“With you in the middle.”
“That’s not where I’m happiest, but if I have to keep the peace sometimes, so be it. There are three of us: we take it in turns.”
“Lamp thinks there’s a tout in the gang. He offered me ten grand to find out who it was. Not so much an offer as a kind of blackmail, actually, given he has, or he claims to have, the knife that killed Devlin and Cummins—with my prints on it.”
Moran stared at me for a while with no expression on his face. I was pretty sure what I’d said had come as a complete surprise to him. When he spoke, his voice was shaking. If he’d appeared frightened before, that was just a rehearsal: this was the show.
“A tout…what did he mean? Did he have anyone in mind? In relation to what? To Paul Delaney?”
“To the shipments the National Drug Unit keep picking up. Lamp thinks they must have someone on the inside. He said it doesn’t seem to matter which route they use: it’s clear they’re getting expert intelligence.”
Moran exhaled with apparent relief and shook his head: no longer agitated, simply bewildered.
“I don’t know…why would he ask you?”
“Because he thought I could find out.”
Moran nodded emphatically, not so much because he agreed as because he wanted us to go away, nodded and looked down sorrowfully at his tooth.
CHAPTER 15
I was in the habit of withholding information, sometimes going so far as to withhold it from myself; now I sat in my apartment and tried to make serious use of that habit, in the hope that I might bury in some lower depth of the mind what I had just been party to. When that didn’t work, I picked up my mobile. Noel Sweeney, the detective who’d worked the original Fogarty case, had phoned a few times and left a message; when I called him back, he answered on the second ring.
“Don’t tell me, you’re not just a private detective, you’re a priest as well, and Good Friday’s the busiest day of your year.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner.”
“Ah don’t be talking, Father. Sure God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.”
“I’m sure that’s true. Would it be possible to meet up with you at some stage to talk about the Fogarty case?”
“I’ll meet you at the scene of the crime, Father, how would that be?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The old Fogarty house in Farney Park. By a happy coincidence, it’s on the market. Douglas Newman Good has an open view there at midday. Don’t suppose I’ll have any trouble recognizing you, Father—unless you’re one of these modern priests, more concerned with the profane than the sacred. Barely priests at all, the same fellas.”
I allowed that that was almost certainly the kind of priest I was and, having arranged to see him outside the house in Sandymount, hung up. Sweeney’s humor was laid on with a trowel, but there was an edge to his voice that made me think he played the fool but was far from being one. Or maybe in my intensely hungover condition, I was ready to invest the mildest of remarks with portents of doom.
The ominous Prelude from Parsifal coiled insistently around my brain, while lurid images from my lost twenty-four hours with Donna Nugent flashed before my eyes like prosecution evidence; I wanted to call Anne Fogarty back, but I felt guilty, as if I had betrayed her, or that she would think I had; counsel for the defense reminded me that she had lied when she told me how unhelpful Dave had been over the matter of reinvestigating her father’s murder, that she had neglected to mention the family home was on the market, and that in any case, all there was between us was a kiss and maybe the slim chance of something more; the jury was no help: they stared at me with unforgiving eyes, making it clear that I had had too much fun and now it was time to pay.
I involuntarily held my head in my hands, then caught sight of my reflection in the window. Jesus. A grown man bowed in despair at eleven-thirty in the morning. Get a grip, Ed Loy. You’ve so much poison in your system you’ve no clear idea how you feel about anything. Don’t look too long at the mother cradling her newborn outside the Maternity Hospital there, you might burst into tears at the beauty of it all. Get a grip, Loy. You flew too high, and now you’re landing hard: it’s not the first time, and knowing you, it won’t be the last. So you don’t do drugs as a general rule: you did them last night, and nobody forced you. So what if Donna Nugent is the exception to the rule: you could have said no and you didn’t, not because you were drunk, but because you didn’t want to.
