Little Criminals (30 page)

‘Could you tell me how long you’ve been renting the house?’

‘Just a couple of days. Myself and the lads, we’re down from Dublin for a bit of a break. Is everything all right?’

‘And how many of you would that be?’

‘Four of us. We’re bus drivers. Just down for a bit of drinking, few games of cards, check out the talent. Everything OK?’

First, the cops ask the questions they know the answers to. Once the busybody called in the report about a man in a mask, they must have done a check with the owner of the house.

Now, get to the point.

‘Would it be OK if we had a look around?’

Martin waved a hand. ‘No bother, but is there something we should know?’

‘Nothing to worry about.’

Dolly Finn was sitting in the kitchen. He nodded when the garda came in. Brendan Sweetman stayed in the hallway, one eye on the younger garda, who didn’t reckon it worth his while to come into the house.

The older cop poked his head through doorways, nodded, mooched on. When he spoke, there was no curiosity in his voice. ‘When’ll you be leaving?’ The body language said this was going to work out fine.

‘Just a few days, soon as the booze money dries up. Listen, we haven’t done anything wrong, have we?’

One last door. The cop tried the handle and found it locked.

Stay quiet, Angela. Not a peep
.

‘What’s in there?’

Martin said, ‘That’s the other fella, Liam, that’s his room. Just a Dublin habit, I suppose, locking up when you go out. He went into Wexford earlier on, pick up a few things.’

The sergeant nodded.

He knows
.

Maybe something in Martin’s tone or in his face. Maybe something about the way Brendan was hanging around the hall, looking like he was expecting a visit from the Holy Ghost. Whatever it was, the cop knew. No doubt about it. And he knew this was no time to be a hero. In his head he was measuring the distance to the front door. He said, ‘Well, that seems to be all right, lads. No problem, then.’

He blushed.

He knows that we know that he knows
.

The cop was moving towards the front door, his casual smile fixed now, his movements too deliberate. Then Dolly Finn was standing beside Brendan and raising his gun, pointing it at the sergeant. ‘We all know the score,’ he said quietly to the cop. ‘I’m sorry.’

Martin said, ‘Don’t—’ and he saw Dolly’s finger tighten on the trigger and he knew he was too far away to do anything. Brendan howled, ‘Fuck sake!’ and pushed Dolly’s arm away. The gun fired, the noise seemed to make the room shake. The smell of the gun’s explosion swept through the air and Martin, having instinctively flinched from the shot, opened his eyes and turned towards the sergeant and there was no one there. Martin ran down the hall towards the open front door and he could see that the sergeant was halfway down the path, running in a crouch, as though he expected any second to take a bullet in the back of the head. The younger cop was almost at the road.

Brendan and Dolly came out of the house a step behind Martin. The sergeant was running past the squad car, screaming, ‘Leave it!’

The younger cop dropped the mike of the car radio and ran after the sergeant. They were forty feet away and only a few yards from the cover of the woods.

‘Fuck it!’

Martin stopped. He turned to Brendan. ‘The cop car. Smash the radio, make sure the car can’t move.’

To Dolly: ‘Put the mask on her, get her into the boot, we’re going.’

‘We should’ve done them. It was the only thing to do!’

‘That’s over with now, let’s go.’

‘Why—’ Dolly turned and called after Brendan. ‘Why the hell—’

Brendan jerked the cable of the radio mike out of the squad car’s dashboard. ‘Killing two cops? You’re not fucking serious, man. Jesus Christ.’ He brought his boot down on the mike and little bits of plastic scattered on the roadway.

‘Move it!’ Martin said. ‘It’s done now, just grab what you can.’

Brendan opened the bonnet of the garda car. The other two headed back towards the house.

‘Prints?’ Dolly said.

‘No time,’ Martin said. ‘Torch the place.’

The shooting in Rosslare was on the radio news bulletins within the hour. Brief and bare, just the news that two Wexford gardai had been fired on in an incident in a house at the holiday resort. ‘No further details are available.’ Frankie was approaching the Wexford roundabout on the N
II
when he heard the news. He did a 180 around the roundabout and drove back towards Dublin.

Steering with one hand, he tapped Martin’s number into his mobile. Nothing.

Could be they’d been caught. Could be Martin had left the mobile behind in whatever kind of scramble had gone on. An hour later, Frankie was stuck in the Gorey traffic jam when the next radio bulletin said that two Rosslare gardai were recovering from their ordeal at the hands of an armed gang. Garda sources believed the incident was connected to the kidnap of Dublin woman Angela Kennedy.

There was more of that kind of thing, none of which told Frankie anything he needed to hear.

Could be since then the cops caught up with Martin and the others. Could be the cops knew everything. Could be they knew nothing. Could be any fucking thing.

Frankie kept the radio on. When the next news bulletin came the opening words were exactly the same as they’d been an hour ago. ‘Two Wexford gardai are recovering;—’

Frankie tried Martin’s phone again. Nothing.

He needed to leave the money somewhere safe, somewhere he wouldn’t have to babysit the two holdalls. Uncle Cormac’s wasn’t safe, cheesy bastard could come back early. Joan would never take it. He tried to think of who he could trust to hold on to two fat holdalls without getting nosy.

Frankie hadn’t intended ever again coming near Harte’s Cross after the fuck-up over the pub job two months ago. Now, he was driving a stolen Volvo down the main street of the small town with a million in two holdalls in the back of the car. He glanced at the pub as he passed.

Two miles beyond Harte’s Cross, he turned off the main road and drove up a narrow track for a mile or more before he came to a farmhouse, with a shed to one side and a dilapidated tractor to the other. Leo Titley’s home was a plain, grey, squat building, without adornment. Rectangular, with a shallow pitched roof, two bedrooms and a combined living room and kitchen. The house hadn’t been painted in a couple of decades and the wooden window frames were cracked and the glass cloudy. When there was no answer to his knock, Frankie went round the back and broke in. He got the money from the car and five minutes later he was panting slightly, having hidden the heavy holdalls in the attic.

