A Box Full of Darkness (Wilson Book 5) Read online

  ‘Understood,’ Wilson stood up . The office two doors down was the one with the metal desk and the crap chair. Welcome to Purgatory, maybe the beat in Crossmaglen would begin to look attractive as time went by.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wilson opened the door and looked around the small room. He smiled. Now he knew he’d been properly screwed. Jennings had prepared his revenge well. He took a closer look at his new surroundings. The room was sparsely furnished with a small metal filing cabinet against one wall, a dated metal desk on which a computer sat, the pre-ergonomic chair and one visitor’s chair. At least there was a single window that looked out onto the back wall of another building in the complex. If he ever got bored, he could find relief in counting the red brick on the wall just beyond his window. In the centre of the desk there was a small black box file he assumed contained the papers relating to the crime he was about to investigate. Royally screwed, he thought as he moved behind the desk. Jennings’ hand was undoubtedly there somewhere, but even he would have to use a lot of influence to have him sidelined like this. There were so many options open to him. Why bury him investigating a forty-two-year-old murder? If there was a reason, he’d discover it soon enough. He moved behind the desk and sat down. It wasn’t in his nature to be morose or depressed. When he played rugby, he’d often been on the losing side but he kept going until the end of the game. Now, when things were going against him he would have to find the resilience that used to be second nature to him. He looked at the label on the box file. It was a simple handwritten white label inscribed with the word ‘Cormac Mallon and Sean Lafferty – Belfast, 1974’. He opened the lid of the box and looked inside. There was a single buff-coloured file. He took it out and pushed the box file away. If this was a record into the death of two men, it was something of a joke. A murder book was generally several hundred pages and for a difficult case could run to more than a thousand. The file before him contained no more than thirty pages. He ran quickly through the contents. There were a number of statements but no photographs of the scene. There was a one-page report of the autopsy but no photographs of the corpses either at the scene or at the autopsy. He settled back in his chair and began to read the file.

  Half an hour later he had read the contents of the file twice. If the RUC had intended to investigate the murders of two young men, they had failed miserably. It wasn’t just a case of incompetence; it was also sloppy police work and a flagrant disregard for procedures. He opened the drawer in the desk and found an empty notebook and a couple of pens with the logo of a garage on them. He opened the notebook and began to set out his strategy for investigating the deaths of Cormac Mallon and Sean Lafferty. It was forty-two years since the crime had been committed. Little or no evidence had been collected and the murders had received scant investigation. The task force, if you could call him and Jackson by that name, certainly had their work cut out. Both of the young men had been seventeen which meant that their parents would have been in their thirties or forties at the time of their deaths. That would mean that they would now be in their early seventies or even eighties if they were still alive and if they were still living in the Province. That would be his starting point. He had just commenced writing in the notebook when there was a knock on the door. ‘Come in.’

  Detective Sergeant Simon Jackson entered and stood at attention in front of Wilson’s desk. ‘I was wondering what you want me to do,’ Jackson said.

  ‘For God’s, sake, stand at ease, sergeant. I’m not one of those people who stand on ceremony.’

  ‘Sorry, sir, it’s just force of habit.’

  Well lose it, Wilson thought but didn’t say. ‘I’ve just read the file and quite honestly I’m appalled at the way the investigation was carried out.’

  ‘It’s par for the course,’ Jackson said relaxing slightly but still maintaining the military bearing.

  ‘Where did you work before here, sergeant?’

  ‘The Legacy Support Unit, that’s where I met the boss.’

  ‘And before that?’

  Jackson hesitated just perceptibly. ‘Special Branch.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘British Army.’ No hesitation.

  ‘You have a very interesting career trajectory, sergeant.’ Wilson was wondering what a former Special Branch officer was doing working as an investigator. And even more interesting what was a former Special Branch officer doing working with him?

  ‘I go where I’m told, sir.’

  Wilson leaned back in his chair and only just regained his balance in order to stop the chair toppling over. ‘I started as a simple plod and worked my way up through the ranks. I didn’t have any of those exotic moves.’

