McTiernan snorted. ‘No, no, that’s not it at all. Hayford’s dead these past six months. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He was gunned down in a bar fight in Rotterdam, by a gang of geared-up Colombians.’
‘Colombians?’ Mulcahy’s eyes lit up.
‘Yeah, exactly.’
‘Over what?’
‘Rotterdam, guns, Colombians … What the fuck do you think?’ McTiernan sneered. ‘Jesus, I thought you were supposed to be in the drugs squad?’
Mulcahy let that one go. All he could think of was what Ford had told him earlier about the line of enquiry SOCA was pursuing in Liverpool.
‘Ronson was seriously fucked off,’ McTiernan continued. ‘I mean seriously. It was like his own flesh and blood had been taken from him. Said he was going to get his own back. Get even, you know. And Ronson had plenty of heat at his disposal, I can tell you. The problem was who he decided to take on.’
‘Not just any old Colombians?’
McTiernan grimaced and nodded at the same time. ‘Six months later Ronson and Bingo are dead. So go figure, as they say.’
‘But what has any of this got to do with Bingo?’
‘I don’t know, I swear. Like I said before, him and Ronson were pretty tight. Bingo had a reputation for being good on the money side. You know, as in laundering. Maybe he got caught up in that end of things. All I know is, he was scared shitless. He was white with it.’
‘Hang on,’ Mulcahy said. ‘You told us yesterday you didn’t go to see him when you were over there. All that dead-man-walking crap. How come—’
‘I didn’t. Go see him, I mean.’ McTiernan swallowed. ‘Bingo came to me. He just turned up one evening at my place in Marbella, knocked on the window. I barely recognised him, he looked so rough. He’d heard I was looking for property and offered to sell me some of his places at a knockdown price for cash. Said he needed it quick because he had to get away.’ McTiernan paused.
Mulcahy frowned. ‘Go on.’
‘Christ, I mean, I’d been hoping he’d buy me out. And, when I told him, the man just crumpled, went to pieces right there in front of me. So I sat him down and gave him a couple of whiskies, and he started jabbering on about how he was fucked, he was finished, and some fuckin’ unstoppable greaseball loony was on his tail. He was pretty incoherent, but what I understood was he’d got caught up in some scam after Steve Hayford was murdered, something he’d got dragged into with Ronson and now some Colombian hard heads were out for his blood. He buggered off pretty soon after that. And that’s all I know. That’s the God’s honest truth, Mr Mulcahy.’
There was a boom like a foghorn from the ferry, and a corresponding roar from the Bentley’s V12 engine as McTiernan started the ignition. Mulcahy looked around. They were alone in the vast parking area now. The last of the cars had boarded and, from the activity dockside, it looked like the ferry was ready to depart.
‘Wait, Eddie.’ Mulcahy put a hand on McTiernan’s arm. ‘When was this?’
‘I told you, last time I was over – two, three weeks ago. Not long after Ronson’s funeral. He’d just come back from there. Now I really have to go.’
Mulcahy jumped back as the Bentley shot forward, eating up the empty acres of concrete in seconds, and squealed to a halt at the foot of the boarding ramp. At the top of the incline the bow doors of the ferry were already beginning to close. Only then, looking at the Bentley’s brake lights burning bright red in the distance, did Mulcahy realise that darkness had fallen. He turned away and walked back to the Saab. For once in his life it looked as if Eddie McTiernan might have missed the boat.
Siobhan went to the fridge to get a glass of wine, and a ready meal to heat up. She was coming back to the table, glass of chilled sauvignon in her hand, an M&S seafood casserole pricked and in the oven, her mind still buzzing, when she noticed the light on her landline answer machine blinking. She stopped and stared at it. She had never really trusted the machine since the year before, when someone had left a series of creepy messages, in the form of Roy Orbison songs, on it. The weeks she’d spent in hospital had obviously put whoever it was off, as she hadn’t received any more since, but she still thought of it every time she saw the light flashing. She pressed the answer button tentatively, ready to turn it off again at the merest suggestion of music. But instead, thankfully, she heard her accountant’s chipper tones emanating from the speaker, returning her call from the day before.