Think about that when Anne Fogarty looks at you the way she did and you start mistaking yourself for someone she can trust. She’s not the kind of woman a man like you could hope for. You get the wounded and the crazed, the mentally halt and the spiritually lame, the slender, hollow-eyed girls of low self-esteem. At best, you get Donna: the life and soul of the all-night party, but with true feelings off-limits and ice in the soul. Get a grip, Ed Loy. Get a grip and do the only thing you’re good for, the only thing you know how to do: go to work.
On my way out, I called Anne Fogarty. Not surprisingly, but much to my relief, she didn’t ask me to account for myself, or charge me with infidelity, or tell me I was fired and she wanted her money back. If anything, she sounded like she was the one with a guilty conscience.
“Oh Ed, I’m so glad you called. I wanted to say…well, I suppose you know by now, he’s a friend of yours after all…I don’t know why I said he was unhelpful, maybe I wanted you to think you were my only hope. Sorry, that sounds desperate, in every sense, desperate housewife alert! Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m actually, I’m on my way out now—”
“Of course, I don’t want to get in the way of your work.”
I wondered whether I should mention where I was going, but decided against it: if she knew the house was on the market, I wanted to see her face when I asked her why she hadn’t told me. And of course it was entirely possible that she didn’t know, that the Fogarty family home coming up for sale at this time was a complete coincidence. I’d believe that myself, if I believed in coincidence when it came to a case. Which I didn’t.
“But we could catch up later,” I said. “I could call around in the afternoon.”
“There’s actually something I wanted you to see, at three? It’s in a church, but it’s not a church service.”
It would have made no difference to me if it had been. Churches were the city’s refuges, harbors for the weary and the soul sick of any religion and none, respite from those who only wanted a piece of you. I’d as soon go to a church as anywhere, even when I wasn’t hung over. I said I’d love to come, and Anne named a small church by the banks of the Grand Canal and I said I’d see her outside beforehand.
The estate agent’s board was up outside the house in Farney Park, a quiet street of mostly semidetached houses built in the 1930s. A couple of years back, the vendors could have expected one and a half million for this kind of family home in Dublin 4, maybe a couple of hundred K more. Today it was on the market for 1.25, and the anxious look in the auctioneer’s eyes as she stood in the porch, beckoning passersby in from the street, perhaps, told its own story: whatever the vendors thought, they were going to have to settle for less. It wasn’t really much to do with estate agents anyway, or with the vendors, for that matter. The banks were running the downturn, just as they had fueled the boom: if this house miraculously went sale agreed at the asking price of 1.25 (and achieving an asking price was a miracle these days), that would only hold until the bank’s valuer bounced along to value it at a million, say; then the buyers would let the sellers know what the new price was, and there was nothing the sellers could do except hold out for the kind of buyer who didn’t need to borrow from a bank, and that kind of buyer wasn’t generally to be found paying full price in a fire sale. The bank didn’t really want to lend anyone money, because their borrowing costs had shot up, so they were working to bring about a kind of equilibrium, where sellers didn’t want to sell so low and buyers couldn’t afford
to borrow so high. Equilibrium they called it: deadlock was more like it, with activity paralyzed and the tax take down, it was only a matter of time before the government agreed to give the banks—who were all still in substantial profit—low-interest loans to kick-start the market. The public shouldered the risks and the banks made all the profits: free enterprise, Irish style.
The question of the vendors intruded more insistently when I stepped into the hall. The woodchip wallpaper was tattered and peeling, the stipple ceiling cracked and grimy, the rough sisal carpet worn to a bare sheen. The estate agent, whose name was Lorna, was blond and young and had the brave, faintly manic face of a hostess giving a party while her marriage is falling apart. She showed me a lot of teeth and chattered about ideal location and massive potential and then, as she saw me take in the pockmarks of damp that scarred the ceilings and walls and the prolapsed furniture and decomposing curtains, briskly muttered something about an executor’s sale before scuttling off toward a young couple who were trying to get out into the back garden.
