The Murk Beneath: A Cork Crime Novel (Mickey Bosco Series Book 1)

by L. D. Cunningham

  I’d crossed the line before, taken the law into my own hands. And the sad thing was, each time I crossed it made the next time that bit easier. Made it self-justifying. Mogs was in a hospital bed with a hole through him, so what better justification did I need than that?

  I looked back at the gun in the mirror and feathered the trigger.

  “Fuck them,” I said and pulled the trigger.

  There was a loud click.

  “Damn them all to hell.”

  The next time I pulled that trigger there would be a bullet in the chamber and someone would be paying for what they did.

  I rang reception and ordered a double whiskey. I took a couple of painkillers and downed the whiskey in four or five gulps and shortly after passed out on the bed before I could take my shoes off.

  A loud knock on the door woke me. Opening my eyes was agony and it felt like the late morning light was piercing them with shards of glass.

  “Mickey!”

  It was a woman's whispered shout.

  I tried to open my mouth to reply, but it was like it was sealed with glue. Dried saliva parted like a spider's web and I finally got an utterance out.

  “Hah?”

  “It's me, Mickey. Grace.”

  I got up and opened the door. Grace stood there with a bag under her arm.

  “They took O'Keeffe,” she said and rushed in. She looked at me and wrinkled up her nose. “Did you sleep in your clothes? You need a shower.” She threw the bag to me. “Here’s a change of clothes. I overestimated the size just in case.”

  I cocked up an eyebrow, said nothing.

  “Didn't you hear me? They took O'Keeffe. You need to get dressed and come with me.”

  “Wait. Who took O'Keeffe?”

  “The Guards.” She put a hand on top of her head. “They came right up to the house just after dawn. I thought … I thought …”

  She didn't need to finish. She thought they were coming for Jordan. Finally.

  “OK,” I said. “Let me get freshened up.”

  I showered with deodorant rather than soap and water. She looked disapprovingly at me as I flattened the hair on my head only to have it spring back into its previous bed-ruffled bird's nest. In the bag was a pair of tan-coloured chinos and a check shirt. They actually fit perfectly, which meant I was fatter than Grace thought.

  “Where exactly are we going?” I asked.

  “Somewhere safe. Somewhere for us to regroup.”

  Suddenly it seemed like not only was I under siege, but everyone around me was too. I checked out at reception and got some change back out of my room phone deposit. I smiled at the receptionist and she smiled falsely back at me. Grace gave me a hurry up look and we went to the parking area around the back where she had parked next to my old banger.

  “You need to ditch the car,” she said.

  “You mean hide it.”

  “I mean ditch the piece of junk. Burn it out, leave no trace.”

  The thought of burning the old chariot hit me like a bag of old boots.

  “Jesus, Mickey, it's just a car. And a noisy one to boot. It's …” She took my hand and squeezed it. “It's her time.”

  I looked at her face. Maybe she understood.

  “Follow me for a couple of miles. I know a good spot to do it.”

  The good spot was a few miles to the east of the city. I didn't set my Fiat alight, though. Didn't see the point in it. We left it in a field off the lane to an abandoned farm, one of Jordan’s speculative property investments, and drove away in Grace's Volvo.

  Not long after, we arrived at a fairly nondescript bungalow somewhere just past Killeagh. High hedges surrounded the property, keeping it nicely secluded from the main road. A curtain peeled back a bit as we drove in. I thought I might have seen the nozzle of a gun doing the peeling. I thought about the gun in my pocket and panicked for a second. They'd search me for sure. And what would they make of me then?

  I took the gun out while Grace was focusing intently on the wing mirror as she parked next to a Land Rover. I placed it under my seat. I would surely get the opportunity to retrieve it later.

  We got out of Grace's Volvo and went to the front door. She paused.

  “Tensions are up a bit.” She sighed. “Just bear in mind the pressure my father is under and make allowances for it.”

  I nodded. The door opened and Geary was standing there. We went inside and aside from Jordan, I recognized another man.