‘Siobhan, it’s Tom Fahy here. Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I was away yesterday familiarising myself with the Revenue’s latest masterplan to force us poor PAYE fools to pay for the sins of others. But to answer your question, yes, you’d have to get in touch with the CAI, Chartered Accountants Ireland, to make a complaint about an errant, negligent or malfeasant colleague. Don’t be surprised if they tell you there’s a long queue ahead of you, though. The profession hasn’t been exactly showering itself in glory since the financial crisis hit. You’ll find all the CAI’s details online. Anything else, give me a shout. I’m around for the rest of the week.’
She deleted the message, sat down again, put her untouched wine on the table and called up the CAI website on her laptop, copying down on her notepad the contact phone number, which she intended calling first thing in the morning. Beside it, she jotted down some other questions that badly needed answering in relation to Gemma Kearney. Just doing so brought the doubts flooding back. Was there really a story in this, or was she just fooling herself? Bashing her head against a brick wall simply because it was there? And what did it matter how Horgan got to Bristol, anyway? What she wanted to know was whether he’d met Gemma there or not.
Taking a sip of wine, she Googled the Lennox Hotel and dialled the number for reception. She asked to be put through to the manager, but the person who answered wasn’t the one Walker had dealt with earlier. This woman sounded younger and friendlier.
‘Hi, I know it’s a bit late,’ Siobhan said, ‘but I spoke to your colleague earlier – Ms Trenchard, was it? Is she there still by any chance?’
‘I’m sorry, she’s gone off duty now. Can I help?’
She felt her hopes of getting any information diminish with that response, but pressed on regardless. ‘Yes, I hope so. My name’s Siobhan Fallon. I came in earlier with Sergeant Walker, to pick up the belongings of a guest called—’
‘Yes, of course. I remember. I’m Sally. I was just coming on duty as you were leaving. You’re the Irish policewoman, aren’t you?’
Siobhan vaguely remembered a smiley young woman hovering in the background when Walker had been talking to the hotel manager. Well, she wasn’t going to waste an opportunity like that.
‘Eh, yes, that’s right,’ she said. ‘Sorry to disturb you again, Sally, but I forgot to ask earlier – would you, by any chance, have a record of what time Mr Horgan checked in with you?’
She repeated Horgan’s details and dates, and waited as she heard the tapping of fingernails on a keyboard.
‘Yes, here it is now. Mr Cormac Horgan. He was with us on the third and fourth, and his check-in time was … Oh, that’s … ’ Sally’s voice trailed off.
‘That’s what?’ Siobhan said, trying to keep a lid on her curiosity.
‘Oh, nothing, really. A little odd, I suppose. It says here that Mr Horgan didn’t check in until five a.m. on the fourth. The night porter must have let him in.’
‘Five in the morning?’ Siobhan exclaimed. All sorts of questions were running through her mind now. ‘That’s more than a little odd, isn’t it? It’s weird.’
‘Well, nothing’s weird in this business, as such,’ Sally said, making it sound like some kind of corporate mantra. ‘But, yes, it is early, or late, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Friday nights can get quite hectic here in Bristol.’
At last Siobhan saw the goal wide open for the one question she had wanted answered all along, even before she went to Bristol. ‘Eh, is there any way of telling if he was alone when he checked in, Sally?�
�
There was a soft cough from the other end of the line. It sounded suspiciously like the shutters coming down on that line of questioning. ‘I’m sorry, Officer. We charge by the room, and what guests do in them is their own affair so long as they do it cleanly, quietly and legally.’
Another corporate mantra, no doubt. Siobhan was about to thank Sally and hang up when the girl came back with one last suggestion. ‘Unless this message could shed some light?’
‘Message?’ Siobhan might as well have felt something go pop in her head. ‘Your colleague didn’t mention any message.’
‘Well, no. It’s a check-in message. When one’s left before a guest arrives, we log it and it automatically comes up on screen when they check in. It only popped up again now because I accessed Mr Horgan’s actual check-in details.’
‘Can you tell me what it says?’
‘Yes, it’s short. It says, “Well done. Told you crossing would be fine. See you later, Gemma.”’
