Little Criminals Page 13

  ‘Milky,’ Brendan Sweetman said, ‘where in the name of fuck did you get those videos? Titanic, for Jesus sake. And that other thing, Jack Nicholson. I mean, what about something made this century?’

  ‘What’s the matter, Sweets—’ Milky adopted an American accent,‘—you can’t handle the truth?’

  ‘Fuck it, I’ll go out later and get something worth watching.’

  ‘No one leaves here,’ Frankie Crowe said. ‘We don’t want locals noticing a parade of strangers coming and going. Milky comes in and out, one guy, nothing odd about that.’

  ‘Just the once. Down the street, get a few videos, no big deal?’

  ‘It’s a couple of days, Brendan, that’s not a big deal. Then, we collect the ransom, and you can be up to your bollocks in DVDs.’

  Sweetman made a grimace of displeasure. He finished his own food, screwed the wrapping paper into a ball and threw it across the room, missing a waste bin by a couple of feet, then he unwrapped Dolly’s untouched chips.

  Milky said to Frankie, ‘You’re not tempted to ring, see how the money’s coming along?’

  ‘He’s sensible, he’ll be working on it. If not, fuck him.’

  When he got home from Turner’s Lane garda station that evening, Detective Inspector John Grace went to his home office, a converted spare bedroom, and spent an hour reading the file on a case that was due to start in the Circuit Criminal Court the following Tuesday. It had been fourteen months since he supervised the investigation and many of the details had become blurred. In the witness box, he’d have to provide instant, clear answers that gelled with those of other officers.

  Around eight o’clock, his wife Mona came in and asked if he was OK for taking Sam to bed.

  ‘My turn,’ John Grace said.

  ‘You haven’t eaten yet,’ Mona said. ‘I’ll take him up’.

  ‘Not at all,’ Grace said. ‘My turn.’

  He valued these evenings, reading his grandson to sleep. Married at twenty, he had three children of his own before he was thirty. Now, at forty-six, he’d been a grandfather for almost six years. Of his own kids, Jocelyn had an engineering job in Birmingham and David was studying economics at UCD. The eldest, Jess – Sam’s mother – had a flat in town and worked as a freelance illustrator. Because Jess was single and working, John Grace and his wife helped with the raising of Sam. Grace was enjoying it, aware that when he was a young policeman pursuing an ambitious career, he’d missed a lot of the pleasures of parenthood.

  He tidied up his desk, locking the case material away in a file drawer. Sam sometimes used the computer in the office, to play his Pingu and Bananas in Pajamas games. Raising his own three kids, Grace had become scrupulous about never leaving documents or crime-scene photographs lying about. There were times when he brought home the kind of stuff that would give a kid nightmares.

  Until recently, Grace had never lived in a house big enough to offer a separate room as a home office. Then, two years ago, he and Mona had moved to a house near the sea, at Sutton. With the two oldest kids moved on, they had more room than they needed. The home office was twice the size of the shoebox he shared with another detective down at Turner’s Lane.

  Sam stayed over most Friday and Saturday nights, sometimes a couple more nights, depending on his mother’s work and social schedule. He liked to change into his pyjamas himself, and if he sometimes got them inside out, that didn’t matter. John Grace sat on the child’s bed and watched the awkward ballet of sleeves and trouser legs until Sam was ready for bed.

  ‘Where were we?’

  Sam had already fetched the book from his shelves. ‘We were going to start the cat story tonight.’

  ‘Fair enough, lie down there and we’ll start.’ Grace watched as Sam wormed his way under the bedclothes. The simple beauty and innocence of the big brown eyes in that soft oval face never ceased to amaze him. He’d seen that quality in his own children, and watched as it was washed away by incremental waves of maturity. There wasn’t a face on the planet, no matter how hardened, weary or cruel, that hadn’t at one time, and however briefly, glowed with that same beauty and innocence. Grace opened the book in his lap. ‘Sunny’s Big Adventure, Chapter One.’

  *

  Angela was lying face down on the mattress when the kidnapper with the soft voice brought the meal of fish and chips and a bottle of water. She looked up, saw the food, then turned so she was facing the wall. She heard the click of the plate being placed gently on the bare floorboards.

