by Matt McGuire
O’Neill got in his car and headed out to the Ravenhill Road. He turned into a side-street and parked the car; 150 yards away sat 56 Ravensdene Park. It was Tony Burke’s house. O’Neill wanted to do a door knock. See what he could stir up. He wondered how much of it was not wanting to think about the other two possibilities.
In the car he hesitated. It was the size of Burke’s house. When he’d given his address, O’Neill had imagined one of the small terrace houses at the lower end of the Ravenhill Road. This was leafy suburbia though. Detached and semi-detached villas. It was all bay windows, driveways and gardens. Burke might be a foreman but he’d said he was a labourer before that. So how did a labourer end up in a place like this?
It was after five. Burke would be home from work soon. O’Neill waited, watching. Radio Ulster hummed at a low volume in the car. Gerry Anderson was reminiscing about showbands and dance halls, a Belfast O’Neill never knew, but had heard about from his mother. It sounded cosy. But then, nostalgia always did. The radio announced that rush-hour traffic was building on all the usual routes.
O’Neill’s mobile rang. It was Ward.
‘How you doing, Sergeant?’
‘Still alive. Or just about, anyway. I’m outside Burke’s. Going to make a house call.’
‘Sounds good. A bit of community relations work.’
O’Neill thought about telling him about the boot-prints, about the potential link back to the police or Special Forces. He wondered what Ward would say. The RUC had bent the rules to the point where some people asked themselves if there were any rules. The ends justified the means. But what about now?
Just then a white Transit van pulled up outside number 56, and a man got out. Same height, same build as Burke, but it wasn’t him. The man put a key in the door and entered the house. It looked natural, as if he’d done it a million times before. O’Neill still had Ward on the phone.
‘Sir, can you run a registration for me?’
‘Go ahead.’
O’Neill gave Ward the licence-plate.
‘Nissan Almera. Red. Registered to a Martin Cushnan, 28 Ladas Drive, Newry,’ Ward read out.
‘What would you say if I told you your red Nissan was a white Transit van?’
‘I’d say false plates.’
‘I’d say you’re right, sir. And it’s parked outside Burke’s. The driver just went in. Looked like he’d lived there all his life.’
‘Newry licence. . Do you want to take a bet on the brother, Michael?’
‘DI Ward,’ O’Neill said, feigning surprise. ‘The same brother Burke told us he hadn’t seen in six months? You’re not suggesting someone lied to the PSNI, are you?’
Ward laughed. O’Neill looked at his watch and yawned.
‘How do you want to play it?’ Ward asked.
‘I’m going to hang back. See if Tony comes home. Can you put in the request for Burke’s phone record? He’s just lost his innocent bystander status.’
‘Anything else, Sergeant? A nice cup of tea? A wee portion of fish and chips, perhaps?’
‘Sounds good. And plenty of salt and vine-’
Ward hung up on him mid-sentence.
He sat back in his chair in Musgrave Street. Ward knew the Review Boards were less than two weeks away. He also knew you couldn’t force a case. It was like trying to grab the soap in the bath, his old Sergeant had once said. The tighter you squeeze, the more it slips out of your grasp. Still, none of that was going to help O’Neill.
Ward realized the younger man was being hung out on something the rest of the world had forgotten about a long time ago. Last week Laganview had made its procession back through the newspaper. It went from Tuesday’s front page, to page four on Wednesday. By Thursday there was a single paragraph on page eight. It sat beside a story on the latest Northern Irish contestant in Big Brother. Stuart Colman’s words echoed in Ward’s head: footballers and soap stars, who’s shagging who.
O’Neill sat and waited. The radio show ticked over. Five o’clock came and went. Then six. Then seven. The traffic eased as folk arrived home. O’Neill was hungry. Across the North, people were tucking into their tea. He tried not to think about it. Egg and chips, bowls of stew, plates of lasagne. He lit another B amp;H and wound down the window. He looked into the packet. There were only three left.
O’Neill glanced at the clock. He had been supposed to come off-duty an hour ago.
