The Rage (21 page)

He parked and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

When he got inside he found the Protectica money bags untouched beneath the tarp. It took him four journeys to get them into the boot of the car.

When he turned the key in the ignition it occurred to him that the noise might be the cue for a sudden burst of police activity, but nothing happened.

There was a garage in the rented house on Rathfillan Terrace and he drove inside and closed the door before he began unloading the bags. After about a minute he said, ‘Fuck it,’ dropped the bags where they were and spent the next five minutes checking rooms. When he realised he was down on one knee, looking under a bed, he told himself not to be a total spanner and went back to unloading the bags.

He spent over an hour getting the money sorted. He used a Stanley knife and a high-leverage cable cutter to get into the Protectica bags. Then he pocketed some money – not enough that he couldn’t explain if he was pulled in – and sorted the rest into large beige envelopes. He put the envelopes into six plastic Tesco bags. Noel had prepared a hiding place under some stripped-back insulation in the attic. There wasn’t enough room there, so Liam brought the leftover money to the bathroom and stuffed it behind a bath panel.

From the upstairs front window everything outside seemed normal. Two men who’d been working on a car engine across the road when he’d arrived were still at it. One of them was scratching his head now, and staring into the engine like it was an impossible crossword. Next door, a woman was using a hooked garden weeder to scrape dirt from between paving stones. It looked normal enough, the whole street. He peeled off the latex gloves and used the side of one hand to lever the front door shut behind him. On the way to his car he listened to the scraping of the woman’s weeder, half expecting it to suddenly stop. As he slid behind the wheel he kept an eye on the two amateur mechanics across the road.

Liam Delaney was halfway down Oscar Traynor Road before he admitted to himself that he was free and clear. Whooping, he thumped the steering wheel. What had happened to Noel and Kevin was shit, but those are the breaks. He was suddenly convinced that the bummer had bottomed out and the only way was up.

When he got home there was a small padded envelope lying in the hallway below the letter box. It was addressed to Liam in block capitals. When he tore it open he found a mobile phone inside. He stared at it for a moment, then checked the inside of the envelope. Nothing.

He switched on the phone and when it asked for a PIN he tried four zeros, the likely factory default, and it worked. He tapped into the call list – nothing. No texts in the inbox, no sent messages. He tried the address book and there was just one number. He highlighted the number and tapped
Call
.

When the call went through, Vincent Naylor said, ‘It’s me.’

Bob Tidey said, ‘Sorry about that – bit of a waste of time.’

Rose Cheney said, ‘Had to be done.’

Tidey dangled Emmet Sweetman’s key from its leather Armani key ring. He was beginning to think that maybe Garda Homer Simpson was right – it was just a key. ‘Maybe it
is
the key to a gym locker, a spare one, an old one, whatever.’

Tidey and Cheney had spent the afternoon at an apartment block five minutes off the Malahide Road, trying the key in apartment doors. It was slow, boring work. They pressed buttons on the front-door intercom until they found someone in, explained who they were and that they needed to find a particular flat. After that, it meant going from apartment to apartment – ringing bells and asking permission to try the key in the lock. If there was no one home they tried it anyway. Over and over, hope waning as lock after lock rejected the key.

There was a second apartment block, close to the Swords Road. ‘You want to do this again tomorrow?’ Tidey asked.

‘The first apartment tomorrow – first apartment, ground floor,’ Cheney said, ‘I know we’re gonna get lucky.’

Tidey grinned. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve found it usually works like that.’

Anthony Prendergast was hunched at his workstation, deadline coming up fast and a final paragraph to write. You need to finish on a punchy last par, something that’ll stay with the skulls when they put down the newspaper. He did a Control/Home and the cursor shot up to the top of the story.

When you go up against a city’s deadliest bad men you need more than a quick mind and a sense of justice. You need armour covering your vital organs. You need a state-of-the-art automatic weapon in your hands.

John is not this man’s name, but it’s the name we’ll use to protect him. It’s the least we can do, given that every working day he puts his life on the line to protect us.

Tight, clear, immediate. A killer opening.

The thing a lot of hacks don’t understand is that sometimes all you have to do is ask. The way Anthony saw it, journalists are so used to being told to piss off by people with real inside information, they assume the worst and get lazy and don’t even try.

‘A ten-par follow-up on the North Strand shootings,’ his news editor had told him. ‘Something on the ERU lads.’

Dead easy. No way those hard nuts would talk, but he could tap his Garda contacts for anecdotes, get a formal briefing on the unit, string together a few of the ERU’s Greatest Hits, with a short par on the Abbeylara controversy. Because he wasn’t lazy, first thing this morning Anthony made a formal request for an interview with the Garda who fired the fatal shots. Then he worked the phones for an hour and was preparing to go down two floors and check the ERU file in the newspaper’s library when he got a call.

‘The answer to your request is no – the member of the Emergency Response Unit involved in the shooting is on leave and we don’t allow individuals to talk to the media.’

‘Thanks, I—’

‘My name is Sergeant David Dowd. I was in charge of that detail and I’ll talk to you – unofficially and off the record – if you can meet me in twenty minutes.’

At the
Daily Record
, the suits had taken their regular penny-pinching to new levels. A round of wage cuts was followed by a memo advising staff that usage of soap, towels, stationery and toilet paper was at unsustainably high levels. For years now, all taxi expenses had to be pre-approved by one of a small circle of executives. Anthony Prendergast decided that going through the hoops would leave him no time to make it to Rathmines to meet Sergeant Dowd. He decided to break a sacred rule of journalism and pay for his own taxi ride.

