“Yeah, but he didn’t want to face the facts: he thought they could just go on bombing and shooting. And the thing was, Cullen wasn’t talking about going straight, he had nothing to do with Sinn Féin, he couldn’t stand the political side. He had no intention of becoming, like, a councillor and then working up to being a TD. He had his operation, he’d built it up through the years, he wanted to keep it intact. But he saw they’d have to step up a level, and he saw it early: before the Criminal Assets Bureau was even thought of.”
“Except by people the likes of Brian Fogarty.”
“Maybe that’s what planted it in Cullen’s mind, when he got the letter: this may not have any official weight now, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“So what, Lamp thought he was being sidelined? And to prove his worth, he took Fogarty out? Why?”
“Charlie doesn’t think there was any great thought process. Lamp just reacted. Like I say, he was jealous, he got emotional. And then Fogarty’s dead, and it’s like, look at that, will your new boy do that for you? Because Lamp came up with Jack. Lamp was Jack’s man, all the way. And then that night, Jack suddenly has someone else, someone who could do what Lamp never could: help to give him security, a certain kind of legitimacy. Of course, Lamp provides what Ray Moran doesn’t have: muscle. And that’s how it’s been ever since, between the three of them. And now things are starting to come apart.”
“Lamp said he thinks there’s a tout in the gang. That too many drug shipments are being intercepted by the NDU.”
“And Lamp wants you to sort it out. He’s given you money to sort it out. On top of the knife that done those lads in Beresford Lane. And how do you think all that’s going to work?”
“I haven’t thought much about it at all, to be honest. All I know is, provided Lamp’s telling the truth and he has the knife, I’m in as much trouble as he wants me to be in: he can certainly destroy my ability to do my job. He has a good chance of my being charged with manslaughter, maybe even murder.”
“It’s a lot worse than that, Ed. Charlie asked me one thing: if it comes to it, are you a killer? Because if you get among Lamp and Jack Cullen and even Ray Moran, what it’s going to be about is, who is the last man standing? If Lamp suspects Jack of touting, you can be damn sure Jack has his eye on Lamp.”
“I’m not sure what my options are, Tommy. I mean, if Lamp pulls the plug on me, I’m finished anyway.”
“Charlie said you should leave the country.”
“Leave the country?”
“Go back to the States, yeah. Because if you don’t, if you stick around, Charlie says it’s only a matter of time before you go down. Forget about the Guards. Forget about your job. No matter what you do, how you seem to help. For getting in the way, for being a threat, or just to be on the safe side, one of them is going to take you out.”
CHAPTER 14
I walked Tommy down to the street, but who should we see standing by the stairwell in the main hall only Leo Halligan, as if he were Tommy’s personal bodyguard, even if I knew that wasn’t the case and saw from Tommy’s face that he was as surprised as I was, although it turned out that Tommy was merely surprised by how quickly Leo had got here, Leo in jeans and black biker jacket and dark green cowboy boots and hair slicked up and back in a DA, Leo smelling of lemon cologne and French cigarettes, rail thin and deathly pale and looking for all the world like the villain in a 1960s French film.
“You’ve got two Branch men out front watching you, Ed. That can’t be good. Unless of course, they’re watching him.”
Leo Halligan gestured to Tommy with the mixture of affection and contempt that most people who knew him found themselves resorting to sooner or later.
“Special Detective Unit, I think they’re called these days.”
“They’re the Branch and they always will be. Poking their noses into organized crime now the security of the nation is a done deal. Or so my brother George tells me. I of course wouldn’t know these days, being in the high street retail business.”
“To what do I owe the honor, Leo?”
“To this gimpy fuck. He tells me you’re in trouble, and together we should all pay a visit.”
“To whom? And with all due respect, what the fuck is it to you?”
Leo winced in a is-this-all-the-thanks-I-get kind of way, and laughed out loud.
“Exactly what I was thinking, and I had to get out of bed an’ all. I Don’t Know, is the answer. But since I knew the quare fella back then, and in passing since, it might be rude not to.”
