Little Criminals (26 page)

A problem had been solved, he was a step closer to getting Angela back. Kevin Little’s involvement wiped out any logistical hurdles to lining up the money. More than that, Justin felt as though – in an implicit way – he’d received some kind of promotion.

*

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I offer you my heart and my soul.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me in my last agony.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I— may I—

Fuck it.

Angela turned over onto her back and stretched to ease the muscles in her shoulders.
All that time with the nuns beating it into me, and I can’t remember the damn thing now that it’s appropriate
.

Appropriate, but not important. Not even now. The prayers she learned in school, seeming to carry such weight, turned into meaningless strings of words when the faith that sustained them evaporated. They were still carved into the memory, but less sharply, the edges rubbed away.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I—

It was in the missal under the heading ‘Three Ejaculations’, which gave the girls at St Catherine’s no end of chuckles. It was Sheila Brannigan who stood up one day in class, shaking her head so her long blonde hair danced on her shoulders, and asked Sister Dominica, ‘Sister, how many ejaculations are appropriate in any one session?’

It was anger the nun stifled, not embarrassment. Her weary ‘Sit down, girl’, acknowledged the truth. Things were changing. There were always thirteen-year-olds who dared in private to mock the majesty of the cloth. Now, the schools were crawling with youngsters who wanted to publicly flaunt their moral and intellectual superiority to the Pope.

‘The Prayer for the Grace of a Happy Death,’ Sister Dominica called it. Angela tried to remember if she’d ever, in her days of faith, truly believed that there were magic words that would help in the face of death. At worst, glimpsed in momentary thoughts she never entertained, death was an unexpected intrusion, the accident or disease that could suddenly cut across anyone’s path. Mostly, the certainty of death was associated with the wrinkles and the cooled passions of an old age that wouldn’t come for decades. Death would be something that would eventually meander into her presence, circling at a distance, allowing time for familiarity to breed acceptance. That comforting image had been swept away by the knowledge that her life was now a short thread, possibly measured in hours, minutes, or – as she’d felt when the kidnappers stopped in the woods on the way down here – seconds.

The thoughts she had carefully suppressed were now scuttling around her mind, mice in the skirting boards. There was something in the gang leader’s rudeness, his indifference, above all the dismissive contempt of his voice, that was unmistakable. When he looked at her, when he spoke to her or about her, she felt disposable.
There will be no ceremony
. Any time she was in his presence she watched for the sudden movement that would tell her it was over.

Is Justin haggling?

The thought came unbidden.

That’s what he does all day at work. Haggles, over words and clauses, dates and amounts of money. Justin haggles for a living.

Justin loves me
.

Was the gang leader telling the truth? Was Justin haggling? Was he trusting his negotiating skills against people whose brutality was beyond his understanding? Was that why the gang needed the note, to put more pressure on Justin? Should she have been more emotional in what she wrote – should she have pleaded?

Justin loved her. She knew that. From the start, the open, flatly stated, frequently repeated, assurances of his love were wholly convincing.

She knew he loved her more than she loved him.

Do I love him?

She asked herself that on the morning of their marriage, and the answer she told herself was the same now as it was then.

She loved him – no, she loved being married to him – for what he was. His character and qualities, his assuredness, his generosity, his pride in her. She liked him for a lot of reasons. He was a good provider. He never embarrassed her. He was kind. She liked his confident advance through the business and social jungle, his lack of doubt in himself, in her, in them.

She appreciated him.

And his screwing around was part of that.

She had known about the women from early on. Without any evidence other than her understanding of the subtleties of their relationship. The unnecessary pause, the words spoken cheerfully but with a casually averted gaze. Very occasionally, the tone that said,
Don’t ask
.

The evidence didn’t come until three years ago, when she was saying goodbye to Elizabeth out at the airport. Sharing a coffee at a table on the mezzanine overlooking the departures area, seeing Justin come in through the sliding doors below. He was carrying a briefcase, with a short, over-cheerful blonde by his side. The blonde collected a large envelope at the Ryanair desk, took the briefcase from Justin and gave him a peck on the cheek. There was nothing obvious, he might merely have been seeing off a business colleague, but there was an intimacy, the hand on the blonde’s forearm, the tilt of her head, the eye contact.

Elizabeth was chatting away, and Angela leaned back, casually moving her head out of Justin’s line of sight, nodding in agreement with something her sister said. At first she thought her reaction sprang from a fear of being caught snooping, but she later realised she instinctively ducked away from the possibility that she might embarrass her husband. In the years before she met Justin, Angela had been PA to an up-and-comer in a brokerage. He was married with children and he treated Angela with impeccable professionalism. He was open about his girlfriend, and Angela came to understand that among his peers it was as routine to make casual remarks about the problems and joys of the extra-marital side of life as it was to commiserate about a particularly unfortunate golf score.

So be it. By and by, whenever Justin was engaged in one of his little adventures, Angela took care to stay out of his line of sight. There was nothing to be achieved by confrontation – just anger, pain and the end of everything. This was part of the package.

Angela’s enthusiasm for her regular sexual jousts with Justin did not diminish. Her feelings for him and for their marriage didn’t change. In a way, the knowledge that the marriage survived such assaults buoyed her. She knew what they had together. He knew it. It was what it was.

Do I trust him?

She knew him. She could trust him to be the man she knew him to be.

The gang leader was playing with her head.

Justin wouldn’t haggle
.

