Dark Times in the City

by Gene Kerrigan

  A sergeant from Coolock gave details of an incident in which four shots had been fired into the living room of a house. ‘The woman of the house came close to being clipped – says she knows no reason why the house might have been targeted. Her husband works for a bookie, so it could be some kind of extortion racket, though he says not. There’s another family, same name, two roads away, the older son isn’t long out of Mountjoy, two years on a drug charge. It might be that he stepped on someone’s toes and they shot at the wrong house.’

  An inspector from Clondalkin gave details of the beating of a young man, four nights back. ‘He’s one of Tommy Farr’s enforcers – what we hear is Tommy’s semi-retired, living in Spain for the past few weeks. And now that this kid hasn’t got Tommy to hide behind he ended up being stomped on by some people who figure they owe him a thumping.’

  ‘My heart bleeds for him’, Assistant Commissioner O’Keefe said. ‘The Glencara killing a few nights back, Walter Bennett – who’s got that?’

  To Bob Tidey’s left, a garda said, ‘Me, sir,’ and identified himself as Detective Sergeant Michael Wyndham. He rattled off the known facts. ‘I got word yesterday, sir, from Gravesend Street station, a member there tells me he recruited Bennett as a confidential informant some weeks ago. Might be related to that. Bennett had a record – burglary, car theft and the like – nothing you’d expect to get him killed. We’re still exploring the possibility of a gang connection. The manner of the killing – it was particularly vicious – suggests a personal motive.’

  O’Keefe nodded his thanks. ‘As we see, although the media is drooling at the thought of all-out gang war, these killings seem isolated. All of them can be explained in terms of local feuds. However, in this kind of situation the media has great fun roasting the Minister for Justice. And over the past few days the Minister has –’ O’Keefe paused ‘– expressed his concern. As a result, the Garda Commissioner will be announcing the setting up of Operation Sledge Hammer—’

  O’Keefe smiled as a low-key chuckle rippled around the table.

  ‘– To which the Minister, as part of his War on Crime, has pledged his full support. Increased overtime has been authorised. Rapid-response units have already stepped up activities within the areas of the city where the most serious of these offences have occurred.’

  O’Keefe looked down at his clipboard. ‘Now, this latest killing, at the Hive last evening. That has all the hallmarks – Bob?’

  Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey looked up. ‘I should be out there now, supervising the searches, not—’

  O’Keefe didn’t look up when he spoke. ‘Details, Bob.’

  Tidey nodded. ‘Oliver Snead, aged—’

  ‘Name, Bob, and station. For members who don’t know you.’

  Tidey held back a moment, as though he was waiting for his blood pressure to stabilise. ‘Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey, Cavendish Avenue. This kid’s named Oliver Snead, aged 19, both parents are dead, he lived with his grandfather. He had no record. He was shot dead last night, on the green in front of the Hive. End of story.’

  O’Keefe stared. ‘And that’s it?’

  Bob Tidey said, ‘More or less. We know why, we don’t know who, and I doubt if we’ll catch them.’

  O’Keefe kept his voice steady. ‘Perhaps you’d share what details you have with us, Bob?’

  ‘He owed them money. He couldn’t pay. They shot him.’

  ‘Witnesses?’

  ‘Several.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Deaf, dumb and blind.’

  ‘Forensics?’

  ‘They used a gun.’

  O’Keefe made a face. ‘Bob, please.’

  ‘Large-calibre automatic. We already found two of the shells, I expect the gun went straight to the bottom of the Liffey. Two shots in the chest, third one in the head.’

  ‘Any known connection with any of the other incidents?’

  ‘Here’s what we know. Three months ago, a patrol pulled over a car on Oscar Traynor Road. About ten in the evening – no particular reason, except there were two young fellas inside. The passenger did a runner, the driver was arrested. There was an amount of heroin in the pocket of the passenger door – the driver said he knew nothing about it, claimed he didn’t know the passenger’s name, said he was just a fella he gave a lift to. Lying, of course.’

  ‘How much heroin?’

