Little Criminals (17 page)

Frankie took another bite from the apple and gave Milky a nod. ‘Got some stuff to shift.’ The two left the staffroom and went into the front of the building, a former butcher’s shop. The window was covered by a grubby once-white blind that filtered all strength from the daylight. There was an old-fashioned ornate cash register and a mechanical scales. On shallow shelves underneath the counter, the top sheets of a stack of white wrapping paper were yellowed and turning up at the edges. There was some kind of metal dispenser at the end of the counter, holding a roll of plastic bags, a length of the roll hanging down almost to the floor. The bags each had an illustration in dark blue ink. It showed a fat, cheerful butcher and the slogan, ‘There’s No Meat Like Rafferty’s Meat’. Against the back wall, there was a worn, scarred, well-scrubbed butcher’s block. The shop hadn’t functioned for over two years, but the smell of dead meat lingered. It was like someone had tidied up one weekend and everyone forgot to come in the following Monday or ever again.

The site had twice been purchased by companies that pulled out of the deal when business slumped and survival took precedence over expansion. When he rented the place for a month, Milky used two cut-outs between himself and the people who owned the building.

‘You reckon what,’ Milky said, ‘a week, no more than that?’

‘Three, four days,’ Frankie said, ‘no stalling.’ He pressed a key on the register and watched the drawer spring open. It was empty. What I need now is a dozen mobile phones, ready-paid, clean and untraceable, kind I can use once, and then bury.’

Frankie took another bite out of the apple, dropped the core into the cash drawer and slammed it shut.

Milky gestured at the bulky holdalls on the floor near the counter. ‘This them?’

‘Some jewellery, small electronic stuff – Palm Pilot, a couple of laptops, digital cameras, silverware, shit like that. A few decent watches, too – I’m keeping a souvenir.’ Frankie held up his wrist and Milky nodded appreciatively at the Rolex.

‘Everyone should have one.’

Once the portable loot was shifted by Milky, and passed to a fence, it would bring enough of a cash bonus to take care of running expenses.

Martin Paxton came through from the back room. ‘Just the man,’ he said, and handed Milky a piece of paper torn from a notebook. ‘I jotted down her list.’ He put his hands on his hips and smiled.

Milky raised an eyebrow and glanced at the list, his tongue flicking at his half-open lips. ‘Facial wipes? Fuck sake.’ He shook his head, passed the list to Frankie and grinned. ‘Madam keeps this up, maybe you ought to jack up the ransom by a few grand.’

Frankie read the list. ‘No radio. Don’t want hubby sending messages through some helpful disc jockey. Rest of it, what the fuck. She’s going to pay her way, before this is done.’

Milky came back to the former butcher’s shop that evening carrying two plastic shopping bags, the air around him reeking of fish and chips. He dumped one bag on the table in the staffroom and said, ‘Dinner is served, gentlemen.’ The smaller bag he left on the floor by a wall. ‘Her ladyship’s delivery.’

Brendan Sweetman took charge of dividing up the individually wrapped portions from the chipper. Dolly Finn asked, ‘Is there nothing else?’

Milky looked for a moment as though he might be about to say something waspy, then he just said, ‘No.’ Dolly turned away and went to the fridge, where he found one of the sandwiches that Milky had brought earlier. He sat down, opened the
Mirror
and nibbled at the sandwich as he read.

Frankie Crowe unwrapped a packet of fish and chips and asked, ‘Anything unusual going on out there? Cops putting up roadblocks, that kind of thing?’

‘Not that I’ve heard,’ Milky said.

‘Raids, searches?’

Milky shook his head. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, I think I’d have heard.’ Brendan, already halfway through his own food, reached over for the packet of fish and chips that Dolly had disowned and moved it closer to his side of the table.

Martin Paxton emptied a bag of chips on to a plate and added a portion of cod. He got a bottle of Ballygowan from the fridge and took the food upstairs to the hostage.

‘Milky,’ Brendan Sweetman said, ‘where in the name of fuck did you get those videos?
Titanic
, for Jesus sake. And that other thing, Jack Nicholson. I mean, what about something made this century?’

