The Final Silence Read Free Page B

ached from the thin cushion on the plastic chair, the year-old injuries to his shoulder and side nagging at him. The boardroom’s storage heater wheezed and clanked. The yellowed vertical blinds over the windows swayed in the air currents.
    The lawyer the Police Federation had retained on his behalf sat across the table, running the tip of a pen down the page, his lips moving as he read. Fluorescent light reflected in bright spots on his scalp. Adrian Orr, his name was, and Lennon had seen far too much of him over the last year.
    Orr had made a decent fist of things, but still Lennon found the heat of anger building every time he saw him. He knew he was lucky to have held onto his job this long, that if not for Orr he would have been cut adrift from the force months ago, but still.
    For the first few meetings, Lennon had made an effort, tidied himself up, put on a suit. Now he didn’t bother. Jeans and a shirt were fine for these dull encounters. He hadn’t visited a barber for almost nine months, his dirty-fair hair hanging below his collar and over his eyes. Grey strands had worked their way in. Susan had given up telling him to get it cut. Besides, his daughter Ellen said she liked it.
    ‘Aren’t we done yet?’ Lennon asked.
    ‘Mm?’ Orr looked up from the page.
    ‘Are we nearly finished?’
    ‘Give me a couple more minutes. Just going over these last few notes from the Ombudsman.’
    A heavy ache climbed from the back of Lennon’s neck into his skull. The back pain would follow soon. He rolled his dry tongue around his mouth, thought of the bottle of water on the passenger seat of his car, and the strip of painkillers in the glovebox. He exhaled, an ostentatious sigh he regretted even before his chest had emptied.
    Orr looked up again.
    ‘Please, Jack, settle yourself and let me read. The sooner I get through this the sooner you can go home.’
    The thought of apologising flitted through Lennon’s mind, but the ugly balloon of pride that remained at his core wouldn’t allow it. He shifted in the chair, buttock-to-buttock, then suppressed a grimace at the pain.
    Orr set his pen down, folded his hands atop the page, and readied himself to speak as if he were delivering a speech to the Assembly up in Stormont.
    ‘You’re not going to get a medical pension, I can tell you that now.’
    ‘Fuck,’ Lennon said.
    Orr bristled. ‘I told you before, Jack, I don’t like that kind of language. There’s no call for it.’
    ‘Yes there bloody is,’ Lennon said.
    ‘You shot and killed a fellow officer—’
    ‘Who was shooting at me. He’d have killed me and the girl if I hadn’t—’
    ‘You shot a cop.’ Orr’s cheeks reddened when he realised his voice had risen to a near shout. He took a breath before continuing. ‘You helped a murder suspect flee the country. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances were. Gandhi and Mother Teresa couldn’t talk them into giving you a pension now.’
    For the last year and three months, the Ombudsman, the Policing Board and Lennon’s own superiors had been trying to find some way to sweep away the mess he’d made. Three times he’d been up in front of the misconduct panel at the PSNI headquarters on Knock Road, going over the events again and again for the Assistant Chief Constable. Orr and the Police Federation had done their best to fight his corner, but their best had achieved little.
    The incident had been over a Ukrainian girl called Galya Petrova. She’d been trafficked in to work in a brothel west of the city, but she’d escaped, killing one of her captors in the process. She wouldn’t have lived another day if Lennon hadn’t got her to the airport that cold morning. She almost didn’t make it. He had taken three bullets for her while she fled.
    A young sergeant named Connolly had pulled the trigger after ten thousand pounds had been transferred into his bank account. Lennon had left his colleague’s wife a widow and his twin babies fatherless. He