The Midnight Choir (10 page)

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Authors: Gene Kerrigan

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural

BOOK: The Midnight Choir
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‘You going to report those bastards?’
Synnott said, ‘I knew her, the garda you shot.’ He made eye contact. ‘I met her once. It was a terrible thing to do.’
The prisoner said, ‘I didn’t do it.’
‘The fuck you didn’t.’
‘I’m a soldier,’ the prisoner said. ‘I follow orders. I fight the Brits. I don’t shoot Irish women.’
When Joyce and Buckley came back, Harry Synnott went to the canteen. He had a cup of tea and sat at a table on his own, looking at his notebook. The notes were spaced out, two or three sentences per page.
I’m a soldier
the Provo said. Soldier of the Republic. And that made it OK, whatever he did. How come, Synnott wondered, not one of them ever stood up in the witness box and said
Yes, I did it and I’m proud I did my duty as a soldier
? How come every fucking one of them’s innocent?
Harry Synnott stared at his notes, at the lines he’d scrawled and the gaps between them, until his tea was cold.
He went off duty that evening at 7 p.m. and called in sick next day. When the radio alarm went off the following morning the news came on and David Hanly announced that a man named Conal Crotty had been charged at a special sitting of the District Court with the murder of Garda Maura Sheelin.
*
When the trial of Conal Crotty came to the Special Criminal Court seven months later, Harry Synnott wasn’t on the list of witnesses in the garda file. His role in the case, guarding Crotty for a short time, had been peripheral and he hadn’t expected to be called, but he was nonetheless relieved.
Crotty pleaded not guilty and claimed that he had been forced to sign a statement implicating him in the bank robbery and the murder. The chief prosecution witnesses, detectives Joyce and Buckley, gave evidence that he had made a voluntary confession.
‘When I came back in the room,’ Joyce said in the witness box, ‘the accused remained silent. After a while, we had a general conversation. I knew he’d played a bit of hurling at county level and I’d played a bit myself with a cousin of his, so I asked him about that. After we’d talked for about half an hour, give or take, he suddenly said he wanted to get something off his chest. That’s when he made the statement.’
It was Crotty’s senior counsel, Desmond Cartwright, who buggered up the confession.
With little material to work with, other than his client’s protestation of innocence, Cartwright cast his net wide. Apart from those who had made statements, Crotty and his lawyers didn’t know the names of any of the uniformed gardai who had been present during his detention. So Cartwright asked the court to call every garda who was on duty during the forty-six hours his client had been held prior to him signing the incriminating statement. It was a tiresome process, lasting several days, with a procession of gardai confirming their insignificant roles in the events, or their complete lack of involvement in the case, and swearing that they’d seen and heard nothing to substantiate the accused’s claims of being beaten up. After sixteen such witnesses had given evidence, with number seventeen on his way to the witness stand, one of the court’s three judges leaned forward and asked, ‘Mr Cartwright, are you certain this is necessary?’
Cartwright, a small man, broad-faced, with a receding hairline and an air of natural superiority, put on a smile that was as ingratiating as it was blatantly spurious. ‘What I’m certain of, My Lord, beyond any doubt, is that Your Lordship will be absolutely scrupulous in protecting my client’s right to a full and fair ventilation of all aspects of these most serious charges.’ Everyone in court knew that this was a barrister’s way of telling a judge to go fuck himself.
Harry Synnott was garda witness number twenty-four.
‘In the course of your duties that day, Garda Synnott, did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary?’
Two days before he was due to give evidence, Synnott had considered resigning from the force.
Commit perjury, or help that murdering bastard walk free?
Helen, his then girlfriend, later his wife, told him that he’d been talking in his sleep, pleading with someone not to do something. ‘Walk away from it,’ she told him. ‘They’re no good, any of them.’
On the witness stand, Harry Synnott said, ‘I saw the accused being assaulted.’
