Better Together (35 page)

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘You’re not planning another stakeout at March Manor, are you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Well then chill, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Sorry.’

None of the messages that came in that day were from Joe. She couldn’t chill. She was strung out with tension. And even more strung out because she kept telling herself there was nothing to be tense about.

She was logging out of her computer before going home when DJ’s phone rang, and she knew from the tone of his voice that it was something out of the ordinary. Her first thought (how self-centred can you be, she asked herself afterwards; you need to keep a sense of perspective) was that Joe had rung DJ to complain about her, just as Paudie had done. But the editor of the paper hung up and looked at her.

‘There’s an incident developing at the school on the Kilkenny road,’ he said. ‘Some sort of protest. I need you to go there. Find out as much as you can. Get photos.’

Another night she would have jumped at the chance to cover something even vaguely newsworthy, but she’d planned to wash her hair before meeting Joe and it always took ages to dry. She didn’t want to waste time on some non-story at the local school.

‘Don’t you want to do it yourself?’ she asked DJ.

‘I’ve things to do here. Besides, you’re perfectly capable. I want you to get the details back to Shimmy and me so that we can update the website. OK?’

‘OK,’ she said. A few pupils staging a protest about too much homework or whatever else was going on at the school wouldn’t delay her that much, after all. She’d still have time
to wash her hair and do her make-up the way Talia had taught her. If she was going to have to face the wrath of Joe O’Malley, she’d do it looking her very best!

She pulled on her jacket and hurried out of the office building. The school was about three kilometres outside the town, so she hopped into her car and turned on to the main street. A soft drizzle had begun to fall, misting the windows and slowing traffic. However, it didn’t take her long to reach the school, where a small knot of people had already gathered and were looking at the building. The flashing blue lights of a police car illuminated the bystanders.

She got out of the Beetle and looked at the building too. The original two-storey flat-roof structure had been built in the seventies. A further single-storey extension had been added to the side of it, making an L-shape. The large windows were currently in darkness, and it took Sheridan a few seconds to realise that people weren’t trying to peer into the building itself – they were staring at the figure standing on the two-storey roof.

‘Who is it?’ she asked a woman in a red coat and blue scarf.

‘Conall Brophy,’ she said. ‘He’s from the Bawnbeg Estate. I don’t know what he’s doing up there.’

Sheridan circled the onlookers and stood beside a young garda. She introduced herself and asked what was going on.

‘He’s protesting because the bank is repossessing his house,’ said the garda.

‘Why is he doing it on the school roof?’ asked Sheridan.

‘The bank manager is married to the school principal,’ explained the garda. ‘They recently moved to a bigger house on the other side of Ardbawn. He’s upset that they’re trading up while he’s being turfed out.’

‘Right.’ Sheridan nodded. ‘So what’s—’

As she spoke, Conall started shouting from the rooftop.

‘They’re all thieving bastards!’ he cried. ‘Them and their swanky cars and their big salaries. And what happens to the likes of me? What? I’m shafted because I miss a couple of payments.’

‘He also lost his job recently,’ the garda said.

Sheridan’s sympathies were entirely with Conall Brophy. She knew how he felt.

‘He has an industrial gas canister up there,’ continued the garda. ‘He’s threatening to blow up the school.’

‘You’re joking!’ Sheridan took her phone out of her pocket, ready to call DJ.

‘My sergeant is going to try to reason with him,’ said the garda.

‘I hope he’s successful.’

‘We’ve called for the fire brigade all the same,’ the garda added, just as his sergeant beckoned to him to join him.

Sheridan called the
Central News
and brought DJ up to speed.

‘Conall Brophy?’ DJ paused, and Sheridan imagined him trawling his brain and maybe also his computer for information. ‘I don’t know him. Get as much info on him as you can, OK? I can put together something about the bank manager and the teacher. It must be the IRB. Clinton O’Grady is the manager there. Jude Delaney manages the other one. She’s grand, but Clinton can be a bit of a pompous arse sometimes. I’ll do some background checking on the bank. See what other dastardly deeds I can pin on them. It’s a while since we’ve done a bastard bankers story.’ He sounded cheerful now. ‘This is great.’