“Which quare fella are we talking about?”
Leo looked at Tommy, a thumb flipped toward me.
“Is Ed awake, Tommy? Only he seems a little slow to me.”
“He’s just tired, Leo.”
“Aren’t we all? The quare fella who goes by Ray Moran. Is there a back way we can leave?”
I wasn’t exactly crazy about my day being ordered by one of the Halligan brothers, but I was curious to see where it would lead, and the overcast blear of my hangover meant my will wasn’t as sturdy as it might have been. I led them down one flight of stairs and out into the backyard. There was a stone mews house beyond the parked cars, and the gate to a path that gave onto Denzille Lane and that way we wheeled south toward Merrion Street. It was five minutes’ walk the length of Baggot Street to Pembroke Road on an overcast Easter Saturday morning, the pavements damp and the smell of rain in the sharp air. The cafés were filling and the pubs were opening and American and French tourists were wandering about in bright waterproof jackets.
Ray Moran’s practice was on the south side of Pembroke Road, a fine three-story above-basement Georgian house with a brass plate on the gleaming black palings. The great bulk of Charlie Newbanks shambled over from a parked car as we approached.
“You’re all right for fifteen,” he said, addressing Tommy and Leo. “No receptionist today, just go straight in on the ground floor, the door’s open. I’ve told his security I’ll handle it, sent them up the road for a pint. I’ll keep any footfall away. Fifteen mind.”
“Has he a piece?” Leo said.
Charlie shook his head, then looked at me.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you about all this.”
I shrugged. What choice did I have? You take the case, you take what goes with it. Don’t be a gardener and then complain about the dirt. I suppose I could have thanked Newbanks, but I didn’t want to: maybe he was trying to help, but he wasn’t on my side: he was still a gangster, no matter how often he looked the other way.
We climbed the stone steps to the great red-paneled door and walked past the vacant reception and past the open door of an empty conference room and straight without knocking into Ray Moran’s office which had another brass plate on the door and Ray Moran in shirtsleeves and black braces behind a large pale oak desk and before Moran’s face had time to register surprise at our entrance or who we were or anything much at all Leo Halligan had leapt onto his desk and kicked him three times around the head and face with the points of his green cowboy boots.
Moran’s nose erupted in blood which flowed through the hands he held to his face to protect himself from any further harm. He cried out as Leo leapt on top of him and straddled him and rode his swivel chair back against a wall of framed diplomas and certificates and tapped Moran’s head sharply against as many as he could reach, moving right to left along the wall until the chair was crunching through shards of broken glass and Moran was whimpering. Leo sprang off him then and wiped blood off his jacket and brushed glass off his hands. He extended a hand to Tommy and waved it and Tommy, alert to the semaphore, found a bathroom and returned with two wet towels and Leo used one to clean himself up and passed the second to the sobbing Moran, whose face and shirtfront were covered in blood
“Now we don’t have to waste time threatening you. ’Cause you see, that’s just hello, you gibbering fuck, hello and how are you and tell us what we need to know and stop the fucking whimpering you little squally bab
y! Are you a fucking girl? Are you? Are you? Well don’t be fucking crying like one then. Are you a squally baby? You bad cunt, clean yourself off and shut the fuck up!”
Then Leo paused from his rant and turned to me and winked. A certain part of me was riven with nausea and despair at the cruelty I was witnessing, but I have to confess, it wasn’t hard to set that part aside; Moran was the respectable face of an ugly business that brought death and suffering to thousands, one of many accountants and solicitors that richly deserved a Saturday morning like this, possibly every Saturday. I couldn’t condone it, but it was hard to deny Moran had it coming to him: call it an acceptable level of hypocrisy on my part.
“Hold the nose then, below the bridge; well maybe it is fucking broken, what do you want me to do, here, let me feel it for you…no, it’s grand, you’ve just got a fucking nosebleed, be a fucking man about it.”
