by Chris Ryan
Danny smiled. ‘Ah, c’mon, Frank.’
Frank shrugged. ‘What more can I say, Danny boy? Go ahead and give it a crack.’ He put his feet back on the desk. ‘They’re your bollocks.’
‘So if she’s such a fucking wonder woman, what’s she doing chasing drugs with the rest of us?’
Frank took a sip from his coffee, then made a sour face. He shrugged and downed the rest of it anyway. ‘Word is,’ he continued, ‘she had a kid. Off the rails. Junkie. Usual story. Went missing three years ago. She transferred to our unit and since then she’s been like a dog with a fucking bone. No personal life, no nothing. On the job 24/7.’ He smiled. ‘Which wouldn’t leave a lot of time for you, Danny boy, now would it?’
Danny sniffed. ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘you know what they say. Don’t dip your pen in the company inkwell.’
‘You’re a fast learner,’ said Frank. He looked at his colleague’s desk. ‘You finished that report yet, lad?’
Danny shook his head, then turned back to his computer and continued his slow, two-fingered typing.
Kids, Frank Maloney thought to himself. Fucking useless, the lot of them. No wonder the country’s gone to the dogs.
Siobhan Byrne had important things on her mind.
Like meeting with Kieran.
Her tout looked bad. Really bad. He stood across the street from the safe house, leaning against a tree and chain-smoking the thin roll-ups that lasted a couple of minutes before he had to roll another. Siobhan didn’t acknowledge him as she entered the house. She knew he’d walk through the door in his own time – when he could be sure there was no one watching.
And he did. The smell of his cigarettes entered with him as he gave Siobhan a surly look.
‘C’mon now, Kieran,’ she said with a mocking little lilt to her voice. ‘Can we not just be friends?’ And then, when he didn’t reply: ‘You look like shit.’
‘Didn’t sleep well.’
‘Little Jackie keeping you up?’
Kieran shook his head. ‘Let’s just say I had a bit of knees-up with an old friend.’ He put his hand in his back pocket and fished out a scrap of paper, which he handed to Siobhan without looking her in the eye. Siobhan examined it. An address in the west of the city.
‘What’s this?’
Her tout started to roll another ciggy. Siobhan waited while he licked the skin, removed a packet of Swan Vestas from his pocket and lit up. ‘A lock-up,’ he said once he had taken a deep drag. ‘One of my uncle’s. A new one. You’ll find stuff there.’
‘What sort of stuff, Kieran?’
Kieran shrugged. ‘You know. Guns, money, a bit of product . . .’
Siobhan nodded. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now that wasn’t really so difficult, was it?’
The tout finished his cigarette. ‘So,’ he said, avoiding Siobhan’s eye, ‘are we good now?’
Siobhan blinked. ‘Are we what?’
‘I’ve given you good stuff on Cormac. Debt paid.’
She started to laugh.
‘What’s so fucking funny? Will you not stop laughing, woman?’
‘I’m sorry, Kieran. It’s just . . . Did you really think that would be enough to get me out of your hair? You and me are going to be having these little get-togethers until your uncle is behind bars. You start relaxing, Kieran, and you’ll be joining him.’ She waved the piece of paper in his face. ‘This is all right, Kieran, but it’s just a start. You’d better keep these tidbits coming.’
‘Jesus, woman. It’s not as easy as that, you know.’
He started rolling another ciggy and Siobhan noticed that his hands were shaking.
‘I didn’t promise you easy, Kieran. Easy doesn’t come into it.’
Kieran looked up, suddenly murderous. Siobhan found her fingers edging towards her concealed firearm. ‘Careful now, Kieran. I’ve floored tougher bastards than you. Don’t go doing anything stupid.’
In the end her tout just spat copiously on the floor.
‘Did you plant the listening device?’
He nodded. ‘Under the football table.’
‘Anything more to tell me?’
‘Yeah. If you didn’t have my balls in a G-clamp, I’d fuck you over so bad you’d be begging me to put you out of your misery.’
