All the Dead Voices

by Declan Hughes

  Lamp looked like he had been bewitched: the smoking poker held above Newbanks’s head, the face like molten metal, the mouth struggling to get the words out.

  “Fucking lying fucking—”

  Jack Cullen held a tiny hand up, his face a mask.

  “Shut up, Lamp. Go on, you.”

  I needed more detail and I needed some facts. No matter what I got wrong, I needed to get more right. Like in love, like in life, what I needed was a little luck. Because for all that he was a gangster, if they did what they looked like they were going to do to Charlie Newbanks, I wasn’t sure I could come back from it.

  “Ray Moran said the INLA was one possibility. But he said there was an alternative.”

  Jack Cullen stood up.

  “Put the poker down, Lamp,” he said.

  Lamp swung the poker in the air as if it was a saber. A blue-gray hunk of metal appeared in Jack Cullen’s hand, and he waved the barrel toward Lamp.

  “Put the poker back in the fire.”

  The red seeped from Lamp’s cheeks as if someone had chilled his blood. The huge hulking mass that answered to the name Sean materialized at Jack Cullen’s side. Lamp slowly turned to the fire and put the poker back among the flames. Jack Cullen waved the gun at me.

  “Go on.”

  I remembered Dessie Delaney watching in dismayed fascination as Jack Cullen lingered on his brother Liam’s shoulder at the removal. I remembered Cullen’s operatic grief at the news of Moran’s death, and the generally held view that Paul Delaney had been like a son to him. I remembered Tommy’s tales of how jealous Lamp had been of Moran’s fast-track induction into the inner circle. I rolled it all up into a ball and flung it as hard as I could.

  “Ray Moran said there was an alternative explanation that was equally consistent with the facts. An explanation he in fact thought was far likelier. And that was, to take it in order, that Lamp had killed Brian Fogarty himself in order to curry favor with you, because he was jealous of how close you had become to Ray Moran. (And that squares with what the original investigating detective, retired Garda inspector Noel Sweeney, now believes.) That Dean Cummins and Simon Devlin were Lamp’s boys, hired from outside, nothing to do with the INLA, just regular guttersnipes, and that Lamp had set them on Moran because he’d had enough: he wanted to take you down, Jack, and that meant hitting you where it hurts most.

  “But of course they fucked up; they got me instead of Moran, they got a beating instead of an easy kill, and then Lamp had to finish the job, and turn it to his advantage. Moran told me he never called Lamp that night, so how did he get to Beresford Lane so quickly? Because he had masterminded the whole operation. And we can assume that the earlier display at Tolka Park was down to Lamp as well, all part of his attempt to make it look as if the INLA were leading the charge. When it wasn’t the INLA at all, it was Lamp himself, Lamp who blew up Moran’s house on Pembroke Road and killed Moran because he was afraid he was the tout, Lamp who had two lads toss a grenade at you in the churchyard, Lamp Comerford all the way down to Paul Delaney.”

  “This is just fucking lies, Jack—”

  “No it isn’t,” Charlie Newbanks said.

  “Shut up the pair of yous,” Jack Cullen said. “Go on you,” he said again.

  “Lamp started seeing conspiracies everywhere. Ollie and Dave won’t let him in the Viscount. He shoots the door up, and they take off on the lam. Where do they end up? In Delaney’s Bar on a Greek island. Ollie and Dave and Paul Delaney, all on one side and Lamp on the other, everyone touting except Lamp. That can’t be right, can it?”

  “Did Raymond say Lamp killed Paul?” Jack Cullen said.

  “Ray Moran thought Lamp killed Paul. Or had him killed. He thought Lamp’s plan was to rub out everyone who was close to you who might be touting, and then if information was still being leaked then it would be obvious that you were to blame. But of course, he couldn’t say for sure. He wasn’t there. And neither was I.”

  “I was,” Charlie Newbanks said. “I rode the motorbike. I dropped Lamp off at the Viscount after, then took the bike up and burnt it out in St. Anne’s Park after. I had no choice, Jack. But I didn’t pull the trigger. Lamp did.”

