The Midnight Choir (12 page)
Read The Midnight Choir Online
Authors: Gene Kerrigan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Then I said to myself, no, maybe not. For a minute there I could have sworn you were a fella used to work in the clubhouse bar. He was from Drogheda. Every Saturday morning, I went there. Nice people. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.’ Kemp was staring at the shrink. ‘It was like I was waking up, standing on the roof. I knew why I was there, and I kind of remembered – maybe not. Anyway, that was that.’
‘And?’
The nutcase looked again at Joe Mills. ‘I was just curious. Thought you might be the guy, after all. Just wanted to ask you.’
‘There was no woman.’
Kemp raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course there was.’
‘I looked all over the house, the garden, front and back.’
Kemp looked confused. Then he closed his eyes for a few seconds and when he opened them he was smiling. He understood. ‘No, not Mina’s house – Christ, no, what do you think I am? She’s my sister.’
‘What did you mean –
I’d never hurt a woman before
?’
I’d never hurt a woman before
?’
The suspect shook his head. ‘Different thing altogether. Not here. Not Galway.’
‘Blackpool?’
‘What about it?’
‘This woman, whatever you did to her – did it happen in Blackpool?’
‘Do you think I could get a cup of tea? Milk, no sugar.’
Wayne Kemp got his tea and he didn’t say another word for three days.
DUBLIN
When he closed the front door of his flat, before he switched on the light, Harry Synnott saw the little yellow light blinking on the answer machine. He grimaced. The day’s work might not yet be done.
Synnott pressed a button on the machine.
‘Harry—’
It was OK – his ex-wife.
Synnott pressed another button and the message aborted. He crossed to the kitchen table, set down the Chinese takeaway, and hung his jacket on the back of a chair. When he’d spooned the food onto a plate he sat at the table and began eating. After a couple of minutes he switched on the radio. A man was talking about classical music, explaining the background to someone’s masterpiece. After a while he stopped talking and played the music. Synnott listened as he ate and when he’d finished eating he switched off the radio and dumped the remains of the meal in the bin. Then he went to the answer machine and played Helen’s message.
‘Harry, maybe it’s nothing, but I had a call from Michael this afternoon. Nothing wrong, but he casually dropped the fact that he intends quitting college. Just like that. Has he said anything to you? You know how these things go, it could be he’s just being cranky, but, anyway, I think maybe you should give him a call, see if he’s serious. Let me know if there’s anything to worry about. Take care.’
Synnott had spoken with his son a week earlier. He’d taken Michael to dinner in the expensive city-centre restaurant that his son had nominated. The food was all right, the servile waiters a pain in the arse.
When Michael ordered something with a French name he leaned heavily on the appropriate accent. Synnott didn’t know why that irritated him so much, but it did. His son was pushing adulthood. He was just three years short of the age that Synnott had been when he had given evidence in a murder case. Synnott found his son’s pretensions no longer cute, just irksome.
Michael chattered about some opportunity that had come up. He and two friends were hoping for some venture capital from the father of one of the friends. ‘We’re thinking of opening a brand consultancy.’
Synnott tried to keep the scepticism out of his voice. ‘Michael, what do you know about—’
‘Suppose you’ve got a business – a product or a service you really believe in. It’s only as good as the image your potential customers have of it. That’s where we come in.’ Michael leaned forward. ‘Everything from letterheads to launches, from the design of the product to the look of your offices, the packaging, the clothes your people wear to work, the music the customers listen to when they’re put on hold. We enhance your presence in the market, using the sensibilities of the artist.’
Michael paused, as if suddenly aware that he was giving his father a ready-made marketing line. ‘It’s cool, dad. We take a humdrum business, we give it all the style of a brand, we make it stand out from the herd.’
Synnott said something about college and Michael waved that away. ‘That’s for drones – initiative and blue-sky thinking, you can’t learn that kind of thing in a lecture hall.’
Now Synnott lifted the phone and tapped in the first four digits of Michael’s number before he hung up.
Not tonight.
Synnott had had similar conversations with Michael over the past year. Never a product, never a skill, never a consumer service at the heart of the latest plan, always a fresh angle on how to interface with something, or how to get in on something, or behind it or intervene or connect or transform. Synnott found such conversations difficult. It was as though they were speaking the same language, but in different dialects.
Not tonight.
He’d call his son tomorrow.
*
Joshua Boyce wasn’t crazy about La Pontchartrain, but Antoinette got to choose the restaurant tonight. The lighting was too dim, the food was too –
fussy
was as close as he could come to putting a word to it. Boyce didn’t like places that made a drama out of producing a meal.
fussy
was as close as he could come to putting a word to it. Boyce didn’t like places that made a drama out of producing a meal.
‘To us.’ Antoinette was drinking white wine, and Boyce returned her toast with mineral water.
It had become a custom for Joshua Boyce and his wife to dine out the night before he did a job. If something went wrong tomorrow it would be a long time before they did anything together. And although the jewellery shop was a safe enough job, once there were guns involved things could get hairy very quickly.
Antoinette was the prettiest woman in the room, no doubt about that. Long straight hair, pale blue eyes. She was wearing her newest dress, a dark blue Marc Jacob that she had picked up on a weekend trip to New York with a couple of friends. It used to be London for shopping trips, but New York was better and cheaper and more fun. Joshua Boyce didn’t see the need for such excursions, given the arrival in Dublin of every consumer delight from Harvey Nichols to Louis Vuitton, but Antoinette got a kick out of her shopping adventures.
Things are as they should be.
Boyce allowed his fingertips to brush the walnut handle of the fork in front of him.