‘What’s the matter, Sweets—’ Milky adopted an American accent,‘—
you can’t handle the truth
?’

‘Fuck it, I’ll go out later and get something worth watching.’

‘No one leaves here,’ Frankie Crowe said. ‘We don’t want locals noticing a parade of strangers coming and going. Milky comes in and out, one guy, nothing odd about that.’

‘Just the once. Down the street, get a few videos, no big deal?’

‘It’s a couple of days, Brendan, that’s not a big deal. Then, we collect the ransom, and you can be up to your bollocks in DVDs.’

Sweetman made a grimace of displeasure. He finished his own food, screwed the wrapping paper into a ball and threw it across the room, missing a waste bin by a couple of feet, then he unwrapped Dolly’s untouched chips.

Milky said to Frankie, ‘You’re not tempted to ring, see how the money’s coming along?’

‘He’s sensible, he’ll be working on it. If not, fuck him.’

When he got home from Turner’s Lane garda station that evening, Detective Inspector John Grace went to his home office, a converted spare bedroom, and spent an hour reading the file on a case that was due to start in the Circuit Criminal Court the following Tuesday. It had been fourteen months since he supervised the investigation and many of the details had become blurred. In the witness box, he’d have to provide instant, clear answers that gelled with those of other officers.

Around eight o’clock, his wife Mona came in and asked if he was OK for taking Sam to bed.

‘My turn,’ John Grace said.

‘You haven’t eaten yet,’ Mona said. ‘I’ll take him up’.

‘Not at all,’ Grace said. ‘My turn.’

He valued these evenings, reading his grandson to sleep. Married at twenty, he had three children of his own before he was thirty. Now, at forty-six, he’d been a grandfather for almost six years. Of his own kids, Jocelyn had an engineering job in Birmingham and David was studying economics at UCD. The eldest, Jess – Sam’s mother – had a flat in town and worked as a freelance illustrator. Because Jess was single and working, John Grace and his wife helped with the raising of Sam. Grace was enjoying it, aware that when he was a young policeman pursuing an ambitious career, he’d missed a lot of the pleasures of parenthood.

He tidied up his desk, locking the case material away in a file drawer. Sam sometimes used the computer in the office, to play his
Pingu
and
Bananas in Pajamas
games. Raising his own three kids, Grace had become scrupulous about never leaving documents or crime-scene photographs lying about. There were times when he brought home the kind of stuff that would give a kid nightmares.

Until recently, Grace had never lived in a house big enough to offer a separate room as a home office. Then, two years ago, he and Mona had moved to a house near the sea, at Sutton. With the two oldest kids moved on, they had more room than they needed. The home office was twice the size of the shoebox he shared with another detective down at Turner’s Lane.

Sam stayed over most Friday and Saturday nights, sometimes a couple more nights, depending on his mother’s work and social schedule. He liked to change into his pyjamas himself, and if he sometimes got them inside out, that didn’t matter. John Grace sat on the child’s bed and watched the awkward ballet of sleeves and trouser legs until Sam was ready for bed.

‘Where were we?’

Sam had already fetched the book from his shelves. ‘We were going to start the cat story tonight.’

‘Fair enough, lie down there and we’ll start.’ Grace watched as Sam wormed his way under the bedclothes. The simple beauty and innocence of the big brown eyes in that soft oval face never ceased to amaze him. He’d seen that quality in his own children, and watched as it was washed away by incremental waves of maturity. There wasn’t a face on the planet, no matter how hardened, weary or cruel, that hadn’t at one time, and however briefly, glowed with that same beauty and innocence. Grace opened the book in his lap. ‘
Sunny’s Big Adventure
, Chapter One.’

*

Angela was lying face down on the mattress when the kidnapper with the soft voice brought the meal of fish and chips and a bottle of water. She looked up, saw the food, then turned so she was facing the wall. She heard the click of the plate being placed gently on the bare floorboards.

‘Don’t be silly, love. You have to keep your strength up.’

