by Jane Ryan
The clock on the van’s dashboard showed 2.30pm. Seán drove into the cul-de-sac of St Martin’s Gardens. Built on land from reclaimed mud flats, the Victorians deemed it too salty and left it to the working class. For Seán it was home and everything that implied. The people knew one another, their lines unbroken from the first stevedores-turned-privateers. Rumour had it they ate their young, a bogeyman tale for naughty children in their middle-class beds.
Sheila Devereux was standing in the middle of the cul-de-sac. She looked at him in a way that made every hair on Seán’s body rise in a spike.
He shunted the van to a stop. The coal tar and salt smell of Dublin Port greeted him as he got out.
‘Seán?’ said Sheila Devereux.
Her face was unreadable and Seán didn’t have time to work out what she was up to. He swung his head around. Nothing. No children, no gossiping shrews slugging designer coffees, no lads prowling, nothing but the lone yapping from a caged dog. Dread, rising inside him, put a hot hand around his neck and squeezed.
The wrongness of the situation set Seán’s teeth painfully on edge. He looked around for Gavin but couldn’t see his car on the road or in the bubble at the end of the cul-de-sac.
‘Where’s Gavin?’ he asked.
‘Gone somewhere,’ said Sheila. Her eyes were narrow slits in a watchtower.
Every nerve exposed, Seán ran for the cover of his front door. His hand caught on a sharp ridge of his house key as he pulled it out of his jocks, and opened the cut on his finger.
Inside his home nothing but quiet. The house was freezing. His breath puffed in a cold cloud at the empty rooms. His back door was open. Where were his dogs?
Where was everyone?
His hands were shaking as he put his house key on the van key ring. It was slippery with his blood but occupied him while his mind writhed around his brain, searching for answers. Nothing came other than a poisonous fear, crawling up inside him.
He had to leave.
He tapped the internal wall between his hall and living room. The thick satisfying sound of a space filled with cash insulation. He was about to kick a hole in it when a leg took his feet from under him. Seán fell, putting a hand out to an ornamental table, an idea forming in his mind to throw it at his attacker.
They were too quick. One held Seán down while the other injected the base of his neck. Two laughing black faces with teeth as white as chalk.
One spoke to the other. ‘Remember to take the tracker off the van. Then call the road crew and get them to burn it out.’
The second one looked at Seán with eyes full of laughter. ‘We’re going to take you on a little holiday, Seán.’
Chapter 11
‘Walk with me?’ said DCS Muldoon.
Not so much of a question.
We were on Harcourt Street and this meeting didn’t have the smack of chance. I turned for a panoramic view, in time to see his driver and car moving off into the traffic. My eyes found the lane with tram-tracks sliced and over-sliced into the tar, a Frankenstein surgery stitching the street together, a monster spanning a bridge from old technology to new.
‘Joe spoke to me,’ said DCS Muldoon. ‘He thinks you’d be a good resource for the Criminal Assets Bureau.’
Muldoon took military strides, long and sharp. I fell in with his pace.
‘It’s something I would be very interested in, DCS Muldoon. And I’m grateful for the support on the Flannery drug seizure.’
He waved away my thanks.
‘Why would you want to leave the Sexual Assault Unit? Joe told me you were exceptional when you worked serious sexual assault prior to your time in the DOCB.’
‘I don’t want to leave, but the work I’m doing in the SAU is sifting through piles of data, trying to find evidence of tax avoidance for pimps and brothel-owners. It’s not that satisfying.’
Too much the diva, but how to explain to DCS Muldoon that Flannery’s seizure would change the criminal stage in Dublin and this was the chance I’d waited for? With all the friction and uncertainty the seizure brought, Flannery and his cohorts would fall off their pedestals.
‘What do you think we do in CAB, if not sift through mountains of data? It’s a core skill for my group.’
