Angels in the Moonlight_A prequel to The Dublin Trilogy

by Caimh McDonnell

  “Ye tried your best.”

  Gringo gave a short, bitter laugh and looked over the grey stone wall. His voice came soft and distant. “Did I?”

  “We’ll nail those bastards for this.”

  “With what?” said Gringo. “We didn’t even get a positive ID, they were wearing masks.”

  “You said one of them got shot, didn’t ye?”

  Gringo’s forehead creased. “Yeah, they did. I think they did. It was, I dunno, it was . . .”

  The sound of a cleared throat alerted them to the presence of DI Fintan O’Rourke. The look on his pale face gave Bunny a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “The hospital just . . . Dara died in the ambulance.”

  Gringo put his head in his hands, clutching tufts of hair between his fingers, his eyes clenched shut.

  DI O’Rourke turned to Bunny. “I’d like a moment alone with DS Spain, please, Bunny.”

  “Sure.”

  Bunny moved off towards the opposite end of the crime scene. Police tape was stretched across the road at the far side of the bridge, keeping back a couple of industrious freelance photographers and a few local looky-loos. He leaned against the wall and looked over at Gringo and O’Rourke, deep in conversation – O’Rourke constantly scanning his surroundings, Gringo’s eyes firmly on the ground.

  Bunny turned and looked over the wall, at the railway lines lying empty, the canal crawling by like a motorist slowing down to take a gander at another poor soul’s worst day. Bunny took a deep breath and tried to process all of this information.

  His shock at Dara O’Shea’s death was mixed with guilty relief at it not being Gringo. On the drive over, he’d imagined again and again being the one to tell Gringo’s mother that her only son had been gunned down on the job.

  Then there was his anger. He’d hang that little scrote Carter out to dry if it was the last thing he did.

  A movement caught Bunny’s eye. There was an abandoned shed on the sloping stretch of wasteland that connected the canal’s edge to the higher railway tracks that crossed the bridge above his head. The figure was hard to make out – or at least it would have been if he hadn’t already known who was living there.

  Maybe she would have the answer to the biggest question that was playing on Bunny’s mind. Why was Gringo lying to him?

  Chapter Thirty

  Bunny knocked on the door of the shed. He’d had to walk around to the bridge and then down across the wasteland, there being no way over the canal directly from Ossory Road.

  Silence.

  “Mary, I know you’re in there.”

  “Go away,” came that familiar voice with its haughty tone. “A lady does not like to be disturbed.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary, but it’s important. It’s Bunny McGarry.”

  A sound of movement inside was followed by the door creaking open a couple of inches, Mary’s eye peering out through the gap. Once ID had been achieved, she opened the door fully, running her hands over herself, checking she was still all there and that her tiara was in place. “Oh, Bunny, I do apologise. I did not realise it was you. I am not normally at home to a gentleman caller after dark. Would you mind terribly if I do not invite you in?”

  Bunny glanced behind her. The shed was rammed with a cornucopia of shiny tat. A child’s mobile dangled from the ceiling, and string held all manner of luminous detritus to the walls, the culmination of Magpie Mary’s ceaseless years perusing the dumpsters of Dublin. The floor held a thin mattress, the only furnishing in the entire structure.

  “Of course not,” said Bunny. “It wouldn’t be proper. Perhaps we could have a chat out here?”

  Mary smiled nervously and nodded. “Indeed, one moment.”

  She produced two deckchairs that had seen better days from the side of the shed, unfolded them and set them out. Bunny carefully lowered himself into the one indicated, painfully aware that his bulk could be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  Mary sat down opposite him. He noticed that, since he and Gringo had met her a couple of months ago on Mercer Street, she had added a glow-stick necklace to her outfit.

  “I’m sorry, Mary, I’ve not seen you since you had to go to the hospital. I’ve been meaning to drop in to check on you.”

  Mary waved his concerns away. “That’s quite alright, Bunny. It was very good of you and your associate to show such concern.”

