Little Criminals (21 page)

As the meeting broke up, Hogg touched John Grace on the elbow and said, ‘Well done.’ Grace felt like he’d been given a silver star on his school copybook.

It was pushing two o’clock in the morning. The pub was ten minutes from Carbury Street garda station and when John Grace tapped on the side window the pub owner himself let him in. He was a genial type who knew the value of soft-soaping certain classes of people. Two of the bar staff were cleaning up, and as on most nights a handful of off-duty policemen and a couple of journalists were having an after-hours jar or two before heading home. Apart from the drink, there was usually a buckshee sandwich on offer at this time of night, and Nicky Bonner was chewing on one.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Get me a pint and I’ll tell you.’

Immediately after O’Keefe’s phone call summoning him to the briefing, John Grace made a call to Nicky Bonner.

Nicky was upbeat. ‘Looks like you’ve fallen on your feet there, boy.’

‘You don’t suppose I’m being set up?’

Hang around management types long enough, Grace knew, and you’ll notice that the most successful ones have a twin-track approach to every problem. First, they decide what they’re going to do about it. Then, they arrange to have a patsy on-site that all the fingers can point at if something goes wrong.

Nicky’s opinion was that Grace hadn’t a choice. ‘Assistant Commissioner calls you in, you curtsy. Suppose you could always go sick. I was you, I’d go with the flow.’ The call ended with Nicky demanding that Grace meet him afterwards in the pub, whatever the time.

Now, after the conference, John Grace’s wariness had evaporated. He told Nicky about the kidnap and the hunt for Frankie Crowe.

‘What’s Hogg’s team like?’

‘Young, energetic, going somewhere.’

‘It’s the place to be seen, sure enough. Play your cards right, this could open up new avenues.’

At forty-six, John Grace had long lost whatever professional ambitions he nursed when he joined the force. He had mastered the methodical routine of detective work and was sure of his abilities as a supervisor of those beneath him on the ladder. Those talents got him to a respectable level, at which he lingered. From early on, Grace recognised his lack of the political skills necessary for zigzagging to the higher reaches of the garda pyramid. He’d come to believe he was the type that gets his nose stuck into a job and by the time he remembers to look up and work out where he’s got to, most of a life has gone by. Grace – processing a ceaseless stream of damaged people who committed stupid or desperate crimes – knew that where he was in his working life wasn’t where he set out to be. He sometimes wondered if he and they hadn’t been corralled in a ghetto on the outskirts of real life, condemned to endlessly act out petty games of cops and robbers.

Which was maybe why spending long weekends weeding the garden and watching his grandson Sam use his fingers to smear paint on sketchpads was an increasing part of his life.

Moving on was an option, but there were no great career moves awaiting a middle-aged copper of modest rank and reputation, and he was too young to take to the garden full-time.

Nicky was right. This kidnap thing might open up opportunities. So be it. Perform well in a high-profile case, people who know people put your name around. When there’s an opening, inside the force or otherwise, people remember. Ideally, a promotion, a couple of years at senior level, then maybe a move to a management position in private security. Put together a little pot of money before retirement. Cases like this made careers. Grace felt it was almost indecent to benefit from someone else’s troubles, but in this business that was usually how it worked.

‘Joining Hogg’s team, it can’t hurt.’

‘I’m not joining the team – he wants someone on tap with personal experience of Frankie.’

‘Keep in mind you’re not the only one.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean it. You see an opening, give me a mention to the bossman. I know Frankie. I could be useful.’

‘I’m not exactly Hogg’s right-hand man, Nicky.’

‘I’m just saying. If the opportunity comes up, right? I’m available.’

‘You never know your luck.’

Nicky raised his glass. ‘Here’s to Frankie Crowe’.

John Grace got home shortly after three in the morning, slept for three and a half hours and was back in the incident room at Carbury Street before eight. If Nicky had been around he’d have remarked on the crispness of Grace’s best suit and made a crack along the lines of, ‘Holy God, someone stood up close to the razor this morning.’

