City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  It takes Tommy half an hour to get to the café, and it looks like it’s going to take as long as that again to get him to stop moaning about the hot weather, which does not suit us as a nation and we’re only kidding ourselves to think otherwise, and the latest chapter and verse on the misdeeds of the nation’s bankers (complete with names, numbers and severance packages), in which Tommy (despite having lost no savings or pensions that I knew of and sitting tight in the family home which as an only child he has inherited outright), has taken an extremely personal, highly outraged and incredibly tedious interest. Once I had persuaded Madeline King, who had come down to the café to inspect Tommy, to go back and liberate Jenny Noble from the costume truck, I give him fifteen hundred of the three thousand advance Jack Donovan gave me. Not that this shuts him up, or at least, not immediately: the notion that you could soften Tommy’s cough with filthy lucre would be intolerable to his dignity. But it might at least begin to work its slow-release money spell and bewitch him into channeling some recondite aspects of his better nature.

  I say persuade in relation to Madeline because she made it clear that Tommy did not look to her like a person into whose custody you would release a stray dog, let alone a vulnerable young girl. And it must be said, Tommy, whose image was idiosyncratic at the best of times, looks especially unusual today: with Doc Marten boots that reached midcalf, three-quarter-length black combat trousers, a black short-sleeved combat shirt and a black Kangol beret, he resembles an extra in a modern-dress production of Macbeth, an effect mitigated by his slouching gait, his wispy beard, his native genius for anarchy and derision and his seeming inability to stop talking. I had laid out the basics of the case to Tommy over the phone, but I can’t help feeling there is still a certain lack of engagement on his part.

  “Tommy,” I say.

  “Yes, Ed?”

  “Shut the fuck up and listen to me.”

  “I’m listening. Not hearing anything worth listening to, but miracles can happen.”

  “It may be nothing. But this girl could be in danger. Do you understand? Grave danger. I know I can trust you to make sure she’s safe. Don’t I?”

  Tommy’s reaction is everything I hoped for. He looks at me like I have lost my mind.

  “Less of the fucking melodrama man, is this movie malarkey going to your head? Of course she’ll be safe, what do you think? And I’ll keep me eyes open, look-out-at-night type of thing. Have we anyone in the frame?”

  “Strictly speaking, Maurice Faye, Mark Cassidy, Conor Rowan. And Jack Donovan.”

  Tommy looks at me like I’ve lost my mind for real this time.

  “Are you kidding me? Jack? Abducting young ones? Mossy? No way. Sure even if they were capable of it, they’d only be harming themselves, wouldn’t they?”

  “They’re the only suspects I’ve got at this stage. But as you say, it seems highly unlikely. It may be someone connected to them. Someone who wants to implicate one of them, someone who bears a grudge or who wants revenge.”

  “Extreme way of going about it. And you’ve no candidates for that particular post as yet?”

  I think about giving Tommy a rundown on Jack and the case of the anonymous letters, but I decide against it: partly because I want to talk to Madeline, who is the common element in both cases, but mostly because I’m not yet convinced the letters amount to anything more than some kind of narcissistic Jack Donovan psychodrama. I’m not convinced, in fact, that he hasn’t written them himself.

  Any anxiety on Madeline’s part about how Jenny Noble will fare in Tommy’s charge is instantly put to rest by the following brief exchange:

  JENNY: Mr. Owens! What a surprise. How are you? Naomi’s nearly done, isn’t she, she texted me last week in the thick of it.

  Jenny kisses Tommy on both cheeks. Tommy’s face reddens.

  TOMMY: (Accent a rung or two up the social scale) Hello, Jenny, very nice to see you. Naomi’s getting on grand, or so she says. She’s just got geography to go, then school’s out forever.

  It turns out that Jenny went to school with Naomi, Tommy’s daughter, and although Naomi lives with her mother, she spends plenty of time with her dad. The girls were friends: Jenny is a year ahead, and Naomi has applied to do the same university course Jenny is doing. In Dublin, it sometimes seems as if more than one degree of separation is too much to hope for. In this instance, it worked out for the best, as Madeline reflected afterward.

