‘Not mine, not Milky’s. Besides, there’s a difference.’
The Rosslare cops, and maybe fingerprints, that was probably enough to put them away, but a victim standing up in a courtroom and pointing a finger and saying, ‘That’s him’, that closed down any loopholes.
‘It’s all over,’ Martin said. ‘None of this matters. We’ve got the money, we can divvy tomorrow, next week, whenever. Drop her somewhere, forget the rental, forget everything, let’s just fucking go!’
Brendan said, ‘No, she’s seen our faces. It matters.’
Martin said, ‘Kidnapping’s one thing. Be fucking sensible.’
Frankie said, ‘Bollocks.’
Dolly appeared halfway down the stairs. He seemed distanced from the scene before him, like he was watching a mildly interesting television programme.
Martin turned away and hurried back into the kitchen.
Maybe fifty feet away, there were two women in their twenties, stride-walking past on the other side of the road. They were in Nike tops and shorts, one was wearing a pink headband. Their arms stiff and swinging, they were walking fast, shedding calories with every stride. Had they glanced to the right they would have seen Angela at the front door, facing back into the house, one hand held out in front of her, and Frankie beyond her, pointing his gun at her face. Chatting, the two women walked on, out of sight behind the hedge.
Frankie made a gesture with the gun. ‘Come back in,’ he said.
Angela said, ‘Please.’
Milky said, ‘Please, not here.’ He ran forward and awkwardly threw an arm around Angela and pulled her towards the hall. She grabbed the edge of the doorway, one knee braced against the architrave, and Milky punched her fingers and kicked at her legs. He clawed at her and she cried out. Brendan took a handful of her hair and pulled and she screamed and lost her balance and fell on her back on the thick blue carpet. Milky closed the front door.
Frankie stood over the hostage and pointed the gun at her face.
‘I said no!’ Martin was back from the kitchen, holding his gun down by his side. ‘Come on, let’s take a minute, calm down.’
Frankie looked at Martin and made a dismissive noise.
Martin shook his head. ‘I mean it. No killing.’
‘We’re in a situation. You know that.’
Angela’s voice was high and wavering. ‘Please, Martin, don’t let him kill me.’
‘Martin?’
Frankie’s voice had an hysterical edge. ‘Martin?’
Martin said, ‘Look, let’s just—’
‘Fucking Martin, right? You told her your name? Holding hands, is that it? She’s pulling your chain, mate.’ He was moving slowly around the hostage, the gun pointing down at her face. ‘Is that all she’s been pulling?’
When Angela stood on the front step and turned round and the gang leader pointed his gun at her forehead, she looked into his face and saw her death. If she did as he wanted and came back inside he would take her somewhere in the house and kill her. If she stayed where she was, he would kill her.
From that moment, something inside her hunched over, braced for the killing blow. All thought was swept away by the rush of dread. She felt hardly any pain in the struggle to stop them pulling her back into the house. Each second was the last second before the end. She tried when she could to hold up one hand or the other, to position it between her face and where she thought the gang leader’s gun was.
And when she was lying on the floor and the gun swung down and pointed at her head, a physical weakness swept through her and she felt her bladder empty.
‘I said, no!’
She didn’t take in what the two gunmen were saying as they argued about her life. She said something, a plea, and she wasn’t sure if she said it aloud. Their voices became harsh.
Finally, Martin reached down and grabbed her by one arm and half dragged her back towards the closet, the gang leader still pointing his gun at her head.
Someone said, ‘Ah, Jesus, look at the fucking carpet!’
Martin pushed her roughly into the closet.
‘Please—’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘You have to get me out of here, he’s—’
The gunman, his expression bitter and angry, slammed the door of the closet. She heard the sound of the chair being propped under the knob.