  “Not at all, Mary,” he said, producing his card from his pocket. “In fact, if you ever get any trouble like that from any gurriers, you give me a call. ’Tis a shocking state of affairs.”

  “Well, yes, although I must say the health service took excellent care of me. It is such a wonder. Whether it be you or I, or the least fortunate amongst us, they give the same excellent care to all. Fantastic.”

  “Absolutely,” said Bunny, noting that Mary considered herself to be amongst the more fortunate.

  “Speaking of which,” said Mary, looking around herself in alarm, “where are my manners. Will you have a cup of tea?”

  Bunny held his hands up. “Oh no, honestly, Mary, it’s very late. No caffeine or I’ll be up all night.”

  “If you’re sure?”

  “I am,” said Bunny. He nodded to the flurry of activity still happening on Ossory Road, the patrol car lights still needlessly strobing into the night. “I’m sorry that your night’s sleep will have been disturbed by all this.”

  “Well, yes,” said Mary, “there has been quite the commotion.”

  Bunny nodded. “I was just wondering if, perhaps, you might have seen any of what went on earlier?”

  Mary shifted nervously, causing her deckchair to squeak her discomfort. “I don’t want to get involved in anything. While I have nothing but respect for you, my experiences of law enforcement in general have not been positive.”

  Bunny nodded his understanding. He and Gringo had had to step in a couple of years ago to stop two uniforms from evicting her from the shed when an overly-keen new manager down at Connolly Station had decided it was a misuse of Iarnród Éireann’s land.

  “I’m not here as a guard, Mary. I’m here as a friend.” He held up his empty hands. “I’m not taking notes, this is just a chat.”

  “Well,” she said, as if weighing things up, before they tipped in his favour. She leaned in closer, a gossip with a story to tell. “I did see rather a lot of it.”

  “Is that so?”

  She nodded. “I was sitting here, as it happens, enjoying a nightcap.”

  She looked suddenly nervous, her face clouded by the inveterate drinker’s fear.

  “As you would,” said Bunny. “Something to fend off the cold winter’s chill.”

  She nodded her agreement, a smile of relief crossing her lips. “Indeed. Well, I noticed this van pulling into the industrial estate, and that struck me as unusual, late as it was. Then a minute later, all the banging noises started. I didn’t know what it was at first. I thought it might be fireworks. Honestly, the children around here with those blasted fireworks they have at Halloween, you’d be afraid for your life. Demons, they are, pure demons! Why one time, it must have been three in the morning—”

  Bunny reached his hand across and touched her on the arm. “Sorry, Mary, not to . . . It wasn’t fireworks tonight though, was it?”

  She nodded her head and then shook it. “No, it was gunfire. There was quite a bit of it, and some shouting. Some of the language was very uncouth. Then, a car, a blue car, comes hurtling out of there and speeds away up the road – driving very recklessly, I must say.”

  “I see,” said Bunny. “And you’re sure you saw nobody go in, between when the van went in and the blue car came out?”

  “Oh no,” said Mary, “nobody. Not until the lady ran out.”

  “A lady?”

  “Yes,” said Mary with a nod. “I was surprised when she pulled the balaclava off.”

  “What?”

  Mary pulled a face at Bunny’s shocked tone.

  “Sorry, Mary. You were saying?�
��

  “Well, yes. The lady, she had something in her hands. She ran down the road to a car there and then ran back up.”

  Bunny nodded. Jessica Cunningham. Why would she run back to her car while her partner lay bleeding out on the ground? First aid kit? Perhaps. Surely they’d have had their mobile with them to ring for an ambulance?

  “She came back,” continued Mary, “and there were a few more bangs and then, a couple of minutes later, all the police and ambulances showed up. My Lord, the racket!”

  Bunny, lost in thought, registered what she’d said a few seconds after she said it. “Wait, hang on – she came back in, and then there were more bangs? You’re sure?”

  Bunny must have let his tension show, as Mary shifted nervously. “Yes. That’s right. I don’t want any trouble now. I may have misremembered it. I hope I can trust your discretion in this matter?”