  ‘Don’t be silly, love. You have to keep your strength up.’

  The smell from the fish and chips was heavy and inescapable, filling every corner of the room.

  The day had started with the same kidnapper looking in on her, yawning. He’d brought her a cup of tea. When she rapped on the floor he came and took her to the toilet, down a short corridor, past doors open on what seemed like a couple of makeshift bedrooms. She could see mattresses on the floor, bedclothes thrown untidily on top. The toilet was dim and dusty. The man stood outside. There was no window in the toilet; the bare bulb was low wattage. There was graffiti on the back of the door and on the walls, some crude, mostly just names. Some kind of workplace.

  Later, when the same gang member came up with a sandwich, an apple and milk for her lunch, he scribbled a note as she recited a list of things she needed and he said he couldn’t promise anything.

  She opened the sandwich but couldn’t eat it. Nothing wrong with it, ham with a sliver of limp lettuce, but she suddenly wasn’t hungry. She ignored the apple but drank some of the milk.

  Her plans for organising her thinking came to nothing. Her mind seemed clogged and slow, incapable of pulling together coherent thoughts. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t distress. More a kind of indolence. She lay on the mattress most of the afternoon, in something close to a daze. Hours passed in which she did nothing but lie there. Her eyes seemed to have acquired the ability to consistently focus on some point in mid-air.

  The gang looked in on her every half-hour or so. Always the same, checking that the sheet of wood covering the window hadn’t been interfered with. A glance around to see that everything was as it had been, then they left. None of them said anything, except the one with the soft voice, the leader’s sidekick, who made a point of being friendly. Everything OK? Warm enough? Fancy a Coke? She ignored him.

  The small fat gunman was easy to read, even with the mask. Every movement, everything he said to her, dripped with irritation and resentment. It was like he wanted her to know that she’d done something that personally hurt him. In the afternoon, he came up after she knocked on the floor. When he took her to the toilet he used single words, his voice coarse and abrupt. ‘OK,’ he said, holding the door open, when she told him what she wanted. When they got to the toilet he said, ‘There.’

  When she closed the toilet door, he roughly pushed it open again and said, ‘No.’ She didn’t see the point of this. ‘Are you trying to humiliate me?’ she said. This time, he used two words. ‘Fuck off.’ He stood out in the corridor, off to one side of the door and out of sight, while she used the toilet.

  At some stage that day she took off her watch. Whenever she looked at it the time on its face seemed to bear no relationship to the time that had surely crept by. She’d left the watch on the floor several feet away from the mattress and she hadn’t the energy or the will to get up and check it. The day merged into a dull, featureless length of time, a disabling fear leaking out of her every pore.

  Now, in the evening, the smell of the fish and chips reminded her that she had hardly eaten all day. The satisfaction of her insolent non-response to the gunman who delivered the smelly food had faded. She turned over and looked at the food. She made a face. Christ, even a McDonald’s would be better than this. It was old-style fish-and-chip-shop food. The gnarled brown batter in which the fish was encased was visibly saturated with grease. The thick chips were little better, but they were edible if she took sips of the Ballygowan. There was no fork, so
she used her fingers. Once she got used to the taste, she ate more eagerly. By the time she finished the chips the edge had been taken off her need, but she was still hungry. She broke the fish in two. The grease had penetrated the batter and coated the surface of the fish. She split the batter away from the fish and tried a piece of the white flesh. It was hard to discern a flavour under the taste of the grease, but she ate it all. When there was no more fish she ate some of the batter. When she squeezed a piece of batter she saw the grease run out of it, which was when she pushed the plate away, took another mouthful of Ballygowan and lay down on the mattress.

  After a while, the chatty gunman came to collect the plate. ‘Good girl, well done.’ He left a plastic shopping bag on the floor. ‘Stuff you asked for.’ Again she ignored him.

  When he was gone, she emptied the bag. A couple of celebrity magazines, a copy of Cosmo, a hairbrush, tissues, facial wipes, a three-pack of knickers, toothbrush and paste, a sponge, two small bottles of Coke and a litre of Ballygowan. She used the wipes to get the grease off her fingers, then cleaned her face and neck and under her arms.

