“I think Jack Cullen will be coming after you once he finds out you’re back on the streets. Which is an added incentive to help us take him down.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said again, the enormity of it looming above me again. “I’m feeling a little out of my depth here Dave. I mean, the IRA, the INLA, Special Branch or whatever they call themselves these days. This is not what I do. I’m a private detective, not a secret fucking agent. I mean, there was a guy at the hospital last night, wouldn’t tell me his name, or who he worked for—the Department of Justice? The Army? The Guards? None of my business. Some kind of spook. Old boy with steel-rimmed glasses, sinister-looking fucker, just staring at me throughout. John O’Sullivan tells me he wanted them to put me away on any charge they could think of, for as long as they could get away with, and hopefully something would happen to me in jail to make my stay much longer, make it permanent. I mean, I’m used to the bad guys having a go, and I have the scars to prove it.
“But firstly, terrorists are off the scale when it comes to bad guys as far as I’m concerned, and maybe they all claim the war is over, but they’re still fighting about something, aren’t they? Once a terrorist, always a maniac, that’s how it looks to me. And second, I assume Steel Rim is supposed to be one of the good guys, yet he wants me out of the picture in a major way. And sure, I’ve run up against cops before and had them come down hard on me. But in the roundup, they’ve conceded, grudgingly but still, that I’m on the right side, that I’m doing the right thing.
“This doesn’t look that way to me, Dave. Even if I come out in the end with a result, what difference is it going to make? I know Jack Cullen is a murderer, everyone knows he’s a drug dealer, fuck’s sake, the National Drug Unit are more or less sponsoring him to be one for the privilege of catching him occasionally. If he killed Brian Fogarty, the only difference it will make is to Brian’s daughter Anne, who will at last know the truth. And that’s one of two reasons I’m not still in hospital. The other is that I made a promise to Dessie Delaney to keep an eye on his brother Paul, and now Paul is dead, and I wanted a name to pin that death on: if it’s Shay Rollins, then that job is done. I know that Dessie wanted revenge, but I don’t think he’s equipped to take on the INLA. I know I’m not.”
Dave Donnelly looked quickly at me and nodded and looked away.
“Very shifty, Dave, what are you not telling me? Is it about Bobby Doyle?”
Dave Donnelly’s face flushed, and he glared at me.
“I can’t talk about Bobby Doyle,” he said. “Not yet. I mean, he’s not connected to this.”
“Oh, but I think he is. He’s been one of the Fogarty suspects all along, and you don’t get to keep company with the likes of Jack Cullen and George Halligan by doing good works and giving your money to the poor. But more than that, in the last while, Bobby Doyle is the name on everyone’s lips. John O’Sullivan asked me if Jack Cullen had mentioned him, and then he made it fairly obvious that at the very least there’s some kind of cover-up going on regarding Doyle. And the last thing I can remember at the farm is Jack Cullen firing questions about Doyle at me.”
Dave looked at the door like the SDU guys might be outside; then he flicked his chin up and rolled his huge head around on his neck.
“Fuck it,” he said. “I think you’ve paid your dues on this one, just don’t tell them it was me who told you. Noel Sweeney—what did he say about Bobby Doyle?”
“That nobody knows what he did before he popped up in San Francisco. That he had no record of involvement in terrorism, no IRA history, in fact, no history of any kind.”
“Yeah. I don’t know who was running Noel Sweeney, the SDU or O’Sullivan at NBCI, but whichever, they were all on the same page over this one anyway, he was sent to you Ed, Conway told me to give you his details, he was intended to steer you toward Cullen and far away from Bobby Doyle and his activities back in the day.”
“Back in what day?”
“The seventies, the early eighties. He was an IRA volunteer, although it seems as if he never had the appetite for violence the likes of Jack Cullen had. He was always in the political camp, trying to get the politics moving, trying to build the Sinn Féin side of the operation at the expense of the IRA. He wasn’t that well known. And then he fell off the radar entirely, around about 1980, ’81, reemerged in the States.”
