Read The Midnight Choir Online
Authors: Gene Kerrigan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural
The Midnight Choir (8 page)
Synnott shrugged. ‘Besides, what could you possibly trade – something this heavy – I’m sorry, love, I’d like to help you.’
He was already leaning back in his chair, the first move towards levering himself to his feet, knowing that the gesture would unsettle her enough to speed things up.
‘I want money, too.’ The pitch of her voice was higher.
Synnott smiled. ‘And a cherry on top. Come on, love, you’re not exactly dealing from a position of strength.’
‘I want five hundred.’
Synnott put his hands flat on the table. In the years he’d known Dixie Peyton, she’d given him four good tips that had led to arrests and convictions, another half-dozen that helped foul up criminal projects and a dozen scraps that hadn’t taken him very far. Some informants were one-offs, the product of an arrest and panic, ready to sell whatever and whoever they could in the hope that it would ease the weight coming down on them. Others, like Dixie Peyton, were there or thereabouts among the grifters and the shifters, not close enough to the action to produce the inside dope but picking up enough to give a friendly garda the occasional steer towards a worthwhile arrest.
‘You want a dig-out on this needle thing, and you want five hundred?’
‘It’s good.’
‘You know where they buried Shergar, then?’ Pushing away from the table, Synnott stood up. It was probably bullshit, but he’d listen to it. Making like he was about to walk away was part of the expected dance.
‘Five hundred.’
‘If there’s any message you want me to pass to anyone outside, maybe something you want sent in—’
‘I’ll do whatever they want, for the thing with the needle, I’ll plead guilty, whatever they say. But right now I need to be out. My kid—’
Dixie looked up at Synnott and stopped, as if suddenly aware that he wasn’t interested in her problems.
Synnott had one hand on his hip, the fingers of the other hand splayed on the table. Standing there looking down at Dixie like he was working something out in his head. Finally, as if he’d totted everything up and the answer came out just about right, he rapped his knuckles on the table and sat down.
‘Tell me.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘Scratch my back.’
She told him about the warehouse on the Moyfield Industrial Estate, how it had been motoring away for six or eight months, producing bootleg DVDs. It had everything – the machines for churning out the discs and the printers for the labels and inserts. ‘All top-quality. They bring it over from the States months before the movies are released here. They can charge top rates for that kind of stuff.’
‘Who?’
‘Do I get what I want?’
‘Who’s running it?’
It was one thing to get fifth-rate copies of movies shot on a Handycam by someone sitting in the stalls of a New York movie house. Making duplicates from a genuine advance copy of the movie needed good criminal contacts in the States. That, and manufacturing good-quality copies, took an investment way beyond the means of the usual quick-buck artists selling dodgy DVDs for a fiver at car-boot sales.
‘Lar Mackendrick.’
Thought so.
‘I’ll tell you exactly where it is, but they’re moving out – they’ve got a new place set up down the country, miles from anywhere. If you want this you’ll have to hurry.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘It – I can’t say where I got it, but I swear it’s good.’
Synnott said, ‘Three hundred.’
9
GALWAY
The yellow identity card said that the nutcase was named Wayne Kemp and he worked for Paladin Security Solutions, a Dublin firm. It took Garda Joe Mills five minutes to get the number of the company and discover that Kemp was currently on a week’s holiday. It took him another fifteen minutes to coax an executive in the security company to fax him a page from Wayne Kemp’s personnel file. There was little in that except the standard details of DOB, address and phone number. A start date told Mills that Kemp had worked for the company for six years. In a box at the bottom there was a handwritten note stating that Kemp had served two years in the army, then spent several years working in Britain before he had returned to Dublin. Mills rang back the executive and found out that the firm paid Kemp’s wages into a Bank of Ireland account in Ranelagh.
The bank would tell him nothing on the phone, so Mills rang Ranelagh garda station and they sent someone around to the bank and an hour later he knew that Kemp had had an account there for six years. It was a standard account that never went too much into the red, and never accumulated more than a few hundred. He had only once taken a loan, five grand, which he’d paid back scrupulously. The guarantor was his older sister, Mina Moylan, who was married and had an address in Bushy Park, Galway.
