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.