“And look at him now. So what’s the story? Surely he can’t keep his past a secret.”
“Not at all. Sure the Mail ran a feature on it last year, short on all facts except the main one, that Doyle was in the IRA. They tried to blow it into a big deal, surely this is not the kind of man to be bankrolling such a major national building project, but nobody really seemed to care. I suppose when they’re in government in the north, building a bridge pales into insignificance. I’d cheerfully see him hanged off the same bridge, I have no time for the fuckers, past present or future, but it’s not up to me.”
“And so what…what’s the deal? What are you saying?”
“Most of the government will be at the Independence Bridge opening ceremony today. The Taoiseach, the President, the Army, all the bankers and barristers and businessmen and the big rich, you know?”
“You sound as if you like them just as much as I do, Dave.”
“I’m paid a pittance not to take a view on that. And so the scrutiny’s been tight on Bobby Doyle for weeks, months, really, has been pretty tight. Just in case something pops up unexpectedly from his, eh, colorful past.”
“And has it?”
“How well do you know Donna Nugent, Ed?”
I don’t really do blushing, and I was in too much pain for embarrassment.
“Very well, as you’re probably going to tell me.”
“Sounded like a better Good Friday than I had anyway.”
“Did they bug the room and all?”
“I don’t think they go that far. Anyway, serious question actually, how well do you know her?”
“Not very well, really. She’d do anything for Bobby Doyle, I know that much. Where ‘anything’ begins and ends for her, I don’t know. Where are you going with this?”
“Do you know what car she drives?”
“A red MINI Cooper ’08 reg.”
“Is there any reason you can think of for Donna to be driving around a corporation housing estate in Clondalkin in the middle of the night? Several times in the past two weeks?”
I was about as rough as Donna’s sexual tastes tended, so I doubted she was cruising.
“Drugs? She does a lot of drugs.”
“She made one stop only, and though the house she stopped at is occupied by a drug dealer, he never keeps the product in the house.”
“Maybe she paid him and picked the drugs up later, or they were dropped off at her house.”
“Why couldn’t she pay for them then?”
“All right, I give up. Whose house did she stop off at?”
Dave looked at me and smiled.
“The officer commanding of the Dublin INLA, Shay Rollins.”
I PLACED A call to Donna, but her phone went straight to message; I doubted, given the day that was in it, if I’d get hold of her at all today. I had a message on my phone from Anne Fogarty, to ask if I wanted to meet her and her kids after the opening of Independence Bridge: there was a firework display on the quays and all manner of family-friendly fun to be had on the streets of the city. I needed an antidote to the likes of Jack Cullen but I thought that might be pushing it a bit, although in fairness to Anne, she did say she’d understand perfectly if I wasn’t up for it: she wasn’t a hundred percent herself, but she couldn’t let the girls down.
Before I got any further with my phone, my eye was drawn to a letter Dave had brought with him. I had assumed it was from him, an invitation from Carmel to yet another Donnelly party, or photographs from their canoeing holiday in Devon. But no: on the front of the cream, watermarked, lavender-scented envelope was printed Mr. Edward Loy, and underneath that, By Hand. I o
pened the envelope and several faded newspaper clippings fell out. Each of the clippings had a photograph of a young family called the Coyles: Gerry and Claire and their children; Yvonne, aged fourteen, and Luke, eight. The Coyles had been driving home to Belfast from a weekend in Liverpool when they were blown to pieces by a roadside bomb outside Newry in South Armagh. The IRA had admitted responsibility, but regretted the incident, an error which they said “was wrong,” and “shouldn’t have happened.” The IRA didn’t explain exactly why what shouldn’t have happened happened, but one report speculated that the distinctive nature of the Coyles’ vehicle—Gerry Coyle was a vintage motor enthusiast, and drove a red Jaguar Mark 2 3.6 liter—was responsible, although obviously the reports didn’t allude to the identity of the likely target who also drove such a car.