  “You lying fucker,” Lamp said.

  Lamp had the red-hot poker out of his hand and was tracing a burning spiral through the air toward Charlie Newbanks’s head, and Jack Cullen swung the gun up like it was part of his hand and squeezed it five times, briskly, methodically, like he was wringing out a cloth, and Lamp Comerford crashed to the ground and the poker fell against his shoulder and his neck and began to burn his leather coat and sear his flesh and Jack Cullen signaled to Sean to detach the poker from the lifeless body of his feared enforcer Lamp Comerford, now dead.

  Jack Cullen looked at his gun and sighed and shook his head; then he shot Charlie Newbanks twice in the head. Then he turned the gun on me and nodded to Sean and before I had time to move Sean had picked me off the couch like I was a small child, trapping my arms in his, and the barrel of the gun came closer and closer and I could see Jack Cullen’s eyes behind the gun, the darkness in his eyes and the darkness down the barrel of the gun and I didn’t hear the shot, and all I saw was darkness.

  CHAPTER 20

  Big Sean watched over me at gunpoint as I dug the graves. Strictly speaking it was one grave, but it had to be deep enough for two bodies, and Charlie Newbanks wasn’t small. Sean had marked out the edges and turned the first sod and I was to do the rest. The thought occurred to me that I was favorite to join Charlie Newbanks and Lamp Comerford in their unmarked grave, but it didn’t seem to me that there was a lot I could do about that. The ground was soft enough to turn, flat agricultural land that surrounded the farmhouse; we were in among a copse of pines but in the open, you could see for miles: Kildare, I thought, or the midlands, but that might be too far from Dublin for Jack Cullen, if the house was actually his and not one of a thousand “safe houses” the IRA had at its disposal throughout the troubles and still had though they’ve supposedly directed their attentions elsewhere.

  A thin sliver of moon leaked scant light though the cloud. Sean had a car flashlight by his feet; he sat on a kitchen chair among the pines; he cradled an Uzi in his lap. I tried to think of some heroic maneuver involving knocking the light off and blasting Sean out of it, but I didn’t have anything to blast with except the odd stone, and while I was usually game in most situations, particularly those in which there was a strong chance of my being buried alive, or indeed dead, being buried at all, my strike rate against Sean hadn’t been very impressive so far, and I wasn’t convinced in a David-and-Goliath throw-down that he’d suddenly and miraculously evince a hitherto undetected weakness.

  I went on digging.

  My head was hot with fresh blood from where Jack Cullen had brained me, and I had to avoid patting it to see whether it had stopped oozing now that my hands were dirty with clay. I had been sick again, and it felt like it wouldn’t be the last time; sweat had soaked through my shirt and dripped from my brow, at least I hoped it was sweat, and all the while the rain fell cold and steady; I tried to work harder to guard against the cold, until I wasn’t sure whether my muscles were weakening or I was shivering. Two men were dead because I had told lies about them. Maybe if Charlie had denied driving Lamp to murder Paul Delaney, he might have lived. But Lamp himself would have killed Charlie. Charlie had signed his own death warrant when he pulled Ray Moran’s security. And that, at least, although Leo and Tommy’s idea, was for my benefit, and hence my fault.

  I didn’t really care about Lamp’s death, except I’d rather not have been around to see it. Anyone who did what he had done and what he was about to do to Charlie deserved anything that he got. But Charlie Newbanks’s death was going to haunt me for a long time. Provided I didn’t join him prematurely, of course. Either alternative seemed equally bleak.

  I tried to empty my mind, but the faces of the dead kept looming before my eyes, leering at me: Paul Delaney, then Dean Cummins and
Simon Devlin, Ray Moran, Lamp Comerford and Charlie Newbanks, and then Jack Cullen’s face, those opaque eyes, as if killing was always and everywhere to be regretted but nonetheless had to be done. In the churchyard he had wept, but in repose he looked like a man to whom intense emotion was a stranger, a man used to living in the dark, a man well acquainted with the void. He was in the house now, talking to the burly, straw-haired, red-faced barman from the Parting Glass, who was there when I had come to, and had maybe been there all along. He had looked like an ex-cop then, and he looked even more like one now, as he and Cullen looked down on me, their mouths moving sparingly, their faces devoid of expression. If they were a jury, I hadn’t a prayer.

