCaul says. Usual, the child protection officer says. Bring Norman in, CID says.

McCaul’s mobile rings. Michaela. He had a tattoo, she says. Who had a tattoo? The man she was talking to. Was it a flower? McCaul says. No. It wasn’t a flower, she says. Come in tomorrow and draw it for me, he says, thinking that if it isn’t a flower then it isn’t Norman. He puts the phone down. Her accent stays in his head. A hoarse damaged sound. He remembers the way she put her hand on his sleeve. The earnest way she looked into his face. As if she was saying, We can retrieve something from this. As if she was saying that there was something to be found among the human ruins.

CID says don’t get involved. CID says observe the code of conduct.

Donegall Pass PSNI Station, interview suite intercam, 8:20 p.m., 27/05/13

It’s a perspective you’ve seen a thousand times before. The suspect sits on his own at a plain table. It’s a camera but you feel as if you’re looking through a one-way mirror. You’re waiting for the suspect to turn to the mirror glass with a knowing look. But he doesn’t. Norman sits at the table with his head down and his hands hanging between his thighs. Slumped. Big man brought to his knees. McCaul asks him if Lorna got her interest in flowers from him. Flowers? Norman says. You’ve got flowers tattooed on your arm, McCaul says. Norman rolls up his sleeve. It’s not flowers, Norman says. It’s twin screws. Submarine propellers. Submarine crews get them done like that.

She was jealous, Norman says. What do you mean jealous? McCaul says. And then the penny drops. Norman looks at him. As though this was a weakness that he might be forgiven.

We sank a ship with torpedoes, Norman says. I dream about it. We were a week out from Ascension Island. We sank the Belgrano two hundred and fifty miles south of the Falklands. Tarry corpses floating in the cold water. Gouts of foul air vented from the sinking ship. Bunker oil alight on the surface.

McCaul doesn’t know why he’s being told this. Norman looks at him as if his dreams give him rights.

I waited until she was asleep, then I hit her with a hammer. I wrapped the body in a sheet and drove it down to the embankment and put it in the water. I threw the hammer into the river. When I put her in the water I thought of corpses afloat in the wake of the Belgrano . The screeching of gulls.

Forensic laboratory, Belfast, technician cam, 9:10 a.m., 28/05/13

Forensics work the car from front to back. The white dust suits. Coming right down to the matter of things. The nub of it. Picking through the microfibres. Finding strands of Lorna’s hair in the boot. Finding traces of her blood.