A ripple of murmurs and feet-shuffling swept through the courtroom. To Desmond Cartwright’s credit, he didn’t do anything more than raise his eyebrows. ‘You did?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘By whom?’
‘Detective Sergeant Joyce, sir, and Detective Garda Buckley.’
Cartwright took off his glasses and looked down at the table in front of him, absorbing the prospect of victory after several days of assuming that he was fighting a dead one. He’d handled a number of these Special Criminal Court trials and made no secret of his contempt for the ease with which the three judges, sitting without a jury, accepted garda evidence. There had been a steady accumulation over the years of allegations of brutality, confessions later repudiated, suspects who emerged from interview rooms with bruises that were explained with a claim that they fell down stairs or bumped into a door. On occasion, the explanation was that defendants, in order to cast doubt on incriminating statements, had beaten each other up. Or, when alone in cells, that they had beaten themselves up. A similar explanation had been given for the bruises found on Conal Crotty when he’d been subsequently examined by a doctor. He had, for one crucial hour, been kept in a cell with another Provo.
Aware that he’d been given an unprecedented gift, Cartwright took his time. The judges seemed to be sitting straighter on the bench, and the detectives gathered at the back of the court were exchanging whispers. Three newspaper reporters were taking down every word. Sitting on a bench off to one side, Detective Sergeant Joyce was looking down at the floor. Detective Garda Buckley stared at Synnott as though he was something nasty that Buckley had found on the sole of his shoe.
Cartwright put his glasses back on and made eye contact with Harry Synnott.
‘And what did you do when you witnessed this, Garda Synnott?’
‘I reported it to a superior, sir, but he wasn’t interested.’
‘You made a contemporaneous note of all this, I hope, Garda Synnott?’
‘Not contemporaneous, sir. I made a note of what happened, immediately afterwards, in the canteen.’
‘And you have that note?’
Harry Synnott took a notebook from a side pocket.
The prosecution made noises about having this sprung on them, while Cartwright pointed out that it was all news to him, too.
The prosecution went through the motions of seeking to suppress Synnott’s notes, knowing that no judge would dare do so. One of the judges leaned forward. ‘This notebook that you have, Garda Synnott – that’s the original?’
‘It’s not detailed, My Lord. It’s just a note I made immediately afterwards, in the canteen – it says,
DS Joyce and DG Buckley beat and kicked the suspect, Mr Crotty, in my presence
. That’s all it says. I just thought, My Lord, I just thought I should make some kind of note. I wasn’t sure what to do, My Lord.’
Cartwright then took Harry Synnott minute by minute through his contact with the accused, stitching the description of the assault into the court record. He listened to every account of a punch or kick and then brought Synnott back at it from several angles.
‘When this particular punch connected, Garda Synnott, did my client scream?’
‘He made a noise, yes.’
‘An exclamation of pain?’
‘Yes.’
‘Extreme distress?’
‘He was distressed.’
‘Distraught?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Agitated?’
‘Yes.’
‘He cried out? Screamed?’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘Was it a loud scream?’
‘It was a scream.’
Cartwright was speaking to Synnott but he was looking up at the judge who had questioned the need for the lengthy trawl through the police on duty during Conal Crotty’s interrogation. The judge kept his gaze fixed on the back of the court.
‘Not a mere yelp, Garda Synnott, certainly not a restrained expression of protest?’
‘He screamed.’
‘And when he was kicked, did he scream then, too?’
After a while, Synnott mostly looked down at his notebook and when he looked up he didn’t look at Cartwright but at the stenographer, a middle-aged man with wavy grey hair. He could hear the thump of the heel of the man’s hand repeatedly hitting the bench in front of him as his fountain pen scurried down page after page, putting every word on the record.
Cartwright took Synnott through Conal Crotty’s statement, in which he alleged he had been beaten.
‘This passage, where my client alleges he was lying on the floor when one of the detectives – he’s not clear which one – stamped on his chest, did you witness that?’
‘Yes.’
The senior counsel for the state was sitting behind his table, his gaze cast down on an empty page of the foolscap pad in front of him.
