Mothers and Sons (2 page)

He drove to Landsborough House one Sunday afternoon. It was only a year since the house had been opened to the public; the signposting was clear. He needed to check the alarm system and to look at the position of the paintings and get a feel for the place. He had known that most visitors on a Sunday afternoon would be family groups, but he hadn’t brought his family with him, he did not think that they would enjoy a trip to a big house or tramping around looking at paintings. He liked getting away on his own in any case, never telling them where he was going or when he would be back. He often noticed men on a Sunday driving out of the city with an entire family in the car. He wondered what that felt like. He would hate it.

The house was all shadows and echoes. Only a section – a wing, he supposed the word was – was open to the public. He presumed that the owners lived in the rest of the house, and smiled to himself at the thought that as soon as he could make proper plans they were in for a shock. They were old, he thought, and it would be easy to tie them up. Old people, in his experience, had a tendency to make a lot of noise; their howls were somehow louder or at least more irritating than those of their younger counterparts. He must remember, he thought, to bring strong and effective gags.

At the end of a corridor there was an enormous gallery, and this was where the paintings were hung. He had the names of the most valuable ones written down, and he was surprised at how small they were. If there were no one looking, he thought, he would be able to take one of them
and put it under his jacket. He imagined, however, that there was an alarm behind each painting and that the guards, who seemed sleepy, would, if alerted, be able to move very fast. He walked back down the corridor into the small shop, where he bought postcards of the paintings he planned to steal and posters of the Rembrandt, which would be the jewel in his haul. His brother-in-law later framed two identical posters for him.

He relished the idea that no one – no one at all, not the guards or the other visitors or the woman who had taken his money and wrapped the cards and posters for him – had noticed him or would ever remember him.

T
HE COPS
knew he had the paintings. A few weeks after the robbery, a front-page article in the
Irish Independent
announced that he was the Irish Connection. He presumed that by now they realized there was no international gang with whom he was associated, that he had acted alone, with merely three helpers. These three helpers had now become the problem, as each one believed he was going to get at least a few hundred grand in cash. All three had instant plans for the money, they continued to ask him about it. He had no clear idea how to make these paintings into cash.

Later that evening, two Dutchmen were going to book into a hotel on the north side. They had made contact with him through a man called Mousey Furlong, who used to be a scrap dealer with a horse and cart and now sold heroin to children and teenagers. He shook his head when he thought about Mousey Furlong. He did not like the heroin business, it was too risky, there were too many people in on each
deal, and he hated the idea of having strung-out kids arriving at his door, skinny, pale-faced kids with huge eyes. Heroin also turned the world upside down, it meant that men like Mousey Furlong had contact with Dutchmen, and this, he thought, was an unnatural state of affairs.

Mousey spoke of the Rembrandt as though it were a new and lucrative narcotic on the Dublin scene. The Dutchmen were interested in the Rembrandt, Mousey said, but would need to verify it. They had the money available to them in cash and could come up with it once they had seen the painting. They could talk about the rest of the hoard later, Mousey added.

The Dutchmen had to be careful too, he supposed; if they had the money with them it would be easy from a distance to show them the poster, see their money, and then tie them up and walk away with the loot, leaving them to go back to Holland with a lovely framed poster. He did not plan to show the Dutchmen the Rembrandt until he had taken the measure of them; instead, he would show them a Guardi and the Gainsborough first to prove to them that he had the paintings.

A robbery was mostly simple. You stole money and it was instantly yours; you kept it somewhere safe. Or you stole jewellery or electrical goods or cigarettes in bulk, and you knew how to offload them. There were people you could trust, a whole world out there that knew how to organize such an operation. But these paintings were different. This involved trusting people you did not know. What if the two Dutchmen were cops? The best thing to do was wait, then move cautiously, and wait again.

