Little Criminals (34 page)

Down the corridor from the incident room, in a small office assigned to them, Grace and Bonner were pulling on latex gloves when a uniform brought in a plastic bag and took from it a small pile of documents and several newspapers and magazines. ‘This is the Rosslare stuff,’ he said. ‘There’s more on the way.’

‘Technical find anything?’

The uniform shook his head. It could have meant they didn’t, or that he didn’t know. He looked a little resentful at having to cater to a couple of outsiders. He proffered a chain-of-evidence form for Grace to sign, then he left.

The two detectives sat at opposite sides of a desk and Grace passed the newspapers and magazines to Nicky. ‘Phone numbers scribbled on the margins, names, directions, anything that might mean something.’

On top of the pile of documents there were two passports. They belonged to the Kennedys. There was an ESB bill, again belonging to the Kennedys, AA renewal forms, bank offers of cheap loans, and similar domestic junk from the Kennedy house. The kind of stuff someone like Frankie Crowe, given time enough, could use to create fake papers. Grace did a quick shuffle through the rest of the documents, hoping there might be a ticket or a receipt that might point in a specific direction. Nothing of the sort. He went back to the passports and began to check everything, page by page.

Joan Crowe got out of her twelve-year-old Fiesta and watched Sinead scramble out after her, carrying her schoolbag. Joan locked the door and ignored the two plainclothes cops pulling up behind her in the unmarked Sierra. They just sat there, long faces and Action Man haircuts, staring at her, as they’d stared when she and Sinead left the house. Here, in front of St Ciaran’s, the street alive with parents herding their kids towards the school gates, they were as inconspicuous as a couple of clowns at a funeral.

As Joan passed through the school gates she felt her daughter’s hand slip into her own. Since Frankie’s photo appeared in the papers, Sinead had been distracted, surly and said no to anything Joan asked her to do. Joan had tried to talk about what was happening but Sinead made angry noises and turned away. She must have got some word from the other kids, but more likely she’d cut them off as well. Last night Sinead had come into Joan’s bed in the small hours and while Joan lay awake beside her, she cried in her sleep. However this turned out, there was going to be a lot of that.

This morning, Sinead had very deliberately adopted a cheerful style and Joan played along with her chatter about a TV soap. They crossed the yard and rounded a corner into the school’s prefab area. At the bottom of the steps up to the classroom, they kissed and Joan watched until Sinead was inside, then she turned back towards the school gate and she saw Frankie leaning against the wall of the administration building, smiling.

Peering around the corner of the administration building Frankie Crowe watched his daughter pass through the school gates and across the playground, holding hands with Joan. Five minutes to nine, bang on. Sinead liked to get into school a few minutes early, gave her a chance to chat with her friends before lessons began. He stifled the urge to step into the open and call to her. Much as he longed to see her face broaden into a smile, to watch her run to him, to feel her arms hugging his waist, there’d be no comforting her once she knew he was going away.

There’d be a time when she would run to him again. If he made it, he’d stay in Amsterdam for a year or two, put the money to use, then there were people in London, new papers, a new life. Eventually she’d be part of that, even if she just came on visits. It’d be awkward, and missing a chunk out of her life would be hard, like doing a couple of years in the Joy. But they’d adjusted to that before and they’d do it again, and he watched Sinead move away from Joan, up the steps to the prefab classroom, and he strained to see her face, fix it in his mind, and she was gone.

He watched Joan turn and he prepared to say the things he’d thought through during his uncomfortable night in the car. About the way stuff happens that makes you do things that make sense at the time. And when it all dies down you come out the other end and it seems like there was a lot of strutting and prancing and the thing that mattered more than anything has turned into something else.

He put a smile on his face just a second before she looked up and saw him.

‘They’re outside the school,’ she said. ‘The house, too.’

He nodded. ‘Fuckers’re everywhere.’

She moved to pass him. ‘Goodbye, Frankie.’