The smell from the fish and chips was heavy and inescapable, filling every corner of the room.

The day had started with the same kidnapper looking in on her, yawning. He’d brought her a cup of tea. When she rapped on the floor he came and took her to the toilet, down a short corridor, past doors open on what seemed like a couple of makeshift bedrooms. She could see mattresses on the floor, bedclothes thrown untidily on top. The toilet was dim and dusty. The man stood outside. There was no window in the toilet; the bare bulb was low wattage. There was graffiti on the back of the door and on the walls, some crude, mostly just names. Some kind of workplace.

Later, when the same gang member came up with a sandwich, an apple and milk for her lunch, he scribbled a note as she recited a list of things she needed and he said he couldn’t promise anything.

She opened the sandwich but couldn’t eat it. Nothing wrong with it, ham with a sliver of limp lettuce, but she suddenly wasn’t hungry. She ignored the apple but drank some of the milk.

Her plans for organising her thinking came to nothing. Her mind seemed clogged and slow, incapable of pulling together coherent thoughts. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t distress. More a kind of indolence. She lay on the mattress most of the afternoon, in something close to a daze. Hours passed in which she did nothing but lie there. Her eyes seemed to have acquired the ability to consistently focus on some point in mid-air.

The gang looked in on her every half-hour or so. Always the same, checking that the sheet of wood covering the window hadn’t been interfered with. A glance around to see that everything was as it had been, then they left. None of them said anything, except the one with the soft voice, the leader’s sidekick, who made a point of being friendly.
Everything OK? Warm enough? Fancy a Coke?
She ignored him.

The small fat gunman was easy to read, even with the mask. Every movement, everything he said to her, dripped with irritation and resentment. It was like he wanted her to know that she’d done something that personally hurt him. In the afternoon, he came up after she knocked on the floor. When he took her to the toilet he used single words, his voice coarse and abrupt. ‘OK,’ he said, holding the door open, when she told him what she wanted. When they got to the toilet he said, ‘There.’

When she closed the toilet door, he roughly pushed it open again and said, ‘No.’ She didn’t see the point of this. ‘Are you trying to humiliate me?’ she said. This time, he used two words. ‘Fuck off.’ He stood out in the corridor, off to one side of the door and out of sight, while she used the toilet.

At some stage that day she took off her watch. Whenever she looked at it the time on its face seemed to bear no relationship to the time that had surely crept by. She’d left the watch on the floor several feet away from the mattress and she hadn’t the energy or the will to get up and check it. The day merged into a dull, featureless length of time, a disabling fear leaking out of her every pore.

Now, in the evening, the smell of the fish and chips reminded her that she had hardly eaten all day. The satisfaction of her insolent non-response to the gunman who delivered the smelly food had faded. She turned over and looked at the food. She made a face.
Christ, even a McDonald’s would be better than this
. It was old-style fish-and-chip-shop food. The gnarled brown batter in which the fish was encased was visibly saturated with grease. The thick chips were little better, but they were edible if she took sips of the Ballygowan. There was no fork, so she used her fingers. Once she got used to the taste, she ate more eagerly. By the time she finished the chips the edge had been taken off her need, but she was still hungry. She broke the fish in two. The grease had penetrated the batter and coated the surface of the fish. She split the batter away from the fish and tried a piece of the white flesh. It was hard to discern a flavour under the taste of the grease, but she ate it all. When there was no more fish she ate some of the batter. When she squeezed a piece of batter she saw the grease run out of it, which was when she pushed the plate away, took another mouthful of Ballygowan and lay down on the mattress.

After a while, the chatty gunman came to collect the plate. ‘Good girl, well done.’ He left a plastic shopping bag on the floor. ‘Stuff you asked for.’ Again she ignored him.

When he was gone, she emptied the bag. A couple of celebrity magazines, a copy of
Cosmo
, a hairbrush, tissues, facial wipes, a three-pack of knickers, toothbrush and paste, a sponge, two small bottles of Coke and a litre of Ballygowan. She used the wipes to get the grease off her fingers, then cleaned her face and neck and under her arms.