Little Criminals (37 page)

The solicitor took another sip of water. ‘My client has indicated to me his willingness to cooperate with the authorities in order to help bring this unhappy affair to a swift conclusion. To that end, he suggests that information in his possession may or may not be useful. However, it’s my professional advice that he makes no other statement until such time as I feel it’s in his best interests to do so.’

One of the detectives leaned towards Sweetman. ‘Why did you go along with it? When you found out it was a kidnap, why did you—’

The solicitor shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I must insist—’

Brendan leaned towards the detective. ‘Easy for you to say.’ He ignored his solicitor’s upraised hand. ‘Not so easy when you’re dealing with a nutter like Frankie Crowe. I mean, you don’t know what he’s like. He’s fucking mad.’

‘That’s enough,’ the solicitor said. ‘That’s quite enough.’ He stood up. ‘Gendemen, I must ask you to return my client to his cell.’ He put both his palms on the table and leaned forward. In a quiet voice he said, ‘If, perhaps, your superiors have anything to say about any mitigating statements they might wish to make to the court, during my client’s eventual trial, I’d be available at the shortest notice. Delay on this matter, in my opinion, would not be in the interests of your ongoing enquiries. Nor, indeed, in the wider interests of justice.’

The Minister for Justice was at the Westbury Hotel along with the Taoiseach and two junior ministers, attending a fund-raising lunch for the party, when the call came through from Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe. No, O’Keefe told the minister’s aide, he would not like to leave a message. No, it wouldn’t be all right if the minister rang him back when he had a break from his current duties.

O’Keefe said, ‘Just get him and no more bullshit.’

The minister took the mobile and went into a corridor. O’Keefe told him, ‘She’s out, Mrs Kennedy is safe.’

‘Jesus. That’s great.’

‘And she’s OK. A bit bashed about, but alive.’

‘Thank God. What happened?’

‘We got a lead, she was found at a house in Killester, there was a bit of a shoot-out.’

‘And?’

‘One gang member dead, two in custody, at least one got away at the scene, and there was no sign of the leader, Frankie Crowe.’

‘The money?’

‘No sign so far.’

‘My sincere congratulations, Assistant Commissioner. Listen, pass on my congratulations to Chief Superintendent Hogg. I’ll formally thank him at a more opportune time.’

The minister felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see two of the guests at the fund-raiser preparing to leave. One was a public-relations consultant and the other a builder responsible for many of Dublin’s new apartments. The builder pointed at his watch, arced a thumb down the corridor towards the hotel lobby, then turned the gesture into a thumbs up. The minister said ‘Sorry—’ into the phone and he reached forward and shook hands first with the builder, then with his companion.

‘God bless, take care—’ He returned the thumbs up as he spoke again into the phone, ‘Sorry about that.’

O’Keefe kept his tone even. ‘Apart from a serious facial wound and two members with minor injuries, there were no garda casualties.’

‘Fine, that’s splendid. Should I – where is the, where’s Mrs Kennedy? Should I go see her?’

‘The Blackrock Clinic. I don’t think she’s up to visitors. There’s something else. She’s having an HIV test.’

‘Fuck. What happened?’

‘The gang leader, Crowe.’

‘Ah, Jesus.’

The minister’s voice took on the tone of a press release. ‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re still free to authorise whatever is necessary in the way of overtime or additional resources. We’ve got the victim back, but there’ll be no let-up until the leader of this gang of thugs is where he belongs.’

Stephen Beckett, in black T-shirt and black underpants, grunted and sat upright on the edge of his bed. He straightened his back, ran a hand through his tangled grey hair, and took a long deep breath. Getting out of bed was one of the many routine activities he found troublesome these days. Performing each movement carefully, he let one knee down on to the worn green carpet, then the other knee, one hand on the bed, the other briefly touching a nearby wooden chair until he was sure his balance was right, then he was kneeling alongside the bed.

Jesus God, who’d’ve thought it
.

It was the best part of seventy years since the days when kneeling by his bed, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, was a part of his life.

Gave up that oul shite before I got into long trousers, and now look at me
.

