“Did you have to go into it all? The murder, Irene’s death, all of it raked up again?” She was hissing at me as if that made her words less audible to Owen, although the reverse was surely the more likely outcome. I raised my palms in the air and turned to look back at Owen, and at Dublin Bay spread out behind him.
“It’s to try and put it all to rest,” I said. “To find out who is guilty.”
Janet Ames looked at me as if I had said something pitifully naive.
“It’s the innocent who suffer,” she said. “I don’t know that finding who killed Brian Fogarty will change that.”
“I don’t know either,” I said. “But that’s what his daughter has hired me to do. Justice doesn’t always bring an end to suffering. But at least it’s justice.”
She opened the door and I followed her out. A blast of light from the landing brightened her hair to a shimmering auburn gold; it was the kind of hair a man could fall in love with.
It was clear Janet Ames was very much in love with Steve Owen. Before she shut the door on me she said one last thing.
“Please don’t come back. He needs to live in the future now. The past will be the death of him.”
CHAPTER 10
Noel Sweeney, the retired Garda officer who led the Brian Fogarty murder investigation, lived in Stillorgan, but I only had a landline number for him, and either he didn’t have a machine, or it wasn’t switched on. I stopped by his house, which was in a cul-de-sac tucked in off the dual carriageway that, in rush-hour traffic, took me about half an hour to reach, only to find, inevitably, that he wasn’t home. I scribbled a quick note mentioning Dave Donnelly’s name, added my card to the envelope and dropped it through his letterbox.
Sitting into the Amazon, I lit a cigarette and checked my phone. Donna Nugent had replied to the message I’d left her by inviting me to dinner that evening. Her text, in full, read:
Cum to din 8 in Shanahan’s bd n dd n yanks n me fr dessert yum yum lucky u dxxx
Coy, that was Donna. But if bd was Bobby Doyle, she had come through in a major way. The text I sent her back read:
Look forward to it x
The text message is a mode of communication ideally suited to lies. Donna adored it. She’d text you from the other side of a bar. The only way you got to hear her voice these days was if you stood right beside her. And then she usually thought of something else to do with her mouth.
It was going to be a long night.
I eased the Volvo out onto the N11 and joined the southbound flow of traffic. As I did, a dark blue saloon, an Avensis or a Passat, I couldn’t see it clearly, pulled out after me. I couldn’t see it clearly, but I thought I had seen it before: outside the nursing home, perhaps. Perhaps not. Past the Radisson, I took a left down Booterstown Avenue. Was the saloon following me? Was the gin making me paranoid?
I’d had two gimlets with George Halligan, and one very strong gin and tonic with Steve Owen. For some reason, I had got it into my head that I wasn’t going to drink like a fool anymore. Not that I was giving up, I just wasn’t going to drink during the day. Or on my own. I certainly wasn’t going to drink and drive. And here I was, in broad daylight, swinging onto the Rock Road and heading for the city, checking my rearview to see if two men in a blue Passat, or Avensis, or Primera, maybe, were still following me, if they were following me at all, with about seven or eight measures of gin sluicing through my frame. Tight ship, Loy. I could have said I wasn’t feeling the gin at all, which was true, and that it was working as a natural anesthetic to take my mind off the pain in the left side of my face, which felt true. But still. I couldn’t see the car I’d thought was following me, or I could see more than one unmarked blue saloon in traffic behind me. I gave it up and turned on the radio.
The news wasn’t good. House starts were down, and house prices were dropping, and mortgage lending was down because mortgage rates were going up because not enough people could afford a mortgage because they were too expensive because the bankers, as usual, didn’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, and the American firms that had bankrolled the boom were cutting back, or worse, pulling out, and the government was attributing it to the “knock-on effect” of the subprime crisis, which was all the fault of other bankers who didn’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not our own, as if this made anything better. Even economists that could have been trusted a year ago to talk things up had reinvented themselves as prophets of doom, while the stalwart prophets of doom who had spent ten years warning people that the boom would end in tears could barely contain their solemn, puritan glee.
