Dark Dawn (14 page)

‘And this?’

Another name.

Ward went through each person, jotting down names. He took his time, letting Spender see he could make things awkward for him. No smoke without fire. Another showed Spender in a dinner jacket alongside three other men at a charity auction. Ward imagined tables of drunk businessmen playing How Big is Your Wallet? They would try to outbid each other for signed rugby jerseys, tickets to Paris, a spa day for the wife.

‘Well, Mr Spender. Let me leave my card.’ Ward put his card down on the corner of the oak desk. ‘If anything pops up, you’ll be sure to give me a call.’

Ward turned slowly. ‘And don’t worry. I can show myself out.’

Moving into the hall, he heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. He paused at the family photograph and looked at the children. Karen Spender walked behind him.

‘Great-looking kids,’ Ward offered. ‘Still at home?’

‘No. Across the water. London and Manchester.’ The woman looked briefly at the picture, before continuing down the hall and into the kitchen.

Ward got in the Mondeo and lit a cigarette, breaking the force rule about smoking in pool cars. At the bottom of Spender’s drive he sat for ten seconds as the black gates slowly opened and released him into the grey morning.

Sean Molloy was raging.

‘Fucking wee prick-tease. A pair of bitches. Letting us look after them all night and then sliding off in a taxi.’

Saturday night had run into Sunday morning. The club had closed and he was walking home with Tierney. Until an hour ago this had looked like the least likely outcome of the night.

Molloy had been playing the big man, throwing his money round. They’d been sitting for three hours in Mint with two girls, Tara and Sharon. They must have only been eighteen but, as Molloy told Tierney, a hole was a hole. The two girls fancied themselves and for good reason. They both looked like they’d been poured into their dresses. Molloy had done a line before they arrived so was already buzzing. He ordered a bottle of champagne, even though he would have preferred a pint of Harp. The two girls loved it, sitting there like it was Christmas, hanging on his every word, especially after he gave them a wrap to take into the toilet with them. When they were away he turned to Tierney.

‘Fucking gagging for it.’

‘Aye.’

‘They’re all the same, these wee sluts. All want a good seeing-to.’

The girls came back and sidled in beside the men. Molloy put his arm around Sharon. He looked old enough to be her father. The perfume, the feel of her pressing against him and the coke all started working their magic. He told her he was in business. Self-employed. An entrepreneur. She nodded, pretending that she cared. The only thing she knew was that the champagne was free and didn’t look like drying up any time soon. An hour later Tierney went to recharge his batteries. Molloy went with him, following his mate to the gents. As they walked back from the toilet Molloy put his arm on Tierney’s shoulder.

‘She’s full of shit this one, but I tell you what, I’m going to buck the fucking hole off her.’

Both men laughed aggressively. When they got to the table, the girls were gone. All four glasses were empty.

‘Fucking wee hoors,’ Molloy said. He was fuming. He wanted to kill someone and started looking round the room for them.

‘I’ll wring her fucking neck, next time I see her.’

Tierney led him to the bar where they pushed to the front and ordered two bottles of Budweiser. By the time they finished, the chilled beer had started to cool Molloy’s temper.

‘Come on,’ he said as the bouncer did the rounds, getting folk to drink up. ‘I’m calling Alice. Party up at her place.’

Molloy was married but Alice was his thing on the side. She had been for almost three years. There was Louise as well, but she had been doing his head in lately. Alice was twenty-eight now but when she was eighteen she had been one of the most stunning girls in the whole of Belfast. Since being with Molloy she had had two abortions. She was a devil for the coke and Molloy knew he was guaranteed some action, no matter what time of the night it was, provided he didn’t arrive empty-handed.

Outside, both men were hammered. There were no taxis but it was only a twenty-minute walk. Halfway along Victoria Street Molloy announced that he needed a slash and turned down an alley. Tierney waited at the mouth of the entry.

‘Stop looking at my knob, ya fruit!’ Molloy shouted over his shoulder.

Tierney flipped his mate the finger and walked on. He knew they’d get to Alice’s and Molloy would disappear with her into the bedroom. Besides, he had some dope back at the house which would help bring him down after the last few hours.

In the alley Molloy put his head back and sighed as the stream of hot piss flowed out of him. He thought about what he was going to do . . .