Touch wood.
Touch wood.
*
As Dixie came awake she could feel the pulse in her neck, as strong as if her heart had pushed its way up into her throat.
Stay calm.
Panic attack’s the last thing we need.
Stupid. In here. Trapped in a box.
She pressed her face into the pillow. The monotony of the day and a half that she’d spent so far in Mountjoy had left her exhausted, but her sleep was shallow and repeatedly broken. She turned over onto her back.
‘Friday will tell the tale.’
Tomorrow.
Another prisoner, a woman with a sing-song voice, was talking somewhere not too far away. Just the one voice, no reply, and occasional hoarse laughter from the same voice. Dixie welcomed the diversion that the noise provided. A long time later it stopped: the woman must have dozed off and that made it easier to think, which Dixie didn’t want to do.
Tomorrow would be the end of everything there was and everything there was to be, and from this cell Dixie could no more change that than she could fly to the moon.
‘Friday will tell the tale.’
In search of distraction and comfort, Dixie said one prayer and then another.
Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for . . .
Our Father, who art . . .
Hail Mary, full of grace . . .
In the name of the Father . . .
14
The first time Dixie saw Owen Peyton, he wasn’t the handsomest man in the pub – that was Paul, the long drink of water she was seeing at the time – but he was the coolest. Owen didn’t live on the Cairnloch estate – he was in the Bird’s Nest that evening, in company with a dozen others, because he hung around with a brother of one of Dixie’s friends. Shaggy dark hair, a bottle of Heineken in his hand, and a smile that lit up his deep dark eyes. She was aware that she wanted him to like her and even more aware that she didn’t want him to know she gave a damn.
Back then she was Dixie Bailey. Deirdre to her father, Dixie to everyone else. The most important thing in her sights was the health-and-fitness course she was doing. A diploma would open all sorts of doors – a job at a fitness centre, maybe freelance work as a trainer. She didn’t speak to Owen that night, but towards the end of the evening, just before he left with a couple of friends, he met her gaze and raised the Heineken in a toast.
Two weeks later she broke up with Paul and phoned Owen. He said, ‘You took your time.’
Owen drove a white van. ‘Deliveries,’ he said. He didn’t have set hours, he didn’t take the van home with him – it was garaged, he said, somewhere out in Coolock. It wasn’t his van, but he had the full-time use of it from his boss. People that he knew, he said, recommended him to people who wanted stuff moved.
He’d spent a year at DCU and quit, because he could earn more doing what he did than he’d ever earn when he got a degree.
It was a few weeks later that Owen’s van was stopped with a stack of stolen tyres inside. Standing at her front door, Owen’s brother Brendan telling her what happened, Dixie felt like a layer of ice had been placed across her scalp.
‘He’ll be all right. Don’t worry.’
Owen rang Dixie as soon as he got bail and they went to The Merchant Prince. ‘It’s something I do from time to time, it’s not a big deal. Some of the stuff I move, it’s not the kind of—’
He stopped, took a breath. ‘It’s not how the millionaires do their business. But, I mean, that’s the way things work in this country. There’s the official way, right? And there’s VAT and receipts and accountants and all that shit. Underneath that there’s the real businesses, the ones that most ordinary people make a living out of. I mean, do you know anyone who pays full price for anything?’
People do deals, he said, and maybe they don’t do all the paperwork, but it’s how the world works, and when people do deals they have to have stuff shifted, and that was what Owen did.
Dixie asked him if he’d ever been arrested before.
He looked her in the eye for a few seconds. ‘A couple of little things. Probation. Doesn’t count.’ Then, he said, he got two months for receiving, but that wasn’t a serious thing and, besides, he got out after six weeks.
This time he did fourteen months.
While Owen was in jail, Dixie had a miscarriage. When he came out they got a three-bedroom flat in Santry and spent a week fitting it out. Dixie thought it looked like something from a magazine.
*
Owen’s brother Brendan was best man. He was the older brother, pudgy and dour, but Owen said he was just shy.
At the reception Dixie came across Owen in conversation with a chubby middle-aged man in an expensive suit. The man looked at Dixie and turned to Owen. ‘You did well, kiddo.’
Owen introduced him as his boss. The man stuck out his hand to Dixie. ‘Lar Mackendrick. Best thing ever happened to this scallywag, when you took him on.’
Later, Lar Mackendrick danced with Dixie, sang two songs and when he left he handed Owen an envelope. When they opened it that evening they found tickets for a flight to Paris, a voucher for a week’s stay at a hotel and two grand in cash.
‘What business is he in?’
‘Whole lot of stuff.’
‘He must think well of you.’
‘I told you, I know people.’
‘Never?’
‘No.’
‘Not even tempted?’
‘At parties, now and then, the odd joint, that kind of thing. I wouldn’t touch the hard stuff.’
Owen laughed. ‘Coke isn’t hard stuff. It’s just – it gets you there.’
‘I like to keep a clear head.’
‘Nothing clears your head like a Bacardi Breezer?’
‘That’s different.’
‘I know. This is better.’
Dixie told him about the guy who worked with her brother Fiachra, how he overdosed on heroin. ‘They all got the day off work for the funeral.’
‘Heroin is shit. Only losers mess with shit.’
She watched the plastic card slicing the white powder.
He said, ‘You don’t mind?’
‘To each his own.’
*
When they raided the flat for the first time, the police weren’t gentle. Everything that could be moved was turned over, every drawer and door was opened, every shelf was cleared, they emptied shoeboxes and cabinets. Dixie said, ‘What gives you the right—’ They ignored her.
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