Read The Midnight Choir Online
Authors: Gene Kerrigan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural
The Midnight Choir (17 page)
After about twenty minutes she gave Stephen a big smile and said, ‘You’re terrific. Could I just ask you to hold on a minute? I need to make a phone call.’
*
When Joshua Boyce left the long-term car park at the airport, he crossed the Swords Road and walked for almost fifteen minutes and when he reached the short-term car park he got into a Nissan he’d arranged to have parked there that morning. He drove the two miles up the road to the Northway Retail Park, where he went into the furniture section of the Perry Logan superstore.
He looked at his watch. A minute past twelve.
After strolling around for a couple of minutes he saw Antoinette. He casually joined his wife in the middle of a row of beds. They didn’t greet each other.
‘Which one?’
Antoinette said, ‘The one with the curved headboard.’
‘You don’t think it’s a bit colonial?’
‘They’re delivering it next Tuesday.’
‘That’s quick.’
‘You like it?’
‘It was your choice, I thought it was a bit colonial, but I went along.’
He kissed Antoinette, then said, ‘See you back here in a minute.’
He went through the store to the electronic section, where he immediately took a Canon photoprinter to the pay-point and used his Visa card.
After the ‘guess what’ phone call from Rose Cheney, Harry Synnott went back to the coffee shop, sat down across the booth from the jeweller and said, ‘Tell me about the safe in the floor.’
The jeweller sat very still.
Harry Synnott said, ‘You ask me what safe and twenty minutes from now a half-dozen policemen will be digging up your floor with pickaxes. Then I’ll charge you with obstruction of a criminal investigation. Tell me about the safe in the floor.’
The jeweller’s name used to be Murphy and his parents named him Patrick, a decision he came to bitterly resent as an adult. In a society in which image mattered, where a cosmopolitan tinge could justify a premium price, the jeweller didn’t see himself as a Paddy Murphy.
When, at the age of twenty-six, Paddy Murphy received a considerable inheritance from a grandfather who had never said two kind words to him when he was alive, he bought a half-share in a small and faltering jeweller’s shop owned by an old fool. The old fool had accumulated a fortune from his decades in the jewellery business, but he was a conservative, out-of-touch fossil who had no understanding of the possibilities open to a businessman attuned to modern Ireland’s need for the proper fashion accoutrements. For a couple of years, Paddy Murphy made himself a nuisance, constantly questioning stock decisions, pestering his partner with queries and demanding explanations for the most routine business judgements. When he offered to buy him out, the old fool hurriedly accepted.
At twenty-nine, Paddy Murphy had taken a crucial step on what was scheduled to become a legendary rise to the summit of Irish moneymaking. The shop would be modernised, applying all the marketing principles he’d learned at the business school. He would seek out young designers in touch with the
Zeitgeist
. He referred to the shop sometimes as a launch pad and at other times as a cash cow. It would finance his initial foray into property. That was the business where anyone with a million to invest at breakfast time could be sure of a million and a half by lunch.
Zeitgeist
. He referred to the shop sometimes as a launch pad and at other times as a cash cow. It would finance his initial foray into property. That was the business where anyone with a million to invest at breakfast time could be sure of a million and a half by lunch.
Believing that his name was inappropriate for the class of person he intended to become, Paddy Murphy adopted and adapted the names of two of his favourite Hollywood stars, Julia Roberts and Andy Garcia, and for professional purposes became Mr Robert Garcia. It was the name above his shop, and it was printed in gold on the faux-leather jewellery boxes in which he sold his goods. The professional name soon became the name he used in his personal life.
Within a year of taking over the shop, he had borrowed heavily to invest in his modernisation and marketing plans. The shop’s internal lighting scheme alone cost €60,000, the new display and counter modules another hundred and thirty grand, while the revamped exterior, the translucent wrapping paper and the faux-leather jewellery boxes cost only one sixth of the amount he spent in advertising during that year. On top of all that, he now had a wife with a serious Prada habit and the upkeep of his two kids cost so much that he briefly considered downsizing from his VW Tuareg 4×4. The redevelopment of the cash-cow shop came to fruition just in time for the business to collapse, as customers flocked to the new shopping centre two miles away. The centre had three jewellers’ shops, all staffed by extraordinarily thin young women with long straight hair.