There was a somber footnote to the report: Gerry and Claire had each been only children without any other relatives, and so at one stroke, that was the end of the Coyle family history.
There were no personal details accompanying the news clippings, but I’d only met one person on this case who smelt of lavender, and that was Dee Dee Doyle. Dee Dee Doyle had given me her number and told me to call her because she got so lonely: I thought at the time she’d been making a rather broad merry-widow-style pass; now it looked like she had something urgent to tell me. When I called, Dee Dee was somewhere between hair and makeup in a salon off Baggot Street; she agreed to meet me at the Merrion Hotel when she was done.
Dessie Delaney was next on my list, but I didn’t have anything for him yet; I texted him to say that I’d be in touch soon, I was on the cusp of something big, and not to do anything until he heard from me; I hoped that would keep him from driving out to Clondalkin himself and blasting up Shay Rollins’s windows.
I soaked my eye for half an hour in a solution the nurse had given me, and had a very careful shower, and by the end of all that, washed and dressed if not shaved, I had one eye open and one eye half, and a reset nose that was still swollen but substantially reduced from last night. I put fresh dressings on the wounds that needed them, and swallowed the painkillers but not the sedatives, washing them down with a double measure of ice-cold Tanqueray and bitters for old time’s sake. The gin played havoc with my broken teeth, but I felt the better of it, or thought I did until I looked in the mirror. Sweat beaded across my brow, which was the color of sour milk. Short of a trip to the beauty salon myself, I couldn’t do much about that. The eye still looked pretty grim though, so I put on a pair of sunglasses and decided that looking like a bozo who wore shades indoors was about as good as it was going to get and went down into the street.
CHAPTER 24
Le Bistro on Harcourt Street opened for coffee at ten, so I sat and had a cup and then asked the server, who was Spanish, if I could see Ms. Fogarty. She smiled and shook her head, and I said, “Ms. Fogarty? The manager? It’s a business matter,” and she said she would find someone.
Aisling Fogarty, in a clipped accent, said she was Aisling D’Arcy, and asked me what I wanted. She looked like a streamlined version of her sister, Anne as a fashion designer would resculpt her: tall and slender, she wore skinny black jeans that displayed her narrow hips and thighs, tiny waist and long legs, and a black top that did the same for her skinny arms and torso. Her skin was taut but lush in an expensive-looking way, and she wore her dyed blond hair straight and long. Her eyes were smaller, darker, harder versions of her sister’s: while not exactly hostile, the look she gave me through them made it plain I’d better come up with something worth her while. I couldn’t think of anything off-the-cuff, so I took off my shades, and when dismay flashed in her face like a flare in a winter sky, lighting its austere features with something that bordered on sympathy, I said the first thing that came into my head.
“I’ve been trying to find out who murdered your father. But there are a lot of people out there who’ve been getting in my way. I wonder whether you’d like to help me.”
I don’t know which brokerage Mr. D’Arcy worked for, but it must have done well out of the boom years, because whether you judged the four-story eighteenth-century house on Harcourt Terrace that Aisling and he lived in by the grand scale of the rooms or by the incredibly high spec of the design, the result was equally impressive. I was sitting in an easy chair in the ground-floor sitting room, or it could have been the morning room, or even the drawing room, I’m not an expert when it comes to the eighteenth century or to people called D’Arcy, but it was all a far cry from Farney Park, and unless Mr. D’Arcy’s brokerage was feeling the pinch in the new austerity, it didn’t strike me that Aisling could be in a desperate rush to get her hands on the proceeds of any sale of the family home.
Aisling D’Arcy came back from putting her face on for a second time. The first time was after she’d burst into tears in the restaurant. She had apologized then, and said it was just the shock of it being brought into her own place; she knew Anne had hired someone, but over the phone, it didn’t have the same kind of reality. She suggested we take a walk around the corner to her house, having first called her sister to establish that I was who I said I was, and that I was adequately house-trained. The second time was when we walked into the house and there on a wall in the sitting room was a framed photograph of her father.
