The Midnight Choir (13 page)
Read The Midnight Choir Online
Authors: Gene Kerrigan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural
They found nothing. Afterwards, Dixie asked Owen, ‘How often is this going to happen?’
‘They’re just fishing – they’ve nothing solid.’
The police came back three weeks later, on an afternoon when Dixie was alone in the flat, and again they found nothing.
This time Dixie stood in front of a detective and watched him poke through a kitchen cabinet.
‘You’re just doing this to fuck us up, aren’t you?’
‘Our job is to inquire into the activities of criminals.’
‘I’m not a criminal.’
‘You’re married to one.’
‘My husband isn’t a criminal. He’s a driver. He drives a van.’
The detective opened a cabinet below the counter, bent over and began pulling out saucepans.
Dixie’s father hadn’t worked for years. His kidneys went bad early on and he needed regular dialysis. Jack Bailey didn’t show any fear when things got bad. His wife had died a year after Dixie was born. He seemed neither surprised nor upset by his own sudden decline. Dixie was with him every day in the hospital. Her big brother Fiachra came home from London for the funeral.
Fiachra had never said a bad word against Owen, but a couple of days after they buried their father he repeated what he’d said the night before she got married. ‘I’m always there for you, remember that.’
One evening, two or three weeks after the funeral, Owen was slicing lines of coke on the kitchen table when Dixie said, ‘I’d like to try.’ Owen looked at her for a moment, then nodded. He passed her the tube from a biro and she bent over the table and snorted.
It wasn’t the big deal she thought it would be. She was waiting for a rush inside her head, and when it didn’t come she thought maybe she’d done it wrong. After a while, when she’d stopped thinking about it, she noticed she was laughing loudly, in the middle of a very funny, very fast conversation with Owen about something her friend Shelley had said.
From the morning of her father’s death, it was like some kind of invisible weight had attached itself to Dixie. Now the coke seemed to flood through her, cleansing her head of the cheerlessness that dominated her days. She felt it made her who she was again.
Owen held up the Tesco Clubcard he used to slice the lines. Dixie took it, licked it and in seconds her tongue was numb.
The health-and-fitness course was a doddle. Dixie was slim, fit and eager to learn, the practical end of it was a snap and she immediately got into the rhythm of the lectures. The middle-aged man who ran the course – whose nickname, for some long-lost reason, was Obi-Wan Kenobi – told Dixie one morning that once she had the diploma he’d introduce her to contacts in the gym business and she’d have no bother getting a job.
When Dixie opened the door and saw the detective who’d led the last police search, the one who’d called her husband a criminal, she said, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ He didn’t have a warrant in his hand and there was just one other garda with him, a younger man with red hair and freckles.
‘Showing him the ropes, are you? A few tips on how to push people around?’ Dixie had one hand on the door, the other on her stomach. She was two months pregnant.
The freckled cop seemed embarrassed.
The detective didn’t display the cold manner he’d shown during the raid. When he said, ‘Mrs Peyton—’ there was a softness to his voice and Dixie said, ‘No, please—’
The policeman said his name was Detective Sergeant Harry Synnott. Dixie was looking at his nose, where it thickened in the middle like something inside had been knocked out of shape and it hadn’t healed right. He was sitting across the kitchen table from her. The freckled cop was carefully placing a cup of tea on the table.
‘He wasn’t being chased at the time,’ the detective said.
Owen had been driving the white van when he was pursued by a garda squad car. ‘They lost him. He was free and clear.’ He wanted her to understand that the police weren’t to blame.
No one knew that the van had gone into a ditch on a narrow twisting road beyond Balbriggan until an early-morning walker found it not long after dawn.
‘How long was he lying there?’
‘It happened sometime after 10 p.m. – that’s the last the local guards saw of the van, and – they don’t know, sometime after that.’ His voice was low, reluctant. ‘A few hours.’
When he offered his sympathies Dixie knew that he meant what he said.
