Dark Times in the City

by Gene Kerrigan

  ‘Sir, you’ll have to, sir, please—’

  Waterman turned and shuffled down the corridor. In the open air he stared again at the figure of his wife in the back of the squad car.

  ‘Sir?’

  Waterman turned to the fat detective. When he spoke, he met the sergeant’s gaze and his voice was quiet, his tone lifeless. ‘What’s this fucking country coming to?’

  His eyes made it clear this was not so much a question as an accusation.

  After the inside of the car fogged up again, Danny Callaghan had the chamois ready and he took his time wiping the moisture from every inch of the windscreen. Then the side windows. He brought the window down and wiped the rear-view mirror. The black Hyundai was parked midway between two street lamps. This time of night, after one in the morning, most of the houses were dark. The street was deserted, only the occasional car passing through to disturb the stillness.

  Sleeping dogs.

  Maybe he should have let things be. Arranging to confront Frank Tucker might be reckless. The blue vans were probably a coincidence.

  Against that, there’d been that moment in Novak’s pub when Callaghan saw the killers coming in, and the infinite feeling of helplessness that had swept through him before it became apparent that he wasn’t the target.

  The alternative to confronting Tucker was perpetual fear.

  Callaghan stared again at Hannah’s house, across the street and two houses down. Big detached house, painted yellow, set back from the road. The only sign of life a light in the hallway.

  He sat still as a pair of headlights appeared in his mirror. As the car drew near Hannah’s house it slowed down. Hannah’s red Saab took a curving turn into the wide driveway, pulling up behind Leon’s Nissan Patrol. Leon got out of the passenger seat, leaned on the roof of the car and said something to Hannah, who was locking the driver’s door. Callaghan could hear her laugh from a hundred feet away. After they went inside, the hall light stayed on for just a few minutes, then the front bedroom lights came on. Someone closed the curtains. Callaghan couldn’t tell which of them it was. All went dark after a few minutes. Another quarter of an hour or so passed before Callaghan switched on the engine, listened to it hum a while, then drove away.

  Part Two

  Entrepreneurs

  Day Four

  Chapter 16

  After waiting almost an hour, Danny Callaghan stood up and crossed to the door of the interrogation room. He shook the handle until a uniformed garda came. The garda unlocked the door and told him to stop being a pain in the arse.

  ‘I want to know why I’m here.’

  ‘Because.’

  The garda pulled the door shut and locked it.

  Callaghan sat down at the scarred metal table. The room was bare, drab – whatever beige liquid they used to paint the walls, odds were that the sub-contractor had watered it down. After eight years inside, Callaghan had developed the patience necessary for coping with institutional timescales. You learn patience, or you grow yourself an ulcer.

  After another forty minutes Detective Sergeant Wyndham arrived, his round face puffy and unshaven. ‘Thanks for coming in.’

  Callaghan stood up. ‘Two of your flunkies pulled me out of bed this morning – it’s not like I had a choice.’

  ‘Won’t take long.’

  ‘I’ve wasted half the morning in this room.’

  Wyndham sat down on the other side of the table and motioned for Callaghan to return to his seat. ‘Look – I’ve had four hours’ sleep on a camp bed, so your troubles don’t impress me. Where were you last evening?’

  Callaghan took his time sitting down. Then he said, ‘What time?’

  ‘You tell me – whenever you finished work.’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘You finished work what time?’

  ‘What am I supposed to have done?’

  ‘You finished work what time?’

  Callaghan said nothing for a while, then he said, ‘Late – I had to pick up some people at the Citywest Hotel, bring them across the city.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘I wasn’t keeping track. Had something to eat, dropped in to my local, had a coffee, went for a drive.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Nowhere, just around. I like to drive – maybe half an hour, maybe more, I don’t know – then I went home, went to bed.’

  ‘Did you see Walter Bennett, talk to him at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He call you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You call him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘After you helped him out the other night, did he say anything about why it might have happened?’

