Colm Meaney, they all said. He’s the spit of Colm Meaney. Dessie couldn’t see it at all. Colm Meaney as Pavarotti, more like. Sharon said it was the same as a fat politician you’d see with some gorgeous young one hanging out of him—it was about power. All these Irishwomen come on holidays and what do their husbands do? They booze morning noon and night, ignore the wives, ignore the kids, sit around with lads the same as themselves shitin’ on about football. You’ll never beat the Irish! Wives have been looking forward to this all year, here they are, completely ignored, and who pays attention to them? Liam Delaney of Delaney’s Irish Pub. The Man Himself. Complimenting their hair, remembering what they drink, dealing out his store of charm and good humor and one-liners and who’s this you remind me of, Michelle Pfeiffer/Helen Mirren/Glenn Close when she was young.
And on the third day, there he is before them, Colm Meaney for a holiday romance. Liam started renting the DVDs so he could quote the great man himself, The Snapper and Layer Cake and all. Deep Space Nine, Sharon said, that’s the one you need. That’s where you should be. Fair play, Liam laughed at that. He didn’t take it seriously. I’m a fucking eejit kiddo, just like anyone else, he’d say to Dessie. Only I’ve found a way to make a go of being a fucking eejit. What’s more, I’m a lucky fucking eejit. And that’s the trick.
Liam’s head fell toward the window and he began to snore. Two-thirty A.M.—Dessie hadn’t set his phone back yet. Time enough when they landed. He knew Liam would head straight to the funeral home, and then into the pub until the removal if he was let. Dessie didn’t drink much anymore, but even if he did, he had better things to do than sit around shouting about Jack Cullen or Lamp Comerford when he knew precisely fuck all squared about it.
Liam was full of shite about the old days and what blags he pulled and all this. Liam was a lucky fucking eejit and no mistake. Liam had been a driver like Dessie only not as good, but Liam hit the jackpot first time out. Brock Taylor’s regular wheelman broke his leg the day before the Securicor job in Naas and Liam got the nod on account of everyone knew what a petrolhead he was. Brock’s gang walked away with three and a half mil, Liam took 450K in the divvy-up. In 1996. He just legged it to Greece pronto, bought the bar, never looked back. That was the extent of Liam’s life of crime. He could talk seven shades about who was going to answer to him and what he was going to do to them but he knew and everyone else knew it was all shite.
Dessie was different. Dessie hadn’t run with the likes of Larry Knight and Podge Halligan for nothing. Dessie knew someone had to pay. Sharon knew it too. She looked at him before he left—she could look a man in the eye, that counted for something, even at his lowest with smack he’d whisper to himself that, even if he couldn’t meet her eye now, he’d chosen her because he wanted to, and that meant maybe one day soon, he could again—and if she’d thought he was going to hit the booze, or worse, start using again, she’d have dropped him where he stood, but she knew this was different.
Like the time those lads from Drimnagh threw her brother off the warehouse roof and broke his back and he died soon after. Dessie seen it happen, and he told Sharon he was going to Larry Knight with the names. She knew what Larry would do, sure her brother was dealing for him. Still, she knew it had to be done. She never faltered. Larry’s boys done those Drimnagh lads big-time, two still haven’t even turned up, somewhere at the bottom of the Grand Canal is the story, no one cares enough to search. This was the same: she looked straight at him, and nodded, and all she said was, be careful, and don’t be stupid: the kids’ll be asking where you are. And I want you to tell them in person.
If that wasn’t an incentive, Dessie didn’t know what was.
The stewardess came around. Dessie knew you weren’t supposed to call them that anymore, but fuck it, she looked like one. He passed her Liam’s lukewarm beer and asked for another Diet Coke.
Paul. Fuck. Eighteen. Just a kid himself. He had the worst start but the best chances. Half brother he was, just like Dessie and Liam. Ma just couldn’t settle. That was the nice way of putting it. Best not to speak ill of the dead, and it was Paul’s da that done for her too, having pimped her out and then accused her of robbing him. He died of AIDS a couple of years into a life sentence in the Joy. Best thing that could have happened to him really, to be rid of those two, he went into foster care there in Drumcondra.
