The Midnight Choir (6 page)

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Authors: Gene Kerrigan

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

BOOK: The Midnight Choir
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‘She said no, though? Before.’
‘Bullshit. It old you, she wanted it, same as me, and she can’t turn it on and off like a tap, right? Bottom line. There was no doubt in my mind, and there wouldn’t have been in yours – she wanted it, and she got what she wanted.’
Harry Synnott could hear the scratching of Rose Cheney’s biro.
Game, set, match.
6
GALWAY
When they got the nutcase down off the roof he sat in the back of the squad car and said nothing all the way to McCreary Street garda station in the centre of Galway City. Garda Joe Mills put him into an interview room, while Declan Dockery did the paperwork and the prisoner sat there in cuffs, licking his lips and looking at the wall.
He wouldn’t give his name when Joe Mills asked. He just sat there all afternoon. Wouldn’t say where he was from, why he’d been on the roof.
‘To tell you the truth,’ Joe Mills told him, ‘I’m not crazy about pressing assault charges. Not against someone with the kind of troubles that had him standing on the edge of a roof. Know what I mean?’
The nutcase didn’t look at Mills. He just continued staring at the bare wall, like he saw something fascinating there. His eyes had lost the icy thing that Joe Mills had seen up on the roof.
‘You pack a bit of a punch, though. We’re looking at assault, resisting arrest.’
Silence.
‘If you were to tell me what had you out there on the roof, maybe we could forget about the rough stuff.’
Nothing.
‘My nose is a bit sore, but there’s no harm done.’
Nothing.
Don’t beat about.
‘Where’d you get the blood on your hands?’
The nutcase looked down at his cuffed hands, then he looked up at Joe Mills. Then he shrugged.
‘Come on, fella. You know this has to be sorted out, whatever it is.’ That was when the shrink arrived, and a sergeant who told Joe Mills that was fine, he’d take over now, go type up a report. Mills was at the door, on his way out of the room, when the prisoner said, ‘When it started out, there was no rough stuff. I’d never hurt a woman before.’
Mills turned and the prisoner was looking up at him, his expression uncertain.
The shrink, a slim brunette woman in chinos and a blue cotton shirt, looked like she’d been dragged here on an afternoon off and wasn’t pleased about it. She caught Joe Mills’s glance and inclined her head towards the door. Mills said, ‘Okay, fella, these folks will look after you, right?’
Joe Mills and Declan Dockery spent the rest of their shift typing up reports on what happened on the roof of the pub. Mills added a paragraph on the nutcase’s silence since they got him to the station. Then they went for a pint.
DUBLIN
The Hapgood solicitor, Trevor Egan, arrived at Macken Road garda station in the late afternoon. He demanded and received access to his client and when he emerged after twenty minutes he had a narrow smile on his wide face. Standing in the corridor, notebook in hand, Detective Inspector Harry Synnott inspected that face carefully. Plump and smooth and shiny. It went with the suit and the sculpted hair, the thick gold ring, the onyx tiepin and the heavy gold watch. Mr Egan’s dark suit minimised his plumpness. He was carrying a black leather briefcase with his initials in gold letters below the combination lock.
How do you get a face to look like that?
The surface of the solicitor’s face wasn’t just washed, shaved and after-shaved, it seemed to have a veneer, like maybe every day when Mr Egan finished breakfast he took his face to a team of vestal virgins and they spent an hour buffing it with exotic leaves.
‘Might I enquire when my client will be free to leave the station?’
Harry Synnott said, ‘You can take him with you.’
Egan nodded as though he was pleased that the police had seen what should have been obvious all along. ‘You’ve put the lad through a bit of a grind, Inspector. For no good reason.’
Synnott said, ‘We’re preparing a file for the DPP. I expect we’ll be proffering charges at a later date.’
Egan looked Synnott in the eye for a moment, then deliberately looked away, staring at the wall, his jaw working. Either he was counting to ten or he was trying some intimidatory trick he’d picked up at lawyer school. When he looked at Synnott again his tone had an edge of anger. ‘Inspector, come
on.
This is a young man and a young woman – the worst we’re talking about is mixed signals. I mean, we’ve all been there.’
Synnott said, ‘You’ve been there, have you?’ He held up his notebook. ‘Would you care to give me names and approximate dates and details of the occasions on which you held women down and forced yourself upon them?’
‘Come on, Inspector, it’s her word against his.’ Egan made a snorting noise. ‘If this ever went to court it’d be on the one hand, and on the other. And that, if I can be technical about it, is the definition of reasonable doubt.’
The solicitor stopped for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had softened. ‘Why put two people – and I’m sure that this young lady is quite sincere but the chances are that she’s already having second thoughts – why put two people through such an ordeal?’
‘Your client has a case to answer.’
‘You know this isn’t going anywhere.’ Egan’s voice took on an edge. ‘Max’s father is a man of substance – the firm of Hapgood & Creasy has done PR for some of the most important—’
Synnott said, ‘I’ll have someone get your client.’ He turned and walked down the corridor to the public office.
The temptation was to argue with the lawyer, to wipe some of the gloss off his silly face. But Synnott considered Max’s solicitor a poor opponent for such an exercise. When it came to commercial contracts Egan could no doubt spot a loophole at sixty paces. This was a criminal case, though, in which a slip of a girl would get up in front of a jury and tell one story and a brute in a suit would tell another. And what the jury would be looking for would be the bits and bobs of evidence that could tilt the scales one way or the other.
Synnott patted the pocket into which he’d slipped his notebook.
Actus reus. Mens rea.
*
Dixie Peyton woke, still smiling, sat up and Owen was gone. It was dark, but she hadn’t dozed for long and the noises beyond her cell told her that the prison hadn’t yet settled down for the night.