  When John Grace’s home phone rang, he had just come down from the child’s bedroom and Sam was no more than ten minutes asleep, not yet beyond the reach of a persistently ringing phone. Mona was in the kitchen. Grace hurried across the living room and picked up the cordless.

  ‘John Grace.’

  ‘I’m told you’re the man to talk to about a thug named Frankie Crowe.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Colin O’Keefe. I need to talk to you about this Frankie Crowe fella.’

  For a moment, Grace was puzzled, then the name clicked. He had met Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe at a retirement party for a colleague, a superannuated super. He doubted if the AC remembered him. Given the general level of intoxication at the party, he hoped not.

  ‘What’s he done now?’ he said.

  ‘How soon can you get up here?’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Tell your missus not to wait up.’

  When Martin Paxton came downstairs after checking on the hostage, there was a bullshitting session under way. Brendan Sweetman was telling Frankie, Milky and Dolly the story of a burglary he did in Rathmines, the one about the big dog coming howling up the stairs. ‘The hound of the Baskervilles, no kidding. Big as a bleeding donkey.’ The story ended with Brendan locking the dog in a closet and screaming at the owner to get the fuck back to his bedroom and count to five hundred.

  ‘Halfway down the stairs, I was, when the gobshite opened the closet. The dog came flying out, mad as a hen with piles.’ He paused for a beat. ‘Started biting the legs off yer man.’

  Frankie laughed, although Martin knew that he’d heard it at least once before. Dolly’s face adopted what might have been a smile.

  Frankie contributed the tale of the fuck-up at Harte’s Cross, and how he and Martin got a tip-off from Leo Titley and toddled off down to do a pub in Hicksville and how Titley fucked up the info on the job and they ended up with a lousy two hundred.

  ‘Not surprised,’ Brendan Sweetman said. He did a job with Leo once. ‘Culchie wanker.’

  ‘There was a bit of crack, mind,’ Frankie remembered. ‘Old bollocks in the pub, he looks at me like I’ve landed in a flying saucer. Put away that gun, he says. Middle of a job, the local yokel decides to come to the rescue of the oul bitch that runs the place. Leave the lady alone, says he, standing there like Rambo’s grandad. So I let him see the business end. You want to keep your balls, Sir Galahad?’

  Brendan Sweetman laughed.

  ‘Shut him up, right off,’ Frankie said. ‘Another old guy, when I let off a couple of rounds to encourage the bitch to cough up some money, know what he did? He pissed himself. Standing there with his hands in the air, big wet patch all the way down his trousers.’

  Martin Paxton stood up. ‘I need one last coffee. Anyone?’ Only Dolly nodded. As Martin left the room, Frankie looked at Brendan, pointed at the ceiling and said, ‘Lights out.’

  When the small fat gunman came to switch off the light Angela said, ‘No, please, just a while more.’

  He switched the light off.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said.

  He stood there, silhouetted in the doorway. She could hear the noise he was making chewing gum. After a few moments, he gave a grunt and turned away, pulling the door shut behind him.

  ‘Bastard!’

  There was a second’s silence, then there was a very loud noise, and Angela could almost feel the concussion ripple through the room as the door shook from his kick. She sat up on the mattress her arms crossed in front of her body, clutching her elbows to stop herself shaking.

  Someone shouted something from downstairs and she could hear the fat little man grunting a reply. When she heard him going down the stairs she sank back down on the mattress. A little later she heard loud male laughter from downstairs.

  She took long, deep breaths. Again, she made an effort to hold at bay the thoughts she had resolved to shun. She tried to make sense of the chatter coming from downstairs, but it was muffled and disjointed, punctuated by laughter.

  She turned on her side, knowing she was a long way from sleep. She heard a toilet flush, a door closing. It was like when she was a child, lying in the darkness of her bedroom at night, waiting for sleep, random thoughts floating in and out of her mind as she listened to the noises the adults made downstairs. It was the sound of life continuing. It was one of the ways she began to understand the size and the complexity of the world, and that she wasn’t the centre of it all, and that it didn’t stop when she went to bed and fell asleep.

