Little Criminals (20 page)

‘I know him. He does front-of-house security in the city centre.’

O’Keefe said, ‘The incident room is at Carbury Street station. Right after this, I want you to brief Malachy’s lads – about Crowe, and any of his mates that might be involved. You’ll be having a late night.’

Hogg said, ‘And I’d like you to come in on the case as a consultant of sorts, since you know the little shit.’ It was as polite an order as Grace had ever had.

O’Keefe said, ‘I’ll arrange for your caseload to be transferred within the station.’

‘I’ve got one coming up in the Central, Tuesday.’

‘Leave the details, I’ll have a word with the judge.’

Hogg was looking at his watch. ‘We should be setting off. I’ve called my lads in for an update in about half an hour, give or take. OK with you?’

Again, an order delivered tactfully. John Grace nodded.

O’Keefe said, ‘One thing strikes. No one does kidnaps any more. We went through that in the old days – the IRA, some other ambitious bastards, no one made it pay. Hold up a bank and there’s a team of policemen after you. Kidnap someone, you’ve got the whole force on your back. How dumb is this Frankie Crowe?’

Grace said, ‘Frankie’s not stupid, but he tends to do what feels right at the time, whether or not it’s in his best interests.’

‘Has he ever done serious damage?’

‘I take it you don’t know about the supermarket trolley?’

O’Keefe made a face. ‘Something tells me we’re not talking about shoplifting.’

John Grace took a breath. ‘A week after Frankie came out of the Joy, back with his beloved family after two years pulling his wire, a friend of his, Timmy Pocock, was taken out of the Royal Canal. In a supermarket trolley. With a screwdriver in his ear. Round about then, Frankie’s wife turned up in Beaumont A&E with a technicolour face.’

Joan Crowe’s face had been one big wound – swollen, lopsided, bruised and bloody. Grace remembered the physical strain it put on her, in the hospital cubicle, just listening to his questions, never mind refusing to answer them.

‘He did this to you, Joan? Frankie?’

She said nothing.

‘Far as I know, Frankie’s not a thumper. Maybe he thinks he had a reason?’

She didn’t even look at him.

‘What do you know about Timmy Pocock? Was that Frankie, too? That’s what I’m hearing. You and Timmy, is that right, Joan?’

The story going around was that Frankie was a week out of the Joy before he found out that Timmy and Joan had been at it.

John Grace adjusted his features to add a quota of compassion to his natural air of sensitivity. ‘You don’t have to let him get away with this, love.’

She turned her gaze on Grace briefly, assessed his sympathetic expression, then looked away. She was too disinterested to be irritated, like he was some tight-ass Mormon trying to sell her a change of religion.

‘Make a complaint. I’ll have him locked up by the end of the day. He’ll never lay a finger on you again.’

It took an effort for her to open her lips, and when she did he could see that an upper tooth was missing. Her voice was low, hoarse, exhausted and not at all angry, when she told him to fuck off.

Frankie and Joan split up, but although John Grace tried a couple more times to get her to talk about the killing of Timmy Pocock, she remained unresponsive.

Grace said, ‘It was one of those things where we all knew the score, and I could never touch him for it.’

‘You believe him when he says he’ll kill the hostage if he doesn’t get the money?’

‘He doesn’t know we’re aware he’s involved. In the wrong circumstances, he’s capable of anything.’

At the top of the incident room there was a white noticeboard, with photographs of Frankie Crowe and Brendan Sweetman just below a photograph of a smiling dark-haired woman in her late twenties. The two criminals’ images were mugshots. The victim’s picture was no informal snap. Her hair had the casual perfection that comes with painstaking design. Her teeth were American in their flawlessness. The yellow of her blouse perfectly complemented the greens and browns of the background. And the abstraction of that background, artfully thrown out of focus, was a perfect setting for her crisp beauty. It’s not just that she looks like she hasn’t a care in the world, Detective Inspector John Grace decided. She looks like she lives in a world where cares are an alien concept.
Mind you, she’s had twenty-four hours in the company of Frankie Crowe and his merry men. No matter how this works out, it’ll be a long time before she’ll smile like that again
.