  ‘I told you – we never spoke – I knew him briefly when I was inside, that’s all.’

  ‘You hear anything about what he’s been up to these days?’

  ‘Look, sergeant, it’s not like I’m hanging around street corners, swapping jokes with the neighbourhood wiseguys. I get up, go to work, go to bed, get up again – I hear nothing about anything. I got into trouble a long time ago, I was a kid. Then the other thing happened and I went to prison. I don’t steal, I don’t hurt people – that other stuff, it’s like it’s someone’s else’s history.’

  Wyndham gave in to a long yawn, his head back, the back of one hand to his mouth. He flexed his shoulders, then he said, ‘Later on, if we find out you knew something—’

  ‘What’s happened to Walter?’

  ‘If I find out you’ve been hiding something, if it turns out you and he had something going on—’ He leaned forward, his voice hard. ‘You never finished your sentence, sonny. You’re on parole, which means you step out of line and we make a court application and back you go – no charges, no trial, just the stroke of a pen – four more years behind bars.’

  ‘What’s happened to Walter?’

  Wyndham’s face softened. His sigh wasn’t all about tiredness. ‘The other night, when they tried to shoot him? The way things turned out, it would’ve been a mercy to the poor bastard if you’d let them do it.’

  Sergeant Wyndham left an Evening Herald behind when he went to take a leak. The front page headline screamed ‘Mob Boss Torture Killing’. The story said that Walter Bennett, a veteran gangster, was the latest victim of Dublin’s gangland feud. It also said his throat had been cut.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Sergeant Wyndham said when he came back.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’ He stood, holding the door open. ‘Off you go.’

  ‘“Mob boss torture killing” – it doesn’t make sense. Walter wasn’t anyone’s boss.’

  ‘There’s a whisper, so they guess the rest. If your business is selling papers, one guess is as good as another. Walter’s a mob boss today, and that sells papers. Tomorrow, maybe he’ll be an innocent bystander – whatever – it’ll sell more papers. It’s show business. Cops and robbers, like on the telly, but with real corpses. Now, if you’ll kindly toddle along, I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘You believe me? I’d nothing to do with anything?’

  ‘The warning stands – I catch you lying just a little bit, and you’ll do four more years without even the benefit of a trial.’

  *

  Heavier than it looks.

  ‘You’re doing fine, lads – take it easy.’

  Karl Prowse liked the way Lar Mackendrick didn’t leave everything to the foot soldiers. He wasn’t much help when it came to shifting things, but at least he turned up.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Robbie said. ‘My grip’s a bit—’ He used a knee to take the weight while he slid his fingers back a couple of inches along the steel pole.

  The beer barrel was set within a rectangular metal frame. Two steel poles fitted into pairs of parallel slots in the frame. Robbie and Karl held the poles at one end, two of Derek Roeper’s people held the other. Together, they had the barrel halfway towards the back of the white Ford Transit Connect.

  The van,
the back doors open, was backed up to the entrance of the lock-up.

  Robbie took a breath. ‘Okay.’

  When they got the barrel into the Ford, one of Roeper’s people went to work with a spanner and tightened the nuts that kept the metal frame immobile on the floor of the van.

  Robbie sat on the floor of the van, just in front of the beer barrel, while Karl drove and Lar Mackendrick sat up front. It took half an hour to get to the street in Santry where Karl was renting a house with his wife and two kids. The house had a garage attached. When they parked the Ford Transit inside the garage there was just enough space to open the driver’s door. As he climbed out, Karl looked back and saw Mackendrick leaning towards the barrel, giving it a gentle, affectionate tap.

  Chapter 17

  At the front desk of the police station Danny Callaghan asked a sergeant if he could get a lift home and the policeman just smiled. The sergeant gave him his wallet, his money, his mobile, his keys and his Swiss Army knife. Outside, Callaghan crossed the car park and turned right and a car horn beeped from across the road. Novak’s red Audi pulled away from the kerb, U-turned across the road and pulled up alongside Danny.

