On the other hand, one thing that did convince her there was something more to Gemma Kearney’s disappearance was this locked-up office. Siobhan couldn’t imagine any accountant being flaky enough to just up sticks and bugger off like that. It didn’t fit the stereotype, and it kept on nagging at her until she picked up her mobile and called Tom Fahy, the guy who did her tax returns every year; but she only got his answerphone.
‘Hi, Tom. It’s your favourite hack here. Who do you contact if your accountant pulls a fast one and does a runner? Is there an official body or council to complain to? Call me back, would you?’
She hung up, frustrated. She’d told Griffin that she would file the funeral piece by the end of the day, but with the best part of a week to go before deadline, he’d hardly worry about keeping her to that. In any case, Dublin was still two hours away, and knocking out the 500 words he asked for wouldn’t take up more than one of those. At least, not the story she’d originally envisaged filing. But this Gemma thing, that made it a whole different ballgame.
She grabbed her mobile again, opened the contacts book on her laptop and dialled. ‘Is that Paddy Rowan?’
‘Yeah. Who’s this?’ came the subdued answer, the voice suspicious. In the background she heard a low rumble of conversation, the scrape of cutlery, the clinking of glasses.
‘It’s Siobhan Fallon. We talked the other day about Cormac Hor—’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ the voice came back angrily. ‘The man’s barely an hour in his grave. Can’t you leave us in peace to give him a decent send-off?’
There was a click and the line went dead. She checked her watch, sucked a breath in through her teeth. Maybe that was a little insensitive. Anyone who attended Horgan’s funeral would probably still be in the pub for the traditional ‘bite and a jar afterwards’. To try contacting any of them now would be too intrusive. She’d have to wait. But what to do in the meantime?
Siobhan sat back in her seat, a dull ache at the back of her neck reminding her of how Mrs Kearney had come upon her in the graveyard. She shook her head at the thought of it. What must she have looked like? It wasn’t the first time she’d felt light-headed since returning to work, but it had never overwhelmed her like that before. It was just the early start, the lack of a breakfast, wasn’t it? She’d have to be more careful, that’s all. Putting a hand up to her shoulder, comfortingly, she breathed deep, willing herself to think of something else, and looked out the window at the lush green landscape rolling by. In the far distance, a long chain of jagged blue-grey mountains rimmed the horizon, then gave way to a clear expanse of cloudless sky. Something about the mountains, the flat blue colour of them probably, made her think of maps and classrooms, and she struggled to resuscitate her schoolgirl geography. Which mountains were they? The Galtees, or the Comeraghs? Or Slieve Blooms, maybe? She hadn’t a clue, really. Her dad would have known. He was the mountain man, the outdoorsy one. She wished he could have seen her on television earlier, seen her name on a book cover. She’d been wishing that kind of thing for the past twenty years.
A well-built woman bustling awkwardly down the carriage towards the bar snapped Siobhan out of her reverie. Her gaze came to rest on the laptop again, on the folder she had opened to retrieve Rowan’s number. One result of Griffin’s pain-in-the-arse molly-coddling since she got back to work was that she had been doing more from home instead of always being in the office. Seeing the folder open, she remembered she had all the info she’d gathered for her piece on Horgan stored right there on the laptop, notes and everything.
She opened a file containing her unsubbed final version of the story and began reading it. Objectively speaking, it was run-of-the-mill stuff, worked up into a recession-tagged human-interest story on a slow news day. It was just about good enough for the page-three lead, with a big picture of the Clifton Suspension Bridge to give it some punch. If there had been anything doing on politics, crime or the sleazy-scandal front, Horgan’s death wouldn’t have got more than a mention in ‘News in Brief’. But, on the day, with a deadline looming and nothing else to fill the slot, Griffin had told her to take it and run with it.
It had not come as a complete surprise when, the following day, it caught a wave of genuine public sympathy. The government’s official line was that the recession had eased its grip in recent months, but everyone knew the banking crisis had never really been sorted out, that the toxic-debt time bomb ticking away could detonate at any moment and scupper the entire economy. Thousands of people around the country still found themselves in situations not so far from Horgan’s, albeit on a smaller scale – up to their necks in debt, waiting for the axe to fall, terrified of losing their jobs or businesses, facing the yawning gulf of failure and shame.