He braced himself as something moved out the corner of his eye.

A 6-inch rat scuttled down the drainpipe next to his head. Molloy breathed a sigh of relief as the rat burrowed into a pile of black bags.

‘Aye. You better run, you wee fucker.’

He zipped up his fly and made his way out of the entry, looking for Tierney, who was nowhere to be seen.

‘Aye. You run and all, you fucking bastard,’ he slurred to himself.

Molloy started walking, thinking about Alice. The road was deserted, except for the odd car with a
TAXI
sign lit across the roof.

Molloy walked up Cromac Street. Four street-lights in a row had been smashed, creating a darkened stretch of pavement. Broken glass lay across the ground and Molloy swerved at the last minute to avoid walking into a bin. At the side of the footpath, shop doorways formed a series of black alcoves. He was still thinking about Alice. He’d get her high. Then he’d get her to put something on. Her wee black number. Then . . .

Darkness.

Something had smashed into Molloy’s face. He stumbled and went down, the back of his head cracking off the pavement, knocking him out. A brick had come out of nowhere, out of the empty space of a shop doorway. It struck him square in the face, breaking his nose and sending him to the ground. Six foot four, sixteen stone, lay motionless on the pavement.

A taxi drove by but didn’t stop. The driver saw a man fall and assumed it was another steamer, with one too many in him. The car paused at the lights at the bottom of the road. The lights changed to green and the taxi turned the corner into May Street.

Quietly, Joe Lynch stepped out of the doorway.

He was still holding the brick. A small beanie covered his head. He pulled the collar up on his black jacket. He was calm and stood quietly looking down at the prone figure of Molloy.

For three days he had watched and waited. By now he knew Molloy better than he knew himself. It was like the old days. That sense of familiarity, like putting on a pair of jeans you’d already worn. He’d watched and he’d waited. Over three days Lynch had memorized Molloy’s life. Every detail. Where he went, and who he saw. Where he slept, where he drank, where he ate. The wife, the girlfriend, the bit on the side.

Lynch looked at the large frame, lying comatose on the pavement. He kneeled down, crouching next to the body. Molloy was breathing, but he wasn’t moving.

Lynch looked at the brick in his hand, then at the body. Blood ran out of Molloy’s nose which was now lying sidewards across his face.

‘Not so handsome now. Eh, big lad?’ he whispered.

Lynch exhaled before he stood up. His eyes swept the street. It was all clear. He walked off, making his way along Cromac Street, staying in the shadows. He was calm, collected, in control. He hadn’t felt this steady in months. Since he’d come out of prison, in fact. Around the corner he cut through a side alley into the Markets. He walked past the Lagan, silently flowing by, and threw the brick into the middle of the river.

When he got home, Lynch lit a cigarette and sat in the living room with the lights off. His eyes slowly adjusted and after a few minutes he could see in the dark. He was able to make out the outline of his hand. He held it up in front of his face. It was still. Perfectly still. There wasn’t the slightest tremor. He went upstairs and lay on the bed, fully clothed. Lynch closed his eyes and fell into a deep, satisfying sleep.

Catherine lay in bed, trying to read. Her mother had given her the book. An Irish family saga. The story of three sisters growing up in fifties Dublin. Sexual repression, domineering parents, sibling rivalry. She wished life was that simple.

She set the paperback down on the empty space in the bed next to her. Catherine was still sleeping on the left-hand side and wondered if there would come a time when she would move to the middle of the bed. She knew it would finally be admitting that the current arrangement was permanent.

She looked at the ceiling, thinking about John. He was on nightshift. She imagined him at Musgrave Street, staring at the computer, his brow furrowed. Catherine had a copy of O’Neill’s shift pattern sellotaped to the back of a kitchen cupboard. It helped with arrangements for Sarah. He had been in her head constantly since Jack Ward’s visit last week. Sarah seemed to be asking about her daddy more than usual, too. Catherine wondered if it was like buying a car. Suddenly you started to see the same model everywhere. Sarah had also asked about Rex, Ward’s dog. Catherine agreed to arrange for her dad to take her the following weekend.