  “Jesus,” I said, looking at Jordan, “you go and hide out with him?” I pointed at the man on the couch. “He'll have paparazzi swarming on this place in no time.”

  The man was celebrity lawyer and socialite, Terence Goulding. He only represented the highest profile clients in the highest profile cases. If he was around, Jordan can only have been expecting the worst.

  “I can be discreet when I need to be,” Goulding said when I was expecting a reply from Jordan.

  Jordan, it turned out, was in pretty subdued form. The guy who was prone to repeating his words for emphasis, couldn't seem to utter a single one.

  I took a look around the room. Geary and two other heavies. All wearing suits, insides of their jackets bulging with submachine guns. It didn't make me feel any safer. Geary came over to me and patted me down. Thank Christ for my quick-wittedness in the car.

  “What do you take me for?” I said. “If there's one bastard you can trust, it's me.”

  Grace gave her father a reproachful look. I was surprised by how much that look meant to me.

  Jordan finally spoke. “Please, Michael.”

  He gestured to a chair next to Goulding. I sat.

  There was no whiskey this time. It was probably low on the list of priorities when they had no doubt made a hasty retreat from the mansion. But it raised a question in my mind: how did they escape the Garda surveillance? Had they escaped it at all?

  “Why have you brought me here?” I asked. “If it's heat you’re trying to avoid, I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm practically melting.”

  Jordan sniffed. He sat next to Goulding. “I take it Grace told you that O'Keeffe was taken for questioning?”

  “Not arrested, then?”

  I had assumed wrong, perhaps.

  “No. But we weren't going to wait for the Gardaí to come back with a warrant. I told O'Keeffe to co-operate and he accompanied them to the Bridewell. We didn't hang around for long after that.”

  “Questioning about what?”

  “That's where we are in the dark, I'm afraid.” Jordan sank back into the settee. “It's where I'm hoping you might be able to help us out.”

  I laughed sardonically. “I've come up pretty dry so far. What makes you think I'll fare better now?”

  I looked at Goulding. The guy was all over radio and television, yet here he was in the company of the biggest crook of them all – the guy who had put the organised in organised crime in Munster. How much of a bulwark had he been between Jordan and the CAB? How much credit could he take for decriminalizing The Gentleman? Was Goulding the artist who had painted the portrait of Jordan as legitimate businessman?

  “You've taken some knocks, Michael,” Jordan said. “You're a canny man. A canny man. Get out there and make it happen. Find out what they have on O'Keeffe.”

  “And on the Moolah hit?”

  Jordan tried to force a smile.

  “And the Fitzmaurice hit. Two birds with one stone, as I like to say.”

  I had to ask now. If I was going to go back out in the open, I had to know if the Guards were out there with their telephoto lenses.

  “You know the Guards are watching, right?” I said, testing them.

  I looked up at Grace, who was standing at the door to the dining room, then back at Jordan. Neither expression changed.

  “We're OK,” Jordan said. “We sent out a decoy vehicle. Drove it out of the garage. Blacked-out windows. No way they could tell who was in it. No way. We also have an escape plan for just such a situation – a tunnel leading fro
m a safe room to an out building where a Land Rover took us cross country. So unless they had eyes in the sky, I'd say we were good.”

  Paranoid as fuck. Of course he had an escape tunnel.

  “Why can't you send Goulding? Or one of his associates?”

  A most serious look came over Jordan's face. It sent a chill down my neck.

  “We have an unwritten rule. And by we I mean anyone who works for me.” He leaned forward to emphasize his next sentence. “And I include you in that.” He relaxed back into the couch. “If the Guards have you, you're on your own.”

  Besides, even if Goulding was there, the Guards weren't going to show their cards up front. They'd fish for information to hang you with. Seemingly irrelevant stuff they could use to contradict you later. The only strategy was silence and O'Keeffe didn’t need Goulding to remind him of that.

  Goulding took something from his pocket. A mobile phone. He tossed it to me. Jordan spoke for him.

