Dark Dawn

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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.

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