Dark Dawn (25 page)

‘You lucky fucker.’

‘Aye?’ Petesy looked down at his legs. ‘Do you think so?’

Marty didn’t know what to say. He glanced round the ward, anything to avoid Petesy’s eyes. He reached into the bag at his feet.

‘I’ve brought you some presents. Thought they might cheer you up.’ He pulled three books out of the bag and showed them to Petesy. ‘Three history ones. No pictures. Especially for smart cunts, these ones. Eh? Mr Queen’s fucking University.’

Petesy smiled as Marty set the books on the bedside cabinet.

‘Where did you get them?’

‘Waterstones in the town. I tell you what, nicking stuff there’s a total piece of piss. No one on the door. Just some old boy in a grey cardigan behind the till. Almost made me want to take up reading.’

‘What are they about?’

‘Ah, I don’t know. Revolutions or something. I figured I’d go for big ones. Size matters, you know. Least that’s what the birds keep telling me.’

Petesy smiled again. Marty tried to ignore the two large casts that floated in front of his face.

‘So what about the nurses then? That one at the desk’s a bit of a boot. Are there any fit ones? Have you had a bed bath yet? I heard they sometimes can give you a wee . . .’

Marty whistled in and out. Petesy laughed.

‘What do you think
you
are doing here, Martin Toner?’

Petesy’s granny stood at the end of the bed, her mouth pursed, her face scowling. She had been looking for a row for days now. Marty somehow got the feeling he was her big chance.

‘I hope you’re happy with yourself. This is all your fault. It should be you lying there, you frigging waster. Hung up like some bit of dirty washing.’

Marty didn’t know what to say. There was nothing he could say. She was only saying what he had been thinking, ever since Petesy got done.

‘Our Peter would never have gotten into any of this if it wasn’t for you. Go on, take yourself off. If I ever see you anywhere near our Peter again . . .’

Marty was going to tell the old woman to go fuck herself. What the fuck did she know about anything? He caught his tongue though. Petesy loved his granny and he could see how upset she was. She needed someone to blame. But deep down he knew she was right. Petesy
would
never have had the balls if it hadn’t been for him. Yeah. It should have been him. He was the one that deserved it, not Petesy.

Marty looked at his mate, lying in the white hospital bed. He stood up and walked past the old woman. It
was
his fault. The whole thing. He turned and marched out of the ward. Round the corner he sniffed and rubbed his sleeve under his nose, fighting back the tears.

In the corridor Marty pushed between two men in suits. He didn’t look up, focusing all his energy on not crying. The nurse glared at him again as he passed her station.

‘Fuck you,’ Marty mumbled, walking on, not looking up.

The nurse felt smug, glad that she had been right about him. Marty took the stairs down to the main doors and walked out of the hospital. He headed down the Grosvenor Road, walking under the stern gaze of a wrought-iron statue of Queen Victoria. The plump woman stared pitilessly out over his head, her eyes fixed on the horizon in the small corner of her once-mighty empire.

***

O’Neill and Ward approached Peter Kennedy’s bed. They looked down at the two legs, covered in white plaster. The kid had had the shit beaten out of him. There was no other way to describe it. O’Neill knew they were wee bastards, a bunch of hoods. He didn’t think they deserved this though. You wouldn’t do it to an animal.

An old woman had settled herself near the head of the bed. She looked up at the two men, clocking them instantly for who and what they were.

‘What do yous want?’ she demanded.

O’Neill introduced himself and Ward. Petesy’s granny remained stone-faced, barely masking her contempt.

‘We need to talk to Peter,’ he told her.

‘You need? Where were you three nights ago, when
he
needed you?’

O’Neill had to change tack, bypass the old woman, talk to the boy. The kid was on morphine and would be pretty high. He could distract him, make him forget they were peelers, if only for a minute or two.

He caught sight of
FourFourTwo.
It had a picture of the Liverpool midfielder Steven Gerrard on the front cover.

‘Please don’t tell me you are a Liverpool fan.’

The boy looked up. ‘Man U, actually.’

‘Even worse. Beckham, Giggs, that crowd? Posers, the lot of them. Spend half their lives combing their hair. And the Nevilles? Don’t get me started. Talk about Dumb and Dumber.’