Afterwards, there was little talk about what happened. Martin and Frankie played it cool, let it all simmer down. That moment Martin walked back out into the hall, carrying the gun down by his side, careful not to point it at Frankie – that would always be between them. You could tell that from the politeness of the few words they exchanged afterwards. Anger would have been open to negotiation. Martin could have explained how just for that moment he wasn’t sure where he stood with Frankie and he knew he needed to get his gun before he said anything else, and maybe that was the wrong thing to do but it was how it felt when the heat flared up.
‘Killing her didn’t make sense. You know that. It would have put us deeper into the shit.’
Frankie said nothing, just shrugged. Martin nodded. The shrugs and nods and the short, polite sentences that followed emphasised the strain between them.
Later, one of Milky’s people arrived with two sets of car keys. ‘They’re parked down the seafront,’ Milky told Frankie. ‘Red Mégane, white Ford Transit.’
Frankie gave the keys of the van to Martin, who was lying down upstairs. ‘For the morning. I’ll take the Megane, you’ll need the van for the hostage.’
For a moment, it seemed like Frankie was about to add something, then he nodded and went back downstairs. It was like they both realised there was nothing to be said about the craziness that wouldn’t make things worse.
Around six o’clock, Martin came down wearing his jacket and said, ‘I told Debbie I’d be in touch today.’ Frankie nodded, Martin stopped like he had something important to say, then he said just, ‘OK,’ and he left.
It took twenty minutes of texting Deborah, watching her from a distance, directing her in and out of stores at the Omni Centre in Santry, before Martin Paxton was sure she wasn’t being followed. He joined her in O’Brien’s sandwich shop and there was an undertone of pleading in his voice. After he’d spoken for maybe five minutes she said, ‘No.’
‘Deb, think about it, please. It’s the only way.’
She said, ‘I have a family. I have a job. I can’t just drop everything here and go off and maybe never see them again.’
The tone of what he said changed, he spoke now of how he was entitled.
‘It’s my kid too.’
‘And he’s going to be born in his own country.’
‘Deb—’
‘There’s no way I can learn another language.’
‘Sí, sí, señorita, mucho dinero.’
She didn’t return his smile.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you’ll pick up all you need in no time. This time tomorrow, I’ll have my share, we build a whole new life.’
She said nothing for a while. Then, staring at the table in front of her, she said, ‘You know it’s what I want, the three of us together, but – it’s no life, Martin. It’s no life.’
The honesty of her sadness was unmistakable and Martin realised he’d never loved her more.
After a while she said, What are you going to do with that poor woman?’
‘She’ll be all right.’
‘What are you going to do with her?’
‘What about the baby? I mean it. I have rights. I have to be able to at least see him.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how we’ll manage that, love. There’s years ahead. Jesus, Martin, how do we arrange it? Where? How often? This is a lifetime thing.’
‘The cops, they get lazy – I know people who come into the country and go out again when they want. People come back. Slip in, find somewhere, settle right back in. Different names and stuff, you know. We can do it.’
She closed her eyes
for a few seconds and bowed her head and when she opened her eyes the pain he saw was answer enough.
He said nothing for a while. He took a sip from the still-full mug of coffee. It was lukewarm. Then he said, ‘Christ, what a fuck-up.’
23
Milky was pacing his living room. ‘Bastard!’ He said the word again and again. Brendan Sweetman was standing by the marble fireplace, his right hand making agitated patterns on his bristled hair.
‘I told him,’ Milky said. ‘I fucking said it, again and again. Not here, I said, not here!’
Dolly Finn was upstairs in a small bedroom at the back of the house, sitting on the floor by the window, his back against the wall, his knees up and his hands cupped over his eyes.
From downstairs, from the kitchen, the noises had been coming for almost twenty minutes. They started maybe half an hour after Martin left. First, the sounds of struggle, then a scream, then a series of harsh, strained cries, then another scream. For some time, there were no abrupt sounds, no sounds of struggle, just a repetitive moan.