  “Jenny was not at all happy when I told her what we had planned. Having had time to think, she decided that she was more than capable of looking after herself. And to be honest, I was anxious that she would be in safe hands. I mean, he has a pretty strange vibe going on, doesn’t he, your friend?”

  We are standing on the street in a stream of office workers flocking to eat their lunch in the sun, sunshine in Dublin resembling a visiting dignitary from an exotic land whose appearance you could not count on being repeated any time soon. I draw Madeline in toward the palings that run along the terrace.

  “I’d trust Tommy Owens with my life,” I said. “In fact, I have, many times, and had cause to be grateful. I would not be here without him. He may look, he may well be, a little…unconventional. But he’s rock solid, and we’re lucky to have him on our side. No harm will come to Jenny Noble while she’s in his care.”

  I believe every word of this as I say it, as indeed I should: it’s true. But it isn’t the whole truth, and I don’t tell Madeline about pulling Tommy to one side while Madeline was slipping Jenny some petty cash for expenses and exchanging mobile and e-mail details with her.

  “How’s business these days, Tommy?”

  “Grand, Ed. Grand.”

  “Still keep in touch with Leo Halligan, do you?”

  “We’re not in each other’s pockets. But yeah, I still see Leo from time to time.”

  “Does he come to the house?”

  “Of course he doesn’t come to the house. What, you think…I mean, Naomi stays for weekends, you think I’m going to let my daughter anywhere near one of the Halligans? What’s the matter with you, Ed?”

  “There’s nothing the matter. I just need to be sure—”

  “You just want your mind set at ease. You’re very happy to make use of any connections I have when they’re useful to you, whether it’s Leo or any other number of dealers and blaggers and crims, so you can keep tabs on gangland without getting your hands dirty. And I cultivate any number of those fuckers, at this stage almost entirely for your benefit. But you don’t acknowledge that. And you don’t trust me to have the wit, the gumption, the common sense to keep that part of my life separate from my daughter and her friends?”

  Tommy shakes his head in disgust, his dignity wounded. I take my lumps. Maybe I deserve them. On the other hand, I happen to know for a fact that Tommy had recently been involved with Leo Halligan in counterfeiting designer bags and in DVD piracy; the reason I know is because Garda Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly warned me that the Fraud Squad were closing in on Leo, and that Tommy should step lightly in the other direction as fast as possible. I duly passed this tip on, and I assume Tommy took the necessary precautions, but it’s hard to detect any of this amid the current self-righteous grandstanding. Let it go. I nod as if I have overstepped the mark.

  “Of course I trust you, Tommy. Thanks for doing this, all right?”

  Of course, as Tommy knows I know he can be trusted about as far as he trusts himself, a gratifying look of confusion and distrust now flashes across his face. Having worked himself up to a shouting match, he’s deflated when he doesn’t get it. There was always the danger the Guards might catch up with Tommy, but I feel reasonably sure, now that he doesn’t do drugs in the volume he used to, that he is keeping his less-than-salubrious pals well clear of the house. Not least because his ex-wife, Paula, would have him killed if she heard anything to the contrary. Or rather, knowing Paula, who once stabbed a boyfriend of hers who was putting the moves on Naomi in the hand with a screwdriver and then expressed
regret that she had missed what she was actually aiming for, namely, his balls, she would do the job herself.

  I want to talk to Madeline there and then, but Jack needs her back on set, so, after warning her not to tell anyone where Jenny Noble has gone—and by anyone, I emphasize Maurice Faye, Mark Cassidy, Conor Rowan and yes, Jack Donovan—I tell her I’ll catch up with her later. On my way out to Ringsend to interview Marie Donovan, I call DI Dave Donnelly of the Serious Crime Review Team, the Garda cold-case squad, and tell him who I’m working for, taking care to emphasize the anonymous letters over the missing girls.

