by Matt McGuire
‘Thanks. It’s like driving a frigging tank, this thing.’
‘How old is the wee one?’
‘Five months.’
‘He’s cute.’
‘He’s a she.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ Lynch raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Ciara.’
The two of them walked in silence for a few yards. She was on her way to the Health Centre. Lynch knew her routine. He knew the routine of almost everyone on the street. He couldn’t help it. Memorizing people, their habits, their movements. The girl went to the Health Centre every Thursday. On Mondays and Fridays her mother came, just after nine, to clean the house and help with the child. There was no father, at least none that had been anywhere near the house. Lynch feigned ignorance.
‘So where yous off to now then?’
‘Health Visitor. Nosy cow. It’s like being under surveillance. If you don’t go and see them, they think you’re killing your own child.’
‘Still,’ Lynch said. ‘It can’t be easy.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Is her da not around to help out?’
‘Her da’s an arsehole. Frigged off when he found out I was pregnant. Wanted an abortion. And before you start, I’m not like the rest of those wee girls, getting pregnant to get myself a house and all that. I was working before I had her.’
Lynch didn’t reply.
‘Anyway. It’s just as well he frigged off. Couldn’t have handled the lack of sleep. I’m up half the night.’
‘Don’t start me off,’ Lynch said, rolling his eyes. ‘Who would have thought getting a bit of kip could be so difficult?’
‘You tried gin? Works for me every time.’
Lynch laughed. The girl smiled at him sidewards, enjoying a bit of adult company.
‘A right pair of zombies, we must look,’ he joked.
‘Hey, speak for yourself, mate.’
Lynch smiled. It was good to be out walking, talking to someone, doing something normal. He introduced himself. Her name was Marie-Therese. He wondered about asking her if she fancied a cup of tea or something. A cafe somewhere. After she got done with the Health Visitor.
At the end of the street two men leaned against a parked car. As Lynch and the girl approached they got up and stood shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking the pavement. Lynch had never spoken to either of them, but he knew Tierney and Molloy by sight and reputation. The girl started to speak.
‘So what are you-’
‘Listen, love, you head on there. I’ll catch you later.’
The girl looked up and recognized the two men. She immediately stopped talking and put her head down, pushing the buggy onwards. The men parted to let her pass, looking her up and down, like she was something they might eat. Molloy spoke.
‘A bit young for an old fucker like you, don’t you think? Now a good-looking guy like me. .’
Lynch didn’t respond. He kept his hands in his pockets, sizing up Molloy and Tierney. Molloy was the bigger of the two of them. He knew he could put Tierney down pretty quickly, then concentrate on the other one. He couldn’t tell yet if they were holding. If they were it was a different story altogether.
‘Mr McCann has sent for you.’ Molloy gestured at a grey Ford, parked at the kerb. ‘Get in the car.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Lynch said.
He didn’t move. He stared at Molloy, seeing that he was calling the shots.
‘Listen, Clint Eastwood.’ Tierney chipped in. ‘We’re not asking you. Get in the fucking car.’
‘I’ve nothing to say to McCann.’
‘We don’t give a fuck what you’ve got to say.’ Tierney had a mouth on him. Molloy was more deliberate, weighing things up.
Lynch didn’t move. They weren’t holding. If they were, they’d have shown something by now.
‘You might have moved into the Markets with Hughesy,’ Tierney continued, ‘and you might have done your time together. The big heroes. Up in the Maze. The Cause and all that.’
Lynch half-listened to Tierney, keeping his eyes fixed on Molloy.
‘You see, Hughesy’s gone, he’s not here any more. And when he goes, so does your pass for the Markets.’
Lynch had known this was coming. Tierney was doing all the talking, but it was Molloy that counted. He was the one to worry about.
‘You need to come and see Mr McCann,’ Molloy said. ‘Need to have a chat with him. There are no freeloaders here. Everyone has to earn their keep.’
‘I’m retired.’
‘Retired!’ Tierney exclaimed. ‘Away and fuck yourself. Retired? Don’t make me laugh.’
Tierney was a slabber all right, but Lynch had heard the stories and knew he could back it up. Meanwhile, Molloy was trying to do the same thing Lynch had done earlier: figure out if he was carrying.
Lynch took his hands out of his pockets. With his right hand he reached round into the belt at the small of his back. There was nothing there, but Lynch kept his hand hidden, holding on to the leather.
Molloy saw it and his eyes narrowed. He knew the stories, knew that Lynch had several bodies on him. The Lynch Man. The Lyncher. Molloy knew he wouldn’t hesitate, wouldn’t shirk at putting a bullet into either of them. Lynch found himself sliding into character. The passive face, the eyes taking on an empty, hollow stare. Molloy looked at him. He thought he was bluffing, but he couldn’t be sure.
‘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.
SEVEN
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.
‘I know him,’ O’Neill said. ‘We’re two minutes away. Let’s swing by and bring him in. I fancy a chat. Catch up on old times.’
