The Rage (22 page)

‘Take your pick,’ he said, the briefcase open on the floor of the little kitchen, three guns showing on the table – two automatics and a revolver.

‘Whichever,’ Vincent said. ‘Which one’s the best?’

‘It depends on what you want to do with it. Say you’re walking in somewhere, you want everyone to shit themselves, so no one feels like playing hero – I’d take the Taurus.’ He picked up the revolver, passed it to Vincent. ‘Forty-four calibre – it’s got Clint Eastwood all over it.’

‘Heavy, though.’

‘The Chiefs Special – that one’s light. Seven rounds, nine mil. Some American cops use them. Reliable. But, if it was me, I’d use the Bernardelli. It’s a combat pistol, nine mil, sixteen rounds. It’ll do just about any job.’

He passed the gun to Vincent, who hefted it, then held it level with his eye and took aim at an imaginary target. ‘Feels OK.’ He nodded. ‘I don’t need the Eastwood, too showy. The cop gun – no, I’ll need more than seven bullets. I’ll take this one.’

Liam put the Taurus and the Chiefs Special back in the briefcase. He took out two magazines for the Bernardelli. ‘Enough there, unless you’re planning to invade a country.’

‘Thanks – how much did this cost you?’

‘Forget it.’

Vincent nodded his thanks.

‘You really need to do this?’ Liam asked.

Vincent didn’t say anything.

‘It’s not my style, Vincent – otherwise, you know, I’d—’

Vincent said, ‘It’s me has got to do it.’

Vincent was filling the kettle when Liam said, ‘You any idea who ratted us out?’

Vincent spooned Maxwell House into a couple of mugs. He did it slowly, as though part of him was off somewhere else. Liam began to wonder if Vincent had heard the question. Standing at the kitchen counter, looking out into the back garden, Vincent said, ‘I know who’s top of the list.’

Bob Tidey rang the bell for Apartment 1, ground floor, in the Swords apartment block, and there was someone home. ‘Of course, Garda, no bother.’ He was a small, neat septuagenarian and he was delighted to cooperate with the police. The key didn’t fit his lock.

Ninety minutes later, on the third floor, Apartment 327, there was no one home, and after Cheney slid the key into the lock there was a click and they were in.

Cheney said, ‘
Yes
.’

‘Gotcha.’ Tidey immediately pulled the door shut.

Fifteen minutes later, a uniform arrived from Swords Garda Station. By then, Tidey had borrowed a kitchen chair from the nice old man in Apartment 1 and had installed it outside 327.

‘Got something to read?’ Tidey asked. The uniform smiled, took an iPod Nano from his breast pocket and settled down on the kitchen chair.

It took two hours to get a search warrant.

Outside Vincent Naylor’s hotel-room door, two or three young women were laughing as they passed down the corridor. One of them said, ‘Oh my God,’ over and over until their voices faded in the distance. Vincent was sitting at a dressing table, a sheet of Westbury Hotel stationery in front of him. His handwriting had always been neat, but he took special care writing his list. It had four names.

He sat there for a long while, staring at the sheet of paper, picturing faces – enjoying the anticipation.

‘Socks,’ Bob Tidey said. ‘Dark blue, three pairs. And three pairs of dark blue Ralph Lauren boxer shorts.’ It was the first sign of personal possessions in Emmet Sweetman’s very bare love nest. The apartment was small. Two bedrooms and a living room and a tiny kitchen. It was bare and characterless. No food in the kitchen cabinets or the fridge, no washing-up liquid, no newspapers or magazines in the living room, no clothes thrown casually anywhere. A duvet pulled more or less straight on the bed suggested a minimal attempt at tidying.

A randomly used apartment known to few others would be an ideal place to stash any business material that required an extra layer of security. Tidey had hoped for a briefcase, a file, some papers – anything that might connect with Sweetman’s murder. It was too much to expect, and he wouldn’t say it to Cheney, but his hope was for something like a threatening letter – the kind of thing that murderers are sometimes thick enough to do.