  “Use this to call me. There's a single contact saved on it. That's how you contact me.”

  I keyed into the contacts list. Sure enough, there was a single contact by the name of A.

  “I'll need a car.”

  Jordan nodded to Geary. Geary took keys from a trouser pocket and threw them to me. Now I had a problem: my gun was in Grace's Volvo. But I'd been resourceful – I'd left my bag on the back seat of the car. I explained that I had to retrieve it and prayed that they didn't look out the window as I retrieved the bag – and my gun.

  As I opened the front passenger door, Grace came out the front door. I very quickly reached under the seat, took the gun and bent into the back to grab my bag. I just had time to slip the gun into a side pocket on the bag when Grace arrived.

  “I don't want you to take any risks,” she said quietly. “It's in my father's nature to look out for himself and his family, but I don't want that to happen at your expense.”

  I got out of the car and nodded. I checked the windows to make sure no one was looking. When I was sure, I took Grace's hand.

  “Your father is getting on in years now. He's had his day, had a good run of it. You have so many years ahead. I wouldn't …” A lump formed in my throat and I cleared it quickly. “I wouldn't want you to get dragged down with him.”

  She squeezed my hand as if in reassurance. “He's changed. Nobody's going anywhere.”

  I forced a smile. He hadn't changed. That was more clear than ever now.

  “Till the next time, then,” I said.

  She waved to me as I drove away in Geary's Volkswagen.

  I stopped in Castlemartyr and got out the old burner phone. I keyed in Cotter's number and hit the green key.

  “Mickey,” Barry droned like a tape player on low battery.

  “Yeah.”

  “I'm not even going to ask what you're up to.” He was barely audible, like he was talking through a pillow. “Are you going to come in and make a statement?”

  “I am. Sooner the better.”

  “Get your hole down to the Bridewell. Thirty minutes?”

  “Thirty minutes works for me, Barry.”

  “Meet me inside the One Euro shop on North Main Street.”

  “Got it.”

  I almost hung up there and then.

  “Eh … it's going to be just you taking the statement, right?”

  There was a pause.

  “That's the plan, Mick.”

  The response didn't reassure me.

  “It's just a statement, right? I'm not coming in for questioning or anything.”

  “Understood, Mick. You make your statement and get the shag out of Dodge.”

  “Because it's a fucking rat's nest in there. Savage will no doubt be sniffing around, his buddies ready to tip him off at the first sight of me. And yer man Halloran with the hairy suit will be trying to join up the dots with a line straight through me. I'll fucking hold you to it, Barry – statement only.”

  Barry sighed again, said nothing.

  “And maybe a couple of pints later when your shift is finished. Like old times.”

  “Why not, Mick. Maybe I could do with it.”

  Barry was looking at the underside of a toilet roll holder when I arrived at the One Euro shop.

  “Expecting more shit than usual?” I said.

  Barry looked up without changing expression. He looked stressed.

  “What do you think?” He put the holder back on the shelf. “Are you ready for this, Mick?”

  I nodded. But could I ever be ready for a parade through the very institution I’d betrayed? Being a Guard had, for a large part of my life, defined who I was. I had defiled that, disrespected the notion of An Garda Síochána as the guardians of peace. But my intentions, if not my methods, had been true. I think most Guards would understand, if not condone, that. I had to go through this because there were others in blue who were staining the force, blackening it, poisoning it from the inside out.

  I followed Barry the short distance to the Bridewell. There are Bridewells throughout the UK and Ireland. The first was established as a place for harlots and the homeless in the London of the sixteenth century. The site of the current Bridewell in Cork dates back to early in the eighteenth century, though the building itself is more modern, having been built after the original building was sacked and burned during the civil war of the 1920s.

  Barry led me through the side entrance. My chest tightened and the pain in my leg worsened, but I was damned if I was going to limp in the door. I would hold my head up high.

