The Rage
Vincent Naylor is a professional thief, as confident as he is reckless. Just ten days out of jail, and he’s preparing his next robbery. Already, his plan is unravelling.
While investigating the murder of a crooked banker, Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey gets a call from an old acquaintance, Maura Coady. The retired nun believes there’s something suspicious happening in the Dublin backstreet where she lives alone.
Maura’s call inadvertently unleashes a storm of violence that will engulf Vincent Naylor and force Tidey to make a deadly choice.
The Rage
is a masterpiece of suspense, told against the background of a country’s shameful past and its troubled present.
Veteran journalist Gene Kerrigan is the author of four novels, the most recent of which,
Dark Times in the City
, won the Irish Crime Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.
Gene Kerrigan
Novels
Little Criminals
The Midnight Choir
Dark Times in the City
Non-Fiction
Round Up the Usual Suspects
(with Derek Dunne)
Nothing but the Truth
Goodbye to All That
(with Derek Speirs)
Hard Cases
Another Country
This Great Little Nation
(with Pat Brennan)
Never Make a Promise You Can’t Break
For Pat Brennan and Evelyn Bracken
GENE KERRIGAN
THE RAGE
The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night.
Trouble Is My Business
His fingers gripped the thick wooden rail, both hands clenching so hard that it felt like he might crush the wood to splinters. His breathing was shallow, the air sucked in and expelled in short puffs, hardly seeming to reach down as far as his lungs. His shoulders and chest were suddenly sweaty. It crossed his mind that something serious might be happening, something more than a panic attack. He was a big man, and fit, but he was a smoker, and at forty-seven he was carrying the consequences of a few failed New Year’s resolutions. There was fear, and there was relief too. Let someone else, or no one else, deal with this – he’d have no choice but to let it all go. The tension of recent days would be swept away as his body shut down and everything evaporated in a smothering rush of mortality.
If that happened, Holly would feel the pain of it, then she’d accept his absence as just another fact of life. Like the creases around her eyes, regrettable but inevitable – and no big deal in the long run. And Grace and Dylan would feel the shock of the loss, but they were already shaping lives of their own. It was the way of things.
And without his protection Maura Coady would die. Sooner or later the lunatic would come out of the shadows and take a few minutes to crush out the small amount of life left to her.
It was towards the end of a warm April evening, a foretaste of summer. Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey was standing on the north bank of the River Liffey, on the boardwalk overhanging the dark water. Upriver, to his right, the sun left a golden glow on the clouds above the Phoenix Park. Behind him, on the quays heading into the city centre, the sound and the smell of traffic.
A city going about its business, getting ready to wind up the day. Smug and oblivious.
Bob Tidey had been born here, grew up here and raised a family, he knew the city and loved it and served it and hated the way it could turn a blind eye. He was gripping the rail so hard his fingers hurt – his arms and shoulders pushed and pulled at the wooden rail, as though he was trying to shake it, to shake the entire boardwalk, to shake the whole fucking city. He pushed himself away from the rail.
The way things had gone, there was no good way out of this, no moral thing to do. The banker’s murder, the Maura Coady situation – Tidey’s last conversation with the brass had shut down the safe options.
He lit a cigarette and tried to still the shaking in his hands. He took a deep drag, let the smoke out slowly, then began to walk up along the boardwalk towards O’Connell Bridge.
No moral thing to do. But something had to be done.
The Smoking Garden
1
Lying on his back, Emmet Sweetman opened his eyes.
Everything was familiar, but all wrong.
A dark raindrop
—
Falling from the ceiling
—
He was lying on the floor of his wide front hallway, the cold, hard marble beneath his back. All around him, the familiar dark green walls topped with the moulded cream cornices that bordered a high white ceiling. To his left, the antique walnut table where he dropped his keys when he came home each evening. He’d never seen the table like this, from below. Underneath, barely visible in the shadows, there was a scrawl in pink chalk –
VK21
.
Someone did that in the auction room, probably, where Colette bought it.
Falling slowly, from the ceiling, a dark raindrop
—
All wrong
—
He felt a desperate need for certainties. Time and place and other people, and where he was in relation to it all.
Dark out
—
Late, now
—
Lunch with
—
Then
—
In an instant, the day unfolded in his mind, moments emerging one from the other. Afternoon, long meeting – fat fella from the Revenue Commissioners, then more fucking lawyers—
Evening, late home, tired, the sound of his car keys dropping onto the walnut table.
Colette—
There was
—
On his way up the stairs to join her—
Doorbell
—
‘I’ll get it.’
Now, watching the dark raindrop, falling so slowly it was still only halfway to the floor, he felt a rush of cold flooding through his body. It felt like his flesh had suddenly fused with the marble beneath him. His mind stretched towards something he didn’t recognise, failed to connect—
Turning on the stairs, coming down again—
Two men on the doorstep
—
The one on the left wore a hoodie, a scarf across the lower half of his face. The one on the right, his shadowed face under a baseball cap, had a midget double-barrelled shotgun and it all happened together.
The flash.
The impossibly loud bang.