‘No, wait a minute, I’ve something to tell you.’

Joan looked at her watch.

‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a fella who can get me on to a ferry tonight.’

‘I don’t want to know.’

Frankie nodded, held his palms up. ‘All I’m saying is I’ll be away a long time.’

She said nothing, just looked at him.

‘I’ll send money.’

‘Keep it.’

‘Joan—’

The tone of his voice, the naked plea on his face, told her what he suddenly couldn’t put into words.

‘Don’t be foolish,’ she said.

Frankie shook his head. He’d known the answer, but he couldn’t go away until he’d heard her say it.

‘If anything happens—’ he said.

Joan said nothing, just stared at him like there wasn’t anything he could say that she hadn’t heard a dozen times.

‘What I mean—’

Joan walked away.

Frankie moved to follow her, then realised that two more steps and he’d be out into the yard, in view of the police watching for Joan to come back to her car.

For a second he almost stepped out.

‘Joan,’ he said, but she was already halfway across the yard.

Cold-hearted bitch
.

Frankie turned and headed towards the passageway that led to the back gate.

‘Bugger all in that,’ Nicky Bonner said, pushing aside a small pile of magazines. A phone number scribbled on the back of a torn and empty envelope turned out to be the number for account enquiries at Dublin Gas. Two numbers on inside pages of magazines were traced to a Southside restaurant and a car valet service. An address written neatly in the centre of an A4 page belonged to a businessman whose dinner party the Kennedys had attended a couple of months earlier.

John Grace came across several sheets of A4 paper with scribbles on them. ‘Looks like Frankie was trying out different versions of a ransom note.’ He put them aside in a folder as potential evidence in any future trial.

After a while, the resentful uniform came back, this time with a cardboard folder of material just arrived from Technical.

‘Finished?’

Grace nodded and the uniform took the original Rosslare documents and returned them to the plastic bag they’d come in. ‘That stuff’s from Brendan Sweetman’s house. As soon as you’re done with that, there’s a shoebox full of stuff from Frankie Crowe’s apartment.’

He was signing the chain-of-evidence form when Grace leaned across the desk and picked up the material he’d been examining. ‘What’s this?’

The uniform looked at him like he always knew that plainclothes weren’t the full shilling. ‘It’s the stuff from Rosslare, the stuff you’ve just been through.’

‘The plastic bag. Did the documents and the newspapers come in that, or did you put them into it?’

‘That’s exactly how I got it from Technical, that’s what I passed on.’

Grace held up the plastic bag so Nicky Bonner could see. It had an illustration of a jolly butcher, announcing that there was no meat like Rafferty’s meat.

‘That’s a Phibsboro address along the bottom,’ Grace said. ‘And it ended up in Rosslare.’ Nicky took a small Garda diary from an inner pocket, checked a number and thumbed his mobile.

Grace said, ‘Technical find anything on this?’

The uniform said, ‘Nothing useful on any of it.’

Less than a minute later Nicky Bonner ended his call. ‘According to the local station, Rafferty’s butcher shop’s been out of business for a year or two.’

Chief Superintendent Malachy Hogg was on the third floor of the Department of Justice when he got the call from Grace. He was providing a civil servant with a detailed update on the kidnap, for the information of the minister. The civil servant was slow at taking notes, and several times read the notes back to Hogg, for confirmation. Hogg felt like everything he said was being taken down to be used in evidence against him.

‘Could be anything or nothing,’ he told Grace. ‘Give me the address of the butcher’s shop. I’ll get ERU to have a look and I’ll join you there.’

As he stood up and moved towards the door, the civil servant said, ‘I really believe you ought to finish your report before haring off.’

Hogg said, ‘I’m sure you’re right.’ He closed the door softly behind him.

By the time Grace and Bonner arrived at Rafferty’s butcher’s shop, the ERU had been through the building.

