That heist was still officially the second biggest in Ireland’s history. The biggest occurred just two days later, leading to calls for the resignation of the then Minister for Justice. Christy Duggan was again responsible, this time using four minor associates of Spiderman to carry out a mail robbery, which Bilko had been planning for months, on the Dublin-Belfast express train.
Christy had acted openly in arranging both robberies, knowing that neither Bilko nor Spiderman would believe him capable of carrying out such operations on his own. Both gang-leaders believed Christy to be working for the other. The resulting vendetta had claimed four victims in a week, including Bilko himself, left for dead outside a gay sauna. Christy was rumoured at the time to be in hiding in England. But it was discovered he had been passing himself off as a party worker, volunteering to put up election posters for the Minister for Justice’s nephew, who was fighting a by-election in Mayo. By dropping his trousers and allowing himself to be photographed by a tabloid Sunday newspaper up a ladder holding an election poster, Duggan had destroyed the Minister’s career, scuttled his Government’s chances of winning the by-election and turned himself overnight into an underworld legend and Ireland’s best known criminal, with a new nickname of ‘The Ice Man’.
Duggan had been held for questioning in the safety of a Garda station. During his detention Spiderman and other, by now, paranoid figures from both gangs were caught in possession of firearms during dawn raids on their homes. It was rumoured that Duggan had tipped the police off about the hiding places of weapons, just as he had tipped off the newspapers about his own whereabouts in Mayo. However the only man known to have publicly made such an allegation to Duggan’s face, in an inner city pub, was found dead on wasteground in Blanchardstown a week later. Either way, when Christy Duggan had been released without charge it was to fill a vacuum on Dublin’s Northside, along with a new generation of criminals, many of whom had been with him in Saint Raphael’s.
These childhood contacts had helped him to maintain his position in recent years when his career in robbery tapered off and he had focused mainly on illegal cigarettes. Therefore there had been surprise in underworld circles in October when ‘The Ice-Man’ was rumoured to be behind a three quarters of a million pound security van robbery. In a copy-cat of his famous raids, this had allegedly been originally planned by a young gang from the Tallaght/Clondalkin area, known as the Bypass Bombardiers because of the use which they made of the new EC-funded network of motorways to carry out vicious robberies on towns that were suddenly within easy reach of Dublin. If true, then according to the paper, this was a rare miscalculation by someone whom neither the police nor his many enemies had been able to touch until he was gunned down on Saturday.
My coffee had gone cold while I read this account of his life. The restaurant owner came over to offer me a fresh cup. I nodded my thanks and he retreated behind the counter, yet I felt he was watching me. I dismissed it as paranoia, but I kept wondering if anyone had seen me at the airport with Luke. The owner started chalking up a dessert menu on a blackboard. The kitchen staff spilled out to stand around the counter in the lull before the lunch-time rush and joked about local events. I turned over the newspaper, not even wanting to be seen reading about Christy. Luke had never made him sound like this. I felt nervous about returning to the hotel, but I couldn’t just buy a cheap ticket to London. The police would be called if I didn’t return and my bag searched, containing the airline ticket in my name but booked on Luke’s credit card. For the first time we were linked by computer.
It was one thing for Luke to claim in London that he had no links with Christy, but here – a few streets from where Christy was gunned down, and possibly closer to where Christy had caused others to be murdered – I felt I had stumbled into a feud which I couldn’t hope to comprehend. I remembered laughing drunkenly with Garth and Liam about the nicknames of Dublin criminals. They didn’t sound funny any more. I was out of my depth, but I suspected that by being associated with Luke I could be in danger of being shot, without knowing why or by whom. No cheap gangster film is complete without a scene where the hotel door is kicked in. The criminal’s face is briefly glimpsed as he turns from screwing the anonymous girl, but it is her heaving breasts that the camera always lingers on, the token piece of fluff, as they are both riddled by machine guns.