She picked up the book again, trying to concentrate on the words, to put a stop to the memories of John. Ward had sown a seed inside her. If John was anything to go by and if she knew CID, it was exactly what he’d intended to do. Policemen spent their lives performing, one minute feigning ignorance, the next acting as if they were omnipotent. She thought about Ward’s hesitancy, his awkwardness. He’d been able to read her as well. Knew she needed to vent, to let go, to let it all out. It was the last thing she would have thought of doing, speaking to another cop. Ironically, Ward was one of the few people she could talk to. It had been like a release valve. Afterwards Catherine hadn’t felt nearly as weighed down. She’d let go of some of the frustration. For the first time in months she was able to look past the petty annoyances, the minor disappointments. She caught herself wondering if there might not be hope.

Lying in bed, Catherine began to think about why she married O’Neill in the first place. She thought about the two of them when they first got together. John started in uniform not long after. He would come home from a nightshift at 8 a.m., still buzzing. He’d roll into bed beside her and spend half an hour telling her stories about what the night had been like. He sanitized them, of course, holding back anything that might worry her. On weekends she would have a lie-in, spending the first two hours of the day reading, listening to him snore quietly beside her.

Catherine thought about their second date and the fight she had told Ward about. He had smiled at the story, like he couldn’t imagine John doing anything else. She thought about Sarah and how there might be a time when she would be in trouble, when neither of them would be there and she’d need someone to stick up for her. Someone who wouldn’t just walk past like everyone else.

The day after Ward’s visit Catherine had taken the brown envelope with their divorce papers out of her handbag. She had been carrying it round with her for almost a week. Her solicitor had been right. The best thing to do was just post it. Once it was done it was done. The horse would have bolted and things would take on a life of their own. So why hadn’t she? After O’Neill disappeared from the café she had addressed the envelope with the details of the flat in Stranmillis.

Now she had put it into one of the kitchen drawers. If moving into the middle of the bed meant acceptance, then perhaps this was a stay of execution. She thought about John. Her John. Perhaps Ward was right. Maybe he did need her help, after all.

At 3 a.m. O’Neill sat in Musgrave Street, hunched over the case-file for Laganview.

The nightshift had its advantages. Wilson wasn’t in the station and he didn’t have to worry about any unexpected visits. ‘How are things going? What about this? What about that?’ They were loaded questions. The only right answer was that he was getting closer. O’Neill told it to Wilson but he also told it to himself. He had to. He was fighting Murphy’s Law. The one that says it’s the drunk driver who always walks away from a car crash. That says it may be the tenth time he beat her, but she’ll still take him back. That says a good peeler will always get fucked on a case no one gives a shit about.

O’Neill had the Laganview file memorized. They had no ID on the victim, no suspects and no forensics. He knew there must be something he wasn’t seeing, a detail, something he’d overlooked, an angle that hadn’t been considered.

Both the physical evidence and the pathology report had told him nothing he didn’t know the morning they found the body. Puslawski had checked out. The foreman, Tony Burke, was dodgy but it didn’t make him a murderer. O’Neill knew that people lied to the police for all kinds of reasons. Ward had told him he would look into the Spender angle. ‘It’s a while since I’ve had a jaunt down to Cultra.’ Meanwhile, O’Neill had compiled a list of the great and the good of the Belfast drug scene. He was looking for mid-level guys, the boys who ran things. They’d be involved, but high enough up not to directly handle any product. The list stretched to 146 names. And that was only the people the police knew about. Any one of them could have done the boy at Laganview.

Uniform had come up with nothing either. They’d spent two days questioning every tracksuited teenager in East Belfast. The kids laughed at them, knowing the police had nothing. They started owning up, like it was some kind of game.

‘I done him.’

‘No, I did.’

‘No, it was me.’

O’Neill thought back to his uniform days in North Belfast. The New Lodge. The Oldpark. The Ballysillan. You’d climb out of the wagon to a row of ‘fuck you’ stares from fourteen year olds. The rest of his patrol hated them – ‘fucking wee hoods’, ‘a bunch of ball bags’. O’Neill didn’t mind. After a year he got to know the faces and some of the names. He would give them a slagging-off – ‘Hey McCrory, you still not got laid yet?’ He’d pick the smallest in the group – ‘Big lad, you know fags stunt your growth.’ Or ask them all – ‘Where’s the birds tonight then? Is this a social club for fruits? Or are yous an out-of-work boyband?’ They would laugh and call him a wanker as soon as he was out of earshot.