Nothing left but to collect the money from the old paint factory, move it to the safe house and divvy it up later. He was approaching the MacClenaghan building, looking up towards his fourth-floor squat, when he took out his phone and rang Noel.
‘Yeah?’
‘Noel?’
Not Noel’s voice. What—
Vincent stopped walking, stood there with the phone to his ear.
Fuck, no.
The voice broke the silence. ‘He’s busy at the moment. I’m a Garda. To whom am I speaking?’
Vincent held the phone up over his head and threw it as hard as he could against the pavement. The phone bounced and landed several feet away. He picked it up and smashed it down again, then stamped on it over and over until bits broke off. A harsh noise escaped him as he walked away, then he turned and came back and took the SIM card from the wrecked mobile. It was a disposable, used just for the Protectica job – nothing the bastards could get out of it now. He stamped again on the broken phone and he walked until he found a drain where he dropped the SIM card in.
It took Vincent a few minutes to get to the fourth floor of the MacClenaghan. He filled a glass with water and stood on the tiny balcony, thinking it through.
If Noel was caught with the money he was fucked, plain and simple. There was no guessing how long they’d put him away for, but it would take a big chunk out of the middle of his life. And Noel, Jesus – coming back from that, that would take time.
What people didn’t understand about Noel – he was strong, but he was fragile, too. When Vincent was about twelve, their da left him alone in the house and pissed off to wherever he went that time, Kilkenny or somewhere, with a woman. Vincent wanted to find him and smash his face. Noel – who was eighteen then – said Vincent ought to stop mouthing off that way. Noel talked about how Da was shredded when their mother buggered off, his whole life just went whoosh, Noel said, lost everything he’d come to take for granted. Da was still a young man, looking after a ten-year-old and a four-year-old and no notion of what to do with two anxious kids. And when he fucked up over and over – with schools and food and clothes and keeping Vincent from being frightened – the bottle was a good place to get relief.
At the time of the Kilkenny thing, Noel had his own place and he took Vincent in. Then, three years later, Da came back from Kilkenny or wherever the fuck and Noel stopped Vincent from waxing him. ‘He’s our father – we’re his blood.’ He had Vincent by the shoulders, not shaking him, just staying in his face. ‘He’s all the family we have.’ And there were tears in Noel’s eyes when he said it – not shaky tears – not weak tears. Noel had character – tears that said things weren’t what they should be but they were what they were and it was OK to regret the way things had gone, but it wasn’t OK to give in to it. Noel said that even if Da was a pathetic cunt, he had the right to be treated properly when he came home.
There was more to Noel than people thought.
‘Three things matter in life. First, you do the best you can with the skills God gave you. Second, pick a goal and go for it. And, most important of all – nothing matters more than family.’
Two years after that, Noel was heartbroken when Da did a fade again. Good riddance, as far as Vincent was concerned. Of the two brothers, Noel was the better man, Vincent knew that in his heart. Noel had a code, something to measure his life against. Vincent didn’t think about things like that. It rarely bothered him, but he knew that was no way to live. ‘You need something bigger than yourself,’ Noel said, ‘or you’re all you are, and that’s not enough.’
No need to think the worst. A lot depended on when Noel and Kevin were picked up. If they were lifted with the money in the Lexus – that was the worst-case scenario. Anything else – they could say they were just doing a favour for someone, they thought they were torching the car for the insurance. Not an easy argument to win. But it was a possible runner.
Now, Vincent tried to blank his mind, but it was like trying to hold a door shut against a hurricane. Could be the cops just picked Noel up afterwards, when he was clear of the job, some uniformed shithead recognised him in the street and gave him a pull for old times’ sake.
Best thing Vincent could do for the moment was keep his cool. If Noel got clear he’d be in touch soon enough. If not, Vincent would get him an army of lawyers and they’d fight this every fucking step of the way.
