Little Criminals (6 page)

There was a plate of biscuits in the centre of the table. No chocolate ones left. Lots of pinks and yellows and a few of the round brown ones, with the sugary white cream sandwiched in the middle.
Eeny, meeny, miney, mo
. Justin Kennedy was chewing the third and last of the chocolate biscuits from the plate. He gestured to young Faraday, who hopped up and hurried over to the table in the corner of the room. He came back with the coffee caddy and refreshed everyone’s cup.

Albert Gibson was still yammering on. Albert Gibson was a fool, and that was just one of the many things Justin Kennedy was grateful for.

They were in the main conference room of the offices of Justin Kennedy & Co., on the top floor of a building round the corner from St Stephen’s Green. The building was owned by, and the offices rented from, Flynn O’Meara Tully & Co., the legal firm with which Justin Kennedy had made his name as a mergers and acquisitions expert, with a promising sideline in property. Six years earlier, Kennedy had amicably parted from Flynn O’Meara Tully, having built a reputation as a good man to have on side in any major deal. If you were assembling a site for development, buying or merging a company or taking it to the market, putting together a consortium or sourcing finance for a deal, Justin Kennedy could be relied on to save you a lot of grief.

There’s security in being a prized performer at a place like Flynn O’Meara Tully, but no matter how much they pay you there’s always some no-talent gobshite further up the corporate food chain taking a bigger share of the proceeds and the credit.

From independent advising and consulting, Kennedy moved to taking a percentage in the deals he handled, and increasingly to initiating his own projects. As yet, he saw himself as merely moving out of the base camp of the higher peaks of the Dublin financial landscape, but he knew precisely where he was going. The current deal was a routine but high-fee transaction that would pay the rent.

Behind Albert Gibson, the window of the conference room ran almost the length of the room and more than half the height. It framed a panorama of the Dublin skyline, where a familiar sprouting of cranes decorated the city. From where he sat, Kennedy could see three tall buildings commemorating deals in which he had been involved, and from which he could remember the billing totals to the cent. Two of the cranes were markers for similar deals-in-the-making. Before this takeover thing was done and dusted, he’d be up to his neck in the next deal and getting another couple out of first gear.

Kennedy had been shepherding such deals for the best part of a decade. The work involved connecting ideas people with money people and identifying obstacles before they became problems. Once the numbers were credibly established, every deal had its own logic. It was all about recognising the pattern the negotiations would take and staying ahead of the curve, preparing responses before the opposition thought of the questions. Kennedy had figured out the pattern of this one weeks ago.

An Irish company, Kwarehawk Investments, was merging with an American corporation. Like lots of such developments since the economic boom peaked, Kwarehawk was merging in the sense that a fat little fish merges with the gaping jaws of a shark. Over the previous ten years, successful Irish businesses, having prospered for a while, queued up to be sold off to large foreign outfits, mostly British and American. Whatever the business – newspapers, PR firms, hotels, radio and TV stations, phone companies, pharmacy chains, electronics stores – as soon as it established a feasible profile it was rushed to the global market place. The founders of successful Irish companies tended to take the money and run. Maybe it was what Justin Kennedy thought of as the chicken factor – an absence of long-term confidence – or maybe just an impatience to get hold of the loot. Whatever, smoothing the way for such deals had become a significant part of Kennedy’s business.

Justin Kennedy’s firm had been hired to guide the Yanks through the intricacies of Irish company law. Two American lawyers had come over to earn big money for being told what to say. Gibson had brought along three sidekicks to pad out his firm’s fees. Kennedy had young Faraday for the same reason, but mostly to pour the coffee. Helen Snoddy, a freelance consultant on contract to Flynn O’Meara Tully, was sitting to Kennedy’s left. Tall, thin, brunette, primarily Prada, with a touch of Vuitton, just twenty-seven, smarter than anyone in the room and aware of it, she supplied specialist advice on tax matters. Sometimes an aspect of a deal had to go through three or four shelf companies and a couple of offshore jurisdictions before the tax liability was small enough to please the players. And Helen always knew the shortest route between any given deal and the nearest tax sanctuary.

