Authors: Gene Kerrigan

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

The Midnight Choir (27 page)

BOOK: The Midnight Choir

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The minister leaned forward, one hand on the door handle. Synnott looked down, saw the minuscule white bubble on his left knee. He forced his eyes to look away. The minister’s voice was passionate. ‘To hell with moral victories, Harry. These days we have victories, full stop. Nothing moral about them. We stomp right out into the centre of the ring and we don’t stop punching until the ref is holding our hand up high and fuck the begrudgers.’

Brannigan had the car door open. The minister had one foot on the pavement when he said, ‘Soon as you’ve wrapped this one up – this animal, what’s his name, Boyce – we’ll have the Europol paperwork ready and you’ll be on your way.’

Synnott arranged his face and said, ‘Thank you, minister. I won’t let you down.’

Brannigan waited until the minister was up the steps of the house and through the front door before he got back behind the wheel of the Merc and put the car in gear.

‘Where to?’

‘Macken Road garda station.’

As they pulled back onto the main road, Harry Synnott used the cuff of his jacket sleeve to brush his knee.

Lar Mackendrick was standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, waiting for his wife May to come out of the Ladies’ and join him for lunch. His nutritionist would tut-tut if she knew he was indulging in hotel food, but it was May’s birthday, so sod the nutritionist. If he couldn’t celebrate the sixty-first birthday of the woman who’d shared his life, what was the point of all the effort to protect his health?

Lar nodded to a builder he knew, a man for whom he arranged waste disposal at an unlicensed site in Wicklow. The man didn’t return the nod. He steered his two companions towards the bar. Lar didn’t mind the snub – the guy had to be careful about who he was seen with.

Lar’s mobile rang. He answered and listened for a few moments.

‘You believe him?’

Matty said, ‘We pressed our case very hard.’

‘Fair enough. Better find her, then. Thing like this, I’d like to attend to it myself.’

Sunday lunch was the one guaranteed sit-down family meal of the week and Rose Cheney’s husband was dishing out the roast lamb when the phone rang.

‘Your mother,’ Rose said.

‘Your boss,’ David said.

Eight-year-old Louise picked up the phone. ‘Mammy,’ she called. David smiled. Rose breathed a silent curse.

Harry Synnott said he was ringing from Macken Road.

‘I’m just about to have lunch with my family.’

Synnott said, ‘No problem – you know Chief Superintendent Hogg has called a conference at four-thirty? On the jewellery robbery?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Kellsboro Arcade – Boyce dumped his car there after the robbery – a waitress in the coffee shop saw someone pass through, did a runner out the back door – we can assume that was him. No one’s run a photo display past her – how about, an hour before the conference, we see if she recognises his picture?’

Rose knew it made sense, but she’d been looking forward to an hour of nothing much, maybe chasing around the garden with Louise and Anthony.

Bugger.

‘Three-thirty, not a minute before. Where’ll we meet?’

Dixie Peyton was in the kitchen at Shelley Hogan’s flat, rinsing the saucepan she’d just cleaned, when Shelley arrived, slamming the door behind her. There was rage in the way she tore off her yellow jacket and threw it at the armchair.

‘I thought—’

Shelley went into her bedroom, slammed that door too. It was fifteen minutes before she came out. She slumped onto the settee and grimaced at Dixie. Her voice was calm. ‘Bastard gave me the sack. He was waiting when I arrived in at noon, big gob on him—’

She suddenly shrieked, ‘
Bastard!
’ and lashed out with her right foot, connecting with the side of the coffee table. An empty cup rattled on its saucer and Shelley shrieked again, ‘
Fucking bastard!
’

‘Why’d he sack you?’

‘That stuck-up bitch from last night. Whining about how her coffee didn’t come the way she’d ordered it. She rang this morning, telling him the customer expects certain standards these days.’

