‘Just one call?’
‘I’ll tell you what. I’m going to join my mate for a coffee, and when we come back, if your memory’s any better, maybe—’
‘Bastard!’
‘You need to do a course in making friends and influencing people, you do.’
When the garda was gone, Brendan told a nurse he needed to make a phone call. She said what he needed was a bed and they didn’t have one available. Brendan Peyton, held together by painkillers, spent the evening on a trolley in the A&E corridor. The police came back. When he said again that he didn’t remember what had happened they stared at him with a mix of sympathy and contempt.
‘Don’t be stupid. Whatever animals did that to you – let us deal with them.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Brendan said.
After a while, he borrowed a mobile from a man on another trolley and called home, but Dixie didn’t pick up. He rang Shelley Hogan’s flat but there was no answer.
33
Harry Synnott had just pulled into the car park of The Majestyk
Inn when his mobile rang.
‘Please, I have to talk to you.’
‘Dixie, it’s Sunday evening, I’m off duty, and we don’t have anything to talk about.’
‘I’m begging you, now, begging you. If I don’t – look, this is more important to me than anything,
ever
, and you know I’ve been a help to you, you know I’ll give you stuff again, you know –
Jesus
, Mr Synnott, I’m begging you, and it’s hardly any money, a few hundred, I’ll get it back to you, you know—’
‘Look, Dixie—’
‘–
Please
, Mr Synnott, I’ll do anything, anything, and if—’
‘Dixie, I’m late for an appointment.’ He cut her off, put the mobile in his pocket and got out of his car.
*
It was a gorgeous house and Finbarr was an attentive host. He wouldn’t do business until the jeweller named his drink and accepted a heavy crystal brandy glass that was generously laden with Courvoisier. Paddy Robert Garcia Murphy was here to get the opinion of one of the most expensive barristers in the country, and the hospitality was a welcome extra.
‘I don’t want to know what was in the floor safe,’ Finbarr said, ‘but I assume it was legal.’ His smile gave his ample face a benevolent glow. ‘Since there’s nothing to show it wasn’t – the proverbial empty stable – the police must in legal terms make the same assumption. Ergo, no problem.’
‘They threatened me – obstruction, concealment of a crime – the detective was an obnoxious bastard.’
‘They’re entitled to their suspicions – and you’re entitled to tell them to bugger off. Evidence is what matters. They find a secret safe, empty after a robbery, and you don’t wish to tell them what was in it.’ He shrugged. ‘It might be photos of your mistress, for all they know, and you don’t want the embarrassment. They may speculate, they may bluster, but you’re on safe enough ground.’
Robert Garcia felt better. He’d had the same advice from his solicitor, but it meant more to him when he had to pay top rates to hear it from a senior counsel. He sipped his brandy and listened to Finbarr rephrase the same reassurance in various ways, giving value for money.
He liked being in Finbarr’s house, the walls of this reception room heavy with selections from Finbarr’s renowned and very expensive collection of paintings. He liked being able to share his problem, he liked the warmth he got from Finbarr’s fellowship, even though he knew that he wouldn’t get an invitation to attend at Finbarr’s home on a Sunday evening unless there was a hefty bill attached.
‘Is there anything else arising from this robbery that might be a problem?’
Robert Garcia shook his head and put on a smile. ‘No, that’s it.’ The problem of how he’d break the news to the owners of the jewellery stolen from the floor safe wasn’t something he could discuss with a lawyer, even at Finbarr’s rates.
‘Well, then,’ Finbarr said, swallowing his own whiskey and giving Robert Garcia another benevolent smile. He gestured to the brandy glass. ‘Take your time.’
*
Someone had strung a banner across the top of the room. In black letters on a pink background decorated with stars and streaky-tailed comets, it said
Amazing Grace!
There were posters on each side of the banner. One said,
Good Luck, John!
The other said,
Life Begins at Retirement!