It wasn’t prayer that had him on his knees these days but the physiotherapist up in Dublin that his GP recommended. It was like something had worn away inside Stephen’s back, and the pain that used to afflict him occasionally was now a nagging part of most days.

‘First thing in the morning, it takes less than a minute,’ the physio said, ‘on your knees, loosen up the spine, you’ll notice the difference.’

From the kneeling position, Stephen went down on all fours, then slowly pushed his buttocks back towards his heels, feeling the stretch in his spine, stopping just the right side of pain. Five times back, then five times to each side, then another five times back, and he’d live to fight another day.

Using the bed and the chair to hold on to, he stood up, a tall man pushing eighty, big-boned, his hair as thick on his head as it was when he was young, but now even that dull grey crop looked tired. Big day ahead. Today he had to decide if he would kill a man.

On his bedside table, lying on top of a red and white hand towel, there was a dull grey pistol, a Colt .45.

Stephen had left Meath in 1942, when he was seventeen. He had the muscle and the ambition to thrive on the building sites in London. Bugger all for him at home. Strong and tall as he was, snagging turnips for pennies would have knackered his back long before now.

After a few months in London, he joined the army and in the weeks after D-Day he was among the thousands who broke out from the Normandy beaches, pushing the German army back, from hedgerow to village to hedgerow to town, and always another treacherous hedgerow.

‘Oh,’ a man named Benny said, quietly. He was walking alongside Stephen Beckett, part of a patrol beyond Caen, on the way to Falaise, several weeks after D-Day. Following days of heavy fighting, things had been quiet all morning, apart from an intermittent mortar duel. Talking about it later, none of the soldiers remembered hearing the shot. One second Benny was there alongside Stephen, then he was on his knees, then toppling on to his side, rolling over on to his back, the dark stain on his chest growing bigger by the heartbeat, and within a second or two there was a machine gun’s harsh burp and Benny’s mates were scattering and he called weakly for help, his hands quivering down by his sides. He continued calling for help for the next twenty minutes, his life’s blood pumping out of him, and every time someone moved to go towards him there was a blizzard of bullets from the German position. He didn’t scream, just called out in a frayed voice for help, usually ending each appeal with a drawn-out ‘Please’. The unit was isolated and pinned down. Attempts to break out to either flank cost two soldiers their lives and left another with a bullet-smashed elbow.

Benny’s cries were relendess. Stephen saw one of the sergeants gesture to another, his suggestion obvious. A mercy shot? The other sergeant thought for a moment, then shook his head.

It wasn’t long before Benny stopped begging and began cursing his comrades, screaming obscenities and damning them all to hell. Then he begged God for help and called for his mother, his cries growing weaker, intermittent and more bitter, the ground around him soaked with his blood. Eventually, the cries stopped and Benny died.

After a while, a Centaur tank came up the road and dealt with the Germans, about half a dozen of them grouped at the edge of an orchard on a commanding rise about three hundred metres away. Two of them were still alive when the tank had done its work. They surrendered, both of them wounded and bloody, and Stephen Beckett and his comrades talked about it for a while, a note of hysteria running through their chatter. Then Stephen and a blond bloke named Carter took the two Germans into a ditch and shot them. One of the Germans said nothing, the other – a private, hardly twenty – began praying aloud when he realised what was about to happen. Just before the bullet in the back of the head silenced him, he sobbed, his breaths coming in gulps. The other one, early thirties, a sergeant, a sullen, dark-eyed bastard with a hand wound, said nothing.

Before and after that incident, Stephen Beckett fought in several intense actions. He’d certainly shot at other soldiers and probably killed some of them, but none of that lodged in his mind like the image of that dark-eyed bastard. There was hardly a week since that Stephen didn’t think of him, and the way he showed no fear as he waited. It was as if the man accepted that his life had come down to the remaining seconds in that godforsaken ditch, and he was determined he’d live it as whatever he chose to be, refusing to allow fear or hope or even anger to commandeer the small sliver of life left to him. When his comrade was shot he looked briefly at the crumpled body, then he examined his wounded hand, rearranging the grubby bandage. He waited with neither anxiety nor resignation, just watching what was happening, and then he died.

