When he got home, Lynch lit a cigarette and sat in the living room with the lights off. His eyes slowly adjusted and after a few minutes he could see in the dark. He was able to make out the outline of his hand. He held it up in front of his face. It was still. Perfectly still. There wasn’t the slightest tremor. He went upstairs and lay on the bed, fully clothed. Lynch closed his eyes and fell into a deep, satisfying sleep.
SIXTEEN
Catherine lay in bed, trying to read. Her mother had given her the book. An Irish family saga. The story of three sisters growing up in fifties Dublin. Sexual repression, domineering parents, sibling rivalry. She wished life was that simple.
She set the paperback down on the empty space in the bed next to her. Catherine was still sleeping on the left-hand side and wondered if there would come a time when she would move to the middle of the bed. She knew it would finally be admitting that the current arrangement was permanent.
She looked at the ceiling, thinking about John. He was on nightshift. She imagined him at Musgrave Street, staring at the computer, his brow furrowed. Catherine had a copy of O’Neill’s shift pattern sellotaped to the back of a kitchen cupboard. It helped with arrangements for Sarah. He had been in her head constantly since Jack Ward’s visit last week. Sarah seemed to be asking about her daddy more than usual, too. Catherine wondered if it was like buying a car. Suddenly you started to see the same model everywhere. Sarah had also asked about Rex, Ward’s dog. Catherine agreed to arrange for her dad to take her the following weekend.
She picked up the book again, trying to concentrate on the words, to put a stop to the memories of John. Ward had sown a seed inside her. If John was anything to go by and if she knew CID, it was exactly what he’d intended to do. Policemen spent their lives performing, one minute feigning ignorance, the next acting as if they were omnipotent. She thought about Ward’s hesitancy, his awkwardness. He’d been able to read her as well. Knew she needed to vent, to let go, to let it all out. It was the last thing she would have thought of doing, speaking to another cop. Ironically, Ward was one of the few people she could talk to. It had been like a release valve. Afterwards Catherine hadn’t felt nearly as weighed down. She’d let go of some of the frustration. For the first time in months she was able to look past the petty annoyances, the minor disappointments. She caught herself wondering if there might not be hope.
Lying in bed, Catherine began to think about why she married O’Neill in the first place. She thought about the two of them when they first got together. John started in uniform not long after. He would come home from a nightshift at 8 a.m., still buzzing. He’d roll into bed beside her and spend half an hour telling her stories about what the night had been like. He sanitized them, of course, holding back anything that might worry her. On weekends she would have a lie-in, spending the first two hours of the day reading, listening to him snore quietly beside her.
Catherine thought about their second date and the fight she had told Ward about. He had smiled at the story, like he couldn’t imagine John doing anything else. She thought about Sarah and how there might be a time when she would be in trouble, when neither of them would be there and she’d need someone to stick up for her. Someone who wouldn’t just walk past like everyone else.
The day after Ward’s visit Catherine had taken the brown envelope with their divorce papers out of her handbag. She had been carrying it round with her for almost a week. Her solicitor had been right. The best thing to do was just post it. Once it was done it was done. The horse would have bolted and things would take on a life of their own. So why hadn’t she? After O’Neill disappeared from the cafe she had addressed the envelope with the details of the flat in Stranmillis.
Now she had put it into one of the kitchen drawers. If moving into the middle of the bed meant acceptance, then perhaps this was a stay of execution. She thought about John. Her John. Perhaps Ward was right. Maybe he did need her help, after all.
At 3 a.m. O’Neill sat in Musgrave Street, hunched over the case-file for Laganview.
The nightshift had its advantages. Wilson wasn’t in the station and he didn’t have to worry about any unexpected visits. ‘How are things going? What about this? What about that?’ They were loaded questions. The only right answer was that he was getting closer. O’Neill told it to Wilson but he also told it to himself. He had to. He was fighting Murphy’s Law. The one that says it’s the drunk driver who always walks away from a car crash. That says it may be the tenth time he beat her, but she’ll still take him back. That says a good peeler will always get fucked on a case no one gives a shit about.
O’Neill had the Laganview file memorized. They had no ID on the victim, no suspects and no forensics. He knew there must be something he wasn’t seeing, a detail, something he’d overlooked, an angle that hadn’t been considered.
Both the physical evidence and the pathology report had told him nothing he didn’t know the morning they found the body. Puslawski had checked out. The foreman, Tony Burke, was dodgy but it didn’t make him a murderer. O’Neill knew that people lied to the police for all kinds of reasons. Ward had told him he would look into the Spender angle. ‘It’s a while since I’ve had a jaunt down to Cultra.’ Meanwhile, O’Neill had compiled a list of the great and the good of the Belfast drug scene. He was looking for mid-level guys, the boys who ran things. They’d be involved, but high enough up not to directly handle any product. The list stretched to 146 names. And that was only the people the police knew about. Any one of them could have done the boy at Laganview.
Uniform had come up with nothing either. They’d spent two days questioning every tracksuited teenager in East Belfast. The kids laughed at them, knowing the police had nothing. They started owning up, like it was some kind of game.
‘I done him.’
‘No, I did.’
‘No, it was me.’
O’Neill thought back to his uniform days in North Belfast. The New Lodge. The Oldpark. The Ballysillan. You’d climb out of the wagon to a row of ‘fuck you’ stares from fourteen year olds. The rest of his patrol hated them — ‘fucking wee hoods’, ‘a bunch of ball bags’. O’Neill didn’t mind. After a year he got to know the faces and some of the names. He would give them a slagging-off — ‘Hey McCrory, you still not got laid yet?’ He’d pick the smallest in the group — ‘Big lad, you know fags stunt your growth.’ Or ask them all — ‘Where’s the birds tonight then? Is this a social club for fruits? Or are yous an out-of-work boyband?’ They would laugh and call him a wanker as soon as he was out of earshot.
Life was a game to them. It had to be. The only commandment that mattered was Thou shalt not get caught. And it wasn’t just the peelers you had to worry about. In fact, the police were the least of your worries. Everywhere on walls you saw the letters UTH — Up the Hoods. FTIRA — Fuck the IRA. There was not one of them didn’t know someone who had been done by the Provies, given a hiding, been told to leave the country, or worse. O’Neill thought about Janty Morgan. He must have arrested him half a dozen times. He thought about Morgan’s backchat, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. It was as if he knew this was it. This was as good as it got. You took the money and ran, and you kept running, until eventually, some day, a hand would reach out and grab you and that would be it. Game over.
Earlier that evening O’Neill had called at the Royal Victoria Hospital to talk to the surgeon who headed up the Orthopaedic Unit. Mr Winters was in his early fifties and for the past ten years had been running the reconstructive team. He was a minor celebrity in the world of knee surgery. Practice makes perfect, O’Neill supposed. They had coffee in the empty canteen of the hospital, a couple of ghosts, existing at odd hours, in spaces vacated by normal, everyday life. They swapped stories, talking about their experience of Belfast’s hoods. Winters was quiet, reflective.