And the way Horgan did it? Well, there was something so symbolic about throwing yourself into an abyss. The photo of the bridge was a beauty, suggesting the full horror of that plunge, the gorge, below, yawning open. Readers looked at that and imagined themselves, in their worst nightmares, up there on the metal gantry, the wind whistling around their ears, trying to make that decision. It was impossible not to imagine it. Jesus knows what awful stuff must have rushed through his head to make him go through with it.
Siobhan reached the end and gave herself a mental pat on the back for a job well done. Then she began opening each of the other files she had on the story, reading through them systematically – records of phone calls made to Horgan’s family and friends, psychologists, economists, spokesmen for estate agents and property developers, and the police officer she’d liaised with in Bristol for details of the post mortem and the repatriation of Horgan’s remains. Nowhere was there any mention of Gemma Kearney.
She was just about to close the folder when a name on one of the files leapt out at her: a good friend of Horgan’s, supposedly, to whom she’d spoken at some length, but hadn’t seen at the funeral. She thought about it for a second, then tapped the number into her phone. Her call was answered almost instantly. Cathy Barrett sounded a bit harassed at first, but remembered Siobhan and was willing to talk again.
‘You weren’t at the church this morning,’ Siobhan said.
‘No, I couldn’t. The baby’s not the best. I couldn’t leave her with the sitter, poor thing. I’ll have to send a mass card.’
She didn’t sound too upset about her absence, Siobhan thought. So much the better. ‘I wanted to ask you one more thing about Cormac, if that’s okay. A name came up. I thought you might know it.’
‘Oh yeah? Go on, then,’ the woman said, only half curious, still distracted by something at her end of the line.
‘Gemma Kearney. Do you know her?’ The dead silence with which the question was received was enough to tell Siobhan she’d touched a raw nerve. ‘Cathy? Are you still there?’
She was there all right. ‘You’re not seriously telling me she had the gall to turn up at Cormac’s funeral? That bitch?’
‘Eh, no,’ Siobhan said, thrilled by the response but not wanting to say too much. ‘But you obviously know her. Were she and Cormac—’
‘Look,’ Cathy broke in impatiently, ‘whatever she said to you, don’t believe a word of it, okay? She messed Cormac around something terrible, but that was years back. And if she’s saying she had anything to do with this now, well, it’s a lie. And a bloody disgusting one at that. He told me so himself. He got over her. Completely.’
You clearly haven’t, Siobhan thought. There was such venom in the woman’s voice. ‘Sounds like it was pretty serious at the time, though,’ she said. ‘Why are you so convinced he wasn’t seeing her again?’
‘After what she did to him?’ Cathy Barrett scoffed. ‘No chance. She screwed him over good and proper. He’d never have been stupid enough to go back to her; nobody would. And if she’s saying any different, she’s lying. That’s what she does best, by the way, lying.’
4
It was as if all the fight had gone from the day. The wind had dropped off completely, the rain settled into a pers
istent grey drizzle. Only the recurrent sweep of the wipers and occasional crackle of the Garda radio broke the silence. Mulcahy, his stomach yawning, gazed out of the car window, across the empty car park by the Gables restaurant, where they were idling. Ford was staring at the succession of big, flashy cars negotiating the junction of Torquay Road and Westminster Road, most of them gleaming Audis, Mercs and Lexus four-by-fours, driven by permatanned, dyed-blonde women of child-rearing age.
‘Not much sign of the recession biting out here.’
‘No,’ Mulcahy agreed. ‘We forget how much some people squirrelled away during the good times.’
Few places in Dublin had better form for squirrelling than the elegant, tree-lined avenues of Foxrock. This was the land of the long-term wealthy, of old money or the unfathomably quickly acquired, of fine Victorian and Edwardian mansions, and gardens measured by the half-acre rather than the square metre. Some new money had moved in during the boom. Rambling old plots had been subdivided, fine old houses pulled down, and shiny, high-tech modern structures shoehorned into the capital’s most desirable address list. But there was no sign of Foxrock getting any less exclusive than it always had been. Restricting the foreign holidays to two a year rather than three was probably the toughest the belttightening got around here.