‘Looks like it’s the place OK.’ Suited up and carrying an Uzi, the tactical commander introduced himself as Sergeant Derek Dowd. To Grace, he looked absurdly young to be in charge of anything involving firearms.

Dowd led Grace and Bonner upstairs to a room where a heavy panel of chipboard was screwed in place across the window. Nothing in the room except a single mattress with a Pokémon quilt.

‘My lads have done a quick run-through, but there’s nothing to find.’

It took Grace and Bonner no time at all to conclude that Sergeant Dowd was right. If this was where Angela Kennedy was held, the gang had cleaned up before they left.

In the front of the shop, at the end of the counter, they found a roll of Rafferty’s plastic bags, one of which had been used to wrap the documents taken to Rosslare. Grace bent and looked under the counter. Nothing except white wrapping paper. He pressed a key on an old-fashioned metal register and watched the cash drawer spring open. There was a decayed core of an apple inside. Grace shut the drawer.

In what seemed to have been some kind of staffroom, Bonner checked the fridge and found it empty. He looked in the cupboards and inside the microwave. When Grace joined him he was looking down into a waste bin. It was empty.

‘Technical might get some prints,’ Nicky said.

Grace shrugged. ‘It’s a dead end.’

Sergeant Dowd came in to say that he and his ERU team were pulling out. Grace thanked him and said he and Bonner would secure the scene until the uniforms arrived.

Grace found a chair and sat down. Nicky, standing beside the television, poked a finger at a button on the front of the video. There was a whirring noise and a video cassette popped halfway out of the machine. Nicky exchanged a glance with Grace, then he took out the cassette.

‘
A Few Good Men
.’ He turned it over. ‘It’s a rental job. Video Express.’

Grace went into the front of the shop and came back with a phone book. He said, ‘Any numbers, codes, that kind of thing?’

‘Yeah, here on the spine.’

There were fifteen branches of Video Express in the Dublin phone book, nine of them on the Northside. The first call got them the information that the prefix on the cassette number belonged to the Clontarf branch. It took Nicky less than two minutes to ring that branch and get a name.

‘It’s overdue,’ he said, pocketing his mobile. He looked at his notebook. ‘Someone called Adrian Moffat.’

Grace said, ‘No bells.’

‘Address in Killester.’

‘Who’s this?’ Neither of them had heard Chief Superintendent Hogg enter the room. He was standing just inside the open doorway, looking at Nicky but speaking to Grace.

‘Detective Sergeant Bonner, sir. He was helping me go through the stuff from Rosslare.’ Hogg looked as though he was deciding if someone was trying something on.

‘Sergeant Bonner’s from Turner’s Lane, sir. He’s had as many run-ins with Frankie Crowe as I’ve had myself.’

Nicky smiled. ‘I was hoping I might be of some help, sir, and—’

Hogg leaned forward, hands in the pockets of his overcoat. ‘Adrian Moffat. What’s he got to do with this?’

‘Sir?’

‘The Milky Bar Kid. What’s the story?’

Martin Paxton didn’t sleep much and when he rose that morning his mind was made up. The others were talking shite.

Brendan Sweetman said, ‘Once we get to the rental, divvy up the money – those that want to go, go. I say we go for broke, hold on to her and have a shot at the second million. Situation we’re in, it’s not like we can afford to pass up that kind of chance.’

Dolly Finn said, ‘Soon as I get my share, I’m off.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s over.’

Martin had already called Frankie’s mobile half a dozen times that morning, and all he heard was the voice saying the number he dialled was not in service. No way on Christ’s earth was Frankie going to show up to divide the money.

Milky’s mind was focused on getting everyone – especially the hostage – the hell out of his house. The rental in Tallaght had been confirmed the previous night, first thing this morning Milky fetched the Ford Transit from the seafront and parked it in his driveway. By ten o’clock there was still no sign of the contact arriving with the keys of the rental.

‘Come eleven, keys or no keys, I want you lot out of here,’ Milky said.