Dublin Folktales (14 page)

Time passed and the ground remained as it was. He became ashamed of himself. He removed the lead and its cloth covering and smoothed the ground. But when he went to visit his gold coins in the cellar of his home he found they were gone. He found a note in Lara’s handwriting saying the following, ‘If you value gold more than love, then you had best spend your days with your true love.’ There was no gold to be found anywhere in the cellar. He thought that he had been right all along: she was a gold digger.

Lara had disappeared, her account on the internet where they had first met was closed and her telephone number was discontinued. When he drove to where she lived, her apartment was to let. It was empty and no one could tell him where she had gone. The value of the gold coins was such that the Garda would begin an immediate investigation if they were informed. Nevertheless, he hesitated to explain to someone else how he had tempted his future wife to steal from him and how she had yielded to that temptation.

He was a man with a steady profession and an assured income so he did not want for anything in a material way.
Each night, he logged on to the internet and searched for her name to see if she was to be found elsewhere. He used many variants of her name, but to no avail.

It is true that when you do not have something it seems you will see it all about you. Without a fiancé, it seemed to Steve that on every road he travelled there was a chapel or church or meeting house where a couple was being married to the great joy of the assembled wedding guests. Each time Steve saw a bride floating along in a white dress, he returned home to search his house once more for a clue to the disappearance of his fortune and his fiancé.

One day, he pushed open the door to the bedroom Lara used to sleep in when she stayed with him, for he had insisted they sleep apart until their wedding night. He leaned against the frame and looked around the room that used to be his nursery when he was little. It was a place he did not like to enter as it had been the private place of his fiancé. For no reason that he could fathom, Steve found himself drawn to the neat little bed. He sat down on it to be closer to Lara’s absent presence. He became aware of something underneath the bed clothes which was making him uncomfortable. When he turned over the bed clothes he found every single coin of gold that he owned, together with a single faded rose from his garden.

Four young men decided that it was easier to be thieves than to work and so they launched into a life of crime. They robbed and stole whenever opportunity presented itself, but they made a fatal mistake in what was to be their biggest robbery.

In the early 1960s, they were charmed like everyone else in Dublin with the arrival of the new national television station. They were particularly interested in the crime drama. One crucial fact eluded them and that was that in all of these programmes the bad guys lost and the good guys won. Basic morality was not their strong suit, and so they missed the point. They fancied the criminal life and given their lack of knowledge of fine art or jewels, they settled for robbing small shops and unsuspecting householders who had left their homes unlocked.

In the 1960s, few people could afford television sets when the new national service began broadcasting. To meet a market need, astute traders made sets available through a weekly rental plan. To ensure payments were kept up to date they employed door-to-door collectors to gather in the weekly amount. In return, the hiree had immediate access to television and world television programming for a small weekly payment. Should anything go wrong, as it frequently did with the early models, the set would be serviced by the
renter. The hire collector became a familiar guest in those households that were willing to pay him as agreed. Other householders refused to answer the door when he called, as they had no money to pay for the week and had no intention of surrendering the rental set either.

At this time in Ireland there was a very relaxed attitude to the procreation of dogs. The pups were of many strands of lineage and were designated as mongrels. Nearly every household had a dog which would be allowed to roam the streets at will. When a bitch came into heat, every male dog for miles around would stand guard outside her house for a chance to say hello, should she be allowed out by her unthinking owner. This led to many litters of pups being born. Few people had the heart to kill the pups so homes were normally found for them. This meant that most homes had a dog in residence, which might or might not bite the collector upon their arrival, depending on the disposition of the animal on the day. This fact was to play a crucial part in the investigation of the gang’s final act of robbing Noel, the collector, of his collected rentals. They’d decided that this would be best done on a Friday night, on a quiet street, when Noel had called to his last house. He would be relaxed at that point, they reasoned, and a little less on his guard than at other times.

However, Noel was not the premier television rental collector for nothing. He frequently changed routes and times and was as often as not to be found concluding his run where he should have been starting from. In frustration, the four thieves, Andy, Derek, Barry and Brian, robbed anyone they met when Noel did not show up. It was reported in the local papers as a crime spree. They were masked and could appear anywhere at any time, an excited reporter stated. In fact, the masked robbers, on one occasion, struck in two different places at the same time, a worrying development for the local forces of law and order. This was because they had spilt up to increase their chances of accosting Noel.

As it happened, on this night, Noel had accepted the offer of tea and homemade scones from a recently widowed client. She said she was considering getting a bigger television set for her home, now that the insurance money on her dead husband had arrived. She asked Noel to sit down with her for a while, which he did. There he stayed until it was so late in the night that the milkman had begun his delivery to the sleeping houses all around where the widow lived. Once more, Andy, Derek, Barry and Brian were left short of Noel’s collection. Once more, they were vexed. They began to believe that Noel knew they planned to rob him. Andy, the oldest of the four and unofficial leader, believed that he was playing cat and mouse with them. His followers, Derek, Barry and Brian, hardly had one collective brain of a single robber between them.

