The Midnight Choir (16 page)
Read The Midnight Choir Online
Authors: Gene Kerrigan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural
Great.
As Boyce swung the car out of the car park, he glanced back and saw that Dumbo was leaning on one elbow, trying to stand up.
*
Detective Garda Rose Cheney finished typing up a long-overdue report on a child abuse case just in time to leave for the courts. The way traffic was, it meant adding half an hour to the usual driving time, just in case. Better that a copper be an hour early than keep a judge waiting half a minute. She pulled on a jacket and was reaching for her handbag when her mobile rang. The caller introduced himself as a detective from Earlsfort Terrace. ‘You’re dealing with an alleged rape, I’m told?’
‘Who said?’
‘A colleague mentioned it, knew I’d an interest, put me onto you. The name of the alleged rapist is Hapgood, I’m told?’
‘You know him?’
‘We should talk.’
19
The Kellsboro Shopping Arcade was barely a six-minute drive from the jewellery shop and Joshua Boyce decided that was as far as he could go in the hot Accord. The small collection of shops, jam-packed under a perspex roof that badly needed hosing down, had been opened in the 1980s. It now had too many scuff marks, too many faulty light fittings, too few customers. Like everything else around here it was losing out to the new shopping centre a couple of miles up the main road between Kellsboro and the outer suburbs. Boyce needed a minute of privacy and the shopping arcade would do.
Once the cops got into gear there wouldn’t be a garda in the country who didn’t have a description of the car. The plan had been to use the Accord to get to a second getaway car, but Dumbo had blown that. Boyce would have to improvise.
He took his holdall and left the Accord in the shopping arcade car park with the door slightly open and the keys in the ignition. There was a chance that some loser would steal it and give the police something to keep them occupied.
Fucking Dumbo.
An armed robbery at a poky little jewellery shop would make the news, but way down the list. A shooting, even a nick in the leg of a gobshite security guard, raised the ante.
Inside the Arcade, Clara’s Coffee Shop had cheap mugs, scarred Formica tabletops and a dyed-blonde waitress with the disposition of someone doing community service. All five customers were pensioners killing time, two of them eating belated breakfasts, the others nursing cups of something brown. Walking past the waitress, Boyce’s smile was all sunshine and roses as he ordered a coffee and continued on through to the tiny toilet down the back. He took off the anorak and stuck the baseball hat in one of its pockets along with the false moustache. He put the lot into the holdall along with the jewellery.
He looked at his watch. Almost ten-thirty.
When he came out of the toilet he noticed an emergency exit at the end of a short, murky corridor. He went to it and pushed down on the bar. The yard the door opened onto had a metal gate with large bolts, no lock, and when he opened it he found himself in a laneway. At the end of the laneway he crossed the road. A bus was just approaching a stop thirty yards further on. The jewellery in the holdall rattled as he ran.
Boyce got to the stop as the last of the four or five people in the queue shuffled aboard. He put some coins into the machine beside the driver and waited for his ticket. He had no idea where the bus was going.
*
Detective Garda Rose Cheney was in her Astra, on her way to the Circuit Criminal Court, when her mobile rang. She pressed a button on the hands-free and the car filled with a voice she recognised as a lawyer from the Chief State Solicitor’s office.
‘Detective Garda Cheney?’
Cheney said, ‘Bollocks.’
‘I’m afraid so, garda.’
‘What is it this time?’
‘He’s claiming that all the publicity makes a fair trial impossible. His high profile, and the resultant media comment is prejudicial – he wants it put back indefinitely, to create a cordon sanitaire. The papers went in this morning.’
‘But, he’s – ah, Jesus!’
‘I know, he’s the one who created most of the publicity. If he gets a judge with the balls of a performing flea he’ll be told to take a running jump, but – in the meantime.’
‘Bollocks.’
This was the fourth legal motion designed to postpone or sabotage the trial of a prominent accountant accused of several varieties of corruption. The attempts to find a loophole had precedents in various high-profile trials, and the accountant had the money to employ enough lawyers to trawl the books in search of fresh punctures in the law through which he might wriggle. Cheney’s only involvement in the case was that she had accompanied several members of the Criminal Assets Bureau in a raid on the accountant’s home. Her evidence would be formal and routine, but the defendant’s lawyers were conceding nothing. It had already cost Cheney several wasted days hanging around the courts, waiting for the trial to get into gear.
‘How long will this one take?’
‘Depends on the testicular condition of the performing flea. Anywhere from a week to several months – and if he gets his cordon sanitaire, who knows?’
‘The Yanks could put Michael Jackson and OJ on trial, the Brits could put Jeffrey Archer in the slammer – Jesus, this is a joke.’
Cheney turned onto a side avenue that would eventually allow her to double back towards Macken Road. She stopped and left the engine running while she called the station to let them know she wasn’t on court duty after all. The sergeant on the other end told her about the robbery at a jeweller’s shop in the Kellsboro area.
*
When Detective Inspector Harry Synnott arrived at the jeweller’s shop, there were two uniforms there and a third maybe a hundred yards up the street, holding traffic back as an ambulance, siren shrieking, came out of a car park and sped away. A young man with a peculiar hairstyle was standing outside the jewellery shop, his head held back, his white shirt streaked with blood, a couple of civilians looking solicitous.
‘What’s the score?’
The older of the two uniforms pointed out the shop where the hold-up had happened, and told him the guy with the bloody nose was an employee. ‘The jeweller’s down the road, having a coffee to steady his nerves.’
‘The call said shots fired – in the shop?’
‘There was a security man – from the building society, had a go. That was him in the ambulance. Flesh wound – up the street it happened, there’s a car park.’
Synnott looked in the direction the uniform was pointing and saw that the garda who had directed the ambulance onto the roadway was walking back towards the jeweller’s shop.
