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  ‘I don’t care what it looks like, O’Neill. The Peace Agreement was signed eight years ago. We’re trying to return this country to a state of normality. Punishment beatings, paramilitaries. They’re a thing of the past. They’re gone.’

  ‘Well, someone forgot to tell that kid down at Laganview.’

  Wilson’s face reddened.

  ‘This is not about Laganview. It’s more than that. It’s about money, investment. America. The European Union. The less we hear about punishment beatings, the better. What do you think would happen if people start getting cold feet? Investors pull the plug. Then we’re all in the shit.’

  O’Neill wondered when exactly it was that a dead body ceased to be important in its own right. It was Belfast though. Nothing was ever simply what it was.

  Wilson pulled back, realizing he had strayed from the topic.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong – we need to catch whoever did this. We just need to go about it in the right way.’

  O’Neill knew he should let it go. But . . .

  ‘On hospital numbers we had almost three hundred punishment beatings last year. Two-fifty the year before that. It doesn’t sound as if everything’s over, as if it’s all behind us.’

  ‘I don’t need a statistics lesson from you, Detective.’ Wilson glared at O’Neill. ‘But if you like though, we can start drilling down into your own stats. Maybe begin with your clearance rate, eh?’

  O’Neill knew he’d gone too far. Wilson had made his threat. It was subtle, but there nonetheless.

  ‘This is not just another body, whether we want it to be or not. And we’re not just a police force. There’s history to consider.’

  History again, O’Neill thought. For years history had been kicking in doors, shitting on people, giving folk reasons, putting guns in their hands. The North had had too much history. O’Neill remembered the TV when Tony Blair had flown in for the peace talks. He met the press, grinning: ‘I can feel the hand of history on our shoulders . . .’ O’Neill wondered who had been grinning the night before, as they stood over the body of a dead teenager on the bank of the River Lagan.

  DI Ward waited for O’Neill in CID. Paul Kearney, one of the other DCs, sat typing at his desk. It was O’Neill’s case, but Ward wanted to help out with the interviews.

  Kearney spoke when O’Neill entered.

  ‘What did the big cheese want?’

  ‘Wants to fast-track me. Make me a DI. He says the current one isn’t up to much.’

  Ward smiled in the corner of the room. He knew O’Neill was giving Kearney the brush-off.

  ‘Detective Inspector John O’Neill,’ Ward piped back. ‘God help us all.’

  O’Neill sat at his desk and switched on his computer.

  ‘Your wife called while you were upstairs,’ Kearney said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ he replied casually. ‘What did she want?’

  ‘Said she wants a real man. Someone who can get the job done in the bedroom.’

  Ward watched O’Neill who refused to take the bait. Kearney kept running.

  ‘If you need some help there, mate, just let me know.’

  O’Neill didn’t look up from the computer screen.

  ‘Some smelly culchie from Ballymena? A gut like yours? A bit too much of a real man, I’d say. Still, I’ll put a word in for you. See if she feels like doing some charity work.’

  O’Neill’s mind started racing. Why was Catherine calling? Was something wrong with Sarah? Had she had an accident at school? No, there’d be a message if something had happened. It had been six months and no one at Musgrave Street knew. Maybe this was her coming round. Asking him back. He’d get to see Sarah every day. She would be six in April. He was supposed to see her at weekends but with the shifts it was more like every second one. Even then, he was often coming off nights and ended up falling asleep on the sofa. Sarah watched cartoons and didn’t bother him. She was happy, just hanging out with her daddy.

  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 foreigne
rs. 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?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  O’Neill went to the autopsy. He watched the boy, laid out on the cold steel slab. The table had a slight tilt, to allow fluids to drain away. He watched Rob Leonard, the State Pathologist, slice open the teenager. He removed his organs, examining each one carefully, taking samples for the toxicology report before putting them in a plastic bag and back into the empty chest cavity.

  O’Neill was embarrassed to be there, watching such a private thing. He was embarrassed for the boy. Embarrassed he’d been laid out like this, that he’d been stripped bare, that there was no one there for him. No one to give a shit. No one to claim him, to say he was theirs.

  He returned to Musgrave Street and spent three hours filling out paperwork. At eleven o’clock he drove to the flat in Stranmillis and showered. He still had the smell on him. Decomposition mixed with disinfectant. You couldn’t wash it off. He’d wear fresh clothes the next day and it would still be on him. It would be there for several days. Only after the steady accumulation of other smells, the grime of everyday life – sweat, cigarettes, petrol – might it finally start to become less noticeable.

  FIVE

  Petesy’s cousin lived in the Ardoyne. He was in his twenties and had been dealing for a few years. Marty and Petesy had been at it for six months, starting off for Johnny Tierney and Sean Molloy who ran the lower Ormeau Road.