  Jackson had taken up the military at-ease stance with both hands behind his back. ‘I wouldn’t use the word “exotic”, sir. Special Branch was no big thing. The work was a little more political, terrorism and the like.’

  And the like, Wilson thought. In the PSNI and the RUC before, the Special Branch were in the force but not of the force. ‘Chief Superintendent Sinclair told me that I might find the task force small beer. I would have thought that the same applied to you. Tricking around with cold cases that mainly involve family liaison doesn’t seem to fit your profile.’

  ‘Like I said, sir, I go where I’m posted,’ said Jackson.

  ‘An admirable approach,’ Wilson said. ‘And an approach much appreciated by the hierarchy. As of right now, I’m telling you to head off for lunch. I’m working out a strategy to investigate the Mallon and Lafferty murders. I want to make a start this afternoon so maybe we could meet back here at 14.00 hours.’

  ‘Sir.’ Jackson whirled in one movement and headed for the door.

  Wilson was waiting to hear the click of his heels but that didn’t happen. He stood up and walked to the window. He started counting the number of bricks in the horizontal rows. It was proving to be an interesting morning to add to what had been an interesting week. There were a long series of questions running through his head and they weren’t about the murders he was supposed to be investigating. There was a kind of twisted logic to his posting to an investigative unit but it was highly unusual to have someone of his level doing the work of an inspector or a chief inspector at most. His sergeant was a former Special Branch officer with no investigative experience. He was well aware that both the Special Branch and the Legacy Unit were being reorganised because of their links with Protestant paramilitaries. Wilson stopped counting the bricks. Perhaps there was more to his new colleagues than met the eye.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It took Wilson and Jackson just over ten minutes on the M1 to cover the four- plus miles between the Dunmurry complex and Beechmount Parade. They stopped their car on Beechmount Avenue and walked fifty metres or so to the junction with Beechmount Parade. Wilson looked along the street. It was typically Victorian with two-storey red-bricked terraced houses on both sides. There were no front gardens and the houses had only a short paved area in front, with a low wall or railing separating them from the footpath. Each house had two windows at ground level on either side of the front door, and two windows on the upper floor. Wilson thought that the street would look pretty much as it had in 1974. The only difference would be the number of motor vehicles that were parked half on the road, and half on the footpath on each side of the road. He doubted very much whether there would have been so many cars on show forty-two years previously. He walked slowly down the road closely followed by Jackson. They had been silent on the trip from Dunmurry, and Wilson had already concluded that their relationship would be a difficult one. He wanted to get a feel for the crime scene. Since no photos had been taken at the time of the crime, he was forced to imagine the scene. The road was off the main thoroughfare and would be the perfect site for an impromptu game of street football. There were only two streetlights on the short road, one at the Beechmount Avenue end and the other at the opposite extremity. As he looked from one side of the narrow road to the other, he imagined the gam
e in progress and the players cowering as a hail of bullets came in their direction. Since most of the players would have been young men living on the street, he could see in his mind’s eye the people tumbling out of their terraced houses directly into a scene of carnage. Four young men had been shot, two dead, more or less instantly, while the other two were rushed to hospital with injuries that although not life-threatening, were serious enough. There would have been ambulances and police and bloody mayhem. And 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 to be his shadow,’ Sinclair shouted. “He’s not to be allowed ramble around on his own. We need to control every direction he goes in.’

  ‘Easier said than done, sir,’ Jackson said. “You knew he was pretty sharp. If we stick too close and push too hard in one direction, he’s going to smell a rat.’

  ‘So, where’s he off to now?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Fuck.’ The line went dead.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wilson was sitting in the snug at the Crown enjoying a pint of Guinness and awaiting the arrival of his “new best friend”. At five thirty exactly, Jock McDevitt pushed open the door of the snug and sat down across from Wilson.

  ‘I see you started without me,’ said McDevitt as he rang the bell that alerted the barman that a customer required serving. ‘I had to put today’s happenings in Court No 1 to bed before I could allow myself the consolation of a drink.’

  ‘Most unjournalistlike of you,’ Wilson laughed. ‘I thought you guys were permanently on the booze.’

