City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  “It’s more than that.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t find anything that would be an excuse.”

  “An explanation.”

  “An explanation is not an excuse.”

  Amanda Cole smiled, not unkindly.

  “Then don’t make things any worse, Ed Loy. I will keep the peace offerings. Even the horrid bag. And know your friend will miss you, but that you will miss him, too. No matter what he did. He is not a bad man.”

  Loy remembered feeling as he walked away from Amanda’s apartment that he had left something behind. He couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was, or maybe he refused to let himself. He didn’t call Jack Donovan again, and wouldn’t return any of his calls. When Jack called at his house, Loy wouldn’t answer the door. Eventually, the calls stopped. Not long afterward, Loy took up seriously with the woman he had gone to see Speed with back in ’94, and they married. The next time Loy saw Jack Donovan was in Dublin, in a nightclub, during the shooting of Nighttown. And that night, Loy remembered Amanda Cole telling him he would miss Jack. She was right. He had.

  CHAPTER 17

  Anne knows it’s a spur-of-the-moment thing, and Ed has only been asked himself, but honest to God, an hour. An hour to get the girls fed and used to the idea of her going out, to find a babysitter (Kevin was in Krakow, the recession having failed to quell the Irish Pub epidemic thus far), and most important, To Find Something To Wear. She’s too old now to underdress and get away with it like she could in her twenties and thirties: nine nights out of ten, if she just throws on a pair of jeans and a wrap top, she’ll look like she’s popping up to Spar for a carton of milk, but go too far in the other direction and she’ll morph into a total desperate housewife. And, inevitably, tonight is the night Aoife chooses to reveal that she and her best friend since Junior Infants are not friends anymore, and Ciara, not to be outdone, says that she doesn’t know what it is, she just “feels a little sad” and the only cure, apparently, for this sadness, is fastening her little arms around Mummy’s neck and clinging on like a marmoset, if marmosets are the things that cling, Anne can’t remember, koalas, perhaps, except not nearly as cute as koalas, certainly as the clinging continues.

  Finally, mercifully, Molly, her fantastically cool and self-assured babysitter who is sixteen and looks twenty-four, arrives and whirls the girls off into a world of Mary-Kate and Ashley and Hannah Montana and Zoey 101, and after that, Anne might as well be in another country for all the attention her daughters pay her. She doesn’t know whether there’ll be any actresses there tonight—come to think of it, she isn’t entirely sure which actresses are in the movie. She has the notion Mischa Barton is, but that might just be because she had that thing with Josh Tyler, who definitely is, and she’s pretty sure Kirsten Dunst is in it, and that English one, not Kate Winslet, the other one, Emma Thompson. No, Emily Watson. Or was it Emily Blunt? Oh God, she’s hopeless, she sounds like…and as Anne considers her makeup in the bathroom mirror, and considers equally the prosecution evidence it’s intended to counter, and wonders grimly, how long, O Lord, how long, it comes to her exactly what she sounds like: somebody’s mother.

  At which uplifting intelligence, she decides that, having successfully slept and steamed and flash-facialed the two glasses of champagne she’d had at lunchtime away, if she has to play the part of some suburban matron among a crowd of glamorous young things, the least she is entitled to be is a bit pissed. So she nips downstairs before she puts her heels on and rescues the Veuve from the fridge and finds a glass and sits in the window of her bedroom and drinks champagne until the taxi arrives, all the while trying to retrieve and reorder the space in her mind that she used to use for talking to other adults.

  CHAPTER 18

  The city feels close tonight, with barely a breath off the river; the glare of the exhausted sun dazzles my eyes as I turn onto the quays. I’m carrying the Glock in case I run into anything Podge-related; as if in sympathy, Tommy Owens calls.

  “The girls are good with Paula, yeah?”

  “Yeah. How are you?”

  “I think I’ll watch outside your gaff, Ed. Don’t know if Podge has a crosshairs on it, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to find out, even for a thick fuck like him.”

  “Tommy—”

  “Leo says he’s got you Glocked up, are you carrying? Ed?”

