Little Criminals (16 page)

Brendan Sweetman came into the staffroom, sleep in his eyes, a heavy shadow on his jowls. ‘Any breakfast? I’m famished.’

‘Corn flakes,’ Crowe said.

‘Fuck sake.’

‘Milky’ll be here later, put in your order.’

There was silence for a long while, then Dolly Finn said, ‘No going out at all?’

‘Safer that way.’

Dolly nodded.

‘Long day ahead,’ Brendan Sweetman said.

Crowe said, ‘There’ll be nothing stirring today. He has forty-eight hours to get the money, then we’ll see how fast we move. That’s the thing. No hanging around, no negotiations, just bang-bang-bang, and we’re gone. Today, tomorrow, we just bide our time while hubby makes a withdrawal.’

Martin Paxton was last to come down from upstairs, yawning. He said, ‘She’d like a cup of tea.’

‘There’s some tea bags there.’

‘And she has a list.’

‘She has what?’ Crowe was grinning.

‘A list. She has a list of things she’d like us to provide.’

‘I like it! I like it!’

‘Toothbrush, toothpaste, that kind of thing.’

Frankie said, ‘Candelabra on the table, place mats and silverware, right?’ Brendan Sweetman laughed, a series of hiccupping sounds.

Paxton shrugged. ‘She’s just, I reckon she’s just trying to cope, just trying to get along.’

‘What it is,’ Frankie said, ‘is you can take the bitch out of the mansion, but you can’t take the mansion out of the bitch. Fucking list.’

Martin filled the kettle. ‘Tea, anyone?’

Coming up to eleven o’clock in the morning, the Round Hall of the Four Courts was like a major train station at the start of a holiday weekend. Crowded, noisy and tense. The circular floor was thick with robed and wigged barristers conferring with each other, with solicitors and with clients. Around the edges of the hall, people sat on curved wooden benches. Others leaned against the pairs of tall pillars that flanked the doors to each of the four principal courtrooms surrounding the hall. The black Druidical garb of the barristers set the tone. The accumulated chatter rose like invisible steam high up into the massive dome above the crowd. Despite the airs and graces of the place, it had the unmistakable character of a marketplace.

Detective Sergeant Nicky Bonner was standing on the steps of Court No. 3, his eyes sweeping the crowd, watching for the arrival of Desmond Cartwright, Senior Counsel. He’d tried Cartwright’s mobile, with no response. The barrister might have had to go into a huddle with a solicitor or a client before the 11 a.m. court session. In which case he wouldn’t be available until the courts adjourned at lunchtime.

Lawyers clutched untidy bundles of documents to their chests, as though they were shields. Clients glanced repeatedly at the huge clock over the entrance to the deeper recesses of the building. At eleven o’clock, when their cases began or resumed, years of worry, months of preparation, would come to a climax. The lawyers displayed their trade’s confident nonchalance. There would be another case tomorrow, next week and the week after. The clients might fret about the outcome, but for the lawyers, win or lose, there was nothing personal involved, it was just another eddy in the never-ending stream of business.

The crowd parted as a short procession of jailers and prisoners came through the front doorway and crossed the hall towards the stairs down to the waiting room. Lawyers ignored them. Gardai checked them out. Civilians cast quick glances at the defendants, handcuffed creatures from an exotic underworld. Litigants in civil cases, for whom winning or losing meant a financial penalty or a windfall, were merely consumers of legal services. The major criminal cases, murders and rapes, were usually one-offs, products of anger or passion. The career criminals, the thieves and the drug peddlers, in their uniforms of the Nike and Reebok armies, seemed for the most part unresentful of their probable fate. Their repeat business made them the reluctant underwriters of the prosperity of the legal business.

Bonner recognised one of them that he’d done for burglary a few years back, a shuffling loser from an inner-city flats complex, still playing out the hopeless hand he’d been dealt. He didn’t know any of the others, fresh-faced hoods who kept a touch of arrogance in their stride, even while handcuffed. It was as though graduation to this plateau of justice, from the rough and tumble of the district court, was some kind of promotion. A sign of getting old, Nicky Bonner reckoned, when the criminals start to look young.

