All the Dead Voices

by Declan Hughes

  PART II

  HOLY THURSDAY

  CHAPTER 3

  I awoke at dawn and took a hot shower, then turned the hot water off and held my head under the jets until the cold was like a ragged knot in my skull. Afterward, I sat on the edge of the bath with a towel over my head until something that felt like blood had begun to spread shoots of warmth through the numb flesh. The left side of my head felt like a graft that hadn’t taken properly, and that was probably the wrong fit. And my ear looked and felt like it had been scalded. But dwelling on the pain was never a good idea, and this morning I simply didn’t have the time: first I was hungry, having forgotten to eat last night, and then I had work to do.

  I washed down two Nurofen Plus with orange juice, dressed, put the kettle on and went down to Grand Canal Street to get the papers and some eggs. It was a raw, squally morning, and the gray sky spat jets of sleet onto the gravel sodden ground, and the wind off the river caught you by the throat and made your eyes smart. By the time I’d come back up the stairs my head was clattering again, so I scarfed another two Nurofen with my first cup of coffee. I softened some red onion in olive oil, scrambled three eggs and ate them with a few slices of smoked salmon, my breakfast of choice when I was feeling a little sorry for myself.

  The papers were full of CRAZED GUNMAN STALKS STADIUM—the first time Tolka Park’s status had ever been thus elevated—with fervid speculation as to whether a U.S.-STYLE CAMPUS SLAUGHTER might have been in the offing; there was more than a hint of disappointment that no such RAMPAGE had occurred. There were no leads as yet, and none of the usual conjecture about which organized crime figure or gangland feud may have been behind the shooting, or whether it was an EMBITTERED LONER ENACTING HIS REVENGE.

  I turned on the radio to see if RTE had anything to offer, and discovered that the crime reporters had bigger fish to fry this morning. The bodies of two young men had been found in Beresford Lane, brutally beaten and stabbed, their throats cut. I sat like a stone and listened to the details: the Guards had secured the scene, the young men, clad in sportswear and baseball hats, were “known to Gardaí,” the State Pathologist was expected this morning, the murder weapon had not been found. The murder weapon: a knife with a set of my prints, and a fresh sample of my blood. The gash on my hand smarted suddenly, as if reproving me for underestimating its importance, and a hot trickle of blood slithered across my palm. The Guards had my prints on file, and my blood and DNA if they had a big enough fridge, and my preferred takeaway curry order and taste in beer for all I knew, but they had no reason to connect me with the victims—unless they found the knife. Provided that was the knife that their killer had used.

  I drank another cup of coffee and thought about who had set the two baseball hats on me, and wondered whether they had been ordered to kill me or to scare me off, and whether they had left the murder weapon at the scene, or held on to it to use against me in the future. The only conclusion I came to was that there was more, much more to come, and that there was nothing I could do about any of it right now.

  My client wasn’t due for an hour, so I went back downstairs and pulled my coat tight and stepped out into the wind. I thought of walking through Merrion Square, with its great Georgian houses overlooking the park, but this wasn’t a morning for the early daffodils and crocuses or the first trees in leaf; spring was here, but not in any way you could savor. I turned down Holles Street, passing a couple of hard-faced new mothers in pink wrappers smoking cigarettes in the wheelchair entrance of the National Maternity Hospital, and hooked left along Sand-with Street through the damp tunnel beneath the railway. Lombard Street brought me onto City Quay, and I left the traffic’s thunder behind to step onto the Sean O’Casey pedestrian bridge across the Liffey. I stopped halfway across and looked down the docks toward the sea.

  My head was wet now, and cold from the sleet; I could feel my nose and lips numb on my face; the tattoo of pain in my left ear had finally abated. I could see the latest addition to the docklands’ skyline, the glittering asymmetrical towers of glass and steel on opposite quays, two hundred meters high, with the interconnecting pedestrian bridge, the illuminated Independence Bridge, suspended a hundred meters above the river between them. It was an extraordinary sight, dwarfing everything else in the area; they said you could see it from miles away, whether at sea, air or land; it was to be the new gateway to the city.

  There had been years of protests and planning objections, but the Docklands Development Authority had prevailed; the towers and bridge would be officially opened by the Taoiseach, the Irish prime minister, on Easter Monday, the floating anniversary of the 1916 revolution that was the first marker for the independent republic that followed. At least, that was the official line, but the papers and pubs had been full of enough dissent and debate and division about what 1916 meant, and what independence meant, and what Ireland meant, not to mention what architectural beauty meant, to make your head spin. All you could say for sure was that the towers and the bridge were on the skyline now, and they’d be the gateway to Dublin for many years to come, and we were all going to have to get used to them, whatever we thought.

  These things were never simple; the bridge I was standing on was named after a great and notoriously cranky playwright who refused to return to Ireland after the Abbey Theatre rejected his fourth play; I doubted whether his shade was especially sanguine about his commemoration over water, especially since it served primarily as a walkway for workers to get from the DART to the International Financial Services Centre, one of the totemic sites of Ireland’s recent economic boom and a building the old Marxist would have execrated.