  With the knowledge that others’ lives go on even as we surrender to sleep, came an understanding of how the world goes on whether we’re there or not. It was an understanding that intrigued her in childhood and terrified her as a teenager, when she began to measure her own mortality.

  Angela turned her face into the pillow and closed her eyes. She recognised that she was on the verge of admitting some of the thoughts she’d sworn to banish. She needed to think other thoughts. Very deliberately, she began trying to visualise what the small fat one looked behind his mask. She imagined that face, chubby and sweaty, vacant and slack-jawed. And in her imagination, she spat on it.

  When Brendan came back downstairs, Martin Paxton was trying to encourage Milky to tell the others how he got his nickname.

  ‘Ah, Jesus, leave me alone,’ Milky said, but he was grinning. He liked the story. He lit up a Player’s, used a thumbnail to remove a flake of tobacco from his tongue. ‘You tell it,’ he said to Martin.

  ‘What were you, twenty, something like that?’

  ‘Eighteen, nineteen. It was the first gun I ever got my hands on. A starting pistol. A newsagent’s out in Bray, up the town,’ Milky said. ‘And I did a bookies before that, same starting pistol. Stroked a couple of grand that time.’

  ‘Anyway, Milky walks into the newsagent’s, no customers, one bird behind the counter. Hand it over, he says, and your woman squeals and when he gets her to calm down he says, Give me the money, all of it. Now, there’s nothing she’d like to do more, and get Jesse James out of her shop, but there’s only a handful of notes in the register, fivers and tens, and she throws them on the counter. Anything over a twenty goes straight into a drop safe, she says, there’s no way she can get at it. So, Milky picks up the money and puts it in his pocket and stands there, the gun in his hand, big scarf over his mouth, your woman licking her lips. You know what he did?’

  ‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do!’

  ‘He grabbed a handful of chocolate bars and ran for the door.’

  Brendan Sweetman snorted. ‘Good man, Milky!’

  Milky shook his head. ‘Big GAA slob coming in, just finished practice, a hurley in his paws, takes a look at the starting pistol in my hand, gives me a smack in the mouth with the hurley and when I woke up the cops were standing over me, breaking their shite laughing.’

  Mart
in said, ‘Tell them, when you were wheeled into the Joy, what the screws christened you.’

  Milky sighed, looked up at the ceiling. ‘The Milky Bar Kid.’

  There was a high-pitched hooting laugh from Dolly Finn, a series of short honking noises that came as much from his nose as his mouth. It was the first time any of them had heard Dolly laugh. The sight and the sound of Dolly laughing stoked the others and Milky threw his head back and chortled, Frankie Crowe’s shoulders were heaving. Martin looked across at Dolly and saw that he was blushing.

  ‘Jesus,’ Brendan said, ‘I’d love a pint. That’s what an evening like this needs, a bit of lubrication.’

  Frankie shook his head. ‘Take it easy, lads. This whole thing, it could go like click-click-click, and we walk away with a bundle. Or, maybe we already did something wrong, and the cops are outside putting on their bulletproof vests.’

  ‘We’re cruising,’ Sweetman said.

  Frankie said, ‘It happens. Whatever way it goes, best chance we have, keep clear heads. There’s lots of time later for cracking bottles.’

  Dolly Finn said, ‘How long you reckon?’

  ‘We’re got a schedule – short and sharp. So far, we’re on track.’

  Brendan Sweetman poked a finger in the direction of the ceiling. ‘That one? What you reckon’s the safest thing to do with her?’

  ‘Don’t see why we can’t hand her back spick and span. She hasn’t seen any faces, right? No names? Should be OK.’ Frankie shrugged. ‘I mean, you can’t be a hundred per cent on a thing like this, but the way we’re going, no reason we can’t pat her on the arse and send her home to hubby.’

  14

  There were two gardai in the kitchen of the Kennedy home, with the telephone-monitoring equipment. Two more were on permanent duty in the hall. All armed. There was little likelihood of the gang coming back to the house, but it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone wanted to take a chance on.