A Box Full of Darkness (Wilson Book 5) by Fee Derek Page B

finally, there would have been investigating officers who would search for evidence of the crime. All that activity, and whatever investigation was carried out in the weeks after, had been distilled into the small buff folder that was sitting on his desk in the wooden hut in Dunmurry.  If his job was to decide whether a proper investigation had been carried out, he could have concluded by lunchtime that the victims and their families had been badly served by the RUC. Maybe Sinclair would be satisfied with that conclusion but Wilson knew that, if he were a member of either the Mallon or Lafferty families, he would only be satisfied when he knew why two young men were gunned down, and who had perpetrated the killings.  As he walked along the road, he noticed movement of the curtains on more than one house. He reckoned that the police were not welcome here.
    ‘Strange there’s no one around,’ Jackson said.
    Wilson kept walking. ‘They know we’re here and they probably guessed that we’re police so they’re watching but not engaging. Any idea if the Mallons or Laffertys still live in the area?’
    Jackson shrugged. ‘No idea, sir.’
    ‘Then let’s find out, shall we?’ Wilson said turning and retracing his steps. ‘Also let’s find out where the injured lads are at the moment. I’ll want to interview everyone who was around that evening. Get on to ballistics, there’s no report in the folder of a ballistics examination. See if there ever was one. And if there was, I want a copy of it.’
    ‘If there was one,’ Jackson said falling into step beside Wilson, ‘it would have been in the file.’
    ‘So there mustn’t have been an autopsy either, because the report would have been in the file. And what about the witness statements? None must have been taken because they would have been in the file as well. ‘
    ‘If you say so, sir.’
    ‘Oh but I do say so, sergeant.’ They had almost reached Beechmount Avenue. As they turned the corner Wilson saw that there were a lot more people on the street and he noticed a group of four men standing in front of a four-storey red-bricked building that looked like it contained apartments. The men were staring in his direction, and they didn’t look friendly. Wilson turned to face Jackson. ‘In your rather limited experience of criminal investigation, would you say that the file on the murders of Cormac Mallon and Sean Lafferty were somewhat incomplete?’
    ‘I’m not in a position to speculate,’ Jackson said.
    ‘No speculation required, sergeant. At first glance I would have said that the investigation was shoddy but right now I’m beginning to wonder if this particular file has been doctored. Papers that should have automatically found their way into a file on a murder are missing. We may have to assume that given the more than forty-year gap that we’re going to have a job putting the file together properly. But that’s exactly what we’re going to do. ‘
    ‘Yes, sir,’ Jackson said without enthusiasm.
    ‘I’m going to head into town,’ Wilson said. ‘You take the car back to Dunmurry. I want those addresses by tomorrow morning; if the parents are dead I want the addresses of the siblings. And I certainly want to speak to the two men who were injured. Got it?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    Wilson started to walk down Beechmount Avenue in the direction of the city centre.  He didn’t have to turn around to know that Jackson’s eyes were boring into his back. He could almost feel them. There were two aspects to his new post. One was that he had been handed a case that was peculiar in the extreme. He was going to have to investigate a cold case with the bare minimum of evidence from the time. The second aspect that worried him was who had selected the members of the “task force”?
    As soon as Wilson was out of sight, Jackson removed his mobile from his pocket, brought up his contacts and pressed call. He reported on the afternoon excursion.
    ‘You were told