A blind was half pulled up in a window across the street. It was a seedy hotel, occupying the top floor above a row of shops. I couldn’t see the young woman’s face, just her thin white legs partly covered by a cheap red top as she washed the young boy in the sink. I didn’t want to spy on them but found myself staring across, even after they’d moved out of sight and all I could glimpse was the tiny sink and the end of an unmade bed. I felt sick, but wasn’t sure if this was caused by nerves or memory. The Dublin restaurants where my mother had sat, over a decade before, had never been as fancy as this, but the hotel room where I had waited for her seemed like a replica of the one opposite me.
The young boy came back to the sink by himself. He was scrawny and small, wearing only a pair of cheap white underpants. He played with plastic models of Batman and the Joker, having them climb on to the taps and fight with each other. Occasionally the Joker fell into the sink and Batman would stand astride the tap in triumph. The boy seemed alternatively bored and then absorbed in the game. The young woman pulled the blind up fully. She was dressed now in a faded track-suit and had his clothes in her hands. She looked tired and stressed. She stared across, meeting my gaze and holding it, before snapping the blind shut. I felt embarrassed, as if caught. Behind me, the staff had returned to the kitchen. The owner was seating the first lunch customers to arrive, part of a boisterous Christmas office party. It was time to leave, yet I couldn’t stop myself staring across at that window blind.
I could still recall the weight of the brass hotel key and how I had struggled to turn it in my eleven-year-old hands, knowing that the cleaner was impatient for me to leave so she could do the room. Guests were meant to hand the key in at reception but I was afraid to. For those five summer days in Dublin the room key was the only security I had. I no longer even knew if my mother had enough money to pay the bill. I longed to be invisible. I knew we shouldn’t be there, that neither of us was capable of being in control. I would slip out, past the hotel manager whose very silence was a commentary on the sad cases flitting across his lobby.
I always looked for my mother in the cheap cafés off O’Connell Street. When I found her I could estimate by the number of cigarette butts how long she had been sitting over her tea and untouched toast.
‘Come on, Mammy,’ I’d plead, ‘you can’t sit here again all day. You promised we’d take a bus to Donegal this morning.’
Sometimes I got her to walk as far as the bus station, but I knew that, even before we reached there, the excuses would start. One route to Donegal went through Northern Ireland, which she was frightened of. The routes through Sligo and Ballyshannon connected different parts of Donegal that she seemed unable to choose between.
‘Your Daddy has no proper home, Tracey, do you not understand?’ she’d say. ‘If he’s alive at all, he’s just wandering around. We could spend months, having doors slammed in our faces and still never track him down.’
It was no good arguing or begging her to take the boat back to London. Even at eleven, I knew she was incapable of making decisions any more. Her gaiety and confidence had vanished into the depths of the Liffey along with the bottle of tablets she had flung from O’Connell Bridge on our first evening there. It was up to me to mind her. Depression had her in its grip again. It was vital she saw a doctor but she so badly wanted to believe herself well that I found myself playing along, desperate to believe it too. Every morning she spent half an hour staring at her face in the tiny mirror like a woman going on a date. All day she kept vanishing into toilets, checking her hair or lipstick. Even the hotel staff recognised that she needed help. Their silent pity made my skin crawl as I stared defiant
ly back at them over her bowed head.
Three times during that week I stood in call boxes, listening to the phone ring in Harrow. I could almost count Gran’s footsteps as she raced from the kitchen to answer it. Once I even let the coin drop and heard her voice call my mother’s name, worn-out with worry. But I knew it was me who was really in charge, so that therefore I was to blame. I was too scared to speak as Gran called her daughter’s name down the line until the pips came.
On our final day together we spent hours sitting in the church in Berkeley Road where she had been married during the six weeks Frank Sweeney and she had lived together in Dublin. An organist practised in the loft, his gloriously rich music making the church tremble. Occasionally old women lit candles, blessed themselves and knelt to mutter aloud before scurrying out. She told me that there had been no music at her wedding, and almost no people either. It was the only day she ever spent with my father in Ireland when she hadn’t heard music played. Previously Sweeney had not set foot in Dublin since before the Second World War.