In the absence of Nicky, Grace silently mocked his own enthusiasm. If he’d been asked, he couldn’t say if it came from a dutiful wish to play a part in getting the victim back to her family, or an eagerness to impress the bossman. He told himself that, whatever his motive, it worked out the same for the victim.

About half of Hogg’s team were already at work in the office – as fresh and peppy as they’d been at the midnight briefing – the rest were out beating the bushes. Grace found a free keyboard and began typing up everything he knew about Frankie Crowe. He made phone calls, mentioned Hogg’s name, and there was none of the usual
We’ll do our best
. He had the records he needed delivered by garda courier well within the hour.

Halfway through the morning, a gofer from Technical brought in a folder of photographs of Frankie and the other suspects, along with snaps of relatives, associates and known hang-outs. Grace got the job of adding details about the various players. Hogg wanted the completed folder printed off as a kind of match programme for the team of detectives.

It was a surprise to see Brendan Sweetman back in action. Marriage and fatherhood seemed to have made a solid citizen out of him. His wife was an obnoxious woman who had filled Grace’s ear with obscenities the last time he made a routine visit for a chat with Sweetman. Obnoxious, but straight as they come. After years together, Sweetman remained obviously crazy about her. However this worked out, whoever got the job of raiding Sweetman’s home could look forward to a right bollocking from his missus.

John Grace made a habit of keeping in touch with old clients. The last time he’d been in Frankie Crowe’s Glasnevin flat was shortly before Frankie checked out of his partnership with Oscar Waters and Shamie Cox. It was an expensive little dive, one of the thousands of pygmy apartments thrown up in Dublin over the previous decade, built on the cheap and sold at a premium. They were the surest sign of an underdeveloped city, newly affluent, borrowing heavily and impatient to spend its money.

For a while, Grace had great hopes for Frankie. He recognised a type. Ambitious but not making any great strides. That kind, if they’re tapped at the right moment, make the best informers. They’ve been around the scene, they know lots of people and what those people are up to. Not having reached the status they imagine is their due, they’re bitter. A position as an informer gives an opportunity for revenge against those who prospered, and it gives the ambitious type a genuine role as a mover and shaker, which is half of what he’s wanted all along. Their new-found status has to remain secret, but for that kind there’s a pleasure in looking someone in the eye and feeling the thrill of superiority that comes from deceit.

Within ten minutes of making his pitch to Frankie Crowe, John Grace knew his timing was off. Frankie was still convinced of his destiny, disillusioned with Waters and Cox but still confident that his fate involved greater things. He was too upbeat to take the offer seriously.

The hell with it, Grace had told himself. Give him time, he’ll bite.

‘Do you ever feel guilty? The kind of things you do to people, walking into their lives with a gun in your hand?’

‘I’m not a bad person, Mr Grace. Mostly, the things I do, an insurance company coughs up. Big fucking deal. Thing is – look, if you want to do the best for yourself, sometimes you have to do something you know is just plain wrong. You do it because it’s the only way to get you where you want to be. Don’t do it, you stay a loser.’ He paused, like he was about to deliver a polished credo. ‘People with the balls to do what they have to do, they own the people who don’t. So, you do what you have to.’

‘And you can live with that?’

‘It’s a bad thing, but doing a bad thing doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a person doing a bad thing – one bad thing. You do it, maybe you feel bad about doing it, but it’s that or be a loser. So, you do it. You do it and you move on.’

In the report he was typing up for Hogg’s team, John Grace didn’t mention anything about Frankie’s possibilities as an informer. In the time since he propositioned Frankie, the opportunity hadn’t arisen again. Whichever way this kidnap thing went, the chances of Frankie Crowe ever again being in a position to rat on anyone were on the slim side.