  Tierney gave them dope. Ten quarters. Told them to get rid of it and come back with the money. They hung around outside the Spar for six hours, speaking to people they knew and anyone that looked as if they might smoke. It was cold and afterwards Tierney paid them by giving them each a quarter. He told them to come back when they wanted to earn some more.

  Two weeks later Marty had had enough.

  ‘This is shite. Even in McDonald’s they don’t pay you in fucking hamburgers.’

  They decided they would get their own gear. Go into business. Sell it for themselves.

  ‘Entrepreneurs, Petesy. That’s us. Fucking Dragon’s Den. Here we go.’

  They started with a nine bar from Petesy’s cousin. He had scales and cut it into ounces, then quarters. Petesy and Marty wrapped them in clingfilm. They knew the drill. You kept a few on you at a time, left the rest stashed away somewhere. You kept them in your keks, tucked behind your balls – that way if the peelers searched you they wouldn’t find them. And even if they did, they’d only get a couple of quarters and would probably just take them off you.

  Getting the gear was Marty’s idea. Petesy made the mistake of mentioning his cousin and Marty practically marched him up the Ardoyne.

  ‘A nine bar at six hundred quid. Thirty-six quarters at twenty pounds a go. Seven hundred and twenty quid. That’s over a hundred for us.’

  ‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ Petesy said. ‘What about Johnny Tierney? And Sean Molloy? They’ll have our fucking knees if they find out. Remember Jackie Magennis.’

  Everyone remembered Jackie. Tierney caught him skimming and had beaten the fuck out of him at half one in the afternoon in the middle of Cromac Street. He put him in hospital. Fractured skull, two broken ribs and a punctured lung. Tierney was twenty-four, Jackie fourteen. He’d lain there, completely motionless, until the ambulance came and took him away.

  ‘You know where Jackie went wrong though?’ Marty said, looking at Petesy’s eyes. ‘He got caught. There’s two of us. We can look out for each other. Batman and Robin. Butch and Sundance.’

  ‘Who the frig are Butch and Sundance?’ Petesy asked.

  ‘Never mind. Listen, the boys working for Tierney and Molloy are slaves. Do you want to be skint your whole fucking life? No? Well then. You have to use your initiative. He who dares, Petesy, he who dares.’

  They shifted the nine bar in a week, selling it round the Markets and in the Holy Lands where the students from Queen’s University lived. Cairo Street. Damascus Street. Jerusalem Street. Marty and Petesy’s own Promised Land.

  They came out with over a hundred quid. Petesy’d bought his granny a box of chocolates but she wouldn’t take them as she thought they were nicked. They blew the rest on a two-day bender. White Lightning and a load of Es. Steako and Micky came round and they all got fucked. Marty and Petesy were like kings, doling out the goods. It was brilliant.

  After a few weeks the students started asking if they could get them other things. Speed. Coke. The first time they took co
ke into the Holy Lands they doubled their takings.

  Marty bought a mobile phone. He used it to text birds to try and get his hole. Hey drln. Cnt stp thnkng abt u. Wt u up to later. MTxxx He would scroll through and send the same message to six different girls.

  ‘You gotta be in it to win it, Petesy.’

  Round the back of the twenty-four-hour Maxol was where they counted their takings. Petesy stood up and started trying to do keepy-ups with an empty can of Club Orange.

  ‘We need to calm ourselves, Marty. Locksy was telling me that Tierney and Molloy are out looking for us. Someone said they were the ones that done that boy down at the river.’

  ‘Nobody knows who the fuck that guy is.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s his fucking problem. Grow a dick, will you, Petesy. Sometimes I feel like I’m out here working with a wee girl.’

  ‘I’m just saying, I don’t want to end up limping round on a pair of walking sticks.’

  Petesy managed two keepy-ups before the can clattered to the ground.

  ‘Aye.’ Marty nodded. ‘It would ruin your chances with Man United and all.’

  Marty stood up and started walking. He shouted back, over his shoulder, ‘Come on, Beckham. Let’s go and find that Cara one. Apparently Sean McAteer got a go at her tits at a party last Saturday.’

  SIX

  The sleeping tablets only half-worked. Lynch looked at the clock. 3.42 a.m.

  He lay in bed, his thoughts going back to what the psychologist had said. As much as he hated the plush furniture and the rooftop views, Burton had been right. He could have gotten sleeping pills from anywhere. He was right about the memory as well – the taste, the smell, the metal. Lynch began to wonder what else Burton might know.

  After the appointment he’d walked round the town for two hours. He’d tried to go for a pint in the Kitchen but it wasn’t there any more. It had been knocked down and was a building site for a new shopping centre that would stretch half the length of Victoria Street. At home Lynch lay in front of the TV, flicking between programmes. The choice was between cooking and DIY. Some chef ran round a kitchen telling people to fuck off every ten seconds. On the other channel people were renovating some house they’d bought, plotting how to make their millions on the property market. At half ten Lynch had had enough. He popped two pills and went to bed.