O’Neill thought about Laganview. With a murder, the scene was everything. You wanted to know why the body was there. How it got there. Was this the crime scene or the deposition site? If there was a league-table of crime scenes, Laganview would languish somewhere near the bottom. It was an enclosed piece of ground. There were no passers-by, no witnesses. You wanted a house on some leafy street. A house was top of the table. An enclosed space with tons of forensics. Nosy neighbours, a few curtain-twitchers. A house did half the job for you. It asked its own questions. Did the murderer know the victim? Did he force entry? What did he touch?
It had been four hours and O’Neill still didn’t have a positive ID on the body. Already though, it had become ‘his’ body. The kid’s pockets were empty. No wallet, no keys, no money. O’Neill imagined a robbery gone wrong. Some hood, doing a bit of dealing, gets jumped by a couple of junkies.
There were two CCTV cameras at Laganview, both outside the fence and well away from the body. Both had been vandalized the week before and hadn’t been fixed. It was convenient.
Four Scenes of Crime Officers were present, combing over things at a snail’s pace. The white overalls, facemasks and gloves gave Laganview a surreal air — part moon landing, part nuclear clean-up. O’Neill wanted soil samples, footprint casts, cigarette ends. On his sketch of the site he’d marked out the position of the body, possible entrance points and sightlines to all the buildings across the river.
With Ward in the passenger seat he steered the unmarked Mondeo past a billboard advertising Spender Properties. They were the development company on Laganview. In four hours neither of the armoured Land Rovers had moved. At the back of one stood a female uniform, her hat pulled low over her eyes.
The officer turned her head and looked at the car. O’Neill did a double take. The cheekbones, the blue eyes, the short ponytail. It was Sam Jennings. They’d been at Police College together. They had got on well. He had only been seeing Catherine for two months. After passing out, Sam was sent to Dungannon. O’Neill went to North Belfast and hadn’t seen her since.
The jury was still out on female peelers. Some reckoned they were a liability. Good in the office. Good at typing, consoling victims, that kind of stuff. The famous Musgrave Street story was Carol Smith. She was a female uniform attending a call off the Cregagh Road, in East Belfast. Her partner ended up inside the house getting the shit beaten out of him by two guys. Back-up arrived to find her standing outside, pointing at the door, shouting: ‘He’s in there!’ Since then new recruits, men and women, were all Carols, at least until they proved themselves otherwise.
The last O’Neill heard, Sam had got into a fight in Dungannon one Saturday night. Two of her shift were arresting a guy for Drunk and Disorderly when his three mates piled in to try and liberate him. Sam waded in, getting a black eye and a fractured cheekbone for her trouble. They kept hold of the guy and got his mates a couple of days later from the CCTV. They were all sent down.
From the back of the Land Rover Sam locked eyes on O’Neill in the Mondeo. She’d heard he had gone to the dark side and ditched his uniform. Jennings had her street face on — mouth set, eyes fixed. She gave nothing away. O’Neill remembered from Police College, Sam had her stare down long before she ever put on a uniform. Almost unnoticeably she flicked her head back, acknowledging O’Neill with the slightest of gestures. O’Neill nodded back, edging the Mondeo between the Land Rovers.
His mind snapped back to the kid. It was his first body. He’d heard about detectives who had ended up with bodies hanging over them for years. People spoke about being followed. Every dead end in every case became an accusation, like someone picking open an old wound. Cops told themselves it was only a job, that you couldn’t take it personally. That was the theory anyway.
Outside the car, the rain showed no signs of letting up. Two white vans, UTV Live and BBC Northern Ireland, were parked along the road. Presenters stood under umbrellas, speaking into cameras. ‘Reporting live from the scene. .’ O’Neill wondered what they were saying. If the peelers knew nothing, what could the TV know? Still, it never seemed to stop them.
The Mondeo waited for a break in the traffic.
‘You’re pretty quiet there, Detective,’ Ward said.
O’Neill sighed. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, sir.’
‘You’re just hungry,’ Ward said, deadpan.
‘I’m serious, sir.’
‘You’ve got bad feelings about everything.’
‘Have you seen the cases I’ve been pulling lately? I mean, whatever happened to karma?’
‘Don’t know her. She sounds nice though.’
‘You’ve seen the job. You know what I’m talking about, sir.’
‘Listen, Boy George, just keep your eyes on the road. I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse in my time.’
Ward didn’t let on, but he knew what the younger detective meant. The more time he’d been at Laganview the more he saw its potential to bury O’Neill. Walking round the site, he had begun to wonder if he hadn’t saved Wilson the hassle and written O’Neill’s ticket back to uniform himself.
Across the road, a 20-foot mural loomed over the car. The red hand of Ulster hung in front of them like a giant stop sign. It was two storeys high and filled the gable end of a council house.
O’Neill squinted at the blood-red hand, thinking about his da and the story he always told when he was half-cut. The red hand was on the coat-of-arms for the O’Neills, who’d been the ancient Kings of Ulster.
‘Let me tell you something, son. We are the descendants. . (hiccup). . the red hand. That’s us. That’s ours. At least it was, before these bastards stole it.’
Apparently there’d been a contest for the kingship of Ulster. A boat race. The first man to touch Irish soil would claim the place. When they were all 20 yards from shore, one of the O’Neills cut off his right hand and threw it on to land to claim the kingship of Ulster.
It was a family cliche, rolled out every time his da was blitzed and got sentimental. As a boy O’Neill had thought about the story. Cutting off your hand. It was clever, but also desperate, reeking of something fanatical. ‘Remember that, son,’ his da would slur. ‘We mean something. Do you know what I’m talking about? Are you listening to me?’ By the time he was ten O’Neill felt like he’d heard it a million times.
‘Hey. Sleeping beauty,’ Ward interrupted. There was a break in the traffic. ‘Let’s go then.’
O’Neill slipped it into first and pulled out on to the road, turning towards the station.
Musgrave Street was more military barracks than police station. Nestled in the city centre, its perimeter wall was three feet thick, made of reinforced concrete, and topped with a high fence of corrugated iron. Bomb-proof. Mortar-proof. You could drive a tank at it and the place wouldn’t flinch.
The station stood 500 yards from High Street, which covered the old River Farset as it rumbled, unnoticed, below the feet of Belfast shoppers. A 113-foot gothic tower pierced the dark grey sky. Built on slob land, the Albert clock had a four-degree lean, like the ghost of a drunken sailor, looking for one of the hoors who used to ply their trade in the shadow of the clock.
At Musgrave Street O’Neill and Ward sat in the navy Mondeo, waiting for the gates to open. Inside they parked alongside a white Land Rover. It was adorned with a blue and yellow check band and the Crimestoppers phone number. The side of the Land Rover had several dents and a splash of red paint.
Doris was on reception as the detectives entered the main building. She was in her fifties, with short blonde hair. Civilian support staff, Doris had been at the station longer than anyone, including the Chief Inspector. Her husband was RUC, a Reservist who’d been shot in the late seventies. He’d survived the bullet, only to go down with cancer a few years later. There was something very Irish about it. Ward had introduced O’Neill to Doris when he first joined CID.