Ten months later, three stone lighter, Lar Mackendrick lived according to the diet drawn up by a nutritionist called Tammy and the regime laid down by a fitness instructor called Dave. First thing every morning he swallowed his daily seventy-five-gram dose of Nu-Seal, last thing each evening he took the Lipitor that kept his cholesterol down. Before long his doctor told him to forget the daily Tritace dose, his blood pressure was stable. He hadn’t had a drink since the night before his collapse.
Upper abs.
Lar’s breathing was steady. A few months back, he would have been puffing just from the effort of opening a bottle of Stolly.
His back was flat on the floor, arse tucked into the skirting board, legs pressed up against the wall. Slowly, drawing in air, he bent up from the waist, upper body lifting from the floor, fingers reaching towards his toes, then exhaled as he sank back, five, ten times, fifteen. Twenty repetitions. His breathing heavier now, he stood up and his mind felt as clear as his body felt invigorated.
Jesus, Jo-Jo, who’d have thought it. Lump of lard like me doing a Schwarzenegger.
The fear that motivated Lar had over the months turned to pride. He still had a bit of a belly but he was trimmer, stronger than he’d been since his twenties. Clear-headed and aware of the world around him, he’d applied himself to the family business with a passion that he hadn’t felt in decades.
Six weeks ago, for the first time in twelve years, Lar had personally carried out a killing and found he enjoyed it. The subject was a mouse of a man, had to be done. Years ago Jo-Jo and Lar Mackendrick set this fella up in a small neighbourhood mini-market, let him keep a percentage. A lot of funny money went in one door of that shop and came out the other end smelling sweet. Recently, the guy had been pulled in for an insurance fraud on a failed garage he’d owned with his brother-in-law. Two days later, the whole thing was dropped. The mousy man – name of Johnny something, just turned fifty – turned up back at his home as casually as if he’d just spent a long weekend at the races in England.
‘The cops had me by the balls,’ he told anyone who asked. ‘Then they screwed up the paperwork.’
The Lar Mackendrick who struggled to keep sane after the death of his brother might have missed what was happening, but the wide-awake Lar could read this one from a mile off. This had to be some cop bastard turning Mr Mousy, setting him up as a channel into the Mackendrick business.
It made sense. Over the past while, it had become obvious that someone was whispering in the law’s ear. Maybe more than one someone. Over a year or so, several jobs had to be aborted when the cops tightened security. A bookie shop and a building firm, well insulated from association with Lar, had to be closed down after the Criminal Assets Bureau raided them. Lar figured the bastards had targeted the Mackendrick businesses once Jo-Jo was off the scene. Johnny Mousy Man knew the scene, now he was walking free from a sure-thing conviction.
‘One thing I can’t stand’, Lar told Matty Butler, ‘is a tout.’
This wasn’t really true. Lar Mackendrick knew that sometimes people get caught up in something and they can’t find a way out and they do what they think is best, and sometimes that involves squealing to the law. Lar didn’t take it personally, but it wasn’t something that could be left unattended. He sent Matty off to arrange things and a week later Johnny Mousy Man was shoved into the boot of an Avensis and driven to a derelict house near Ballybough.
When Lar walked into the house, Johnny was slumped on a broken-down sofa, his hands tied behind his back, his face bloody, Matty and one of his people standing over him. He struggled to sit upright and said, ‘Lar, I swear—’ and Lar said, ‘It’s OK, I know, I know.’ He looked down at the mousy man. ‘Don’t worry, Johnny. I understand your situation. Everything’s OK.’
‘Please, Lar—’
Matty handed Lar a .22-calibre Ruger pistol and Lar shot Johnny in the forehead. Johnny fell back on the sofa and lay there, his eyes open, staring at Lar, still breathing. His lips moved, a whisper came out, too ragged to make sense. Lar sat down beside Johnny on the sofa and looked at the small black wound in Johnny’s forehead. The bullet hadn’t come out the back of his head, which was only to be expected with a .22, but you could never tell with bullets.