At around eight, a Ford Mondeo pulled in behind him. A figure got out of the driver’s side and O’Neill’s passenger door opened. Ward slipped into the seat beside him. He tossed a fresh packet of cigarettes on to the dashboard, handing O’Neill a cup of coffee and a stale bun.
‘You been baking again, Inspector?’
‘Canteen leftovers. You don’t want to see what you might have won.’ O’Neill took a bite and a drink of coffee. He immediately felt his spirits lift.
‘Did your date cancel on you again?’ he asked.
‘Listen, Billy No Mates. You’re not exactly in a position to talk.’
O’Neill agonized over telling Ward about the boot. He felt sure the Inspector would tell him to follow the investigation, wherever it took him. But where would it take him? Getting the shoe-size of every uniform in Musgrave Street? Cross-checking it with who was working Sunday night and who was off? O’Neill’s stomach turned over at the thought. He imagined the comments from other cops.
‘That’s him there.’
‘Bangs up his mates.’
‘Whose side does he think he’s on?’
By ten o’clock the Burke house was in darkness. No one had left. The brother’s van was still outside.
‘Not seen him for six months? My arse,’ O’Neill said.
‘Looks like that’s him for the night,’ Ward pronounced.
‘Think so.’
‘Let’s get to our own beds then.’
Ward got out of the car and into his own. He drove off, turning right down the Ravenhill Road.
O’Neill was about to turn on the ignition but stopped. He sat on for another twenty minutes. Finally, he cursed Burke, him and his fucking brother, and turned the key. The engine caught first time and he drove across town to the empty flat in Stranmillis.
The next morning, O’Neill got a call from Rob Leonard at the pathology lab.
‘I’ve been working some more on Laganview, looking at your body.’
Still it was O’Neill’s body.
‘I’ve got something you’re going to want to come and see. Can you make it up to the Royal Victoria Hospital this morning?’
‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’
O’Neill was relieved. Anything to get out of the station, away from the paperwork, which only reminded him of the dead weight of Laganview round his neck. He was a day closer to the Review Boards and still nothing. He’d seen Burke’s brother last night and was going to pay him a visit later that day. It might be something. Then again it might not.
The State Pathologist’s Department was a thirteen-man operation, located in a nondescript building within the RVH. Every year, thousands of hospital visitors parked in its shadow without any idea what they were next to. At the entrance to the hospital, people clutched flowers and bottles of Lucozade, gazing up in bewilderment at signposts for various wards. Old men in dressing-gowns stood on the steps smoking, their oxygen canisters wheeled out, standing beside them. They held their cigarettes between two fingers, a defiant gesture to the Grim Reaper or whatever the end might look like.
O’Neill remembered Leonard from the autopsy two weeks before. For sixteen years he had headed up the SPD at the Royal. Two decades’ worth of death. Every body since 1989 had passed under Leonard’s nose. He had signed off them all. If you were looking for a ferryman to the next life, Leonard was your man. He had seen all the ways people end up making the journey.
O’Neill arrived as the pathologist hunched over some papers on his desk. He was a short man, five-eight, with thinning grey hair. A pair of half-moon spectacles
sat on the end of his nose, and he looked at the detective over the top of them. Leonard was everything you wanted in a pathologist: steady hand, cast-iron stomach and a sense of curiosity.
‘O’Neill. Good to see you. Looks like Laganview’s added a few years to you since we last met.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I wouldn’t worry. How do you think Jack Ward ended up looking like he does?’
O’Neill laughed.
‘How is he, by the way?’
‘The Inspector’s the Inspector. What can I say?’
‘I miss him, you know,’ Leonard joked. ‘He never phones. He never writes.’
Ward and Leonard had history. When the pathologist heard he’d been made DI, he sent a jar with a cancerous lung down to Musgrave Street. It was part-joke, part-jibe, a dig at Ward’s lifelong sponsorship of Benson amp; Hedges.
‘Is he still on the fags?’
‘Off them six months.’