An executor’s sale was exactly what it looked like, except it was fifteen years too late. There were still books on the shelves in the living room, and a dinner service on a sideboard by the dining-room table, and delph and cutlery in the kitchen, but nothing that seemed personal or distinctive. There were four bedrooms upstairs, but again, little trace of the occupants remained: discolored oblongs on the walls where posters and mirrors had hung; a green snake with yellow eyes that had served as a draft excluder; a woman’s wide-toothed comb with a handle; a faded cassette inlay card from the Pixies’ album Bossanova!
I went downstairs and, from the front door, according to what I had been told, retraced the killer’s steps; as far as I knew, he had struck from behind as Brian Fogarty was leading him, or being led, toward the kitchen. There was a rug in the hall where I reckoned he would have fallen; I went down on my knees and lifted the rug, but the carpet beneath had been removed and imperfectly replaced; the rug served to conceal the ridges and upturned seams at the join. In its own way, it was as vivid as the bloodstains I hadn’t expected to see would have been. I hunkered there for a moment, trying to clear my mind of everything but the ancient legend: Here Be The Place. When I looked up, a tall, thin man with a beak of a nose and silvery hair swept back from a high, tanned brow was looking down at me. He wore an off-white cotton overcoat and an olive-green cotton suit. He looked like what I thought a European architect might look like, which made it all the more surprising when he spoke.
“If you look at the surrounding wallpaper, you’ll notice it has been replaced also, but they did a better job with that. Mind you, I suppose the carpet just looks like a botch job unless you know what it’s covering up.”
Without rising, I studied the wallpaper and saw it was slightly brighter and in better condition on either side of the rug than it was farther down the hall. Again I had an acute sense of the blood that had flowed; this time it felt even more intense than before, as if the cover-up was worse than the original crime. I stood up and extended my hand.
“Ed Loy,” I said. “You must be Noel Sweeney.”
“There isn’t exactly a queue for the title,” he said. His voice was dry, faintly ironic, with a Dublin drawl I couldn’t place exactly; the skittishness he had displayed on the phone wasn’t in evidence now. He wore oblong glasses, behind which cold blue eyes held me in their gaze.
“We should get out of here,” he said. “There’s nothing more to see.”
I nodded and found Lorna in the kitchen, where I thanked her and said it was probably a bit big for me. She smiled glassily, not quite impervious to rejection yet, but getting there steadily, another estate agent who woke up one morning and found she had to work for a living. On my way out, I stopped one last time at the spot where Brian Fogarty had fallen, and looked for anything else that might be relevant. The only thing I noticed was that there was a small rectangular bulge in the wall he would have faced at about head height, over which the wallpaper had simply been hung. I worked at the bulge with a key, and the paper cracked and tore; beneath was a ceramic wall bracket, the kind you’d maybe hang an old can opener on.
Halfway down the drive, I turned to fix in my mind the last impression Anne had given me: of her little sister Margaret sitting in the porch crying, covered in blood, having just discovered her father’s body. Noel Sweeney looked at me as I did this, and his mouth curled in something that was as close to a smile as it was to anything else.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said. “We’ll cut onto Herbert Road and have a look at the school Owen taught at. Give you the full picture.”
I had already seen down the length of Herbert Road to the new Lansdowne Stadium from the pinker of the three Fogarty sisters’ bedrooms. I assumed it was Margaret’s, since she was the youngest, and since it was also the smallest. It looked out over the back garden, and there was a gate in the fence at the bottom that led directly onto where Herbert and Tritonville roads met. I had wondered whether Steve Owen had used it as a shortcut when he was seeing Irene Fogarty. As we walked around in an elaborate semicircle to get onto Herbert Road, I concluded that he must have, and wondered about the sister who might have been watching from her bedroom. What must it have been like growing up in a house where your mother was having an affair with a teacher from the local boys’ school? If she was as indiscreet and reckless as Steve Owen claimed, surely the girls must have known, despite what Anne Fogarty claimed. Was that relevant?