  ‘Get in,’ he said.

  Callaghan climbed into the car. ‘How the hell did you know I was here?’

  Novak glanced in the mirror and pulled away. ‘Kid named Oliver, he drinks in the pub – called me, said he saw the police take you away from the Hive this morning.’

  ‘They tell you what it’s about?’

  ‘They didn’t have to. When I heard about Walter, I knew that had to be it.’

  ‘So you told them to let me out or you’d – what? – stamp your foot and hold your breath till your face turned blue?’

  ‘I gave my fat friend Sergeant Wyndham a shout. Told him your solicitor was on her way to the station – they hate that – and he said not to bother, you’d be out by lunchtime. And here I am.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Wyndham’s heart wasn’t in it. If they thought you were involved, they’d have kept you for at least a couple of days.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Lunch – I’m doing an omelette, that sound good?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘You’ll sit and eat a mushroom omelette, and when it’s gone down you’ll belch and say that tasted lovely.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  It took about fifteen minutes to drive to Novak’s semi-detached in Glasnevin, close to the Botanic Gardens.

  ‘We’ve got the best garden in Dublin on our doorstep. Any time of year, Jane and me get a spare hour – nothing like it, letting the colours and the shapes and the scents get at your head. Nature’s detox.’

  In the kitchen, Novak was all business, giving a running commentary as he cooked. ‘What you don’t want to do, when you make an omelette, you don’t want to beat it to death. So you leave the whisk alone, you use a fork, right? You have the heat right up – get a pan like this, an omelette pan, otherwise it spreads all over the place and you’re making a pancake.’

  Quietly, Danny Callaghan said, ‘I don’t need cheering up. I’m okay.’

  Novak dropped the mushrooms into the pan, flipped over one edge of the omelette. ‘You’re such a whizz in the kitchen, you don’t need a cookery lesson?’

  ‘Since you picked me up, you’ve been non-stop yapping. I’m okay.’

  Novak nodded and concentrated on his cooking.

  Eight years.

  All that time ago, at the driving range, with Brendan Tucker beating up the kids, an impulse made Danny Callaghan shout at a bully and one thing led to another, and he went into a box for eight years.

  Quarter of my life.

  And now, again, he’d crossed the border into territory where it wasn’t possible to take the next breath for granted. At any moment, someone might point a gun at the back of his head and he’d die without an instant’s warning.

  The image of his life as a stunted thing, the greater part of it gone, closed down whole areas of Danny Callaghan’s mind. Permanently standing on the edge, forever expecting that fatal push, to imagine anything beyond the immediate tasks of the day seemed pointless.

  After a while, Callaghan said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m nervous, I get snappy.’

  ‘No problem, you’re fine.’

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, Callaghan eating the omelette, Novak with a ham sandwich.

  ‘Maybe now Walter’s dead, maybe that’s the end of whatever that was about. And once I get the Frank Tucker thing—’

  Novak said, ‘I rang Tucker’s place this morning. Like getting an audience with the Pope. I left a message with one of his toadies, they’re to ring back.’

  Danny said, ‘Thanks. That’s good.’

  ‘It’ll get sorted.’

  Danny nodded. ‘One way or the other.’

  Novak’s wife arrived as Callaghan was washing up.

  Jane was in her mid-fifties and a couple of inches taller than her husband. Blonde and slim, a briefcase in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Before marriage and raising a family, she’d worked with the probation service, advising ex-prisoners. Now she worked part-time for a citizens’ advice centre. She put down the briefcase and said, ‘He been poisoning you?’

  Callaghan grinned. ‘It was lovely, an omelette.’

  ‘I can do you one,’ Novak said.

  ‘Ate at the canteen.’ Jane turned to Novak. ‘Did you ask him?’

  ‘Ask him what?’

  ‘Christmas?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ Novak turned to Callaghan. ‘You’re coming for Christmas dinner, okay?’