The clunk of the door handle behind made Mulcahy turn in his seat.
‘Is it okay if the dog comes in, too, lads?’ the man said, squeezing himself in through the Mondeo’s nearside rear door. He was short, prosperous-looking, in his early fifties and balding. Raindrops streaked his nut-brown pate, and beneath the dripping blue raincoat, with its red Ralph Lauren logo, he was more than a little overweight. From his right hand a green and black tartan dog lead stretched out through the car door. If a dog was attached to the other end, Mulcahy couldn’t see it.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Ford muttered.
‘What else is he going to do with it?’ Mulcahy said. He turned again towards the man. ‘Go on then, Eddie.’
Eddie McTiernan made a clicking noise with his tongue and a terrier-sized bundle of brown and black fur shot in through the door and onto his lap. As soon as the door closed, the interior was filled with a fug of wet dog.
‘If that thing shakes itself in here, I’ll put a bullet in it,’ Ford said.
‘Sorry,’ McTiernan said, addressing the apology to Mulcahy. ‘I’ll keep him off the seat. We had to come all the way across Leopardstown Golf Course to get here. It was the only way to get away from the missus, y’know, to say I was taking Charlie here for a walk.’
Ford glanced across from the driving seat at Mulcahy. ‘Did he seriously just call it what I think he did?’
‘What else would Eddie call his best friend?’ Mulcahy laughed.
‘Ah, now, don’t be going on like that,’ came the protest from the back seat. ‘That’s all in the past. I’ve been out of the game for as long as you’ve known me, Mr Mulcahy. You know that.’
Mulcahy cast him a sceptical look. He had known Eddie McTiernan for fifteen years or more. In his early days with the Garda National Drugs Unit he had bagged him as an accessory on a cocaine bust and, as soon as he got him in the interview room, spotted his potential as an informant: his large circle of acquaintances, his love of his own voice, his gift for sly pragmatism, always hankering to do deals, hedge bets. Back then Mulcahy made it clear the price of letting him off was gratitude of a tangible variety, and McTiernan had come up with the goods, in time becoming one of his most reliable snouts. But for favours, not money. That was always the deal with McTiernan.
‘Which would explain all those trips you’ve been taking out to Spain lately, would it?’ Mulcahy said.
‘Spain?’ McTiernan echoed, a little weakly.
‘Come on, Eddie, you didn’t get that tan in this weather, and a little bird tells me you’ve been spending way too much time out there in the last couple of months. Six trips. Four to Malaga, two to Alicante. Giving Ryanair a lot of business there. Doesn’t sound like retirement to me.’
‘Jesus, talk about the surveillance state,’ McTiernan said. ‘Is there nothing you fellas don’t know about?’
‘Plenty,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Which is what you’re doing here. Tell me about Spain.’
‘Yeah, well, I suppose I can see how it might look,’ he said defensively, ‘but I wasn’t bringing anything in, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not that desperate. It’s just my investments, like. The Spanish property market’s been hit worse than we have by this crash. I was trying to get a couple of places off my hands, reduce my exposure on that front, y’know?’
‘Sell one to Bingo Begley, did you?’ Ford cut in, the aggression in his voice attracting even the dog’s attention.
‘Ah,’ said Eddie, realisation at last dawning. ‘Okay, I get the picture now.’
‘So, did you see him?’ Ford asked, the growl an octave deeper this time.
The dog gave a whimper and buried its head in the crook of its master’s arm.
McTiernan turned towards Mulcahy, a forced look of outrage on his face. ‘Are you going to let this galoot talk to me like that, Mr Mulcahy? You know I didn’t have to come out here today, especially not in this weather.’
Mulcahy shrugged. The last thing he was going to do was interrupt Ford’s well-honed routine. ‘Just answer the question, Eddie. I’ll say “please” if it helps.’
The bald man sighed and shook his head, then gave the dog’s head a stroke for good measure.