It was difficult at this stage in a case to distinguish between background and foreground: everything counted or nothing did. You couldn’t overemphasize what seemed obvious lest you ignore the tiny detail that was the key to the entire picture. I sometimes thought it was like one of those paintings whose true meaning lay in the way the subjects are facing or holding their hands, or in the precise configuration of the objects that surround them: what appears clear dissolves into murk at the first close inspection; if you’re patient and cunning—and lucky—eventually the clouds disperse, and you see it all with a new clarity, as if for the first time, but also as if it had been apparent all along.
We were at the gates to Marian College at this stage, this detective I had asked to meet, with the Dodder River flowing beneath us and the new Lansdowne Stadium under construction a stone’s throw away and the redbrick school rising beyond the small playing field at its front, and I realized we’d been walking for ten minutes in total silence. I looked at him and found he was watching me with the same shrewd, semiamused scrutiny.
“Worked it out yet?” he said. “Going to tell me where I went wrong?”
“Anne Fogarty said neither she nor her sisters knew about their mother’s affair. Do you think that’s likely? Teenage girls?”
Sweeney nodded, his mind immediately on the case.
“They claimed not to. My questioning of them wasn’t exactly intensive. But they were all that upset over their father, it’s hard not to think one of them wouldn’t have spoken up if she’d seen anything. What made you wonder? The size of the house? Or maybe the view?”
From where we stood at the entrance to the school, Sweeney pointed down Herbert Road in the direction of Farney Park. I nodded.
“From what Steve Owen told me, there was a certain amount of running around—French farce stuff, climbing in windows, hiding on garage roofs and so forth.”
“The view from the back bedroom,” Sweeney said.
“Margaret’s room?” I said.
“No, it was Aisling’s, actually. The older sister. But it had been Margaret’s, you’re half right. When the mother took to her bed, the father commandeered one of the girls’ rooms. Anne and Margaret had to share. Aisling claimed Margaret’s room for herself. Eldest sister, studying for her exams, so forth.”
I nodded and turned away, momentarily weary of the semi-detached suburban coziness of it all. Gangsters and blaggers, that was my meat, tough guys and wide boys, wayward women and strong booze; I hadn’t signed up for which g
irl gets what bedroom, had I?
“Don’t suppose it matters much anyway,” I said.
“I suppose that all depends on whether you think Owen was guilty or not.”
“Dave Donnelly says you’re in no doubt he was responsible, with the mother at least consenting, if not actually caught up in it.”
Sweeney smiled his half smile again and shook his head.
“Dave Donnelly,” he said, and not in a good way. “Tell me this, I gather he’s a friend of yours, is the same Dave Donnelly just a time-serving lickspittle or would he actually go out of his way to bury a case because it might prove inconvenient for the Garda powers that be?”
I flushed, and put a hand up to my mouth so I didn’t say the first thing that came to me, then I took it away again.
“I don’t know anything about Dave that doesn’t say he’s a good cop. And I know enough about him as a man to know what you’ve just said is bullshit.”
There was a lot to follow that I didn’t say, but I think some scowling and exhaling got the point across. Sweeney held his hands up and laughed.
“All right then. He is a friend of yours. Good to see. Loyalty: if he can command it, he must be worth something. It’s probably not down to him anyway, he’s fronting for other people inside in Serious Crime Review, I know they’re swamped with cases, need to eliminate as many as possible on whatever pretext they can find.”
“What are you talking about? Dave said…are you not convinced Owen was guilty?”
Sweeney looked up the drive toward the school buildings.
“Do you want to take a closer look?”
I shook my head, and we turned back toward Farney Park. I asked him a second time if he didn’t think Owen was guilty, and he said tartly that there were a lot of people it suited to think that way. I thought about this for a while: about Cullen’s IRA membership and Doyle’s republican connections, and about Ray Moran and the INLA. As we walked, it seemed to me that Sweeney had begun to look edgier; he looked over his shoulder more than once; when I told him I thought I had seen two men watching my apartment from across the road, and following me in an unmarked blue car, and about the cops who visited me and asked why I had called to his house, he tucked me past the iron gates of the detached house we were passing and in behind the high granite wall, an urgent expression in his cold blue eyes. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and unsteady, as if he had been waiting a long time to say his piece.
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