‘Gemma?’ Siobhan gulped. ‘You’re absolutely sure of that?’
‘Yes,’ said Sally. ‘It’s here on the screen in front of me.’
When Siobhan put the phone down, her mind was on fire. In a single stroke all her doubts had been resolved. Gemma Kearney had been in Bristol with Horgan. Before she could think about it any further, the phone rang in her hand. No caller ID, but she recognised the number as the one Mrs Kearney had given her. She’d meant to call the woman earlier, but had put it off and off again, not wanting to have to tell her that she hadn’t been able to turn up any definite leads on her daughter in Bristol, that she really couldn’t justify spending any more time on looking for Gemma. Well, she sure as hell had something more positive to tell the woman now, didn’t she?
Wednesday
12
She woke with a start, the chill of early morning on her skin, fear like bands of steel cramping her breathing as she fought for air and prayed the blackness weighing down on her was the ordinary dark of night and not the end. She threw out her arm, fumbling, scrabbling, searching until at last she found the light switch and with a click brought reality, reassurance, relief surging into her heart along with the light. She flopped back against the pillows, struggling to regulate her breathing, pulling the duvet up to stop the cold settling on her skin, the stress in her chest ebbing away slowly, second by second. She was safe; she was in her own bed; she was alone.
Even as a shudder of relief ran through her body, she tried to laugh it off. The dream had been so literal, so stupid, like something out of The Wizard of Oz. How could she have been so fooled, so terrified by it? Had the trip to England prompted it, maybe? She’d been in a boat, one of those long, flat skiffs you see in period dramas, laid back on a bed of silk cushions, one hand trailing in the water, luxuriating in the warmth of a beautiful day. She closed her eyes and drifted off but knew something wasn’t right, and when she next looked up, the sky was black, the world around had changed utterly, and she was on a sea of dark water, no land in sight. The boatman, in his striped jacket and straw boater, was no longer behind her but at the front of the boat, thrusting the long wooden punting pole in and out of the water with a remorseless slurping, slapping rhythm, pushing them on towards some awful looming threat. But of what?
She reached for the red hardcover notebook she kept by the bed to record the nightmares that, thankfully, came less and less often now, for the therapist who, even more thankfully, she saw only once a month instead of the twice weekly it had been for so long. This was what they called progress. She jotted down the details as she remembered them: how she tried to call the boatman but he didn’t hear her, or ignored her; how she sought desperately to crawl forward and make him turn round, make him turn back; and when she reached him, when she tugged at the bottom of his white linen trouser leg and looked up, how all her hope had fragmented into razor-sharp shards of horror as he turned his head and she recognised the face seared onto her memory the year before, the scar on his neck burning like a purple flame …
Rinn. Who else could it have been? Who else was it ever going to be? She shook her head, wished for the thousandth time she could train her subconscious to recognise her fears for what they were: stupid, irrational. And what right did that evil bastard have to supplant every other thing in life that had ever frightened her, to become the sum of all her fears. Was there nothing else left in her imagination? Couldn’t it rustle up something new, more original than Sean fucking Rinn?
She wrote it all down, wrote it all out of her, the fear, the fury, the frustration, and, when she’d finished, saw she’d covered six full pages in the untidy scrawl her handwriting became when she was angry. Ever the reporter, she looked back over it, correcting solecisms, striking out repetitions here and there, noticing that she’d used the same word time and again to describe the setting and the nature of the journey she’d been on. The crossing. Like she’d been on some kind of Stygian journey with Rinn the ferryman pulling her from life to death. How boringly predictable was that for a woman who’d been crucified?
She shut the notebook, lay back against the pillows, closed her eyes, thought of the conversation she’d had with Gemma Kearney’s mother before she went to sleep. The woman had been drinking, she was sure of it. Probably to numb the pain of not knowing. Was there anything worse, Siobhan wondered, than the pain of not knowing whether your child was alive or dead? The child you’d loved and nurtured half your life, whose every hope and dream became your own. Jesus, at least you got closure with the grave.