I’d never hurt a woman before.
On the way out to Bushy Park, Declan Dockery said, ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’
No shit, Sherlock.
Joe Mills was driving. The neighbourhood had a fine view of Galway city but Mills wasn’t in a humour to be impressed by the scenery. It could be that the sister had information that might lead them to wherever the blood had been spilled. Or—
I’d never hurt a woman before.
The Moylan house was in a cul-de-sac. Like most of its neighbours, it had a well-tended garden behind high hedges that maintained privacy. A three-year-old Isuzu Trooper was parked in the driveway.
‘Not short of the odd penny,’ Dockery said.
Joe Mills was reaching to press the bell when he saw the blood on the round brass handle in the centre of the door.
‘Declan.’
The blood had dried to the same brownish colour as that on Wayne Kemp’s hands.
Dockery winced. ‘Told you I had a bad feeling.’
Joe Mills used a knuckle to push against the door but it was closed. Instead of pressing the bell, he used his baton to rap hard three times on the door. He waited a minute, then did it again. Nothing.
‘We should call it in,’ Dockery said. ‘Preserve the scene.’
Joe Mills shook his head. ‘There could be someone in there needs help.’ While Dockery spoke into his radio, Joe Mills used his baton to lightly tap the glass in the door, near the lock. Then he swung it sharply and the glass shattered.
They found a dead man lying on his back in the hallway, his blue shirt pushed upwards, baring his chest, his arms spread wide, his eyes and mouth agape. His torso looked like it had been opened by several strokes of a blunt axe.
I’d never hurt a woman before.
Joe Mills took a deep breath. He wasn’t looking forward to the next few minutes.
Declan Dockery’s voice quivered slightly as he got on the radio again and called in the murder. Joe Mills looked into the living room, then the kitchen, then he went upstairs and checked out the four bedrooms. All neat and shipshape upstairs and down. Imaginatively decorated, good-quality carpets, solid furniture. When he opened the bathroom door he immediately smelled the blood. Even with the door half open, Mills could see there were splashes of red everywhere. On the white-tiled walls and the white rug, on the ceiling, on the pebbled-glass window, on the toilet and the washbasin, on the mirror – even on the narrow porcelain frame around the mirror – there were red streaks. Several of the bottles of shampoo and skin cream on the three glass shelves above the washbasin were splashed with blood. Mills opened the door wide. He didn’t go inside. He saw blood on the floor. He noticed a bloody shoe-print. Looking around the door he saw that blood had pooled in the bath around the body it had come from.
The corpse was small, slender, face up, dressed in black shorts and a white shirt. The shirt was open and the torso had been repeatedly slashed. The pale face was serene, streaked with blood, the eyes wide open. It was the face of a teenage boy.
I’d never hurt a woman before.
Joe Mills called down the stairs, ‘Second body. Another male.’ He moved more quickly now, retracing his steps and opening every bedroom closet and finding just clothes and shoes and shelves with neat boxes. Then he went downstairs, where Declan Dockery was standing pale-faced in the hall and looked inside the ground-floor bathroom. Nothing. He pulled back the shower curtain and saw a long wide-bladed knife lying in the shower tray, the blade blood-streaked, a single large bloody handprint on the pink-tiled wall.
Mills found the back door unlocked and went out into the garden. It was about fifty feet long, bounded by a wooden fence. There were garden chairs and a table to one side, a shed to the other, no sign of anyone. He broke open the padlock and hasp on the wooden garden shed. There were only garden tools and old tins of paint inside.
There was no woman – alive, dead, injured or otherwise – in the Moylan house.
10
DUBLIN
Detective Inspector Harry Synnott had already driven through the gateway of Garda headquarters in the Phoenix Park, shown his ID, and was past the security barrier before he realised that he’d ignored the monument. There’d been a time when he couldn’t come through those gates without looking to the right and paying a silent tribute to what it represented – the forty-three gardai killed on duty since the foundation of the state. Since the murder of Garda Maura Sheelin he had self-consciously tried to resist taking the monument, and what it represented, for granted. Back in Templemore he’d learned the stories behind the Roll of Honour but it was dry stuff, names and dates from the history books. Not half as interesting as learning how to take a watertight statement or how to make a suspect come quietly. After Garda Maura Sheelin’s murder, Harry Synnott had seen the Roll of Honour as an emblem of something that had to matter deeply to any serious police officer. He believed it was that murder, and his part in what followed, that had shaped his life over the past two decades.