‘You’re a shit liar,’ Leonard said, smiling. He turned to three brown envelopes sitting on his desk.
‘OK. Let’s have ourselves a mini-pathology lesson. See if you’re as clever as Jack Ward thinks you are.’
Leonard opened the first envelope and poured out its contents: three photographs of male legs, each one skinny, bruised and badly contorted.
‘What do you see, O’Neill?’
‘Three sets of legs. All male. All pretty skinny. Not a lot of meat on them bones. Is this a bit of compare and contrast, this morning?’
‘Spot on. Look here. This one’s a jumper, eighteen years old. Similar age and build to your boy at Laganview. Leaped from a warehouse. Fell forty feet. Shattered both knees.’
There were large areas of discolouration, purple and pink bruising, covering more than half of the limbs. The surrounding area had started to turn as well. Shades of brown, green and yellow.
‘You’ve seen the site at Laganview, Rob. My guy’s not a jumper.’
‘I know. It’s the bruises we’re interested in. Now take a look at this.’
Leonard swept the photos aside and brought forward the second envelope.
‘I got these from one of the orthopaedic surgeons upstairs. Again, similar age and build. This is a straight-up knee-capping. They took a bat to him. Shattered both knee-caps and both ankle-joints. He lived, but will probably be on sticks the rest of his life. And you don’t want to know about the early-onset arthritis.’
O’Neill studied the bruising on the second set of photographs. They were similar to the first. Large patches of discolouration. Purple and pink, spreading out from the knee area, covering over three-quarters of the surface area of skin.
Leonard then produced the photographs from Laganview.
‘OK. Now this is your boy.’
O’Neill looked at the limbs stretched down the steel plate of the autopsy table. There was less than a quarter of bruising on him than on the other two. A couple of small purple patches, but nothing like the others. He saw it immediately.
‘Post-mortem bruising.’
‘That’s right.’
The body at Laganview was already dead. The heart had stopped beating so the haemorrhaging as a result of the blows with the bat was much smaller.
‘Judging by the amount of bone breakage, he took just as much punishment as contestant number two.’
‘So who knee-caps a dead body?’ O’Neill asked.
‘You’re the detective, O’Neill. I am merely the State Pathologist for Northern Ireland.’ Leonard shrugged. He could sense O’Neill’s frustration at this latest turn. He knew the police still hadn’t arrested anyone, let alone brought charges.
‘I’ll tell you one thing though — Jack Ward’s no mug. And if he put you up front on this thing, it means you’ve got what it takes.’
‘So why does someone do that — knee-cap a corpse?’
‘You were closer with your first question. It’s not about “why”. It’s about “who”.’
‘You’re right.’
‘For what it’s worth, I’d say you’ve got a straight-up murder. Someone wants you to think it’s a punishment beating, but it is murder, pure and simple.’
As he walked back to the car, O’Neill’s mobile rang in his pocket.
‘You still up at the RVH?’ Ward asked.
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘The surgeon from Orthopaedics called. You told him to get in touch if they had any more punishment beatings from Belfast. He just operated on someone last night. I ran the name. Peter Kennedy. Sixteen years old. He’s from the Markets.’
This might be the breakthrough he’d been after. O’Neill felt optimistic for a second, before he remembered the fact that they were no longer after a punishment beating. Laganview was something else. Still, it couldn’t hurt to talk to the kid.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Petesy was asleep when Marty arrived. He swaggered along the corridor in tracksuit and trainers, trying to follow the signs. A nurse in her forties glared at Marty as he passed her station. There had been an increase in people stealing from the hospital. It was sometimes patients, but mostly visitors. They took computer equipment and drug supplies off the ward. Staff had been told to be extra-vigilant, and the nurse left Marty in absolutely no doubt that she was watching him.
In Ward 16 Petesy lay still, dozing in and out of sleep. Both of his legs were in plaster and hung in front of him, elevated by a system of pulleys. The tibia and femur, left and right, were both broken. The right knee was shattered and had had to be replaced by a metal insert. The ligaments in both knees were torn and were repaired with cartilage taken from the patient’s hip. Marty looked at his mate, remembering the crunching sound of the bat and Petesy’s screaming.
