The Midnight Choir (34 page)

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Authors: Gene Kerrigan

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

BOOK: The Midnight Choir
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Dixie waited until she was sure that he was finished. Then, still looking down at the table, she said, ‘Three thousand.’
40
When Rose Cheney got home her husband was asleep in bed. She checked the kids, then she went back downstairs and poured some Jack Daniels over ice. She sat at the kitchen table, enjoying the coldness of the glass.
It’s amazing how dumb some smart people are.
Max Hapgood Senior was smart enough to run a successful PR company, making a fortune from burnishing the image of the entrepreneurial set. And determined enough to do whatever it took to repeatedly protect his darling son from the consequences of his own brutishness. And dumb enough to piss on his own doorstep.
Where does a man like Max Hapgood Senior find a presentable young thug to throw a scare into a young woman?
When Rose Cheney laid out the eight pictures she’d downloaded from the Hapgood & Creasy website, it took Teresa Hunt all of five seconds to point to the picture of the young man who’d approached her outside Trinity. Sitting in her city-centre flat, where she had been entertaining a girl friend when Cheney rang, Teresa tapped the photo and said, ‘No doubt, none.’
‘Take your time – look at each photo again, no hurry.’
Teresa nodded. She looked at the photo at the extreme left and worked her way through, spending several seconds on each. Again, she tapped the same picture.
On the back of the sheet Cheney had pasted the details of one Roland J.B. Jackson, B. Comm., M.P.R.I.I.
These days, even the hoodlums come with letters after their names.
Roland, according to the website, was a junior associate who specialised in corporate events. Which probably meant he chose the menu for company lunches when new products were being rolled out for key customers.
Little desperado like that, all Cheney and Synnott would have to do was cough and he’d roll over and give up his boss.
Cheney thought of ringing Harry Synnott, then she decided the hell with it. Probably in bed by now. Time enough in the morning.
The whiskey glass was empty. Too stimulated to go to bed, Cheney poured herself another drink. Then she sat in the living room, slouched in an armchair, thinking through the Hapgood case, looking for holes and deciding that there were none. The urge to contact Synnott had gone, along with an impulse to wake David and tell him about tonight. Instead, she just sat there and relished the feeling.
*
Harry Synnott was sitting at a desk in the incident room at Macken Road garda station. He’d gone there directly after talking to Dixie Peyton. On the desk in front of him was a statement, handwritten by Synnott and signed by Dixie. She’d have to spend the night in a cell but Synnott had promised to return to the station the next day to persuade the arresting garda that she was a deserving case. Before he left he had a word with a sergeant and told him this woman was being helpful.
‘It would be a big plus if this thing stayed at this level. She’s a good sort – she just got upset, wanted to see the kid, no harm done.’ The sergeant said he’d have a word.
Synnott typed up Dixie’s statement and produced a printed version to be signed in the morning. He made a copy of that and then made working copies of around a dozen statements from the files. It took him over half an hour to read them, marking sections with a red pen.
Macken Road was quiet. The shifts had changed and the debris from the post-pub fights hadn’t yet been swept into the station. There were no detectives around and the incident room was dark except for a lamp on the desk where Synnott was working. It crossed his mind that he should call Chief Superintendent Malachy Hogg, keep him up with developments. But he decided it would be best to lay it all out for him tomorrow at the daily conference on the jewellery robbery and killing of Arthur Dunne.
The bulk of the file sent to the DPP would be supporting material – technical reports, factual statements from witnesses, an autopsy report that might clarify whether they could medically link the gunshot and the death. The evidence that would make it all work would be Synnott’s own statement, about the conversation with the handcuffed Joshua Boyce in the driveway of his home. That statement was just a page and a half long, typed, and the only significant portion was a paragraph near the end.