Liam sent money back from the start, Dessie chipped in once he’d cleaned up—he hadn’t really seen Paul for a long while before then—and Paul made his way. He’d come out to see them, wanted his own place, bit of distance from the foster parents, who were a little on the Holy Joe side. Liam and Dessie rented the apartment for him, Liam mainly, fair play to him, and of course there was the football, above all there was the football, they were all building toward the football. Toward the future. Toward one Delaney brother doing things the right way.
Not going to happen now. Maybe it never was, if what Ollie and Dave said was true. Dessie’d talk to Ed Loy, see what he’d turned up. Dessie never thought he’d warm to anyone who’d broken his arm. But in fairness, Dessie was holding a knife to Loy’s throat at the time. Lot of fuckers wouldn’t have let you live after that. Dessie always said he wouldn’t have killed Loy. Just self-defense. Didn’t know whether that was true or not, he was so strung out all the time back then, he’d’ve done anything. But he was never violent, not intentionally, and definitely never a killer. That all came later.
No, Loy was sound. Dessie owed him. If it hadn’t’ve been for Loy stepping in, there’d’ve been no rehab, no Greece, no Sharon. He was a dangerous fucker, though. One of those guys, very calm on the surface, very still, and then he just fucking erupts. You’d be waiting for it, taking steps to avoid it. Not mental like Podge, but you’d be a fool if you weren’t wary of him. Dessie knew Loy wouldn’t go along with what he had in mind. He just had to play Loy as best he could, so he could pick his brains and then use what he learnt. Wouldn’t be easy, since Loy was not exactly stupid. But none of it was going to be easy. Apart from the killing itself. Dessie couldn’t get over how easy that had been when it came down to it, for him at any rate.
It was in Greece, after everything. They’d been there a year, the kids had picked up the language, little Greeks themselves at the local school, Sharon and him were like teenagers again, almost. It was a whole new life. And then one of Podge Halligan’s boys shows up. Nose Ring, his name was, except he didn’t have the nose ring anymore, and where his head had been shaved now he had his hair plastered halfway down his forehead in a greasy fringe. Stupid fucking hairstyle, Dessie had it himself once when he lived in navy-gray-and-white sportswear just like Nose Ring still wore.
Dessie clocked him the second he walked in. It took Nose Ring longer, on account of a) Dessie having grown his hair to the collar, dressing in jeans and a black T-shirt, and no longer looking like a total fucking knacker, and b) Nose Ring being thick as two short ones. But gradually, he pieced it together: the face, the name above the door, the past. That’s what Dessie found seated at the bar one night after everyone else had left, with a knowing smirk on its stupid face: The Past.
Even if the DPP had ruled against taking a case against Podge based on Dessie’s evidence on account of Dessie being a totally unreliable and untrustworthy junkie, even if Podge had eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter under pressure from his brothers, there was nothing good gonna come from Nose Ring knowing where he was. It was in that instant that Dessie made up his mind: Nose Ring’s smirk, his look that said I know you, his malevolent Howya Dessie! Dessie knew there was no deal he could make that would keep Nose Ring quiet: he was too greedy. The past would return and destroy them. It wasn’t fair. And Dessie wasn’t gonna let it happen.
Liam had the night off, and he had let the local girls go home, so there was just the two of them in the bar. Nose Ring started in on how he didn’t recognize him at first, with the hair and everything. Dessie gestured outside and made a face and said something about the Greek cops and
his license, and why didn’t they go in the back there, he had a bottle of Jameson for old friends. He nodded Nose Ring behind the bar and followed him into the dark kitchen and took a heavy steel pan from the stove near the door as he walked and hit Nose Ring hard on the back of the head with it before he had a chance to turn around even, and Nose Ring went down face-first with a crack on the tiles. Blood came out his ears and his mouth and brimmed on the hard floor.