  “Such glamour,” Dave says. “I read an article in the Herald there about Mr. Jack Donovan, numbers of homes he has, he’s like a perfume company so he is. New York, L.A., Rome, wherever. Does he not have his own private police force?”

  “You’re speaking to it. I worked for him before sure, back in L.A.”

  “Well excuse me. Not sure you should be talking to a lowly inspector today, Ed, I think an assistant commissioner might be more appropriate to your status.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “That’s what I just said. Anyway, if you didn’t just call to boast, what was your point? Would you like me, as a public servant who has taken a hit on his salary because of the public service pension levy, to assist you on your high society case over there free gratis and for nothing?”

  “Not only that, I’d like you to be a little less chippy and resentful while you’re at it, thanks. There’s no room anymore for the politics of envy, as you know, Dave. We should just sit back and wait for the bankers and developers who got us into this mess to get us out of it, as of course they will, in due course, once they’ve figured out a way to screw us all over again.”

  “What do you want, Ed?”

  “I want you to check four names to see if they’ve criminal records. Maurice Faye, Mark Cassidy, Conor Rowan.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “The fourth is Jack Donovan.”

  “Well now. Scandal in high places. Digging the dirt. It’s a grubby way to make a living, don’t you think?”

  “You’re breaking up, Dave.”

  “Come here, isn’t your man in that film?”

  Dave pronounces it “fil-um.” There are only two people “your man” could be. In honor of Jack Donovan’s first Irish movie in twenty years, pretty much every Irish screen actor of note had signed up to do something in Nighttown. As a result, taxi drivers and barmen and DJs had been referring to Colin and Brendan and Cillian and Gabriel and Liam and Colm as if they grew up around the corner from them. But if Dave is interested in an Irish actor, it’s on his wife’s behalf, and there are two at the top of that particular chart.

  “Colin Farrell and Gabriel Byrne are both in the film, Dave.”

  “If I got their autographs for Carmel, that would give my domestic numbers a bump.”

  “Signed photographs?”

  “Even better. Have you met them, Ed?”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m just the help, Dave, strictly below stairs. But I know people who can get their feet under the big table. Anything for Carmel.”

  Dave clears his throat loudly, by way of alerting me to what’s coming next.

  “Ed, you know our friend Podge will be out this afternoon.”

  “No doubt?”

  “It’s a formality. They reduced the sentence sure. After a plea for lenience by McLiam’s widow, can you believe it? She thinks Podge has found God.”

  “She’s a very devout woman.”

  “She’s a fucking fruitcake. But an influential fruitcake. They’ve been doing well to keep him in until today, trying to find anything to throw at him.”

  “That’s what I was hoping for, Dave. Some charge like ‘Being Podge Halligan.’”

  “You’ll have us living in a police state yet, Ed.”

  CHAPTER 8

  There’s a certain kind of Irishwoman who you feel is biding her time, waiting for the chance to land at her default physical type, which is that of The Nun. Maybe that won’t be true in the future, now that nuns are less involved in education, are dying out, in truth, but among women of my generation, it’s not uncommon. Marie Donovan looks like one of those women. She wears jeans and a blue polo shirt and purple Birkenstock shoes; her undyed, unstyled dark hair is short and graying around the edges; her elfin face bears no trace of makeup whatever, not even no-makeup makeup; her pale blue eyes are framed by oval steel-rimmed glasses. If I hadn’t been told she had had an abortion, I might have discounted the likelihood of her ever putting herself in the way of one. She is slim and pale, physically easy but edgy in manner, quick to smile and to talk.

  She lets me into her small house on Cambridge Avenue, a quiet cul-de-sac tucked in between Ringsend Park and the R131 off Pigeon House Road, set across from the tip of the North Quay East. Marie Donovan’s kitchen has pale boards and cane furniture and a wooden Spanish Mission crucifix of a kind I had seen in Santa Barbara and bookcases of plays and drama criticism and psychology and political theory and Indian and Latin American and African fiction and feminist theology.