‘Ah, Jesus—’

‘She wasn’t the first. He’s been looking for an excuse, that bastard. I told him to fuck off – I wasn’t—’ Her voice was lower now, her words coming more slowly. ‘Last night, Robbie – fuck it, one thing on top of the other.’

‘I thought you and him—’

Shelley shook her head. Leaning forward, elbows resting on her knees, she cupped her face in her hands. Dixie busied herself pouring two mugs of coffee.

Shelley sounded more tired than angry now. ‘The thing about Robbie – he liked me being – Jesus, he’s a bastard. He liked it that I depended on him, it was part of the kick. And showing me how easy he could fuck me over, that too.’

‘I thought—’

‘He was OK for a laugh and he had a good connection. The stuff he was moving, he gave me a discount. Last night – he’s a shit, just a shit.’

Dixie removed the empty cup and saucer from the coffee table and brought Shelley a mug of coffee.

‘One thing on top of the other.’ Shelley’s eyes were closed, her head resting against the back of the settee.

‘You were going to try for another job anyway, right?’

Shelley opened her eyes and leaned forward. ‘Suppose so. It’ll take a few days, and there’s nothing coming in and without Robbie’s discount – fucking wonderful.’

‘I wish I could help.’

Shelley smiled. ‘Look at the two of us, right pair of whingers.’ She raised her mug. ‘We’ve survived worse, sweetie, and we’ll rise again.’

Dixie held up her own mug in a toast.

‘Tight corners.’

The waitress from Clara’s Coffee Shop at the Kellsboro Shopping Arcade reluctantly let Synnott and Cheney into her home. When they told her what they wanted her to do she said, ‘Why?’

The waitress was in her mid-thirties. She’d put a lot of effort into her hair. There was something in her wide, dark eyes – mischief, Synnott decided – that compensated for the rounded shoulders and the lines around her mouth. Her house, in a cul-de-sac in Dolphin’s Barn, was small, clean and the front wall and windowsills were freshly painted. The front garden was tiny, the grass trimmed to within an inch of its life. There were rows of daffodils under the window and the borders consisted of assortments of small blue, pink and yellow flowers that Synnott didn’t recognise. The front room was little bigger than the garden, and there were two kids under ten slumped on a two-seater sofa in front of the television. In the kitchen the woman offered Synnott and Cheney coffee, which they declined. She didn’t bother to pretend to seriously consider their request. All she said was, ‘Why?’

Synnott answered. ‘This man killed a young security guard. He left his getaway car at the shopping arcade where you work, we know he ordered a coffee from you, didn’t stay to drink it. Apart from the victims of the robbery, you’re the only witness to see him close up.’

She looked at Synnott as though he was speaking another language.

Rose Cheney said, ‘Perhaps he’d taken the false moustache off, perhaps he’d changed his clothes. You may be able to identify him.’

‘Why should I?’

‘All we’re asking is that you look at the photographs.’ Cheney touched one of the eight pictures she’d laid out on the table in two rows, squaring it up with the others. Joshua Boyce’s face was second from the left, second row.

‘No point. I saw nothing.’

There was an edge to Synnott’s voice. ‘Perhaps you’ll recognise a face. Sometimes people don’t know that they’ve—’

The waitress leaned forward, hands flat on the table and when she spoke her voice was gentle. ‘Five days a week, love, I work breakfast and lunchtime serving sausages and chips and pots of tea. I take orders from people who have the manners of pigs. Five nights a week, eight to eleven, I clean offices. Don’t ask me whose offices or what business they’re in. All they know is that when they come in next day the dirt fairy has taken away the mess they left. Saturday and Sunday afternoons, I do five hours behind the counter in a pub on the other side of the estate. Altogether, what I get, it almost adds up to a wage.’

She stood upright, folding her arms across her breasts.

‘If I want to take holidays, or get sick, I do it on my own time.’

‘If you’re afraid—’

‘I’m not afraid. I don’t care.’

Synnott said, ‘A young man lost his life. A decent working man with a family. Every one of us has a duty to ensure that the killer is put where he belongs.’

