The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley

by Jeremy Massey

  Sure enough, within another half hour they phoned the office. Frank’s secretary told Eamonn that there was a John looking for him, so into the middle office we went.

  “Just make sure you get them in here. No matter what they say, tell them to come in and discuss it in private. Don’t tell them directly you’ll give them the money, but give them the idea that you will. Can you do that?” I asked.

  “No problem,” said Eamonn. He took the call while I held my ear next to his to listen. With the right coaching, Eamonn was back on form, sounding perfectly confident in his compliance.

  “All right, John?” he said.

  “Eamonn, how’s the man?” said the guy who called himself John in his silken voice.

  “Good, how’d it go?” said Eamonn.

  “Well, we definitely have him onside, but he’s got wise to the worth of the stock we’ve got. He wants more money, Eamonn.”

  I smiled at Eamonn. Greedy bastards.

  “How much more?” asked Eamonn.

  “Another two grand and he’ll release it immediately.”

  “Right then,” said Eamonn. “You’d better come in so.”

  “Right you are. Be there shortly.” And they ended the call. There was hope back in Eamonn’s eyes, but he was nervous now, too.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now when they come back in, bring them in here and wait. Just listen to them tell you their story, then after two minutes, I’ll come in and take over. You get out of the seat, stand back, and tell them I’m your associate and that I’m taking over. All right?”

  “Right,” said Eamonn.

  I waited down the end of the yard by the stairs to the loft and watched them drive in ten minutes later in their unblemished Audi A5 coupé. Only two of them this time: a guy wearing a suit with no tie—presumably “John”—and another guy in jeans and a purple anorak. Cocky as you like. They walked out onto the street to come in the main entrance where Eamonn would meet them. When they’d turned the corner, I quickly walked up to the top of the yard and locked the cast-iron gates. Then I went inside.

  I opened the door to the middle office and went in. As soon as I’d closed the door, Eamonn got up from the chair behind the desk and stood back. The two men ignored me and would look only at Eamonn.

  “This is my associate, Paddy, he’s taking over now,” said Eamonn, stepping further back to stand at the wall.

  “It’s much better if we keep this between ourselves, Eamonn,” said John, like he was as close as a brother to him. “Eamonn . . .” he said again, looking for eye contact, but Eamonn had shut down.

  “You’re talking to me now, lads,” I said. Reluctantly, they turned their gaze to me. John had a fair belt of charisma about him; he was probably a traveler and knew well how to work his charms. And he did look like Dean Martin—minus the magic. He was fairly well built, too, and so was his friend, who looked more physically imposing; no surprise then who they’d picked to do the talking. Neither of them would be beyond playing the violence card if it came down to it. But I had my ace.

  “We want the money back, lads,” I said.

  “We don’t have it,” he started.

  “Don’t even try and pull it.”

  “The customs official has the money—”

  I cut him off fast. “I don’t want to hear it. We want the money back now, or I’ll have the law down here in a flash.”

  He looked at me, still relaxed, but no longer playing his role.

  “You wouldn’t like to see a man go down, would you?” he said.

  “My only concern is the money. Nobody needs to go down as long as it’s handed over.”

  “We don’t have it,” he said, turning his hands up, empty.

  “Then get it. We’re finished talking here,” I said with finality, opening the door. I walked out with Eamonn close behind me. “We’ll let you out the back, lads,” I said, leading them into the back office and opening the door out into the yard. It wasn’t until they followed us outside that they realized they were snared. No way out. John looked directly at me for a moment, fox to fox, then back to the locked gates, and then down to the ground. Dino wasn’t happy. His friend waited for his move and, like an obedient watchdog, would look only at John. After weighing up his options, John pulled out his phone and called a number. I could only hear him mumbling, but it was clear he was giving instructions. He ended the call and turned to me.

  “Right,” he said, capitulating. “You’ll have it back in a minute.” Ten minutes later, Eamonn met one of the other two thieves at the main entrance and was handed back the money, and then I opened the gates.