For a while, hardly a night had gone by that she hadn’t dreamed of Owen, but that was in the first year after he’d died. These days, it happened now and then and it upset her and she welcomed the upset. If a dream was all she could have of Owen she didn’t mind paying a price in wretchedness when she woke.
Stupid.
Ending up here.
Especially now.
‘Christ, Dixie.’
Around teatime, the screw with the bushy eyebrows had tried for a heart-to-heart. ‘Bit desperate, love, waving a needle around. Not like you.’ His voice had sounded like it mattered to him. ‘You on that dirty stuff now?’
‘Not now.’
Dixie had asked him to ring Turner’s Lane and ask for Inspector Harry Synnott. He had and he’d come back and told her that they’d said there was no Inspector Synnott there.
‘Christ’s sake,’ Dixie had said. She had Synnott’s card, with his mobile number, somewhere at home. If she got bail.
No chance.
Stupid thing to do.
Stupid.
Especially now.
Stupid thing to do.
What else was there to do?
Stupid.
She flinched from a thought, then relented, let it well up.
In the beginning, thinking about Owen had been too painful but she hadn’t been able to help it. Then it became easier until she could remember him without the grief washing everything good out of the memory. Now, especially when things were as shitty as they’d become, it was where Dixie sought comfort. The last few days, she’d thought about him when she woke and when she tried to sleep, and in between she’d eased her stress sometimes by talking to him. Mostly she chose from an assortment of well-worn recollections, things that were nothing much until they turned into precious scraps when there was little else. She had four years of fragments from that life, from the evening they’d met to the morning she’d learned he was dead, and she had by now organised them in her head so that she could go to one bundle of remembrance or another as the mood took her. Anything that wasn’t a comfort she could keep at bay.
Except for that night, Owen’s last night. That night came at her sometimes when she wasn’t careful and mostly she couldn’t push it away.
She tried to put herself there beside him in the ditch, wondering if he managed to get past the pain and the fear, to find any kind of comfort in her and in Christopher, the son she’d been carrying when he died.
*
When he got home to his flat on the North Quays, Harry Synnott stood at the kitchen counter and flicked through his post. He threw away the garish advert for the German supermarket and the leaflet that insisted he wouldn’t believe the difference that broadband would make to his life. He read the itemised bill for his mobile phone and then the leaflet that came with it. It boasted about the recent upgrade of transmission facilities. It told him how he should register to receive text messages of future improvements to the service. He stood for a moment and wondered who would have such an empty life that they’d sign up to receive such urgent news.
He read the invoice for his cable-TV service and the final demand that he pay his waste charges, then he wrote cheques for both and left them in envelopes on the table near the door. His mobile made the melodic sound that indicated the arrival of a text message. He opened the text.
Lunch tomorrow? 1.30? Colin.
After a moment, Synnott thumbed a reply –
OK
– and sent it back to Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe.
It’s on, then. Or it’s not, and he wants to break it gently.
A classical singer, one of the fat guys who used to sing at the World Cup, was warbling in the flat below Synnott’s. The woman who lived there didn’t seem to have any other music and she played it every evening and sometimes joined in. Synnott had come to like the sound. He’d never particularly liked the fat guy’s singing, and the woman’s voice was no great shakes, but the combination had something about it. Synnott had never seen the woman and imagined her as a thirty-something, probably a civil servant. There were a few of them in this apartment block, or at least that was what they looked like on the rare occasions when he saw any of them. A couple of weeks back the woman had gone on a singing bender, the whole evening, her voice ripping through walls, soaring along with Luciano or Domingo or whoever it was as though she’d lost all inhibition. She hadn’t done that before or since, and Synnott wondered if something had happened to cause the eruption. Maybe it had been her birthday.
In the six years since his divorce, Synnott had lived in three different rented flats, moving on for no reason other than boredom. Over the fifteen years of his marriage, he’d never warmed to the family house in Clonsilla. He remembered standing in the back garden one day, looking at the trellis he’d fixed to the wall, a profusion of green woven through it, thinking about the hours he spent on that and similar jobs. He remembered a broken strut on the trellis and how he repaired it with electrician’s tape and Helen said no, that wouldn’t do, they’d have to take it down and—
Staring at the trellis, Synnott concluded that it was the most idiotic, pointless contraption he’d ever seen.
What the hell is that about?
How do you end up doing so many things you don’t care about, just because they’re the things you’re supposed to do?
Stuff like that had gradually transformed the house into the kind of place that Helen’s magazines ordained a married couple ought to live in. That Sunday afternoon, under a blazing sun, he and Helen erupted into a screaming match over the broken strut on the stupid fucking trellis. It was around then that Synnott began seeing his marriage as something that he’d got into because it had seemed the orderly thing to do. It was what people did to make sense of their lives, and Helen had been the prettiest, brightest, bubbliest woman he knew. And when he began thinking that way, a whole section of his life – Helen and Michael too – began to seem as pointless as a tacky trellis on a garden wall.
Now it seemed to him that a small central flat, easy to keep tidy, was the kind of place a single man in his forties needed to create a sense of order. No room for clutter. In his kitchen, without moving more than three feet, he could reach the fridge to get three eggs, the beaker to break them into, the fork to mix them with, the pan to cook them on, then the fridge again for some cooked ham to toss into the pan at the last moment. He opened the vegetable drawer. The two remaining tomatoes had gone off.

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