Yet even at his age he had strong arms that could swing her through the air, my mother told me. He could spin a story for a full hour and never lose one person’s attention. In Donegal he walked everywhere, across mountain tracks and tiny roads where no cars passed. She never knew if this was because he was reluctant for people to see them together. People hadn’t understood or approved up there. Even when he announced their intention to marry, the women in whose houses they stayed argued that he was almost three times her age and couldn’t support a wife anyway. She had never liked this staying in other people’s houses, never knowing if she was a guest or was meant to pay. Her own money had run out and she kept putting off phoning Harrow, even when they had taken a bus to Dublin and been married like a pair of fugitives in this empty church. The priest, who was also from Donegal, had to find witnesses. My mother said that Sweeney and he had argued in Gaelic right up to before the service began.
Then my mother stopped talking and I remember how, when the organist ceased playing, it seemed to take an eternity for silence to possess the church again. By bringing me there she had been trying to explain. But I was tired and hungry and didn’t bother hiding the disgust in my voice as I scolded her: ‘But Mammy, you were only twenty-two. Why did you ever marry such a filthy old tramp?’
For years afterwards Gran used this trip as a weapon against Mammy. My mother carried her guilt silently, but I could never tell her, even when she lay dying, that she hadn’t lost me in Dublin, it was me who deliberately lost her. It had been the only way I could bring matters to a head. She was as scared to phone home as I was. If I had started hating Frank Sweeney for what we were being put through, I also found that I was ashamed of my mother. I couldn’t cope with being responsible for her any more, I wanted to become a child again.
The incident had occurred on a pedestrianised street where hucksters dodged the Irish police. I could still remember a woman with an enormous deformed lip pushing an ancient pram past, filled with over-ripe fruit. There was a toy display in the window of a department store, with nurses’ outfits and tea sets which I had long outgrown. I let go of my mother’s hand among the summer crowds and walked a few steps behind her to see if she noticed. She looked pathetic and deranged. I felt that every person was staring at her. I glanced back at the toys, imagining myself playing with them in a warm room, and the perfect miniature worlds I would build with the Lego. I stood at the shop window, counting to fifty before I turned. I could just about see my mother among the crowds who had reached O’Connell Street. People pushed right out into the road, even though cars still had right of way. My mother looked around and put her hand out in panic. I turned away. In the corner of the window there was an old-fashioned doll propped up in a antique pram. Beside it, in the next window display, two window-dressers had stripped a shop dummy. Her bald torso lay on the carpet with plastic breasts exposed. It made me uneasy. I turned around but my mother was nowhere to be seen. I was lost now, no longer having to be in charge. With a giddy thrill I began to run through the crowds, crying like a baby.
I paid for my coffee and went down the steps on to Talbot Street. Bustling Christmas shoppers enveloped me, full of purpose. I was envious of them, with their lists of presents and quarrelling in-laws. I walked a few paces before something made me glance around. I immediately recognised the ginger-haired youth standing inside the doorway of the crowded Pound Shop across the street. He turned to the security guard, as though they were sharing a conversation, but I wasn’t fooled. He had been watching me sit in the restaurant window and waiting for me to come down. It was impossible to mistake his bad haircut and those boyish features.
I had put my unease about Christy down to paranoia. But now I was scared. Had the ginger-haired youth followed me from Glasnevin where I’d seen him eye me up in reception? Had he been shadowing me all morning? I walked quickly, trying to lose myself in the crowd. I glanced behind once. Through the jostling bodies I saw that he had left the Pound Shop and stood as if examining a window display. I reached a shopping complex and ducked into a newsagent’s, browsing among the magazines and watching the doorway to see if he would follow me in. Five minutes passed with no sign of him. I went out another door and through the arcade of small shops, then found myself out on an open air plaza. A stone charioteer gripped imaginary reins in the centre of a fountain. I ran down steps on to a different street, guessing that I was near the bus station by the railway bridge overhead. I ran towards it, charging across the path of cars as the lights changed. I dodged through the entrance and rushed into the safety of the crowds queuing at the ticket desks.