  Frank never found out. Eamonn learned a lesson, and he also knew that I’d always have his back.

  The matron in Lia Fáil led us into a ward of old men, twenty in all, most of them asleep, and stopped by the bed of the deceased. There were old screens on either side of the bed that must have been fifty years old and shielded the view only from knee to chest.

  “I’ll be in my office,” she said, and walked out. Eamonn watched her backside sway from side to side as she waddled away.

  “Would you look at the state of that,” he said.

  The corpse was still warm. And terrified-looking. All these guys were—dead or alive. And all so skinny—they must have been fed soup and nothing else. The funerals that followed these bring-backs were known within the company as “housers,” as they were effectively on the house. Gallagher’s had the contract with the Liberties Health Service, and did however many there were each year for a nominal flat rate. These were the forgotten people whose funerals consisted of veneered chipboard coffins, which arrived for the removals hours earlier than normal, and had their funeral Masses and burials before any of the company’s regular funerals so they wouldn’t interfere with them, timewise, as they were serviced by the same vehicles and men. There were seldom more than two or three people at these funerals. Most times, none. Except for Shay. And when Shay had gone, Frank.

  At half two in the morning, these poor old souls got to see us at our worst: Our five o’clock shadows had doubled in length, and our dark suits and overcoats took on an even darker hue in the badly lit wards and corridors. It was always the same: These old men, scared and gaunt, would gape out from beneath their covers, looking more like concentration camp detainees than senior citizens in a modern republic. And they all had the same expression on their faces, which said only one thing: Will I be next?

  We placed the stretcher on the bed beside old Harry’s remains. His eyes and mouth were both wide open and he hadn’t been shaved in a week. We pulled the covers off him and got ready to lift him, Eamonn at the legs, Christy and I on either side of his shoulders. Just as we went to lift him, a pocket of gas found its way up through the windpipe and escaped through the mouth, filling the air with a noxious smell, which regularly happens when a remains is lifted. But it still came as a shock to some people, and the smell was like nothing else—the worst smell in a zoo couldn’t hold a candle to it. Eamonn and I were long since hardened to such smells but Christy was still a novice, and as soon as he smelled it, he hit the deck—the best place for fresh air.

  Eamonn and I couldn’t help laughing silently through our closed mouths, our shoulders shaking up and down. The two of us easily lifted the corpse onto the stretcher, old Harry being as light as a twelve-year-old child. We buckled the straps tightly around his torso and legs, placed the black plastic cover over him, and pulled the screens back. By this time, Christy had recovered and the three of us carried Harry out of the ward.

  “I nearly brought my dinner up there,” said Christy, pressing the elevator button. “As if the smell of piss and Pine-Sol isn’t bad enough.”

  We stood the stretcher up in the elevator and sank to the ground.

  NINE

  3:00 a.m.

  With Harry Roche’s remains locked safely in the embalming room b
ehind me, I turned my thoughts again to slumber and a soft pillow. I was about to head home when Eamonn slowed his Mercedes down as he was leaving, lowering his window.

  “Back left tire, Pat,” he said with a downturned smile, and drove out the gate. I looked at the tire on my Camry. It was completely flat. And then, as if on cue, the rain came down, prompting Christy to rush to my boot and open it.

  “Come on, Buckley, you unlucky fuck,” he said, pulling the spare out. “Let’s get it changed.” If it had been hailing golf balls, Christy wouldn’t have hesitated to help me, such was the quality of his friendship. We battled away at the wheel with the rain bouncing heavily off the ground beside us, the pair of us saturated by the time we’d finished changing it.

  “Go home,” I told him. “I’ll get the gate.”

  Christy didn’t have to be told twice. He ran to his car and drove off.

