The Midnight Choir (24 page)

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Authors: Gene Kerrigan

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

BOOK: The Midnight Choir
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The bottle of Johnnie Walker was still half full when Harry Synnott stood and stretched his arms over his head.
‘Mona should be home soon,’ John Grace said.
‘I’ve got an appointment in the morning – about the possible job. Better get my head down.’
‘Coffee?’
‘I’ll wait until I get home.’
John Grace rang for a taxi and they waited at the front door. The wind was picking up and overhead the dark clouds were low. Down to the right there was a narrow view, between a line of trees and the side of an apartment block, across a stretch of water to the distant lights of the city centre.
‘You were blessed, moving out here.’
Grace said, ‘It worked out. Mona will be sorry she missed you.’
‘You’re retiring, not emigrating – I’ll probably see more of you than ever.’
‘Tomorrow night, The Majestyk – will you be there?’
‘I don’t think it would be appropriate – Turner’s Lane, all that shit.’
‘The hell with that – it’ll be a good evening. Do your best.’
Synnott’s nod could have meant anything.
By the time the taxi arrived the rain had started. Synnott got in and as he closed the door he saw John Grace coming from the house, something in his hand. Synnott rolled down the window and Grace handed him a red box file with the words
Swanson Avenue
scrawled along the side.
Grace said, ‘Without you, he’d have got away with it.’
29
The apartment was dark except for the pool of light around the kitchen table at which Harry Synnott sat. He’d shut the windows because of the rain, so there were none of the late-night city noises, just the patter on the glass. He opened the Swanson Avenue box file, grimaced and felt an urge to close the lid. The statement on top of the case documents was a psychiatric counsellor’s assessment of Carmel Callaghan’s son, Donny. Synnott hadn’t seen the report in the four years since the Swanson Avenue murder but he could remember everything it said.
Poor little bastard.
Synnott remembered sitting next to three-year-old Donny Callaghan on a sofa at his granny’s house, giving him a smile, asking him what Santa brought, how he liked playschool. There was nothing inside the kid except terror as he shrank away to the other end of the sofa. A week previously, three days before Christmas, he had watched his father murder his mother.
Perhaps John Grace was right, perhaps police work amounted to little more than sweeping up a never-ending supply of debris. But there was a reason why the Swanson Avenue case meant a lot to Harry Synnott. It was high-profile, a big deal in the media, but what mattered when it was all over was the certainty that he had done right by Carmel Callaghan and her devastated son.
This is what makes all the shit worthwhile.
Harry Synnott took the statements out of the box file and spread them on the kitchen table. He could remember the content of every document. It had taken Synnott and John Grace less than two weeks to break the case.
It had seemed obvious at first that Carmel Callaghan had come home with her son from playschool and interrupted a burglar at work. She was killed in the conservatory. Harry Synnott flipped open a two-page report by a detective inspector, pointing out that there’d been four similar break-ins in the area over the previous three weeks, all mid- to late morning, all detached houses, entry gained in all cases by the burglar breaking a window at the back or side. And in the Callaghan house there was a broken pane in the back door. As in the other break-ins, money, small pieces of jewellery, a couple of cameras and the like were missing.
Synnott found the autopsy report, but didn’t read it. Three or four blows to the face from a heavy object, the pathologist said. A statement from an officer from Technical identified the bloody weapon, found near the body. The heavy brass statuette of Molly Malone was a wedding present from someone Carmel had once worked with. Although her pants had been pulled down the pathologist reported there was no evidence of sexual assault. The inspector with the theory of a burglary gone wrong suggested that the burglar pulled down the pants in a half-hearted effort to mislead police into rummaging among the city’s registered creeps, looking for someone with a sexual motive.
Synnott opened the book of photographs taken by the garda technicians. The pictures were a superficial representation of the desolate atmosphere in the house that day. When John Grace saw the victim he said, ‘Ah,
Christ
’ and turned away. Synnott forced himself to look at the mess that had been Carmel Callaghan’s face. From the bloody midst of that shambles her lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling. Her jeans and pants in a clump around her ankles added indignity to the woman’s devastation.