Apart from Grace, there were fourteen detectives in the briefing room, ranged around a long table, with Chief Superintendent Hogg standing at the top of the room. All the detectives but two were male, all younger than Grace, and they had the bristling confidence of the ambitious. Hogg’s men were young strivers, hand-picked for fast-tracking. Although it was after midnight, they were all wearing suits and none of them looked like they’d spent a long day on a hot case. There was no coarse language or mocking camaraderie, none of the careless office jumble, the small forests of Styrofoam cups and displaced files, that John Grace associated with intense late-night group work. Mostly these people looked like they were on their way to a nightclub, or at least a parish hall
ceilidh
. John Grace was beginning to regret his open-necked shirt and the casual jacket he’d thrown on when Colin O’Keefe called.

Hogg was wearing a beige suit, his tie loosened and his two-tone shirt open at the collar. As the meeting began, Hogg introduced Grace, bringing him to the top of the room, to stand facing the rest of the detectives. Then he took a series of updates from his squad. All routine stuff, the process of collecting evidence, seeking leads, and carefully recording every step for possible use in a prosecution. Most police work involved going to all the obvious people and asking all the obvious questions. Eventually, two or more pieces of evidence didn’t fit together, so someone got leaned on with diminishing levels of politeness, until there was enough of a case to bring charges.

Several members of Hogg’s team were reporting back on the various areas of work they’d been assigned. An exhibits officer was in charge of maintaining the chain of evidence, another detective was drawing up a questionnaire for a house-to-house. A third was liaising with Special Branch, the Technical Bureau and district stations. A fourth was maintaining contact with the Emergency Response Unit, as the chances were before this was over they’d need an armed squad to wallop someone fast and hard. The necessary equipment had been immediately assembled in case it was needed for a siege – audio and visual fibre-optic snoops, to be inserted in walls, and the technicians to operate them, along with an assortment of rams, gases and communications equipment. A negotiator and a couple of psychologists had been put on standby.

The rest of the team had been checking possible leads assigned at a previous conference. Ballsbridge, being a parish with clout, was well policed. Uniforms who had been on duty on the night of the kidnap and over the previous week had been painstakingly debriefed by Hogg’s detectives and ordered to scour their notebooks for any incident that might provide a lead. About two-thirds of the CCTV tapes retrieved from businesses and houses in the area had so far been assessed.

Two detectives were combing through a list of traffic tickets handed out in the streets adjacent to the Kennedy house over the previous month, checking reg numbers against known or stolen cars.

Two more detectives made contact with the previous owner of the Kennedy house, now living in Portugal. He agreed to see them, and they had flown out that morning. Chances were he knew nothing about anything, but there was a possibility that he’d been threatened before, or got some hint that someone might have been keeping an eye on the house.

Was the victim’s husband involved? Money problems? Marital? Either of them playing away? Business rivals? Personal enemies? Threats? Kennedy’s family and business associates were canvassed to see if anyone thought this might be retaliation for something he had done? Did she have any enemies?

At the start, every possible angle had to be considered, the case a foggy swamp with little solid ground. The family’s Saab turned up abandoned in Lucan and got the works from Technical, with no useful results. Then the mist cleared. The CCTV footage of the Hyundai parked near the Kennedy home was put together with the stolen Hyundai found with Frankie Crowe’s print. The kidnap was no longer a riddle without boundaries, it was an identifiable problem with specific targets. Frankie Crowe, Brendan Sweetman.

One by one, Hogg’s team reported. Hogg’s style was brisk. Pay attention, catch it first time. No room for slackness in this outfit. Puppies, John Grace thought as he watched the eager detectives bringing back titbits to impress their boss. The sparse details were outlined, sketching a picture of the Kennedy family as well-off and trouble-free. The detectives would continue checking off possibilities, just in case, but Crowe and Sweetman were in the investigation’s cross-hairs.

‘Sweetman we have an address for, a semi-detached out beyond Coolock,’ Hogg said. ‘The files have nothing current for Frankie Crowe. Can you help?’