  ‘Couple of grand, street value. The passenger was Oliver Snead. Seems young Oliver was a user, ran up a bill with his suppliers. They offered him a way to work it off, making heroin deliveries to retailers around the Coolock area.’ Tidey glanced up. ‘We got all this from the kid’s grandfather. I know him – James Snead.’

  O’Keefe’s double nod said get on with it.

  ‘When Oliver lost the heroin package he was told he had a month to come up with three grand. When that didn’t work they put the arm on the grandfather – the most he could put together was fifteen hundred. They took it, and last night they killed the boy.’

  ‘Who are the witnesses?’

  ‘Some of the kid’s mates were there – apparently they had a regular cider party – and we talked to them. The gunmen weren’t masked. But no one’s saying anything.’

  ‘The grandfather?’

  ‘He says if we find the man who threatened him he’ll identify him, and give evidence.’

  ‘If he’d had the guts to come to us in the first place—’ O’Keefe shook his head. ‘The message we need to get out to these people – and this applies in most of the cases we’re dealing with this morning – is that we can’t do this alone, we need them to stand up to the thugs. And we’ll back them all the way if they do that.’

  Bob Tidey leaned forward towards the Assistant Commissioner. ‘We’re among friends here, sir – no media, no need to throw shapes. These people—’

  ‘If the grandfather had come to us—’

  ‘—We might have pulled in the bastard who threatened him and after a couple of days Oliver and James Snead would have been dead. Standing up to the thugs – it’s a hard line to sell. Because these people live with the thugs. The thugs know where they work, where they shop, where they drink and where their kids go to school. And if I lived in that fear factory I wouldn’t talk to us either.’

  ‘Bob—’

  ‘This shit has been building up for thirty years and we left them to stew in it. We patrol some areas of this city like we’re dealing with Fallujah. People get murdered there – for a long time we could live with that. The way a lot of people see it, the ghettoes aren’t a problem, they’re a solution – containable units to isolate the people who don’t matter.’

  O’Keefe said, ‘That’s not the way it is today.’

  ‘Really? If things are different now it’s because the financial-centre crowd and the models and the lawyers and the journalists are powdering their noses. And the gangs that supply their jollies are swaggering around on the stylish side of town and the Minister is worried.’ He paused to lower his voice. ‘He wants us to go into the estates and break up the gangs, and we want people like Oliver Snead’s grandfather to stand up to the thugs and do the job we never did.’

  In the silence that followed, Assistant Commissioner O’Keefe stared at the detective sergeant. In the fifteen years since he’d worked with Bob Tidey, as a fledgling detective, O’Keefe had taken the high road to senior office. All that time, Tidey had continued rummaging in the city’s wastelands, where the villains called the shots and the bodies were found.

  O’Keefe said, ‘All very fine, Bob. But we are where we are – however we got here – and what we need to be is constructive, and I don’t see how this helps.’

  Tidey took a long breath. His voice was quiet. ‘It doesn’t help – it’s just the way it is. And what we’re doing this morning, it has nothing to do with the way it is for these people. It’s about the way it is for us. Our image problem. It’s about the Minister and the Commissioner, and it’s about looking like we’re on top of things.’r />
  One of the chief superintendents to O’Keefe’s right leaned forward. ‘Detective Sergeant Tidey, the lack of moral fibre among these people is one thing – but when experienced police officers pander to spineless behaviour we’re lowering ourselves to their level. This—’ and the point of his rigid index finger tapped the table in front of him ‘—is about taking responsibility.’

  Bob Tidey nodded. Then he sat up straight and folded his arms. His tone was conversational. ‘Would you like a sausage to go with that waffle?’

  The chief superintendent stared, as though mentally photographing Tidey.

  Colin O’Keefe raised a warning hand. ‘Bob—’

  Tidey said, ‘No offence, sir, but I’ve got an active investigation. So, if it’s all right?’ He stood up.

  Colin O’Keefe nodded.

