The Midnight Choir (7 page)

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Authors: Gene Kerrigan

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

BOOK: The Midnight Choir
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He made toast and sat in front of the television and flicked from channel to channel as he ate. He found an American sitcom, something about a man and a woman who shared a flat. He’d seen it before but he’d forgotten what it was about. The man was gay, maybe, or he and the woman had been lovers in the past and now they had to share the flat for some reason or other. The audience laughed every five seconds or so. After a while Synnott realised that the reason he was frowning at the screen wasn’t just that he didn’t think it was funny but that he didn’t see how anyone could think it was. He reached for the remote and found BBC’s
Newsnight
. It was doing something on a sudden renewal of an old conflict between two factions in some Middle Eastern country. Synnott watched for a minute or two before he decided he didn’t need to have an opinion on whatever the trouble was. He found a channel with a soccer match. He didn’t recognise any of the players. They were Italian teams and he knew nothing about them. He watched for a while and found himself willing on the side in yellow.
Synnott felt his head twitch and his eyes opened and he realised he had dozed off for a moment. He knew that if he continued sitting there he’d fall asleep and wake in the middle of the night with the television on and an ache in his neck. The plate with the remnants of the scrambled egg was on the floor at his feet. The morning would be time enough to deal with that. He reached again for the remote and a minute later he was undressing in his bedroom.
*
Dixie said to him, ‘It’s a dream, Owen. I know it’s a dream.’ He had Christopher sitting on his knee, bouncing him gently, and Christopher was giggling.
Owen held the son he’d never seen, smiling, shaking his head. ‘Nothing to worry about, love, I know people.’
Dixie lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling of the cell, unsure if she was awake or asleep.
Going to be a long night.
She got out of bed and sat at the metal table, rubbing her upper arms for warmth. The only light came from a lamp that was out beyond the window high up on the cell wall. She wrapped her arms around herself and lowered her head until her forehead was touching the table and the chill of the cold surface seeped through, freezing her thoughts.
THURSDAY
7
Joshua Boyce was still fifty feet away when he heard the pounding music coming from his car. One of the stations where the style was rap and the morning DJ’s chatter was peppered with
Yo! Bro!
and
Ma Maaan!
in an accent that swung wildly between Los Angeles and Mount Merrion.
The car was parked in the street next to his daughter’s school and Joshua had just taken eight-year-old Ciara as far as the school’s inner gate. His son, recently turned eighteen, was taking a lift with Boyce into town, where he worked as a trainee chef in an Italian restaurant.
Slumped in the front passenger seat, Peter had the window rolled down and was holding a cigarette between middle and ring finger. Joshua thought he probably got that from watching some MTV pimp showing the cameras around his crib.
Jesus. When I was that age, was I half as bloody obnoxious?
Joshua got behind the wheel and turned off the radio. He sat there a moment. Then he said, ‘Come on.’ He waited, staring ahead while Peter took a long drag from the cigarette. Peter pulled out the ashtray and made a big deal of tapping the butt. When he’d finished he folded his arms and looked out the side window, as though he could see something terribly interesting somewhere in the distance. A thread of smoke danced up from the crushed butt. As he moved the car away from the kerb, Joshua let the window down and threw the butt away.
He dropped Peter near the Custom House. The boy got out of the car and walked away without a word. Joshua continued on across the river and parked on the third floor of the Stephen’s Green Centre and walked down two floors. He went into TK Maxx, walked about fifty feet into the shop, then turned back. There was no one of the right type between him and the entrance, so the odds were that no one had followed him in. He went up one floor on the escalator, switched to the descending elevator and went down to the ground floor. Everything still seemed OK. He went out a side door, then hurried around to the top of Grafton Street, crossed the road and got a taxi.
GALWAY
The manager came into the public office of McCreary Street garda station and said he wanted to speak to one of the policemen who’d got the nutcase down off the roof of his pub yesterday.
‘We found a wallet,’ he said, when Joe Mills arrived down.
‘Congratulations,’ Mills said.
‘In the jacks, when we were cleaning out this morning.’
‘And?’
The manager held up a black leather wallet and opened it. There was a yellow identity card tucked into one side. Staring out through the clear plastic was the dour and unsmiling face of the nutcase.
The manager said, ‘It says his name is Wayne Kemp.’
DUBLIN
Each morning the routine was the same. The jeweller arrived at a minute or two to 10 a.m. and opened up. Each morning his assistant was waiting for him, leaning against the shuttered shopfront. The assistant, a young guy with silly hair, arrived by bus. The jeweller arrived on foot from the coffee shop a few doors down. He always carried his briefcase and a folded newspaper. Within a minute or two past ten, the lights went on, the steel shutters went up. Business was slow between ten o’clock and noon and somewhat better between noon and one o’clock. Joshua Boyce watched the shop just between the hours of ten and one. He didn’t care what happened after that.
In the four weeks he’d been keeping watch no customer arrived before ten-fifteen, and on all but two occasions none before ten-thirty-five.
In the long-gone days when Kellsboro had been a centre of commercial and social activity for residents of the surrounding estates, there’d been two cinemas, three cafés and four excellent pubs. Now, with people travelling into Dublin city centre or out to the shopping malls, Kellsboro had the air of a run-down village. The stretch of shops on the south end of the main Kellsboro road was dilapidated, four of the fifteen shops gone out of business, their boarded-up fronts plastered with posters. Further down the street a row of buildings was scheduled for demolition, to be replaced by dog-box apartments with a Spar supermarket on the ground floor.