Turner’s Lane station had booked the biggest function room the Majestyk Inn had to offer, and when Harry Synnott arrived it was already filling up. There was a bar down one side of the room and the centre was a forest of tables and chairs. On a raised dais in one corner a fat red-haired man with freckles was sitting behind a stack of speakers and a keyboard programmed to sound like an orchestra. He was halfway through the theme from
Hill Street Blues.
Bob Tidey was at the bar, a whiskey in one hand, the other hand waving in the air to attract Synnott’s attention.
‘What are you having?’
‘A pint.’
‘He’s well on already.’ Tidey nodded towards John Grace, who had one arm around the shoulder of a young red-headed woman and the other around the shoulder of a grizzled ex-sergeant who’d had a similar party when he’d retired a couple of years back. Grace’s wife Mona, sitting at a table in the middle of the room, caught Harry Synnott’s glance, smiled and raised her eyebrows.
Synnott looked around. There was no one he wanted to talk to. When he was young, this kind of crowded pub was standard for a night out, but now he couldn’t understand how he’d ever put up with the noise and the crush of it.
Most of the drinkers were Turner’s Lane people, with a sampling of members from stations around the city who had worked with John Grace in the course of his career. There was a Chief Superintendent from Turner’s Lane, and a couple of senior officers from the Phoenix Park HQ. Tidey said, ‘O’Keefe left a little while ago. He made a speech about life after crime-fighting. Apparently, we’ve all got a lot to look forward to.’
‘Is that it then, for the speeches?’
‘Dream on.’
The freckled man with the keyboard was working his way through his repertoire of television cop shows. As the last notes of
The Rockford Files
died, the Chief Superintendent from Turner’s Lane took the microphone. ‘Order! Quiet down the back! Bit of order, or I’ll have to call in the heavy gang!’
When the hubbub died, he spoke for a few minutes about civic duty and how easily it was taken for granted, about pride and honour and integrity. ‘John Grace, in his time as a policeman, has taken more than his share of knocks. But he came through it, and we’re proud to be here with him tonight, and to wish him and Mona all the very best in the years – the long years – to come. He’s getting out when he’s still young enough to thrive in some other field, and the rest of us can only hope that when we leave the force we’ll have a career as worthwhile as John’s to look back on.’ After the applause, it took him a minute of coaxing to get John Grace, shaking his head and making hushing gestures with his hands, to come up to the microphone. Holding on to the microphone stand with one hand, the other tugging at the side of his shirt collar, Grace waited for the applause to end.
‘Listen, all I want to say – to all of you degenerates – is thanks. It’s been – I won’t say I’m not glad to be getting out. Some of you know that wouldn’t be true. But I made a lot of friends on the force, and I think, over the years, we managed not to let ourselves down. We did the job.’
A couple of people near the dais began clapping and the rest joined in. Beside Harry Synnott, Bob Tidey’s piercing whistle soared above the applause.
‘There were shitty times.’ John Grace paused. ‘Good people gone. But we’re not here tonight to mourn. What I still – I know everyone says this, but it’s true – you think you’re just getting the hang of something, and you look up and notice your hair is grey and there’s young bastards like some of you lot, sniffing at your heels. Then you know it’s time to shut the fuck up.’
There was applause as he stepped down off the dais, and several people stood to shake his hand as he walked back to his table. By the time he sat down, Sergeant Derek Ferry from Turner’s Lane was holding the microphone. ‘There’s something not yet said, but it ought to be.’
Sergeant Ferry looked around the room. His gaze passed over Harry Synnott, then came back again. Then he looked down at Grace.
‘John Grace is a gentleman who served the public with distinction. I’m proud to call him a friend. He and Mona – and I know she wouldn’t want to be—’ There was a flurry of applause. ‘It’s a life well spent. A life of service, comradeship – as the Super said, honour, integrity – and a life of trust. The public trust us, we trust each other.’ He paused. ‘Trust. And when you can’t trust the member of the force next to you, when you have to watch your back—’
Bob Tidey said, ‘Ah, for fuck sake.’
Harry Synnott looked down at the bar in front of him. His pint glass was almost empty.