Ward 16 had ten other beds in it. Old men mostly, in for hip replacements. Marty felt their eyes on him as he sat beside his friend. He knew what they were thinking.
‘Joy-riding scum.’
‘Wee cunt, got what he deserved.’
‘There’s another one.’
It was pure hatred. Marty wanted to flick the brake on the bed and wheel his mate out of there. He didn’t need to lie there and have these auld bastards staring at him, their yellow faces, their teeth in jars beside the beds.
The room was warm and smelled like old people, mixed with disinfectant, bedclothes and piss. Petesy was asleep. Marty picked up the copy of FourFourTwo from the bedside cabinet. He flicked through, looking at pictures of footballers. He wondered what his friend must have thought, seeing the magazine. Petesy was a shite footballer. That wasn’t the point though.
A quiet, croaky voice came from the top of the bed.
‘Does this look like a library?’
Marty looked up and smiled. ‘If it is, it’s a shite one. It’s only got one frigging magazine.’
Petesy gave a faint smile, before wincing and inhaling through clenched teeth. The medication was starting to wear off and had wakened him from his sleep. He reached down to his side, lifted a small white remote, and clicked it twice. It was connected to an anaesthetic drip. In thirty seconds the jagged edge started to ease off.
‘Is that morphine?’ Marty asked.
Petesy nodded.
‘You lucky fucker.’
‘Aye?’ Petesy looked down at his legs. ‘Do you think so?’
Marty didn’t know what to say. He glanced round the ward, anything to avoid Petesy’s eyes. He reached into the bag at his feet.
‘I’ve brought you some presents. Thought they might cheer you up.’ He pulled three books out of the bag and showed them to Petesy. ‘Three history ones. No pictures. Especially for smart cunts, these ones. Eh? Mr Queen’s fucking University.’
Petesy smiled as Marty set the books on the bedside cabinet.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘Waterstones in the town. I tell you what, nicking stuff there’s a total piece of piss. No one on the door. Just some old boy in a grey cardigan behind the till. Almost made me want to take up reading.’
�
��What are they about?’
‘Ah, I don’t know. Revolutions or something. I figured I’d go for big ones. Size matters, you know. Least that’s what the birds keep telling me.’
Petesy smiled again. Marty tried to ignore the two large casts that floated in front of his face.
‘So what about the nurses then? That one at the desk’s a bit of a boot. Are there any fit ones? Have you had a bed bath yet? I heard they sometimes can give you a wee. .’
Marty whistled in and out. Petesy laughed.
‘What do you think you are doing here, Martin Toner?’
Petesy’s granny stood at the end of the bed, her mouth pursed, her face scowling. She had been looking for a row for days now. Marty somehow got the feeling he was her big chance.
‘I hope you’re happy with yourself. This is all your fault. It should be you lying there, you frigging waster. Hung up like some bit of dirty washing.’
Marty didn’t know what to say. There was nothing he could say. She was only saying what he had been thinking, ever since Petesy got done.
‘Our Peter would never have gotten into any of this if it wasn’t for you. Go on, take yourself off. If I ever see you anywhere near our Peter again. .’
Marty was going to tell the old woman to go fuck herself. What the fuck did she know about anything? He caught his tongue though. Petesy loved his granny and he could see how upset she was. She needed someone to blame. But deep down he knew she was right. Petesy would never have had the balls if it hadn’t been for him. Yeah. It should have been him. He was the one that deserved it, not Petesy.
Marty looked at his mate, lying in the white hospital bed. He stood up and walked past the old woman. It was his fault. The whole thing. He turned and marched out of the ward. Round the corner he sniffed and rubbed his sleeve under his nose, fighting back the tears.
In the corridor Marty pushed between two men in suits. He didn’t look up, focusing all his energy on not crying. The nurse glared at him again as he passed her station.