34
It was late in the evening when Bob Tidey arrived on Kilcaragh Avenue, near the Fairview Park end of North Strand. A long section of the roadway had been cordoned off, and inside the cordon two white forensic tents had been erected. Small groups of people gathered at each end of the street, with uniforms allowing access only to residents. Tidey had to explain himself to a Garda, who insisted he speak to the officer in charge, who turned out to be a snotty detective inspector with whom he’d shared an office at Cavendish Avenue up to two years back.
‘Hi, Polly.’
Detective Inspector Martin Pollard was as frosty as ever. Many of those who had worked with Polly – Tidey being just one – insisted on using the nickname, knowing the Detective Inspector detested it. Precise and pernickety, Pollard was one of those people who, without ever doing anything downright blameworthy, somehow managed to piss people off.
‘You have business here?’
‘The old lady who lives in that fourth house down, she’s a friend. Gave me the tip on the car – that’s what got the ERU lads involved. I should speak to her.’
Pollard pursed his lips for a moment, then said, ‘I’ll expect a note on anything she may say – we’ve taken statements up and down the street, but if she has anything useful—’
Pollard handed Tidey a card.
‘Sure, no problem.’ Tidey pointed towards the white forensic tents, about twenty yards apart. ‘Both of them?’
Pollard nodded. ‘The pathologist has almost finished the preliminary. One was dead before he hit the ground, the other was gone soon after.’
‘You’ve got an ID?’
‘Small-timers. One of them started shooting. There’s no accounting for stupidity.’
Back at Castlepoint station, Tidey had spent the afternoon and evening reading the Sweetman files. He was taking a coffee break, half inclined to quit until the next morning, when he heard two uniforms talking about an ERU shooting at North Strand. After a quick call to a friend in Garda HQ, he locked away the Sweetman files and hurried to his car.
When Maura Coady opened her front door the lines in her face seemed to have deepened since last he saw her. She did the one thing he couldn’t have imagined. She circled his waist with her arms and rested her head against his shoulder. His embrace absorbed the shaking in her slender frame. After a while he eased her back into the hallway and closed the door. ‘You’re OK, Maura, it’s just the shock.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice was a thin whisper.
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘The police brought someone – I think he was – he gave me something, said it would calm me.’
He sat her down in the front room and when he reached for the light switch she said, ‘No, please.’ He made tea and sat across from her. It was still a bright summer evening outside but the street was narrow and little daylight reached into the front room. She sipped the tea and for a long while neither of them spoke. Then Tidey said, ‘I’m sorry you got caught up in all this.’
She looked up at him. ‘He was frightened, the second man. The first man was dead, died immediately. The other man was alive, his throat was all bloody, he was making noises. I started saying – I didn’t think – it’s as natural as making the sign of the cross. I started saying the Act of Contrition. And – the poor man – it was just a moment, but I could see the fear. He knew, when he heard me—’
‘It was a comfort, I’m sure it was.’
‘He was afraid and I made it worse.’
‘Most people wouldn’t even think of going out onto the street, with something like that ha
ppening.’
‘I was in here, just looking out at the street – sometimes I do that. I saw them, they were the men who left the car there, I was going to ring you. One of them opened the driver’s door, he looked up and I could see the panic, one of them put his hands up, the other one—’
She sat silently, as if seeing the events again.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘A time like this, you have to look after yourself. I can make you something.’
‘If I hadn’t said anything. Those two young men. Lying out there in the street.’
‘The technical people are nearly done, the bodies will be removed soon, everything will be back to normal.’
‘If I hadn’t called you—’
‘You did the right thing. They had guns, they were putting other people’s lives at risk.’
‘What did they do?’
‘I don’t know – a robbery, I’m not sure where. I’ll find out, if you like.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
He leaned forward. ‘Maura, the shock, a thing like this – it’d drain anyone. You ought to lie down, try to get some sleep.’
‘I couldn’t. I keep thinking—’
‘No need to worry – there’ll be a Garda on duty all night, it’s routine when something like this happens. You’re safe here.’