  I went on digging.

  Finally, I was down about four or five feet, up to my shoulders in the earth, when Jack Cullen came out of the house and spoke to Sean. I climbed out of the grave, and Sean gestured me toward the house with the barrel of the Uzi, and when I got there, the barman was waiting to help me lift the corpses out.

  We took Lamp first. I had his feet and the barmen took his arms. We carried him through the rain in silence. By the grave, the barman stopped.

  “On three,” he said.

  We swung him twice and threw him in, and the barman hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat it down on top of him.

  I felt so weak I could barely stand up, weak of body, weak of spirit. There wasn’t a sound but the breathing of four men, and the falling of the rain.

  Charlie was harder to carry. We had to hold him closer, at the arms beneath the shoulders, and at the legs beneath the knees, and we went sideways like crabs, and Charlie’s bulk carried us faster than we wanted to go, and it was all we could do to halt at the graveside, and we didn’t swing him so much as let him drop. He hit the side of the grave with a thud, and earth spilled in on top of Lamp, and the barman pushed at Charlie’s side with his gray shoe, and Charlie Newbanks rolled onto his massive belly as he sank face-first below onto Lamp Comerford. The barman hawked up another mouthful of phlegm on top of Charlie. For some reason, this obscene desecration upset me as much as anything I had witnessed tonight, torture and murder included, and if someone had suddenly given me a weapon, the first member of our company I’d have taken out would have been this revolting pig. But of course, no one was going to give me a weapon. There was still between three and four feet depth in the grave. Room for one more. I waited, thinking that if this was how it had to end, out here among savages, it would at least have the macabre distinction of being as bad as it could possibly be.

  Jack Cullen looked at the barman and nodded. And the barman turned to me and spoke.

  “Well, I don’t see any other cunt with a spade. Are you going to pile the earth back, or do you want to want to get in there yourself?”

  I piled the earth back. The momentary relief I felt at not joining the dead didn’t last. I had seen Jack Cullen murder two men. He knew I would take that information to the Guards. So it wasn’t a question of if, but when, I would die. I looked at him now, as he walked back into the house with the barman and they resumed their perch above me, and wondered how often Cullen had stood witness to such scenes, how many bodies had he seen buried on lonely hillsides, among sand dunes, in lush pastures and deserted forests.

  I wanted to feel anger, and somehow to convert that anger into action, to slay Sean with a belt of the spade and then turn the Uzi on my two overseers, but that wouldn’t be enough to bring the dead back to life, and all I ended up feeling was pity for the dead men, and fear, that I would surely soon be joining them, and the most profound, despairing sadness, that I lived in a world where such things not only happened but, to those like Jack Cullen, who had fought a long war supposedly for his country’s freedom, were commonplace.

  I patted down the mound of earth on top of the grave as best I could, and then Sean directed me to pull a few fallen pines across the bulging clay. He indicated that I should lay down the spade, which I did. The last thing I remember was Jack Cullen asking me questions I couldn’t answer, asking them over and over again, and someone punching me in the face each time I failed to answer, until Jack Cullen was shouting, and then there was a flash of red just outside my eyeline and the force of Sean’s boot as it connected with my temple, and then my head exploded in a ball of flame.

  PART V

  EASTER SUNDAY

  CHAPTER 21

  There are times in your life when you awaken and if not quite shocked to find yourself alive, you are certainly overwhelmed by the scale of the events you’ve experienced, and find it difficult to respond in the way you would prefer, or even to determine just what that preference might be. Maybe you’ve slept with your brother’s wife, and worse, you don’t know whether you regret it or not. Maybe that’s her hair spilling over onto your pillow right now. Maybe your husband died, and this morning is the first time you don’t think of it immediately, don’t think of it for minutes on end. Maybe you wanted to die without him, and now, for better or worse, you want to live. Maybe you’ve been so sick for so long that when you wake up and suddenly feel marginally, but quantifiably, better, your immediate instinct is distrust, despair, even, because you had gotten used to giving up, and now you simply doubt you have the fire to rejoin the struggle for life.