He stood up from the sofa and went to the small window
which looked onto the balcony. Then he walked out onto the balcony itself. He half expected to notice a figure lurking in the grim spaces below, a lone man beside a motorbike, but there was no one, that emptiness again, as though the world had been poured out for his amusement, or as a way of frightening him. He supposed that Cassidy told his colleagues about this flat, and maybe they needed no one to watch him since they had Cassidy who, he thought now, gave the money each week to the Garda Benevolent Fund. It was enough to make him sick. He asked himself if it was time to do something about Cassidy, but he would wait until the paintings had been successfully sold. He had learned over the years that it was always wise to tackle one matter at a time.

He went back and lay on the sofa. He stared at the ceiling and thought about nothing. He slept well at night and was never tired at this time of the day, but he felt tired now. He lay on his side, putting a cushion under his head, and, knowing that it would be a few hours before his sister-in-law returned, he slowly faded into sleep.

When he woke he was nervous and uneasy; it was the loss of concentration and control which disturbed him and made him sit up and look at his watch. He had only been asleep for half an hour, but he realized that he had dreamed again about Lanfad, and he wondered if he would ever stop dreaming about it. It was twenty-four years since he had left it.

He had dreamed that he was back there again, being brought in for the first time, between two Guards, arriving, being shown along corridors. But it was not himself as a thirteen-year-old boy, it was him now, after all the years of
doing what he liked, being married, waking in the morning to the sound of children, watching television in the evenings, robbing, making plans and deals. And what unsettled him in the dream was the feeling that he was happy to be locked up, to have order in his life, to keep rules, to be watched all the time, not to have to think too much. As he was led through those corridors in the dream, he had felt resigned to it, almost pleased.

He had felt like this for much of the time when he served his only adult sentence in Mountjoy Jail. He had missed his wife and their first child, and missed going where he liked, but he had not minded being locked up every night, he enjoyed having all that time to himself. Nothing unpredictable occurred and that made him content; the other prisoners knew not to come too close to him. He hated the food, but he paid no attention to it, and he hated the screws, but they knew to be careful of him as well. He made sure when his wife came on visits once a week that he gave nothing away, no emotion, no sense of how lonely and isolated he sometimes was. Instead they spoke about what would happen when he would get out, as she slowly put her finger into his mouth, a finger she had just wriggled around inside herself, so that he could take in the smell of her, and hold it, letting her talk about the neighbours and her family while she made it fresh again for him. He touched her hand so that the smell might stay with him for the rest of the day.

His first days in Lanfad were the ones which lingered most in his mind. Perhaps because it was in the midlands and he had never been outside the city before. He was stunned by the place, by how cold and unfriendly it was
and how he would have to stay there for three or four years. He had allowed himself to feel nothing. He never cried and when he felt sad he made himself think about nothing for a while; he pretended that he was nowhere. That was how he dealt with his years at Lanfad.

In the time he was there he was beaten only once and that was when the entire dormitory was taken out one by one and beaten on the hands with a strap. Usually, however, he was left alone; he kept the rules when he knew there was a danger of being caught. He realized that it was easy to slip out on a summer’s night as long as you waited until everything was quiet and you chose the right companion and you did not go too far. He learned how to raid the kitchen and made sure not to do it too often in case they set a trap for him. As he thought about it now, lying back on the sofa, he realized that he had liked being on his own, standing apart from the others, never the one caught jumping from bed to bed, or locked in a fight, when the brother in charge entered the room.

On one of his first nights there, there was a fight in the dormitory. He heard it starting, and then something like: ‘Say that again and I’ll burst you.’ This was followed by cries of encouragement. So there had to be a fight; there was too much energy in the dormitory for something not to happen. Although it was dark, you could make out shapes and movements. And he could hear the gasping and the pushing back of beds and then the shouting from all around. He did not stir. Soon, it would become his style not to move, but at this early stage he had not developed a style. He was too uncertain to do anything. Thus when the light was turned on and one of the older brothers, Brother
Walsh, arrived, he did not have to scramble back into his bed like the rest of them, but still he felt afraid as the brother loped menacingly about the dormitory. There was now an absolute silence. Brother Walsh spoke to no one but walked around the beds looking at each boy as though he would pounce on him. When the brother looked at him, he did not know what to do. He met his gaze and then looked away and then back again.