‘Aye. So who is your team?’ the boy shot back.

‘Everton. A real football team. No primadonnas or wannabe fashion models.’

‘Everton. Are they First Division? What’s the last thing they won?’

‘FA Cup, 1995.’

Petesy laughed.

‘FA Cup? Try the treble. League title, FA Cup and the Champions League.
That’s
a real football team.’

The grandmother was shrewd and saw what was happening, where the cop was trying to lead him.

‘I don’t care what you know about football,’ she snapped at O’Neill. ‘He’s got nothing to say to you.’

O’Neill turned to the boy. ‘Is that right, Peter?’

The boy looked round the room. The two men across the ward were pretending not to be interested. Petesy had felt their stares for two days though. He knew they hated him. If he spoke to the peelers, people would find out. Not only would he be drug-dealing scum, he’d be a tout as well. He saw the expression on his grandmother’s face. She was right. Where were the peelers two nights ago? And they wouldn’t be there if Molloy and Tierney came for him again. He remembered the pain, lying there waiting for the ambulance, his legs on fire, wishing someone would just cut them off. That was what he needed to remember. The pain, only the pain.

He pinned his gaze to the two white casts, hanging up in front of him.

‘I’ve nothing to say to yous.’

O’Neill stared at the bed. The kid was right. He didn’t have anything to say. Even if he knew who did it, which he probably didn’t, he couldn’t say. There wasn’t a single peeler lived in the Markets or any of the areas where these punishment beatings happened. The cops didn’t have to leave their house looking over their shoulder, worrying about more of the same. The only thing more dangerous than being a drug dealer was being a tout. O’Neill left his business card on the end of the bed. If Peter changed his mind . . .

As they walked down the corridor O’Neill remember the kid in the white Kappa top, the one who’d brushed past him. He stopped at the nurse’s station.

‘How’s the hardest-working nurse in the hospital?’

The nurse frowned at him. She’d heard it all before and was having none of it. O’Neill read the signs and went for the easy route, producing his warrant card. The nurse relaxed a little, feeling the unspoken bond between the two professions. O’Neill asked about the tracksuit, whether he had been visiting the boy who’d had his knees done. The woman glanced from side to side. They weren’t allowed to talk about patients. Strict hospital rules. She gave an almost imperceptible nod of agreement before announcing for her colleague four feet away, ‘I’m sorry. We’re not allowed to discuss anything to do with patients.’

‘I understand completely,’ O’Neill said politely. ‘Thanks.’

The two men turned and headed for the lift. It took them to the ground floor of the RVH and back on to the street again.

Lynch walked along Cromac Street on his way into town. It was drizzling and he moved quickly along the pavement, his head down and collar up.

He had slept for twelve hours after being out on the job with Molloy, dozing off as he replayed the night in his head. The sounds and smells became a form of mood music: the car, the orange street lamps, the sound of Molloy’s breath, the weight of the Glock. As Lynch relived each sensation, his eyes began to grow heavy and sleep came and took him. A pressure valve had been released. He didn’t take any tablets. He didn’t need to. It was the job that had done it. Lynch knew it. Walking along Cromac Street in the rain, he knew it. Just being there, being involved. It had been enough.

A silver Mercedes slowed and pulled in alongside Lynch. Its tinted rear window slid down and Gerry McCann’s voice came out of the back seat.

‘Joe. Come on in out of the rain. I need a word with you.’

Lynch looked up and down the street before ducking into the car. The Mercedes pulled out quietly into the morning traffic. The car was stopped at traffic-lights halfway down Victoria Street. The rumble of a building site came through the tinted glass windows. McCann pointed to his left.

‘Look at the state of that, would you? Another frigging shopping centre. I swear, these guys are better at flattening this city than we ever were.’

Lynch looked at a pair of steel cranes rising high over the city skyline.

‘Molloy told me you were good the other night. Said he reckons you might have what it takes.’ McCann laughed at the idea. Molloy, still in his twenties, providing a reference for Joe Lynch. ‘These kids, Joe. No sense of history. They think the world didn’t exist before they strode on to the scene and took centre stage.’

McCann knew it would work in Molloy’s favour, not knowing too much about who he was partnering. He was a good worker, reliable, and remorseless when he needed to be. Sometimes a bit of ignorance could be bliss.