Justin Kennedy was slumped in the back of an unmarked police car, one armed garda beside him, two more in the front, speeding through the bus lanes. It was a relief to get out of the house. In the thirty-six hours since this started, there seemed to be something like twice the usual number of minutes in every hour. The very air that he breathed seemed charged with some form of ominous energy.

From the speeding car, he took in isolated images of the city’s daily routine, everything distinct, sharp and cut off from its surroundings. Glimpses of the normal world, operating at its usual pace, emphasised the strangeness of the landscape in which he now existed. An old woman standing at a bus stop, her thinned hair dyed bright red, her face lifeless, like she’d given up on something. A prat in a silver sports car, mobile clutched to his ear, steering one-handed through the traffic, almost clipping a cyclist.

When the police car stopped at a traffic light on Baggot Street, Kennedy watched a tall, thin, grey-haired man in a well-cut blue suit cross the road, placing one foot in front of the other with the care and attention only the truly drunk can bring to the task. Kennedy recognised the type, still clinging to the uniform of respectability while allowing himself the delicious irresponsibility of surrender. For a moment, Kennedy let himself envy the drunk, easing into the comfort of recklessness, letting go of everything that made life complicated and fraught. The joy and the hope as well as the pain, worry and fear. It was a thought that sometimes surfaced during times of stress – he quickly killed it now.

The police car passed through a narrow street of rundown shop fronts. Kennedy recognised the area as one that he and some associates had appraised with a view to development. Some of the shops were derelict, others had been re-opened on low rents and short leases. They were now run mostly by immigrants offering ethnic foods, colourful clothes and hairstyles, expertise in mobile-phone repairs or cheap Internet and phone connections to far-off continents. The boom had suddenly brought a wave of Asians, Africans and East Europeans to Ireland. Apart from staffing the pubs, restaurants and hospitals that found it hard to hire Irish workers, they were spawning old-fashioned commerce in the unlikeliest places. Kennedy had decided against buying up the site, but someone else did. Once the immigrants were evicted from here, they’d as quickly start businesses elsewhere.

Now, as the police car turned out of the street, Kennedy saw two black men standing outside a clothes shop, one rolling a cigarette, the other throwing back his head and laughing. Usually, whenever he encountered immigrants Kennedy wondered what their story was, what dangers they had endured in getting from some distressed country to this one. Now, he was surprised to feel a surge of resentment towards immigrants who didn’t appear all that troubled. He didn’t question or dispute the emotion but found a comfort in yielding to its spite.

The policemen remained in the lobby of the Flynn O’Meara Tully offices while Kennedy went up in the lift. Daragh O’Suilleabhain was waiting when the doors opened on the fourth floor. Daragh was in his forties, and had cultivated a slight Northside Dublin accent and a roughness around the edges, though he was pure Blackrock College. Daragh was known in Dublin business circles as ‘a bit of a character’, which in his younger days had led a lot of people to underestimate him. After a while, his contemporaries began to realise the ease with which he could switch off the joviality and hand them their heads. He was seldom underestimated these days.

His first words on welcoming Kennedy set the tone of the meeting. ‘I won’t waste time on sympathy, Justin. Let’s get this done, give the bastards the money, and get Angela back.’ Daragh had been a year ahead of Justin at Blackrock College, and though they’d had little contact at school they had since developed a durable business and personal relationship.

Daragh led the way to a small conference room, where the occupants stood and greeted Justin with the uneasiness of distant relatives dutifully attending a funeral. There was a senior bank executive, and a Flynn O’Meara Tully accountant that Justin didn’t know. As the firm’s primary mouthpiece, Daragh O’Suilleabhain’s job involved an amount of glad-handing, both inside and outside the firm, and he had developed a style to go with it. This morning, he shed the bonhomie like an unnecessary piece of clothing.

‘To bring you up to speed, Justin, first thing yesterday, soon as you got in touch, I got on to the bank and they assigned two officials solely and exclusively to sourcing the cash, and they’ve done a superb job.’ He nodded to the bank executive, inviting a contribution.