Little Criminals (39 page)

The day after the hold-up, when Sean Willie went into Tubridy’s to buy his
Irish Independent
, someone asked him what it was like in Sweeney’s Pub during the hold-up and he shrugged and mumbled that it all happened so quick. Everyone in town was talking about what happened, and Sean Willie had been at the centre of it, and the man who always had a story had nothing to say. The following evening, in the back lounge at Hartnett’s, Sean Willie ordered a pint and was watching it settle when one of half a dozen young men playing poker over by the fireplace looked up and said, ‘Hey, Sean Wayne, I hear you’re auditioning for a part in Piss in Boots, what?’

Whether it was the pub owner or the young woman with the baby who told people about Sean Willie pissing himself, never mattered. Perhaps it was Garda Hanlon, or someone else who came to the pub after the shooting.

The other young men around the card table laughed and Sean Willie blushed. He walked out of the pub. The young lad who made the crack followed him out and apologised.

‘It was just, Jesus, Sean Willie, it was just a stupid thing to say. I was being a smart-ass. Sure, you know I meant no harm?’ Sean Willie nodded and said there were no hard feelings and he never went into Hartnett’s or Sweeney’s or any other pub again.

He hadn’t recognised what had happened, not for a few seconds after the shooting, then he felt the wet on his trousers, the hot liquid running down his leg, and his whole mind screamed
No!
And when it was over and Garda Hanlon arrived and he was allowed go home, and no one seemed to notice anything, he didn’t relax for a moment. Although Stephen had seen it happen, he never mentioned it. When a detective from Dublin came to Sean Willie’s home the morning after the hold-up, to take a statement, he didn’t mention it. The fear of it all coming back at him was like something heavy had been implanted in the back of Sean Willie’s skull. When the kid from the pub made the Piss in Boots crack, the realisation slammed right through him that there wouldn’t ever be a time when he’d be free of this. He told Stephen that evening about the kid in the pub.

Stephen visited Sean Willie every day after that and once managed to convince him to come for a walk down by the river, but that was all. Sean Willie stayed at home, had his few groceries delivered. He watched news bulletins and sport on the TV, but he didn’t watch any of his movies. He never did another crossword.

Sean Willie never broke down in front of his friend, but one lunchtime he was cooking something at the stove and Stephen saw him grimace and close his eyes, as though the shame of it all had suddenly rushed through him. Sean Willie went into his front room for a minute and when he came out he continued cooking, without comment.

One evening, a week before he died, while they were playing a game of sevens, he put down his cards and he said to Stephen, ‘A whole life I spent spoofing. Then real life came along and I pissed in my pants and everyone knows what I am.’

Stephen told him that was nonsense but he knew Sean Willie wasn’t listening.

And one morning he didn’t wake up. He was an old man, and there was no saying that what happened in Sweeney’s Pub had hastened his death. But what Stephen Beckett knew was that those final three weeks demeaned a good life and tore the heart out of a kind man.

One lunchtime, three months after Sean Willie died, Stephen was crossing the main street on his way back home from the Spar shop. He paused to allow a Toyota pickup to accelerate past. His eye registered the driver – Leo Titley. Stephen knew his late father well, used to drink in Sweeney’s. He stared after the pickup as it turned the corner and out on to the Kildorney road. He stood there for a couple of minutes, his breathing even, his senses suddenly icy clear, aware of everything around him with a sharpness he hadn’t known since he was a young man walking down deadly country lanes in the French countryside.

The little fucker
.

The last time he had seen the face of Leo’s passenger was beneath the peak of a baseball hat with a cartoon character, and the little fucker was driving out of Sweeney’s car park and smiling at him.

Feeling as though he’d been knocked off balance, he walked to the corner and looked down the Kildorney road, but the pickup was long gone. Off to Leo Titley’s farm, a couple of miles down the road, Leo and his passenger, the little fucker.

He went home filled with the crystal awareness that seized him when he saw Leo’s passenger and thought about nothing else all day. He ate only beans and toast and didn’t sleep much that night. It never once occurred to him to call the police.