‘I am aware of that, DCS Muldoon, and I believe I’ve given a significant amount of analysis – albeit about small-time criminals – to Revenue and DS O’Connor. Actionable data. But in CAB I’d have a chance to work it myself and have access to other resources. The pressure we could exert on Seán Flannery! With the support of a superintendent or above, we can deem that property is the proceeds of crime and confiscate it –’
‘Before you get too carried away, Bridge, one of the key duties you would be performing, should your application to transfer to CAB meet with success –’
DCS Muldoon could be an officious bugger when he wanted.
‘– is adviser to the superintendents on the Policing Authority.’
My face must have fallen off my head and he guffawed behind a spidery hand.
‘Well, it’s your ex-brethren they’re up against. Police reform, risk management, mid-year performance reports, analysis of the recent commissions of investigations and all in full legalese. Do I need to go on?’
With three sitting judges and a prestige of dusty civil servants the Supers assigned to the Policing Authority were called ‘tributes’ by their colleagues.
‘If I hear another “ten-point plan” or “lessons learned at An Cosán” it will be too soon,’ he said. ‘You see what we’re up against? The meetings are biannual and I won’t need you to be present – just to prepare whatever Super is going in.’ He shook himself, a great dog throwing excess water off his coat. ‘Still interested, Bridge?’
‘Yes, DCS Muldoon.’
Anything to get into a fair fight with Flannery.
‘Might I ask, DCS Muldoon, if I must finish the monthly evaluations? DS O’Connor is insisting I do them.’
‘How many do you have left?’
‘They’re at the end of the month, so I still have October’s to do, then November and December.’
DCS Muldoon gave a small smile. ‘You may consider them finished.’
No more spilling my guts in Paul’s office.
‘Thank you, DCS Muldoon.’
‘You’re welcome, Detective Garda Harney.’
Back in the game.
Chapter 12
A withheld number rang my phone.
‘Bridge?’
I recognised his voice straight away. ‘It’s not a good time, Chris.’
‘No, it’s not a good time for me neither, little ’un,’ said Detective Chris Watkiss. ‘But, if we don’t get this sorted, we’ll be in a sight less of a good time than we are now. The West Midlands Constabulary and the Garda Síochána got commendations over our joint case. If I were you, I’d listen.’
I was on the fourth floor in a pokey communal office where administration had moved anyone waiting for a seating allocation or, in my case, until the main Criminal Assets Bureau office-space was reconfigured to accommodate new personnel.
A woman wearing a burqa moved and I jumped, having mistaken her for a solid object. An impulse to crack a joke about the fascist Norwegians who mistook six empty bus seats for women wearing burqas hit me. I wasn’t sure if I could make it funny or at my own expense, so I said, in an overly loud voice, ‘Can I help you?’
The woman gave a slow headshake in the negative, the kind you’d give someone with impaired faculties.
‘Who’s that?’ said Chris.
I exited the office.
‘I’ve just made a total fucking eejit of myself in front of a woman in a burqa.’
‘No need for all the effing and jeffing!’
I tried to choke back a laugh. His north of England burr was soft as peat-smoked whiskey.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘You don’t see a woman in a burqa every day in Dublin. Sure it weren’t a niqab?’
‘Look
ed like a burqa to me, but it could have been a fancy niqab. I’m not sure I’d know the difference.’
‘There’s some’atcoming in about headgear in the new year here. My two are furious.’
‘Why? They’re Hindus – they don’t wear any headgear, do they?’ I said.
‘No, but they’re protesting everything at the minute – you’d want to see them on climate change! Their mother isn’t allowed use cling film or paper towels anymore. And they’ve me walking down to get a fish supper instead of taking the car.’
I pictured Chris’s twins – strong, smiling girls. ‘They still playing Union for their school?’
‘Aye, made the team for the county schools cup.’ He was in danger of spontaneous combustion.
‘Well, wish them luck from me and send over a couple of photos of their next match. But you didn’t call me to talk about sport. What’s with the new number?’
‘I’m on the wife’s phone. Brace yourself. Anne Burgess’s conviction might be unsafe.’
Shock put my hand out to a wall. It had ended a metre before and I stumbled through a half-open door. My reflection in the glass panels of the office door, making giant sidesteps to stay upright, was pure bumbling chorus girl.