‘Well, no, as it happens. Not as such. Neither did anyone else for that matter. And before you ask, no, I had nothing to do with any shooting.’
‘We know that, Eddie,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Not your style. Like I said, we just want the word on the street.’
‘Yeah, well, I wouldn’t want to get too much of a rep for that, either.’
‘So when did you hear about the shooting?’ Ford broke in impatiently, refusing to let up.
McTiernan sighed. ‘Like everyone else, I suppose, on the news this morning.’
‘Come as a surprise, did it?’
‘Well, no. That’s what I was just saying, really. I didn’t see Bingo, ’cos nobody had for a couple of weeks when I was out there last. The word, as you have it, was that Bingo was a marked man.’
‘The word according to who?’
‘Just around, y’know. It came up in passing. I was out having a meal one night with some pals, alfresco, like, and I thought I saw Bingo go by in his Lexus. I mentioned it to the guy sitting next to me and the whole bleedin’ table went quiet. Then one of them said, “Dead man walking,” and the others said it couldn’t’ve been him and that was all they’d say about it. When I asked Frankie Delahunt later, he said Bingo’d got himself into some deep shit that nobody reckoned he’d be able to pull himself out of.’
‘What sort of shit?’
‘Well, that’s just it. Nobody would say. To be honest, I didn’t think they knew themselves. Just that it was major.’
‘Anybody mention Russians?’ Ford asked.
‘In connection with Bingo?’ McTiernan looked genuinely surprised. ‘No way. Why? Is that what they’re saying now?’
‘It’s what the papers are saying, Eddie.’
‘Well, it could be true, I suppose. That Moscow lot are deadly out on the Costas. Have you heard what their latest scam is? Kidnapping rich Spanish banker types and injecting them with—’
‘Forget that, Eddie,’ Mulcahy interrupted. ‘What about Bingo? What’s this “dead man walking” stuff?’
‘Like I said, that’s what they were calling him.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘The lads – y’know, the fellas in the game out there.’
‘Irish?’
‘Yeah, and English, too. There’s so many of them lot out there you can’t help knowing a few.’
‘So what exactly were they saying?’
‘Just that Bingo had got in over his head, with some really dangerous fuckers this time. Made the Dublin
mob look like Barbie dolls.’ McTiernan rolled his eyes for effect, then gave a little shrug. ‘Beyond that I really couldn’t say.’
‘Come on, Eddie, you know more than that.’ Mulcahy knew that when it came to the hard stuff, the solid stuff, McTiernan always had to be reeled in, made to feel he was the one making the running. ‘What is it you’re after?’
‘Well, there is something, now you mention it,’ he said, as if the thought had never before crossed his mind. ‘A pal of mine, his son, up for possession. Only a couple of grams, mind. Purely personal, I promise.’
Mulcahy looked at Ford, playing the game. ‘Can we do anything, Liam?’
‘A couple of grams?’ Ford said begrudgingly, giving McTiernan a baleful stare. ‘Depends. Do you know who pulled him – were they in uniform?’
‘No, plainclothes, couple of ’em, in a club. He was taken to Santry Station.’
Ford nodded. ‘Probably our lot, so maybe. What’s his name?’
‘Get the details later,’ Mulcahy cut in. ‘You spill first, Eddie – if it’s good, we’ll do what we can.’
McTiernan tried to look like he was thinking about it for a second or so, then nodded. ‘Okay. It’s only a rumour, like, but you know that English fella Ronson? Got topped a few weeks back, across the water?’
‘The guy in Liverpool?’ Ford asked.
‘Yeah, big player.’
‘Trevor Ronson,’ Mulcahy said, uneasy at the mention of that name. Ronson had been gunned down outside a pub on one of Liverpool’s roughest estates a few weeks earlier. Tagged by the British as a major wholesaler of cocaine and other narcotics, the hit had sent shockwaves through the criminal underworld. The enforcement community’s secure intelligence sites and blogs had been ablaze with it, too, although in all the digital chatter Mulcahy hadn’t picked up on any Irish connection. He wasn’t disposed to believe there was one now, either.
Dublin Dead Page 4