Matt McGuire - Dark Dawn

‘It’s the twenty-first century, not Star Trek.’

‘Fair point. Listen, thanks for doing this. I appreciate it.’

‘I’ll get it done and call you as soon as it comes back and I’ve run the comparison.’

O’Neill spent the rest of the morning walking the corridors at Musgrave Street, punctuated by drinking cups of coffee and smoking in the car park. He had been pacing up and down outside CID when Ward stopped him.

‘Are you digging a trench in that lino?’

O’Neill forced a pained smile.

‘Go and sit down somewhere. You’re making me dizzy.’

He had pulled a name and address for the bouncer from Mint’s Inland Revenue returns. Ivan Walczak. He was Polish and had been in Northern Ireland for three years. He lived at 56 Glandore Avenue, a two-bedroom terrace house off the Antrim Road.

At noon O’Neill couldn’t wait any longer and called Jordanstown.

‘You know, Detective, you’ve got even less patience than my wife.’

Despite his desperation, O’Neill liked that Bradley was making fun of him. It meant he had another friend in Jordanstown — and you never knew when it could come in handy.

‘The results are just back. I’m running the cross-check. Give me ten minutes,’ Bradley said. ‘And I’ll phone you.’

O’Neill sat at his desk looking at his watch. It had been twelve minutes. He sighed, tapping his hand on the telephone handset.

Thirteen.

Fourteen.

The phone beeped and O’Neill snatched it up before the first ring had time to end.

‘O’Neill!’

‘Good news, Detective. I’ve got two exact matches. A cigarette end and one of the samples lifted from the kid’s clothing.’

‘Thanks,’ O’Neill said, banging down the phone. He stood up and marched out of CID, shouting as he passed Ward’s door.

‘This is us. Let’s go.’

O’Neill and Ward stood at the back of the armoured Land Rover. They had on bulletproof vests and Ward had had to suck in a breath to get the Velcro round his.

‘I’m too frigging old for this.’

O’Neill adjusted his own vest, feeling reassured by the weight of the Kevlar.

They had assembled a couple of streets away to suit up and brief uniform before taking the door. They had three patrols with them, one for the assault team and two for either end of the street.

In the back of the wagon the uniform listened as O’Neill ran through the drill. There was an air of giddiness. O’Neill stamped it out, pointed to each man in turn and demanded to know if he’d taken a door before. They all had. Earlier, O’Neill had caught himself looking at the officers’ footwear. All four were wearing black canvas Magnums. He tried not to think about it.

O’Neill took control, telling them that once the place was secure, they’d all need to step out. The plan was to bring in the dogman and go room-to-room. Ward and O’Neill then climbed up into the Land Rover, shouting at the driver to go.

As the white vehicle rumbled along the street, one of the uniforms, Terry Carson, leaned over to the man next to him. He had to shout above the noise of the engine.

‘Kicking in doors. Love it, fucking love it!’

The other man nodded, a nervous smile.

On Glandore Avenue two kids on BMXs stopped riding and stood watching in silence. On the opposite side of the street a curtain twitched and a nosy neighbour shouted to her husband, ‘Come here and see this!’

The front officer banged on the door, shouting ‘Police! Open up!’ He stepped aside and immediately the heavy steel battering ram began blasting the door. Normally a door popped on its first or second hit. Walczak’s took six. It had been reinforced and triple-bolted. Each blow made a deep, medieval noise.

When it popped, uniform piled into the house, shouting, ‘Police!’ at the top of their voices. They fanned out into the rooms, three running up the stairs. From the front door O’Neill heard shouts of, ‘Clear, clear, clear. .’ as each room was secured.

He cursed under his breath. No one was home.

After a few minutes uniform slowly backed their way out of the house. Ward had reminded them beforehand that it might be a crime scene, and that the first man to touch something would be on foot patrol for a year.

O’Neill and Ward let the dogman in, trailing a small brown and white spaniel, its tail wagging as if it had never been happier in its life. The dogman pointed at things, opened cupboards and ran his hand under furniture. The spaniel sniffed its way round the house, in seeming ecstasy. Near a chest of drawers the dog suddenly stopped and sat down, looking up at its master. The dogman gave a treat and had a quick rummage through the drawers but couldn’t see anything. It might only be a trace on the clothes. He turned to O’Neill, making sure the detective had seen it before he moved on with the dog. The spaniel stopped and sat three more times but each time the dogman couldn’t see anything obvious. Once the spaniel was back in the van he came to talk to O’Neill.

‘This place is definitely hot. Or at least it was, not too long ago.’

O’Neill thanked him and went inside, starting a room-to-room search. The kitchen cupboards were sparse, containing tins and jars with various foreign labels that he didn’t recognize. Dzem. Makrela. Pinczow. Walczak lived alone and there was no sign of a woman, something O’Neill confirmed when he went through the clothes upstairs.

In a living-room cupboard Ward found a 12-inch bowie knife and an improvised baton, made from heavy-duty cable, twisted and held by masking tape.

‘Nice guy,’ O’Neill muttered, holding up the weapons.

The bedrooms didn’t contain much and only had the most basic furniture.

‘This guy lives like a monk,’ he said to Ward on his way out of the bedroom.

The first sweep found nothing and O’Neill had gone back to the four spots where the dog had sat down. He still couldn’t see anything. He bagged the clothes from the chest of drawers, some more forensic evidence for his new friend Robin Bradley.

Then O’Neill went back and started over at the front door. He went from room to room again, this time going through the litany of secret spaces, the secluded hiding spots that every criminal thought he was the only person in the world to have thought of. He checked the carpet in the corners, listening for loose floorboards. He pulled back the side of the bath and lifted the cistern. He tore apart the beds and pulled kitchen units away from walls. He sliced open the sofa and felt up the chimney. With each new empty space, O’Neill could feel his chest tightening.

Under the floor in the cupboard, he got his breakthrough. It wasn’t drugs, it wasn’t a gun. It was better.

O’Neill lifted out a shoe-box and called Ward in from the next room. He placed the box on the bed and slowly took off the lid.

Inside were a couple of photographs. One was a picture of some soldiers in full combat gear, their faces blacked up. They were crawling through a forest and looked to be on some kind of training exercise. In another picture, a group of three men stood side by side. They looked lean and menacing, all with shaved heads and black combat uniform. Again their faces were camouflaged but O’Neill could make out Walczak. On the back of the photograph were the letters WS RP, followed by Wojska Specjalne Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej.

‘What do you want to bet WR SP is Polish Special Forces?’ O’Neill asked Ward.

‘Looks like it to me.’

The box also contained a plastic bag with at least twenty SIM cards for mobile phones. He’d be switching SIM cards all the time to make it difficult to trace his calls. At the bottom of the box were six passports, all of them Polish. O’Neill flicked through them, expecting a series of false identities for Walczak. They weren’t. They belonged to different people. In each one the face of a young man, no older than sixteen, was framed in a 1-inch passport photo. O’Neill held the fifth passport in his hand, showing it to Ward. It was their victim.