Eventually, the brother spoke.

‘Who started it? Stand out who started it.’

No one replied. No one stood out.

‘I’ll pick two boys at random and they’ll tell me who started it, they’ll tell me all right, and it’ll be worse for you now, whoever started it, if you don’t stand out.’

The accent was strange. He could not think what to do except pretend fiercely that this was not happening at all. If he were picked on, he would not know what to say. He did not know anyone’s name, and had not seen whoever it was who had started the fight enough to identify him now. Also, he did not know what the rules were, if it were agreed among the boys never to tell on anyone else, no matter what. He was puzzled as to how all the rest of them had learned each other’s names. It seemed impossible. As he thought about this, he looked up and saw that two boys were now standing beside their beds, their eyes cast down. One of them had the top of his pyjamas torn.

‘Right,’ Brother Walsh said. ‘The two of you will come with me.’

The brother went back to the door and turned the lights out, leaving pure silence behind. No one even whispered. He lay there and listened. The first sounds were faint, but
soon he heard a shout and a cry and then the unmistakable sound of a strap, and then nothing and then a howl of pain. He wondered where it was happening, he thought it must be in the corridor outside the dormitory, or the stairwell. Then the beating became regular with constant crying out and yelping. And soon the sound of voices shouting ‘No!’ over and over.

Everyone in the dormitory remained still; no one made a sound. It did not stop. Finally, when the two boys opened the door and tried to make their way to their beds in the darkness, the silence became even more intense. As they lay in bed crying and sobbing, the other boys did not make a sound. He wished he knew the names of the boys who had been punished and he wondered if he would know them in the morning, if they would look different because of what had happened.

In the months which followed it seemed to him unbelievable that the boys around him could lose any sense of caution and forget what had happened that night. Fights would regularly break out in the dark dormitory and boys would shout and get out of bed and leave themselves wide open to being caught when the lights came on and Brother Walsh or some other brother, or sometimes two brothers together, stood there watching as everyone scampered back to bed. And each time the main culprits would be made to own up and then taken outside and punished.

Slowly, the brothers noticed him; they realized that he was not like the others and gradually they began to trust him. But he never trusted them, or allowed any of them to become too friendly with him. He learned instead how to look busy and seem respectful. In his time there he never
had a friend, never let anyone come close to him. At the beginning, when he had trouble with Markey Woods, a bloke older than him and bigger, he had to put thought into how to deal with him.

It was always easy to get a companion, someone who would work for you if you offered them protection and attention. He found a wiry fellow called Webster, but he did not tell Webster what he had in mind. He told him to let Markey know that there were cigarettes hidden in the bog, a good distance from the school but within its grounds. He let Markey threaten Webster that if he did not lead him to the hidden cache, he would beat him up. Thus he found himself walking with Markey and Webster towards the outer and remote limits of the Lanfad estate. He had primed Webster to run at Markey at an agreed signal, simply knock him to the ground. He had been experimenting with knots and ropes, having stolen a length of rope from the workshop, so he knew how to tie Markey’s legs quickly and then extend the rope to his hands and tie them too. This would be the difficult part, but with his legs tied, Markey could struggle all he liked, he would not have a chance.

All this took more time than he had imagined as Markey struck blow after blow at Webster, causing him to become afraid, almost useless. Eventually he pinned Markey down and got the knot around one wrist, jerking it so that it almost broke his arm and then turning him face down so he could tie his wrists together. He had worked out that there was no point in trying to beat Markey up. It would mean nothing to him. Which was why he had brought a blindfold, and a small pair of pliers he had also found in the workshop. Once the blindfold was on, he turned Markey
on his back and told Webster to start kicking him in the ribs, and as Webster was doing this with relish Markey had his mouth wide open roaring threats at him.