  But I had lived too long in America to fret overly about preserving the old and frowning upon the new, and my experience had been that those most passionately opposed to new buildings were often sitting on substantial old piles of their own, and so could hardly be described as disinterested observers; in any case, while Merrion Square was a glowing testament to the glories of the city’s past, Docklands needed all the help it could get. And at night, the blaze of light stretched across the heavens was something to behold; I never thought I’d see its monumental, carnival like in hard-bitten, downbeat Dublin, and maybe that was enough in itself to commend it.

  I walked back the way I came, still getting used to the fact that I now lived in the city center. When I came back from Los Angeles to bury my mother, I assumed I would turn around and leave before the earth on her grave had subsided. But as one case followed another, I found myself living in the house I had grown up in. That was unsatisfactory for all kinds of reasons, chiefly because while I stayed there, the ghosts of my past refused to let me be.

  There’s a reckoning you can make with history, a reasonable settlement that makes demands but leaves you with your dignity. And then there’s a kind of morbid fascination that borders on obsession, a grave-robbing disorder that fills your every waking moment with memories and echoes and dust. Something like that had gotten ahold of me in the house in Quarry Fields and its surrounding streets. I’d seen it in other people, a kind of living death, where all possibility of change is weighed in terms of what has gone before, and quickly discounted as an insult to the memory of things past. And when I looked in the mirror, or, having stopped looking, when I caught my reflection in the rearview, I saw the same dead eyes telling me that my race was run, that there was nothing new under the sun except the next job of work, the next faithless woman, the next empty glass.

  So I got out. I rented the house to Maria and Anita Kravchenko, two Ukrainian women I had met after they ran into some trouble with Brock Taylor’s boy Sean Moon, back when I worked the Howard case. They had had a hard time back then, but Taylor and Moon wouldn’t be bothering them anytime soon, or indeed, ever. They were tough, optimistic, handsome women. My friend in the Guards, Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly, had helped ease their visa troubles, and now Anita was working in a nearby restaurant and Maria had a child-care job in a crèche. They had a couple of friends working
as nannies who shared the house with them, and the rent they paid more than covered the small mortgage my mother had taken out before she died, alongside the larger mortgage I was paying on my new apartment. I had tried to charge them less than the going rate, but Maria and Anita insisted on paying full whack, and on occasionally delivering me loaves of paska and kolach, traditional Ukrainian Christmas and Easter bread that tasted good whatever the season, along with strong Ukrainian beer that tasted even better but tended to turn every season into bleak midwinter somewhere in the middle of the third bottle. Maybe I couldn’t drink the way I used to. Maybe I didn’t want to.

  On the steps of the Maternity Hospital, a skinny smoking mother in a peach wrapper with black hair had been joined by what looked like her own skinny mother, who had dyed black hair and was smoking also; there were infants in a double buggy and small children swarming around their feet and the hospital steps and lobby; the women ignored the children, sucking on their cigarettes and muttering to each other like workmen stealing heat around a brazier. A winter spent watching from my window as women who had just given birth stood in biting wind and rain and frost to smoke a cigarette had convinced me as never before of the folly of my addiction; it hadn’t yet imbued in me the firm purpose of amendment needed to shake it, however; I stood on the steps of my building now and exhaled blue smoke, an ephemeral salute to skinny, hard-faced mothers and smoking fools everywhere.

  CHAPTER 4

  The door to my apartment opened onto a hallway that led directly to the small kitchen; the bathroom lay to the left; to the right were the two great rooms with high ceilings that I lived and worked in. My office was to the front; it didn’t have a glass door with my name on it, or a rolltop desk, and the whiskey was Irish, and in plain view, not hidden in a filing cabinet, but I had done without an office before, and it had somehow helped to make everyone’s problems my problems at a time when I had enough of my own to be going on with; I hoped an office would serve as a kind of clearinghouse for me, impersonal walls within which the dark secrets and thwarted passions of the cases I worked might disperse, or at least be safely caged. Hope springs infernal. There were three big sash windows and a sofa and two armchairs, in case an entire family wanted to hire me, which had happened a few times, with successful but never happy results. There was a pale oak desk and a dark-stained captain’s chair that I sat in, the windows behind me; across the desk there was a Lloyd Loom leather chair with a cane back which women liked to sit in; there was one sitting in it now.

  Anne Fogarty was about forty but looked thirty-five, or maybe she was thirty-five and looked her age. It was hard to tell these days, when twenty-one-year-olds were so primped and groomed and orange-faced they often looked like startled fifty-five-year-old millionaires’ wives with too much work done. She looked well to my eyes, whatever age she was, in indigo jeans and a tight purple wraparound top that exposed just enough flesh at eleven in the morning to keep my gaze determinedly level on her twinkling brown eyes, which was no hardship. Her lips were full and painted red, and her slightly prominent teeth were crisscrossed with metal braces; her wavy hair was dyed honey blond with the ghost of dark brown roots showing; it fell in wayward bangs to her lightly freckled neck and brushed against the chain that held a glittering silver crucifix at her throat. She wore several silver and jeweled rings, but her ring finger was bare with a tan line wide enough for a wedding ring; as I was looking at hers, I saw her notice mine. I saw her notice my ear also, and something like pity, or horror, shuddered across her face.