  Jane adopted a withering tone. ‘You’re full of the social graces.’ To Callaghan she said, ‘We do a low-key Christmas. Jeanie’s coming home from London, Caroline and her boys are coming up from the country. Gordon Ramsay here will do his usual turkey dinner, I do the veg, and I’ll be highly offended if you don’t turn up.’

  Novak’s tone was mock outrage. ‘Gordon Gobshite? Not fit to wipe Delia Smith’s wooden spoon.’

  Callaghan smiled. Jane said, ‘No kidding, you’ve got to come. Your first Christmas on the outside – you shouldn’t spend it alone.’

  He hadn’t thought as far ahead as Christmas. It was – what? – two weeks, maybe less, something like that. ‘Thanks, both of you – but let’s see how things go, okay?’

  Jane said, ‘That’s a yes, then.’

  The clatter of the police helicopter woke Danny Callaghan. First time in a couple of weeks. Before that it was every night for a week. That was the pattern, on and off, since he came to live at the Hive. The local community groups kicked up a fuss, the police denied that they used helicopters to patrol working-class areas, things went on as before.

  Callaghan glanced at the clock. Just past midnight.

  The kotcha-ta kotcha-ta of the engine wasn’t just loud, it sounded like something was loose inside and at any moment the whole thing might break apart and come down from the sky like a falling truck. Standing at the window, Callaghan looked up to where the helicopter was hovering, red light steady at the tail and a brighter white light flashing somewhere underneath. It would stay for a while, maybe five minutes, low enough to shake the windows and get the dogs barking, long enough to wake all but the heaviest sleepers, then it would piss off to some other estate.

  Callaghan’s father had had a thing about helicopters. When he was a kid, helicopters were rare in Ireland – wondrous machines that attracted great excitement on the rare occasions they made an appearance. ‘Even now,’ he’d told Callaghan, ‘any time I hear a helicopter I automatically look up, like it’s some exotic sight. Must have been like that for people who grew up when cars were a novelty – they heard a car, they rushed to the window.’

  When his father died, Callaghan got two days’ compassionate parole. Finding himself wrapped up in the rituals of the funeral, it was a strangely unemotional time. His father had never wavered in his love, but had never been able to conceal his shame at his son’s crime.
He’d visited the prison, but infrequently, his unease obvious. A week or two after the funeral, back in prison, reading a newspaper, Callaghan saw a piece about how helicopters had become the new definers of super-wealth. Newly prosperous Ireland had acquired more private helicopters than any other country. He made a mental note to mention that to his father, and seconds later he was bent over, the newspaper crumpled, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  A searchlight came on near the cockpit of the police helicopter, moving erratically for a moment, then it found its target, the group of kids drinking around the fire on the green in front of the Hive. Danny saw a couple of the kids raise their cans in a toast to the pilot, another kid gave the helicopter the finger. One kid put down his can and stood up, arms stretched out, and began to dance, a cross between Travolta and a drunken sailor. Danny recognised Oliver. The dance in the spotlight continued for a minute, then Oliver gave the helicopter a cheery wave and sat down. The kids ignored the clattering noise and after a while the spotlight went out and the helicopter moved away.

  Day Five

  Chapter 18

  When Danny Callaghan’s black Hyundai came to a stop, Karl Prowse was thirty feet behind. He was driving slowly enough to be able to immediately and smoothly park his Toledo without any sudden swerves. Karl watched the interfering bastard get out of the car and walk into the driveway of a large detached house.

  ‘You come back here, you’ll get your pimply arse kicked.’

  We’ll see who gets his arse kicked, smart bastard.

  The call from Lar Mackendrick had ruined a potentially good Saturday evening with an old girlfriend. Lar’s surveillance people were all tied up – could Karl handle the smart bastard for a couple of hours?

  Karl watched as Callaghan pressed the bell and a woman with short dark hair opened the door and greeted him with a hug. She ushered him in.