The Midnight Choir (25 page)

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Authors: Gene Kerrigan

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

BOOK: The Midnight Choir
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Then Synnott and Grace watched him fall apart as they unreeled the evidence they’d gathered of his sham marriage, his bullying, his lies.
It was all in the box file, the statements from four of the women he’d had affairs with since his marriage, one of them – located through his mobile-phone records – in the months prior to him murdering Carmel. The witnesses who saw Callaghan and his wife arguing, the neighbours, the housekeeper. The statement from Carmel’s sister – how Carmel came to her in tears and showed her the photo she’d found in Ned’s desk at the pub, a holiday snap of a young brunette, taken on a beach. The sister was there as Ned screamed at his wife that she’d had no fucking business snooping. The insults, the open contempt, the three times he left her in the evening and didn’t come back until next day.
‘Don’t tell daddy,’ Carmel begged her sister.
Daddy would have snapped the bastard in two.
‘Your current girlfriend, Ned – does she know about the dumb blonde?’
Callaghan just sat there, looking at John Grace.
‘Blondie? Petra Maguire? Affair number five. We took her in last night. Petra’s in a cell right now.’
Ned Callaghan was rubbing his hands on his thighs again.
Synnott said, ‘She crossed her legs and tilted her head and gave us a great big smile and we told her she was going to jail as an accessory to murder. Within two seconds she was blushing, within five minutes she gave us everything – the affair, how you told her you didn’t have an alibi and you were afraid the police would stitch you up, so could she please say she saw you at the pub mid-morning.’
Ned didn’t say anything for a while, then he said, ‘I swear, on my son’s life, it’s true, the whole morning—’
‘As true as the shit you told us about how you never had an affair?’
At that stage, Ned began admitting things he knew they could prove – the affairs, the rows – though he still denied he ever physically hurt his wife. ‘I never laid a finger on her,
ever
.’ Which was when they read him the statement from the friend who had tried to convince Carmel to see a doctor four months earlier, when Ned had twisted her arm so badly that she couldn’t use it for a couple of days.
‘That was an accident.’
‘It’s not your pub, right?’
‘It was a wedding gift, from Carmel’s dad.’
‘He kept it in your wife’s name, right?’
‘That’s a technicality.’
‘Not if she told you to pack your bags and bugger off with your dumb blonde. That’s what she said, that last argument, right?’
When Ned Callaghan looked up at Synnott the confirmation was all over his face. All Synnott knew was that Callaghan’s next-door neighbours had heard a very loud argument in the driveway the night before the murder. There had been previous quarrels, but this had gone beyond the usual shouting.
‘We know everything, Ned.’
When Callaghan began crying, Harry Synnott glanced at his watch. Just fifty-three minutes had passed since the interview began.
‘I didn’t do it.’
Ned Callaghan’s voice was weak.
Synnott wrote a line in his notebook.
The fear of public shame was the last barrier. It would crumble if they had long enough to work on him.
‘Ned, I’ve been making notes.’ Synnott peeled the pages back towards the front of the notebook. He stopped and began reading aloud:
‘I lied when I said I never had an affair during my marriage to Carmel. It was also a lie when I said that Carmel and I didn’t have any rows.’
Synnott took his time reading the details of the affairs and the rows Ned had admitted to.
‘I lied about being in the pub all morning.’
‘That’s not true. I didn’t say that.’
‘When I arrived at the house at around eleven-thirty, Carmel wasn’t home yet and—’
‘Fuck off, I didn’t say that.’
Synnott put pity into his eyes when he looked up at Ned Callaghan. ‘I know it’s not easy – what we’re trying to do here, we’re trying to help you find the truth. If that isn’t exactly how it happened – OK, maybe we’ve got some of the detail wrong. Tell us how it went down.’
‘I’m not under arrest – am I?’
‘Ned, you’ll just make it worse for yourself, for your family, for Donny.’
‘No—’
‘What’s it going to look like when it all comes out – the affairs, the rows, the physical stuff—’
Callaghan’s mouth was open, his breathing was audible. For a moment Synnott was certain that he was about to cave in. Then the scraping noise as Ned pushed his chair back and stood.
‘I’m not under arrest, right?’
‘You said you wanted to help us find your wife’s killer.’
‘Go fuck yourself.’
Ned Callaghan, face sweating and red, was unsteady on his feet, shaking his head, his movements awkward. He left the door wide open behind him.
John Grace said, ‘We should arrest him now.’
Harry Synnott disagreed. ‘We don’t have enough – he’s signed nothing incriminating – but we’re not too far off. We need a lever.’
As his guilt weakens him, the fear of public shame strengthens his resistance. Find the piece of evidence that tips the balance, sends him tumbling into the self-hate that allows him confess the truth and to seek to justify.
Donny would help. Ned Callaghan could fool his friends and his relatives, and in time he might fool himself. But his son was something else. Donny wasn’t at ease in his father’s presence. That one time when Synnott had talked briefly to the boy alone, at his granny’s house, the kid hadn’t responded to the questions about Santa or playschool. Synnott had been about to stand up when Donny had said, ‘My mammy—’
Synnott had no idea how to respond. The kid was too young to be asked what he’d seen that morning. The counsellors said it and the police agreed. To question him, no matter how sensitively, risked shattering an already damaged boy. Anyway, nothing a traumatised three-year-old might say was of evidential value.
Synnott didn’t reply to Donny. He just put what he hoped was a comforting expression on his face. He lifted his chin, inviting the kid to continue.
Donny’s eyes were brimming. Synnott could barely hear him when he spoke, but the repeated words were unmistakable.
‘
My daddy, my daddy—
’
A moment later the grandmother, Ned Callaghan’s mother, swept into the room and took Donny away.
Callaghan was on the edge. One push.