  Chapter 23

  Way out on the green, eight uniformed policemen were down on all fours, in a line, inching forward, doing a fingertip search of the grass around the murder scene. Danny Callaghan stood at the window of his third-floor flat, cup of coffee in hand. The cops were wrapped in bulky pants and thick winter jackets, but that still had to be miserable work on a misty December morning. An hour back he’d watched a hearse make its way onto the green area. They were preparing to remove Oliver’s body.

  ‘It’s wrong, it’s not fair,’ was all Oliver’s grandfather said when Callaghan went up to the fifth floor last night and knocked on his door. A couple of neighbours were inside, women, sitting silently with the grandfather. One of them nodded at Callaghan, the other whispered that there was a pot of fresh tea. Callaghan shook his head.

  He bent down in front of the grandfather. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ he said. It was limp, but sometimes the routine phrases said it best.

  The grandfather nodded, as though he valued the words.

  ‘He was a good kid,’ Callaghan said.

  ‘It isn’t fair.’

  Callaghan didn’t stay long.

  Now, down in front of the Hive, a couple of uniformed gardai hurried across the green as an unmarked black Volvo came to a halt. A tall uniformed officer climbed out of the back seat and went to meet them.

  Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey turned in time to see Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe arrive.

  Tidey sighed. ‘Wonderful. That’s all we need.’ He waited while O’Keefe, accompanied by the two uniforms who’d gone to greet him, made his way across the green.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Bob.’

  O’Keefe’s expression suggested that he was mending fences. ‘In case you’re worried, I’m not here to add pressure. I just wanted to take a look at the scene, if that’s okay.’

  ‘I’m not worried.’

  O’Keefe took Tidey by the elbow and moved him some distance away from the others. ‘Are you okay, Bob?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘That’s not the impression—’

  ‘Okay, I’m not fine. I’m tired.’

  ‘It gets to us all, from time to time.’

  ‘I’m tired of this crap, yeah, but I’m more tired of the ignorant bullshit. For Christ’s sake – moral fibre – you’ve got idiots who want me to pressure Oliver’s friends to make themselves the next target – Jesus, Colin, where do you get these gobshites from?’

  ‘He’s a good administrator, one of the best.’

  Tidey gave a dismissive grunt. ‘This kind of thing, it’s not like some evil spirit descended on the city. We sow, we reap. Chicago in the 1920s, London in the 1960s, Moscow in the 1990s – when things change, and people have money that they didn’t use to have, they find new ways to spend it. Other people find new ways to take it. Supply and demand, market forces.’

  O’Keefe said, ‘Not that it matters, but I agree with most of what you said this morning. About the Minister and the Commissioner and about being seen to do something.’ His voice softened. ‘But that’s the real world, too, every bit as real as this shit, and it has to be handled.’

  Tidey was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘A generation ago, it was booze and grass for the relaxing classes, and heroin in the ghettoes. The smack killed a lot of kids – overdosing, dirty needles and HIV – but that was okay. We left them to it. Then the middle classes got a major taste for cocaine, which means there’re market opportunities for any kid fucked-up enough to risk a bullet in the head.’

  ‘The Minister—’

  ‘Ghetto entrepreneurs. Look around you, Colin – we’re not the island of saints and scholars any more, we’re the nation of entrepreneurs. Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, including the psychos who run the drug business. They understand the importance of market share. They can’t use the courts to enforce their mergers and acquisitions, so they use guns.’ Bob Tidey kept his voice low and even. ‘I’ve known James Snead, Oliver’s grandfather, for a long time.’

  ‘Did he have a record?’

  Tidey shook his head. ‘James Snead was a brickie – from back in the bad old days, when brickies had to spend half their time looking for work in England, because there was damn-all happening here. He was a union man, and by the time the construction boom came along he was on a couple of blacklists, so he didn’t do so well, but that was okay – he had a family and he got enough work to get by. His wife died young, he raised his daughter himself. She got pregnant, she had Oliver, and when the kid was eight months old she and her boyfriend overdosed on heroin in their flat in Ballymun.’

  O’Keefe said, ‘That’s hard.’