For a time, Stephen Beckett envied and admired the dark-eyed bastard’s strength in the face of death. Later, when the sensations of his own war had been diluted by time, he understood how seeing and doing terrible things could leave a man like the dark-eyed bastard all hollowed out inside and all he felt for him was pity. In his long life, there were two major decisions Stephen Beckett made that he wished he could undo, and taking those two poor bastards into the ditch was one of them.

The second thing – well, that was more recent. And maybe he could make amends before the day was through.

Stephen considered a shower, then decided the hell with it. Time and energy he couldn’t spare. For a man with so much time on his hands, it seemed to Stephen Beckett that he never had a minute more than he needed. Back when he was working, he could pack so much into the day and still have time left over for the family.

After the war, Stephen went back to the building work in London. He met and married a woman named Lily, a nurse who hailed from Kilkenny, and they had three boys, one of whom – the eldest – died at the age of six, a chest thing. In the booming 1960s, Stephen set up as a subcontractor, employing a handful of construction workers, never growing big enough to get rich but doing fine. Then Lily died. Stephen never knew what happened. The doctor said no more than ‘The gut, I’m afraid’, and shook his head when Stephen asked what could be done. Six weeks later Stephen buried her.

His youngest sister Eilish came over to look after the kids. She’d been a baby when he left home and Stephen hardly knew her. Quiet and shy, she’d never been away from home for more than the odd weekend in Tramore. She stayed with Stephen long enough to see the kids through their teens, then she married an electrician from Kent and divorced him within a year. Last Stephen heard, she was running a B&B in Liverpool.

Stephen made a decent job of raising the boys. The older one became a policeman with the Met, the other went wild for a while but ended up in Cornwall, with his own small DIY store. One morning in the mid-1980s, shortly after his sixtieth birthday, Stephen lay on in bed, thinking for the first time since Lily died about what his life had become. Why did he bother working as hard as ever, pitching for jobs, arranging crews, pricing materials, filling his days with finding solutions for problems he didn’t care about? The kids had their own lives, his needs were few, and he was tired. Not just physically, but drained by the pointlessness of it all. He was of an age when it was not unusual to think, in the final moments before sleep, of the possibility that he would not wake up, and he realised he was at ease with that.

It took him a while to make a decision, but eighteen months later he sold up the business and visited the two boys and their families. Despite their pleas that this was unnecessary, he insisted that they accept a cut of the money from the business. Then he sold his house and – at the age of sixty-two – went home to Meath to wait for death. His two eldest brothers were dead, the surviving brother was friendly enough but a stranger. Stephen rented a flat in Harte’s Cross, the nearest town to the long-demolished family home, and it was there, one morning in July, sixteen years later, that he stood in Sweeney’s Pub and said, ‘Leave her alone, you. Leave her alone.’

When Frankie Crowe – Stephen didn’t know the gunman’s name then, but he knew it now – said, ‘Who the fuck’re you, grandad? Sir Galahad?’ and pointed the gun at his crotch, Stephen felt physical fear for the first time in decades.

Stephen Beckett’s breakfast at the Olive Grove was the usual orange juice, coffee and two slices of wholemeal bread, followed by a bowl of porridge. Sean Willie Costello never got tired of wrinkling his nose in mock disdain at Stephen’s breakfast. Every morning, Sean Willie cooked himself a fry-up in his single-storey house in Coulthard Lane. ‘Maybe if I ate rabbit food I’d live to get the president’s cheque, what?’ he’d cackle, ‘but it’s no breakfast for a grown man.’

Sean Willie had had his fry-up that morning before Sweeney’s Pub was robbed. Then he’d arrived at the pub with his three Sunday-newspaper crosswords. Every week, no exceptions, Sean Willie did all the crosswords in the Sunday papers. He once won a Cross pen from one of them and newsagent Angus Tubridy cut out the crossword section of the newspaper the following week, with Sean Willie’s name on the bottom where they printed the name of the winner, and stuck it in the shop window.