  Alone again, I settled into my car and relaxed, closing my eyes to listen to the rain on the roof. Memories of laughter came in and out of my mind. Lucy laughing her beautiful laugh while holding my hankie, and me laughing with her; Brigid stifling her laughter while we whispered together; Eamonn and I silently laughing in Lia Fáil; and Eva laughing the sexiest laugh I’ve ever heard, her hoarse and croaky voice crowning it. I imagined being away in another land with Brigid Wright, remembering the laughter from there, but I was only tormenting myself with pleasant notions that could never be.

  After locking the gates and getting back in my car, I moved off down the street and failed to do something so routine, so reflexive, that I unintentionally transformed my car from an everyday object of convenience into a giant bullet. I’d forgotten to turn my lights on.

  I drove down James’s Street, headed for Kilmainham, my attention more absorbed in tuning the radio away from a late-night chat show than focusing on the road in front of me. Just as I tuned into some music, something ahead of me grabbed my attention. In the fraction of a second that I got to see him, I saw the trotting figure of a man holding a newspaper over his head to shield himself from the rain while he was crossing the road. But he was moving so ridiculously fast towards me that I only had time to raise my foot from the accelerator. His body was hit by the car with such a deafening wallop that he must have been thrown a good fifteen feet up in the air. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop on the rainy street twenty yards up the road.

  It was only as the car finally stopped moving that I realized my lights weren’t on. I looked in the rearview mirror and in the dark could just make out a body lying motionless in the middle of the street. I looked at the shattered windscreen and the crumpled bonnet, and then I turned around and looked out the back window, my heart marking each moment like a pounding drum.

  I got out of the car and walked shakily towards the crumpled prostrate figure. I knelt down beside it and saw a tall, well-built man, not yet middle-aged, dressed in a suit and overcoat not dissimilar to my own. The man’s eyes were open and there was a little stream of blood that had trickled out of his mouth down the left side of his face. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I felt for a pulse and, for the second time that day, found none. The man was dead.

  Sticking out of his inside coat pocket were a bulging zip case and a leather-bound rectangular wallet. I took out the zip case and looked inside. It was jammed tight with fifty-euro notes, totaling what looked to be more than seventeen or eighteen grand. I put it back in the man’s pocket and took out the wallet. I opened it up to see a large collection of credit cards. I searched for the name and saw it in raised print: DONAL CULLEN. My eyes widened with increasing horror as I looked to the face of the dead man, and then I recognized him: from the papers, outside the courts with his brother, Vincent, Dublin’s number one thug.

  “Oh, no.” I barely whispered the words. I dropped the wallet to the ground as fear swept through me like a ghost, and I stumbled backwards to my feet. The hum of the engine running behind me never sounded so inviting. I scanned both sides of the street, both ends, to see if anyone could see me or had witnessed the accident, and I saw no one. I backed away from the body slowly. Once I got a few yards away, I turned and walked purposefully to the car. I snapped the number plate off the back of the car, quickly did the same around the front, and then got back in and shut the door. A little voice in my head made a suggestion. Leave the lights off, it said. I put her into gear and drove off slowly with my hands trembling. Just before I turned the corner, I noticed in the rearview mirror somebody running from a building to the body in the middle of the road. I punched the accelerator, kept my head looking forward, and a moment later I was around the corner and gone.

  The voice continued. You killed him. Not like Lucy, who happened to die while you were fucking her, this man died because you killed him with your car. You killed him by not looking. By being tired. By tuning the radio. By driving with no lights on and not braking. You took his life.

  I shook my head and gripped my face.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said out loud. “Oh, Jesus.”

  Any worries I had about Lucy Wright’s autopsy disappeared the moment I’d read Donal Cullen’s name. In the blink of an eye, my concerns switched from being caught out for riding a bereaved widow, a client, and sending her to the grave in the process, to being butchered alive for the unceremonious killing of the brother of the most dangerous gangster in Ireland.