  As Bunny spoke, he stared once more over the canal, the silent train tracks and the grey stone wall to the industrial estate beyond. Trying to tie the facts together in any other way than the direction they were pointing. “Yes, Mary, don’t worry. This is just a chat between us. In fact, if anyone else comes asking, I’d suggest you say you were asleep and didn’t see anything.”

  “If you think that is best?”

  He stood and nodded. “I do. Sorry again for disturbing you.”

  “That’s quite alright.”

  With a nod he turned and started walking back up the slope towards the tracks. Behind him, he could feel the presence of Ossory Road and its badly kept secrets weighing on his back.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Tommy Carter moved the armchair to face the window of the front room, sat down and waited. He’d expected to be picked up a couple of hours ago. He didn’t know what to make of the fact that he hadn’t been. DI O’Rourke was probably being careful. Making sure he had all his ducks in a row. They also now knew that Carter had his house covered by CCTV, and they’d probably correctly guessed that the others would have done the same. The Gardaí weren’t going to fall for that trick again, although the tape of Detective Dinny Muldoon assaulting him would still come in handy. When the arrest came, he’d no doubt the officers would be the model of restraint, at least in his house. One of their own was dead; that changed the game.

  He had barely slept last night and, when he had, his dreams had been fitful and filled with fire. He had woken to find Eimear standing in his doorway, looking terrified. He must have been worse than usual. His sheets were sweat-covered and his knuckles were bleeding from where he must have punched the wall. He assured her that he was fine and she had gone back to bed. Then he’d sat up, not wanting to return to sleep. Afraid to see O’Donnell consumed by the flames again.

  The job itself had gone flawlessly. He, O’Donnell and Moran had waited it out in the hole exactly as planned. They’d had just enough room for one of them to stretch at a time. It had been torture but he’d put up with a lot for sixteen million quid in uncut, untraceable diamonds.

  But the van dump had gone completely tits up and he was still trying to work out how. Franko had been driving, with O’Donnell in the back, opening the cases and extracting all the diamonds, exactly to plan. They had no intelligence to suggest there were tracers in the cases but they weren’t taking any chances. They had set the incendiary in the van and were transferring to the clean vehicle when the ambush had come. O’Donnell had said it was three shooters, all in balaclavas. He’d put down one of his attackers but he’d been shot in the leg while doing so. Initially, Tommy had assumed the IRA had shown considerably more capacity for surprises than he’d credited them with. Then he’d picked it up on the Garda scanner: the industrial park on Ossory Road, a guard was down. Franko had hit the roof. They’d not identified themselves as Gardaí or made any attempt to make an arrest. Trying to rob a robber, was there anything lower? Still, thought Tommy, if they’d played it straight, there’d have been a heavily armed Emergency Response Unit waiting for them instead of three greedy little pigs, and not even O’Donnell could have shot his way out of that.

  Franko had driven O’Donnell to the pick-up with Skinner. That had been the long-standing arrangement. A text to a burner phone and then whoever was injured would be delivered to Skinner wherever he specified. They wouldn’t even know where the wounded man would be taken. That was for Skinner’s protection. He was clean – no known connections to the crew and no criminal record. He had enough army medic training from his time in the British Forces to be able to give some field assistance. O’Donnell could lay low there and get better – assuming he was going to get better.

  O’Donnell was a problem, but not Tommy’s biggest. The cops had known where they’d be – only four people, including him, had known that. He’d tried to think of other ways around it but he kept coming back to the same thing: one of those four had talked.

  The circle of trust had been broken.

  There was movement amongst the numerous Garda vehicles that were congregated outside his house. Tommy caught a glimpse of a large posse heading up the drive.

  Someone knocked loudly on the door.

  “C’mon in, it’s open.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  DI Fintan O’Rourke dragged in a deep breath, puffed out his cheeks and then knocked on the door. He heard the sound of a throat being given a phlegmy and bombastic clearance, followed by Commissioner Gareth Ferguson’s familiar boom: “Come in.”