Not on this. Angela concluded she had absolute faith in her husband’s love, and in his loyalty to her.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I—

And it was suddenly there, faded but irredeemably etched in her mind. It came to her in Sister Dominica’s brusque voice, and for the first time ever she envied the nun her smug, eternal certainties.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I breathe forth my soul with You in peace
.

Dolly Finn and Brendan Sweetman were walking on the Rosslare beach. Neither had much to say, which suited them both. They strolled the length of the beach and halfway back, then Sweetman said he needed to go to the jacks. Finn nodded and watched Sweetman climbing the steps to the strand road.

The pub
.

Supposed to be against Frankie’s rules, not that Dolly Finn gave a damn. He continued walking a while, then he found a quiet spot and sat down. Here and there kids were squealing, parents were snappy. The summer season over, few people were using the beach. The day was sunny, with a bit of wind, and Dolly Finn tried to remember when he’d last sat on a beach. Too long ago to remember when or who with. He lay back and felt the tension leak out of his shoulders.

Up in Dublin, Frankie parked in the grounds of the Church of the Most Precious Blood. He pulled on latex gloves, took from his pocket the note the hostage had written and used a pencil to add two lines of block capitals at the bottom. Then he went inside and planted the note.

Three hours earlier, shortly after he’d got the hostage to write the note, he’d taken off for Dublin. He’d probably be back in Rosslare tomorrow night. Maybe have another chat with Martin. The previous day, after all four of them, and the hostage, arrived from Dublin and settled in, Frankie and Martin ended the day yawning over a couple of cups of coffee in the kitchen of the Rosslare bungalow. The chat didn’t last long enough for Frankie to be sure, but it was like Martin was going soft on the plans they’d talked about in the months before this kidnap thing. Martin was talking about buying a house somewhere outside Dublin. Him and Debbie. Which was fine, as far as it went. But you have to think ahead, figure where you want to be ten years from now. And if you want to look to the long term, you’ve got to see this thing as the roots of a money tree. Speculate to accumulate.

‘There’s not going to be too many pay days like this. You want to squander it on home comforts, fair enough. But the kind of deals we talked about, you could end up buying a whole fucking street.’

Martin said, ‘It’s just, I’m not sure how long I want to go on living on my nerves. This works out, it’s a big lump of money and it could be time to quit while we’re ahead.’

What Frankie wanted to talk to Martin about was ambition. Doing a thing just for the money – so you could have a bigger house or a new car or longer holidays in more expensive resorts – that was just greed. Doing a thing to get the money so you could step up to a new level, that was ambition. Long-term thinking. Consolidate, move on, you end up with fingers in all sorts of pies, many of them legit. That was the goal. It might well be that Martin wasn’t – or wouldn’t ever be – ready for that. Which would be a pity.

Driving out of the grounds of the Church of the Most Precious Blood, Frankie glanced at his Rolex. Lunch, then he’d ring the hostage’s husband and give the cops something to do.

The one with the soft voice brought Angela’s lunch. A thin slice of cold roast beef between a couple of pieces of cheap sliced pan, and a small carton of Tropicana. The gunman poured the orange juice into a paper cup and stood over by the door as Angela took a bite of the sandwich. He was wearing faded blue jeans and a white T-shirt and the brown woollen ski mask. Perhaps it was just that she’d become used to the masks but she no longer found them so frightening. The gunman looked like an overgrown kid playing a fancy-dress game.

The window, like the room in the first place she’d been held, was covered on the inside by a sheet of wood. When they arrived here the previous evening, they’d locked her in here with a bottle of Pepsi. It was after midnight when the tall skinny one came in and took her to the toilet. She’d had nothing to eat, and when she woke this morning she felt nauseous and had to bang on the door until the gang leader came and took her to the toilet to be sick.

After she’d written the note he wanted and he’d taken it away, when she was alone, the tears came and she spent a long while in a fog of depression. She hated them for creating her fear, she hated them for the horror they had invented for her family. Mostly, she hated them for saturating her in helplessness.

Fuck them
.

The light bulb in the centre of the ceiling was a sixty-watt effort that was just bright enough to add to the gloom of the room. The sheet of wood that blocked the window was framed by a thin line of surging daylight that emphasised the feebleness of the artificial light.

She knew that whatever she wrote in the note to Justin would only add to the pressure on him. That was the purpose of the note. So, she’d kept it as short and as bare as possible.

Dear Justin,
They told me to write you a note. I am OK, but I miss you and Saskia and Luke and love you all very much. I know you are doing everything you can. Take care,
Angela

She felt hungry, but she knew it would be foolish to eat anything heavy so soon after being sick. As the gang leader read the note, she asked if she could have some toast and a cup of tea.

‘Later,’ he said. It was well over two hours before the one with the soft voice brought the roast-beef sandwich.

Angela took small bites from it and chewed each one slowly. The meat tasted better than she expected, and in her mouth the flavours of the processed bread, the butter, the salt and the cold meat seemed both separate and perfectly complementary. She washed the last crumbs down with another mouthful of orange juice, and if she was imagining the physical boost the food gave her, so be it.

Christ sake, do something. Any fucking thing
.

She was still wearing the same tracksuit, grubbier than ever. Her hair was stringy, her skin taut.

She’d heard a car drive away during the morning and from the lack of sounds of movement in the house, she guessed that she and the soft-voiced gunman were alone. When he took the empty plate, Angela rubbed her hands on the legs of her tracksuit and said, ‘Isn’t there anything I can change into?’

‘Maybe we can get something. See if there’s a shop.’

‘Can I at least have a shower?’

He said nothing for a moment, his indecision reflected in tentative movements, a step back, a hand half raised, then, ‘I suppose—’