‘Anyone securing the scene of the shooting?’
The two uniforms said nothing.
Synnott spoke to the younger of them. ‘Tell that fool to go back, you go with him. Nothing more goes into or comes out of that car park – no one gets in, no matter how urgently they need to get their car.’
The younger uniform moved away in a hurry.
To the other one, Synnott said, ‘Have we got a description?’
‘It’s been called in. Early thirties, five-ten or so, moustache, baseball cap, jeans, anorak – driving a dark blue Accord. Two witnesses got the reg – but they disagree on the last two numbers.’
‘We’re going to need enough members here for control and search and to canvass for witnesses.’
As the uniform spoke into his radio, requesting support, Synnott crossed the pavement and went into the jeweller’s shop. Most of the businesses around here hadn’t seen a lick of new paint in ten years, and never would. The area had redevelopment written all over it. The jeweller’s shop was lit like an operating theatre, with bevelled glass everywhere and walnut casings for the display units. It managed the trick of looking expensive and tacky at the same time. Sometimes it seemed to Synnott that over the past few years half the city had been redesigned and built by the people who make those crappy little earphones that cost a small fortune and still leak tinny music. There were some drops of blood on a glass-topped counter.
That’d be from the assistant
.
That’d be from the assistant
.
When Synnott came out, he saw Rose Cheney’s car pull up across the road. She parked with two wheels on the pavement.
*
The bus took Joshua Boyce through Rathmines, where he got off and spent twenty minutes in a taxi, crossing the city to Dorset Street. After a minute waiting on the footpath, he flagged down a second taxi and got into the back.
‘The airport.’
The driver glanced at the mirror. ‘Travelling light?’
Boyce had the holdall on his lap.
‘Just the weekend.’
‘Going over for the match?’
‘Ahuh.’ Boyce had no idea who was playing.
He looked at his watch. Eleven-seven.
The driver gave his opinion about Chelsea. Boyce made appropriate sounds.
A little over twenty minutes later he got out at Dublin Airport’s departures terminal, then took a five-minute taxi ride back to the long-term car park and went directly to the Hyundai he’d parked there three days back. He opened the boot and lifted the mat. Leaning in, his body concealing his actions from any casual observer, he put the Sig-Sauer into the empty spare-wheel bay and then the jewellery. He dropped the mat back on top, put the anorak and the empty holdall on the mat, then threw his gloves in. Keeping his fingers inside his sleeve, he used his forearm to slam the boot shut.
He looked at his watch. Eleven thirty-nine.
20
The jeweller looked like someone who’d lost a winning lottery ticket. If he wasn’t patting his pockets he was rubbing the side of his face, pinching his chin or using his nails to scrape something invisible from his forehead.
He was sitting in a booth in the coffee shop a few doors down from his place of business. A waitress gave him a sympathetic tut-tut and refilled his mug.
Harry Synnott said, ‘We’ll need a list of everything stolen – you have photographs?’
The jeweller nodded. ‘Except the cheap stuff – though he didn’t take much of that.’
‘Any idea of the value?’
The jeweller shook his head.
‘You recognise anything about this guy? The voice? The accent?’
Another shake of the head
‘Anything he said strike you as odd? Maybe a turn of phrase, something you’ve heard someone else say – a customer, maybe?’
The jeweller had nothing helpful to say. Synnott went back to the jeweller’s shop and found a detective there named Costigan. He told him to take custody of the shop’s CCTV tape.
‘Then take a walk down the street, fifty yards down to the left, then back the other way, all the way up as far as the car park where the shooting happened. Take a note of every CCTV, get hold of the tapes.’
By the time a second ambulance arrived at the scene, a passing civilian had worked on the assistant with the peculiar hairstyle and had managed to staunch the flow of blood from his nose. The kid didn’t want to go to the hospital but the ambulance men insisted. Rose Cheney went with him. He said his name was Stephen.
‘Take your time, Stephen. Let’s go through everything, step by step.’
Sitting in an administrator’s office, sipping a glass of water, Stephen told Cheney about the shock he got when he saw the gunman coming into the shop. When he told her about how the gunman used the gun to thump him in the face she put on such a motherly look that Stephen felt it might be OK to let go of the tears he’d been holding back. When he’d arrived in the A&E he’d asked a nurse to call his mother at her workplace, let her know what happened, and the message back was that she’d call him at home at lunchtime.
A thing like this, you get your nose smashed, everyone’s supposed to be all over you, but so far this cop – she was way older than Stephen, but not bad at all – she was the only one to act like he deserved a little consolation. After the gunman left, Stephen had expected his boss to fuss over him, instead of which the stingy bastard had stood there, thumping the counter and making grief-stricken noises.
‘My nose,’ Stephen said, and the jeweller got him a dirty towel from the midget bathroom at the back of the shop. Stephen threw it on the counter and held the sleeve of his white shirt against his nose.
‘Do you think,’ Stephen asked the policewoman now, ‘I could claim for this? It’s destroyed.’ He looked down at the bloody stains on the front of his white shirt and on the right sleeve and said, ‘It’s from Thomas Pink.’
‘I’m sure your employer will make good. After all, I’d say it’s a work-related injury.’
‘Tight bastard.’
Apart from the grief-stricken noises all the jeweller said to Stephen was, ‘Say nothing about nothing, right? You know what I mean.’
The policewoman took Stephen through the sequence of events as the gunman directed the collection of jewellery. ‘Did he say anything? Did he know much about jewellery? Did he suggest particular pieces?’
Stephen could tell that she
cared
. It wasn’t like he was just a flunkey in someone else’s world: she listened to him like he was someone who mattered. So he told her everything.
cared
. It wasn’t like he was just a flunkey in someone else’s world: she listened to him like he was someone who mattered. So he told her everything.
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