She cried when she woke up alone and she cried when she lay down at night. When she did things she used to do with Owen – even shopping or watching a favourite television programme – she felt guilty. Doing things that Owen could no longer do felt like a betrayal.
Dixie convinced herself that crying would be bad for the baby inside her; it would fill him with sadness before he was born. So she stopped crying.
The baby was born seven months after Owen’s death, and Dixie called him Christopher as she and Owen had agreed they would. Sometimes when Christopher slept Dixie stared at his face and tried to see Owen there, and tried to imagine how the child’s features would mature and strengthen and evolve. Every night of his life, she kissed his forehead, touched his cheek and whispered, ‘You and me.’
FRIDAY
15
The detective sergeant in charge of the raid on the DVD factory was a thorough sort. He had unmarked police cars set up on all three exit roads from the small Moyfield industrial estate, and half a dozen uniforms were already posted around the back of the target warehouse, cutting off any runners. He wasn’t above seeking advice, either.
‘You see any loopholes?’ he asked Harry Synnott.
Synnott was sitting in the front passenger seat of an unmarked Ford minibus, four other officers in the back. In one hand he had a photocopy of the industrial-estate layout. In the other hand, in a long, narrow envelope, he had a search warrant for the warehouse. He said, ‘Looks good to me.’
This early in the morning, just past dawn, there was little sign of life on the industrial estate. Here and there, lights showed in premises where there was a night shift. A glow could be seen through the windows high up on the near wall of the target warehouse.
The detective sergeant looked at his watch, made a note in a small notebook, returned the notebook to the inside pocket of his dark blue jacket, and said, ‘Let’s get this over with.’
It was a part of the job that Harry Synnott never liked. The physical stuff, where maybe twelve stone of semi-hysterical criminal is hurtling in any direction that might take him away from captivity. Anyone caught in an operation like this faced the probability of several years of living in a small room with barred windows, locked into a suffocating prison routine, the boredom overwhelming even the anger, fear, nauseating smells and limitless sexual longing. With that kind of a future coming towards them, too many gurriers were seized by the kind of reckless panic that could leave a garda in hospital for a couple of weeks. In the raid on Lar Mackendrick’s warehouse there were enough uniforms – members who had volunteered for the job – to handle anything that might happen, so Harry Synnott felt at ease about hanging back. Two of the gardai on the raid were armed in case there were guns inside, though that was unlikely. Harry Synnott’s role was to serve the search warrant and assess whatever might be found on the premises. If whoever was in there was smart and could hold their nerve they’d skip the physical stuff, call their favourite mouthpieces and play the odds in court.
The warehouse was set back off the main road that ran through the industrial estate. There were buildings on every side, making it easy to approach without announcing the raid. The warehouse admitted daylight through the windows of pebbled glass set just below the roof line, through which the glow of lights could be seen. Such windows were useless for keeping watch. The CCTV cameras that looked down from high on the front of the warehouse could no doubt be used to keep tabs on the outside, but it was unlikely that Lar Mackendrick’s crew was that conscientious. The way in was a small door around the side, steel-reinforced but vulnerable to the nudge of a garda ram.
The sergeant in charge of the raid nodded to the four gardai in the minibus, waited until they dismounted, then walked quickly towards the building, his men following, one of them carrying the ram. Harry Synnott got out of the minibus and followed about twenty feet behind. He noticed a visibly increased tension in the gardai posted on watch around the warehouse.
Things speeded up once the crash of the ram on the warehouse door echoed off the surrounding buildings. The uniforms ran inside, while those stationed around the building moved forward, narrowing the area that any agitated suspects might have to play with if they made it outside.
When Harry Synnott entered the warehouse he found the sergeant standing with his hands on his hips, his men standing idly around him. Apart from a heap of something hidden under a dirty tarpaulin in a near corner of the warehouse the floor was bare of anything or anyone, right down to the far wall. The light from the four fittings that dangled from the roof beams showed that the warehouse was entirely empty.