  Ferguson sat behind his large oak desk, rolling a cigar back and forth in his fingers. He was wearing breeches, a tunic and a shirt with puffed sleeves. The ensemble was completed with leather boots, which were currently resting up on his desk. The commissioner had always had a distinctive sense of dress but this was still somewhat of a departure.

  “Ah, Fintan. Excellent. You’re tall. Be a good man and pick up that driver there.”

  The commissioner pointed at a golf club propped up against his bookcase. O’Rourke’s look of confusion was met with an exasperated nod. “Get on with it.”

  Once he had grasped the club, the commissioner pointed up at the roof. “Now, as your commanding officer, I am ordering you to take out that bloody smoke alarm.”

  O’Rourke looked at the alarm, shrugged and then did as instructed. On the third swing it shattered, falling to the ground in three pieces, accompanied by a couple of golf-ball-sized chunks of plaster and a considerable smattering of dust.

  “Good shot. Pull up a chair.”

  Ferguson pulled a decanter of whiskey from his desk drawer, along with two glasses, and poured them both a generous measure. “We were at a fancy dress ball, of all godforsaken things.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “Don’t go for obsequious, Fintan, you can’t pull it off. I, against my own protests, was Henry the bastard Eighth.”

  “Who was Mrs Ferguson?”

  “Cleopatra.”

  “But . . .”

  “Yes, I very much made that point too. My besainted decided she didn’t like her original outfit so she changed. Leaving me in my ludicrous tights and whatever the hell else you call this stuff, playing at being a king while not even being allowed to dress myself.”

  Ferguson threw back half his whiskey and grimaced. He ran a hand around his face. “And the bloody glue for the beard irritates the skin like a bugger. I sent my new assistant home for a change of clothes, and you’ll never guess what the snivelling shit did?”

  O’Rourke shrugged. “Went home to his own house and came back in his dress uniform. I shit you not. Thought I was sending him home to smarten up. I don’t care if the monosyllabic mummy’s boy is the Minister for Agriculture’s favourite nephew, I fired the little shit there and then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He cried. I mean – there is no crying in policing, that goes without saying.” Ferguson swished his drink around in his glass and looked into it as if seeking a divination of the future. “So that concludes the small-talk part of the evening. What in the blue blazes happene
d?”

  “Well, sir, as you know, they hit a plane coming in from Antwerp. A twice-yearly flight where uncut diamonds are brought in. They knew everything – timings, procedures, the lot. They strapped a bomb vest on the Madigan’s head of security and cuffed him to the undercarriage of the airplane. Bloody nightmare. They were in and out in two minutes.”

  “May I ask,” said Ferguson, producing a crystal ashtray from another drawer in his desk, “where the hell was the heavily armed, highly trained Emergency Response Unit that I have repeatedly gone to the minister to ask for more money for?”

  “The ones who were already present at the airport had to deal with the bomb situation, until the actual bomb squad could be mobilised.”

  “And?”

  “And the rest got taken out with spikes spread on the roads in and out of the airport. That was done by the two members of the team who fled on motorbikes. They brought the whole thing to a standstill – it’s a minor miracle nobody was killed in the chaos.”

  “Yes,” said Ferguson, bitterly ripping off the top of his cigar with his teeth and spitting the nub into the bin. “What fucking luck. If these bastards – and let us dispense with the pretence that it might not be Carter and friends – got clean away, one of the many things I don’t understand about this shitstorm is how three of your officers then ended up in a gunfight with them?”

  O’Rourke swallowed. The “your” was not lost on him. He leaned forward in his seat, running his hand around the back of his neck. “They played a hunch, sir. They’d seen one of Carter’s boys casing the location a few months ago, back when we were trying to covertly follow them. They happened to be nearby . . .”

  “And why the hell didn’t they call for backup?”

  “No time, sir. They’d seen them go in, they knew they had the matter of a minute to make a call. For the record, I support their decision.”