Dark Times in the City (13 page)

So the Mansfield Close job was folded into the existing investigation.

‘Sorry about that, Dermot.’

‘Can’t be helped, sir.’

Inspector Leahy waited in the hallway while the member from the Glencara case looked things over in the living room. When Detective Sergeant Michael Wyndham came out into the hallway he was trying to keep his face blank.

He said, ‘They did a thorough job.’

‘You could say that.’

Wyndham said, ‘Who owns the house?’

‘Couple out for the evening. Left around seven-fifteen, got back almost midnight, found the lights on. Didn’t come in – rang 999.’

‘Good.’ Too often, panicky civilians did a headless-chicken routine all over the crime scene.

Leahy said, ‘I hear someone tried to kill this fella already?’

‘Two or three nights back – he got lucky. We’ve pushed all the
usual buttons, with no great results. Walter, God rest him, was into a bit of this, a bit of that. Petty stuff – no obvious reason someone would want him dead.’

The hall, long and narrow and done in various shades of brown, made Inspector Leahy feel claustrophobic. He nodded towards the front door and led Wyndham out into the garden. After the atmosphere in the house, the air outside felt pleasantly cold.

Wyndham said, ‘Technical on the way?’

‘Any minute. I’ve had a couple of members knocking on doors, no one heard a peep.’

There wouldn’t be much from the neighbours. One of those keep-yourself-to-yourself neighbourhoods. Mansfield Close had about twenty houses ranged in a horseshoe layout, with a green area in the centre. Big houses, built in a style most often seen in 1950s Hollywood versions of Olde English villages. The name suggested the estate was probably built in the mid-1990s, when the money was starting to flow but the boom hadn’t yet gathered speed. The North was still leaking blood, and the South’s middle-class aspirations and distaste for the excesses of nationalism came together to create a fashion in housing estates with English labels – Sherwood Park, Tudor Heights, Balmoral Lawns. That was before the economic boom and the winding down of the Northern blood-letting encouraged the middle classes to adopt a bit of the old nationalist swagger.

On the green in the centre of Mansfield Close, where an English village might have had a war memorial, there was an outsize monument commemorating nothing in particular, with a clock on each of its four faces.

A white van was pulling up across the road. Technical was here.

‘The house owners – where are they?’

Inspector Leahy pointed towards a squad car. ‘Back seat, trying to keep their blood pressure under control. Name’s Waterman. Roy and Denise.’

‘They let anyone else have keys to the house?’

The inspector shook his head. ‘Side window open, second floor – access from the garage roof.’

‘So, what do you reckon – Walter’s burgling this place with someone else – and what? Thieves fall out in the middle of a job? Doesn’t look like a spur-of-the-moment thing.’

‘He delivered the pizzas. The name is on the boxes – Anthony’s Pizza Place. Seems this Walter fella did occasional work, delivering. They say the order came in, three pizzas for this address. We checked the phone in the living room, the pizza place is the last number dialled.’

‘Someone broke in—’

‘Picked an empty house at random.’

‘And ordered pizza?’

‘So it seems.’

‘And how did the killers know Walter was working tonight, delivering to this area?’

Inspector Leahy said, ‘I’ve got a member over there now, talking to the guy who runs the pizza shop.’

Wyndham went to meet the two technical people getting out of their van. He gave them the basics as they changed into their white Tyvek coveralls. ‘And bag the remains of the pizzas. Just might get some DNA.’

He and the inspector watched the two technicians, mouths masked, hoods up, slowly mount the steps and enter the house.

‘Not a job I’d fancy,’ the inspector said.

Sergeant Wyndham said, ‘It’d put you off pizza for a while, right enough.’

Roy Waterman said, ‘Look’s like someone’s finally in charge. Back in a minute.’ His wife, white-faced and murmuring into her mobile, nodded. Waterman got out of the back of the squad car.

The detective inspector he’d already met introduced him to the policeman who’d recently arrived. Waterman didn’t catch the name, but he heard the rank.

‘
Sergeant?
Has this case been downgraded already?’

‘Don’t worry, sir – we have a full team on the job, all ranks, and no effort will be spared.’

‘How long are these people going to be crawling all over our house?’

‘It’s a murder investigation, sir. It takes as long as it takes – but I can assure you—’

Waterman wasn’t listening. He turned and looked across the road to where he could see the outline of his wife’s head in the back of the squad car. Months, this would take, before they got back to normal – if ever. Waterman could adjust. As long as the place was cleaned up he’d have no problem living there. Denise, though – she’d probably want to move out. And with the property market the way it was – and the added selling point that a man had been murdered in the living room – Jesus, this was just what he fucking needed.

The two detectives were moving away, head to head, talking. Roy Waterman turned and walked up the steps and into his hallway. He was halfway towards the living room when he heard the fat detective behind him.

‘Sir, you—’

From the living-room doorway Roy Waterman hardly noticed the two policemen in their white coveralls. His gaze was immediately drawn to the figure on the floor. Everything about the body conveyed composure – arms crossed on the chest, feet crossed at the ankles – except for the large, shapeless, clear plastic bag tied around the head, the inside painted red with blood, and the red pool leaking out onto the white carpet from where the bag was bunched up, tied around the man’s neck.

‘Sir, you’ll have to, sir, please—’

Waterman turned and shuffled down the corridor. In the open air he stared again at the figure of his wife in the back of the squad car.

‘Sir?’

Waterman turned to the fat detective. When he spoke, he met the sergeant’s gaze and his voice was quiet, his tone lifeless. ‘What’s this fucking country coming to?’

His eyes made it clear this was not so much a question as an accusation.