‘You’re a charmer, Kieran, I don’t care what anyone says. But actually I was thinking more along the lines of Cormac’s bent police officer. You have any more information on that?’
‘If I did, I’d tell you, wouldn’t I?’
‘Sure, I hope so, Kieran,’ Siobhan told him with an exaggerated sigh. ‘For your own sake, I really hope so.’
It looked like it was going to be a long shift for Dr Sandra Philips at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, but that was nothing new. Every shift was twelve hours long in the intensive care unit. The beds were full and they were turning people away, diverting them to nearby ICUs. In the last hour, they’d had to make the call to divert two road-crash victims to City because they just didn’t have room for them here.
It was always difficult to turn patients away, but doubly so tonight. They’d given the last bed to a comatose junkie from some estate in the north of the city. Didn’t seem quite right that she should get the care when the others couldn’t, but there was nothing Sandra could do about that. Her job wasn’t to judge her patients; it was to make them better, and she’d have her work cut out with this girl. She checked her vital signs. Weak but stable – just. The kid looked like something from a science fiction movie, though, with all the tubes and needles and drips that covered her body.
‘She looks bad.’ Dr Philips looked at the young uniformed scene-of-crime officer who stood at a respectful distance from the bed. ‘I mean,’ the officer continued, ‘face as white as a—’
‘This is the ICU, officer,’ Dr Philips interrupted him. ‘You’ll find that most people here tend not to look like they’ve come back from two weeks on the Costa del Sol. You can do it now, but be quick please.’
The officer nodded and Philips watched as he opened a small plastic box containing his fingerprint kit. She didn’t offer to help as he awkwardly raised one of the patient’s limp hands to take her prints. She was firmly of the opinion that this sort of thing should wait until the patients were out of the ICU. She had to admit, though, that could be a long time for this one. Still, she stood by thin-lipped as the young officer completed his work.
‘Her personal effects?’ the officer asked.
Dr Philips handed him a plastic tray. It contained a single Yale key, a condom, a crushed packet of cigarettes and a photograph. ‘I’ll need to take these,’ he said, producing a see-through evidence bag and dropping them inside. ‘I can return them once they’re properly logged.’
‘Whatever,’ Dr Philips said. ‘I’d like you to leave me alone with my patient now.’
The officer left without saying another word.
Siobhan wouldn’t be walking straight into the lock-up. That would be stupid. Kieran was a tout, and touts were by their very nature untrustworthy little shits. She wanted to be very sure this wasn’t a set-up.
She parked her car – a dented brown Volvo – a good half-mile from the location. She wanted to stake the place out, but a car would be no good for that. Someone sitting in a vehicle by herself for a few hours would stick out. She needed to blend in, and for that reason she had placed a child’s car seat in the back of the car, with a doll wrapped in blankets strapped into it. Siobhan opened up the boot and set up a buggy she had stashed inside. She gently removed the doll from the car seat and strapped it carefully into the buggy. Then she took a bag from the back seat. It was bright pink and padded, the size of a large handbag, the sort of thing every mum carries when she’s out with her baby. But this bag sure as hell didn’t contain any nappies. She shoved it under the buggy, then started to walk. Just another mother, out for a stroll with her kid.
The lock-up was an old garage that belonged to an apartment in a low-rise block on the northern ed
ge of Belfast.
Siobhan entered the block with her buggy and took the lift, which stank of shit, to the top floor. She passed no one. Siobhan knew these buildings from the past, and she knew what she was looking for. She found it soon enough: a fire door. A sign on the door warned that it was alarmed, but she’d have bet her own apartment that the alarm mechanism hadn’t worked for years. She was right. Nothing happened as she pushed it open, checked nobody was there, then carried her buggy up a thin metal staircase on to the roof of the building.
The roof was littered with rubbish – beer cans, plastic bags, a used condom draped over the end of a television aerial like a flag. Siobhan ignored all that while she got her bearings before settling down by the low perimeter wall overlooking the lock-up. She turned off her mobile phone. The ringtone would act like a beacon, and anyway, she didn’t want to be disturbed. Concentration was everything.
