Dark Dawn
Authors: Matt McGuire
Matt McGuire
was born in Belfast and taught at the University of Glasgow before becoming an English lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He has published widely on various aspects of contemporary literature and is currently writing a book on Scottish crime fiction.
Dark Dawn
is his debut novel.
Matt McGuire
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
First published in the UK by Corsair,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2012
Copyright © Matthew McGuire 2012
The right of Matthew McGuire to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78033-225-3 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-78033-226-0 (ebook)
Printed and bound in the UK
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For Maree
There are several people I would like to thank: Peter Straus at RCW for his belief and support. All the team at Constable & Robinson, but particularly James Gurbutt for his insightful editorial suggestions, Sam Evans, Jo Stansall and Angela Martin. I would also like to thank my former colleagues at the University of Glasgow for their encouragement, especially Gerry Carruthers, Kirsteen McCue and Rhona Brown. The support of my family has been consistent throughout the writing of this book and I cannot thank them enough.
Belfast, 2005
It was January. It was raining. The kid was dead.
DS O’Neill pulled on his cigarette as rain drummed on the makeshift roof of Laganview Apartments. They were only a shell: steel girders, concrete foundations. The latest luxury in waterfront living. The new Northern Ireland. Least that’s what the billboard said.
Thirty yards away a couple of uniforms stood behind a band of yellow police tape. They were in a hurry. They always were. Coming off a nightshift, the last thing you wanted was to end up babysitting a stiff. It was solid peeler logic. Protect and serve, so long as you’re not freezing your balls off in the rain for six hours.
O’Neill looked at the body. The arched back, the pale face, the empty eyes that stared down the river and out to sea. He took a drag of his cigarette. Yeah. There was no rush. The kid was dead. He was dead when they arrived. He’d still be dead in ten minutes.
It was eight o’clock, Monday morning. Half an hour earlier the call had come into Musgrave Street – suspicious death. A low buzz went round the station. You couldn’t say it, but CID liked a body. Burglary, robbery, theft – sure, they had their moments. But a body? A body was the real deal. Sharpened the mind. Put an inch to your step. You spent weeks, months, wading through the same bullshit. The same bag-snatching, same robbery, same aggravated assault. A body though, a body was a headline-grabber. Even in the North. There was something about a body, something that couldn’t be denied. In a world of ‘no comment’, of ‘where’s my lawyer’, of half-truths and outright lies, a body was irrefutable. It was a fact. It couldn’t be ignored.
O’Neill looked at the wall of grey cloud that pressed down upon Belfast. It was January, almost February. Christmas was a distant memory. There was still no sign of spring. A line of police tape sealed off the entrance to the building site.
CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.
Behind it the two uniforms swayed from foot to foot. They wore black boots, dark trousers and high-vis jackets. Fluorescent yellow was cut in two by a belt holding a pair of bracelets and the standard issue Glock 19. At the gates to Laganview two armoured Land Rovers stood guard like a couple of bouncers. They were dirty white with heavy grilles across the windscreen. One of them was scarred down the side – charred from some ‘community relations’ work in the Ardoyne the previous week.
The apartments overlooked the River Lagan as it gathered pace before spilling its guts into Belfast Lough. Across the water, the morning rush-hour crawled along Oxford Street. People huddled in their cars listening to Radio Ulster, oblivious to the contorted figure that lay on the far side of the river.
Detective Sergeant John O’Neill was anything but oblivious. He was thirty-four, but looked closer to forty. Six years of shift-work would do that to you. Beneath the suit O’Neill wore a medal, the size of a twenty-pence piece. St Michael, the patron saint of peelers. He didn’t believe in saints. Didn’t believe in God either. Catherine had given it to him when he joined up and he thought, What the hell, might as well have someone watching your back. O’Neill was six foot with black hair, going grey at the side. Catherine, his wife, used to joke about George Clooney. He told her: ‘Keep dreaming, love. It’s as close to him as you’re likely to get.’
That was a couple of years ago. When there were still jokes. Now there were lawyers – or at least, it was heading that way. Every smartarse comment might end up costing O’Neill another couple of grand. They were ‘on a break’. Catherine’s words. It had been six months and still no one in the station knew. O’Neill was in a flat on the Stranmillis Road. Catherine had stayed in the house with Sarah, their five-year-old daughter. O’Neill had asked Jack Ward, the DI, what he knew about lawyers.
Expensive.
That’s what he figured.
It might not come to that though. There was hope. There was Sarah to think about. She’d just started primary school at St Therese’s. O’Neill saw her on weekends, when his shifts allowed. Divorced at thirty-four. Christ, O’Neill thought, you fairly fucked that up in a hurry.