The waitress took her time lighting a cigarette and her chin jerked as she blew smoke towards the ceiling. ‘The things you’re paid to care about, they’ve got nothing to do with me when I’m scraping what’s left of someone’s sandwich off the floor.’ She looked from Synnott to Cheney. ‘Nothing to do with me now.’

‘That’s a pity,’ Chief Superintendent Malachy Hogg said. ‘We need a break.’ He was standing at the far end of the room, making the odd comment, but allowing Harry Synnott to run the case conference. One of the detectives had offered Hogg a seat in the crowded room, but the Chief Super shook his head and stood against the wall, hands in the pockets of his jacket.

The conference started with a review of the physical evidence, or lack of it. Nothing in the Accord, not even a partial. Nothing in the car park where the shooting happened. No second car that could be linked to the robbery. The Kellsboro Shopping Arcade had no CCTV.

‘We need the gun, the jewellery or the money,’ Harry Synnott said. ‘We’ve got bugger-all from the fences we’ve rousted, but we can go back to the likeliest ones. They won’t give us anything, but we may frighten off whoever he has lined up, so he can’t offload the jewellery.’

Chief Superintendent Hogg asked if they’d got anything useful from touts. Synnott shook his head. ‘Not a whisper – Boyce keeps things pretty tight.’

‘Keep at it. He’ll come up with an alibi, somewhere close to home. It’s imperative we get a sighting somewhere over on the Southside, on the way to or from the robbery scene.’

A detective that Synnott didn’t know said, ‘What if it wasn’t Boyce?’

Chief Superintendent Hogg took a moment before he replied. ‘If we get a lead elsewhere, we follow it – meanwhile, if Harry Synnott says he’s certain the man on the CCTV tape is Joshua Boyce, that’s where the emphasis is going to be. We’re pressing all the buttons, and we’ll get a break or we won’t.’

Rose Cheney left Macken Road immediately after the conference. It had taken her two days to track down Donna Wright and she’d already gone twice to the flat on the third floor of Carlyle Buildings where Donna now lived. Third time lucky. The door was opened by a small dark-haired woman in her early twenties. When Rose Cheney introduced herself the woman said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong, and I may be wasting my time, but I think you can help me. I’ve been talking to a detective from Earlsfort Terrace. You talked to him, fifteen months ago, about a man named Max Hapgood.’

Donna Wright closed the door partially. She waited.

‘I wonder, could I come in and talk to you about that?’

‘I’ve nothing to say.’

‘I’ve seen the detective’s notes. I know what happened.’

‘Look, it’s Sunday evening, I’m getting ready to go out.’

‘Donna, can I suggest something? No notebook, nothing on the record, nothing official at all – just one woman talking to another. Nothing can come from it, you won’t be compromised in any way– but it might help, just so I know we’re not wasting our time.’

‘There’s nothing to say, that’s all in the past.’

‘He’s done it again.’

The woman stood silent for a few moments, then opened the door wide.

At first, the doctor in A&E thought that Brendan Peyton had been in a car accident. Bruises on his face and torso, multiple severe contusions and abrasions on both legs, the right shin fractured. Then one of the nurses told him that Mr Peyton had been brought in by ambulance after a strolling dog owner found him moaning in some bushes in St Anne’s Park.

‘What happened to him?’

‘He says he doesn’t remember.’

The doctor told the nurse to call the police, and when two tired uniformed gardai arrived and pulled the curtains around the cubicle Brendan Peyton repeated that he just didn’t remember. One policeman snorted and left to get some coffee.

‘Do you have a mobile?’ Brendan asked the other policeman.

‘Yes, why?’

‘I need to make a call.’

‘You can remember phone numbers, then? No bother with that part of your memory?’

‘Please?’

The garda was looking through Brendan’s wallet. ‘They didn’t take your money, whoever gave you a going-over?’

BOOK: The Midnight Choir

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