‘It’s not that—’ She closed her eyes.
‘I’ll stay here. It’ll be OK.’
She looked at him for a long time, her eyes older and more tired than he’d ever seen them. ‘Would you?’
‘I promise.’
Vincent Naylor’s eyes were shut tight. He was lying on his side on the laminated wooden floor of his squat, wearing just boxer shorts. The volume on his iPod was beyond comfortable and the relentless pounding of Fear Factory filled his head, dissolving all thought. He’d been lying like this for a long while, buried deep inside the pulsing sound, hiding from grief and time, his body rocking with the beat.
Before that, when Liam Delaney called, Vincent was taking a Marks & Spencer ready-made Indian meal out of the microwave.
‘Vincent – Jesus, man—’
Vincent’s first thought was to switch off the phone, lose it somewhere. Strict radio silence. Liam had no business calling anyone involved in the job. Him calling might mean he’d been snagged and he was obliging the shades in the hope of a good word.
‘I just heard—’
‘What you calling me for?’
‘Shit, Vincent, I just heard.’ There was silence, then Liam’s voice was rushed, getting high-pitched, louder. ‘Vincent, it’s on the television, for fuck’s sake – North Strand, it has to be them – haven’t you heard?’
In the hours since then, Vincent had needed noise, something to hold stuff at bay so he didn’t have to think about anything. He’d picked up on Fear Factory from Noel, and it did the job tonight. For a while. Then, above the insistent bass and the relentless drums and the slashing guitar, something – some combination of the overwhelming presence and the irreversible absence of his brother – attached itself to his mind and exploded. As Vincent Naylor rocked and threshed on the floor, the noise of the band and the pain of his grief were locked into his head, surrounded by the silence of the room. And beyond that the silence of the flat and the six soundless floors of the abandoned apartment block.
35
The crime scene tents had gone, taken down after the bodies had been removed last night. The blue-and-white tape had been taken away and the street was its unexceptional self. Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey had slept for a while in the fireside chair in the front room, woke with a crick in his neck and couldn’t get back to sleep. He got a glass of water from the kitchen and sat by the window for a while, looking out at the dark street. When his watch said it was almost 4 a.m. he went back to the kitchen and when he couldn’t find any coffee he made two mugs of tea, went to the front door and gestured to the Garda dawdling around the pavement on overnight duty. Grateful for having his boredom eased, the Garda stood at the door, drinking tea, chatting, both their voices kept low. After a while, the Garda took a twenty from Tidey and headed down to the all-night Spar on the corner. He came back with half a dozen newspapers and a packet of Rothmans. Tidey opened the cigarettes and the two lit up at the doorstep and the uniform went back to his pointless duty, the cigarette cupped in his hand.
Both the Irish Times and the Irish Independent carried the story of the double shooting low down on the front page. The two dead men were ‘known to the police’. The Garda ombudsman had already launched an inquiry into the circumstances. The stories were light on facts and the newspapers bulked things up with comments from politicians. A statement from the leader of the opposition praised the Gardai and condemned the government for its softness on crime. Most of the tabloids rehashed the bare details in clichés about shoot-outs and streets of death. The Irish Daily Record carried the shooting on page 4 and half of page 5, complete with grinning photos of the two dead men. It also had a fair amount of detail, gleaned from locals, about the shooting. One story said that one of the gunmen was surrendering and he called out to the other one.
‘Something about not giving them an excuse, that’s what I heard,’ Phil Heneghan, aged 79, a resident of Kilcaragh Avenue told the Irish Daily Record. ‘I was putting out my wheelie bin when it happened, I was standing a few yards away.’ A statement from Garda HQ said the Emergency Response Unit had fired only after being fired on.