  Barry whispered muted greetings to a couple of Guards, one in uniform, the other plain clothes. My head dropped, dispelling the idea that I could handle their gaze, almost welcome it. He led me to a corridor where I knew there were a number of interview rooms.

  I wondered if O'Keeffe was in one of the rooms. For all I knew, O'Keeffe might have been questioned and released, done a runner already. I would need to dangle some bait out there, hope for Barry to bite, divulge something of use to me and The Gentleman. Although our goals were different – mine revenge for Mogs, Jordan’s the lowdown on O’Brien – they intersected through Savage. I was quite confident of that.

  We went into a small interview room in the middle of the corridor. It was well lit and private. No false mirror, no surveillance that I could see. Barry gestured to a chair and I sat. He leaned against the table.

  “I don’t even know where to begin, Mick. Fuck it, let’s just start with what happened on Blarney Street, take it from there.”

  And so I did. I took him from the moment Mogs and I left An Capall Bán to the moment I hobbled away with the wound in my leg. Barry took notes. He looked up from them when I stopped talking, as if he expected me to continue beyond that point.

  “You wanted a statement, you got a statement,” I said. “Anything more and you are questioning me.”

  Barry raised an eyebrow.

  “And your leg … miraculously healed did it?”

  “I’ve been saying my prayers,” I said.

  Barry sunk his head into his hands.

  “Do we have to play this game again, Mick?”

  “I told you what happened when I was with Mogs. Beyond that and you are showing a lack of trust.”

  Barry grunted. How could he have trusted me, anyway.

  “It’s OK, is it?” Barry nodded downwards.

  “The leg? Yeah, patched up OK. I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, I’m quite confident that McCarthy was the target and you were just collateral damage. I know with all the goings on in Churchfield, your dealings with Jordan, that seems a stretch, but it’s what we’ve heard from …” He paused then, perhaps for dramatic effect. “The street.”

  “Mogs was the target?”

  I didn’t understand it. Mogs’s bagman duties had ended at least four years earlier. Now he was just marking time, spending his remaining days in a drunken stupor.

  “McCarthy didn’t co-operate. Our information … you know I can’t say anything on that.”
>
  I understood. A CI – a confidential informant – was likely the source.

  Barry stayed silent for a moment. He seemed deep in concentration. Then he snapped out of it.

  “I’m not stupid, Mick. I know you’re in bed with Jordan. What’s the arrangement?”

  “What did I say about the questions, Barry?”

  “Some old associates of his have been – how should I put it? – active. Guys who had gone to ground for a while. Have you seen or heard anything?”

  “I saw a busker on the way in, heard him play the theme tune to Game of Thrones on a tin whistle.”

  Barry sighed deeply, ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not going to get any more out of you, am I?”

  “Unless you are looking for a tip on the hounds, no.”

  Barry muttered under his breath, “For fuck sake.”

  He looked down at the paper he had written on.

  “This isn’t exactly an immunity agreement, Mick. I’ll use it to get the others off your back for a bit. Try to, anyway. I’ll say you are a co-operating witness.”

  He forwarded the pen to me so that I could sign the statement.

  “Thanks, Barry,” I said. “I’ll be laying low for a bit. They’d have a job finding me.”

  It was time to cast out the line, try to get the skinny on O'Keeffe and the Moolah hit. But how could I broach that subject without betraying my allegiance to Jordan?

  “You look a bit under the kosh, Barry. Things been happening around here?”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but held off saying anything.

  “Cat got your tongue?” I said.

  “Rat, more like.”

  The door opened and Halloran walked in. Barry closed his eyes in a grimace.

  “What’s this?” Halloran asked, looking first at me, then Barry.

  “Witness statement, Dick,” Barry said. “Mick’s been helpful, very generous with his time.”

  Halloran turned back to me and took some time to size me up.

  “Very good of you, Michael. To help out your old pals. Let’s mint you a nice big medal, shall we? Michael J Bosco, good Samaritan, an example to be held up for society.” He turned back to Barry. “Is this some kind of fucking joke? Witness?”