Synnott walked quickly across to the heap in the corner. His gloved hand pulled the tarpaulin back. There was a wheelbarrow lying on its side and about a dozen bricks spilled onto the floor. A Marks & Spencer plastic bag lay on top of the bricks. Synnott opened it and found a half-empty bottle of Diet Coke and a plastic pencil case with a picture of Buzz Lightyear on the side. He unzipped the pencil case; there was nothing inside.
The detective sergeant was standing beside him.
‘Don’t worry. It happens.’
Synnott let the pencil case fall to the floor and kicked it away.
Dixie.
He didn’t understand what she could be up to.
Ought to know better than to fuck me around.
16
Lar Mackendrick finished his warm-up on the stationary bike, climbed off and took a long breath. He looked around the spare bedroom that he’d converted into a gym. He always felt this bad starting off, and it was always worth it when he was done. In the old days, he’d be tucking into a solid breakfast about now. Instead, he’d had the juice, the tea and the wholemeal toast and much as he’d have liked to take a break he had a routine to follow. He went to the bench and after fifteen minutes he felt warm and loose.
The chest stuff, maybe he could skip that.
Maybe not.
Lying on his back on the bench, a weight in each hand, he began the flat bench presses, counting down the repetitions. After a couple of dozen he put down one weight and clasped the other in his cupped hands. A lot of this stuff was a bore, but Lar enjoyed the dumb-bell pullovers. Arms stretched back over his head, he liked the way the weight created a balance against the pull of his restraining chest muscles. he stopped counting and continued the pullovers until he had to grunt to make the return lift.
A year earlier, six months after the tragedy that had left him alone to run the family business, Lar Mackendrick had got a warning from his doctor. Lose the weight, quit the fags and get fit, or he’d be joining Jo-Jo in the tasteful surroundings of Sutton cemetery.
‘There’s any number of possibilities, the state you’re in. My money’s on a stroke.’
Fear was the great motivator. In the months before the health warning, Lar Mackendrick had had to struggle to keep his mind from seizing up with despair. Pushing sixty, the settled life he’d been living crumbled around him when his elderly mother and his younger brother Jo-Jo had been murdered in their home. If he’d been able to think clearly he’d have realised that such a possibility was always there for anyone living a successful criminal life, envied and feared by their competitors. It had been a possibility for Lar and Jo-Jo from those early days when they’d been working their way up through Dublin’s rapidly maturing criminal network. But after the shock of the murders Lar Mackendrick was on automatic. Later, he didn’t remember ordering the killing of a brother and a couple of friends of the man the newspapers confirmed was responsible for the murders, a man who was himself in hiding abroad. Revenge, Lar concluded, was necessary but empty.
Lar couldn’t imagine life without his brother’s guidance. Jo-Jo had been the brains. He’d handled strategy for the family’s various criminal enterprises, while Lar was the hands-on type. Lost without Jo-Jo, Lar thought of jacking it in, but retirement would only give the emptiness more room to wear him away.
So, fitfully managing the business, he let himself drift, indulging every whim, impulse or craving, half aware that he was sliding towards something from which he wouldn’t be able to come back. An unrestricted intake of food and drink added a layer to his already dangerous bulk. Some evenings he had people around to his home in Howth, sometimes May had a couple of drinks with him, but mostly he watched television alone, all kinds of shite, and sipped vodka. Sometimes he talked to Jo-Jo, just told him how things were going, gave him the drill on people they knew, what was happening. He woke up in the A&E of Beaumont Hospital one afternoon, having passed out at the foot of the escalator on the ground floor of the Jervis Centre.
‘I can’t force you to do anything,’ the doctor told him, ‘but this isn’t something we can fix with a course of antibiotics. Bottom line – things stay as they are, you’ve a good chance of a stroke within a year or two.’ Lar spent a week in the Mater Private, his every moment dominated by fear.
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