The kitchen smelled of cheap curry, and the unwashed plates on the counter had the hardened remnants of what might have been today’s lunch or last night’s dinner. The windows were too small, the rooms too dark. The furniture in the living room was sparse and ill-matched. Frankie was used to a small flat, but this kind of place would drive you mental after a fortnight.

When Leo got back from wherever he was, Frankie said, ‘You’d better fix your back door, OK?’

Leo was tall and stringy, wearing overalls and boots. His long hair was tied back in a ponytail. In his early thirties, he had the drained appearance of a man fighting a battle he no longer believed in.

‘What’s going on, Frankie?’

‘You gave us bum information. But I treated you fair, even though the pub job was a fuck-up. Now, I’m in a bit of a fix and I need a place to leave some stuff. That OK with you?’

‘What’s going on, Frankie?’

Leo’s life was being eaten away by the effort to make a living from a miserable few acres of land. When his father died, Leo had quit the haulage business and gone back to donate his stubborn loyalty to his father’s hopeless legacy. It paid so little he spent most of his time labouring on other people’s farms and doing odd jobs in Harte’s Cross. The sensible thing would be to sell the land, but economic logic is no match for pride.

As a truck driver, Leo had had a fringe role in several criminal projects, one of them involving Frankie Crowe, which led him to offer Frankie a tip about the vulnerable pub where takings from the bar and the concert gig accumulated.

‘You owe me, is all,’ Frankie said, ‘and I need a place. No big deal. You come and go, I come and go. You say nothing to no one, we’re square.’

Leo stood there, silent, hands in his pockets.

Frankie said, ‘You know I pay my way, right?’

Leo thought for a few moments, then he said, ‘You want a drink or something?’

‘I think you’d better fix that back door, and give me a spare key, so I don’t have to break it again.’

‘You staying now?’

‘I need to eat. Anywhere around here?’

Leo said he’d drive him to the Olive Grove, in Harte’s Cross. ‘It’s not the worst.’

Getting into the pickup, Frankie said, ‘Not one word to no one, OK? You and me know I’m here. No one else. And stay out of the attic.’

Leo looked at him for a moment, then he said, ‘Fair enough.’

Three times on the way into town, and twice during his meal, Frankie tried Martin’s mobile. Still nothing.

After the meal, in the pickup on the way back to Leo’s place, Frankie switched on the radio.

‘Two Wexford gardai—’

He was still listening to the bulletin when his mobile rang.

When he heard Martin’s voice he said, ‘What the fuck is going on?’

Through the late afternoon and into the evening Martin Paxton, Dolly Finn and Brendan Sweetman stuck to narrow, twisting Wicklow roads, through mountains that resisted mobile-phone signals. Every bend in the road was a test of nerve. This wasn’t car-chase country. If they stumbled across the cops around here, the jig was up. Twice they moved off the road, into woods, to take a break from the tension they all felt, and to let the hostage out of the boot for air.

Brendan drove, Martin stared at the screen of his mobile. Mostly it said
No signal
. Every now and then the signal bars would pop up, but would disappear before he could connect with Frankie. Finally, while they were taking a break, he got a strong enough signal. The conversation was short, and afterwards Martin could remember little of it. Mostly he remembered
tough choices
.

‘Just bad luck,’ he told Frankie. ‘Tell you later.’

Frankie said, ‘We might have to make some tough choices. You know what I’m talking about?’

Martin knew. He said, ‘Let’s talk when we—’

‘Where? No names.’

‘Can’t stay in the open, can’t just walk in somewhere.’

‘Where?’

‘We’re heading for – the guy who got us the butcher shop – his place, his home.’

‘When will you make it?’

‘Another couple of hours. This is slow, the way we’re doing it.’

‘See you there.’ And that was it.

Tough choices
.

She knows my name. She may know Frankie’s name
.

The woman had not reacted when Martin let Frankie’s name slip. Maybe she hadn’t taken it in. Maybe, maybe not.

But she certainly knows my name
.

Tough choices
.

It was shortly after midnight.

One of Chief Superintendent Hogg’s whizz-kids was addressing the emergency garda conference by speakerphone, explaining why the Wexford gardai sent two unarmed uniforms to check out a possible sighting of a kidnap gang. He was followed by another, reporting in more detail than was necessary on the failure to trace the identity of whoever rented the Rosslare bungalow for the gang.

‘Technical through with the house?’ Hogg said.

‘Just about. The gang tried to torch the place, but it didn’t take. Pucks of prints. Holiday home, there’s bound to be. Most likely civilians, most of them. They’re processing things as fast as they can.’

The emergency conference at Carbury Street garda station was called as soon as Chief Superintendent Hogg found out about the gang managing to get hold of the first million of ransom money. Before the meeting could get under way, news came in of the Rosslare shambles and that put everything on hold. When the rescheduled conference began close to midnight, three of Hogg’s men were in Wexford, a couple were following up the ransom screw-up. Four were accompanying ERU teams raiding the homes of the known gang members. The rest were in the incident room at Carbury Street, looking less gung-ho than the last time John Grace saw them.

Hogg maintained his air of calm, methodically taking his team through possible leads and areas of inquiry. Everyone in the room knew that the case could hinge on the next interview, the next phone call, the next bright idea. Everyone in the room knew that the case could as suddenly fall apart, a civilian might right now be finding a body in a ditch.

It was an image that John Grace found more plausible as this went on. Now that Frankie had a million, and he still didn’t know he’d been fingered for the job, the option of taking his winnings and quietly killing the hostage must look more attractive.