I switched channels until I found music that seemed to fit, and finally came across the prelude to Parsifal. The strings were doing their thing, but the horns hadn’t crashed in yet.
I turned up the volume and let Wagner’s stately siren song draw me slowly home through the rush-hour traffic. By the time I turned off for Holles Street, the music had filled the car with its apocalyptic chill; it came as a relief to see a young couple gingerly putting their newborn in the car and starting their lives over.
As I showered and shaved and dressed, I listened to what the radio had to say about the murders of Paul Delaney, and Simon Devlin and Dean Cummins. Apart from a superb performance from the Minister for Justice, who managed simultaneously to say that urgent steps would have to be taken but that there would be absolutely no need to take them because the Guards were on top of the situation, there was some speculation about all not being well within the North Inner City gang these men were thought to be involved with. I checked my phone: one text message. It read:
The parting glass 6:30
The Parting Glass was the Cullen gang’s local. Charlie Newbanks had left a message for me earlier saying a) that he’d text me a time and place to meet Lamp Comerford, and b) that if I had any sense, I shouldn’t come.
I wore a black linen suit and a white dress shirt with French cuffs. My cuff links were silver, each fashioned in the shape of a mace; my shoes were black Church’s wingtips. My ear didn’t look quite as scalded as before; my face throbbed with a dull pain, but I didn’t want to reach inside the flesh and tear it off like I had this morning. I washed some Nurofen Plus down with a small Tanqueray and bitters. I brushed and flossed my teeth and gargled with Listerine and doused myself with Terre d’Hermès cologne and put my black-wool-and-cashmere overcoat on and let myself out of my apartment and immediately found myself bundled back inside by the two men who had been waiting by the door.
First I felt relief, because the men couldn’t have looked more like cops if they’d been in uniform; then I remembered Cummins and Devlin and the knife with my prints on it, and the relief gave way to unease. As I looked at the cops, the unease seemed to be mutual; the taller and darker of the two men looked neither at me nor at his balding colleague; instead he stared at the floor. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could smell drink off the shorter man, who was of squat build and had a salt-and-pepper mustache. I couldn’t tell whether these were the men who had stood outside the NMH earlier that day, or if they had followed me in an unmarked blue car. We stood in the hall, the silence punctuated only by the sound of the heavier man’s breathing. After a while, I cleared my throat.
“All dressed up?” the squat man said.
“I was on my way out, as you saw,” I said. “Is there something I can help you with, Detectives?”
The tall man shook his head and sighed. The squat man held what looked like a warning hand out to his colleague.
“No one is taken in by your shit, Ed Loy,” the squat man said.
“What shit is that in particular?” I said.
“What were you doing at Noel Sweeney’s house?”
“I was trying to talk to him,” I said. “Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly of Serious Crime Review gave me his name in connection with a case I’m working on.”
“Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly,” the squat man said with labored scorn, as if Dave’s name were a punch line. “For fuck�
��s sake,” he added, in case his meaning escaped any of us.
The taller man made a sound then, a harsh snort or grunt that did not sound to me as if it was intended to support his colleague. I could smell the booze clearly now; it seeped from the squat man’s pores; his eyes were bloodshot and watery.
“And what ‘case’ would that be?”
“That would be a private matter between my client and me,” I said.
The squat man bellowed like a bull at this and poked me in the chest with the flat of his hand, sending me rocking back against the coats that hung on a rail on the opposite wall.
“Kevin!” the taller man shouted, and seemed about to say more, his reddening face taut with anger; instead he opened the door and went out. The squat man made to follow him, then turned back and came up close to me. I could smell the whiskey on his breath, I could almost tell what brand he drank.
“You…watch your fucking step, Ed Loy. Dave Donnelly can’t protect you forever. You’ll get what’s fucking coming to you. It’s only a matter of time,” he said, and shoved me back against the coats again. I could hear his heavy tread on the stairs, and the door slam behind him.
