The Midnight Choir (2 page)

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Authors: Gene Kerrigan

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural

BOOK: The Midnight Choir
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Get him talking. Draw him out. Make a connection. That’s a start
.
Maybe ask him if he’s got kids
?
No
.
Could be domestic.
Mention kids and I might step on something that stokes him up.
It was mid-April and Mills could feel the winter overhang in the breeze.
Down there, touch of spring. Notice the wind up here.
‘Cold out here. In that top.’
Fuck’s sake.
The weather.
The jumper stared straight ahead.
‘You a regular in this pub?’
Nothing.
Should have asked the manager.
‘You want to tell me your name?’
Nothing.
‘Don’t know about you, but I’m nervous up here.’
Mills was trying to remember something that the lecturer had said. About how, more often than not, the subject is using the threat of suicide as a cry for help. Offer a way out, show them that you care.
Okay, fella, I hear you.
Well done.
Point made. Help on the way. Quit while you’re ahead.
Say hello to the men in white coats and they’ll give you all the little pills in the world and by tomorrow you won’t remember what was bothering you.
Or what planet you’re on.
The jumper turned his head just enough so that he was looking Garda Joe Mills in the eye.
Jesus.
The man’s blank icy stare was unmistakable evidence that this was no cry for help.
There’s something mad in there.
The jumper held Joe Mills’s gaze as he turned completely around until his back was to the street and he was facing the garda.
Ah, fuck.
His arms still down by his sides, his heels an inch from the edge of the parapet, his expression vacant, the jumper stared at Joe Mills.
Now, he falls backwards, staring at me until he goes out of sight and the next thing I hear is the gawkers screaming and then the wet crunching sound that I’ll be hearing in nightmares for years to come.
‘Look, fella. Whatever it is – I mean, what you need to think about, give it time—’
Stupid.
Arguing – he can’t—
The jumper stepped lightly off the parapet onto the roof. He stood there, chin up, his bulky tensed arms several inches out from his sides. After a few seconds he flexed his jaw in a way that made the tendons in his neck stand out. Then he took an audible breath and began to walk past Garda Mills. He was moving towards the storeroom and the door down from the roof.
‘Hey, hold on—’
Mills reached out to grab an arm and the man threw a punch. Mills felt like his nose had taken a thump from a hammer. The jumper was turning sideways, instinctively positioning himself to block a return blow, but through the pain Mills was very deliberately suppressing his own urge to lash back. He was already ducking to the left, one hand snapping onto the jumper’s right wrist, then he was twisting the man’s hand and moving around him, keeping the arm taut, twisting it and pushing and the jumper made a
Hwwaawwh!
sound and Mills was standing behind him. The man was bent forward ninety degrees, immobilised by Mills’s grip on his hand and his rigid arm.
Mills hooked a foot around the man’s leg so that when he pushed the jumper forward he tripped and went down, his arm held rigid all the way. The anguished sound the prisoner made seemed to come in equal measure from the pain and from the realisation that he had no control over what was happening.
Mills could hear footsteps behind him and then Dockery was reaching down and seconds later the man was cuffed, belly down on the roof.
Mills felt the elation rush from somewhere in his chest, spreading out right to the tips of his fingers, blanking out even the pain in his nose.
Did it!
Situation defused.
Every move totally ace.
If Dockery hadn’t been there, Mills might have given a whoop.
He wants to go off a roof, there’s always tomorrow, and to hell with him, but for now—
Gotcha!
Mills took a deep breath and Dockery said, ‘Jesus, look at that.’ He was pointing down at the man’s cuffed hands.
Mills could see dark reddish-black stains on both hands, across the palms, in between the fingers. The dried blood was caked thick around the man’s fingernails.
Dockery turned the prisoner over. There were darker stains on the dark blue top. There were also dark streaks down near the bottom of his jeans. The man lay there, quiet, like the fight had drained out of him in that short frantic struggle.
Dockery was looking at Mills. ‘He’s not hurt?’
Mills shook his head. ‘Can’t be his blood. And it’s not recent.’
That much blood – someone was carrying a hell of a wound.
Mills looked at his own hands, where he’d gripped the nutcase. He saw a smear that might have come from the stains on the man’s hand. He rubbed his hand on his trouser leg.
He bent and looked at the man’s trainers. There were dark reddish marks ingrained in the pattern of the sole of one of them.
Might be, or maybe not.
Mills knelt, levered off both the man’s shoes and held them by the laces.
Dockery said, ‘What’s your name?’
The man ignored the question. Lying on his back, cold eyes watching Joe Mills straighten up, there was a twist to one side of his mouth as though his face couldn’t decide whether to scowl or smirk.
They got him to his feet and hustled him towards the roof doorway, from which the pub manager was emerging. As they went past, the manager poked a finger at the prisoner. ‘You’re barred, you are. You hear me? Barred.’
2
DUBLIN
On the way out to the Hapgood place Detective Garda Rose Cheney pointed out the house that had sold for eight million. ‘Around here, the houses go for – what – pushing a million, and that’s for your basic nothing special. One and three-quarters if they have a view of the sea, three if they back onto the beach. Any size on them at all and you’re into four or five mil.’
Detective Inspector Harry Synnott wanted to tell her that he didn’t much care about Dublin property prices, but this was the second time he’d worked with Garda Cheney and she was a bit of a yapper. If it wasn’t property prices it’d be something else.
Cheney steered around a gradual bend and slowed down. ‘That’s it on the left, third one in from the end.’
