Dark Circles

by Derek Fee

  Big George Carroll had long ago finished his Maud’s cream cake, and his stomach was rumbling as he left the M2 motorway at Exit 26 and followed the sign for Antrim/Ballymena/Coleraine. He was still unsure about what had happened in Tullymore but he was certain that he was a very lucky man to be still alive. He didn’t like to think of Owen Boyle’s head looking up at him from the ground. His mother and Uncle Ray would have the answers. They had the brains to put all the pieces of the jigsaw together. He would never be able to believe that Sammy was part of the plot to kill him. He and Sammy were friends since school. He had maimed and even killed people because Sammy had asked him to. He turned onto Lisnevenagh Road and drove the seven miles ahead to the Antrim Road. He turned onto Bridge Street. He was almost at his destination. Uncle Ray lived in a small townhouse in Waveney Avenue. Big George knew the area well and parked the BMW in the small cul de sac. He looked at his watch. It was four thirty in the afternoon. He had called his mother from the southern outskirts of Belfast, and she had told him that she would be waiting at Uncle Ray’s when he arrived. He locked the car and knocked on his Uncle Ray’s door. The door opened, and he was pulled inside.

  ‘You weren’t followed,’ Ray Wright asked. He was a tall, red-haired man in his early sixties and one of the few men that George would allow to manhandle him. Wright looked at the shirt tied around George’s head and suppressed a smile. ‘Take that thing off and let me see the damage. You look even more of an edjit than usual.’

  George started to remove the shirt from his head. The section directly over his destroyed ear was caked with blood and resisted being pulled away.

  ‘Your mother’s in the kitchen,’ Wright said. ‘We need to clean you up a bit before she sees you.’ He led George to the bathroom and turned on the hot tap. He balled up a towel and soaked it in hot water then dabbed it against George’s left ear.

  George stood still. His threshold for pain was way beyond what Wright was doing to him. Gradually, the piece of shirt he had torn from Boyle’s dead body came away and the extent of the damage to his ear was revealed. His left ear was reduced to a piece of red pulp. No amount of surgery was going to fix it.

  ‘You’re one lucky bugger,’ Wright said examining the ear. If Boyle had been a better shot, he would have taken half his nephew’s head off. ‘Let’s go talk to my sister.’

  Clare Carroll sat at the kitchen table smoking. She’d stubbed out her cigarette when she heard the doorbell. She was waiting anxiously to examine the damage to her son. She was a child of the ‘Troubles’ and had seen torn and broken bodies before. But this was her only son, the boy she depended on to put food on the table. She knew that he was still in one piece, but she was hoping that his ability to take care of her had not been impaired. She looked up as her brother led her son into the kitchen.

  George looked at his mother. He half-expected that she might cry when she saw that his left year was missing. However, she seemed unruffled. George moved his eyes to the two men sitting at the kitchen table beside her. He recognised Gerry McGreary and Davie Best.

  ‘There he is Clare,’ Wright said. ‘He’s as right as rain. Mind you, they’ll have to change his nickname from “Big George” to “One ear George”.’ He smiled at his little joke. He turned to George. ‘Mr McGreary and his associate are anxious to have a word with you. First, they want to know what happened in Tullymore. Sit down beside your mother, lad.’

  Big George sat beside his mother She put her hand on his. ‘Mr McGreary is here to help us, George. Tell him what he wants to know.’

  Big George started to recount the events of his day. He went into great detail and Ray Wright was about to stop him when he received a look from McGreary that said leave him alone. After a long discourse, George stopped. He looked at his mother. ‘I didn’t mean to kill Owen. He was my friend, but he shouldn’t have tried to kill me. I only wanted to stop him from shooting at me.’