  When I awoke on Easter Sunday morning in Noel Sweeney’s house in the quiet cul-de-sac off the N11, I was so elated still to be alive, in spite of the pain I felt, the excruciating headache that seemed to scour the inside of my skull like bleach, the eye that had completely closed and made me cry out when I touched it, the seeping wounds at my brow and my temple, the ear that leaked, the nose that was certainly broken and through which I was unable to breathe, the jagged fragments that were all that remained of two or three teeth, I hadn’t the spirit to count, so elated to be alive and not in a cold grave among the pines on a farm somewhere no one would ever find me that it was a good fifteen minutes, or maybe five, or maybe an hour, it’s hard to be sure, duration is elastic in these situations, let’s just say that it felt like a very long time between the point at which I recognized Noel Sweeney and understood I was in his house and the point at which I realized that Noel Sweeney was dead, had in fact been stabbed to death, and that the knife, which I could see all bloody by his chest, was without any doubt the knife with my prints and DNA on it, the same knife Lamp Comerford had rescued from the murders of Dean Cummins and Simon Devlin.

  I was similarly certain, looking at my bloodstained hands, that at least some of that blood would be Sweeney’s, that a fresh set of my prints would be found on the knife, and that, since the police sirens I had been vaguely aware of were getting closer and louder, all of these things would come to pass without delay this Easter Sunday morning. And part of me, knowing the worst had happened, was relieved. Afterward, Tommy said to me, “You could have run.” But that wasn’t true. I couldn’t have run. I couldn’t move a muscle.

  Dublin—M1 to Belfast, November 9, 1980

  THE COYLE FAMILY

  Gerry Coyle

  The first thing I’d say, although I can’t actually think of the circumstances in which I’d be asked, but if anyone actually asked me what you run through your mind to stop yourself from coming, the first thing I’d say is Jaguar Mark 2 specs, but then I’d say: but actually, I don’t. I mean, I try not to run things like that through my mind during sex, the Lisbon Lions or Man United ’68 or Brazil 1970, not because it’s disrespectful or anything, although it probably is, but because they’re really interesting, and when you’re pounding away there working toward a big finale, the last thing you need on your mind is something interesting. Shit, that’s not quite the way to put it. Good thing Claire can’t read my mind. Although sometimes she can all but.

  What I mean is, when I’ve tried it—say, okay, engine first: six-cylinder XK engine, seventy-inch twin overhead camshafts, twin carburetors, 87 mm bore X 106 mm stroke, capacity 3,781 cc, 220 bhp at 5,500 rpm; compression ratios eight to one or optional seven to one—I kind of get caught up in it
, feel the need to go through everything, from transmission and suspension to body and dimensions, and there I am, thinking about the four-speed all synchromesh gearbox on the manual, with the addition of the Laycock de Normanville overdrive controlled by steering-column lever on the overdrive, and then the Borg-Warner automatic transmission with driver-controlled intermediate gear hold and steering-column selector lever on the automatic, and there’s Claire, looking up at me or down at me or over her shoulder going, what happened to you? And that’s the problem: I find it so interesting, so absorbing, every physical attribute and contour of this unbelievably fucking beautiful machine that if I try and count the ways in which it’s just the best car ever, I get so distracted I forget, in an embarrassingly physical way, exactly what it is I’m supposed to be doing.

  Have an extra drink or two, is my final, or at least current, answer, maybe three but probably no more, sometimes you can still get away with it, though probably not like you used to. And keep football and cars out of the bedroom, where a man needs to concentrate on the job in hand.

  Claire Coyle

  It’s nice though, to walk around without a care in the world, not worrying if you’re in the wrong part of town or if you’ve used the wrong expression or if it’s a Protestant pub or a Catholic pub, and even if Robbie did say Liverpool was the Protestant team and Everton was the Catholic team, Alison didn’t actually know. More to the point, she didn’t care, and clearly thought anyone who did was an idiot. That’s the way it should be.