‘Not if he lights that canister and blows us all to hell,’ remarked Sheridan.

‘There’s no chance of that, surely?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was watching the agitated man on the rooftop. ‘He seems pretty strung out to me.’

‘Any likelihood he’ll jump?’ This time DJ sounded concerned.

‘It’s a possibility, I guess.’

‘Ask people about him,’ said DJ urgently. ‘Don’t waste any time.’

‘I’m on it.’ Sheridan ended the call and put her phone back in her pocket. It was raining more heavily now. Which might be a good thing, she told herself, if he really does try to burn the school down.

She spoke to more people in the ever-increasing crowd, and then the tender from the local voluntary fire crew arrived. Conall Brophy was getting more and more voluble and she couldn’t help thinking the likelihood of the whole thing ending without some sort of disaster was decreasing by the minute.

She phoned DJ back, giving him additional details. As well as losing his job and having a repossession order for his house, Mr Brophy had been turned down for the caretaker job at the school the previous week. He’d come back earlier that day to talk to the principal, but she’d refused to see him. Somehow he’d managed to secrete himself in an office and stay there until the school had closed. Nobody was sure whether he’d brought the gas canister with him (difficult, they reckoned; it was big and heavy) or if he’d found one on the premises, but it seemed that he’d managed to manoeuvre it up the stairs, climbed out of a window on to the roof of
the extension and dragged it up a fire escape to the higher roof.

‘Ironic him using a fire escape,’ said DJ, ‘if the place goes up in flames.’

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Has the national media got hold of it yet?’

‘Oh yes. I’m sure they have people on the way. It’s all over Twitter now and I’m keeping the website updated. Stay in touch.’

‘Of course. I’ve emailed you a couple of photos, but the phone isn’t good enough in the dark.’

‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘Anything will do. Get one or two of the locals rubbernecking too.’

The gardai and the firemen were now talking to Conall’s wife, Lorraine, who’d been brought to the scene to plead with her husband. He was ignoring her, continuing to shout from the roof, berating the bank and the school and shouting about how they’d let him down. Sheridan still felt sorry for him. So did many of the crowd. But she knew that if he succeeded in causing a fireball, their sympathies would evaporate very quickly.

She detached herself from the group and walked around the side of the extension. It was quiet there, all the activity taking place at the front of the school. She continued to walk around the building, not entirely sure what she was doing but covering all the bases.

She was at the back of the school when she saw it. An enormous oak tree as tall as the second storey, with wide branches well spaced. An easy climb, she thought. One she could do herself. She gripped the lowest branch and tested it. Strong enough for someone twice her weight, she
reckoned. She began to pull herself up, then stopped. It wasn’t her job to climb the tree and try to reach Conall Brophy. If things went wrong, she might not be able to prevent him either throwing himself from the roof or igniting the gas. She wanted to be a hero but she also had to be sensible. Adding her own presence to the mix might make things worse. She wrestled with her conscience and her desire to be part of the action for another minute, before walking back to the front of the building and speaking to the chief firefighter instead. She knew him. She’d met him with Shimmy in the pub on Saturday night.

She told him about the tree, and he spoke to the garda sergeant, who’d taken a few minutes out from negotiating with the man on the roof. The sergeant looked at the younger garda, who nodded.

‘A rescue attempt.’ Sheridan phoned DJ. ‘Hope it works.’

The garda sergeant continued to talk to Conall Brophy while the junior officer walked around to the tree. Sheridan hoped that she’d been right about it as a potential way on to the roof. And that the garda would be able to climb it. It might be easy enough in the daylight and when the weather was dry, she thought. But in the dark, and with falling rain . . . maybe she’d been stupid in suggesting it.

The young officer (Charlie Sweetman, she told DJ, who was waiting on the phone to hear the outcome; he’s single and lives with his parents on the Dublin road) was almost beside the man on the roof before the onlookers spotted him and took a collective breath. And then, suddenly, he’d caught Conall Brophy and in one fluid movement had him face down on the roof and handcuffed.

Almost at once the firemen raised their ladder, and a couple
of minutes later Conall was being brought to the ground amid a mixture of applause and jeers from the assembled crowd.