It was a tall handsome house, glimpsed through a curtain of trees. Victorian? Georgian, maybe – Harry Synnott didn’t know one period from another. Anything old that looked like a bit of thought had gone into it he reckoned was probably Victorian. Or Georgian. If not Edwardian.
‘Eight million?’
‘Eight-point-three.’
‘Jesus.’
Rose Cheney snickered. ‘Couple of rich men got a hard-on for the same sea view. Nice aspect, mind you. Worth maybe three million, tops. Not that I’d pay that for it. Even if I had three million. But the way the market is, I mean, place like that’d run to three million, there or thereabouts. But you know how it is, bulls in heat, and the bidding went up to eight-three before one of them threw his hat at it.’
Nice aspect.
Synnott wasn’t sure what a nice aspect was, but it was apparently worth a rake of money. One minute the country hasn’t an arse in its trousers, next minute the millionaires are scrapping over who gets to pay over the odds for a nice aspect. There were some who claimed the prosperity was down to EU handouts, others said it had more to do with Yank investment. There was a widely proclaimed belief among the business classes that they’d discovered within themselves some long-hidden spark of entrepreneurial genius. Whatever it was, the country had been a decade in love with its own prosperity and everyone agreed that even though the boom years were over there was no going back.
We might, Synnott thought, be card-carrying members of the new global order, but we’re still committing the same old crimes. The working day had started for Synnott when he met Detective Garda Rose Cheney at the Sexual Assault Unit of the Rotunda Hospital.
Cheney had already interviewed the alleged victim and was waiting outside her room while a nurse did whatever it is nurses do when they usher visitors from a hospital room.
‘Name is Teresa Hunt. Just turned twenty, doing Arts at Trinity. Family’s from Dalkey, she has a flat in town. The doctor confirms she had recent intercourse, swabbed for sperm, so we might get something. She’s not physically damaged, apart from minor bruising around her arms and thighs.’
‘Who’s the man?’
Cheney opened her notebook. ‘Alleged assailant, Max Hapgood. They were an item some time last year, met again at a party a couple of weeks back. He called her a few days ago. Had a date last evening, ended up back at her flat, and you know how that one goes.’
Synnott shrugged. ‘It’ll be a she-says-he-says. How’d she strike you?’
‘See what you think yourself.’
Teresa Hunt turned out to be a thin, wispy young woman who looked Synnott in the eye and said, ‘I want that bastard arrested.’
Synnott’s nod might have meant anything.
‘You had a date,’ Cheney said.
‘I told you.’
‘Tell the Inspector.’
The woman looked slightly resentful that telling her story once hadn’t set the seal on the matter. She turned to Synnott. ‘We had a date.’
‘And?’
‘We had a meal, a drink. It was good to see him again. I assumed maybe he was having second thoughts, you know.’ She made a small dismissive gesture with one hand, like she was brushing away threads of illusion.
‘You and he have a history.’
‘It didn’t last long – it was no big deal.’
Synnott heard something in her tone – perhaps it was a bigger deal for Teresa Hunt than she wanted to remember.
Cheney said, ‘The relationship was sexual?’
Teresa nodded. ‘We saw each other on and off, with other people – it’s a small scene – but it tapered off. Then, when he rang, I assumed—’
Synnott sat back, let Cheney ask the questions. She did so gently but without skirting anything. There was no sign of the yapper now, just a capable police officer ticking off the boxes. Age of the alleged assailant? About the same as that of the alleged victim. He too was a TCD student. Business studies. Where it happened – in the woman’s flat, on the floor of the living room. What time – between eleven and midnight. Yes, she asked him in for a coffee. Yes, there was affection, just a kiss or two. Yes, she consented to that. No, she didn’t agree to have sex. Not in words, gestures or actions. Cheney took her through all the signals that meant one thing but might have seemed to mean another.
‘It wasn’t that kind of evening. It was hello-again, and that was that. I was happy to leave it that way. Then it was like he’d gone through all the right motions and it was time for the pay-off. He pushed me down—’
Again, Cheney methodically took Teresa through the moves that might have been taken for a signal of some kind. No, she’d just had a couple of drinks. Same for him, two pints. Yes, she had made it clear that she was saying no. Yes, she’d said the word. Again and again. Yes, she’d struggled. No, he hadn’t threatened to assault her.
‘I scratched him, his face, but he just laughed. He’s tall, strong.’ Quietly, with a twist of the lips. ‘Rugby type.’
‘Afterwards, what happened?’
‘It was like, he was just normal, smiling, trying to make conversation.’
‘You?’
‘I went into my bedroom. Then he left, called in through the door, said goodbye.’
‘This was about, what—’
‘We got home, I don’t know, maybe midnight, I wasn’t keeping track. He didn’t stay long.’
‘His car, yours?’
‘Taxi.’
A couple of questions later, Teresa went silent, her eyes and lips compressed. When it came, her voice was a hiss. ‘He – just – I was
nothing
. Like it was something he wanted to prove he could get away with.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand.
Cheney said to Harry Synnott, ‘I’ll make the call’. They’d need Hapgood’s address, and they’d have to request a preliminary check to see if he had a record.
Synnott shook his head. ‘I’ll do it. You stay with Teresa.’
When Garda Rose Cheney came out of the hospital room, Inspector Synnott was at the nurses’ station, his mobile to his ear while he scribbled in the notebook that was open on the desk in front of him. Two nurses were chatting loudly about something that had happened the night before in A&E, while a doctor stood by a computer workstation, bent over the screen, clicking a mouse.

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