Robert Garcia cut his staff to the bare bone, just himself and the kid he thought of as his idiot assistant, and still he was losing money. More than once since getting into the business he’d been approached to buy jewellery that he reckoned was of doubtful provenance. With incoming cash flowing like treacle, and the bank threatening to take his shop if he didn’t do something to make up the payments he’d missed, Robert Garcia made a phone call.
What was required was terribly simple. Through previous transactions, one of them questionable but probably legal, he already had a trade contact in Leeds who could shift the stuff for him. He had the expertise to price the dodgy jewellery. He had the money belt in which it could nestle on the flight to Leeds and Bradford airport. He had the trade knowledge to deal with the buyers at the other end.
He had the floor safe installed for extra security. That was supposed to ensure that the special merchandise would be OK. The possibility that some thug might rob the shop came with the territory but the floor safe was supposed to safeguard the uninsurable commodities.
It mattered. The man who’d approached Robert Garcia about the special merchandise had prefaced everything with a warning. ‘You fuck up, you pull a fast one, you even think about it, well—’ And the man had used his thumb and forefinger to make the shape of a gun.
The first three transactions had gone swimmingly and one client led to another. That part of his business flourished and the generous commission he negotiated made the difference. Sooner or later the property people who’d been snapping up premises around this part of Kellsboro would make an acceptable offer. So far, the vultures were trying to get the place on the cheap. Mr Garcia suspected that they knew he was in hock to the banks – all those fuckers gang up against the small businessman, he knew that. They’d make a realistic offer, though, if he could just keep afloat long enough.
Now this.
His thoughts wouldn’t stay in line. He tried to think it through – the police didn’t know what was in the safe, so as long as he kept his mouth shut – the people he was shifting the stuff for, what if they thought he – the police might think – but there was no—
Jesus.
The people who owned this stuff – what if they thought he was in league with the— Ah, Jesus—
With red friction marks on his chin, cheek and forehead where he’d been rubbing his face since the man came into his shop with a gun, Mr Paddy Robert Garcia Murphy looked across the café table at the detective who was threatening to have his shop floor dug up. He said a line he’d learned not at the business school but from dozens of TV cop shows. ‘I want my lawyer.’
21
Dixie got bail just after ten o’clock and it took her an hour to get home. She waited a few minutes at a bus stop near the courts, then got restless and began walking up along the quays.
On O’Connell Bridge, she took off her red jacket. It was clean enough but it was cheap and she’d washed it too many times – the material looked tired, the colour anaemic. She folded the jacket over one arm. Her jeans were OK, her black T-shirt was a little light for the April weather, but she felt cleaner, less conspicuous among the shoppers.
Across O’Connell Bridge and down the south quays. The sky around here had been full of cranes for the past few years, office buildings and hotels shooting up. Beyond the Custom House, either side of the river, there were times when Dixie thought it looked like something from a science fiction movie. She’d crossed the bridge to the North Quay one afternoon and taken a walk through the Financial Centre, past discreet bars and restaurants with French and Italian names, past chrome-clad shops that looked like the de luxe versions of similar ones elsewhere in the city. She felt as though she’d wandered across an invisible border into a foreign country.
Now she took a right through the Grand Canal area. More offices, apartment towers, and bars that looked like upmarket staff canteens, where expensively dressed young office workers with assisted tans made connections over drinks that had humorous names. Eventually, in the area between Grand Canal and Ringsend, Dixie reached South Crescent, a curving network of one- and two-storey houses, where she had lived for the past three years. The land was reclaimed from the bay, the small houses built for the employees of the docks and the factories and mills that had grown up around them more than a hundred years before. Now some working-class families remained, but increasing numbers of the little houses had been bought up by the young executives working in the glass monuments to prosperity that dominated the area. The doors and windows of many of the houses had been modernised, with wooden blinds behind double glazing, the interiors all polished floors and off-white walls. Extensions had been affixed to the backs of some of the houses, some of the extensions bigger than the original dwellings.
