Grace said, ‘You see much of Helen these days?’
‘We talk on the phone. It’s OK.’
‘Michael?’
‘He’s thinking of dropping out of college. Figures it’s a waste of time getting an education when there’s money to be made.’
‘What’s he want to do?’
‘The detail changes from week to week, but he reckons he’s a born entrepreneur.’
Grace grinned. ‘You hear a lot of that these days. They say
I’m an entrepreneur
like it’s a trade – like someone might say they’re a nurse or a mechanic.’
Although both men got on well enough, it was the Swanson Avenue murder case – four years earlier – that had bonded something like a friendship. Synnott had been a detective sergeant then, just arrived at Turner’s Lane, Grace had been one of the station’s senior detectives. Although there had been little contact since that case, the bond remained.
Harry Synnott gestured. ‘This place, it didn’t work out? So dull that you prefer retirement?’
Harry Synnott had last seen John Grace almost eighteen months earlier, two and a half years after the Swanson Avenue case, at the funeral of a colleague murdered during a kidnap. Severely affected by the killing, Grace went on sick leave from Turner’s Lane and never came back. The administrative work at the Phoenix Park HQ was a last resort, after drifting through several assignments.
Grace smiled. ‘Dull is one word for it. Traffic, sports events, immigration. Mostly admin. I went out on two immigration raids, then I couldn’t do it any more. The second one, kicking out a planeload of Nigerians who’d overstayed their welcome. You ever involved in that kind of thing?’
‘Not yet. It’s a thriving business.’
‘This country, everyone used to have a relation who worked himself to a stump on a British building site. Poor lonely bastards, sending home the money that made the difference, drinking the rest.’ He shrugged. ‘You’d think—’
Harry Synnott decided to keep his mouth shut. There’s a reason for the law being the way it is. Send out the wrong message, you lose control – floodgates and open doors.
‘Anyway, since then I’ve been shifting pieces of paper from one desk to another. By and by, it gets like you’re doing things out of habit. So—’
‘Perhaps it’s for the best.’
‘O’Keefe was good to me. I didn’t have to explain, he arranged the paperwork, it’s all painless.’
Synnott said, ‘Why don’t you come around to my place, Saturday night? I’ll cook something, we’ll open a bottle in honour of the next twenty years.’
Grace laughed. ‘If I want chicken nuggets I’ll go to McDonald’s. Come out to Sutton. Mona’s got tickets for some musical thing, herself and her sister. I’ll order in, you bring the bottle.’
‘You’re on.’
On their way back down the corridor, John Grace said, ‘What I’m hearing, O’Keefe has offered you something?’
‘There’s nothing solid, but he’s been sussing things out. Something very different, he said. And Christ knows I could do with a change.’
Grace raised an eyebrow. ‘We could be celebrating, come Saturday evening?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘It’s long overdue.’
Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe didn’t seem to be aware that he’d lost a crumb of chicken from his sandwich and that it had found refuge half an inch above his left jawline.
Harry Synnott, sitting on the other side of O’Keefe’s desk, chewing on his own chicken sandwich, made a gesture towards his own face and O’Keefe flicked the offending particle away.
‘It’s more than a maybe,’ O’Keefe said. ‘If you decide you want it, the position’s there for the taking.’
The ‘position’ had yet to be fully explained to Synnott, but the very real prospect that he might soon be stepping away from the mess of his garda career had lit a small, hopeful light somewhere inside him.
All he knew about the job on offer came from a similar lunch appointment with O’Keefe two weeks earlier, a lunch of ham sandwiches from the canteen, eaten at the assistant commissioner’s desk.
‘The Minister makes the final decision,’ O’Keefe had told him, ‘but I’m headhunting and all I need to know is if you’re in the market?’
‘For what?’
‘Can’t say. But it’s not a small move, and it’s very different. No point going any further if you’re happy as you are.’
Happy as I am.
Now O’Keefe looked at him from across his desk and said, ‘To be honest, Harry – I think you’d be mad to say no, but I know how much it means to you, being at the coalface.’
A desk job, then.
Or continue as I am – wondering how long it’ll be before there’s another stretch of turbulence and everyone decides it’s best if I move on again.
Synnott tried not to let the disappointment show on his face.
Happy as I am.
11
Two days after the funeral of Garda Maura Sheelin, Garda Harry Synnott, aged twenty-three, was on duty at Cheeverstown garda station. What happened that day would define Synnott as a policeman and shape his career over the next two decades.
He was fifty minutes into his shift when he was ordered, along with another garda, to take a prisoner from the cells and bring him to Interview Room 3, where two detectives would question him. The station had been buzzing since the prisoner, Conal Crotty, had been brought in that morning.
‘He’s one of them.’
They hadn’t got their hands on the other bank robber – he was said to have left the country – but this little shit was the one who’d pulled the trigger. The intelligence lads had thrown their weight around, squeezed their Provo touts, and come up with Crotty. He was pulled in under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act, so they had him for twenty-four hours, and they could renew the detention for another twenty-four. During that time, with no lawyer to get in the way, teams of detectives could take turns breaking down his denials.
The prisoner was a weedy little shit, with a sparse moustache and thinning hair. Little beads of sweat stood out across his face. He was wearing a red sweatshirt and black jeans. Harry Synnott was told to stay and guard the prisoner. The second uniformed garda left the room.
‘I’ve done nothing.’
There was a tremor in Crotty’s voice. Synnott didn’t answer.
After a few minutes, two detectives arrived, neither of them from the Cheeverstown station. Detective Sergeant Joyce and Detective Garda Buckley.
‘Hello, Conal.’