First thing in the morning, arrest him at his mother’s house – let him watch her crying while he’s handcuffed. Ask him if he wants to say a final goodbye to his son. The memory had to be gnawing away inside him – looking up from his wife’s dead body and seeing his son’s terrified face. The trauma of the arrest would connect with the guilt, his defences would melt.
An hour later they were back on Swanson Avenue. Not at the Callaghan house but at a builder’s skip, a hundred yards further down the street. Witnesses heard Ned Callaghan’s car accelerate as it tore past his house. Two of them were close enough to see him wrench the wheel to the right and drive diagonally across the road at high speed. When the car hit the skip Gallaghan came out through the windscreen. The police found him in a garden. Looking down at the shattered face, the throat gaping open, Harry Synnott couldn’t help thinking of Carmel Callaghan’s bloody features.
The newspapers called it a tragedy. The next weekend, someone leaked several of the documents from the police file to a tabloid and Ned Callaghan was christened ‘The Monster of Swanson Avenue’. The notoriety of the murder, the shattered child, the proximity to Christmas, all heightened the profile of the case. Synnott found himself being congratulated. When he thought of Donny, the child’s pain now and in the years ahead, the plaudits faded to nothing.
The rain had stopped. Synnott stood at the window, in the dark, looking down at the lights and the revellers across the river.
John Grace was wrong. Maybe it was about cleaning up the crap, but it was also about something else. There were enough times – and the Swanson Avenue case was one of them – where they managed to find some kind of justice.
And that matters
.
Amid all the disappointments, the numbing routine and the faltering ambitions, some things matter. Synnott realised he was clutching the box file, one arm holding it to his chest, the way a kid holds onto a favourite old blanket.
SUNDAY
30
Nothing but pain.
No memory, no anger, no resistance. No fear except fear of more pain. No hope.
After they put Brendan Peyton in the boot of the car they drove for maybe an hour. Then they parked and he could hear them slamming the car doors and walking away. There was no sound of people or traffic.
After a while he kicked the lid of the boot and shouted for help. He stopped when he ran out of hope that anyone would hear him.
He tried to keep a measure of time but he had no idea how many hours went by solid with fear. It had to be into the small hours of Sunday morning by now.
Brendan kicked and shouted again, but this time only for a minute. He was cramped and tired. For a while he just lay there and let the tears come.
He tried to think of what this might be about – with Matty involved, it was something to do with Lar Mackendrick – but he’d done nothing wrong. He hadn’t stolen anything or bad-mouthed anyone, and he didn’t owe money to Lar or anyone else.
He had no idea that he’d fallen asleep until he heard the car start up. As he struggled back to consciousness, he didn’t know if it was the cold or the fear that was making him shiver so violently. He shouted Matty’s name but there was no response.
If they were going to kill me they’d have done it when they took me.
He could feel how weak his grip was on this crumb of hope.
An hour, two hours – he couldn’t tell how long it was before the car stopped and the engine cut out. When they helped him out of the boot the bright daylight made Brendan squeeze his eyes shut. He squinted as they moved him along and he saw that he was in some kind of yard, with building materials scattered around. He searched their faces for comfort.
‘Matty—’
‘Speak when you’re spoken to.’
They took him through a doorway and across bare floorboards to a room with an echo, where a hand on his arm told him to stop. The room was dark, the window boarded up, just enough light to see the cracked walls and a ceiling torn open. He could see the floor joists of the room upstairs.
Matty pushed him in the chest and something caught him behind the knees and he gave a high-pitched squeal as he went down on his back.
Before Brendan could stand up one of them held his hands together while the other tied them tightly in front of him with a plastic loop. They bound his feet together and some kind of cloth was fastened over his eyes. Then he heard them walk away.
After a long time just lying there, Brendan started screaming. He knew they had left him to die. Thirst or starvation, rats – his body jerked and twisted in panic and he passed out.
Brendan was conscious when they came back, a long time later. They said nothing as they untied his feet. They left his hands tied. One of them pulled the cloth roughly from his eyes.
He saw Matty standing over him, his face blank. No aggression, just a man doing a job. That was always how Matty—
Jesus!
The other one hit Brendan across the face with something hard, maybe something wooden, slashing at his cheeks and nose. Brendan didn’t see it coming and as he twisted and hid his face he felt blood trickle from one nostril.
‘Jesus Christ! What the fuck! Matty!’
Wherever they were, these yobs weren’t worried about noise.
‘Matty, what—’
After the next blow to his face, from the heel of Matty’s hand, Brendan Peyton lashed out, his back on the floor, his legs kicking in rage. When they pulled a plastic Tesco bag over his head he shrieked, certain he was about to be suffocated. But they left the bag loose around his neck. The idea seemed to be to leave him blinkered so that he wouldn’t know when the next blow was coming, or where it would strike.
Mostly they hit him in the belly and the back, at first. One of them kicked him in the side, over and over, making a little high-pitched noise to accompany every kick.
When they pulled his trousers down he begged them. He tried to roll himself into a ball and begged them to tell him what this was about. They turned him over onto his back and one of them held his feet down. Then the other one began to hit him across his shins, both shins at the same time, with some kind of metal bar, and Brendan screamed and never knew there could be such pain.
He squealed as cold water struck his face and he felt like he was struggling to the surface and he realised the bag was off his face and he’d passed out, and the agony in his shins filled him up. Then they put the bag back on his head and hit him again, the bar on the shins, and again, and he screamed, and screamed again, over and over and gulped in air between the screams, sucking the plastic bag taut against his open mouth.

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