‘I’m still not used to it,’ John Grace said. He hunkered down beside Synnott and looked at the dead woman. ‘The waste.’
She was twenty-six, small and tubby. There was a photo of her in the box file, a head-and-shoulders taken in a studio. The plainness of her features, the fading chin and the chubby cheeks, didn’t detract from the warmth of the face. The photographer had got her to attempt a glamour pose. Instead of showing her at her best, the photograph caught the timidity in her eyes as she tried vainly to be something she wasn’t.
Her father was Billy Bonds, one of the city’s best-known publicans, owner of three pubs. Carmel and her husband Ned owned a pub, The Old Jar, on the nearby Kilmartin housing estate. Ned was at work when Carmel’s older sister arrived at the house for a lunch appointment and used her spare key. She found the body on the floor of the conservatory. She could hear Donny sobbing. When she traced the sound to a kitchen closet and opened the door the sobbing turned to a scream. A long time passed before the screaming stopped.
‘What’s that?’ John Grace pointed.
Synnott leaned over and saw there was something on Carmel’s lower stomach, an inch or two above her pubic hair. A round mark, perhaps a small healed wound. Synnott bent closer and saw that it was a tiny tattoo, maybe an inch in circumference. It was a finely detailed rosebud. He felt a slight twinge of guilt at being an uninvited witness to the dead woman’s hidden sexual playfulness.
Technical identified urine on the floor of the dining room, just beyond the archway from the conservatory. They concluded that it was where Donny had been standing when he’d witnessed the murder and pissed himself.
There was no statement in the box file about the first hint of suspicion that things were not what they seemed. It was the kind of thing that a police officer would never write down. Passing through the hallway two days after the murder, on Christmas Eve, as garda technicians cleared up after examining the floor and walls, John Grace caught a glimpse of the bereaved husband, alone in the living room, the door half closed. Ned Callaghan was checking his hair in a mirror. It was a mundane action but was being carried out with inappropriate concentration at such a time, so much so that Grace back-pedalled and checked what he’d seen. Callaghan was standing, stooped slightly forward, his right hand teasing some tufts of hair above his temple.
As Grace stepped into the room Callaghan heard him and turned, his expression sombre. He pursed his lips and raised his chin in an enquiring gesture.
Grace said, ‘Everything OK?’
Callaghan hunched his shoulders and nodded, as though too preoccupied to speak. He was medium height, thin-faced, his features earnest and boyish. Grace said later that Ned Callaghan put him in mind of an unreliable waiter. Whatever the circumstances, his face never lost its touch of impatience, as if he believed he ought to be elsewhere, doing something that mattered.
Grace said something meaningless about Christmas and loss and children. Callaghan said yeah, he and Donny would spend Christmas at his own mother’s and they’d do their best to make it mean something to the kid.
Harry Synnott was sceptical. ‘Some people can’t help checking themselves out when they pass a mirror. It’s automatic.’
‘Five minutes earlier he was the grieving husband,’ John Grace said. ‘Then he’s John Travolta, primping up for the disco. If you’d seen it – it just looked – callous, I suppose.’
The husband was always a possibility. Discreet inquiries established that Callaghan had spent all morning at the pub that he and his wife owned. Checking the preparations for the lunchtime food, serving behind the bar, working on the books in the office, checking stock in the cellar. He arrived just after nine o’clock and didn’t leave until he received an urgent call to go home. The murder happened sometime around midday – body temperature suggested Carmel had been killed not much more than an hour before her sister had discovered the body at twelve-fifty.
The main emphasis of the investigation remained on the possibility of a burglary gone wrong. A trawl of fingermarks in the house, when compared with a range of prints taken for comparison, turned up a number that didn’t match any member of the family or known visitors. That wasn’t unusual, and none of the marks were on record. A couple of local crowbar specialists were pulled in, questioned and released.