After the inside of the car fogged up again, Danny Callaghan had the chamois ready and he took his time wiping the moisture from every inch of the windscreen. Then the side windows. He brought the window down and wiped the rear-view mirror. The black Hyundai was parked midway between two street lamps. This time of night, after one in the morning, most of the houses were dark. The street was deserted, only the occasional car passing through to disturb the stillness.

Sleeping dogs
.

Maybe he should have let things be. Arranging to confront Frank Tucker might be reckless. The blue vans were probably a coincidence.

Against that, there’d been that moment in Novak’s pub when Callaghan saw the killers coming in, and the infinite feeling of helplessness that had swept through him before it became apparent that he wasn’t the target.

The alternative to confronting Tucker was perpetual fear.

Callaghan stared again at Hannah’s house, across the street and two houses down. Big detached house, painted yellow, set back from the road. The only sign of life a light in the hallway.

He sat still as a pair of headlights appeared in his mirror. As the car drew near Hannah’s house it slowed down. Hannah’s red Saab took a curving turn into the wide driveway, pulling up behind Leon’s
Nissan Patrol. Leon got out of the passenger seat, leaned on the roof of the car and said something to Hannah, who was locking the driver’s door. Callaghan could hear her laugh from a hundred feet away. After they went inside, the hall light stayed on for just a few minutes, then the front bedroom lights came on. Someone closed the curtains. Callaghan couldn’t tell which of them it was. All went dark after a few minutes. Another quarter of an hour or so passed before Callaghan switched on the engine, listened to it hum a while, then drove away.

After waiting almost an hour, Danny Callaghan stood up and crossed to the door of the interrogation room. He shook the handle until a uniformed garda came. The garda unlocked the door and told him to stop being a pain in the arse.

‘I want to know why I’m here.’

‘Because.’

The garda pulled the door shut and locked it.

Callaghan sat down at the scarred metal table. The room was bare, drab – whatever beige liquid they used to paint the walls, odds were that the sub-contractor had watered it down. After eight years inside, Callaghan had developed the patience necessary for coping with institutional timescales. You learn patience, or you grow yourself an ulcer.

After another forty minutes Detective Sergeant Wyndham arrived, his round face puffy and unshaven. ‘Thanks for coming in.’

Callaghan stood up. ‘Two of your flunkies pulled me out of bed this morning – it’s not like I had a choice.’

‘Won’t take long.’

‘I’ve wasted half the morning in this room.’

Wyndham sat down on the other side of the table and motioned for Callaghan to return to his seat. ‘Look – I’ve had four hours’ sleep on a camp bed, so your troubles don’t impress me. Where were you last evening?’

Callaghan took his time sitting down. Then he said, ‘What time?’

‘You tell me – whenever you finished work.’

‘What’s this about?’

‘You finished work what time?’

‘What am I supposed to have done?’

‘You finished work what time?’

Callaghan said nothing for a while, then he said, ‘Late – I had to pick up some people at the Citywest Hotel, bring them across the city.’

‘Time?’

‘I wasn’t keeping track. Had something to eat, dropped in to my local, had a coffee, went for a drive.’

‘Where to?’

‘Nowhere, just around. I like to drive – maybe half an hour, maybe more, I don’t know – then I went home, went to bed.’

‘Did you see Walter Bennett, talk to him at all?’

‘No.’

‘He call you?’

‘No.’

‘You call him?’

‘No.’

‘After you helped him out the other night, did he say anything about why it might have happened?’

‘I told you – we never spoke – I knew him briefly when I was inside, that’s all.’

‘You hear anything about what he’s been up to these days?’

‘Look, sergeant, it’s not like I’m hanging around street corners, swapping jokes with the neighbourhood wiseguys. I get up, go to work, go to bed, get up again – I hear nothing about anything. I got into trouble a long time ago, I was a kid. Then the other thing happened and I went to prison. I don’t steal, I don’t hurt people – that other stuff, it’s like it’s someone’s else’s history.’

Wyndham gave in to a long yawn, his head back, the back of one hand to his mouth. He flexed his shoulders, then he said, ‘Later on, if we find out you knew something—’

‘What’s happened to Walter?’

‘If I find out you’ve been hiding something, if it turns out you and he had something going on—’ He leaned forward, his voice hard. ‘You never finished your sentence, sonny. You’re on parole, which means you step out of line and we make a court application and back you go – no charges, no trial, just the stroke of a pen – four more years behind bars.’

‘What’s happened to Walter?’

Wyndham’s face softened. His sigh wasn’t all about tiredness. ‘The other night, when they tried to shoot him? The way things turned out, it would’ve been a mercy to the poor bastard if you’d let them do it.’

Sergeant Wyndham left an
Evening Herald
behind when he went to take a leak. The front page headline screamed ‘Mob Boss Torture Killing’. The story said that Walter Bennett, a veteran gangster, was the latest victim of Dublin’s gangland feud. It also said his throat had been cut.

‘Bullshit,’ Sergeant Wyndham said when he came back.

‘How did it happen?’

‘Mind your own business.’ He stood, holding the door open. ‘Off you go.’

‘“Mob boss torture killing” – it doesn’t make sense. Walter wasn’t anyone’s boss.’

‘There’s a whisper, so they guess the rest. If your business is selling papers, one guess is as good as another. Walter’s a mob boss today, and that sells papers. Tomorrow, maybe he’ll be an innocent bystander – whatever – it’ll sell more papers. It’s show business. Cops and robbers, like on the telly, but with real corpses. Now, if you’ll kindly toddle along, I’ve got work to do.’

‘You believe me? I’d nothing to do with anything?’

‘The warning stands – I catch you lying just a little bit, and you’ll do four more years without even the benefit of a trial.’