  ‘Pint of Guinness, please,’ McDevitt said when the barman stuck his head into the snug. He turned to Wilson. ‘Not old Jock.’

  ‘So how did Kate do in court today?’

  ‘It’s moving in a logical direction,’ said McDevitt as he took the drink from the barman and took a long draught. ‘Gold is submerging the jury with a mountain of evidence showing that Cummerford is a serial killer. Your partner doesn’t appear worried by the guilty or not guilty issue. She’s continuing the line of questioning the police cock-up in the Francis McComber case, and the issue of her client’s mental state. I can see a plea of “guilty when the balance of her mind was disturbed by her mother’s terrible death and the refusal of the police to bring the killers to justice”. It might just work.’

  ‘In which case, Maggie Cummerford will be looking at a much reduced sentence.’ Wilson raised his glass in a toast.

  ‘Which would be a success for the brilliant Miss McCann,’ said McDevitt touching his glass. ‘But all this you could have learned from your partner this evening,’ McDevitt looked directly into Wilson’s eyes, and although he didn’t ask a question, it hung in the air.

  Wilson sighed. ‘Kate and I are on a “break” as they call it.’

  ‘So, there really was trouble in paradise? Something to do with Cummerford?’

  Wilson took a slug of his Guinness. ‘No, it’s personal. And I don’t want the whole world and his friend to know.’

  ‘So, fuck off McDevitt.’ He pressed the bell and ordered two more pints.

  ‘You got it in one.’ Wilson finished his drink.

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Did I hear right? You, Detective Superintendent Ian Wilson, needs the help of a lowly journalist on Northern Ireland’s leading rag.’

  ‘It’s not a joke.’ Wilson handed his empty glass to the barman and took a fresh pint. ‘I’ve started work in what’s loosely called a “task force” and I’m working on a specific case.’ He put up his hand. ‘Don’t ask me why. It’s just what it is. It’s a double murder that was committed in Belfast in 1974. The file is a heap of shit. On the face of it, it looks like a sectarian assassination of two young men playing football over near the Divis Flats.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I’ve never seen a file so lacking in detail. It bothers the policeman in me.’

  ‘And how can I help?’

  ‘I need everything that the Chronicle published at the time.’ Wilson toasted and then drank.

  McDevitt’s brow furrowed. ‘It probably wasn’t much. That kind of event was commonplace back then. It mightn’t even have made the front page, and even if it did, it would have been a fleeting vi
sit.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how small the articles are, make me a copy.’

  “And you’ll return the favour?’

  ‘Of course, you’re my new best friend and best friends help each other out.’

  ‘I’ve got news for you, pal, nobody gives a shit for what happened forty odd years ago. That’s ancient history as far as the citizens of this Province are concerned. I’ve been nosing around asking questions about Sammy Rice and I’m getting some strange reactions. It’s like Sammy has ceased to exist, which makes me believe that he really has ceased to exist. I need to know what you guys think.’

  ‘I’m no longer in the loop on that. I don’t even know who’s going to take over this new serious crime squad. Have you heard anything?’

  ‘The bush telegraph is quiet on that one. But back to Sammy. Gerry McGreary is busy encroaching into Sammy’s business and that couldn’t happen if he expected Sammy back sometime soon. You may be dropping the ball on the present but a territorial takeover without the associated crop of dead bodies would be a new feature of the Belfast crime landscape. Perhaps our criminals are maturing.’

  Wilson started to laugh. ‘I wouldn’t bet on that one.’

  ‘I like strange happenings and so does my editor. Strange happenings sell newspapers.’

  ‘Personally, I’m not very keen on strange happenings.’ Wilson was thinking about the past week. There had been more than one strange happening. ‘I’ll ask around and if I hear anything I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, the two murdered men’s names are Cormac Mallon and Sean Lafferty, shot dead in 1974.’

  McDevitt removed a small notebook from his pocket and made a big deal of writing the names. ‘Where do I sent the copies?’

  Wilson took the notebook and pen from McDevitt’s hand. ‘This is my private email. Scan them and send them to me. Also if you have time, could you look for similar shootings around the same period?’