When John Grace voiced his suspicions, Harry Synnott interviewed the pub staff himself. Initial reports from uniforms said that one or other of the employees saw Callaghan at the pub between 9.05 a.m. and 1.10 p.m., when he was called home. Pushed to be more specific, a barman qualified his earlier story that he saw Callaghan carrying a crate up from the cellar at eleven o’clock. ‘I wasn’t clock-watching, it could have been maybe fifteen, twenty minutes either way.’ A cook, who earlier described talking to Callaghan during a coffee break at noon, was taken patiently through her memory of the morning. She recalled that she’d had a minor problem with the base of the soup kettle and she always got that ready for the lunch trade shortly after twelve noon. So she couldn’t have taken the coffee break until perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later. By the time Synnott was finished, he had established a minimum forty-five-minute period in which Ned Callaghan hadn’t been seen at the pub. The murder scene was a ten-minute drive away.
Synnott questioned Ned Callaghan about that forty-five minutes. He said his memory of the morning was confused. ‘Once I got that call – Jesus, the world just went all crooked. I can’t remember who I talked to or when.’
‘It’ll take a few days to get all the phone records – landlines and mobiles,’ Synnott told a conference. ‘Canvass the neighbours again, talk to their friends, family, employees – there’s a housekeeper comes in three mornings a week – how loving were the loving couple?’
Harry Synnott spent a minute leafing through the box file looking for the statement from Petra Maguire. He found the typed-up version as well as the notes he’d made, ten days into the investigation, when she turned up at the station, aged nineteen, all smiles and swishing blonde hair. She worked part-time at The Old Jar and she’d just remembered that she’d seen Ned in his office at the pub at eleven-forty-five that morning.
‘I went in to ask him for Saturday night off.’ They talked for ten minutes. That eliminated the time gap in which Callaghan could have done the murder.
Synnott looked at his note of Petra Maguire’s interview now as he’d looked at it then. She’d remembered none of this when he’d interviewed her several days earlier. He recalled the surge of satisfaction he felt when he finished with the silly bitch.
Stupid move, Ned.
Synnott smiled at Petra as he stood up. ‘Thanks a million for coming in, Ms Maguire. You’ll be hearing from us.’
It’s shame that matters.
The sentence was scrawled at the bottom of a page of Harry Synnott’s notes. He remembered now when he wrote it as a reminder, before he began the interrogation with Ned Callaghan. It was something he’d learned early on in his career. Use the suspect’s shame. Make the stink of unacknowledged guilt unbearable.
Find his weakness, humiliate him with your knowledge of his secrets, pile it on until there’s only one possible relief – to explain why he had to do it, to seek understanding and forgiveness. And there’s no forgivenes without admission.
After a while, the shame seeped out of Ned Callaghan’s every pore.
They invited him in twelve days after the murder, two days after Petra Maguire’s silly attempt at providing an alibi. There were just some things that they needed to clear up, they told him. He was glad to help – ‘Whatever I can do.’ He was determined to be sensible. ‘I know you have to check out the husband.’ As they pressed him, that changed to ‘What worries me, I mean – look, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’
Eyes wide, the complaint conveyed more in regret than vexation.
John Grace sat off to one side, one elbow on the table. Harry Synnott sat in the middle of the room, several feet from the table, almost knee to knee with the suspect. He watched Callaghan first fold his arms, then rub his hands on his thighs, then fold his arms again.
They took him over the jumps. Callaghan denied that he and his wife were having problems. He denied that he’d ever had an affair during his marriage, he denied that he’d had an affair during the year prior to her death. No, he and his wife hadn’t had arguments recently, he hadn’t threatened her. He’d never left the pub that morning. Harry Synnott wrote it all down in his notebook, then he read it back aloud and asked Callaghan if he would sign the notes. Callaghan did.

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