When he saw that there was no one else within several yards the suspect spoke in a low voice. He said, ‘This is all for show. You know you can’t prove it.’ I replied that it was early days yet. The suspect said, ‘You’re a loser, you don’t have a case.’ I replied that we would see about that. The suspect smiled at me and said ‘You’ve got no evidence against me. I saw to that.’ I asked if he was admitting the killing of Arthur Dunne and the suspect said, ‘You don’t really think I’m going to answer that’. I immediately made a note of this exchange and asked the suspect to sign it. He answered with an obscenity. At that stage we were joined by Sergeant Tidey and Garda Purcell and I asked them to make a note of anything they heard.
Bob Tidey’s innocuous statement of what he witnessed in the driveway would be helpful. Nothing incriminating, just confirmation that Synnott asked Boyce to sign his notes.
The clincher, when contrasted with the transcript record of Boyce’s claim to have an alibi, was the witness statement signed by Dixie Peyton that destroyed that alibi.
My name is Deirdre Peyton. I live at 33 Portmahon Terrace, South Crescent. I wish to say that on the morning of Friday 15
th
April I was released from custody. I walked down the quays, towards home. When I was crossing O’Connell Bridge, at around eleven o’clock, heading in a southerly direction, I met Joshua Boyce, whom I have known since my childhood on the Cairnloch estate. Joshua was coming from the other direction. He was carrying a black holdall hanging from his shoulder. As we passed I said, ‘Hi, Josh,’ but he didn’t hear me. He seemed to be in a hurry. I said hello again and he looked around and said ‘Hi, Dixie.’ I then continued on my way home. This statement has been read back to me and it is correct.
Deirdre Peyton
Harry Synnott considered adding some incriminating details to his statement of his interview with the security guard, Arthur Dunne. Boyce had a small acne scar on his left cheek. Maybe the security guard had seen that when he wrestled Boyce to the ground.
Too risky.
Friday evening, he’d told Rose Cheney that the security guard had nothing useful.
There was a reasonable chance that the DPP could be persuaded that Boyce was the kind of gangster who would interfere with jurors. If so, the case would be tried in the Special Criminal Court in front of three judges sitting without a jury. Technically, the evidence was enough to convict Boyce. Whether it worked would depend on Harry Synnott’s credibility in the witness box. And everyone knew that he was the man who told the truth.
Synnott stood at the window overlooking the front yard of Macken Road. A couple of uniforms were hauling a drunk out of a police car. The law could handle that kind of thing. In more complicated matters it was a clumsy, inefficient tool. Joshua Boyce had carried out five armed robberies that Synnott knew of, on each occasion using violence or the threat of violence. If Boyce hadn’t killed the security guard on this robbery he’d have killed someone else on another robbery. This wasn’t just about the law, it was about right and wrong.
Synnott took his jacket from the back of his chair and put it on.
The law is a flawed weapon against the cunning, but the power of the law in the right hands can achieve an imperfect justice.
It’s the right thing to do.
Synnott leaned across his desk and switched off the light.
41
In reception at Garda Headquarters, there was a patrol-car driver waiting to take Garda Joe Mills to his hotel. Mills handed the garda his overnight bag and said he needed to take a walk. He was relieved that his meeting with the Assistant Commissioner was over and felt pissed-off on being told that he had to stay in Dublin next day.
‘I want you here tomorrow morning, no later than eleven,’ Assistant Commissioner O’Keefe told him. ‘Then you’ll be on standby for a few hours in case I need you in here again. Probably won’t, but if we need you in a hurry you’re bugger-all use to us halfway back to Galway.’
Shit. It’ll be Wednesday before I get home.
The North Circular Road stretched ahead of him, from the gate of the Phoenix Park down towards Doyle’s Corner and the city centre. Mills walked at a steady pace, his head down, paying little attention to the charm of the tree-lined pavements or the tall houses on either side of the street. After he left his native Navan, before he joined the force, he lived for a year in Dublin, in a flat off the North Circular and he knew well the neighbourhood’s air of tatty elegance.