  She laid a pale green file on my desk, took the cup of black coffee I offered her, sat back and told me why she was here.

  “My father was murdered in 1991. At the time, my parents’ marriage was effectively over. They were staying together…‘for the sake of the children’ is, I think, the expression, even if the children were old enough to work out for themselves that all was not well in the land of Mammy and Daddy. I was fifteen when it happened, and my sisters were seventeen and fourteen. But whatever we thought was going on, we didn’t know about my mother and…I’m sorry, this is such a jumble, I should tell you what happened first. It’s all in the file, newspaper clippings, accounts of the trial.”

  “I’ll read the file later. But it’s always good to get it straight from the source. Any way it occurs to you to tell it is fine,” I said. “Was your mother having an affair?”

  A flush of red rippled across Anne Fogarty’s face and sparked in blotches on her chest. She laughed in embarrassment, and almost upset her cup of coffee in her lap.

  “I’m sorry, was that too direct?” I said.

  “Not at all. It’s just strange to hear it spoken out loud. For too long the words have been boxed up in my head. My sisters don’t want to know about it anymore. And the Guards are happy that they know the truth. But they don’t. Which is why I’m here, Mr. Loy.”

  She smiled at me then, bravely, I guess you’d have to say, and I saw a history of suffering in her eyes, and of strength too, the strength to carry a burden by herself a long way after everyone around her has cast it off and wishes she would too. I smiled back, because I thought it would reassure her, and because I wanted to anyway.

  “Yes, my mother was having an affair…and while Daddy wasn’t exactly happy, he put up with it. He sort of had to. He had been first in the infidelity stakes, casual stuff with secretaries and women he met in the pub, and then Mammy found out and was heartbroken. They were childhood sweethearts, and Ma thought it would be roses all the way, the anniversary waltz in their eighties. And it didn’t turn out that way. And after the hurt—she spent about a year of my childhood in bed, I was twelve—we didn’t know why, we understood in retrospect—at least, I did.

  “Aisling, my older sister, just gave up on Ma, she had no patience for women who ‘suffered with their nerves,’ as it was called back then. And it fell to me to look after Midge, that’s what we called Margaret, she was still the baby, and Midge never transferred her affection back to Ma afterward. I’m not sure Ma tried very hard to win it back either. When she got out of the bed, it was like she’d shed a skin: she was cooler, more distant—she wasn’t ‘Mammy’ anymore, she’d become…her own person. I’ve understood it better since I’ve had my own. I don’t think it’s an unusual situation, the man has a few flings, the woman finds out, and she can never quite put her heart together again the way it was. And then she met Steve Owen, and fell in love with him.”

  “But you didn’t find out about this until later?”

  “Until they arrested Ma and Steve for Daddy’s murder.”

  “They charged them both?”

  “No, they went ahead with Steve. A jury found him guilty. The conviction was later found to have been unsafe. He was released on appeal after five years. The appeal court judges criticized the Garda investigation, and the trial judge.”

  “And what did the Guards say?”

  “Officially, that the investigation remained open. But they leaked to every journalist in town that they weren’t looking for anyone else in relation to the murder of Brian Fogarty.”

  “And your mother—”

  “Ma died in ’94, three years after Steve was sent to jail. It was like her heart had been broken one time too many.”

  We finished our coffee and sat in silence for a while, as if to mark with due respect the sadness of the story she had just told me. Before I had time to ask her about the circumstances of her father’s death, she continued.

  “Daddy was a tax inspector. The Revenue Commissioners. Worked there all his life, after a commerce degree in UCD. We lived in a semi-d in Farney Park in Sandymount. It was nothing then, but of course, it’d be a mental price now, even with the market on the slide. The neighbors were teachers and civil servants, shopkeepers and salesmen. The lower middle classes, years before they became paper millionaires. Anyway, Da was working at home one morning—he used to do that sometimes, I think it started because he was worried about Ma when she had her whatever, her breakdo
wn. And then he got into the habit of it, he’d work the morning at home, always gone by the time we got back from school for lunch. Only this day, he wasn’t gone. Not entirely.”

  Anne Fogarty made that smile people make when grief, however seasoned it is, brims of a sudden and threatens to spill, a smile that’s both urgent and painful all at once.

  “Did you find the body?” I said.

  She shook her head, her smile intensifying until it looked like it had been painted on her face and left to dry.

  “Midge. When I got home, she was sitting on the doorstep, covered in blood, crying like a baby. I had to walk past her to see what it was, she couldn’t get the words out. He was lying on his face at the end of the hall, just at the kitchen door. The back of his head was all red and black. There was blood on the floor, blood on the walls. He’d been beaten to death. The Guards said he had his back to his killer. They deduced from this that Daddy must have known him. To trust him, to turn his back on him. But it could have equally meant he was being forced along at gunpoint, couldn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. Why would he have been forced along at gunpoint? Who would have pulled a gun on him? Was there money in the house?”