His wife rushed over to him and put her arms around him. The police led him to the squad car and arrested him. Sheridan wasn’t sure what she should do next. She didn’t think she’d be able to talk to him at the police station, and she wasn’t sure that the gardai would answer questions there.

‘I’ll give you a call later,’ said the sergeant when she spoke to him just as he was about to get into the squad car. ‘I’ll let you know what’s happening. We might keep him in overnight but we may have to release him. Can’t tell you now. But . . . good idea on the tree.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. She looked around her. Lorraine Brophy, a pale-faced woman in her mid-twenties, was being comforted by one of her neighbours. Sheridan explained that she was with the
Central News
and told Lorraine she was sorry about what had happened.

‘My husband is a good person,’ said Lorraine as she wiped tears from her eyes. ‘He’s had a hard time. This wasn’t his fault. You can’t make him out to be a criminal.’

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ Sheridan looked at her anxiously. She didn’t want to upset Lorraine any more than she was already. Yet she knew that she had to ask.

‘I have to get to the station to be with him,’ said Lorraine. ‘It’s in Kilkenny.’

‘I’ll drive you,’ Sheridan told her. ‘You can talk as we go.’

By the time they got to Kilkenny, she knew everything there was to know about Conall and Lorraine – his frustration at losing three different jobs when the companies where he’d
worked closed down, his concern about their financial state and his attempts to resolve the situation. He was a forklift operator, Lorraine said, and there just wasn’t the work any more. He thought he’d be good at the caretaking job in the school because he was a useful handyman, but it had gone to a man in his late fifties who, according to Lorraine, was a friend of the principal and who didn’t need the money.

‘If he gets prosecuted he’ll have a criminal record,’ she said miserably. ‘That won’t help with the job hunt either. Or getting another loan for a house. Not that we’ll ever get that. We’re going to end up living with his mother again, the aul’ wagon. She’ll blame me for how things have turned out. She always does.’ She blew her nose in the tissue that Sheridan handed her before going on to say, in reply to Sheridan’s question, that they’d no children. When they’d first married, the fact that babies hadn’t come along straight away had been something that had upset her. But now she was glad. An unemployed criminal for a dad, she sniffed.

‘He’s not a criminal,’ Sheridan told her. ‘He’s just someone who snapped. We all do from time to time.’

‘Yeah, but the rest of us do it quietly, behind closed doors.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t,’ said Sheridan. ‘Maybe it’s good to make a fuss sometimes.’

‘You’re very nice,’ Lorraine said. ‘I know he shouldn’t have done what he did, but please don’t trash him in the newspaper.’

‘DJ is a good man too,’ said Sheridan. ‘He’ll give your side of the story, don’t worry.’

‘Thanks.’

She followed Lorraine into the station, where Vinnie Murray was standing in the hallway. He greeted her cordially
but told her, as the sergeant had done earlier, that there would be no news on Conall for a while.

‘I see you’re following trouble,’ he said to her while Lorraine went in search of water.

‘Ah, not really,’ she told him. ‘I feel sorry for Mr Brophy.’

‘Idiot,’ said the superintendent.

She grinned at him.

‘That was off the record,’ said Vinnie Murray hastily.

‘Absolutely,’ she assured him. ‘You’ll let me know how he gets on.’

‘I said I’d call you and I will.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And the truth is, I only came to the station because his wife needed a lift.’

‘Managed to get yourself in the right place at the right time all the same, didn’t you?’

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I was quite prepared to go home and—Oh!’ The right place at the right time! She looked at her watch. Unbelievably, she’d forgotten about Joe O’Malley. And she was supposed to be meeting him in twenty minutes. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said. ‘I’d better go. Promise you’ll ring?’

‘Absolutely.’

Sheridan saw Lorraine returning with a plastic glass of water and asked her if she’d be OK on her own.

‘Yes.’ The other woman nodded. ‘I’ll ring one of my friends when I know what’s happening.’

‘All right then.’ Sheridan gave her a tentative hug.

‘Thanks,’ said Lorraine. ‘Thanks for listening.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Sheridan as she hurried back to her car.