‘– when you know the member next to you is waiting for the kind of mistake that – everyone, if you’re human, everyone sometimes does something, maybe in a moment of weakness – and when you
have
a moment of weakness, what you need is your colleague, your comrade – someone you trust, there beside you, to see you make it back to the straight and narrow.’
The Superintendent was standing beside Sergeant Ferry, reaching for the microphone. ‘Derek, it’s not the time or the—’
‘Judas!’
There was a smattering of applause, a few boos. The Superintendent took the microphone from Ferry’s hand and shook his head. He gestured for him to step down. Ferry stood there, his hands on his hips. The Superintendent spoke into the microphone, his voice subdued. ‘This is John Grace’s night, Derek. Don’t spoil it.’
Sergeant Ferry tilted his head back, stood there for another moment, then stepped off the dais and went back to his table.
After a moment, Harry Synnott looked up. The room was filling with chatter again. There were people glancing his way, but they turned away when they saw him looking. Beside him Bob Tidey was gazing into his empty whiskey glass, his face flushed and sweaty.
Harry Synnott walked towards the door. No one said anything to him. Behind him, the fat freckled man on the dais was starting to play the theme from
The Sweeney
.
34
It was the rhythm that mattered, not the speed. Get into the rhythm and then it’s just one foot in front of the other until you get where you’re going.
The double murder at Bushy Park had screwed up the week for Garda Joe Mills. The overtime wasn’t to be sneezed at, but his erratic work hours meant that he hadn’t been out for an evening run since the previous Monday. It was past evening now, only the odd pedestrian on the dark residential streets of the Livermore estate where he lived.
There was a time when Joe Mills had taken his running seriously. Breathing 3-2, then 2-2, start the count on the first fall of the left foot, five minutes moderate pace, three minutes fast, then five minutes moderate, keep it going, fast and then moderate and fast again, for an hour. Pretty soon he decided the hell with that. It was like trying to remember a piece of elaborate choreography and that took the fun out of it. Now, usually three evenings a week, he enjoyed his run through the Livermore. Back straight, head up, body slightly forward, the steady beat of his cushioned feet – the rhythm of the run made him feel like he was reclaiming every ounce of flesh that had been deadened by the routine of the day.
Late though it might be, after today’s developments with the nutcase he’d been looking forward to the run, to feel his body loosening, to feel the tendons and ligaments take the strain while he let his mind shut down.
More of that Blackpool shite.
It was like the nutcase had figured that a couple of bodies in his sister’s house wasn’t a big deal. And whatever the story was with the missing woman he’d assaulted, he could care less. What was important was working out where he might have seen Mills before.
‘
Did you have a brother, maybe? In Blackpool?
’
The tone suggesting that he believed he’d finally solved the puzzle.
‘
One brother. Lives in Long Island, has done for six years, doesn’t look a bit like me. Neither of us has ever been to Blackpool.
’
Wherever this Blackpool thing was coming from, Joe Mills knew it was fantasy. Whatever it was about, it meant that Mills was called into the station shortly after noon to let the nutcase ask him more questions. If that was the only thing that got the nutcase talking, the Chief Super said, so be it. Maybe once his lips started flapping he’d answer the odd question about why he’d killed two harmless males in the house at Bushy Park, and who – and where – was the woman he’d harmed, and how badly had he harmed her.
As it happened, after three days of stubborn silence it took no more than twenty minutes of gormless chatter with the nutcase before he opened up a little, just for a few minutes. Then he seemed to wander back into whatever fog he lived in. It was all go after that. It was like when the nutcase spoke he’d thrown a switch and the station came alive. Nine hours later, Joe Mills ended up sitting in the office of the Chief Super, who had his feet up on his desk, his chair tilted back so it almost touched the wall behind. The wall had pictures of the Chief Super with his class at Templemore, at various official functions, and one of him standing, with a huge cheesy grin on his face, beside Chris de Burgh at some charity do. There was a bottle of Jameson on the desk. Joe Mills usually took ice in his whiskey, but he thought it better to take the drink as it was offered, neat.