It wasn’t a duty Tidey could imagine for himself – carrying a gun, facing panicking criminals, making instant decisions about whether to shoot. Move too quickly, you maybe kill someone trying to surrender. Hesitate and you or a colleague or a civilian gets shot. The Record story might be on to something – someone moved too soon. Or it was just media shit-stirring. Either way, Tidey felt regret for the two gobshites in the morgue, and for whatever policeman put them there.
This would be another day for immersing himself in the investigation file on the Sweetman murder. The bad night’s sleep meant he’d need a lot of coffee as the day went on. So far, the file was mostly interviews with people who said they didn’t know much about anything. Detective Chief Superintendent Hogg’s people had been thorough but unproductive. And there was nothing at all suggesting any possible link to the Oliver Snead murder.
If Maura Coady was still edgy tonight he’d have to find someone with rank who’d put a uniform outside the house for a couple of nights, just for comfort. These days, every minute of overtime had to be approved in triplicate, but the force owed her for this.
He could hear Maura moving upstairs. She’d be OK, he decided. The nuns were tough old birds – had to be, to stay sane while living that kind of narrow life. When Tidey first met Maura Coady several years back she’d walked into Cavendish Avenue Garda Station looking to talk to someone dealing with the Teresa O’Brien murder. Tidey was involved in the case, a prostitute found in a builder’s skip in a lane off Capel Street, beaten to death with a brick. At that time, Maura was living in a house with three other nuns from the Sisters of the Merciful Heart. The convent in which she’d lived for decades had been sold at the height of the property bubble and the sisters dispersed to rented houses. Since then, through death and further property sales, the sisters had been reduced to a handful, and Maura opted to live alone.
‘I know who did it.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Teresa O’Brien – I know who killed her. It was Mossy Doyle.’
‘And you are?’
‘Maura Coady – I was a teacher, a nun, and Teresa used to be a pupil of mine. She came to me a few months back, she needed somewhere to stay and I fixed her up.’
‘We’d better talk.’ Tidey waved a hand towards the door leading into the interview rooms and twenty minutes later he had a very concise statement. She’d been having a cup of tea with Teresa in a cafe in Talbot Street when Mossy Doyle arrived and began roaring at them. Doyle was a less than successful pimp
, who felt he still had some claim on Teresa. ‘I’ll swing for you, bitch, I’ll beat every breath of life out of you.’
Maura Coady repeated the words to Bob Tidey that day in Cavendish Avenue station, and she said them again on oath, in the Central Criminal Court, with Doyle a few yards away, staring daggers at her. Maura’s initial statement led to a search of Doyle’s home and the recovery of a pair of shoes stained with what turned out to be Teresa’s blood. The result of the trial was never in doubt. Giving the evidence that put him away, Maura hadn’t so much as glanced in Doyle’s direction, her voice steady and certain.
The nuns were tough old birds, all right.
36
When he came out of it, sometime during the night, his brain bruised by the hours of pounding music, Vincent Naylor moved slowly. Lying on his back, body limp, he raised his hand to his chest, took hold of the iPod lead and pulled out the earphones. Eyes closed, he threw them and the iPod across the room. The silence assaulted his ears and he lay there a long time, dazed, allowing his senses to gradually awaken. He was aware of a massive dread at the centre of everything. After a while he identified a scent.
Petrol—
He wondered what that might mean.
He felt a dull wave lapping at his consciousness and recognised it as sleep. He let it take him.
When he heard footsteps coming down the stairs, Bob Tidey glanced at his watch. Just gone five fifteen. Maura Coady was wearing a dark check dressing gown. ‘Morning, Sergeant Tidey. I hope you got some sleep.’
Tidey stood up. ‘I think it’s probably OK to call me Bob, now that we’ve spent the night together.’ He immediately regretted the quip, but she smiled.
‘There was a time when you’d have gone straight to hell for a remark like that.’
‘Sorry. You slept OK?’
‘I’m fine, thank you. It was just the shock – I’m fine now.’ She crossed to the window and looked out for a moment. ‘It’s like nothing happened out there – two lives.’
The Rage Page 13
