Dark Times in the City (35 page)

‘No bother, I’ll get it,’ Robbie said.

He was coming back with the milk when he saw them. Parked at the kerb, thirty feet in front of him, two men he didn’t know getting out of a black BMW. It was the way they did it, moving together, both looking down the street towards Robbie – this wasn’t good. He turned and he ran and he could hear them coming after him.

After several yards he threw away the carton of milk and that got his balance right, his arms pumping, and within a few yards he could feel his stride lengthening. Head down, leaning forward, he knew he was pulling away. He felt a push in the back and a
millisecond later he heard the bang and he knew they’d shot him and he was still running.

No pain at all. Just that little push in the back. He didn’t know how that could be, but he’d been shot and it didn’t hurt. He rounded into Willow Drive – a woman standing back against a garden wall, looking at him with her mouth open – and there was something wrong with his feet, like they were trying to catch up with the rest of his body. He ended up half sitting, half lying and he tried to get up but there was no strength in his legs.

He turned his head and watched the two men come towards him.

Karl Prowse’s wife said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘What time did he leave?’

All she wanted was for the baby not to wake.

She’d been up three times during the night.

‘Please, keep your voice down.’

‘What time did he leave the house?’

‘He didn’t.’

The two men knew Karl wasn’t here. They’d been in every room.

‘He’s not here. What time did he leave?’

‘He didn’t come home last night.’

They said nothing for a while, then one of them said, ‘What time are you expecting him?’

She said she didn’t know. And after a while they left.

Dolly Finn could feel the surge of the airplane engines in the pressure of his back against the seat, the roar of the rush down the runway. He felt the plane lift and soon he was looking down at Dublin. In less than ninety minutes he’d be searching for a taxi at Heathrow.

There was a time when he couldn’t have imagined being happy
to leave Dublin. He’d left a lifetime’s collection of music behind and he’d adjusted to that, too. He’d long concluded that he was a better man for the change. He was looking forward to getting back to London.

The Dublin job was a downer. He had the upfront money, but there’d be nothing else.

‘No,’ he told Cillian Connolly, ‘I’m not looking for money – I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do.’

They met at two o’clock in the morning, in the 24-hour Tesco at Artane Castle.

In the old days, Dolly had worked twice with Cillian Connolly on jobs that paid well. That was long before Cillian hooked up with Frank Tucker’s outfit. It took Dolly two phone calls to old acquaintances before he got Cillian’s mobile number. Where could they meet? Yes, it was important.

Most of the aisles were half blocked with caged pallets stacked with packets, boxes and tins. Tesco workers, pale and tired, filled gaps in the shelves. Flanked by sliced pans on one side and Swiss Rolls and Bramley Apple Pies on the other, Dolly Finn told Cillian Connolly what his role had been over the past couple of days. He told him everything about Lar Mackendrick’s plans and the people involved, who they were and who did what, why the bombing attempt hadn’t worked. He told him about the plan to use Roly Blount’s family.

‘Lar’s easy – you know where he lives. You shouldn’t have much trouble tracking down Karl or Robbie.’

Dolly Finn believed there was a time when the smart thing to do was to walk away with whatever you could salvage. They’d missed their chance with the bomb. If that had worked Frank Tucker would be history, Lar Mackendrick would be bigger than ever and Dolly Finn would have a powerful friend. Now the odds were that Tucker would figure out what had happened. The Republican outfits were all well stocked with informers and eventually the
police would know that none of the varieties of the IRA were involved.

Too many things might go wrong with Lar Mackendrick’s last-chance hostage plan. Sooner or later, Frank Tucker would put Lar’s balls in a vice and the names would come flowing. Even in London, Dolly would not be safe.

Much better to sabotage the Roly Blount plan – put Frank Tucker in his debt. Dolly had killed several of his people, but Frank was a businessman. Once Mackendrick’s threat was smothered Frank would look at the bottom line, he’d call it quits and Dolly would be safe.

That was what Lar Mackendrick didn’t understand. Those years ago, when Dolly got tight with the Mackendrick clan, when he warned Jo-Jo Mackendrick about the threat to his life, it wasn’t personal. It was the best way out of a sticky problem for Dolly. This job, it was just business. Good money for dangerous work – and when the shit hit the fan you looked for the least unacceptable outcome.

He heard the plane’s undercarriage lock up into place.

Dolly Finn’s thumb worked the wheel of his iPod. It had been a while since he’d listened to the soaring tones of Johnny Hodges’s sax.

The radio’s
pip-pip-pip
at eight o’clock was followed by the RTE newsreader announcing that two bodies had been found overnight in the wreckage of a house fire in Howth. ‘Police have confirmed that the fire appears to have been malicious.’ The newsreader handed over to the station’s crime correspondent.

‘Gardai have not named the two dead, but I understand unofficially that they were a man and a woman in their sixties. Sources say the man is known to gardai as a significant figure on the Dublin
gangland scene. Preliminary examination, sources say, suggests that both victims suffered gunshot wounds.’

In a stolen car across the road from Kimmet’s Ale House, Danny Callaghan sat very still.

Mackendrick?

On the radio, the crime correspondent was saying that the burned-down house was known to belong to a crime figure whose brother, too, had been murdered some years ago.

Can’t be anyone else
.

Callaghan had delivered the last of the stolen cars to the street near Kimmet’s by seven o’clock and found the nearest newsagent. Most of the front pages splashed the gang killings and the attempted bombing. He picked up four copies of the
Daily Mail
, went back to Wakeham Street and left the newspapers on the dashboards of the stolen cars.