  She closes her laptop and smiles broadly at me for perhaps the third time, as if someone has said something hilarious.

  “Is there something funny?” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “No, it’s just…a private detective…well yes, I suppose it is funny. Don’t you think? And there you are, in your suit. You practically have a hat.”

  I smile, or grimace, irritably, unwilling to justify myself or my job or my dress sense, and thank her for the tea, which it quickly becomes clear I am not going to be able to drink because all Marie Donovan has in the fridge to accompany it is soya milk, and soya milk makes Irish Breakfast tea taste, to use the precise chemical term, like shit. She smiles at my dislike of soya milk also, a knowing, wise, somewhat smug smile, or so it seems to me; I appear to be building up quite a dislike of Marie Donovan and we have barely met; before I can get a question out, she irritates me further by taking control of the conversation.

  “So my brother has hired you. How is he?”

  I shrug.

  “Under pressure, I guess you’d say. Budgets, actors, this and that. It’s not a business I really understand.”

  “Oh come on, it’s not exactly rocket science.”

  “You work in the same field.”

  “I work on a TV soap. But essentially it’s the same. And I can assure you, film and TV people exaggerate every aspect of the business so everyone thinks it’s impossibly complicated and mysterious. Which of course, it isn’t. But you know Jack of old, you said. From school?”

  “No, we met in L.A.”

  “Professionally?”

  “Well, I do play a small role in The Dain Curse.”

  “The Dain Curse? Christ, what a mess. Hammett is such a misogynistic, patriarchal writer anyway, and the entire PI genre is basically preposterous boys’-own-wish-fulfillment fantasy, you couldn’t possibly take it seriously, certainly not in this day and age. So there wasn’t just an opportunity, there was an obligation to revisit, to revise, to look anew at tired old genre conventions. But what does Jack do? He makes it even more sexist and romantic than ever. Lovely girls getting rescued by strong silent men, glamorous women with runaway sexual appetites, wholesale violence, an ever-mounting body count. It’s dinosaur time. Don’t you think?”

  I’m the one with the smile now, a patient one. It starts to hurt my face, and it doesn’t seem to be having any positive effect anyway, so I let it fade to a blank stare.

  “You disagree?” Marie Donovan says.

  “I like those tired old genre conventions.”

  “Really? The misogyny, the patriarchy?”

  “I like the glamorous women with runaway sexual appetites.”

  Marie Donovan wrinkles her nose and frowns, a frown that looks intended to be noticed and acted upon. She shakes her head briskly then, as if it’s better that nothing more be said.

  “You must thi
nk me very disloyal to my brother. But he’s made so many movies, I can’t be expected to like them all.”

  “Did you like any of them?”

  Marie Donovan’s eyes flash with what looks to me like anger, and I brace myself for what I suspect might be an onslaught. Instead, she bursts out laughing.

  “I did. I do, actually. I just…it was stupid of me to go off on The Dain Curse like that, but it does get on my nerves, what he did with it. I think Jack’s an amazing talent. I mean, doesn’t matter what I think, he’s Jack Donovan, Hollywood director, for God’s sake. I’m the script editor on a soap, what would I know?”

  “You know what you like.”

  “If only that were true.”

  Marie Donovan’s voice falters on the word true, and she looks away, as if she has been caught in a truth she didn’t expect and doesn’t welcome but can’t deny. The silence isn’t comfortable, but it belongs to her, and I let her have it. She is an angry person, and like most angry people, she employs, consciously or unconsciously, probably the latter, a variety of alternating behavior patterns to help her retain her dignity. When she speaks again, she drops the strident and the confrontational for something more low-key and big sisterly.

  “So look, Ed Loy, I doubt very much if we’d see eye to eye on many things, so let’s not try. You’re here on my brother’s behalf. What kind of trouble is he in that he needs a private detective?”

  “You don’t appear surprised.”

  “I’m guessing you worked for him in L.A. I’m familiar with much of the trouble my brother got himself into in the years before that. Maybe we could have done with a private detective then; it would have saved me a lot of grief.”