  ‘Can you find the place where you buried him again?’ McGreary asked. He ran protection, prostitution and drugs in Central Belfast. Like Rice he had been born and raised in the Shankill and had always wanted to control that area. At the end of the ‘Troubles’ the Loyalist paramilitaries had, like their Fenian counterparts, gravitated to what they knew best, crime. Rice and his family had grabbed West Belfast for themselves and that had pissed him off. He had been forced to settle but deep inside, he always wanted to get rid of Rice. The Cummerford bitch had done him the favour of putting Lizzie Rice in a hole in the ground, and old Willie was too busy pickling his liver. Sammy was the de facto boss of the Rice empire. He was the one McGreary would have to get rid of if he was to become the number-one man in Belfast. Big George Carroll was the second present that had fallen into his lap that day. He had always considered Richie Simpson to be an arsehole and he’d proved it when he’d gone to the Fenians to recruit a killer for Sammy. McGreary had guessed, correctly, that Simpson hadn’t the nous to come up with the idea of killing Sammy. That idea was way beyond Simpson’s level. So the order had come from somewhere above and that probably meant Jackie Carlisle. And everybody who knew anything knew Carlisle was only a boy for the powers that be, the people who really ruled Ulster. If they wanted Rice dead, they might be grateful to the man who accomplished it for them. Simpson and Big George were a gift from God. And Gerry McGreary had learned never to spurn either a gift or God.

  ‘Yes,’ Big George said.

  ‘Do you know why he tried to kill you?’ McGreary asked.

  Big George shook his head, making bits of loose flesh swing from his destroyed ear.

  ‘The Peelers are scouring Belfast for you, son,’ Clare Carroll said. ‘You must have done something.’ She was going to add ‘think’ but realised she shouldn’t ask too much of her son. ‘Boyle wouldn’t have tried to kill you unless Sammy had told him to do it.’

  Big George couldn’t think of any reason why his best friend since school days would want to kill him. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown that man out of the window in Castle Street. But Sammy told me to do it.’

  McGreary and Best looked at each other.

  ‘And Sammy was with you when the man went out the window?’ McGreary asked.

  George nodded. ‘He told me to throw him out and I did.’

  McGreary nodded at Wright. ‘Your nephew has had a busy day. He must be tired. Maybe you should let him rest in the front room.’

  Wright stood up. ‘Come on, George. I’m going to put on the telly in the front room and you can rest. I’ll put your favourite cartoon channel on. I have to discuss things with Mr McGreary and your mother.’

  Big George stood up and looked at his mother. She motioned him to follow his uncle.

  McGreary turned to Best. ‘Get on to the quack in Finaghy. We need to get that boy’s ear fixed up. I have no idea what they’re going to do to it but it’s the least we can do. Alright, Mrs Carroll?’

  ‘Thank you, Mr McGreary,’ Alice Carroll said. ‘You’re a gent.’

  Wright returned to the kitchen. ‘He’s watching the cartoon channel. He should be good for another hour. Between Rice and the Peelers, the poor boy is fucked. Rice can’t leave him alive, and the Peeler’ll have him for doin’ that boy in Castle Street.’

  ‘There may be a way out,’ McGreary said. ‘The Peelers’re aware that George isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. They’ll live with a story where he was told by Sammy to toss the boy out the window. But if Sammy is there to contradict him, then it’s one man’s word against another. Sammy will buy the best legal brain in town that means he’ll skate. And George will take all the heat.’

  ‘But George would never do something without Sammy telling him,’ Clare Carroll said.

  ‘Tell that to Owen Boyle,’ McGreary said. ‘You know your boy, Mrs Carroll. Put him in an interview room and the Peelers will have his whole life history in an hour. Including the part where he decapitated and buried Owen Boyle in Tullymore Forest.’ He looked directly into Clare Carroll’s face. ‘You’ll never see h
im on the street again. You’ll be in the cemetery before he gets out.’

  Ray Wright was following the conversation. He had been a Loyalist paramilitary commander, and he was nobody’s fool. He looked at his sister. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I think Mr McGreary has a way that it won’t happen.’

  McGreary removed his wallet from his pocket. He peeled off two £50 notes and handed them to Clare Carroll. ‘Why don’t you go into town and buy yourself something. Your son might have to go to jail but he’ll have the best brief that money can buy, and you’ll be taken care of while he’s away. When he gets out he’ll come and work for me.’

  She smiled as she took the money. ‘What about Sammy?’ she asked.

  McGreary patted her hand. ‘You leave Sammy to us.’

  Clare Carroll put the money into her purse and left the room.

  The men in the kitchen waited until they heard the noise of the front door closing.