‘You all right?’
‘No!’ I found an obliging piece of knotted carpet on which to park and slid to the floor. ‘How’s Anne Burgess’s conviction unsafe?’
Chris said something, but panic bound me, endless gossamer threads of unintended consequences tightening around my neck. An exquisite noose.
‘Bridge? Bridge?’
‘I’m here.’
‘We might’ve missed something about the Burgesses. Declan Swan’s in the wind – do you remember his alibi? Said he was with a female reporter. She’s now saying Swan left the morning Emer Davidson was killed and came back later that night. Puts him in the timeframe for Emer’s murder. I would imagine this journalist’s memory cleared up right around the time she realised Swan wasn’t coming back for her. I spoke to Anne Burgess, told her Swan was in the frame but she’s sticking to her confession.’
I knew this case in runic detail, could lay the stickmen facts and watch as they became more than the sum of their parts, but perhaps we’d started with the wrong question.
‘Spoke to the accountant out in Burgess Data Centre. Small man with big feet, looked a bit like a penguin, remember him?’
‘Vaguely,’ I said. Information quick as closing credits flashed past my eyes.
‘Well, I’ve stayed in contact with him. He called me, said money’s missing.’
‘What!’
‘He reckons Swan helped hisself on the way out. Burgess Data Centre is getting an audit courtesy of Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue.’
‘Did this financial controller tip them off, Chris?’
‘Wouldn’t think so. It’s standard procedure for Inland Revenue to look into criminals with a profile like the Burgesses. Andy – that’s his name – is a decent bloke and always had his suspicions. The Burgesses and Swans were a fast set.’
Chris sounded schoolmarmish.
‘There’s money missing from asset replacement accounts for one, deposit accounts that business had, nigh on two million pound,’ he said.
‘That’s disappearance money.’
‘It’s a tidy sum, but Inland Revenue will find how it was done. I can promise you that.’
‘Are there any other entities associated with BDC?’ My mind reeled through possible places for a business to stash money.
‘What, like OCGs? That’s Organised Crime Gangs.’
‘Jesus, Chris! I know what OCG means! No police force apart from the UK uses it in conversation. The rest of us say ‘gangs’. And here’s another thing, OCG comes from a European directive, the irony being the UK are leaving Europe.’
‘Do you want your OCG back then?’ said Chris.
I stepped off my soapbox. ‘Sorry.’
‘There’s a logistics company, Slowell Holdings Ltd, that Burgess Data Centre use for everything, but it’s legitimate,’ he said. ‘Andy says they use ’em for deliveries, invoicing, cash collection. Owt to do with the business.’
‘We may need to look at what they’ve filed in the last few years, get a feel for them.’ A desk drawer yielded a spiral pad and I scribbled notes in my loopy writing. ‘We’ll need to dig around in Companies House – it’s all online now.’
‘Oh God no! You know I’m not a filing-and-figures man.’
‘We need to check for bitcoin too.’
‘Why? That’s pretend internet money,’ said Chris.
He pronounced it mun-neh which made me smile.
‘No, it’s a proper crypto-currency and attractive to bad boys on the dark web, where you can wash bitcoin then pop it, neat as a pin, into a bank account and take out crisp notes.’
‘It’s that easy?’
‘Yes, Chris. I mean you have to have connections with dark wallets, but if Swan was embezzling on that scale, he’ll have connections. And Mike Burgess knew about this too.’
‘Aye.’ Chris sounded glum.
‘What’s up? This not good for you?’
‘Well, yes and no. Mike Burgess isn’t doing so well in Winson Green. Got a bad beating week before last and was in the infirmary for four days. I went and told Anne Burgess he were in a bad way and the bint just looked at me and smiled.’
‘That’s cold.’
‘She’s a strange one. I’ll keep working on her. If we’ve missed something about Declan Swan due to a false alibi, Maitland will accept that. We’ll have to sweeten the pill though, by having the real story about Burgess Data Centre.’ He let out a gassy sigh. ‘While we’re on it, deep sea diver brought up bits of a body caught in wet fibre in the Irish sea.’