The following morning, sitting over his breakfast at the Olive Grove, Stephen read the headline of his
Irish Independent
.
‘HAVE YOU SEEN THESE MEN?’
There was a sudden pressure, like something was rapidly expanding inside his chest, as he looked at the first of the two photographs below the headline.

Stephen crumpled the paper in his lap.

The little fucker
.

Over the three months since Sean Willie died, Stephen had paid even less attention than usual to the national news. A few days back he’d heard something on the radio about a kidnap above in Dublin. Now, he read the details.

Poor woman
.

Underneath the photo, it gave the little fucker’s name. Frankie Crowe.

The other photo was of a chubby little thug by the name of Sweetman. That day back in July, there were two of them did the job in Sweeney’s Pub and Stephen hadn’t seen much of the one standing guard by the door. Maybe it was this chubby little hoodlum.

Stephen went to Hartnett’s Pub that evening and sat alone. At nine o’clock the television news showed a house above in Dublin, armed gardai outside it. The Minister for Justice was telling a reporter how thankful he was that Mrs Kennedy had been rescued safely. When the interview with the minister ended, there was a photo of the chubby little thug and the newsreader said that police were still searching for the leader of the gang, a Frank Crowe. They showed his picture and said that gardai were following a number of leads.

Stephen Beckett went home and got Sean Willie’s gun down from the top of the wardrobe. A big grey Colt .45. He remembered the first time Sean Willie showed it to him, unwrapping it from the red and white hand towel. Standing in the front room of his little house, the big gun tucked into his belt, giggling like the kid he’d been when they’d played cowboys in the fields half a century earlier.

‘OK, stranger, slap leather!’

Although Sean Willie’s uncle was the only one of his family to get involved in the war of independence, his reputation as one of Michael Collins’s gunmen gave the family a badge of honour among those who saw everything in the light cast by history. One evening in the mid-1970s, a local member of the Provisional IRA came to the house and asked Sean Willie to look after the loaded Colt .45.

‘I don’t think there was anything going on at the time,’ Sean Willie told Stephen. ‘No reason why he couldn’t have left the gun under his floorboards. It was like he thought I deserved the honour – being the nephew of the local patriot – the honour of doing my bit for the cause.’ He grinned. ‘Right spacer.’

A few months later, this guy did a runner after a garda was wounded in a Provo bank robbery. There were rumours around town that he ended up working in a restaurant someplace outside Philadelphia. Never came back for the gun. Mustn’t have told any of his friends that he’d left a gun with Sean Willie, and no one ever came looking for it.

After Sean Willie died, Stephen Beckett took three souvenirs from the little house in Coulthard Lane. The gun, the Cross fountain pen that Sean Willie won in the crossword competition, and a tattered blue Pelican paperback, a book of essays he found on one of the shelves. He’d been reading it on and off since Sean Willie died.

Now, Stephen checked the weapon and the ammunition and found them in good order. He left the gun on top of the towel, on his bedside table, and stripped for bed. It was some time after three in the morning when he dozed off and when he woke the clock said it was just after seven.

When he finished his little bedside exercises, Stephen Beckett got dressed. He skipped breakfast at the Olive Grove that morning and just had a cup of tea at home, with Sean Willie’s Colt .45 wrapped in the red and white hand towel on the table beside him. Then he put on his black overcoat, took up the gun and walked out of Harte’s Cross and down the Kildorney road towards Leo Titley’s farm.

After an hour sitting in a ditch above the Titley farmhouse, his thoughts darting around inside his head like small frantic animals, Stephen was still wrestling with his urge to kill the little fucker. He had it coming. He did what he did to the people in Sweeney’s Pub that day, and he took that poor woman up in Dublin from her family, and God alone knew what else he did. Stephen thought, as he’d thought during the long, sleepless hours of last night, of the satisfaction of walking up to Crowe as soon as he came out of the farmhouse, and pointing the gun at his face and giving him a taste of the fear and humiliation that Sean Willie had suffered. Then he’d kill him.