‘I’m in no hurry,’ Lar told Johnny Mousy Man. ‘Take your time.’ He felt maybe Johnny expected him to say something, so he said, ‘Nothing personal, Johnny. A problem has to be closed down. Someone fucks with someone, they get fucked right back. It’s expected. Otherwise, what’s the point?’
For a moment, he thought maybe Johnny was going to answer back. But Johnny just kept looking at him, a thin dribble of blood, no more than an inch long, coming from the black wound.
Lar sat back and watched Johnny Mousy Man dying. The smell of the gunshot was strong in the small room. Lar wondered if Johnny could get it.
‘Can you smell it, Johnny? The propellant, that’s what they call it.’
Johnny just stared.
‘Strong smell,’ Lar said. ‘People think it’s cordite, but it’s not. Cordite, that was a bugger of a smell, but they don’t use it any more.’ He wondered if Johnny could hear him, or see him. Probably his senses were all messed up. Get a really hard thump in the face, in a fight or playing football, Lar reckoned, and you’re not sure where you are. Probably more or less the same with a bullet in the forehead, only more so.
‘The same,’ he said to Johnny, ‘only more so.’
He leaned over to the left, out of Johnny’s line of sight, and Johnny’s gaze didn’t follow him. All jumbled up in there, Lar reckoned.
It was hard to tell when Johnny Mousy Man let go. His eyes stayed open and his breath was so hardly there that Lar couldn’t tell if he’d stopped breathing. Lar looked over at Matty and the fella he had with him – Lar didn’t know his name, Troy, Toddy, something like that, a bit of a cowboy. ‘What do you think?’ Lar said. The fella said, ‘It’s hard to tell.’ His voice sounded like his mouth was dry and his tongue was thick. Only to be expected. Young guy.
Lar nodded.
After ten minutes, Lar thought that the mousy man was probably gone, but he couldn’t be sure so he told Matty to do something final before they brought him up the Dublin mountains to bury him. Then Lar gave Matty back the Ruger and went home.
These days, Lar could touch his body and feel his ribs. He could stretch and sense the muscles flexing over his belly. He felt more in touch with everything. He was no Slim Jim, but he didn’t have to connect to the world through a pillow of fat around his body and a cloud of despair around his mind. Things would never be what they were before his brother and his mother were so cruelly taken away, but Lar Mackendrick felt as though he’d been pulled back from the brink of something bottomless.
He was on the landing, coming out from his shower, wearing a purple bathrobe, when the phone rang. It was Matty.
‘They bought it.’
‘Which one?’
‘Moyfield.’
Fucking cops.
Not as smart as they think.
Lar ended the call. The warehouse on the Moyfield industrial estate was one of three locations from which Mackendrick businesses supposedly operated. Fishing for touts, he’d fed the locations to three people he wasn’t sure of.
Moyfield?
Supposed to be a dodgy DVD factory.
Who’d I feed that one to?
Standing at the top of his wide staircase, looking down at the marble-floored hall below, the staircase wall decorated by two Graham Knuttells and a Charlie Whisker, Lar swung his arms forward, back again, and forward, ten times, twenty times, thirty times. Light on his feet coming down the stairs, feeling his body strong, pliable, sensing the energy in his legs, the strength in his arms, the tang of life on his lips.
17
Dixie Peyton wasn’t lying. Her face was frightened and angry and mostly puzzled. Harry Synnott knew that whatever was going on she wasn’t lying about the DVD factory.
‘I swear, I know it’s true.’
Less than an hour after the failed raid, Synnott arrived at Mountjoy prison and confronted Dixie in the same small administration-block room where she’d sold him the information. It took him seconds to know she wasn’t lying. Probably she’d picked it up wrong. Or she’d got it from someone who’d got it garbled from someone else.
‘Who told you about the warehouse?’
‘That wasn’t part of the deal.’
