Dark Dawn by Matt McGuire Page B

to O’Neill next door in CID. He was having a tough time of it. If the kid was in the drug scene there was no way he wouldn’t have some kind of previous. These kids didn’t have records, they had rap sheets. O’Neill had sent the prints down to the
Garda
in Dublin, in case the boy was from the South and had been dumped in Belfast. Again, it came back a blank.
    Ward wondered if this was the perfect crime. He snorted, reminding himself that you only read about such things in dodgy crime books. And anyway, everyone knew the perfect crime was, by definition, the one that no one ever knew about.
    Ward tried to think what the play was. O’Neill had done everything right and he was still drowning. It wasn’t his fault though. He’d been sent into choppy waters with a lead weight tied round his ankle.
    Ward looked up to see the Chief Inspector stride past his door, a man happy in his work. Wilson rarely came to the second floor, but he’d made the trip on Tuesday, Wednesday and now, again, on Thursday. He was riding the shit out of O’Neill. Keeping the pressure on. Ward thought he might be trying to get O’Neill to take himself off Laganview. To throw in the towel. It would make the Review Boards a walk in the park, a mere formality. It would prove O’Neill couldn’t hack it in plain clothes.
    He heard Wilson from along the corridor, interrogating O’Neill.
    ‘Detective, we’ve given you every resource this station has to offer and you’re telling me you still don’t even have a name for the victim?’
    O’Neill didn’t answer.
    ‘What’s your investigative strategy?’
    O’Neill outlined what they’d done so far.
    ‘Well, that hasn’t worked, so what will you do next? And what are you going to do after that? And what will you do
then
?’
    You. You. You. He was putting the whole thing on O’Neill, cranking up the heat, making it
his
job and his job alone.
    Ward thought about going in, but crossing the Chief Inspector wasn’t going to help anyone. He remembered when Wilson had first come over to Musgrave Street. Within six months he had the Chief Constable visiting the station. Wilson chaperoned him round, talking about crime rates, how they were down 5 per cent across the whole of B Division.
    Wilson might be Chief Inspector, but he wasn’t half the peeler that O’Neill was. Or could be, given half a chance. DC Kearney had told him a story about being out with O’Neill, back when he’d first come over to CID.
    It was assault and robbery. A guy had mugged some old dear in the town and uniform had a suspect, Janty Morgan, whom they wanted to bring in for questioning. O’Neill and Kearney were on their way back from another job when they heard the details over the radio.
    ‘I know him,’ O’Neill said. ‘We’re two minutes away. Let’s swing by and bring him in. I fancy a chat. Catch up on old times.’
    O’Neill knew Morgan from his uniform days in Antrim Road. He explained it to the uniform who handed him over.
    ‘Let’s play a game, Janty,’ O’Neill said, steering the unmarked Mondeo into the Belfast traffic. ‘I feel like a game. What about you?’
    Silence.
    ‘Kearney?’
    ‘Sure,’ Kearney answered, playing along, though he’d no idea where O’Neill was going with it.
    In the back, the eighteen year old stared out the window. He was giving nothing away, playing it cool. Not easy with your hands cuffed behind your back. Janty had been on the PSNI radar since he was thirteen. He had what they called pedigree – a scumbag from a long line of scumbags. The da was a scumbag, the brother was a scumbag. Now it was Janty’s turn.
    O’Neill shouted over his shoulder, ‘Hey, Janty. You like games. Don’t you, big lad?’
    In the back Janty mouthed to himself, ‘Fucking peelers.’
    ‘OK. It’s
I spy
today. Janty, you ready in the back there?’
    No reaction.
    ‘I spy,’ O’Neill began, ‘with my little eye, something beginning with P.’
    Kearney roused some fake enthusiasm.