I poured myself another Tanqueray and bitters over ice and drank it steadily, staring out at the night, waiting for my heartbeat to slow. When it didn’t, I drained the glass anyway and left the apartment.
I went down into the street. The restaurant was on Stephen’s Green, but I had a stop to make first. Hard rain whipped up off the river and bit into my face as I crossed Butt Bridge and cut down Beresford Place. Scraps of blue-and-white Garda tape lay scattered around the entrance to Beresford Lane, and a few drenched bunches of polythene-wrapped convenience-store flowers propped against a wall were all that remained of the crime scene, all that commemorated Simon Devlin, twenty, and Dean Cummins, eighteen.
I was overdressed for the Parting Glass, that’s for sure, but that wouldn’t have been hard; a pair of jeans and a shirt would have made you look like Cary Grant compared to most of the lads. And it was men only, not on any enforced basis, but in the way men’s toilets tended to be men only: men only went in there because they had no place else to go; no woman in her right mind would have crossed the door. The dress code was sportswear: gray and navy and formerly white tracksuits, or shiny football shirts: Manchester United, Liverpool, Glasgow Celtic. Heads were shaved. Cary Grant? In a linen suit and a cashmere overcoat, I must have looked like Fred Astaire. The shabby room, festooned with Celtic and Ireland posters and Irish republican memorabilia, was packed at half six, Holy Thursday resembling Christmas Eve in the pub calendar, the only two nights in the year the pub would be closed the day after.
The barman was burly and grim-faced with a red complexion and straw-colored hair; he wore gray Farah slacks and a fawn sweater over a cream shirt, formal dress for this place; if the pub hadn’t been such a den of thieves, I’d’ve put him down as an off-duty or retired Guard; he might have been yet, maybe forced to retire. He looked at me quizzically, as if not entirely sure what I might be after. Two swollen-faced crop heads at the bar stared at me with undisguised hostility.
“Pint of Guinness, please,” I said, sliding my accent down a grade or three.
The barman didn’t move; his face lost any degree of welcome or civility it might have possessed, which hadn’t been much.
“I’ve only a twenty-minute break man,” I said. “Just started at the Gresham Hotel there. Black it is tonight an’ all.”
On hearing this, the swollen crop heads slowly realigned their great heads toward the bar; the barman, although not looking entirely satisfied, grimaced and pulled my pint; when Charlie Newbanks, the Viscount’s bouncer, approached me, the barman’s face recovered something of its severe composure. It wouldn’t have, if he had heard what Newbanks had to say.
“It’s not too late to reconsider,” Charlie said in my ear.
“Good to see you too, Charlie,” I said, loud enough for the bar to hear.
Charlie glared at me. I smiled back. His eyes flashed toward the door, then darted to the back of the pub.
“The Gresham, yeah? I’d take it up to the Sackville if I were you,” he said, his voice quiet and anxious.
“Ah I’m grand where I am, so I am,” I said.
Charlie shrugged his huge shoulders, and the don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you expression he’d worn last night spread across his face, except this time it seemed leavened less with amusement than with unease.
“Bring your jar down with you so,” he said.
I waited a little while longer for my pint to settle, and a little longer again for the barman to notice and to do something about it. Anticipation. It was a kind of prayer. Charlie said the pint here was good. I paid for my drink and walked down the bar. There was a seated area at the back of the pub, four booths with leatherette-covered banquette seats that had seen better days: foam spilled from gaping holes in the seat covering. Charlie was standing by one of the banquettes waiting for me. His face said plainly: you brought this on yourself, son.
He gestured to the sole occupant of the banquette.
“Lamp Comerford, Ed Loy,” he said.