Despite this, they conspired to set a trap for Noel one dark night. They each posted themselves in a different place to watch for the arrival of the collector. They each stood beside a public phone box so they could ring Derek, the liaison man, when they saw where Noel was beginning his round. As communications officer, Derek was to be rung once and told the agreed codeword of ‘Christmas’, to show they were in situ. Soon enough, the phone rang. It was Barry who said ‘Christmas has come early to his part of the world.’ Which was the complicated code for ‘Noel is here’. Derek rang Andy and Brian to alert them that the operation was on. The caper had begun.

Brian’s location was where they believed Noel’s journey would conclude. He brought his mongrel Jack-Russell-looking dog along with him to deal with any other dogs that might cause them difficulties. They would need to concentrate when the action started and they could not have stray dogs attacking them or barking or anything like that. Their plan was going well; each reported to Derek on Noel’s progress as he neared the end of the houses where Brian and his dog waited in expectation. Brian watched as Noel
entered the final house. He waved to the others to gather around him and his dog for the culmination of the plan. They dug deep in their jacket pockets. Each produced a balaclava hood that left only the eyes and mouths exposed. They each donned a boiler suit bought a few days previously.

They were now masked and suited and ready for all eventualities. But they were to be disappointed once more when Noel hove into view. ‘Hello Lads’, he called out to them in a clear and steady voice. ‘What can I do for you?’ They said they were here to rob him and that he was to hand over his money immediately. Well, at least Andy said so, for as well a being leader, he was the best at accents. He issued the instructions in as close as he could get to a New York heavies accent. But, since he had never been to New York, he was not at all sure that it sounded right. In any case, Noel understood what it was they wanted, and went to put his hand into his pocket to retrieve the cash that was hidden in there.

‘Hold it’, said a voice, ‘no funny business. What have you got in your pocket?’

‘I am not armed’, replied Noel, whose most offensive weapon was a comb he used on his receding hair to keep it in as fine a fettle as he could manage. ‘I’m just getting out the wallet of notes for you. I suppose you’ll leave me with the loose coins? I need to get some petrol in the car on the way home. Bad enough to be robbed but I don’t want to have to walk home as well for the want of a few drops of juice.’

The criminals looked at one another. Each nodded in turn. Andy said it was alright to hold on to the change;
but asked if the bank notes weren’t marked in some way. ‘The only marks that could be on them are the tears some of them shed when they parted with them’, said Noel who was by now wondering if he should just walk away to his car with the money and leave them wondering what their next move might be.

‘Hand over the notes’, said Andy who was by now making the executive decisions. Noel did so. ‘Thanks’, said Andy, who was unsure of the protocol to be followed in such matters. ‘You’re welcome’, said Noel. ‘Can I go now?’ They said yes and he drove straight to the Garda station.

The four robbers took off their balaclavas and boiler suits, placed them in a large black plastic refuse bag and headed for Brian’s house to split up the loot. Brian had thoughtfully bought a number of beers for a celebratory drink. As planned, they dumped the bag in a clothing recycling bin before they arrived at Brian’s. The haul was large for they had landed on a collection that was the end of a week and the end of a month, and therefore Noel had collected from both weekly and monthly accounts. All of the money he had collected throughout the day was now piled up on a table in Brian’s house and the gang of four wondered just how much riches there was now before them.

It was hardly a king’s ransom. It was, after all, simply the sum total of one man’s efforts on behalf of his employer. But to the four teenagers who had never seen as much real cash as this in their lives, it was a fortune to be carefully counted but wildly spent. While they were considering what they would spend their share on, the doorbell rang. Outside at the front, were the gardaí and outside at the back were the gardaí. Before long the four robbers were in custody in the Garda station.

They didn’t understand how they were caught. Andy was the most perplexed of them all. He pointed out to the arresting officer that they had worn masks and boiler suits and could not have been recognised. That was correct allowed
the officer, but while all four were excellently disguised as criminals are in such robberies, the dog was not masked. The same dog had bitten Noel the week before, when he called to Brian’s house for payment of the arrears on the television rent. So Noel could easily identify the four pals who were now also failed criminals. As he said when he regained his employer’s stolen cash, ‘Once bitten never forgotten. On television or off.’

The image of a black dog is a powerful one in Dublin storytelling. The black dog is sometimes a banshee in disguise. It is sometimes a demon bent on mischief and destruction. It is sometimes the stuff of nightmares. We are conditioned by many generations of storytelling to think of the black animal as a threat to our safety, life and wellbeing.

Consider then the terror that took hold of the city when it was believed that a black four-legged animal was prowling the streets of Dublin targeting lone women, attacking them with fearful consequences as they flit fearfully along the poorly lit narrow streets. Despite many and widespread searches, no sign of the animal could be found. Safety could be assured for no person, once darkness fell.