I felt secure there. Children playing on benches, while countrymen with stained fingers and heavy coats scanned provincial newspapers. It had to be paranoia after all. Returning to Dublin had upset me. I stood beside a haversacked German youth, reading the peeling timetables and amazed by how many of the Donegal placenames I still remembered. Letterkenny, Milford, Rathmelton, Rathmullan, Gweedore, Dunglow. Towns I had never seen, but whose names were implanted in my mind. I focused on them, trying to stifle my fear. Then I became aware of a presence at my shoulder.
‘You’re not thinking of heading off anywhere?’ a voice said.
‘What’s it to you?’ I turned to stare into the youth’s face. He seemed relaxed and friendly, yet his eyes took in every movement around us.
‘Somebody we both know might be disappointed, Tracey.’
‘I don’t know you, pal, and you don’t know me either.’
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said.
‘I’m not.’ I cursed my voice for betraying me. People tried to push past and read the timetable. I stepped back so that they were between me and the ginger-haired youth. Up close he was older than I had thought, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. I wanted to run, but I wasn’t sure if there were others with him. He side-stepped the people and smiled.
‘Don’t be nervous, Trace. It’s just that you were never in Dublin before. You can get mugged if you don’t know where it’s safe to walk. He asked me to keep a discreet eye out for you but not get in your way, before I collected you.’
‘Who did?’
‘My father. Shane. He picked you up at the airport last night.’ There was an announcement about a bus to Limerick and people drifted towards a departure gate. Suddenly there was nobody between us. His smile was gone and he looked jaded, like he hadn’t slept for a long time. ‘Listen, this is a bad time for my family. I’ve a car parked on double yellow lines outside and the cops would love to bust my arse. You must be tired from the walking. Everything is set up as arranged. Can we go now, please?’
Without waiting for a reply he walked into the crowds. I knew of no arrangement and had no proof that he was who he claimed to be. I could have run but I didn’t. I trusted him. Up close, I quite liked the look of him. He seemed the sort of lad I should be going clubbing with, somebody with whom to share a laugh and an uncomplicated relationship. I followed him outside
where he had parked right up on the pavement. He held the door open and I got in.
‘Did they by any chance give you a name?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied, starting the engine with difficulty and ignoring the bus driver beeping behind him. ‘We were much too poor. I had to rob one off a passing sailor. Al.’
‘After Al Capone?’
‘After Alexander the Great.’
‘Where are we going then, Alexander the Great?’ I said.
He slowed at the corner and glanced at me, surprised.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘It’s set up like you agreed with Uncle Luke.’
‘Yeah, sure.’ I nodded as if I understood. To ask more questions would be to look stupid and admit that events had slipped beyond my control. I glanced at Al’s face, trying to decide if he was playing along, but he seemed without guile. I had come here because it seemed that, just once, somebody needed me. But this was all Luke thought I was, a sexual toy to be ferried between hotel rooms.
We turned down a street of bricked-up houses where a car had been burnt out. Small children emptied rubbish from a skip. A girl with a soother watched from the centre of the road. She didn’t budge, even when Al drove up to her and finally he had to carefully edge his way around. Two shops still stood at the end of the road, a butcher’s and what looked like a fortified off-licence. A price list for cider was crudely painted on a square of plywood outside. Al stopped the car. Luke hadn’t even bothered with the expense of a hotel. I was furious with him but this street also made me nervous. Al got out. The kids had stopped smashing things to silently watch. I wasn’t staying in the car alone and got out too. There was a tacky hairdresser’s above the butcher’s, with an entrance between the shops. A sign on the door said ‘Closed for lunch’. Al rapped three times on the glass panel and footsteps descended. The door was opened by a middle-aged woman who nodded to Al and eyed me. He went up and I followed him, passing the woman who closed the door and stood, as if guarding it.
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