A memory drifted in now of her own mother, a sad, unfulfilled, hopeless alcoholic whose love, in later years, had always been contingent on the proximity of a vodka bottle. So much for closure. Siobhan had stiffened like a board when she heard the slur in Mrs Kearney’s voice, half a childhood’s dread and resentment rushing automatically to the surface in that flash of recognition. But as Mrs Kearney started telling her about what a difficult child Gemma had been – so bright, so pretty, so gifted, yet always dissatisfied with what she had, with what Mrs Kearney and her husband could give her – it became evident that it was Gemma, not her mother, who was the unstable personality in the Kearney family.
Siobhan yawned, turned over on her side. The clock on the bedside table read 3.47 a.m. Exhaustion at last engulfed her.
Mulcahy woke early, surprised to find the first thing on his mind was precisely what had been occupying it the moment he fell asleep the night before: Orla. The deep green irises of her eyes, flecked with brown, and the freckles on her cheeks that weren’t visible until you got so close there was no going back. He hadn’t really thought of her in that absorbed, longing kind of way since they’d first got together, six months back. She’d called him the night before, late, at about eleven thirty, while he was lying on the bed reading the paper, and they’d talked. Not about them, but about the day, the news, some television show she had been watching. It was gentle, easy, teasing chat – both of them knowingly keeping it light, and all the better for that.
It left him feeling restless and keyed up by the time he got into work that morning. Eager to get on with things, to make some headway. And it made Liam Ford’s announcement that he’d arranged to meet Paul Solomons, the Liverpool cop, for a late breakfast at the Clarence Hotel all the more welcome. Mulcahy had half expected he would be dragged along for a couple of rushed lunchtime pints in the Long Hall or the Stag’s Head, and then have to leave Ford and Solomons to get trashed for the afternoon in the name of ‘catching up’. Which he would have gone along with for the sake of hearing what Solomons had to say about Trevor Ronson’s murder – of even more interest to him now, given what Eddie McTiernan had hinted about a possible criminal connection between Begley and Ronson. Money laundering was the ultimate bastardy as far as he was concerned. It was what enabled dealers and drug barons to think they could wash not only their dirty money but the blood from their hands as well.
During the five-minute walk from Dublin Castle to the Clarence, Mulcahy filled in Ford
on how he had caught up with Eddie McTiernan at the Dun Laoghaire ferry terminal the night before.
‘I’m amazed you believe anything that fat windbag tells you,’ Ford said, as they crossed Dame Street and stepped into the narrow funnel of Sycamore Street, and headed down past the stage door of the Olympia Theatre into the heart of Temple Bar.
Mulcahy shook his head. ‘You’ve got to understand how Eddie is. He’s straight most of the time. Sure, he might exaggerate, or pass on something he’s swallowed whole himself, but he wouldn’t sell me a deliberate lie. I’ve known him too long for that.’
‘Not so long you can’t enjoy putting the wind up him, though, eh?’ Ford chuckled. ‘Jesus, I’d love to have seen his face when he realised he’d missed that boat. I’ve never seen blubber go purple. I’ve a feeling that might be the last you see of your arch-informant for a while.’
Mulcahy wasn’t at all sure he shouldn’t be feeling more guilty about that, but he managed a laugh. ‘Well, he can’t have it all his own way. Whatever he had under that rug in the car, there’s an even chance it shouldn’t have been leaving the country.’
Turning the corner by the Purty Kitchen, they passed the blue front wall of the Project Arts Centre, then crossed Essex Street, making for the angular rear entrance of the Clarence.
‘This always reminds me of going into a courthouse,’ Ford said as he went up the steps, like he was some kind of regular. They walked through to reception, but there was no sign of Solomons, so they went back to the Tea Room and were seated at a table beside one of the big windows, the sun beaming in like it was still mid-summer. Ford began reading out the menu, offering his recommendations and suggesting, with a punch on the shoulder, that Mulcahy might enjoy ‘the full Irish’ – a laboured reference, he eventually understood, to Siobhan Fallon’s appearance on breakfast TV two days before. Just at that moment Mulcahy’s mobile rang and, bizarrely, it was her name on the screen.
Dublin Dead Page 12