  Ray Wright looked at the other two men. ‘Okay, Gerry, what do you have in mind?’

  CHAPTER 63

  ‘Boss,’ Eric Taylor almost jumped in the air as Wilson and Moira entered the squad room.

  Wilson went immediately to Taylor’s desk.

  ‘You got to see this.’ Taylor indicated the images on his computer. ‘I’ve been going through the CCTV from every camera in the vicinity of Castle Street. Look what I’ve picked up.’

  Wilson stared at the image on the screen. Two figures, dressed in black, were moving along Castle Street heading in the direction of Royal Avenue. They both wore woollen hats pulled down over half their faces. ‘I can’t see the faces. Can you give me a shot where I can identify them?’

  ‘They don’t want to be identified, Boss,’ Taylor said following them down the street. ‘The hats are pulled down and they keep their eyes on the ground. That’s not the point. The one on the right is a man mountain. Who do we know that looks like that?’

  ‘Big George Carroll,’ Wilson said. ‘If that’s Big George, the other one must be Sammy Rice or one of his men. It all fits. O’Reilly weighed ninety kilos. Big George can probably bench press several hundred kilos. He could pick someone like O’Reilly up with ease.’

  ‘And toss him through a window with equal ease,’ Moira said from behind Wilson. ‘It’s all beginning to centre on Big George.’

  ‘Where do they go from Castle Street?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘They disappear on Royal Avenue,’ Taylor said. ‘They cut into Berry Street where there are no cameras.’ He turned and looked at Wilson. ‘That’s Big George. He was in Castle Street when O’Reilly went through the window. It’s one hell of a coincidence.’

  ‘It’s no coincidence,’ Wilson said. ‘O’Reilly was murdered the same as Malone and Grant. Sammy Rice and Robin Construction are behind the whole affair.’

  ‘Do we haul Rice in?’ Moira asked.

  ‘No,’ Wilson said. ‘We concentrate on Carroll. He hasn’t disappeared off the face of the earth.’

  The six o’clock briefing was upbeat. A large portrait photo of George Carroll dominated the whiteboard. Wilson gave a briefing on the visit to the Infrastructure Agency and the role of Robin Construction. He had drawn lines between the Agency, Robin Construction and Carson Nominees and then linked them to Sammy Rice and George Carroll.

  ‘I think that we’re almost there,’ Wilson said. ‘It not about the crime, it’s about the cover-up. The crime was probably the corruption within the Agency that provided Robin Construction with a mechanism to win the majority of contracts. I’m willing to bet that all concerned made a whole lot of money. Exposing this level of corruption would be a career-maker for a minor politician like Grant. What none of them realised was that Sammy Rice was involved. Sammy isn’t very good at thinking his way out of problems. His solution was to eliminate the trio and to do it in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. What they didn’t count on was Professor Reid. O’Reilly looks like it was a rush of blood on the part of Rice. Like I said it all fits. There’s only one thing missing, evidence. We’ll get Baxter and Weir for Malone and Grant with George Carroll’s evidence. We might even get Rice for O’Reilly but again it will require Carroll to rollover and put him in the apartment in Castle Street.’

  ‘Boss,’ Peter Davidson interjected. ‘I’ve worn out a pair of shoes walking around Belfast today. Nobody has seen Big George in the past two days. He might have gone to ground, or he might even have left the country. I interviewed his mother. I got the impression that she knows where he is, but she isn’t saying.’

  ‘I know George,’ Harry Graham said. ‘He hasn’t left the country. Removing him from both Sammy and his mother would be like putting him in an airless room. He would suffocate and die. He’s still in the Province. The question is, where?’

  ‘What about the international arrest warrants on Baxter and Weir?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘I’ve prepared the papers for the DPP,’ Graham said. ‘It’ll be on the wire in the next few days. But it might take months before we get our hands on them.’

  ‘It all comes back to George Carroll,’ Wilson said. ‘That’s the focus of our investigation. Get me Carroll and we’ll crack this thing wide open.’