Moran’s cries had subsided, and under Leo’s care, he was now sitting up and holding his nose with the blood-drenched towel to stanch the flow. Leo repositioned him behind his desk and made an expansive gesture with his hands to suggest that, the performance having now concluded, the floor was now open for questions. Leo remained at Ray Moran’s side. Moran brought the hand that wasn’t holding his nose up to shield his face from Leo, or to mask him from his sight. There was a line, and I had probably crossed it, but still. I nodded to Leo to come around my side of the desk, where there were chairs enough for three; Tommy was sitting in one of them, shaking, tapping his feet, his eyes fixed on the floor. Leo didn’t want to budge, but after a bout of shrugging and eye rolling, he came around and sat beside me.
“Now,” I said. “Sorry about that. Didn’t know it was going to happen. But everyone has to take one for the team sometime, don’t they? Even you.”
Moran looked at me through blood-smeared, filmy eyes that blinked insistently.
“Dean Cummins and Simon Devlin,” I said. “Who were they working for? Jack? Or Lamp?”
Moran shook his head.
“I know you must have seen them, at the very least. And told Lamp about them. Or Jack, who told Lamp. And Lamp must have moved very fast. Unless of course he knew all along what they were doing, because they were his boys. Otherwise, how would Lamp have known where they were going?”
Moran shook his head again, his lips pursed, his jaw clenched tight.
“I’ll be over that desk and take the head off your shoulders and shit down the hole if you shake it one more fucking time,” Leo said.
Ray Moran grimaced and, with almost a whoop of pain, pushed his tongue through his lips and spat something onto the desk. It was a tooth. Tears were coursing silently down his bloody cheeks. I got up and found a small office kitchen in the hall, adjacent to the bathroom. I boiled water and found some salt and put it in a cup and when the water boiled I dissolved the salt and added some cold water and brought the cup and a second cup in and gave them to Ray Moran, along with two Nurofen Plus I had in my coat.
“Rinse with the hot and spit into the empty cup,” I said, and he did this a few times, having taken the Nurofen, and Leo looking at me the while as if I had put my arm around Moran and begun to stroke his hair, and none of it made me feel better about anything that had happened in the room, but maybe I wasn’t supposed to feel better, maybe that was one of the unspoken perks of my job. Moran rinsed and spat again, then set the cups down on his desk beside the tooth and wiped his mouth and eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. He looked frightened, but that was a measure of his intelligence; anyone with any sense was scared of Leo Halligan.
“Simon Devlin and Dean Cummins were in the INLA,” Moran said.
“They were what?” Leo said.
“They were in the INLA. I had spotted them earlier that evening, I had alerted Jack and Lamp to their presence. We think one of them may have been the masked gunman who shot the volley into the air above in Tolka Park.”
“And what were they doing, just hanging around across the road from the Viscount, unarmed?” I said.
“The INLA?” Leo said again.
Moran looked at Leo with what I can only describe as irritation. Full marks for his spirit.
“The INLA, yes, for the third time. Is there something about that you want to discuss?”
“Don’t get fucking narky with me man,” Leo said and rose out of his chair. I stood up and placed myself between Leo and the desk.
“Enough,” I said. “We’re here to learn something. If your blood’s up, go and take it out on someone else.”
Leo’s eyes flashed at the admonition. He sat down, muttering something which quickly bubbled to the surface.
“I wouldn’t have thought even the INLA would mess with Jack Cullen’s people. Not after the last time.”
Moran didn’t quite smile, but something in his face allowed that there was at least irony in what he was about to say.
“I think this was a kind of softening-up exercise. Come onto Jack’s territory, throw a few blatant shapes, make it look unsafe, volatile, out of control, and then see what happens.”
“To take advantage of the rift between Lamp and Jack?” I said.
“What rift is that?” Moran said.
I looked at Moran, then at Leo, then back at Moran. I wasn’t proud of it, but that’s what I did. It seemed to work.
“Certainly the perception that there isn’t entire harmony between Jack and Lamp is a factor. And of course, since what concerns you most directly is the fact that you were jumped that night, what seems most likely is that Devlin and Cummins mistook you for me.”
“And they were ready to shank you? Why?”