In his mid-forties, Lamp Comerford was small and stocky, well built, without an inch of fat. His hair was completely gray; he wore it in a flattop he kept teased and gelled to perfection. He had a black goatee and a black mustache, both neatly trimmed; his coloring was dark like an Italian’s; his acne-pitted face would have had a five o’clock shadow at nine in the morning. Lamp Comerford didn’t look much like an enforcer, and that was where his power lay, or so they said: while you were underestimating him, he had already taken you apart.
I sat in beside him; he looked up at me and nodded.
“Leo Halligan says you’re sound. He says you’re not bent, and you’re not our friend, but you’re sound.”
Lamp had a mild lisp, that led him to overemphasize his t’s and d’s.
“Greetings to Leo,” I said. “How’s he keeping?”
“He does all right. He’s into retail. The rag trade. Export import. Shop, where is it?”
“Anne Street,” I said.
“That’s right. Leather stuff. Real cowboy boots. Very dear.”
“If there’s a market,” I said.
“Exactly,” Lamp said, nodding his head and smiling as if he’d been vindicated, as if this is what he’d been saying all along in the face of all the naysayers and doubting Thomases. He was drunk, for sure; I just wasn’t sure how drunk.
“Even if it is totally legit,” he said skeptically.
“Is it?”
“I think so.” He shook his head then, solemnly, as if such a thing could not conceivably be, drained his glass and handed it to Charlie Newbanks with an expansive flourish of the hand that swept across the table and almost toppled my pint.
“Reinforcements,” he said to Charlie, and winked at me. “Before we’re fucked entirely, ha?”
Charlie, with no expression in his face, looked at me. I shook my head and put my hand over my pint.
Lamp said, “Fucked in the flank,” loudly.
Charlie went to the bar.
Immediately, Lamp Comerford pointed at me, his eyes clear, his face all business, nowhere near as drunk as he’d appeared.
“I don’t know what you know or don’t know. But someone is a fucking tout. Someone is ratting us out. And when we find out who, he’s going fucking down. Now I’m telling you this because I’m not worried about who you’ll tell. We can get you whenever we like. If we decide, you won’t leave here tonight, and no one will’ve seen you walk in. Nod if you’re following me.”
“It’s not exactly complicated,” I said. “Every gouger in town spins the same streel of multicolored piss. What were you hoping for, applause? A column in the Sunday World?”
Lamp glared at me for a moment, then grinned.
“Leo said you had a mouth on you all right.”
“Fuck Leo. And fuck you too. I don’t care about who’s a tout and who is
n’t, it’s fuck all to do with me. I had one job, which was to keep an eye on Paul Delaney. Made a great fist of that, didn’t I? I want to know who killed him, and why. Allied to that, I want to know who tried to have me killed last night. Was that you, or your boss?”
Lamp was still grinning. Then he shook his head, and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Fair play to you man, you’ve got balls anyway. No one talks to me like that.”
Maybe it was the gin. Maybe it was the fear in Charlie Newbanks’s eyes. Maybe it was Lamp standing for every cheap hood with an ego the size of Napoleon’s. It wasn’t that I underestimated him, it was more that, in the moment, same as with a bottle, or another man’s wife, I simply didn’t care. I shrugged his hand off my shoulder, genuinely angry now. Lamp was still grinning when Charlie Newbanks brought back the drinks, including, inevitably, a pint for me. I hadn’t wanted it, but my first seemed mysteriously to have evaporated.
“Charlie,” said Lamp briskly. Charlie lingered long enough to treat me to another hangdog look of foreboding, then loped off toward the bar. The television was blaring something about the Beresford Lane murders now, and a relative hush had descended on the place. In sympathy, Lamp brought his voice down to a low crackle.
“You could be useful to me,” he said. I didn’t reply.
“Leo said you wouldn’t, but I thought, no harm in asking. I need to find this tout. Four shipments have been seized in the last six months. They’ve come in through Cork, via Amsterdam, straight from Spain, doesn’t matter a fuck. Someone is letting Dublin Castle in on it. We can’t afford this kind of shite. Suppliers are looking to be paid. And we need the few bob ourselves.”
I drank my pint in silence.
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