John Grace nodded. ‘These days, Frankie lives on the second floor of an apartment block in Glasnevin – Temple Road, Temple Avenue, something like that. One of those poky little high-rent places. I’ll get you the details.’

Grace hadn’t noticed until now that Hogg’s somewhat wispy hair was browner than it ought to be.
Been at the Clairol, have we?
Not the kind of thing you’d imagine would concern an up-and-coming chief superintendent. On the other hand, maybe it was a peculiarity of the breed.

Hogg turned to Grace. ‘OK, then, let’s have the full SP on Frankie Crowe.’

Grace told the detectives about the years Frankie worked for Jo-Jo Mackendrick, the failed alliance with Waters and Cox. ‘Frankie’s in his late twenties, separated, one kid. He’s as vicious as he needs to be. His previous is mostly routine thuggery – protection, muscle, small-time armed robbery.’ He told them about the murder of Timmy Pocock, the screwdriver and the way Timmy was worked over before he died.

Hogg said, ‘Family, brothers, cousins? Anyone we should keep an eye on?’

Grace shook his head. ‘Estranged. His dad had a van, delivered vegetables out Finglas way. Respectable type. Started his own little shop. Dead now. Frankie was a bit of a tearaway. Started serving his time as a mechanic, never took to it, had a falling-out with the family. He has a couple of sisters, one brother, mother’s still alive – no contact with any of them for years, far as I know.’

‘Sweetman?’

‘A bouncer, city-centre security. His dad ran a protection racket twenty years ago out in Ballymun, taught his lad everything he knows about being an all-round thug. Brendan was with the oul fella in the old Watering Hole pub when someone came in wearing a motorcycle helmet and carrying a shotgun. They found bits of Daddy sticking to the ceiling.’

Hogg said, ‘There were four of them in the raid on the Kennedys. Apart from Crowe and Sweetman, any notion of who else might be in the frame?’

‘I’d be surprised if Martin Paxton isn’t in the crew. He and Frankie go way back.’

‘Another thug?’

‘Used to be a hospital porter. Break-and-enter, smash-and-grab, maybe a stick-up or two. He can turn his hand to most things crooked.’

‘Who do you reckon for number four?’

‘Could be any one of a hundred third-rate Dublin heavies. That’s the circles Frankie moves in.’

Hogg was nodding. ‘We’ll need addresses.’

‘Crowe lives alone, Paxton lives with a woman. Deborah something. Sweetman is married to a woman who had a couple of kids by someone else, Sweetman took them on. Then his wife got pregnant, had a kid about a year back. The complete family man. Word was he wasn’t stroking any more.’

Some of Hogg’s detectives were bent over notebooks, taking down every word. They all looked like they were prepared for a long night’s work. John Grace’s feet were aching. He wanted to sit down, but he felt that wouldn’t look too clever. He already felt like someone’s grandpa being allowed to stay up late with the hip young things.

‘Informants will be important on this one,’ Hogg said. ‘These gougers won’t have an infrastructure. They’ll need small-timers to arrange cars and safe houses, supplies, that kind of thing. Small-timers gossip. So, talk to your touts, twist arms if need be.’ He nodded towards one of his team. ‘And rustle up whatever we can get in the way of photographs, pass them on to Technical.’ He turned to another of the bright sparks. ‘Family addresses, known associates, talk to Grace here and get the lot, run the names. We’re OK’d for as much back-up and overtime as we need, so anyone promising gets tagged for surveillance.’

A hand went up. ‘We going to raid their gaffs?’

Hogg shook his head. ‘Not yet. We keep our distance. Not a word to the neighbours. Chances are these gents don’t know we’ve got their prints. If they turn up anywhere, we hang back, follow them, no heroics. We could be lucky and one of them takes us somewhere.’ He made a loud clapping sound with his hands and said, ‘OK, I think that’s it. Anyone without an immediate task, get your head down for a bit. I’ve got the security correspondents first thing in the morning, get them onside for a media blackout. Any press enquiries, direct them to me. You all know what you have to do – conference here late tomorrow afternoon.’