Dessie brought the pan down on the back of Nose Ring’s head twice more. He could feel the skull cracking, feel the fragments giving against the soft sponge of the brain. But the thing was, it was almost as if he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing, or more, that he had done it all before, done it so often he barely took it in. What Dessie remembered was that, as he flipped the pan on its edge to smash it down for a final blow that would split Nose Ring’s head in two, he noticed a container of milk on the counter. Better get that milk back in the fridge before it goes off, was what Dessie Delaney was thinking as he made double sure the first man he had ever killed was dead. And having the thought didn’t shake him in the slightest; indeed, hard on that thought crowded another: he’d want to get his clothes off to stop them getting spattered with blood.
He looked at what remained of Nose Ring, set the pan down, washed his hands, put the milk in the fridge, stripped naked, tossed his clothes in the bathroom and then went about the business of cutting up and disposing of the body without any thought other than how long it was going to take, and how, after he’d had a shower in the staff bathroom, he’d have to clean the bathroom itself and then have a second shower.
Cutting up the body didn’t bother him either. They kept the knives sharp anyway for jointing the lamb, and a dead body doesn’t bleed to any significant degree. Even if it had, he wasn’t sure it would have affected him in any way. He cut the limbs off and packed them as one in the heavy disposal sacks they used for animal waste. He removed the hands and the head and stowed them separately, then bagged the torso. Into each bag he added a couple of weights from the old brass steel kitchen scales, the only downside he could see to his plan: that scales was like some kind of family heirloom to the head chef.
He did a preliminary cleanup then, making sure the outside lining of the bags was sprayed with disinfectant and wiped until any visible stains were gone. Then he doubled and sealed the bags to secure the body parts. He sealed his bloodstained clothes in a bag of their own. This was when he realized he’d need three showers. He took the first of them and dressed in the shorts, T-shirt, and trainers he kept to run on the beach. He went outside to his Kia Sorento and laid the backseat down, making sure none of the children’s soft toys or computer games were on the floor. Then he briskly packed the sacks containing the remains of Nose Ring into the back of the Kia and shut the door.
Maybe it was the thought of who’d usually be crowding into the SUV, the sound of his kids, the happy family rough-and-tumble in the backseat, but that was when Dessie had his first pang. Later, he compared it to how you’d feel if you were having an affair: you can’t resist it, you’re in the swim of it, it’s the best thing ever, and then you think of your family and your heart buckles of a sudden. Not that Dessie had the nerves for an affair. But it seemed, apart from that one twinge of regret—and that had nothing to do with the dead man, not really—it seemed as if Dessie had nerves of steel when it came to taking a life. Strange thing to learn about yourself at the age of twenty-eight, like suddenly discovering you were gay, or no, bisexual, Dessie thought later, it’s not as if you wanted to be, or went looking for it, but now you discovered it was something you could do, well, it was another string to your bow. And the more Dessie tried to remind himself of what he had felt about killing before, the horror, the pity, all the things he thought were normal, the less able he was to summon them up. This was his new reality, and he wore it lightly.
Once the boot was full, Dessie locked the Kia, went back inside and took another shower. Then he washed the kitchen floor and wiped down all the countertops and splash-backs and did the same in the bathroom. He took a third shower and dressed in the shorts, T-shirt, and trainers. Dawn was starting to break as he drove the Kia up into the hills behind the bar. About a mile past the quarry, there was a freshwater lake that had claimed three lives in the past six months, so treacherous were its currents. Dessie pulled the Kia in behind a thicket of pines and took the weighted bag with Nose Ring’s head and hands and flung it as far as he could. It disappeared beneath the gray surface with barely a splash, like a stone sinking into wet cement. The limbs and the torso followed.