Buckley stood in front of the prisoner, looking down at him. When the silence got to him, Crotty pushed back his chair and stood up. The defiance in his face was struggling to control his fear.
With one hand, Buckley took hold of the front of the Provo’s red sweatshirt and with the other he slapped his cheek. The prisoner made a noise that might have been an obscenity and Buckley backhanded him, then slapped him again, twice, three times around the ears, the man shouting, ‘Hey!
Hey!
’ and trying to back away.
Buckley twisted the Provo’s sweatshirt around his hand, pulled him forward and spat in his face.
Sergeant Joyce grabbed Buckley by the shoulder. ‘Hey, wait now,’ he said. ‘Hold on a minute.’
Buckley turned and looked at Sergeant Joyce, then looked back at the Provo and made a disgusted noise. He let go of the sweatshirt and stood back.
The Provo, spittle on his cheek, scowled at Joyce and said, ‘Yeah.’
Crotty’s face was reddened where he’d been slapped. He used the sleeve of his sweatshirt to wipe his lips. ‘Good cop, bad cop, right?’
Sergeant Joyce straightened the man’s sweatshirt. ‘Something like that,’ he said. Then he gestured towards Buckley and said, ‘He’s the good cop’ as he punched the Provo very hard in the stomach.
The Provo yelled and bent sharply and Sergeant Joyce grabbed his hair, forced his head down and at the same time drove his knee into the side of the Provo’s face. The prisoner gave a muffled scream as he lost his balance and went down on his back. Joyce stood over him. He lifted his right foot and stamped on the Provo’s chest and stomach, again and again. Then he kicked him in the side as he rolled over, howling.
Leaning across Sergeant Joyce, Detective Buckley bent forward and aimed a punch at the suspect’s face. Unbalanced, as Joyce jostled him, Buckley’s punch missed. Joyce lashed out and kicked the prone man twice in the back.
Harry Synnott ran from the room, hurried down the corridor and up the stairs to the station superintendent’s office. He opened the door to the outer office, found the superintendent talking to a secretary and blurted out, ‘The prisoner, sir – they’re beating him up, they’re out of control!’
The superintendent looked at Synnott. He made a soothing gesture.
‘Calm down, garda. Take it easy.’
‘No, sir, it’s—’
The superintendent’s tone was even, a slight flush to his cheeks. He said, ‘Return to your duty, garda.’ He held Synnott’s stare. ‘You have a job to do. Pull yourself together and do it.’
Synnott was panting. He took a breath and said. ‘Sir, I don’t think—’ but he was speaking to the superintendent’s back. His superior slammed the inner-office door behind him.
The secretary didn’t look at Synnott. He was very carefully inserting a yellow form into his typewriter, twisting the roller slowly, adjusting the paper so that it was perfectly square.
Synnott left the office and stood in the corridor. He leaned back until his shoulders were touching the wall. Then he lowered his arms, palms flat against the wall, aware that his hands were trembling.
If Harry Synnott felt anything for the Provo prisoner it was loathing. Unless garda intelligence was way off target, this was the piece of shit who’d put a bullet in Maura Sheelin. Synnott had been at the funeral, he’d watched the parents, pale and wide-eyed, Maura’s three younger brothers and the teenage sister who adored her, all of them trying to hold themselves together and failing.
It wasn’t the prisoner’s welfare that mattered to Harry Synnott. It was secondary that Synnott himself might get into trouble if it came out that he’d stood by and watched a prisoner being beaten. What was working away inside his gut was the blatant use of naked violence, the contempt not just for the prisoner but for Harry Synnott and anyone else in the station who might see or hear what was going on. It was the assumption that membership of the force automatically tied him into that shameless wielding of unbounded power.
He knew that running to the superintendent had already marked him as a weakling.
You’re one of us or you’re not.
Harry Synnott went back downstairs.
In the canteen, Synnott found three uniformed gardai around a table near the window. He sat down and told them what he’d seen.
‘Fucker deserves whatever he gets.’
‘That’s not what worries—’
‘These are the boys from downtown, right? Buckley and Joyce. Later, when they get tired, some of their mates will be up to keep that bastard company. In the meantime, they’ll do what they’re good at and when it’s all done and dusted another piece of Provo shit will be locked up for the rest of his natural. What’s the problem?’
Synnott stood and left the canteen.
In the corridor, Buckley was headed towards the canteen, lighting a cigarette. He passed Harry Synnott and didn’t acknowledge him by word or glance. He seemed not to see him.
In the interview room, the prisoner was crouched by the far wall, wiping his face with a towel. Sergeant Joyce was standing near the table. Joyce turned to Harry Synnott.
‘About time. Keep an eye on this bastard. He’s got twenty minutes to decide how he wants to play this.’ To the prisoner he said, ‘That’s for openers. And we’ve got another twenty-two hours before we have to renew the detention. And after that it starts to get rough, OK? You think you’re up to it?’
The Provo said nothing.
Joyce turned away. As he opened the door he said over his shoulder to Harry Synnott, ‘Don’t talk to the little shit.’
Harry Synnott stood near the door. The prisoner threw the towel away, then sat down on the floor, his back to the wall.
It was more than ten minutes before either of them spoke.
‘You’re a bit young to be a party to torture.’ The prisoner’s chin was up, his head tilted back to rest on the wall.
Synnott said nothing.
The prisoner said, ‘Those bastards don’t believe in the law.’ Synnott looked across. The prisoner was staring at him, his lips trying for a sneer, but let down by an unmistakable tremor. ‘Great men altogether, those two. When they’ve got one man in a room, and a cop shop full of hard men to back them up.’
Synnott took out his notebook. He wrote down a few words.
‘Keeping a note?’
Synnott said, ‘I’m not supposed to speak to you.’