Cheney opened a closet and found four suits of varying colours. ‘Nice,’ she said. She checked the labels. ‘Same as his closet at home – all Ralph Lauren. If this guy was as loyal to his wife as he was to Ralph, maybe he wouldn’t be pushing up daisies.’

‘You tending towards the wronged husband theory?’ Tidey said.

‘Nah – I’m just partial to a bit of gossip.’

Tidey reached into the back of a drawer – nothing there. He pulled back the lining paper and checked underneath. He did the same with the other three drawers – all of them empty. He felt under the bottom of each drawer to check if there was anything taped there. Nothing.

‘At last,’ Rose Cheney said, ‘a sign of life.’ She had a shallow drawer open in the bedside table and she was holding up an opened box of condoms. ‘The passion kit.’ She threw the condoms on the bed, then a sleep mask, a blue bottle of massage oil and some wispy scarves. ‘A bit skimpy, for a passion kit.’

‘Enough to get a lad through a midlife crisis.’

‘You speak from experience?’

When Tidey didn’t answer, Cheney said, ‘Oops. Sore point? Sorry.’

Tidey smiled. ‘No problem. I’m the one brought it up. But, yeah, sore point.’

Cheney put the passion kit back in the drawer and Tidey tilted the mattress while she checked underneath. Nothing.

Cheney went into the other bedroom, Tidey went into the bathroom. A bottle of shower gel was half empty, the Head & Shoulders shampoo lying on its side, the cap open. There was a towel on the floor, in a corner, another hanging untidily from a rail. Tidey touched them both. Dry.

He joined Cheney in the second bedroom. She was opening and closing drawers. ‘Empty, empty, empty.’ The only sign that anyone had used the bedroom recently was a jacket casually thrown on the bed.

‘You checked the pockets?’

‘I like to keep the most promising for last.’

She checked a tall, narrow closet. Completely empty. Then she turned to the jacket. ‘Bet there’ll be a thick envelope full of documents in the inside pocket,’ Cheney said.

Tidey shook his head. ‘A diary in the side pocket.’

When Cheney lifted the jacket there was a mobile phone lying underneath.

It took forty-five minutes to get the mobile phone to Crime and Security, and another two hours for them to secure the call records from the mobile carrier and email a preliminary report to Castlepoint Garda Station. Sitting in the incident room, Bob Tidey gave a low whistle. ‘Some more gossip for you.’

Rose Cheney said, ‘Make my day.’

The phone was a pay-as-you-go, the report said. It had been activated eight months ago and had never been used to call Sweetman’s home or office. Sweetman appeared to have it solely for his off-the-books social activities. Apart from Orla McGettigan, the phone log showed just four other numbers, all mobiles. Crime and Security had connected the numbers to three named women, two of whom were married. The third woman was an analyst in the loans department of Sweetman’s bank.

‘Could be the analyst was part of his frauds,’ Cheney said. ‘Hogg wants the numbers – he’ll have people knocking on doors first thing in the morning.’

Tidey said, ‘I want to deal with that last number myself.’

Cheney glanced at the report. ‘Cornelius Wintour – sounds like a bookkeeper who still uses ledgers and quills.’

‘Not quite.’

‘It would help on the gossip front if he’s young and pretty and Sweetman liked to vary his diet.’

Tidey smiled. ‘It’s a long time since Connie Wintour was young, and he’s never been pretty. He’s a solicitor, exclusively criminal cases. According to the Crime and Security report, Sweetman made or received calls from Connie several times a week, including two calls he exchanged with Connie on the day he was murdered.’ Tidey stood up, took out his cigarettes.

Cheney said, ‘When you’re facing criminal charges you spend a lot of time talking to lawyers.’

‘Sweetman had a firm of solicitors fronting for him. The kind of clients Connie usually handles – they don’t use banking scams and property deals to steal money, they use balaclavas and guns. Connie could be the link between the murders.’ Tidey put an unlit cigarette between his lips. ‘Now, if I don’t go outside and light this thing I’m going to start kicking lumps out of the wall. Do me a favour?’

‘As long as it doesn’t involve your midlife crisis.’