From the moment he learned that the police knew the names of some of those involved in the kidnap, Dolly Finn felt physically weak. It was only a matter of time before they fingered him. It was like some sinews in his arms and legs had slackened and couldn’t properly function. Even the most routine thoughts had to push their way around the solid block of dread that settled inside his mind. Although capture or worse was possible in any such project, the sudden reality of being separated permanently from his home and his shop and the whole of the small, satisfying life he had constructed was paralysing. The police hadn’t put his name on the radio or his picture in the papers, but there were too many who knew he was involved, and no one was going home from this.
England, he had a friend there, in Nottingham, friend enough to show him the basics. But even if that worked, he would never recover even a shadow of what he was losing. It wasn’t the money that mattered, it was the shop and its merchandise and its customers and the role it gave Dolly in the culture that began with the instruments of faraway musicians, mostly dead now, and spread around the world through a network of people with the ears to appreciate the music. The shop and the flat and the routine they supported were Dolly Finn’s life, and they were gone.
From downstairs, the endless Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh! of the hostage.
‘No, wait,’ was all Dolly said to Frankie when it started. ‘Just wait.’
Doing this didn’t make sense. There was an argument for disposing of the hostage, if it meant saving all of them from disaster. You could weigh such drastic action against all the harm they might suffer if she was a witness, and that would be a reasonable decision. That was business. Not this.
This didn’t make sense.
What this did was take them down beyond ruin, to nightmare.
‘Wait!’ he said, his mind scrambling to find the words.
And Frankie said, ‘Fuck off,’ and Dolly stood there for a moment, then he left the kitchen and passed Brendan and Milky, standing in the hall, both of them looking sick. That was when Dolly came upstairs.
The Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh! of the hostage continued. Dolly Finn realised there were tears on his cheeks.
*
She knew, just from the way he stood when he pulled her out of the closet, what was about to happen. Standing there, the mask over his head, breathing hard, poised, almost inviting her to try to get away. Knowing it was hopeless, she tried to run and as she did she heard him grunt with satisfaction. He caught her in the kitchen, knocked her feet from under her, her thigh raked by the corner of a table, her back slamming against the tile floor.
Somewhere behind her, one of the others said something. The gang leader said, ‘Fuck off.’
Slapping her face, pulling at her clothes, his knee pushing down the tracksuit bottom.
She cried out.
The punch in the face sent darkness rushing through her head, flecks of coloured light arcing and dying.
Then it was like she was waking suddenly, lying on the floor – seconds later, minutes, if she’d been unconscious at all – a rhythm coursing through her body, his weight on her, his panting, his rutting, her body rocking, the hard floor painful against her shoulder blades.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
The kidnapper’s eyes stared down from the holes in the mask. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see the rest of the face – the eyes alone were enflamed with hatred. She felt liquid trickle along the side of her nose and down her cheek. He was making noises, in time with his thrusting, she cried out, he told her to shut the fuck up. He thrust violently, she screamed and that was when he punched her a second time and she felt something move inside her face. She didn’t lose consciousness this time and after a while she became aware of her non-stop panting, Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh!
He had one hand pressed to the floor for balance. Her eyes glimpsed a familiar image. Inches from her face, the Rolex she’d bought for Justin’s birthday said that it was just after seven.
She heard him whisper, Bitch!
Now he had one hand on her left breast, gripping hard, twisting. The other hand came up and his forearm pressed against her throat. The arm forced her chin up, her head back. The forearm pressed and relaxed in time with his thrusts. It was a crushing pressure. Her breath came in irregular gulps.
Knowing it would make no difference, she strained to plead with him not to kill her, but her mouth wouldn’t make the sounds she needed. Blinking, sweat seeping into her eyes, she struggled to grasp the words, to put them in order. Half-constructed sentences broke inside her head and the words came out as a series of gasping noises.
From him, the panting had dissolved into just one word now, a pulsing hiss that kept time with his rutting.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
He hit her again, this time a clumsy glancing blow to the side of her head. He screamed, ‘Say it!’
Through the roaring of the blood coursing through her faltering brain she understood, and her mind scrambled to grasp the word and her throat forced it out through her quivering lips, more of a moan than a word.