Joshua Boyce sat behind the net-curtained window of a flat diagonally across the road from the jeweller’s shop, which he’d rented from an agency three months earlier. The flat had worn carpets and cheap furniture; nothing in it belonged to Boyce. The monthly rent was paid up front through a standing order from a false-name account. When the most recent payment had gone through, six days earlier, Boyce had closed the account. After the robbery, the police might or might not check out the buildings overlooking the shop, but Boyce always wore gloves when he came here, so it wouldn’t matter.
He had a foolscap pad on his knee. There wasn’t much to take note of, but he had a four-week daily record of anything that mattered. Timetables of openings, regular deliveries, rubbish-bin pick-up, daily post. Eleven-fifteen, every day, the jeweller’s assistant fetched a take-out from the nearby coffee shop. The jeweller’s shop was less than a mile from Macken Road garda station, but the only police activity around the area consisted of a couple of beat coppers plodding past the row of shops, never before noon and never after twenty past twelve.
Twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays, always around eleven-forty, a Brinks van collected money from a building-society branch office two doors down from the jewellery shop. A gobshite in a security guard’s uniform stood at the door of the building society. Young man, lanky, with a big chin and a shaven head. He was already there each day when Boyce arrived and he was there when Boyce left. His job seemed to be to stand in the doorway all day, occasionally scratching his arse but mostly just looking bored. Bugger-all use to anyone if there was a serious attempt at robbery, but his presence would keep the insurance people happy.
After four weeks watching the jewellery shop, Boyce planned to take it shortly after it opened the next day. He’d leave the stolen getaway car in the small car park off to the side of a twenty-four-hour shop about a hundred yards up the street. He reckoned he’d have fifteen minutes to do the job safely without interference.
There couldn’t be a guarantee, but Boyce had put enough work into the job to give him a very good chance of getting in and out without any trouble, and to finish up with enough jewellery to choke a whale.
Boyce checked his watch. It was pushing noon. Another hour, and that was that. Seeing as this was his last day watching the shop, and as the robbery would be long over well before noon, there was really nothing to be gained by staying until one o’clock. But Joshua Boyce liked to do things right. He watched a pair of cops walk past at ten minutes past noon, and he waited another fifty minutes. Then he had one last look around the flat, made sure that he was leaving nothing behind, and left it for the last time.
He walked for ten minutes, then got a taxi across the city to the Northside. He bought a sandwich in a deli near the small garage he owned. He spent a while at the garage, chatting with the two mechanics he employed. Between the three of them, they made a good living and the garage also served as a cover for the kind of work from which Boyce couldn’t declare an income.
He left the garage at two-twenty-five and after a short walk he was standing outside the school in plenty of time to collect Ciara.
8
It was called preparing a file for the Director of Public Prosecutions. Harry Synnott had been working on the task for a couple of hours since lunchtime. At first the work involved nothing more than scribbling on a notepad, occasionally scratching out a thought, adding to the list or subtracting. He read his own notes three times, and he read the statement that Rose Cheney had already typed up from her notes.
The file would have to convince a lawyer from the DPP’s office that Max Hapgood Junior had raped Teresa Hunt. Then it had to convince the lawyer that the evidence was strong enough to persuade a jury of Max’s peers to send him to jail for it.
Synnott began typing his own statement, using just the index finger of each hand. The fact that this was slow had never bothered him. He could type as fast as he could think of what he needed to write. It would take him a couple of days’ writing and revising to get his own statement right.
The DPP’s office wasn’t into idealism. It was no use knowing that someone did something. Prosecute everyone who the police believed had committed a crime and the courts would seize up within a month. Worse than that, the state would look inept when juries threw out cases they couldn’t be sure of, or when judges kicked out evidence without which the case was threadbare.
There would be no case against Max Hapgood Jr without the victim’s own statement and the remarks that Synnott had winkled out of the young man. But the element that would make the file a runner would have to be Synnott’s own account of his inquiries.
Nail down the
actus reus
, the performance of the criminal act, then stitch in the
mens rea
, showing that the accused was aware the act was wrong
.
Synnott was six paragraphs into the statement when he got a phone call. He glanced at the caller ID and recognised the number of his old station, Turner’s Lane. The voice was young and female and unfamiliar. She wouldn’t give her name. ‘This may be none of my business, but I think you should know.’ Synnott waited. ‘There’s a woman who’s been trying to get in touch, needs to speak to you. Dixie Peyton? She’s in Mountjoy.’
*
They brought Dixie Peyton to a small room in Mountjoy’s administration block to meet Harry Synnott. She looked like she hadn’t seen sunshine for a few months, and if she’d tried sleeping recently it hadn’t taken. No make-up, her eyes sunken, her cheeks thin. She moved to the front of the desk across from Synnott and let the chair catch her as she slumped.
‘I’ve been calling you for two days.’
‘I transferred out of Turner’s Lane. Just heard an hour ago that you were looking for me.’
She examined him like she knew he was lying. Then she looked down at the desk.
‘Can you get me out of here?’
There were lines around her eyes that Harry Synnott didn’t remember being there.
‘Come on, Dixie, this is not shoplifting. A syringe full of blood, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Whatever it takes, I have to get out. Christopher. My kid.’
‘The procedure—’
‘I can give you something.’
‘Not for this, Dixie. Needles and blood, that’s serious stuff.’
‘It wasn’t blood, it was ketchup.’
‘It was a needle. They tell me you scared the shit out of a couple of tourists. You know what that’s like.’
Mug a tourist and if you came up in front of the wrong judge you’d get a far longer sentence that you’d get for the same crime against a native. Judicial sentencing policy wasn’t supposed to give priority to protecting the tourist industry, but some judges didn’t see it that way.

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