O’Neill knew Morgan from his uniform days in Antrim Road. He explained it to the uniform who handed him over.
‘Let’s play a game, Janty,’ O’Neill said, steering the unmarked Mondeo into the Belfast traffic. ‘I feel like a game. What about you?’
Silence.
‘Kearney?’
‘Sure,’ Kearney answered, playing along, though he’d no idea where O’Neill was going with it.
In the back, the eighteen year old stared out the window. He was giving nothing away, playing it cool. Not easy with your hands cuffed behind your back. Janty had been on the PSNI radar since he was thirteen. He had what they called pedigree — a scumbag from a long line of scumbags. The da was a scumbag, the brother was a scumbag. Now it was Janty’s turn.
O’Neill shouted over his shoulder, ‘Hey, Janty. You like games. Don’t you, big lad?’
In the back Janty mouthed to himself, ‘Fucking peelers.’
‘OK. It’s I spy today. Janty, you ready in the back there?’
No reaction.
‘I spy,’ O’Neill began, ‘with my little eye, something beginning with P.’
Kearney roused some fake enthusiasm. ‘Police?’
‘No.’
‘A prick?’ The other detective laughed, thumbing towards Morgan in the back.
‘No.’
Kearney paused. ‘I give up.’
‘Prison,’ O’Neill announced triumphantly, forcing a laugh.
‘Shit. I should have got that,’ Kearney said, faking disappointment.
‘That’s right, Janty.’ O’Neill knew he was talking to himself, but he kept up the performance. ‘You can call me Mystic Meg from now on. HMP. Her Majesty’s Prison. On its way for you, son. We might as well take you to Maghaberry right now. Save us all a load of paperwork. How many years do you fancy? I’ll make you a deal right now.’
Janty Morgan slouched further into the back seat, his eyes narrowing.
‘That’s right, Detective,’ O’Neill continued. ‘Swipe a lady’s handbag. Not too bad. But you better hope she doesn’t grab you. You may have to smack her a few times, just to get away. I mean, hey, she grabbed you. Judges tend to not really go for that though. Help me with the maths here, Kearney. What does theft plus assault equal? Two years? Four? Hey Janty, you any good at maths?’
Silence.
‘No. I didn’t think so. ’Cause if you were, you’d have known better. And you know what else, Detective, whenever I am going to smack some auld doll I like to make sure she’s not the sister of anyone important — like, say, the frigging Lord Mayor.’
Janty mumbled to himself in the back, ‘Fuck sake.’
‘Oh. You didn’t know? That’s right, Janty. The Lord Mayor’s sister.’ O’Neill laughed out l
oud. ‘You definitely didn’t do your homework on this one, son.’
The lady had had her bag snatched in the Clifton Street car park. Truth was she only saw a blur of white tracksuit and the car park didn’t have CCTV. The attendant’s description matched Morgan. They could charge him but it wouldn’t get a conviction. Half the hoods in Belfast were wearing a white tracksuit that day. Janty had been two streets away when he saw a PSNI Land Rover and bolted. Uniform caught him but he was clean so unless they could get something out of him now, they wouldn’t sniff a charge. The PPS would take one look at it and tell them to wise up.
O’Neill kept on at Morgan. ‘Snatching a bag in broad daylight — you must be one dopey fucker. This is the twenty-first century, Janty. There’s CCTV everywhere. Did you want to be famous? Was that it? Couldn’t get on X Factor, so thought you’d go for World’s Dumbest Criminals. Obviously you don’t watch CSI either though, eh Janty?’
Silence.
‘That handbag will have left traces all over you. There’s all that technology now. We take you to the station, shine the blue light on you, you’re going to light up like a Christmas tree. A regular old Papa Smurf.’
O’Neill was bullshitting, trying to sow some doubt, to get beneath Morgan’s street persona.
‘By the time we get to the station though, Janty, it’s going to be all over. We’ll have you then and nothing you say then will make a bit of difference. You need to start talking, Janty. And I mean now.’
‘No comment.’ A mumble from the back.
‘Buuuurrrraghl’ O’Neill shouted, like a game-show buzzer. ‘Wrong answer.’
Janty was sticking to the golden rule. The one that stretched across the city, crossing every Peace Wall and all the old divides. From the Ballysillan to Ballymacarrett, from the New Lodge to the Short Strand — you didn’t talk to peelers.
‘Try again, Janty.’
Silence.
‘The strong silent type. That’s what I thought.’
O’Neill turned right off Millfield and steered the car up the Shankill Road. The Shankill was the heart of Protestant Belfast and had been a stronghold for Loyalist paramilitaries during the Troubles. It wasn’t the best place for a young Catholic from the New Lodge to be hanging out. O’Neill knew it, so did Janty. Almost instantly the playful atmosphere in the car started to darken. The eighteen year old got more nervous as the red, white and blue kerbstones rolled by and they got deeper into the Shankill.