‘What deal? You make up a story—’
‘I made nothing up!’
‘– and you put a premium price on your lies—’
‘I wasn’t lying!’
‘Who told you about the warehouse?’
Dixie’s breathing sounded like she’d been in a serious struggle.
‘I want to get out of here. I want my three hundred.’
‘Who told you about the warehouse?’
Her head was down, her elbow on the table in front of her, her forehead resting on the rigid fingers of her right hand. She spoke without looking at Synnott, her voice barely controlled.
‘Please. I
need
to get out of here. And I need the
money
.’
His voice was soft. ‘Always, Dixie, going right back, you know I’ve looked after you. But fair is fair. You give me something, I do what I can. And when you give me shit, like you did – it’s embarrassing for me, I have to wonder if you’re messing me about. See it from my point of view.’
‘Please.’
‘What I’ll do, the best I can do, I’ll have a word, bail shouldn’t be a problem. The three hundred – I mean, we have to be sensible.’
Dixie sat there, and as her head tilted forward the fingers of her right hand went back through her hair, slowly, rigid like a claw. She took hold of a handful of hair and held it tightly, her forearm shaking, the hair straining at the roots. When she looked up at Synnott she’d managed to keep the tears from coming out.
Twenty-what – Synnott did a mental sum and came up with twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine. The look of her, she might be five years older. Dixie wasn’t holding up well.
She’d looked so offended, that first time he’d raided her house, on a tip that Owen Peyton was holding a gun for a gang member with whom he’d once shared a cell.
‘I’m not a criminal.’
‘You’re married to one.’
‘My husband isn’t a criminal. He’s a driver. He drives a van.’
Then, her face had been toned and soft, the jawline firm and the skin had had the colour and texture of youth that no amount of cosmetics could replicate. Her skin now was pale, blotchy, her arms, once slender, were now merely thin.
The first time he’d seen her after Owen died was when she’d been getting out of a patrol car in the yard of Sundrive Road, where Synnott was stationed at the time. She was handcuffed, drunk and she had a satisfied smile on her face. Despite her circumstances, she had the bounce and spirit he remembered. He recognised her immediately.
I’m not a criminal.
Synnott found out from a sergeant what the charge was.
‘Pissed out of her head, standing outside a house on Wicker Close. She arrived with a dozen cans of Heineken from the off-licence, had one left when the lads got there.’
‘She drank eleven cans of beer?’
‘Didn’t drink any beer. She was pissed on vodka long before she ever got there. She was throwing the full cans at the windows of the house. They bounced off the windows – double glazing – one of them smashed the glass on the door.’
‘Why?’
‘According to the neighbours, she stood there, screaming at the house – something about Obi-Wan being a bastard. Over and over. And when she felt like it she threw a can of beer at the house.’
‘Obi-Wan?’
‘Nickname of the guy who lives there. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Middle-aged guy, family man.’
‘This a sex thing?’
‘I don’t think so. All she’d say was Obi-Wan was a bastard.’
‘What does he say?’
‘Not home. Himself and his missus were out, left the lights on. I’ll send a lad out later to talk to them.’
Harry Synnott said he’d go and see Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan turned out to be a reasonable man – he knew Dixie, he said, they’d had a falling-out, he didn’t want her to get into trouble. Back at the station, Synnott squared it with the sergeant.
‘You can go home,’ he told Dixie. ‘I’ve had a word.’
‘Thanks.’
‘How are things? The kid?’
‘Bastard promised me.’
‘Obi-Wan?’
‘Know what he said?
It wouldn’t look right, Dixie. Nothing against you, Dixie
, but Owen – he didn’t know about Owen until the accident. If he recommends someone, people trust his word.’ Dixie smiled at Harry Synnott. ‘And we don’t want the local gangster’s widow messing things up, do we? A wallet goes missing, the petty cash doesn’t add up – oh, it must be the bitch that Obi-Wan recommended. You know – the gangster’s widow.’