‘You’ve been busy,’ I said.
‘Fellahs working on behalf of some telco on the Solas cable – body was knotted up in it – they call it wet fibre –’
‘Chris, is there a point to this?’
‘What’s left of the body was Kumran ‘Shabba’ Stephenson. He worked for Burgess. His butler.’
‘The man we met in Burgess’s house in Newton? How’s he tied into all this?’
‘I don’t know as yet, but he were a native of Lozzell Grove, same as Emer Davidson and Declan Swan.’
‘God, Chris, what a cluster!’
‘To be fair, we weren’t looking for it. Shabba and all the Burgess staff were on a night off when Emer Davidson was killed. Shabba were in a local Weatherspoon’s with as many witnesses as you like.’
‘You think Flannery was involved in his murder?’
‘Same disposal as was used for Emer Davidson, so I’d say so. Shabba was weighted down with car batteries, but got caught in undersea cables, triggered an alarm in some network operation centre. If he hadn’t, we’d never have found him. Head got caught in a loop of cable. Flap of skin on his forehead was preserved. Fish couldn’t get at it.’
Oh that I’d exercised some restraint with the breakfast bread and marmalade . . .
‘So you got DNA?’
‘Not the assailant’s. It were blunt force trauma. So I’d say Declan Swan took a rock to Shabba’s head and got Flannery to dispose of the body.’
‘You could be right. Anything to tie Flannery to it?’
‘Nowt but a copper’s gut feel. I’ve put into Interpol for a Red Notice on Declan Swan based on the recanted alibi and the missing money.’
‘Not for Flannery?’
‘Bridge, don’t start – there’s no evidence linking Flannery to this. But I’ll say this, if we get Declan Swan there’ll be no telling who he might implicate.’
It would have to do for now.
Chapter 13
Joe Clarke was waiting for me in the Criminal Assets Bureau, on the second floor of Harcourt Square. Despite being recently reconfigured to accommodate new staff, it was at full capacity, staff sardined into every available space. Desks either side of musty-looking partitions any decent charity shop
would refuse, plastic swivel-chairs with blue padded backs and a jammed carousel with inmates elbow to elbow. With so many people packed into a tight space and a low Styrofoam-tiled ceiling, the level of noise on the second floor was something you built up resistance to. But now it was pin-drop quiet.
‘Bridget, this is Miss Amina Basara.’
Joe tried to work out where to put his eyes which irritated me. She wasn’t naked.
The woman in the burqa was quarantined in the middle of a trestle-like table, a free seat either side of her. She stood to meet me, a ghost rising. She must have been waiting for a seating allocation in the same administration office I was in. She proffered a small white hand.
‘Bridget Harney,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ She raised a gauze. Her eyes were a startling turquoise and blazed with defiance. ‘Amina Basara. I’m from the Revenue Commissioners. I believe we’ll be on the same team, under Sergeant Clarke.’
She had the glottal accent of west Dublin. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t flat Clondalkin.
‘Eh, you can call me Joe,’ he said into the air above Amina’s head, then looked at her civilian identification badge. ‘We’re over here.’ He waved to three desks spooned into a corner. ‘It’s cosy.’
‘Fancy a coffee?’ I said to Amina. The bug-eyed silence from the rest of the office irked me.
‘I don’t drink coffee.’
Part of me was sorry. I was curious to know how she’d navigate the veil.
‘I like a bit of bread and marmalade as a mid-morning snack. The canteen is good – hungry gardaí are not happy people. They make their own brown bread, need I say more?’
She shook her head and the layers of fabric swayed.
‘They have a good mint tea?’ I said, unwilling to give up once I’d started.
She didn’t respond.
She followed me out into the corridor and a group of detectives walked by us, gawking.
‘Close your mouths, lads, lot of flies about,’ I said.
I eyeballed Tom Ryan, but it didn’t stop him shouting ‘Jaysus wept, lads! Scatter!’