Kennedy adjusted his face to display mild interest in Gibson’s meandering, and let some coffee wash down the last crumbs of the chocolate biscuit. Gibson was chubby and bald, the kind of bald where the remaining tufts of hair are fluffed up and teased and treated with the care given to rare plants. It had taken him two weeks to prepare his figures, based on two months of negotiations. Another week to get his PowerPoint presentation to his liking – although the figures could have been printed off on one side of A4.

One of the Americans asked a question about the timescale of an assortment of software licences. Justin Kennedy nodded his approval. Inwardly, he groaned. The short answer was that the software licences were irrelevant, applying to material already obsolete. But Gibson would never give a short answer. Helen Snoddy glanced at her watch. Kennedy could see that the top of the page open on her legal pad was decorated with doodles, prominent among which was a quite impressive caricature of Gibson, with a clown’s nose.

Kennedy took another mouthful of coffee and tried to stop his gaze drifting back towards the biscuits. He decided to exercise restraint. Another twenty minutes of this and his secretary would intervene to announce that lunch was ready to be served.

At two thirty on the dot, the kids of St Ciaran’s National School spilled out the doorway, draining the last of their drinks from their beakers, dragging jackets along the ground behind them. The boys used lurching shoulders and swinging schoolbags to continue the little skirmishes left over from lunchtime in the schoolyard. The girls mostly came in bunches, clustering, chattering.

Little more than a week back at school, Sinead was already settled down and loving it. Over the summer, the school’s old prefab classrooms had been demolished and a row of new prefabs had been built. Frankie Crowe wasn’t happy that his daughter was being educated in a shanty schoolroom, but he had to admit that the prefabs were at least clean and warm. The main school buildings were more solid, but shabby. Despite the voluntary donations and the kids’ sponsored walks, there wasn’t money for plaster on the breeze-block walls, and some of the classrooms had no ceilings, just steel girders beneath a corrugated roof.

Sinead came running. These days, whenever he came for her, at school or at the house, she ran to him. Another year or two, a welcoming hug for her dad would be out of the question when her friends were around. She handed him her schoolbag and ran to catch up with Carla and Patsy, her best friends at school. Frankie walked behind, the schoolbag over one shoulder. Only when they got to the main road and the other two turned right, did she wave them goodbye and drop back to walk alongside Frankie.

Frankie Crowe collected Sinead from school once a week, on Wednesdays. Sometimes at weekends he took her into town for a treat and she slept over at his place in Glasnevin, but she didn’t much like the cramped flat, so he didn’t push it too often. She was eight now, she’d been four when he went into jail and six when he came out, and it had taken her over a year to get to know him all over again.

The Wednesday routine varied little. McDonald’s, then whatever Sinead felt like. Today there was a Disney movie she’d seen twice and had to see again. ‘Mam promised she’ll get me the video as soon as it comes out.’

It was a cartoon thing, several steps up from
Sesame Street, Teletubbies
and all the other bright, cheerful things that once made her giggle but were now deeply uncool. She was a passionate Barney fan when Frankie went to jail. By the time he got out, she was treating the chuckling dinosaur with undisguised scorn.

Sinead changed his point of view about doing a stretch. It used to be that jail was tough, but it came with the territory. ‘You’re doing the crime,’ Jo-Jo Mackendrick said to Frankie when he was still a teenager. ‘Sooner or later, you’ll do the time. If you can’t handle that, now’s the time to find yourself a job stacking shelves down the supermarket.’

Frankie could handle it, and had done so three times. Long before he went down for the two-year stretch, he had taken small hits – probation, probation again, then a few weeks inside. He coped. Get into the right frame of mind and you could even get something useful out of it, like a soldier racking up the campaign medals that gave him credibility with his peers. Stay on the straight and narrow, be an upright John Citizen, you spend how many years locked up in a job that eats a big hole out of your life, pays buttons and bores you into an early grave. Follow your own path and you stay free, live well.