  “Yes. Tommy—”

  “Good. Because we do not need any misplaced fucking Council of Civil Liberties bollocksology here Ed, do you understand me? You get the chance, you plug the fat fuck in the head, empty the magazine to make sure. You know who’s going to care? Nobody. Leo is praying for you to do it. George sees Podge as a walking bad debt. And what do you do with bad debts? You write them off. Tell you what, why don’t we do a drive around, the cunt is up in Redlands, we get him out front on some fucking pretext—”

  “Tommy, I’m wondering is it wise for you to get involved with this one. I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. And that’s not going to impair my judgment, any more than what he done today is going to cloud yours. Are you up to it?”

  “Am I up to what? I’m up to defending myself, that’s why I called Leo. Am I up to taking him out first strike? Of course I’m not. And we’re not going to drive around looking to hit someone like a pair of coked-up skangers, get sense. Don’t ask me about it again. It’s nothing to do with civil liberties or bleeding hearts or anything else, it’s just not what I do. If that’s what Leo wants, let Leo do the work. And for God’s sake don’t get tempted into doing it yourself. Tommy? Because just as Podge’s gang of maggots are happy to spray-paint a headstone or burn down a house, they’ll be just as delighted to take revenge on you, either in person or through the people close to you. Through Naomi. It’s not what you do either. It’s what makes the difference between us and them—”

  “Yeah, yeah, Ed, there endeth the lesson, there’s a lot of parishes down the country looking for priests, you won’t ever be short of work if you’re losing the bottle for this job. Or maybe you’d be happier buying organic vegetables at the farmers’ market with your ladyfriend. Get yourself a Barbour jacket and a pair of fucking Birkenstocks. Meanwhile, I’ll be watching out for you. Down on the street. Don’t forget, I’ve killed for you before. I didn’t much like it. But it would be a pleasure this time.”

  Tommy closes the call, the bitter last word successfully his. I’ve been waiting for a crack about Anne. I wonder if he’s right, although my wondering runs counterclockwise to Tommy’s: Does my reluctance to contemplate full-scale gang war led by myself and Tommy reflect…well, obviously, in the first place, what it reflects is my sanity. Tommy’s blood is up, and he wants nothing more than to feel he’s doing something, even if it means driving around like fools with a death wish. But also, he’s been hanging with Leo. The lines are blurring. At this point, Tommy sees us as a gang too, just one with right on our side. I can’t look at things like that.

  And if I have a shot at happiness, or some kind of life, or more, with a woman who isn’t crazy or dangerous or both, that doesn’t sound the clanging cell doors of bourgeois complacency or suburban smugness, whatever Tommy, the eternal scourge of the middle class, might say. It’s barely an argument worth considering, but I’m finding it difficult to wrestle it to the ground. That’s probably because of my counterclockwise perspective: in the past, the only person who could be endangered by my job was me. If I take on other people, how can I ensure their safety from the kind of people I might encounter? How could I ever protect Anne Fogarty and her daughters from the likes of Podge Halligan? And if I can’t, am I faced with a stark choice? Can I have my job or a life, but not both?

  I stop by Butt Bridge and look down at the Liffey as it flows out to sea, and the commuter trains roll and creak overhead. I think of the night of my mother’s funeral, my first time back in Dublin in over twenty years. I stood and looked out to sea, and watched a train flash past, hurtling into the night, and wished that I was on it, going somewhere,
anywhere. I don’t feel like that now. This is my city, my home, for good or ill. But nothing stays still. I want to find happiness, love even. But that doesn’t come for free. I don’t know yet if I’m willing to pay the cost.

  JACK DONOVAN IS waiting for me in the dark wooden bar in Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street. I say waiting for me, but that is not in fact how it appears. He’s installed at the counter, holding the rapt attention of two barmen who look indecently excited in his presence, particularly when the default mode among the bar staff generally oscillates between morose and taciturn, Mulligan’s being the kind of Dublin pub where it is understood that at some level you are being served drink only on sufferance, and that your demeanor will be closely monitored for expressions of excessive optimism or geniality. I love the air of dreamy melancholy here, and feel that King-of-the-Hill, Top-of-the-Heap, Freeman-of-the-City Jack is somehow the wrong scale for the place, as if his motorcade is stalled outside and everyone is waiting for him to shake hands and leave so that mournful tranquillity may once more descend. But nobody appears to share my unease: the other customers are variously stealing glances and unabashedly staring at Jack. Joining him at the bar, my disquiet intensifies: Jack is showing the barmen how to fix Red Hues.