‘Get onto the DPP’s office. We had a suspect in the Oliver Snead killing, a junkie named Gerry FitzGerald – Zippo to his friends. He’s dead now. Get them to look up Zippo’s file, see if Connie Wintour ever represented him. If he did, we just might have a connection between the two killings.’

Tidey made himself a coffee. He took it to the back exit of the Garda station and lit his cigarette. He took out his mobile and rang Holly’s number. When the voicemail invited him to leave a message he clicked off.

When he finished the cigarette, Tidey lit a second Rothmans. He was halfway through it when Rose Cheney came out the back exit. ‘Two things – the DPP’s office say Connie Wintour never represented this Gerry FitzGerald guy.’ She started moving past Tidey, towards the car park. ‘And, two, Hogg just called. There’s been another killing – possibly related. A couple of minutes’ drive from here.’ Tidey flicked away his cigarette and followed her.

At the wheel of her Hyundai, Cheney said, ‘He’s already at the scene, with the uniforms – the call was red-flagged to Hogg. He says the victim’s some kind of property developer, his name came up in the Emmet Sweetman inquiry – the two of them had a business connection. And now, someone’s blown his head off.’

Nosing out onto the street, Cheney cut off a blue van, turned left and leaned on the pedal.

Vincent Naylor picked up the newspaper from the floor. There was a tiny piece at the bottom of an inside page about the funeral plans for the ‘North Strand shoot-out robbers’. The lazy bastards don’t care what they write – there was no shoot-out, Noel was unarmed when the cops shot him. The piece said Noel Naylor was being cremated at Glasnevin and Kevin Broe was being buried in Balgriffin. It said that police had contacted Naylor’s father, who was home from Scotland to organise the funeral. They were still hoping to make contact with the dead man’s brother.

Yeah, right
.

Vincent had been sitting by the window for a couple of hours. Nothing to see outside except the back of another building. He’d read the piece half a dozen times. Every now and then he put the newspaper down on the floor, and in a while he picked it up and looked at it again. Before this happened, Noel had never had his name in the papers. Now—

One paper had some shit about ‘the Naylor Gang’, and how it had ‘terrorised large areas of Northside Dublin’. Another had a photograph of Noel, a bit blurry – must have been taken on someone’s phone. Some cheap fuck, some so-called friend, must have sold it to a nosy reporter. It showed Noel with a big grin on his face, his mouth open, his hair messy, maybe at a party. Vincent had read shit about himself, about how he had just recently been released from jail after being sentenced for ‘a vicious and unprovoked assault on an innocent young man’. And one piece of crap described Noel as ‘a notorious thug and a leading figure in Dublin’s drug-drenched gangland’.

Noel didn’t fuck with drugs. Didn’t take them, didn’t sell them. Noel always said you get into that game and you’re playing chicken with a bunch of psychos. Noel wasn’t a leading figure in anything. Noel robbed.

They even brought Da into it. Some thick fuck of a cop was quoted about how the old man had been done for violent behaviour in Aberdeen – sounded like he’d clocked a barman at closing time. Now he’s in the papers as the head of a ‘criminal family’. Almost made Vincent feel sorry for the prick.

Vincent let the paper fall to the floor again. It was down there with several newspapers, collected over the past couple of days. The first reports of the shooting and the robbery, the piece from the
Daily Record
about the bastard from the ERU, explaining why it was OK to shoot Noel and Kevin. Strangest thing of all was reading the tiny piece that mentioned the plans for Noel’s funeral. It was unreal. All that decency, all the fun and the clever stuff – the little things that made him special – all melted to nothing. It was over, Noel was all he’d ever be, and that wasn’t enough. He deserved a whole life. Not this broken-off part of a life.

Vincent stared out the window, focused on some spot in midair between here and the back of the building across the way.

After a long while, he looked at his watch. Almost time to get ready.

One of the three uniforms was pale and blinking a lot. He shook his head when he saw Rose Cheney and said, ‘I don’t think you should get too close.’ The corpse was about twenty yards away, in a seated position, leaning back against a wall. What was left of him.

Cheney waved a thumb at Bob Tidey and asked the uniform, ‘Do you think he might manage to keep his lunch down?’

‘I just meant, I didn’t mean—’