While O’Neill had been upstairs, Ward had got Kearney to run background checks on the site foreman and the Polish worker. He looked at the print-out again.
‘These guys are in rooms three and four. The foreman is Tony Burke. Fifty-two. Lives off the Ravenhill Road. He had some connections back in the late eighties. Brother did ten years for membership of a terrorist organization, possession of a firearm, intimidation.’
‘Was Burke involved?’ O’Neill asked, using the local word that covered a multitude of sins.
‘Don’t know. He might have only drunk in a few bars, whispered in a few ears. Could be more. He didn’t do any time though. Two arrests for assault. Drunken brawls by the looks of it. In both cases the charges were dropped. One of them was outside the Crown in 1988. Fella suffered a broken nose, broken jaw and three cracked ribs. The victim told the police he slipped and bumped himself on the kerb.’
‘Sounds like a nice guy,’ O’Neill said.
‘Yeah. Proper choirboy. I’ll tell you better than that. Burke’s son?’ Ward never forgot a name.
‘Who?’
‘Remember the break-ins on the Ravenhill last year?’
‘The two junkies?’
‘That’s right. Jerome Burke was one of them. It’s his son.’
‘Whatever happened to Jerome?’
‘He’s in Maghaberry, doing three years.’
O’Neill and Ward agreed to start with the labourer, before having a shot at Burke.
Victor Puslawski was in his thirties, but looked older. His face was like a piece of leather. Fifteen winters on a building site would do that to you. In the last four years he had lived in Birmingham, Hull and now Belfast. There were thousands of Eastern Europeans in Northern Ireland working as builders, cleaners, security men. Anything they could turn a bit of money at. O’Neill had read a story in the paper the week before about a fight in Craigavon. Some local lads had jumped this Lithuanian as he was walking home from work. They gave him a hiding. An hour later Ivan came back with one of his mates and put the four of them in hospital.
Puslawski was nonplussed, matter of fact. You wouldn’t think he had come across a body that morning. It was the same attitude you saw from the State Pathologist standing over a corpse. Another day, another dollar. O’Neill figured this wasn’t the first body Puslawski had seen.
It was true.
‘I see my grandmother, my grandfather, my father. People die. You want me be sad for some boy I never know? How long you keep me here?’
O’Neill stared at him. ‘You’re here until we say so. Have you got that?’
A silence fell as the two men glared at each other.
‘Now tell us what happened this morning.’
‘Nothing. I see body. I tell foreman. I go back to work.’
‘You didn’t think he might still be alive?’
‘No. He is dead. I know. Look, how long you keep me here? I get paid to build apartment. Not answer question.’
O’Neill told him the site had been closed. There would be no work for anyone that day.
‘Great. No one work, no one get paid.’
They questioned Burke afterwards. The foreman leaned back in his chair. Smug, self-assured. He’d played the game before, several times, by the looks of it. O’Neill kept it light, getting Burke to walk him through the morning.
He’d arrived at seven to open up the site. The workers dribbled in to start at seven-thirty. Just before eight one of the Poles came back to the office, told him someone was dead. Burke thought it was someone from the site. He went to have a look. Then called 999. By the time he’d got there, a crowd of workers had gathered — mostly local lads. The Poles had taken a quick look and gone back to work. That was what they were like.
‘Tell me about Puslawski.’
‘Not much to tell. Never misses a day — but then none of them do. He’s never late. None of them are. Doesn’t say much.’
‘How many Poles do you have on the site?’
‘Forty. We’re about half and half, local lads and foreigners. I’ll tell you what though. If we had more of them, we’d get the thing finished in half the time.’
‘What about CCTV?’
‘The cameras? Kids broke them a couple of weeks ago. We’re still waiting on Securitas coming out to replace them.’
‘Convenient.’
‘They were reported two weeks ago.’
So far Ward hadn’t spoken in either interview. He interrupted O’Neill now though.
‘How’s your Michael these days, Charlie?’
Burke went silent, his face hardening at his brother’s name. He had seen the kid’s body, the state of the legs. He knew what they were thinking, that Michael knew one end of a baseball bat from another.
During the Troubles, once volunteers had been convicted they couldn’t resume active duty. If they were known to the police they might jeopardise operations. A lot of them spent their time running their communities, securing safe houses, gathering intelligence, dealing with complaints.
Once Michael was mentioned, Burke clammed up. He hadn’t seen him in six months. He was living in Newry, sixty miles from Belfast. It corroborated what Kearney had taken from the Police National Computer.
Later O’Neill and Ward sat in CID. It was after four. The three DCs, Kearney, Reid and Larkin, had all gone home.
‘So what do we know?’ Ward asked.
O’Neill thought for a moment.
‘Burke’s dodgy, sir. He has previous himself and knows more than a few boys who could do something like this. The brother might be an in as well.’
‘The pathology lab called,’ Ward announced. ‘They’ve scheduled the post-mortem for seven. Just in time to put you off your dinner.’
As Principal Investigator, O’Neill would go to the mortuary.
‘And we still haven’t got a positive ID on the body?’ Ward asked. It had never taken this long to put an ID on a body before. He couldn’t believe the victim didn’t have some kind of previous.
‘We’re going to make an appeal for information, sir,’ O’Neill said. ‘Oh — and don’t expect to hear too much about punishment beatings. Apparently there’s no such thing any more.’
‘Said who?’
‘The Chief Inspector, sir.’
‘Well, if he said it,’ Ward said sarcastically, ‘it must be true.’
The reinforced steel door thundered shut behind Burke. He stood outside Musgrave Street and looked at his watch. It was just after four.
The rain was coming down but had eased off from the morning. It was already dark. Burke put his hands in his pockets and walked towards the shops and the city centre.
Four streets from Musgrave Street he stopped at a phone box. Inside he took out his mobile and scrolled through the numbers. He dropped a pound into the phone box and dialled.
Two miles away in The George a man sat at the bar reading the Irish News. He was working his way down a pint of Guinness. It was late afternoon and the bar was half-empty. His mobile rang, flashing ‘Number Withheld’. Michael Burke put the phone to his ear.
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s me. They took me to Musgrave Street. They were asking about you — nothing they didn’t just pull out of a file. . It was Ward and some new guy. Think you need to get out of Dodge for a few days. Aye. . OK.’
Burke hung up the receiver. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out another pound. He slotted it in before scrolling through his mobile again. When he got to ‘Spender’ he stopped. He punched the number into the call box and waited as it rang on the other end.
A businesslike voice answered at the other end. ‘Hello?’