The chances of getting away with it were not great. Someone – Leo probably – would see him. The police would ask locals if they had seen anyone in the area and the chances were that someone saw Stephen on the road. He could live with that.

Crowe needed killing.

Sometimes, there are people who need killing. Need it because of what they did and because of what they will do again and because the emotions and the pain of it all demand a bloody revenge. And Crowe, the little fucker, was one of them. Laying waste to people’s lives.

Stephen sat in the ditch with the gun wrapped in the towel, resting it on his lap, telling himself that Crowe needed killing. And telling himself that if he didn’t do it he’d be doing again what he did that day in Sweeney’s – flinching, backing down from doing what ought to be done, out of fear.

The sun was shining but it was cold out here in the countryside. Stephen didn’t notice the cold until a gust of wind blew across his face and he felt the chill of the tears on his cheeks. He was staring across the hedgerow, back down along the lane that led to Leo Titley’s farmhouse. It took him a while to realise that inside his head he was staring across a different ditch, in the shadow of another hedgerow, on the road outside Caen sixty years ago, the other time when the emotion and the pain of it all shaped the judgement that someone needed killing. The memories of Benny and of the two German soldiers in the ditch flooded through him and he felt sick at the thought of what he wanted to do. It was the right thing to do, and the worst thing anyone could do.

It was the loathing Stephen felt for his own murderous instinct that held him back. Sitting there, the towel in his lap, he recognised that it wasn’t fear that was stopping him and it wasn’t morality. It was because he knew that the weeks or the months he had left – and Stephen didn’t think any more of his life as having any number of years to it – would be saturated with the anguish of killing. He knew that although rage made the killing right, the time that followed would make something else of it.

Useless old man. Do it, do something, one way or the other
.

The door of the farmhouse opened and Leo Titley came out. He was chewing on something and he used the back of his hand to wipe his Lips. He got into his pickup and after revving the reluctant engine, he drove away.

Stephen stood up, his spine bent. He made a puffing sound as he forced his back to straighten. In one hand he held the towel-wrapped gun, in the other a rock he’d picked up from the ditch. He approached the farmhouse from its blind side. He reached the back wall of the house and paused a moment, then he stooped down and inched along beneath a window, towards the back door. He found the jamb of the door broken, the door open a couple of inches. Stephen put the rock down gently. He unrolled the towel, cocked the pistol and went into the cottage. It took him less than a minute to check each room and see the place was empty.

Stephen Beckett couldn’t know that Frankie Crowe had driven back to Dublin from Leo Titley’s home two days previously, immediately after Stephen saw him in Leo’s pickup on the main street of Harte’s Cross. He couldn’t know that Crowe spent that night in Dublin, in the home of a man named Adrian Moffat, and that last night he slept in a car in a lane and he wouldn’t be back at Leo’s farmhouse for another four hours.

Stephen went outside, and stood in the open for a while, the gun down by his side, his blank expression concealing his feelings of relief and frustration. He felt more than ever like a man alive beyond his time, beyond understanding the world around him, beyond any use.

He put the towel-wrapped gun under one arm and pulled his overcoat tight around him. His stiff knees, sore from the time spent sitting in the ditch, meant it would take him longer to walk back to Harte’s Cross than it took to walk out here.

An hour after he’d read aloud Brendan Sweetman’s statement, his lawyer Connie Wintour turned up at Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe’s office and asked for a confidential meeting.

‘My client, as you know, was placed in an invidious position, vis-à-vis the professional criminals who—’

O’Keefe said, ‘Let’s take all that bullshit as read. What’s he got to offer?’

Wintour looked slightly miffed at having to curtail his performance. ‘We’re all aware that judges pay attention to what garda witnesses say about defendants. If there could be an understanding about the light in which your people cast Mr Sweetman, my client might well—’ and here Wintour paused to flick an invisible speck of dirt off the sleeve of his jacket ‘—have some additional information you might find interesting.’