He could feel the tension of the day seep away with every step. It was a little more than twenty-four hours since he’d been called back on duty because the nutcase had again demanded to see ‘the policeman from the roof ’. Wayne Kemp had spent two days banged up in St Catherine’s while a couple of shrinks tried to get into his head. Word had come from the police in Blackpool that they had no record of Kemp, but that he had a couple of convictions in Manchester for minor offenses.
Slumped on a chair in a bright room at St Catherine’s, Kemp seemed to Joe Mills to be on edge. Some of the vagueness was gone. Every now and then he touched his face, his thumb and index finger making a pulling motion at his chin, like he was stroking an invisible beard. Sometimes, as though following a pattern, he made a wiping gesture across his forehead, then brushed something invisible away from his temple.
‘You seem confused,’ he said to Joe Mills.
Mills was tempted to make a crack. Instead he said, ‘How so?’
‘This woman thing.’
‘It’s what you said to us, Wayne, about hurting a woman – we still need to know where she is. Or are you making it up?’
‘At first, what it was, I was just trying to scare her.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘To stop her screaming.’
‘Her name?’
Wayne Kemp shrugged. ‘How would I know?’
‘Did you cut her? Like the others?’
Kemp looked up. ‘What others?’
‘Davy and Joseph. Your sister’s husband, her son – your nephew?’
Kemp looked away, his face blank, like he’d been reminded of an unwelcome chore he had yet to do. ‘That was different.’
‘How?’
Silence.
‘Look, Wayne, we need to know. If you’ve cut someone else, if you did this to a woman, it’s best—’
‘I didn’t cut her.’
*
‘From the start, what happened? Where? An address?’ Joe Mills was sitting now, his notebook open on the table, pen poised.
Kemp shook his head.‘Look, I’m trying to do the right thing – it’s just, it’s been so long and, I mean, does it matter any more?’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know. Way back.’
‘How long?’
‘Oh, a long time.’
‘In Galway? Dublin? Blackpool? Where?’
Kemp said nothing for a long while. When Joe Mills asked the same question again, Kemp looked up as though surprised to hear him speak. Mills wondered if maybe the cold, mad thing that he’d seen on the roof was paying Kemp another visit.
Then Kemp began speaking: one flowing sentence, a pause and then a rush of words, a cascade of fragments. Then it stopped.
Towards the end, as Kemp faltered, Joe Mills attempted to ask questions. Each time he tried to tie Kemp to a date or a location, to probe for a name or a detail, the nutcase stopped and tried to think and then seemed to drift off somewhere for a while before Joe Mills eased him back towards his splintered story.
It was the end of that story, just before Kemp closed up again, that was of most interest to Assistant Commissioner O’Keefe.
‘Word for word, Garda Mills.’
Joe Mills had his notebook open. He went through the hair colour, and what Kemp remembered of the woman’s size and shape – nothing remarkable. As Mills read from his notes, the Assistant Commissioner looked off to one side, his tongue agitated inside his cheek.
‘She wouldn’t shut up, screamed twice, three times – so Kemp put one hand over her mouth, she bit him, so he hit her, knocked her out. He said he didn’t know what happened after that, until he looked down and saw she wasn’t moving. He didn’t remember messing with her clothes – what he said, sir –
her pants were down, I just looked up and the kid, the little boy – the kid wasn’t screaming, just standing there, a few feet away, with his mouth open
.’
Colin O’Keefe’s voice was a breath. ‘Donny.’
Joe Mills looked up at the Assistant Commissioner. ‘He didn’t say a name. Last thing he said before he closed up again, sir—’ Mills looked down at his notes and read aloud – ‘
Tiny little thing. Barely see it. A flower. Red flower. Thought at first it was a mole.
’ Joe Mills looked up at O’Keefe, then down at his notebook again. ‘
Pretty little flower on her chubby little tummy. Pretty little rosebud.
’

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