It was cold up here. The afternoon sky was overcast and the wind was stronger than it was down on the ground. Siobhan pulled her jacket more tightly round her body and prepared to shiver. She’d give it till nightfall. Any suspicious activity before then, anything to suggest that she was walking into something, and she’d abort. Till then, the only thing to do was watch.
And wait.
It had taken the SOCO ten minutes to get back to the station and ten minutes to scan the prints. Routine stuff. He’d done this enough times to know what he was likely to bring up. The junkie would no doubt have a string of small offences on file. Petty theft, mostly; shoplifting; a bit of soliciting if she’d been desperate. And sure enough, as the computer screen in front of him brought up a match, he saw pretty much what he’d expected. The name was Alice Stevens. He scanned down the criminal record: three counts of shoplifting, two warnings for possession of a prohibited substance. He shrugged, then emptied the contents of the evidence bag on to the table and started typing the details into the computer.
A door opened and another officer walked in. Yvonne Evans was an old-timer. But unlike most of them, she hadn’t been tempted to climb the greasy pole to a cushy office job. She liked to work cases and that made her popular with the younger ones.
The officer nodded at her; he didn’t even complain when she started looking over his shoulder at what he was doing. But he was surprised when she bent over and picked up the photo.
‘Where the hell did you get this?’ she asked.
‘Personal effects of a junkie that just landed in the Royal. Boyfriend OD’d.’ He looked up at her. ‘You OK?’
She didn’t look OK. Her face had gone white.
‘Mind if I keep this?’ she asked.
He frowned. ‘It’s evidence, Yvonne . . .’
‘Favour to me?’
He exhaled heavily. ‘We never had this conversation, right?’
‘Course not.’ She walked promptly out, taking the photo with her.
Siobhan waited and watched.
At about 15.00 hrs a group of kids turned up and started playing football against the line of garages. They gave up pretty soon when it started to spit with rain; Siobhan just stayed where she was. Immobile. Ever watchful. She’d been on enough stake-outs to know that they were made up of long periods of boredom punctuated, if you were lucky, by a few seconds of activity. You couldn’t let your attention wander. You had to stay on it.
A car arrived. The owner climbed out, then opened up the garage three along from Siobhan’s before parking the car inside, locking it up again and disappearing. Siobhan looked at her watch. 16.38 hrs. More drizzle. Her skin was damp. Clammy. She didn’t move. She kept watching.
It was as the sky was getting dark that the rain became heavier. Siobhan grabbed her chance. Rain was a good time to do anything under the radar. It kept people off the streets, meant she could go about her business unobserved. She hurried away from the roof and back down the lift with her buggy, checking that her handgun was safely strapped to her body and slinging the nappy bag over her shoulder.
Back on the ground, she scoped the area around the lock-up once more before approaching it. Nothing. And no street lamp to illuminate her. Just large droplets exploding on the tarmac.
She walked swiftly to the lock-up.
It was sealed with a heavy padlock, but that wouldn’t be a problem. In her nappy bag, Siobhan had a set of picks and a tension wrench that she could have used blindfolded. Less than a minute at the entrance to the garage and the lock clicked. She opened the door and slipped inside with the buggy before closing the door behind her.
It was dark. Siobhan stepped to one side, feeling her way to the right-hand corner. She loosened her handgun from its holster then held it out towards the entrance. She’d give it five minutes. If anyone was following her in, she’d have the advantage.
It took about twenty seconds for her vision to adjust to the darkness, but the only sound was of her own breathing.
The minutes passed. No one came.
From the nappy bag she drew a thin torch. She had covered the lens with a red filter – white light would affect her night vision, whereas red light wouldn’t – and blocked out the edges of the filter with some thick black gaffer tape so that she had a small, highly directional beam. Siobhan loosened her handgun from its holster and then, with the weapon in one hand and the torch resting on top of it in the other, she stepped further into the lock-up, illuminating everything ahead of her with a red glow.