McCann tossed a brown envelope on Lynch’s lap. He picked it up, not needing to open it.

‘Here. That’s five hundred quid. You’ve earned it. Take that wee girl out for a drink. Get yourself laid. I’m sure it’s been a while.’

Lynch held the envelope in his hand, feeling its weight. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want cars slowing at kerbs beside him. He didn’t want heads turning when he walked into a bar. He didn’t want people watching their words when they spoke to him. And he didn’t want the likes of Molloy thinking they were on the same side. He knew though that giving it back would provoke more hassle than it was worth.

Outside the car, people hurried along Victoria Street under umbrellas, trying not to get wet.

‘I have a proposition for you, Joe. Another job. This one’s a little more, how would you say, technical. Needs more than a bit of taxi driving. Needs a man with some subtlety, some patience, some experience.’

Lynch stayed silent, trying to plot his way out of the car and whatever it was McCann was thinking up for him.

‘Twenty grand. That’s what it’s paying.’

It was a hit. Lynch knew straight away. He waited though, wanting to hear McCann say it. The other man paused, allowing the money to hang in the air for a while, allowing Lynch to imagine what he’d do with it, the doors it would open, the possibilities. After ten seconds McCann spoke.

‘Could you kill a peeler?’

McCann asked the question like you might ask for a light. He turned to Lynch, reassured by the lack of reaction that he’d picked the right man. Lynch wasn’t Molloy, he wasn’t like anyone in the crew. They were all keen, but they were young. They wanted to prove to the world how hard they were, how ruthless. Lynch knew the lie of the land though. He could do something and shut up about it. He didn’t need to brag or try and make a name for himself. Discretion. Professionalism. That was it. He was a professional.

‘What has he done?’ Lynch asked.

‘You don’t need to worry about that.’

McCann had barely said the words when he realized it wouldn’t work with Lynch. He wasn’t some twenty-one year old with a high opinion of himself. He couldn’t just be given an order and expected to blindly follow it.

‘He’s one of Jack Ward’s. He’s messing with my business, lifting people left, right and centre. We’ve become an itch he can’t scratch. Nights off he’s camped outside The George. He’s sniffing round Mint. Asking people questions – the kind of people that don’t want to be asked questions. He’s not going to go away on his own. So we’re going to help him go away.’

Lynch could tell from McCann’s voice that this was a done deal, no longer a question of ‘if’ but rather ‘how’. The peeler was already dead, he just didn’t know it. The clock had started.

McCann resumed his sales pitch. ‘This is your out, Lynch. One last job. A one-time deal. Twenty grand – think what you could do with that. A man could start over, with that amount of money. Head off to the sun. Maybe even take a girl and her wee one away with him. If he was inclined that way.’

Lynch looked at the rain bouncing off the grey Belfast pavements.

‘Picture it. Walking along some Spanish promenade. A wee breeze off the sea, the sunshine. No one knows who you are, no one cares.’

Lynch pictured Marie-Therese in a summer dress and a big straw hat, pushing the buggy in front of her. He imagined them stopping at an ice-cream joint, the kind with wicker chairs out front. A cold beer for him, an ice cream for her. The sun would have just started to dip.

‘Who is he?’

‘It’s a soft target. We have an address and all. He lives alone, in a flat off the Stranmillis Road.’

McCann passed Lynch a photograph. It was one of the peelers who had followed him. The man looked to be in his late thirties. He was walking through Castlecourt shopping centre and the shot had been taken as he turned his head to the right.

‘What’s the name?’ Lynch asked.

‘O’Neill.’

‘Killing a peeler brings a lot of heat. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.’

‘You let
me
worry about that.’

‘What about Stormont? The Peace Process? The Unionists will say this is business as usual, that nothing’s changed. They’ll want to bring the whole thing down. Get the Brits back on the streets.’

McCann smiled ruefully.

‘You’ve been away too long, Joe. Or maybe you read too many books in prison. United Ireland? Great Britain? It doesn’t matter any more. No matter who you vote for, the government still gets in. These days, the only countries that matter are Colombia and Afghanistan. It’s about product, not politics. Politics is dead. The only kind of green that people round here care about is in that envelope I just tossed you.’