When they got to the period when Synnott had been alone with the Provo, Cartwright took a minute to read silently through a passage of his client’s statement. Then he looked up.
‘Did my client make any complaint to you?’ Cartwright asked.
‘He did. He said I was a bit young to be a party to torture.’
‘As indeed you are, Garda Synnott.’
‘He said that the other gardai, Sergeant Joyce and Mr Buckley, were bastards.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said to him something like,
I knew her, the garda you shot. I met her once
.’
Synnott looked down at his notebook again. ‘He said
, I had to do it
.’
Cartwright jerked his head up so sharply that his glasses rocked on his nose.
Synnott continued. ‘He said,
I’m a soldier
.’
Cartwright’s stare was boring into Synnott’s face. Synnott said, ‘Then he said,
And my orders were to do the bank. She got in the way. It was nothing personal
.’
Cartwright, more than anyone else in the courtroom, knew exactly what was happening. His voice was clear and bleak.
‘You say he said that, do you?’
‘Yes, sir. I asked him if he meant to kill Garda Sheelin. He said,
I’ve said too much
.’
Cartwright said nothing for a while, one foot resting on the bench behind him. Like a chess player, he was thinking through the next few moves –if he said this, if Synnott said that – his tongue occasionally wetting his lower lip. Finally, he demanded and was given Synnott’s notebook. The court adjourned for ten minutes while photocopies were made of the relevant pages for the three judges and the other lawyers.
Synnott watched Cartwright examine the pages. There was no way to tell the lines written in the canteen that day from the lines added since.
Eventually, because he couldn’t do otherwise, Cartwright asked the obvious question.
‘And you told nobody about this? And you made no statement?’ His voice rose. ‘You had a confession, you say, implicating my client in the foul murder of a young woman garda, a colleague of yours, a heroic young policewoman who put the defence of the state ahead of her own safety – her young life whipped away in an instant – you have a confession to this vile crime and you quietly close your notebook and put it away?’
Looking at the judges, Synnott said, ‘I did and that was wrong, My Lords. When Detectives Joyce and Buckley secured a confession from the suspect, I was sure that was enough, that he would be charged and convicted. No one approached me, no one asked for a statement. After I reported the assault on the prisoner, and that was ignored—’ Synnott looked across at the bench. ‘I don’t like saying this, My Lords, but I was afraid.’
One of the judges leaned forward. ‘Of what, garda?’
Synnott said, ‘I was afraid that if I came forward and said what he had told me I’d have to tell the truth about the assaults on the prisoner – or perjure myself. Frankly, My Lords, it was a choice I was hoping to avoid. I was hoping that Mr Crotty would be found guilty without my having to say anything. I knew he did it, he told me so. Then Mr Cartwright had me called – I had to tell the truth, My Lords, all of it.’
Cartwright intervened. ‘And what do you say, Garda Synnott, to the fact that my client denies ever making any incriminating remarks such as those you have related here? What do you say to the charge that you’re simply making this up?’
Cartwright knew he had to ask the question, and he knew it was pointless. Synnott’s voice was steady. ‘Mr Crotty killed a garda, My Lords – he told me so. I’m not surprised he’s ready to commit perjury.’
The trial continued for another two weeks, but the outcome was decided before Harry Synnott left the witness stand. The court ruled that Crotty’s confession to the detectives was inadmissible, but found him guilty of murder on the basis of his verbal admission to Garda Harry Synnott. The court found that Crotty had been assaulted while in custody, and one judge – the one who had asked Synnott why he’d beem afraid – made scathing remarks about detectives Joyce and Buckley. The same judge said, ‘The fact that Garda Synnott admitted, here and on oath, that he witnessed the assaults on the prisoner, thereby causing potentially ruinous harm to the prosecution case, marks him as a witness who must be taken very seriously indeed. When it comes, therefore, to assessing his own evidence implicating the accused in the murder, we cannot but assign to it the utmost significance.’

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