  CHAPTER 64

  The snug is not a particular feature of Irish pubs. Special rooms for individual patrons is a feature of bars around the world. The snug in the Crown Bar had gunmetal plates for striking matches, and an antique bell system, very common in Victorian houses where servants were employed, which alerts bar staff to the liquid needs of the patrons. Drinking snugs, according to old records, were not originally built for comfort but to accommodate those people who preferred to drink quietly and unseen. Detective Superintendent Ian Wilson wasn’t the first policeman, or clergyman, to favour drinking in one of the snugs in the Crown. As a patron for more than twenty years, his request for the reservation of a snug was always respected. He arrived slightly before seven o’clock and made his way to snug ‘J’ where a ‘reserved’ sign had been placed on the table. He ordered a pint of Guinness and waited.

  Jock McDevitt was panting slightly when he pushed in the door of the snug. He sat down heavily, a film of sweat on his brow. ‘Jesus, that was a bit of a rush,’ he said and immediately pushed the bell. ‘Pint of Guinness,’ he said as soon as the barman’s head appeared through the hatch between the snug and the bar. ‘Just put my story for tomorrow’s paper to bed. Maybe I should have waited.’ He looked expectantly at Wilson.

  ‘It’s payback time,’ Wilson said. ‘You’ve given me a lead that panned out so I’m going to tell you a story. It’s hypothetical and I don’t have the evidence to back it up, but I think the evidence is out there and someone like you might be able to ferret it out.’

  McDevitt’s pint arrived and he attacked it with gusto. ‘I needed that,’ he said simply when he was finished drinking. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘It all started with the Infrastructure Agency,’ Wilson began, and he connected the dots as he had done during the investigation. He explained the role of Robin Construction and the ownership of the company. ‘We’re nearly at the end of the road. Tomorrow we’ll put out a statement that we’re looking for two men in connection with the deaths of Brian Malone and David Grant. We won’t publish the names, but we have firmly established that they’re the killers. There’s a conspiracy charge somewhere down the road, but we’re not there yet.’

  McDevitt finished writing in his notebook.

  ‘We might never have cracked these cases if you hadn’t tipped us off on the Glasgow connection.’

  McDevitt picked up his glass and toasted. ‘Glad to be of assistance, still think my little story about the Inner Circle is a fantasy?’

  ‘I deal with reality. It’s always easy to ascribe events we can’t explain to shadowy organisations. Half the planet has read Dan Brown and believes that Opus Dei or the Masons have their hands in every pie.’

  McDevitt laughed. ‘And they don’t? You know I have always respected your intelligence, but you can’t possibly t
hink that these organisations don’t include people who only want to use them to make money. The Inner Circle is not Opus Dei, or the Masons. It doesn’t promote religion or business contacts. It has only one God, money. It will turn its hand to anything that will make money. It’s the Mafia, but it’s our version of our Italian cousins. Opus Dei and the Masons would bend their knee to them. Who the hell do you think Carson Nominees are? Surely someone with your level of brainpower can connect those two dots.’

  ‘Some professor from Harvard that my sergeant spoke to seems to think that we’ll never find out who’s behind Carson Nominees. Maybe that’s where you come in.’

  ‘Are you joking? I’ve been at this game twenty-five years, and I’ve dealt with as much scum as you. One thing that I’ve learned is that you don’t step into the lion’s cage. These people would chew me up if they had any inclination that I was interfering in their business. You remember that journalist who was looking into Maggie Thatcher’s son’s connection with the Pinochet regime. He was found dead in a Santiago Hotel. The conclusion of the coroner was that he wanked himself to death.’

  ‘What a way to go.’ Wilson couldn’t contain a laugh.

  ‘Yeah, it’s funny but it happened.’ McDevitt rang the bell and ordered two more pints. ‘The Circle won’t be broken easily, and if they wanted to they’d swat me like a fly. They have connections that go way beyond this Province.’

  ‘Then why tell me the story?’

  ‘You know that saying that it only needs good men to look away for evil to win.’ McDevitt stopped while the two pints of Guinness were delivered. ‘I wanted to put them on your radar. This is an organisation that has existed for over one hundred years and virtually nobody has heard of them. If they were ultimately responsible for the deaths of Malone, Grant and O’Reilly, it’s the first time in a hundred years that they’ve raised their heads above the parapet. Maybe the current crop of leadership is getting sloppy.’