‘The man himself.’ Desmond Cartwright was suddenly at Nicky Bonner’s side, emerging from the crowd. He was a small, fat, bald man, with the cultivated air of a nineteenth-century aristocrat who just happened to find himself working at the Bar in twenty-first-century Dublin, and was perpetually amused by this turn of events.

‘Mr Cartwright.’ Bonner held out his hand and Cartwright shook it. The Waterford background they shared was tangential. Mr Cartwright was leaving boarding school, on his way to Trinity and Kings Inns, around the time that Nicky was quitting his factory job to join the guards.

‘Perhaps we could—’ Cartwright stopped and turned to one side. The crowd parted, this time to allow a judge to proceed across the hall towards the side door to one of the courtrooms. A robed tipstaff, carrying a long wooden rod, preceded the judge. The barristers all turned and bowed their heads towards His Lordship, who acknowledged the deference. His serial nodding, along with his bulbous jowls, made Bonner think of one of those plastic dogs that used to sit in the back windows of cars.

‘Perhaps we could adjourn to a more – if I might use the word – judicious location, sergeant?’

Cartwright, his robe hanging precariously from his shoulders, his wig tilted slightly, led the way out of the Round Hall, across a vestibule and down a corridor.

As a young man, Cartwright had made a solid reputation in the criminal courts, with occasional forays into commercial law. His fees grew in proportion to his experience, and his girth in proportion to his fees. Representing a leading businessman at a long-running tribunal of inquiry, Cartwright graduated from merely very wealthy to unassailably rich. He was now on retainers from two other businessmen who feared that a current line of tribunal investigation might reveal their interest in one of the more controversial property deals of the previous decade. Such work was so lucrative that Cartwright’s involvement in criminal cases was now sporadic. His fortune made, and his interest in fighting routine cases waning, he had recently put out feelers in political circles and was hopeful of an appointment to the bench within the next year.

He found a window nook opposite the office of a Supreme Court judge. There, underneath a No Smoking sign, he lit up a Benson & Hedges. ‘It’s done?’

Bonner nodded. ‘He’s a decent lad.’

‘That’s not the description that leaps to mind when I recall the manner in which he treated me.’

‘Just doing his job. And you can’t deny you were wearing the wobbly boots that day.’

‘A touch over-refreshed, perhaps, but I was quite capable of looking after myself.’

To hear the arresting garda tell it, Cartwright came out of his gentleman’s club with both eyes in the one socket. Middle of the afternoon. Wouldn’t take a friendly warning, insisted on climbing behind the wheel, and then did a runner.

Nicky Bonner said, ‘Not to worry. It seems he’s mislaid the notebook he used on that occasion.’

Cartwright took an envelope from an inside pocket and handed it to Bonner. ‘The avaricious little shit didn’t need too much convincing, I take it?’

Bonner put the envelope in an inside pocket.

The lawyer took a second envelope from his pocket, and said, ‘A little something for yourself, just a small token.’

Bonner shook his head. ‘Put that away, Mr Cartwright. The garda is risking a reprimand for making a balls of a routine drink-driving. So, it’s only fair that he gets compensation. I’m just a go-between. Seriously, I wouldn’t dream of taking a penny off you.’

Cartwright put the second envelope away. ‘Thank you, my friend. Decency, I’m glad to hear, isn’t entirely obsolete, even in the rapacious little nation we’ve regretfully become.’

Bonner said, ‘Mother Ireland, she’s not what she used to be, right enough.’

Cartwright raised an eyebrow. ‘Do I detect a note of sarcasm, sergeant?’

‘Not in the least, Mr Cartwright.’

‘Don’t patronise me, sergeant. I’m quite aware that what we’re doing is ignoble. It’s a question of proportion. I’m a fine lawyer. I’ll be a great judge. Not one of the time-servers appointed to the bench because they licked party envelopes and ministerial arses. I have the intellect and I have the guts to do what’s right for this country. I won’t be anyone’s lapdog. The question is, do I throw all that away because I’ve had a drop or two and some little fascist wants to meet his quota of motoring offences? Do I slink away and let one more slot on the bench be filled by some nonentity who hasn’t two original thoughts to rub together? Or do I do the sensible thing?’