The way Frankie added it up, even doing all the hard time that comes with the life, you spend a lot less dead time in jail than John Citizen spends shovelling shit for shit wages.

What he hadn’t counted on was the massive chunk that the two-year jail term gouged out of his relationship with Sinead. Those two years amounted to half the life she’d lived before he went inside. It was like time changed pace when kids were involved.

And when he came out, the split with Joan had torn away the permanence of his relationship with his daughter, reducing it to this daddy-by-appointment routine.

As usual on Wednesdays, they cut across Rockwood Park, on their way to McDonald’s. Rockwood was a stretch of green in the centre of a housing estate, peppered with untidy clumps of carelessly placed trees and bushes. In the middle there was a flat, glass-strewn tarmacked area where kids played football in the daytime and gangs of teenagers drank cider at night. Throughout the day, people drove to the park, took their dogs out of their cars and set them loose to shit on the grass.

On these walks from the school, Sinead regularly surprised Frankie with her knowledge of trees and plants, her carefully phrased nuggets of information about animals and insects. He didn’t know enough to be sure if her lectures were accurate, but he loved the way she brimmed with new information and couldn’t wait to pass it on. Today it was knock-knock jokes.

‘Knock, knock.’

Frankie grinned. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Luke.’

‘Luke who?’

‘Luke through the keyhole and you’ll see.’

Halfway across the park, Crowe saw the squad car. It came out of a nearby street, turned parallel to the path on which Crowe and Sinead were walking and slowed down, matching their pace. Bastards must have spotted him earlier, now they were timing it so they’d pass the exit just as he came out the other side of the park. Gobshites.

Sinead was telling him about a schoolroom crisis that developed after some graffiti was found in the toilets. ‘The toilet incident,’ she called it. Teacher was pretty mad, and she wanted whoever did it to own up, or they’d be in deep trouble.

They were twenty feet from the park exit, and Crowe could see that the squad car was coming to a stop. He recognised the driver from the local garda station. Used to run into him over in Rialto. What was it? Hennessy, Flannery, something like that. Big ignorant culchie bollocks.

‘I think it was probably Katy O’Neill. She’s a goody-two-shoes when teacher is looking, but she doesn’t fool me.’

‘How a’ya, Frankie.’ The culchie bollocks had the window rolled down and was leaning out with a big grin on his face. ‘Proper family man these days, what?’

Sinead hadn’t noticed the squad car until now. Her cheeks went red, her gaze flicking here and there. She slid her hand into Frankie’s grip.

‘Just keep walking, sweetheart.’

‘What do they want, Dad?’ Her voice was low, diffident.

‘Nothing to worry about, love.’

The squad car moved slowly, keeping up with them. ‘Off to the supermarket, Frankie? Fill up another trolley, what?’

Frankie stopped walking.

‘What does he mean, Daddy?’

‘He’s just stirring it, sweetheart. Don’t worry about scum like that.’

‘You sure you don’t need anything at Tesco’s, Frankie?’

Crowe saw that the other cop, on the passenger side, a young guy, was staring fixedly ahead, at nothing at all, as though wishing he was anywhere else.

Fennelly, that was it, the culchie bollocks. Garda Fennelly.

Crowe hunkered down and took Sinead by the shoulders. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, love. Just a stupid man making a fool of himself. Just stand here, OK?’

‘Daddy, please—’

Crowe stood up, turned and walked over to the squad car. His tone was conversational. ‘Fennelly, you can mouth all you like, but you’ll always be a slag. They all know you.’ Standing close to the car, he bent down and spoke across Fennelly to the young cop. ‘He used to ride the hoors, d’you know that? When he was over the south side. Pretend to arrest the poor bitches, take a freebie and let them off.’

The young cop stared daggers at Crowe. Garda Fennelly went red.