Sheelin’s murder was part of the third wave of police killings. The first wave was in the 1920s, when the Garda Siochana was in its infancy. The war of independence and the civil war had left a lot of guns around, and almost as many old scores to settle. One poor bastard in an ill-fitting uniform was shot dead because he’d been too energetic in his pursuit of
poitin
-makers. The second wave of killings was short-lived, a product of the unrest during the Second World War, as the IRA realised that their old buddy Eamon de Valera was well settled into power and was more likely to hang them than to nod and wink at their capers. The third wave came with the resurgence of the IRA after 1970. In 1987, Garda Maura Sheelin walked into a bank during a Provo hold-up. She was in civvies, looking to cash a cheque before heading off for an afternoon’s shopping with her sister. It was a time when Mickey Mouse bank security dovetailed with the needs of paramilitaries eager to top up their coffers.
poitin
-makers. The second wave of killings was short-lived, a product of the unrest during the Second World War, as the IRA realised that their old buddy Eamon de Valera was well settled into power and was more likely to hang them than to nod and wink at their capers. The third wave came with the resurgence of the IRA after 1970. In 1987, Garda Maura Sheelin walked into a bank during a Provo hold-up. She was in civvies, looking to cash a cheque before heading off for an afternoon’s shopping with her sister. It was a time when Mickey Mouse bank security dovetailed with the needs of paramilitaries eager to top up their coffers.
The two bank robbers came running out, hauling holdalls stuffed with cash and waving revolvers. Maura Sheelin could have stood aside, played civilian, she could have waited and called it in, given a description. Instead, she stood firm in the doorway, shouted ‘Garda Siochana!’ and grabbed hold of the first robber. He shrugged her off, slamming her against the porch wall, leaving her winded, her right hand grasping at the second robber, who shot her as he ran past. She lasted five hours in hospital, doctors patching up her insides and the subsequent complications tearing her apart all over again.
Harry Synnott knew her slightly, her fiancé having been in Synnott’s class at Templemore. The Maura Sheelin murder turned out to be the case that put Synnott’s foot on the first rung of the promotion ladder, pleasing some within the force and pissing off a whole lot more.
‘It’s not that time?’
Colin O’Keefe was one of the few who had applauded Harry Synnott’s performance in the Sheelin murder case. Now he was standing by the open boot of his car, his arms full of R-Kive boxes, watching Synnott approach.
‘One-thirty,’ Synnott said.
‘Look, let me dump this lot, wash my hands. Meet you in my office in half an hour?’
Harry Synnott nodded. Another cheapskate lunch.
Detective Inspector John Grace was in the copy room, off a corridor between reception and the Commissioner’s office, when he heard, ‘So, this is what they have you doing?’
He turned and saw Harry Synnott with a big smile on his face.
‘Don’t tell me they’re letting the likes of you into the inner sanctum?’
‘Another working lunch with O’Keefe.’
‘Hope you’re not hungry.’
They shook hands and Synnott said, ‘You’re finishing up this week?’
‘Tomorrow, lunchtime. You’ll be at the retirement party do? Sunday evening, The Majestyk?’
Synnott grimaced. ‘Turner’s Lane – it’s not a month since I transferred out of there. I don’t think it’s best.’
‘That old shite. Forget it.’
The two had worked on several cases together over the years, a couple of big ones but mostly routine. Grace, six years older than Synnott and now on the point of retirement, looked more tired than his age warranted.
Other books
Shadow's Claim by Cole, Kresley
Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan by Bell, Ian
Purely Relative by Claire Gillian
An Irish Country Christmas by PATRICK TAYLOR
The Harder They Fall by Debbie McGowan
Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner
How I Found the Perfect Dress by Maryrose Wood
Love Like Blood: (Royal Blood #5) by Amity Cross
Another Chance by Winstone, Rebecca.L.