It was a biggish garage, maybe six metres by four, but largely empty. The faint smell of oil in the air suggested it had once housed a car, but if this really was an O’Callaghan lock-up, Siobhan knew they wouldn’t be so stupid as to keep a vehicle here any more. They were too easy to track back to the owner. No, she felt sure that there would be nothing here to link the place with Cormac. He was too cute for that.
There was shelving along the left wall, filled with half-empty pots of paint, a few brushes and a bottle of white spirit. An old bicycle lay on the floor, one wheel detached. And along the back wall, three metal cabinets with dented doors. Siobhan approached them. They were locked, of course, but these cabinets were even easier to pick than the main padlock had been. In next to no time, they were open.
The first cabinet contained money, wads of tens, used. Twenty grand, minimum, Siobhan reckoned. An easy stash to get hold of should anyone need to disappear in a hurry. The second cabinet held weapons and ammo. Two shotguns, expertly sawn off, and a 9 mm Beretta. It was the third cabinet, though, that interested her. Tupperware boxes. Four of them. Filled to the brim with a pure white powder.
Siobhan didn’t need to taste it to know what it was, and she had to fight an urge to take the boxes of heroin and empty them down a drain. But she was in this for the long game, and needed to leave everything untouched. From her bag she removed a small camera that she had modified specially to take pictures using an infrared flash. She quickly snapped the stash, the guns and the money, then relocked the cabinets with her picks. Back home she would carefully write up her notes, detailing where, when and why the pictures were taken. It wouldn’t be enough to bring a charge against anyone, but as corroborating evidence further down the line, it might be worth something . . .
She headed back to the door. One ear against the thin metal told her it was still raining heavily outside. That was good. She secreted her torch and camera in her nappy bag, reholstered the gun and slipped out of the garage. Moments later the padlock was fastened and Siobhan Byrne was pushing her baby back to her car. Not too fast, not too slow.
Doing nothing to draw attention to herself . . .
Back in the car, she strapped the baby into its seat, stashed the buggy, then got the heating going. She was soaked through and shivering and could think of nothing but getting home and getting warm. As she kicked the engine into life and pulled out into the road, she eased her mobile out of her pocket, switched it on and put it to her ear to listen to her messages.
Just one. A woman’s voice, slightly uncertain of itself.
‘Siobhan, this is Yv
onne. You need to call me back as soon as you get this. It’s important.’
She sighed. Yvonne and she went way back. She was a nice girl, but neurotic. Siobhan was cold, wet and not in the mood, but she’d be even less in the mood when she got home, so she dialled her number.
The phone was answered immediately.
‘Yvonne, it’s me.’
‘Siobhan.’ She sounded relieved.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Where are you? Are you with anyone?’
‘No, I’m in the car. Look Yvonne, I’m very—’
‘I’ve just been speaking to a scene-of-crime officer. He’s dealing with a young girl, drug addict. She’s in the Royal now.’
‘And?’
‘He was going through her personal effects.’
‘Yvonne, I’ve had a long day—’
‘Listen to me, Siobhan. She had a photograph on her. Just an old Polaroid. I don’t know how old it is.’
‘Uh-huh . . .’
‘I recognise the girl in the photo, Siobhan. I’d know her anywhere.’
‘Who was it?’
A pause.
And then, with a catch in her voice, Yvonne spoke. ‘It’s Lily,’ she said. ‘It’s your daughter.’
Everything was a blur. The lights of Belfast, the traffic, everything. As Siobhan floored it to Yvonne’s house, her friend’s voice rang in her head. It’s Lily. It’s your daughter . . . She felt sick with apprehension. A small part of her mind hoped Yvonne was mistaken, that the picture she had found wasn’t Lily at all. Ever since her daughter had disappeared she had dreaded receiving any information about her because she knew, in all likelihood, the news would be bad. The worst . . .
But Yvonne wasn’t mistaken. She stood on the doorstep of her two-up two-down, her eyes wide with sympathy as Siobhan stared numbly at the Polaroid.