Dixie lived on Portmahon Terrace, halfway down a row of two-storey terraced houses, no front gardens, narrow pavements separated by a roadway that wasn’t much wider. When she got there old Mr Jordan was sitting on a kitchen chair on the pavement in front of his house, directly across from hers. Mr Jordan, who had lived in the same house since childhood, had retired from work after he got a few thousand in a pay-off for losing his left hand in an industrial accident. That money had long since gone on groceries. Mr Jordan, unmarried and apparently content in his solitude, lived for the sun. As soon as a day worked up a blush of sunshine he brought a kitchen chair to the pavement out front and sat there for several hours. Sometimes he brought a newspaper and held it at arm’s length, reading it through glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He held the folded newspaper with his remaining hand and occasionally tucked it between his chin and his chest to turn a page awkwardly. Mostly he just sat there, one knee crossed over the other, face tilted towards the sky.
Today, in weather that still had a touch of winter about it, Mr Jordan was wearing the black jacket and trousers that weren’t quite close enough in shade to pass for a suit. He sometimes wore a black felt hat but today he was bareheaded. On a sunny day, he’d leave the jacket off and roll up the right sleeve of his shirt, leaving the other sleeve pinned up over the stump of his wrist. Dixie had never seen him without a tie. She sometimes wondered how he put it on.
He nodded a silent greeting to Dixie as she approached her house. She nodded back.
Inside, she had a shower and lay on her bed. She hadn’t got much sleep in Mountjoy but now she spent an hour just staring at the ceiling. When she felt hungry she went downstairs, opened a tin of ravioli, poured it into a saucepan and put the stove on a low heat. Then she went back upstairs. She avoided looking at herself in the full-length mirror beside the wardrobe. The brown skirt and the tan blouse she’d worn on Monday were on the floor, where she’d flung them after the meeting with the bitch.
Four days ago? Is that all?
She took down a white blouse and a pair of light blue jeans. There would be a time for nice clothes, a time for dressing up, a time for more than getting through the day. She had no idea when that might be, and she accepted it might never happen.
After Owen died, the thought that Dixie tried to connect with was
Get back on the rails.
It took a while to accept that there were no rails any more, no certainties. The only thing she could be sure of was the purity of the moments that she shared with Christopher. It didn’t matter where they were or what happened before or after, or what was going on in the rest of her life – the certainty of what she felt for the child and the warmth that was reflected back from him created a kind of sanctuary. Now that too was in danger of crumbling.
Get back on the rails.
It took a while to accept that there were no rails any more, no certainties. The only thing she could be sure of was the purity of the moments that she shared with Christopher. It didn’t matter where they were or what happened before or after, or what was going on in the rest of her life – the certainty of what she felt for the child and the warmth that was reflected back from him created a kind of sanctuary. Now that too was in danger of crumbling.
Get through this.
Money.
Dixie sat on the bed and went over the possibilities, as she’d done a hundred times over the previous few days. There was nothing in the house she could sell. The radio was a cheap piece of junk, the television was a small portable. No clothes worth shit. The jewellery that Owen had given her was long gone, the stuff left was the kind of thing they sold from the stand near the register at Penney’s.
Five hundred would get her free and clear and on her way. Even the three hundred that Inspector Synnott had welshed on. In her pocket she had less than a tenner.
Maybe get twenty for her watch. Fifteen, more likely.
Twenty-five, total.
Today was collection day for the Widow’s Pension. She got the pension book from the kitchen drawer and put it in the back pocket of her jeans. She’d bring back a hundred and fifty from the Post Office.
Not nearly enough.
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