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.