  Bob Tidey was looking up towards the Hive. ‘James Snead came visiting next day. He heard Oliver crying, so he broke in, found the bodies, found Oliver sitting in his own shit in a playpen, six feet away from his dead mammy. That’s how James came to raise Oliver.’

  O’Keefe nodded. ‘Some parts of this city, back in the eighties and nineties, there were a lot of grandparents raising kids.’

  ‘When Oliver got in trouble, James Snead gave the thugs all he could raise and a promise of the rest. It ought to have worked. Maybe some tosspot wanted to send a message to everyone who owed him money. Or maybe he was just feeling under the weather and he wanted to cheer himself up. These days, killing some poor fucker’s sometimes just a way of marking your territory. We’ve managed to create a lot of young thugs who know nothing about life except how to take it.’

  O’Keefe said, ‘You know this kind of thing is taken seriously these days, Bob. And that’s why a coordinated response, at the highest level, is what I’ve been—’

  Bob Tidey smiled. ‘Operation Sledge Hammer, is it? The Minister and the Commissioner must have done some late-night brainstorming to come up with that one. Everything sounds more efficient if you give it a military title. These people can’t do a shit without announcing that they’re launching Operation Bowel Movement.’

  Tidey bent and picked up a shard of glass hidden in the grass at his feet. He walked about ten feet to a litter bin beside a bench and dropped it in. When he returned, O’Keefe said, ‘We do PR because we have to – there are needs that have to be met. That doesn’t mean we’re not also trying to get on top of this mess.’

  Tidey looked at the Assistant Commissioner. ‘I’m sorry, Colin, you didn’t make things the way they are. All those years ago, when James Snead rang 999, I was in uniform, I was first on the scene. I went up to the flat and I saw the bodies, the shitty playpen. And I found James Snead next door, in a neighbour’s flat, with Oliver in his lap. He was shushing the baby, telling him everything would be okay. And last night I went to James Snead’s flat, to tell him Oliver was dead. And, all down these years, I don’t know what I could have done differently – or what you could have done differently, or what the fucking Minister could have done – so that it wouldn’t work out this way.’

  Danny Callaghan finished his coffee. His first job this afternoon was to collect a package from the Mater Hospital and deliver it to an address on the south side. Later, he had to drive some business type from Clonskeagh to Wicklow town, wait for a c
ouple of hours and then drive him back in the early evening. He dumped the half-eaten cheese sandwich he’d made, washed his cup, plate, knife and spoon and put them away. He checked again the notes he’d made on the day’s jobs, put on his brown suede jacket and inspected himself in the mirror.

  On his way to the car, he could see a gaggle of cops, uniformed and plain-clothes, heads together, near the white tent out on the green. Despite the light rain, the line of cops was still inching across the killing ground. Approaching the black Hyundai, Callaghan thumbed the remote and the central locking clicked open. Inside the car it was cold. When he started the engine he used the wipers to clear the rain from the windscreen. The front passenger door opened and a young man in a Nike top and sweat-pants got into the car, sat down and held a gun in his lap, the muzzle turned towards Callaghan.

  He won’t shoot.

  Not with the police just fifty yards away.

  ‘This distance, they won’t even hear the shot,’ the man said.

  For an instant, Danny Callaghan could see himself slumped against the wheel, bleeding, while the man got out of the car and walked away.

  ‘He told me everything was cool,’ Callaghan said.

  The man said, ‘Who?’

  ‘Frank Tucker.’

  ‘That right?’

  ‘He said—’

  ‘Drive,’ the man said. ‘We’re not going far.’

  Chapter 24

  On the way out of the estate they drove past a parked police car, the driver chatting on his mobile.

  ‘Take a left here.’

  ‘You ought to ring him. Me and Frank Tucker, everything’s okay.’

  ‘Shut up and drive.’

  Pointless.

  This wouldn’t happen unless Frank Tucker gave the go-ahead.

  Mistake, going to see him.

  All it did was remind him of a loose end he had to cut off.

  The young man gave directions and several minutes later they were driving under a railway bridge, then a sharp left and into a cul-de-sac.