They met in a cafe in Rathmines. Dowd was in civvies, on mandatory rest after yesterday’s shooting, and mightily pissed off. He had a copy of the
Daily Record
, open to Anthony’s article. They were sitting at a table near the door and Anthony was about to ask what the Garda wanted to drink, but Dowd wasn’t interested in the social niceties.

‘This shit here –
A resident of Kilcaragh Avenue said that one of the robbers appeared to be surrendering when he was shot
. That’s bollocks.’

Anthony said, ‘It’s a quote – there was an old man, his name is in there—’

‘Yeah, Heneghan. This says that one of those fuckers tried to surrender but we shot him.’

‘It doesn’t say that, it’s just what the old guy said he saw – it’s not like
I
was saying that’s what happened.’

‘That’s what people will read into it. Don’t you people care about what actually happened? Does it always have to have an anti-police angle?’

‘Look, no way am I anti-police. That’s—’ Then, he spotted the opening. ‘All I can do is talk to people who were there – and you know what it’s like, trying to get a first-hand account from official sources. So, I had to depend on this old guy, and I know he was sincere, he was just—’

Dowd’s chin was up. ‘The man who fired those shots is one of the most dedicated policemen on the force. He’s no gun nut, he’s not trigger-happy – he fired those shots because—’

‘I never said—’

‘—he had to. And he went home last night in a state because of how it worked out. And when his leave is up he’ll report right back and be prepared to do exactly the same again. Because he believes in what he does.’

Two women at the next table were staring at Dowd.

He lowered his voice. ‘It doesn’t help, when a decent policeman is treated like a fucking Wild West gunslinger.’

Anthony Prendergast leaned across the table and said, ‘Tell me about it – about what happened, about what it’s like. Tell me about the reality of what you have to do.’

Dowd sat there for a moment, then he said, ‘Off the record?’

‘Completely on your terms.’

‘I didn’t get permission to talk to you and if I’d asked I’d have been told to piss off.’ Dowd said he didn’t want to do this in public. He stood up and Anthony followed him out. It took them five minutes to walk to a quiet street lined with old houses. Dowd led the way into a neat semi with a bay window. He went into the kitchen for a minute, spoke to his wife, then took Anthony into the front room.

In the hour that followed, Dowd several times displayed annoyance and anger, but mostly he was matter-of-fact.

‘I’ve never killed anyone, I very much never want to ever kill anyone. I know what bullets do to people and the thought of it makes me sick. I’d prefer if there were no armed police at all, but what do we do when some little fucker shows up waving a weapon?’

‘I know that makes—’

‘The man who shot those two people, he feels the same. I’m not speaking for every policeman, or even everyone in the unit. But there’s no one setting out to get a notch on their gun – and in particular not the man who had to do what he did.’

Anthony Prendergast said, ‘Tell me exactly what happened yesterday.’

Back at his desk, Anthony found that the story wrote itself.

‘We had the situation under control. It wasn’t possible to evacuate the whole neighbourhood but we had the street blocked at both ends.

‘One of the suspects had put down his gun, the other one was holding on to his. They had to know they hadn’t an earthly. But sometimes people, when they’re trapped, can get crazy.

‘The second suspect started shooting. He ran for it – Kevin Broe, his name was. It was a street with occupied houses, at least one civilian standing in the open within yards of the gunman. We had members at both ends of the street, so we had to watch out for crossfire.

‘We had no option but to return fire, and one member – just one – fired three aimed shots at the man who was shooting. Two of them hit their target. The gunman ran across in front of his companion and the third bullet hit the other suspect, Noel Naylor, in the throat. It’s regrettable, but it couldn’t be helped.’

‘Won’t you get into trouble?’ Anthony asked Dowd. ‘It’s off the record, but they’ll know it had to be one of a very few people.’

‘Let them prove it. Long as you keep your mouth shut.’

‘I swear.’

Reading the story back, Anthony felt a glow. A story like that, an exclusive with a member of the Emergency Response Unit – there wasn’t a reporter or editor in town who wouldn’t read that and note the byline.

Sitting in the living room of his modest house, with his wife in the kitchen making coffee and sandwiches, it’s easy to recognise that this is no storm trooper, this is no itchy-fingered heavy – this is a decent citizen doing a difficult and dangerous public service.

All he needed now was an end paragraph that would finish the job in style.

He glanced again at the opening. Sometimes the old tricks are best – you make the end par echo the opening par, gives the piece a feeling of coming full circle. He thought about it for a moment, then he typed quickly.

There are people we depend on to protect us from the bad guys. They’re our armour against the vicious hoodlums who desecrate our country. And when these policemen do what we need them to do, and when controversy inevitably arises, it’s our turn to be their armour.

To protect them.

Without question.

A killer finish.

He typed
Ends
at the bottom, clicked the mouse a couple of times and the story was on its way to the news editor’s basket.

Ten minutes later the news editor wandered over to Anthony’s workstation, holding a hard copy of the piece. ‘Love the ending,’ he said. ‘Sheer poetry.’ He sounded sincere, but Anthony could tell he was taking the piss. ‘By the way, you’ll see I tightened up the opening and cut the last line. We never, ever,
ever
report what anyone does or says
without question
. When we accept anything without question, that’s not journalism, it’s stenography.’

He turned away, then turned back. ‘Nice work. Now, go out there again and get me something better.’

Liam Delaney parked on a parallel street and walked to the rented house on Rathfillan Terrace. He was carrying a briefcase. Vincent Naylor hadn’t been terribly clear about what kind of piece he needed – all he said was
bring stuff
– so Liam had brought him some choices.