The Nameless Dead by Brian McGilloway

shoved him against the wall, patting him down in the hope that he had secreted some of the drugs on himself, the flushing of the toilet a bluff, but his pockets were empty save for a wad of
bank notes in his trouser pocket.
    I pushed him ahead of me towards the kitchen, where McCready was pulling the other youth, now cuffed, to his feet. McCready held a small plastic bag of pills in his hand.
    ‘I’ve never seen them before,’ O’Connell said, before anyone spoke.
    ‘He says you sold them to him,’ McCready replied.
    ‘He’s a lying sack of shit. I never sold him nothing. He tried to sell them to me an’ I said no.’
    ‘And what were you dumping down the toilet?’
    O’Connell looked at me, his smile lopsided. ‘Took a piss, didn’t I? Didn’t know who you were breaking down the door.’
    ‘Check the place out,’ I said to McCready.
    ‘What about the two in the car outside? They had a joint between them.’
    ‘Take names and let them go with a warning,’ I said. ‘Be sure to phone their parents to collect them; they shouldn’t be driving if there’s drugs taken.’
    I took O’Connell’s details while McCready went through the house. Both actions were pointless; I already knew all I needed to about O’Connell, and I guessed from the cockiness
of his demeanour that he had flushed away whatever drugs he might have had. That said, I also guessed that it must have been a fairly big score he’d had to dump, for he’d have had his
evening’s supplies with him.
    Sure enough, a few minutes later McCready returned.
    ‘Nothing, sir,’ he said. ‘The place is empty.’
    O’Connell smirked, sitting down on the upturned milk crate he used for a seat.
    ‘We’ll never get uniforms out on a Sunday night. We’ll bring out a team in the morning,’ I said. ‘The pumping station here is broken; everything that goes down the
toilets around here gets flushed out onto a mound in the field running along the back of the next street across.’
    McCready stared at me.
    ‘ We could look now, sir,’ he said.
    I considered it for a moment, then shook my head.
    ‘We’ll see nothing tonight,’ I said. ‘The morning will be time enough.’
    O’Connell looked from one to the other of us as we spoke, his mouth slightly open, unformed words playing on his lips as he followed our discussion. He blinked slowly as he looked up at
me, unable to quite believe his luck.
    McCready tackled me once we had left the house.
    ‘He’ll be over there as soon as we leave, getting his stash back,’ he said.
    ‘Of course he will,’ I agreed. ‘His bag of drugs is currently sitting atop a pile of everything flushed out of thirty houses in this estate for the past six months. Do you
fancy going in after them?’
    McCready recoiled slightly.
    ‘Exactly. What we can do, though, is wait in the field, let O’Connell go in there and get himself covered in shit getting back his stash, then arrest him with the drugs on him
and take him into the station. Problem solved.’
    McCready smiled broadly. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said.
    We waited along the edge of the field for less than twenty minutes. Once he was sure we had left, O’Connell crossed the broken-down yards behind the unoccupied houses and
scaled the fence into the field beyond. The pumping station was a small red block at the field’s far corner, though it had long since stopped working. Instead, a pipe around a foot wide broke
through the earth six feet short of the station itself, spewing out a constant supply of effluent onto a growing mound. Despite the clear health hazard it presented, no one wanted to accept
responsibility for it, for to do so would be to accept liability for its upkeep.
    O’Connell approached it warily, clearly reluctant to take the final steps necessary for the retrieval of the drugs he had flushed. He pulled his top up over his mouth and, lifting a stick
lying on the ground near him, began poking through the mound. He must have