Lar and his people were half an hour late. No contact, no calls. And now the news on the radio had to be about Lar Mackendrick.

It changes everything
.

Stay calm
.

No point trying to work out what had happened. With Mackendrick dead and the others probably scattered, they wouldn’t need the cars, they wouldn’t need him. They wouldn’t need Novak. What were the chances they’d let Novak live? Had they killed him already?

In the night, unable to sleep, running the whole thing through his head, Callaghan had tried to remember the names of the businesses he’d glimpsed when Karl and Robbie had brought him from the warehouse. It was where they’d taken Callaghan when they needed somewhere isolated. It might be where they had Novak.

Nothing else to go on
.

McSomething
.

Some kind of interiors warehouse –
Mc—

Something
.

And an outfit selling desks – he couldn’t remember the name. A building with something to do with tyres – but all he could remember was a large tattered Michelin poster.

He could find a Golden Pages, spend an hour ploughing through the listings for interiors, for office furniture, for tyres – see if anything rang a bell. If Novak was locked up somewhere, maybe hurt, he didn’t have an hour.

One last time
.

It was the fifth time Karl Prowse had told himself that he’d try calling Lar Mackendrick just one last time. Karl had spent the night in the warehouse, dozing fitfully in a too-thin sleeping bag, guarding the prisoner. It was now pushing nine in the morning, and the plan to take Roly Blount’s family ought to have been well under way. Still no word from Lar.

Karl used his mobile and listened again as the call went through to Lar’s voicemail.

He tried Robbie again. Third time, same result.

Picking up the baseball bat, he crossed the floor to where the fat bar owner was sitting, his hands tied, his arms around the steel support. He shoved the thick end of the baseball bat into Novak’s face and pushed. Novak turned his head and the bat slid along his cheek.

‘Won’t be long now, barman,’ Karl said.

One more time
. He took out his phone.

Novak couldn’t tell how much of his shivering was a result of the chilliness of the warehouse, and how much was due to fear.

He’d thought it through, all the permutations. First thing to go was any notion of talking his way out of it. That lump of walking gristle with the baseball bat was looking forward to killing him – it was in his eyes every time he looked down at Novak.

The only question was – would he use the baseball bat, or would he use the gun?

Novak thought of the possibility of being rescued by the police – not out of the question, but unlikely.

And the way those people talked openly in front of him, there was no possibility they’d leave him as a witness.

It’s about taking a breath
.

Novak’s head was full of his father.

‘It’s about taking a breath,’ the old man had said, all that time ago.

Novak was maybe eleven or twelve, mooching about the house one rainy afternoon. He told his father he was bored.

His father looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Novak was expecting a lecture about how miserable everyone was during the war, how easy his generation had it. Instead his dad said, ‘
You can breathe, can’t you?
’ At the end of the day, he said, that’s what life’s really about, taking a breath. Once you can do that, you’ve got no end of choices.

‘Look at something or listen to something. Go somewhere or play something. If you can’t go anywhere, go inside your head and think of something nice. Walk, run, jump, fall over, take a nap, it’s all good. Read something, eat something, or put your arms around someone. No end of choices.
Unbore yourself
,’ he said.

Novak pushed the past to one side and closed his ears to the muttering of the lump of gristle, who was somewhere at the other side of the warehouse, tapping the baseball bat against something hard.

This time I’ve got—

His arms, held in place around the steel support, ached. He tried to ignore the pain. Novak pictured his wife Jane and decided that in the time he had, minutes or hours, it would all be about her, about Jeanie and Caroline and Caroline’s boys, and the things
they’d have done over the next few years if this shit hadn’t happened.

McCall’s
.

McCall’s Interiors
.

Callaghan could see himself leaving Mackendrick’s warehouse, noticing the tyre warehouse straight ahead, something about desks on another sign, the dirty logo on the warehouse door – McCall’s Interiors.

Callaghan called one of the directory-enquiries companies. They told him there was no listing for a McCall’s Interiors.

‘McCall’s Furniture?’

‘Sorry, man.’ A young man’s voice. He sounded like he meant it.

‘McCall’s – anything that might be furnishing, interiors, decorating, stuff like that? It’s an emergency, please, it’s really serious.’

‘Doing that now, man – interior designers, interior decorators—’ Behind his voice the clicking of a keyboard. ‘Contractors, furniture, curtains – going through the lot—’

‘Thanks.’

‘Not looking good – not looking – sorry, man, nothing here.’

‘Is there—’

‘That was McCall with an M-C. Trying it again with an M-A-C.’

‘Thanks.’

After a few moments he came back, sounding like it was somehow his fault. ‘Sorry, man – nothing happening here.’

‘Thanks for trying.’ Callaghan rang off.

The police
.

But the police had protocols for everything. They’d want detailed statements, with solicitors involved, upward reporting, superintendents overseeing everything – the police were all about procedure and the procedure would take hours and by then Novak might be lying in a ditch, his eyes as unseeing as Declan Roeper’s.

Callaghan’s phone rang.

It was the young guy from the directory service. He had a note of Callaghan’s number and he’d checked back through records of deleted listings. There was a McCall’s Interiors listed up to three years ago.

‘Two outlets in Tallaght, one in the city centre – and a warehouse at Carrigmore Park industrial estate—’

He was still talking as Callaghan gunned the car away from the kerb.

Karl rang again and again all he got was Lar’s voicemail.

Definitely something wrong
.

Definitely
.

Karl’s orders were to wait here until Lar and the others arrived.