‘No offence intended, Mr Cartwright.’

Nicky Bonner watched Cartwright purse his lips.
Smug fucker
.

‘None taken, sergeant.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Showtime.’

They shook hands, Cartwright said something about having a jar one of these evenings and that was that. Two minutes later, in a cubicle in the jacks, Nicky Bonner opened the envelope and counted the money. Well worth it to a lawyer whose career expectations might not survive a drink-driving conviction.

It made sense for Bonner to turn down the bonus. The second envelope couldn’t have contained more than a few hundred, maybe a grand at most, and that was a small price for the lawyer’s future goodwill. This way, he turned a considerable profit and kept a stain-free reputation with someone who mattered. In years to come, there might be occasions when it would do a detective sergeant no harm to have a judge feel a sense of obligation.

Nicky Bonner left the Four Courts and strolled down the quays towards O’Connell Street. Next week he’d arrange the split with the arresting garda. Two grand from the five in the envelope would see the youngster right.

There was a time when Bonner had offered John Grace a cut from the two or three strokes he pulled in a year, but Grace had a conniption. ‘Do what you do, but don’t involve me in that fucking stuff, OK?’

‘No problem.’

‘I mean it, Nicky. I know nothing. I want to know nothing, and if you get caught—’

They both knew there was very little chance of that. The way Nicky Bonner saw it, a hard-working policeman got a very occasional and well-deserved bonus. And decent citizens such as Mr Cartwright retained their well-deserved respectability. Nobody got hurt. And Nicky Bonner brought home to his wife and four kids something like the kind of money to which a man of his experience and dedication was entitled. He owned two houses in Waterford, bought before property prices went crazy, set out in flats and earning big. The plan was to go back there when he took early retirement.

Past Capel Street Bridge, he hailed a taxi and as he climbed inside he was thumbing the keys of his mobile, checking in with John Grace. Unless there was something pressing to attend to, Bonner intended taking the rest of the day off.

Milky came just before lunchtime. He had the
Star, Mirror, Sun, Daily Mail
and
Irish Independent
, three rented videos, the makings of a fry-up, apples, oranges and bananas, a dozen cans of Coke, a dozen assorted sandwiches from a local deli, milk, sugar, a packet of tea bags and a jar of Maxwell House. The label on the sandwiches had the name of the deli, so Martin scraped it off a ham sandwich before taking it up to the hostage, along with an apple and a glass of milk.

Frankie Crowe took a bite from an apple. Brendan Sweetman immediately gave Milky a list of food he wanted for an evening meal.

Milky took his time lighting a cigarette, an untipped Player, then he said, ‘I hope it keeps fine for you.’ He offered Dolly Finn the packet of smokes. Finn shook his head and tapped his own packet of Benson & Hedges on the table.

Brendan said, ‘Fucking corn flakes, that’s all I’ve had.’

‘Your cut from this job, you can spend half the year in the Canaries. All the room service you want.’ He went out to his car and brought in a cheap holdall containing a couple of changes of clothing for the four members of the crew.

Milky was in his late fifties, with a full head of hair dyed black. He was still fit and not too padded by the years. He was wearing his usual gear, a check jacket and a plain shirt and tie. Milky had a selection of check jackets and plain shirts and ties and Frankie had never seen him wear anything else. Today’s jacket was primarily green, the shirt was yellow, the tie was brown. Although his wardrobe had once included a balaclava or two, Milky had long ago stepped up to another level. He owned a garage and a pub, purchased twenty years back on the proceeds of a series of armed robberies. He occasionally dabbled in small Dublin properties and lately he’d bought three beachfront properties in Cape Town. He maintained a sideline in providing facilities for occasional projects carried out by criminal associates.

‘No need to slum it,’ Brendan Sweetman said. He picked up the sausages, rashers and pudding and took a frying pan from a shelf and began wiping the dust off it.