He looked at the body next to the river. Six years with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It wasn’t the first time O’Neill had seen death. He’d seen it ooze out of people, a dark sickly red, as the lights slowly went out behind their eyes. He’d smelled it rotting, an old man on his sofa, six weeks before neighbours noticed the stink. He’d heard it gurgle and choke – a teenage joyrider who left a stolen car, doing seventy, via the front windscreen. At Laganview though it was the stillness. The perfect stillness. The river ran on, the rain poured down, the cars rolled by. The body, however – the body lay completely still. O’Neill kept waiting for the kid to blink, to get up and start rubbing his head. He’d look round, dazed, confused, and wonder what had happened. What was all the fuss about? O’Neill knew better though. The kid wouldn’t sit up. Wouldn’t rub his head. Wouldn’t look round him. He’d lie there. Dead still. At least until someone did something about it.
Six years. O’Neill had seen things. You couldn’t not see things, that was the job. When he signed up, he thought that’s what he wanted. To see things. To be the guy that got the call. The guy that didn’t walk away, that didn’t look away, like everyone else. He looked at the body of the twisted teenager and thought to himself: Be careful what you wish for.
O’Neill took his time, working his way down a second cigarette. You never rushed a crime scene. He knew this. Knew it deep down, like a form of muscle memory. When he’d first stepped out of the car, his stride automatically slowed and his gestures had become deliberate, more measured. His eyes changed. He stopped looking at things and started to stare. He stared at objects. He stared at sightlines. He stared at people. Bystanders, witnesses, onlookers. O’Neill knew the nightmare stories. A detective not controlling his scene. Some uniform, three weeks out of Police College, picks up a knife – ‘I’ve got something here.’ Yes, you do, mate. It’s a ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’ for some lucky bastard. Plus a month’s paperwork and a ball-chewing for me. And Uniform wondered why CID didn’t always like them.
O’Neill remembered a conversation with the DI, Jack Ward, three weeks after he first came over to CID. The shift was asking itself the usual question: was O’Neill just another monkey out of uniform, better suited to wrestling drunks and handing out parking tickets? Ward was ex-RUC. He was in his fifties and had earned his stripes during the Troubles: 25 years, 300 dead peelers. The numbers didn’t lie.
A robbery had come in and O’Neill grabbed his coat. He needed to prove himself, show he was a worker, that he had what it took. He hadn’t popped his cherry and was still chasing his first collar. Ward stood in the doorway, smiling.
‘Detective O’Neill. A question for you. But only if you have time . . .’
‘Sir?’
‘Why don’t they put blue lights on the cars in CID?’
O’Neill paused. The other DCs had been taking the piss since he arrived and it sounded like more of the same.
‘Sir?’
‘Why don’t CID have blue lights, like everyone else?’
O’Neill didn’t answer.
‘I’ll tell you,’ Ward continued. ‘Because . . . by the time
we
get the call, the emergency’s over.’
The other DCs in the room, Kearney and Reid, laughed. The Charge of the Blue Light Brigade. That was what Ward called it.
‘Chasing guys down streets. Rugby tackles. Rolling in the dirt. Jesus. You guys watch too much TV.’ He looked round the room. ‘We’re the clean-up crew. We walk. We don’t run. By the time they send for us, the party’s always over. Our job’s to find out who made the mess.’
Three weeks later, O’Neill was up to his elbows. He’d ten jobs open. Five assaults, three thefts and two robberies. Ward asked: ‘What do you think’ll happen as soon as you clear one of those?’
‘I get another?’
‘Bingo. Sisyphus, son. That’s who you are.’
‘Sissy who?’
Ward laughed as he walked away. ‘Never worry. You just keep rolling that boulder. Shit. We might even make a detective out of you one of these days.’
O’Neill looked down at the lifeless body. Six years on and somewhere along the way, somewhere amid the sights and the smells, the interviews and the bullshit, the paperwork and the procedure, they
had
made a detective out of him. Of that much O’Neill was sure.
As he waited for DI Ward, O’Neill drew an aerial sketch of Laganview on his notepad. The site was a rectangle, 40 by 100 yards or so, hugging the bank of the river. Three apartment blocks filled what used to be the old Sirocco steelworks. Late to the party, Belfast was getting the same makeover that Glasgow, Newcastle and Liverpool got in the 1990s. Old factories were becoming apartment blocks. Disused dockyards were transformed into high-end lofts. It was a building epidemic. The Belfast skyline was dotted with cranes, swinging their arms over the city in a mass benediction. Progress meant property. The Cathedral Quarter. The Titanic Quarter. The Gasworks. The Troubles were over. There was money to be made.
Laganview looked across the river towards the 50-foot high curves of the Waterfront Hall. Next door stood the Hilton Hotel and the white limestone of Belfast City Court House. The apartments rubbed shoulders with the Short Strand and the Markets, working-class areas, where rows of terrace houses formed a maze of side-streets and alleyways. During the Troubles they were a no-go area for police, a breeding ground for militant Republicans. Kerbstones were still painted green, white and gold. Gable ends featured 20-foot murals. Slogans in Irish. O’Neill imagined buyers walking round Laganview, looking down on the streets below. The salesman would tell them to focus on the view. Keep their eyes on the horizon. There was a lot of that going on these days.