‘Yes—’
Within seconds, he bellowed and it all stopped and he was standing up, fixing his clothes. He bent over, grabbed her by the hair and by one arm, pulled her up and dragged her out of the kitchen. She wanted to plead but all that came out were wordless noises. He pushed her into the hall, pressed her head down and flung her backwards into the closet. Her back hit the wall, the top of her head collided with the underside of the stairs and she collapsed on to the floor. The door of the closet banged shut. In darkness, she heard the chair being slammed into place under the doorknob.
She realised she was making hissing sounds. She lay still, her wet cheek touching the cold floor.
*
Martin told the taxi driver to stop. It was a couple of roads past Milky’s place and he walked back through the quiet neighbourhood. Way back when, this was the kind of area he and Frankie and their mates might canvass for opportunities. Maybe a fanciable car in a driveway, or a pitch-dark house that might be worth a visit through an upstairs window. Back then, you got to pick and choose. These days, they all had burglar alarms and reinforced windows.
Passing a gateway, he saw two people talking on a doorstep. At another house an open window let out a belch of canned TV laughter. Around the corner, a car passed and turned into a driveway. He looked at his watch – half nine.
A couple of years back, Martin and Deborah had been to view a house for sale on this road. Just for the crack. Even though the banks were shovelling money at borrowers, stoking house prices, there was no way a librarian and someone on the lower rungs of the thieving business could raise the kind of scratch it took to buy a place around here. Not that that mattered any more.
Before they left the Omni, when the conversation with Deborah had become no more than a muttered sentence every few minutes, Martin had given up trying to convince her. By now, his own belief in what he was saying had
evaporated. When they parted, he held her close and they meant the things they said about the future, and they knew that nothing they said or meant mattered very much. Then they got into separate taxis and Deborah went home and Martin went back to Milky’s house.
When he got there, he stood in the hall, his face pale, the fingers of one hand pinching his mouth, as Milky explained what had happened.
‘Is she OK?’
‘I had a look,’ Brendan Sweetman said. ‘She’s a bit of a mess, but she’s alive.’
‘Jesus, could none of you do nothing?’
‘You know yourself,’ Brendan said, ‘I mean, when Frankie’s like that. Christ, it’s not like I know her or anything. I mean, interfering with something like that, when there’s guns around—’
‘Where’s Frankie gone?’
‘Just gone.’
‘And we’re supposed to hang around here, cleaning up after him?’
‘He’s going to pick up the money, the place he hid it,’ Brendan said. ‘Soon as Milky knows the address of the new place, the rental, we ring Frankie, he meets us there lunchtime tomorrow, split the money, turn her loose.’
Martin shook his head.
When Martin opened the door of the closet, the hostage leaned back from the light that spilled in. Martin hunkered down and said, ‘It’s OK. Look, I heard what happened.’ He moved nearer and she made a shrill noise.
‘I wasn’t here. I didn’t know. I knew nothing.’
Silence.
‘Look, let me help, please?’
Her voice was a whisper. ‘Go away.’ She moved her head into the light and Martin saw the bruised eyes, swollen cheeks, the eye on the right closed, a trickle of blood on her cheek. She was holding a piece of blood-smeared cloth to the left side of her face. It was hard to tell where the blood ended and the bruises began.
‘Jesus, Angela, I’m sorry.’
The whisper again. ‘Fuck off.’
Frankie Crowe had a whole night to kill before heading off in the morning to pick up the money from Leo Titley’s place. He wanted to say goodbye to Joan and Sinead, but not tonight. Sinead would be in bed, Joan wouldn’t want her disturbed. Anyway, there’d be cops watching the house from every angle, best to contact Joan away from there. Most of all, he didn’t want to spend the night in Milky’s house, with all the bullshit he could expect once Martin got back. After he’d told the others he was going to get the money, and he’d given them a mobile number to ring and told them how he’d meet them next day at the new rental, Frankie went down to the seafront and found the red Mégane.
Little Criminals Page 24