She sat opposite me and gave a brisk smile that didn’t reach her eyes, more of a grimace really. She was the kind of woman who usually kept a fierce grip on her emotions, and if you were present on the rare occasion when that grip slackened, her embarrassment at what she considered her display of weakness was converted into aggression.
“Apologies again, Mr. Loy. The sort of thing…it’s the sort of thing that you think has gone away for good, but then it surges to the surface again when you least expect or want it. Now, is there something in particular you want to ask me?”
Mrs. D’Arcy didn’t hang about. I felt like a tradesman being hurried through the house and out to see the rear guttering. My chippy feelings were my problem though, and I didn’t see why I had to burden anyone else with them.
“Yes, for a start, do you think I might have a drink?” I said. From the expression on her face, I may as well have asked her for a ride, and as the silence continued and her expression got even more pinched, I began to wonder if I had. But my head was aching, and it was too early to take any more painkillers, and in any case, I wanted a drink.
“But it’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” she said, and then, realizing even tradesmen merited a certain level of courtesy, stood and asked me what I wanted.
“Gin and tonic, Tanqueray if you have it.”
“Of course we have it,” she said, with a little Farney Park chippiness of her own, and clipped out the door. The drink she brought me was so strong I thought I mightn’t be able for it, but a second sip reassured me on that score. Mrs. D’Arcy had a small bottle of Evian, which she took minute sips from, as if even water was a bit too much sometimes.
“I hope my sister is demanding receipts,” she said.
“I don’t charge for booze,” I said. “Were you aware of your mother’s affair with Steve Owen before your father’s murder?”
Aisling’s face flinched three times during this brief question, and I felt sorry for her all over again.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“I just wondered. You see, I went to the house on Saturday, and I stood for a while in the back bedroom, and looked out. You can see down Herbert Road from there, see all the way down to Marian College. When I interviewed Steve Owen, he said his affair with your mother had involved a certain amount of running around and climbing over walls and hiding on garage roofs, risk taking, that kind of thing.”
Aisling D’Arcy’s face was a study in disapproval and disgust; I suppose I couldn’t blame her, but it looked like she was blaming herself.
“And I wondered, it’s not exactly a huge house, it must have been difficult to carry on a relationship of that kind without being spotted, and so I wondered, since I understand you had
the back bedroom, whether you had seen anything, even…I don’t know, Owen on his way down the street?”
“What difference would it make if I had?” she said.
“I don’t know, exactly.”
“Then why do you take it on yourself to ask me such…impertinent, actually disgusting questions, which you know must be painful to hear, if you don’t have a concrete, logical reason for asking them?”
“Oh, I do have a logical reason for asking them. I just don’t know how the answers will stack up until I hear them. And sometimes it’s not the answers, it’s what someone doesn’t say, or the way they answer a question I didn’t ask. I’m sorry if the questions are painful, but I don’t believe they’re impertinent: your sister hired me to investigate the case, and your mother’s affair with the man who was convicted of your father’s murder is a central part of that case.”
“Is it? I understood from Anne that it was completely irrelevant, that the suspects were three men Daddy was investigating for tax offenses, that what Mammy…got up to had nothing to do with it.”
I nodded.
“That’s certainly possible. It’s still very difficult to rule anything in or out.”
Aisling D’Arcy raised her voice to a hard metallic pitch.
“Well, don’t you think you have a responsibility to work out in advance where you are in the case before you subject me to this kind of…ordeal? I’m one of the victims, you know, and here you are, half drunk, covered in disgusting scars and bandages, looking like an escaped maniac, asking all sorts of…so incredibly rude…I’d like you to leave, actually.”
She stood up and went to the door.
“Not until you answer my question,” I said.
“I’ll call the Guards,” she said. “I’ll have you arrested.”
“I was arrested last night for a lot worse. Covered in a murdered Garda detective’s blood. They let me go. What do you think they’ll do to me for sitting down and drinking gin and asking rude questions?”
All the Dead Voices Page 23