Little Criminals by Gene Kerrigan Read Free Book Online

shark. Over the previous ten years, successful Irish businesses, having prospered for a while, queued up to be sold off to large foreign outfits, mostly British and American. Whatever the business – newspapers, PR firms, hotels, radio and TV stations, phone companies, pharmacy chains, electronics stores – as soon as it established a feasible profile it was rushed to the global market place. The founders of successful Irish companies tended to take the money and run. Maybe it was what Justin Kennedy thought of as the chicken factor – an absence of long-term confidence – or maybe just an impatience to get hold of the loot. Whatever, smoothing the way for such deals had become a significant part of Kennedy’s business.
    Justin Kennedy’s firm had been hired to guide the Yanks through the intricacies of Irish company law. Two American lawyers had come over to earn big money for being told what to say. Gibson had brought along three sidekicks to pad out his firm’s fees. Kennedy had young Faraday for the same reason, but mostly to pour the coffee. Helen Snoddy, a freelance consultant on contract to Flynn O’Meara Tully, was sitting to Kennedy’s left. Tall, thin, brunette, primarily Prada, with a touch of Vuitton, just twenty-seven, smarter than anyone in the room and aware of it, she supplied specialist advice on tax matters. Sometimes an aspect of a deal had to go through three or four shelf companies and a couple of offshore jurisdictions before the tax liability was small enough to please the players. And Helen always knew the shortest route between any given deal and the nearest tax sanctuary.
    Kennedy adjusted his face to display mild interest in Gibson’s meandering, and let some coffee wash down the last crumbs of the chocolate biscuit. Gibson was chubby and bald, the kind of bald where the remaining tufts of hair are fluffed up and teased and treated with the care given to rare plants. It had taken him two weeks to prepare his figures, based on two months of negotiations. Another week to get his PowerPoint presentation to his liking – although the figures could have been printed off on one side of A4.
    One of the Americans asked a question about the timescale of an assortment of software licences. Justin Kennedy nodded his approval. Inwardly, he groaned. The short answer was that the software licences were irrelevant, applying to material already obsolete. But Gibson would never give a short answer. Helen Snoddy glanced at her watch. Kennedy could see that the top of the page open on her legal pad was decorated with doodles, prominent among which was a quite impressive caricature of Gibson, with a clown’s nose.
    Kennedy took another mouthful of coffee and tried to stop his gaze drifting back towards the biscuits. He decided to exercise restraint. Another twenty minutes of this and his secretary would intervene to announce that lunch was ready to be served.
    At two thirty on the dot, the kids of St Ciaran’s National School spilled out the doorway, draining the last of their drinks from their beakers, dragging jackets along the ground behind them. The boys used lurching shoulders and swinging schoolbags to continue the little skirmishes left over from lunchtime in the schoolyard. The girls mostly came in bunches, clustering, chattering.
    Little more than a week back at school, Sinead was already settled down and loving it. Over the summer, the school’s old prefab classrooms had been demolished and a row of new prefabs had been built. Frankie Crowe wasn’t happy that his daughter was being educated in a shanty schoolroom, but he had to admit that the prefabs were at least clean and warm. The main school buildings were more solid, but shabby. Despite the voluntary donations and the kids’ sponsored walks, there wasn’t money for plaster on the breeze-block walls, and some of the classrooms had no ceilings, just steel girders beneath a corrugated roof.
    Sinead came running. These days, whenever he came