The thing Dessie remembered most about it all was what happened next. He drove home, and wasn’t Sharon waiting up for him, what time do you call this, where were you, ready to eat the face off him. Jealous mind, you’d have to say Sharon had, so much so he sometimes wondered was she up to no good herself. But it wasn’t like him, so fair enough. Anyway, Dessie was scared of Sharon at the best of times. But tonight, this morning actually, quarter to six, he just shook his head and passed her the sack with the bloodstained clothes in it and said, these need either washing or burning, you decide, and Sharon looked at the clothes and didn’t say a word, and Dessie didn’t say a word either, then or later.
But things were different after that, between them, and overall. Not that she thought he was a great fellow all of a sudden for having killed someone, not that she was tiptoeing around him or nervous in his company. But he knew she had got a bit of a land all the same. Maybe she noticed him a bit more, was aware of him a bit more. Maybe it was just, things were different now, and they always would be.
No one ever came calling about Nose Ring. No one seemed to miss him. He’d been on his own, far as Dessie could tell. Suppose they must have missed him off his flight back, marked him down as absent, passed it on to the cops. Drunk Irishman misses flight-shock. Even if he went missing, no one looking for him. Over twenty-one. See ya.
He’d need to get some coffee into Liam before they landed. And then they were going to have to have a little talk. Fucker had been drunk since they heard about Paul’s death, fair enough, but it was time to step up now. They could go to the funeral home first thing, sure, Dessie wanted that too, wanted to see Paul’s body, but then they had work to do.
Dessie was going to lay the situation out for Liam. He’d tried to explain it already, but Liam couldn’t take in: it was as if he’d been telling him some bloke in the bar was throwing shapes at him. “I’ll get the fuckers that done this,” Liam said. Well, that was Dessie’s plan too. The problem was, if either Jack Cullen or Lamp Comerford were the fuckers that done this, or someone on their behalf, what did Liam think was gonna happen when Paul’s brothers rolled into town? Did he think Cullen and Comerford’d just be sitting around in the Parting Glass or the Viscount, waiting for them to pile in and take a pop? Or might they take steps at the very least to guard against the did-you-kill-my-pint/spill-my-brother tendency? Might it occur to them that when you plug a lad whose brothers were once players themselves, attack might be the best form of defense?
If Dessie was in their shoes, he’d have had someone watching the flights from Greece every day, he’d set someone to follow them in from the airport, he’d want to know exactly what they were up to every second of the time they were here. He wouldn’t have them killed, or at least, not before the funeral on Monday, because there’d be too much publicity and too much grief. And in any case, maybe Dessie and Liam had been players, but it had been lower division, if not nonleague stuff: Liam drove getaway on one blag, a major blag for sure, but just the one; Dessie was a skin-pop junkie who done a bunk. Neither would need to be killed. Warned off, at most.
But Cullen and Comerford didn’t know about Dessie. They didn’t know he had killed a man without scruple, barely noticing what he had done. They didn’t know he was prepared to do that again, that he’d been in contact with Larry Knight, who was very sympathetic and would do what he could to help. Jack Cullen had been a thorn in L
arry Knight’s side for a long time, and while Larry would never move against him—once a Provo, always a Provo, Dessie knew Larry couldn’t sustain the heat that would come from a war with Jack Cullen, a war that would only end one way. Larry hadn’t clung on from the heroin days of the early eighties, building things up, seeing rivals fall and sending some of them on their way, to go down now. Larry wanted to be last man standing. And if there was a chance to eliminate a rival from a distance, Larry was game ball with it. Dessie was going to see Larry Knight, and Liam was coming with him, and at the very least, they were going to make sure they had what they’d need to protect themselves if it came to it.
The other threat, and you could never discount it, would come from the Halligans. It might have been that they were happier with Podge behind bars, and there’d be no official action, or none sanctioned by George or Leo in any way. But you couldn’t be sure: the principle of touting on a Halligan brother was not to be encouraged, and Dessie’s death’d be a sign to anyone thinking of doing likewise. And while both George and Leo were spending less time on the street these days, they’d still have a nobody like Dessie rubbed out without a second thought.
All the Dead Voices Page 12