“Because he’s a turncoat,” Tommy said. “Because he used to be involved with the INLA himself. Because that’s where he started out.”
Moran shrugged.
“I can’t discount that. But I don’t think that’s where it’s coming from. And I don’t think they would have stabbed me, or at least, not to death. I think they saw me as another way of making their presence felt, of sending a message. Maybe it was personal, but that’s not what the whole thing’s about.”
“Explain the INLA angle to me. I mean, this isn’t exactly about liberating the Irish people, is it?”
“The INLA in Dublin is run by a headbanger called Shay Rollins,” Leo said. “Rollins is based out in Clondalkin and he’s been feuding with a drug dealer over in Tallaght for about a year now over territory out there. But I don’t see why he’d want to move in on the IRA, or the ex-IRA. Mind you, we always steered clear of the Provos anyway, so I wouldn’t know.”
Moran nodded in agreement with the latter.
“The INLA are split in three,” he said. “Two factions are based in the north, they’re on cease-fire, they don’t want any return to violence. Apart from shooting rival drug dealers. They’re semipolitical, semicriminal, if you like. The Dublin INLA are mainly criminal, and what they’re looking at is what they see as a weakened IRA organization on the ground now the cease-fire has bedded in and the war is well and truly over. An example is protection rackets: the IRA ran them, Jack and Lamp ran them, every dealer in their territory had to kick in, and if they didn’t, they’d be shot in the legs, and if they still held out, someone would end up dead to encourage the others. Now they can’t do that anymore. And sadly, it’s the only language that’s understood down there. So the INLA have been moving in and testing the water, beating the shit out of IRA men who can’t retaliate the way they once would have. They see there’s an opening. And of course, when this stuff starts happening, everyone gets very excited, and starts making mistakes and blaming each other and looking for touts and sellouts.”
“What about your connection with the INLA? You were tight back in the day. I thought there was only one way out of an organization like that.”
“Once I went to work for Jack, I was given the equivalent of an honorable discharge. Basically, I never heard from them again. And the faction I was involved with was from the north, not from Dublin. So I don’t thin
k that is an issue anymore. But like I say, it can’t be discounted. The truth is, they want to hit Jack Cullen any way they can. If along the way they could characterize me as a turncoat, all the better for them. But they don’t need the excuse. No one expects them to be anything other than mental.”
“Doesn’t seem like they’ve gotten very far yet,” I said. “I mean, all they have is Cummins and Devlin dead. What have they achieved?”
Ray Moran didn’t have to answer that. Leo and Tommy had been nodding their heads throughout Ray Moran’s last speech, like the audience at a movie when the killer is revealed and they’re simultaneously thrilled and furious they didn’t see it all along.
“Paulo Delaney,” they said, with one breath.
“The INLA killed Paul Delaney?” I said.
Moran raised his eyebrows.
“We’re not sure what it was. For a start, Paul was never dealing, that’s all nonsense.”
“Where did the Mazda come from?”
“From Jack. Jack was…very fond of Paul, like a father. People have this picture of Jack like he’s some kind of mad dog, spitting fury, kill you as soon as look at you. A lot of those guys who were involved in the armed struggle, it suited them to have that kind of image, quite frankly. But he’s not like that. He’d seen Paul Delaney play football, seen him grow up. He looked at him like a son.”
“And his own son died in a car crash a few years back. Nineteen,” Leo said.
“Yes, well, there’s probably a bit of that as well. He’s very upset.”
“And the thinking is, it was the INLA? They targeted him to get at Jack?” I said.
“Who else?”
“What about Lamp Comerford?”
Moran didn’t exactly roll his eyes—given his current condition, he’d probably have vomited if he’d tried—but he made no effort to hide his impatience.
“Look, Lamp got stoked one night and fired up the doorway of the Viscount. It’s all been forgiven. Sure one night, Jack burnt down his own house because he couldn’t get his key to work in the lock. Fun with the insurance company over that one. These are…volatile guys. But Lamp and Jack have been together a long time.”
All the Dead Voices Page 14