Free The Midnight Choir by Gene Kerrigan Page B

turned to Harry Synnott.
    ‘About time. Keep an eye on this bastard. He’s got twenty minutes to decide how he wants to play this.’ To the prisoner he said, ‘That’s for openers. And we’ve got another twenty-two hours before we have to renew the detention. And after that it starts to get rough, OK? You think you’re up to it?’
    The Provo said nothing.
    Joyce turned away. As he opened the door he said over his shoulder to Harry Synnott, ‘Don’t talk to the little shit.’
    Harry Synnott stood near the door. The prisoner threw the towel away, then sat down on the floor, his back to the wall.
    It was more than ten minutes before either of them spoke.
    ‘You’re a bit young to be a party to torture.’ The prisoner’s chin was up, his head tilted back to rest on the wall.
    Synnott said nothing.
    The prisoner said, ‘Those bastards don’t believe in the law.’ Synnott looked across. The prisoner was staring at him, his lips trying for a sneer, but let down by an unmistakable tremor. ‘Great men altogether, those two. When they’ve got one man in a room, and a cop shop full of hard men to back them up.’
    Synnott took out his notebook. He wrote down a few words.
    ‘Keeping a note?’
    Synnott said, ‘I’m not supposed to speak to you.’
    ‘You going to report those bastards?’
    Synnott said, ‘I knew her, the garda you shot.’ He made eye contact. ‘I met her once. It was a terrible thing to do.’
    The prisoner said, ‘I didn’t do it.’
    ‘The fuck you didn’t.’
    ‘I’m a soldier,’ the prisoner said. ‘I follow orders. I fight the Brits. I don’t shoot Irish women.’
    When Joyce and Buckley came back, Harry Synnott went to the canteen. He had a cup of tea and sat at a table on his own, looking at his notebook. The notes were spaced out, two or three sentences per page.
    I’m a soldier the Provo said. Soldier of the Republic. And that made it OK, whatever he did. How come, Synnott wondered, not one of them ever stood up in the witness box and said Yes, I did it and I’m proud I did my duty as a soldier ? How come every fucking one of them’s innocent?
    Harry Synnott stared at his notes, at the lines he’d scrawled and the gaps between them, until his tea was cold.
    He went off duty that evening at 7 p.m. and called in sick next day. When the radio alarm went off the following morning the news came on and David Hanly announced that a man named Conal Crotty had been charged at a special sitting of the District Court with the murder of Garda Maura Sheelin.
    *
    When the trial of Conal Crotty came to the Special Criminal Court seven months later, Harry Synnott wasn’t on the list of witnesses in the garda file. His role in the case, guarding Crotty for a short time, had been peripheral and he hadn’t expected to be called, but he was nonetheless relieved.
    Crotty pleaded not guilty and claimed that he had been forced to sign a statement implicating him in the bank robbery and the murder. The chief prosecution witnesses, detectives Joyce and Buckley, gave evidence that he had made a voluntary confession.
    ‘When I came back in the room,’ Joyce said in the witness box, ‘the accused remained silent. After a while, we had a general conversation. I knew he’d played a bit of hurling at county level and I’d played a bit myself with a cousin of his, so I asked him about that. After we’d talked for about half an hour, give or take, he suddenly said he wanted to get something off his chest. That’s when he made the statement.’
    It was Crotty’s senior counsel, Desmond Cartwright, who buggered up the confession.
    With little material to work with, other than his client’s protestation of innocence, Cartwright cast his net wide. Apart from those who had made statements, Crotty and his lawyers didn’t know the names of any of the uniformed gardai who had been present during his detention. So Cartwright asked the court to call every garda who was on duty during the forty-six hours