  “For fuck’s sake Jack, Mulligan’s is a pub, not a fucking cocktail bar,” I mutter, giving a note-perfect impersonation of a furious old man whose sanctuary has been violated by the filthy modern tide of drinks best left to women. Jack smiles silently and indicates the barmen, who present the drinks. They are smiling also. I look around. Everyone is smiling. It’s like something from an Irish tourism ad, or a Hitchcock film.

  “Take them down there, Jack, and we’ll bring the pints through when they’re ready,” one of the smiling barmen says. Jack picks up the drinks and a newspaper he has been reading and walks along the bar and into the large wood-paneled snug at the back, and we sit around the table in silence and Jack’s smile fades as he sips his drink, then flares up again when the other smiling barmen brings us our pints, then vanishes altogether when the door shuts behind him.

  The paper is the Irish Times, and it is open to Derek Doyle’s column.

  “Ed,” Jack says. “I want to ask you a question, and I want a completely honest answer.”

  “No you don’t,” I say.

  “I do. Why would you say that?”

  “Because nobody wants complete honesty. Complete honesty is what you feel slither across your soul at four in the morning. That’s too much for anyone to carry around all day.”

  “I don’t want it about everything, just one particular…aspect of my life.”

  “‘Aspect of your life.’”

  “Fuck off. Now. Did I, or did I not, make a cunt of myself on The Late Late Show?” Jack said, and he tapped the Irish Times.

  “Ah Jack, you don’t want to mind Derek Doyle—”

  “I don’t mind Derek Doyle. Derek Doyle…do you know something about little Derek? He sends me scripts. He has been giving out about me for ten years now, but after each…episode, I think we might call it, he writes me a letter of apology, as if, I don’t know, Mr. Hyde got out of the pit again and wrote that week’s column for him. And then a couple of months later, he sends me a script! A screenplay. And I read it, I read them all, six, seven over the years, and I say positive things, and I get them to people who I think might like them, and some of them do, although none of them like them enough to get the fucking things made. And no doubt the fact that my things get made and his don’t is an ongoing outrage in his mind. And do you know the worst thing about his scripts?”

  “They’re dreadful.”

  Jack shakes his huge head, his eyes begin to glitter and a grin creases across his face.

  “They’re not bad. That’s the worst thing. That’s what will kill the poor fucker in the end: they’re actually not bad.”

  Jack laughs, hard, until tears of malice course down his face.

  “Ah Jaysus. Poor Derek. May the Lord have mercy on him. And on us all. Now. Ed. Do you agree with Derek?”

  “I think Bono is a national treasure who improves with age. The last album was the best yet.”

  “I agree with you.”

  “And I think your films are great. Even over the last ten years. Even when they don’t entirely work.”

  Jack is taken aback by this confession, but I feel, in the light of what I want to say to him, that I owe him that, at least. Besides, it’s true.

  “What can I say? Thank you.”

  “And yes, I’m afraid you made an epic, Queen Maeve–size, Paddy Irishman cunt of yourself.”

  Jack begins to shake with laughter again.

  “Oh Danny boy…” he began.

  “Yeah, you should have started with that.”

  “And left right after. That’s the future, Ed: forget talking, let the actors do that. I’ll just rock up and sing. That can be, that is my USP.”

  We fall silent for a while, and I move in my seat and feel the Glock in my pocket and my sanctuary door blows open with a crash.

  “Any word from Madeline?” I say.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  Maurice hasn’t told Jack about the discovery of the bodies at Point Dume, so I take him through it myself, tell him how Jenny Noble had received texts that were ostensibly from the missing girls, that they hadn’t gone to Kate’s usual club but that still left the possibility that they’d been somewhere else, but that neither had actually spoken to anyone, not Jenny or, more to the point, to Nora’s sister, Rose. As I speak, I watch for any sign I can interpret, a flicker on Jack’s part that might give me some clue to his possible knowledge of, or participation in, any of these events. I suggest that the reason Nora, Kate and Jenny had been cast was because of their similarity in coloring and look to Madeline, and speculate as to whether their abductor, if there was one, frustrated by his inability to locate Jenny Noble, has plumped for Madeline King to round out his “three-in-one.” I alert him to the fact that he, Maurice, Mark Cassidy and Conor Rowan are the only people around now who had been at Point Dume. I tell him that the killer’s signature, at least in the Point Dume case—because the LAPD had announced they were investigating at least five other cases—is a crucifix with the girls’ initials carved on it, hence the “Three-in-One Killer” tag, and I note how this chimes with the frequent use of this motif in the anonymous letters.

