Matt McGuire - Dark Dawn

‘Come on, Tierney,’ Molloy said, putting his hand on his partner’s shoulder. ‘This one’ll keep.’

The two men turned and went towards their car. Tierney was still slabbering.

‘I’d go out and buy a lottery ticket if I was you, Lynch. ’Cause I’ll tell you, this must be your lucky day or something.’

The two men got into the car and drove off, leaving Lynch standing by the kerb.

After weeks of anticipation, weeks of waiting, weeks of wondering, it had begun. Lynch sighed, feeling some of the tension flow out of him. It had started. At least he knew that now.

O’Neill sat at his desk in Musgrave Street, hunched over the Laganview file. He flicked through the pages. Paperwork. The holy commandment of police work. Thou shalt not shit without filling out a form. Paperwork covered the cracks. It meant you followed procedure. It was management’s way of keeping an eye on you. Their way of staying in the loop. O’Neill wondered what the world looked like from the third floor. Dunking biscuits into cups of tea, flicking through pages of neatly typed reports.

It had been three days since the body turned up and there was a thick file on Laganview. There were interviews, canvassing reports, a list of site workers, criminal records, known drug dealers, SOCO reports, evidence slips, statements, photographs, lab tests. There was nothing like a body for generating a paper trail. The tree huggers would have a field day, O’Neill thought. He imagined the headline: Murder Bad For Environment.

For all the paperwork though, they still didn’t have a name.

The appeal for information had been repeated on TV throughout Tuesday and Wednesday. The Belfast Telegraph led with the story on Monday night. It had fronted radio bulletins throughout the week. Still they had nothing. It made no sense. Absolutely none.

At the press conference Wilson had looked the part. Reassuring the public. ‘No stone unturned. . most horrific crime. . perpetrators to justice.’ All the usual. Tell them what they want to hear. There was no talk of a punishment beating. The press had been kept well away from the scene and the state of the body hadn’t been disclosed.

For two days Musgrave Street flexed its muscle. Uniform stopped kids on street corners. CID lifted anyone with half a history of drug involvement. Jackie McManus, Micky Moran, Johnny Tierney, Stevie Davie, Sean Molloy. All the local celebrities.

They sat in interview rooms. Bored, inconvenienced and mildly amused, watching the police flounder.

‘Where were you last Sunday night?’

Silence.

‘Who were you with?’

Silence.

‘What time did you get home?’

Silence.

These guys didn’t even bother to ‘no comment’. They knew what was going on, knew the peelers were stirring the pot. It was what you did when a body showed up. The cops kicked the hornets’ nest. McManus, Moran, Tierney. . they’d been questioned often enough to know that this time, the police really did have fuck all.

O’Neill had called the Royal Victoria Hospital on the Grosvenor Road. The hospital boasted the best knee surgeons in the world. In thirty years they’d had plenty of practice. He spoke to the head of orthopaedics and got the files sent over of every punishment beating in Belfast in the last eight years. There were 308. Where did you begin? O’Neill asked the hospital to keep him informed if any new victims came in, particularly if they were local.

He frowned at the open pages of the Laganview folder. How could the kid still not have a name? There was no Missing Person report. His prints were nowhere on the Police National Computer, which meant he didn’t have a record.

‘How many wee hoods are there,’ O’Neill muttered to himself, ‘that have never been arrested, not even once?’ He stared at the six digits on the manila folder. 880614. That’s what the kid was. A number. At this stage, it was all he was.

In the next room DI Ward looked into the empty space in front of his desk. He was thinking about his retirement. What the hell was he going to do? He had no family any more, except for a brother in Scotland. He and Maureen had planned to have kids but it just had never happened for them. He didn’t know why. Maureen blamed herself. She turned to him one night, told him that if he wanted to leave her, she would understand. Ward couldn’t believe what he heard. Couldn’t believe it had affected her so much, that she was that down about it. He tried to make it a joke.

‘You trying to get rid of me? Have you got a wee thing with the milkman that you’re not telling me about?’

Maureen smiled and a solitary tear ran down her cheek. That night in bed Ward held her. He told her to wise up, that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Maureen squeezed his hand. He told her he was going to have words with the milkman and all.

When the breast cancer came, Ward knew what she was thinking. She’d got what she deserved. She’d let him down and this was God’s way of punishing her. She did three rounds of chemo but it was too late. Ward had been on his own now for fifteen years.

His mind went back to O’Neill next door in CID. He was having a tough time of it. If the kid was in the drug scene there was no way he wouldn’t have some kind of previous. These kids didn’t have records, they had rap sheets. O’Neill had sent the prints down to the Garda in Dublin, in case the boy was from the South and had been dumped in Belfast. Again, it came back a blank.

Ward wondered if this was the perfect crime. He snorted, reminding himself that you only read about such things in dodgy crime books. And anyway, everyone knew the perfect crime was, by definition, the one that no one ever knew about.

Ward tried to think what the play was. O’Neill had done everything right and he was still drowning. It wasn’t his fault though. He’d been sent into choppy waters with a lead weight tied round his ankle.

Ward looked up to see the Chief Inspector stride past his door, a man happy in his work. Wilson rarely came to the second floor, but he’d made the trip on Tuesday, Wednesday and now, again, on Thursday. He was riding the shit out of O’Neill. Keeping the pressure on. Ward thought he might be trying to get O’Neill to take himself off Laganview. To throw in the towel. It would make the Review Boards a walk in the park, a mere formality. It would prove O’Neill couldn’t hack it in plain clothes.

He heard Wilson from along the corridor, interrogating O’Neill.

‘Detective, we’ve given you every resource this station has to offer and you’re telling me you still don’t even have a name for the victim?’

O’Neill didn’t answer.

‘What’s your investigative strategy?’

O’Neill outlined what they’d done so far.

‘Well, that hasn’t worked, so what will you do next? And what are you going to do after that? And what will you do then ?’

You. You. You. He was putting the whole thing on O’Neill, cranking up the heat, making it his job and his job alone.

Ward thought about going in, but crossing the Chief Inspector wasn’t going to help anyone. He remembered when Wilson had first come over to Musgrave Street. Within six months he had the Chief Constable visiting the station. Wilson chaperoned him round, talking about crime rates, how they were down 5 per cent across the whole of B Division.

Wilson might be Chief Inspector, but he wasn’t half the peeler that O’Neill was. Or could be, given half a chance. DC Kearney had told him a story about being out with O’Neill, back when he’d first come over to CID.

It was assault and robbery. A guy had mugged some old dear in the town and uniform had a suspect, Janty Morgan, whom they wanted to bring in for questioning. O’Neill and Kearney were on their way back from another job when they heard the details over the radio.