  By the time I’d pulled up outside my house on Mourne Road, I was numb, still not breathing normally, and living in a full-scale nightmare. I’d fled the scene, acted like a coward. Countless times had I sat with families who’d had a son or daughter killed by a hit-and-run driver, and I’d silently condemned the driver along with them. I knew well the added injustice a family felt at not having someone put their hand up and say, “Yeah, it was me, I’m so very sorry.” On James’s Street, I’d been fully intent on doing just that until I saw who it was. I knew it was the right thing to do. And then the fear took me. It had me by the balls and the hair and the neck, and wasn’t letting go.

  Eva’s car, a silver ten-year-old Renault Clio, had been parked in my garage since she’d died, and I still carried the key. I opened up the garage, moved past the dusty clutter, and climbed into the little French car, praying the battery wouldn’t be flat. It had been four months since I’d turned her over. I pumped the pedal, turned the key, and listened to the engine roar to life. I closed my eyes to appreciate this small triumph. I moved it out onto the street and parked it, then I drove my Camry into the same spot in the garage. I locked the garage doors and checked the damage to the car. It looked like it had killed someone.

  I went into the house as quietly as I could and didn’t turn on any lights. I crept upstairs to my bedroom. I left the light off while I got undressed, the room being sufficiently lit by the streetlight outside. I took off my coat and threw it to the floor and noticed a bulge in the inside breast pocket, the same one as Donal Cullen had his money in. I knelt down and put my hand in and pulled out a damp green facecloth, the one I’d cleaned off Lucy with. I’d forgotten all about it. I closed my eyes and tossed it towards the little pile of laundry in the corner before heading to the bathroom where I stripped and ran the shower. I stepped in and washed myself thoroughly and dried off afterwards with a fresh towel. I avoided looking in the mirror. I didn’t want to see myself consumed by fear.

  I crawled into bed and huddled in the fetal position, my mind scrambling for exits or explanations. What would Frank have done? Frank wouldn’t have been in this position in the first place. If he had filled my shoes for the day, none of this would have happened. And Frank couldn’t help me with this one anyway. Nobody could. If I’d Eva here beside me, she’d hold my head in her hands and kiss my forehead tenderly and be my lover and confidante, and we’d get through it together with our bulletproof love shielding us from the world. But Eva was gone. As I lay there bereft of comfort or hope, grappling with my predicament, if I could have had the counsel of any
one person, living or dead, it would have been my father.

  After bringing my father to the forefront of my mind, my thoughts spontaneously vaulted back to an afternoon I’d spent with him when I was fifteen. We’d been painting the living room in the house I’d grown up in on Arnott Street at the back of the Meath Hospital, and had stopped to have a cup of tea. It was a hot day in the middle of summer and a big fly was buzzing around the room. Shay smiled at me. He had a way with all creatures, no matter what kind, like no one else I’d ever known.

  Out of the blue, he said, “Make the fly land in your hand.”

  “Come on, Dad, the fly’s not going to land in my hand.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s no way I could get the fly to do that,” I said emphatically.

  “Try it.” He smiled.

  “It’s not going to happen,” I said, smiling back at him.

  “Relax,” he said, “and clear your mind.”

  I’m not sure if it was what he said or how he said it. But at that moment, I understood what he was talking about in a way I hadn’t before. I let him guide me.

  “Open your hand and imagine all your power, all your spirit, your essence, moving into the center of your palm. Imagine it’s the seat of your soul. Everything that makes up who you are is now in that hand.”

  After a minute or so, there was a subtle but definite change in the feeling of my hand.

  “Right?”

  I nodded.

  “Now allow the fly to land in your hand.”

  I looked at the fly, and as soon as I’d imagined it landing on my hand, it flew down and did just that. I was so astonished that my jaw dropped open. But I had the sense not to move my hand. And the fly stayed there. I looked at my father, who remained relaxed as always. Like he knew this would happen.

  “You can close your hand,” he said.

  Slowly, I closed my hand over the fly, and it let me. Then I opened it slowly, and still it stayed there.