  And I wait for his reply.

  And Jack, whose expression has not altered at all during the time I was talking, says: “Even if we got the money to recast the three girls, and reshoot all the scenes they were in, which is doubtful, Josh Tyler’s starting a picture for Wes Anderson next week, and he’s not going to be out of that for months, so I’d have to recast him completely, which is out of the question, as he is going to be a major star and this film will rise with him, or find some way of using a body double and then reinserting his performance with CGI, which will almost certainly send the budget into the outer reaches of feasibility. However it falls, Ed, I think it’s safe to say, Nighttown is fucked.”

  I stare at him in silence for a moment, but he appears not to notice there is anything amiss. I mistakenly think he has not understood me.

  “Jack? Did you hear anything I said?”

  He looks at me closely, his face a mask of amused curiosity.

  “Of course I did. But I wanted to be clear that you knew what you were asking. Which was, Jack, are you the Three-in-One Killer? Have you abducted Nora, Kate and Madeline? Did you kill the girls in Point Dume and bury their bodies? And if I’ve got that right, and please set me straight if I don’t, maybe it’s a two-guys-walk-into-a-bar-one-walks-out-a-serial-killer joke and I’ve misplaced my sense of humor, let me roll that ball right back to you, Ed. Do you think I’m the guy?”

  “I think you haven’t been honest with me. I think you’re not in a very good place in your head. I think there are things to do with your sister and your ex-wife that you need to get clear, and you need to get
them clear with me, because you invited me in. I think you wrote those letters and daubed that drawing yourself so that I could do some of your emotional dirty work for you, just the way I used to. And the last time I did such a thing, I found a woman who had been beaten up. And I should have had the guts to confront you on it, to let you give me the explanation, if not the excuse. But I was too young, and too angry, too consumed by my own certainty over right and wrong. Well, ten years has put paid to that certainty. I’m sorry it took so long. You were my friend, and I owed you more. But you owe me more than this fucking disrespectful bullshit, sending me out with a pack of lies to talk to an ex-wife who is raising your children, obviously your children, who grew to love you and is wasting her life away for the lack of you, and to see a sister who gave up her life for you, and who more or less told me…you know, for a long time, I couldn’t remember anything about the day with Amanda Cole except the bruises on her face, it was like my eyes were dazzled by the glare and I was blind to everything else she said. She loved you too. And she told me I knew nothing about you. Well, this is the time, Jack. Tell me what I need to hear. Tell me about yourself.”

  CHAPTER 19

  After a reviving glass of champagne, Anne’s spirits rise to the point where she decides that whatever she might sound like tonight, she is not going to look like anyone’s mother. She wears her navy Bolongaro Trevor leather jacket over her white Vivienne Westwood shirt and skinny black Zara jeans and the All Saints boots with the double straps, reckoning, after more than one mutton check, that she is still the right side of forty, just about, to get away with rock chick and not look completely deluded.

  In the Octagon Bar at the Clarence Hotel, or strictly speaking in a private room off the lobby, she is glad she hasn’t gone the skirt-and-heels route, partly because she would have felt too self-conscious, particularly because the Famous Irish Actor she was hoping would be here is here, although apparently just for a drink, he can’t come to dinner, and when he says a drink he means water because he doesn’t drink anything stronger now, and he shakes her hand and smiles at her, and she burbles something about the American TV show he does that probably makes her sound half-witted but he is so sweet, and talks to her quite openly, standing with his head to one side, quite grand, really, like an old style actor, a Barrymore, perhaps, beautifully dressed himself, and then those boy producers from L.A. try to fold him into some private conversation, excluding her, and he won’t let them, he insists she be part of things, and there follows a long, rather stilted exchange about how Ireland has changed and yet stayed the same that none of them could in truth think very interesting, until Anne concedes that since the prospect of her and the Famous Irish Actor taking off into the sunset or even getting a room are slim, she should probably get a few more names on her dance card and leave him to the boy producers, who are wearing suits but look like they should be in short pants, and the Famous Irish Actor looks genuinely alarmed as she moves off, but that’s probably only because he doesn’t want to be left alone with the boy producers, although, Anne thinks optimistically, you never know.