“I never saw the copies of the letters Fogarty sent to Cullen, Doyle and Halligan, not during the original investigation. That evidence vanished somewhere inside Garda Headquarters. If I had known about it, it would have changed everything. All we had against Owen was circumstantial. I’m not saying it wasn’t strong—those letters went beyond what a normal man would have said in those circumstances. And there was something about that weak-chinned fucker I didn’t like, he was a vain boy, an underhand smirker, even at the trial, he always had this air about him, as if it was all unreal and a big mistake, surely no one could possibly want to put away someone as wonderful as him.”
“And if he didn’t do it—”
“For sure, if he didn’t do it, that all makes sense, he was entitled to feel it was all unreal. Whatever kind of man he was.”
Sweeney turned to me then.
“I want to know. There’s a lot of people who don’t, and maybe some of those people are manipulating your friend Dave Donnelly. But I was the one who got it wrong all those years ago. The first thing I said after Owen’s conviction was ruled unsafe was, let’s open it up, let’s investigate the three boys. Nobody wanted to know, for a variety of reasons. So anything I can do, I’ll do. Because when it comes down to it, a man was murdered eighteen years ago, and justice hasn’t been done.”
“And the variety of reasons includes what? Keeping the Peace Process shiny and clean? Not treading on the toes of those who helped bring it about, and who keep it on course? That sounds like the Special Branch, or whatever we call them today, the Special Detective Unit?”
Sweeney’s eyes flashed but he said nothing. I continued.
“It was hardly your fault you got it wrong: if evidence was suppressed back in ’91, when the IRA were still bombing and shooting, what hope did you have?”
“I’m not looking for excuses. I’m looking to set things right. If you swear to tell no one—especially not your friend Dave Donnelly—I think I can help you. From the best motive in the world, self-interest. Does that sound to you like a deal?”
Sweeney’s voice had dropped to a cracked whisper. We stood on soft grass beneath a sprouting sycamore, a boat hiding us out of sight of the stone villa in whose garden we’d sought refuge. There was a garden seat beneath a laurel tree that made me think of a park bench, and that made me think of spies meeting in an espionage novel. It seemed faintly absurd, and yet when I looked in Sweeney’s eyes, I knew he was deadly serious. I nodded, and made to leave; he shook his head and led me along the side of the house and through a gateway that gave onto a lane running all the way to the bottom of Newbridge Avenue. Before we got onto the street, Sweeney held me back until he had checked the lay of the land to his satisfaction. When he turned to let me know it was all clear, there must have been a flicker of something less than gravity in my eyes, enough for Sweeney to haul me back up the lane a stretch.
“You may think this is funny, Ed. If so, either you don’t care about your safety the way you need to, or you don’t understand how serious these people are. I know you’re reckless, and you lead with your chin, and maybe that’s been fine up to now, although that ear’s got to hurt, but these people aren’t messing around. And if I’m going to help you, I’m going to be at risk as well. So let me know if you’re going to take this seriously, or you can go solo and welcome.”
It was a version of the speech Tommy Owens had given me. Except Tommy had been talking about the criminals. Noel Sweeney was warning me about the cops. I nodded, and followed Sweeney down toward Irishtown and through a warren of alleyways and lanes that backed onto Ringsend Park; finally he knocked on the side door of a pub and we were admitted to a room that felt like an oul’ one’s tiny parlor: a red Formica-topped table, a couple of battered kitchen chairs, the smell of cooking oil and boiled cabbage and stale smoke, an old Bakelite radio set on a bocketty occasional table. Presently a very fat man in collar and tie and a red wool waistcoat came in through dirty beaded door curtains carrying a tray laden with toasted sandwiches and pints of Guinness. He had greased-back dyed black hair and port-wine jowls and his hands shook, but there was a fire in his tiny black eyes that burned clear. He popped the tray on the table.
“Noel,” he said.
“Seamus.”
“Anyone else?”
“Not unless I’ve gone to seed utterly.”
Seamus nodded, smiling faintly, as if this unlikely but not impossible fate would come to us all. I wondered how he’d be able to tell when it came to him.
“This is Mr. Loy,” Sweeney said. His voice was different when he spoke to Seamus: at once rougher and more musical, it was as if he had put on an Irish accent. Seamus’s blotchy red face presented itself to me impassively. He smelt of whiskey and of soap.
“Good man,” he said, and nodded. It was the blandest of salutes, but I felt strangely bolstered by it, as if, already, I had made all the right decisions, and now I had my feet under the top table. A voice in my head entered the reservation that, given the night I’d had, lunchtime pints were probably not the wisest choice. But as ever with me, it was a very small voice.
“How’s the mammy?” Sweeney said, improbably.
Seamus smiled meekly.
“She’ll bury us all,” he said.
“And isn’t she entitled to?” Sweeney cried, his accent getting broader by the minute.
Seamus gave us a smile in the form of a grimace and retreated. Sweeney’s face set back into the tense, watchful configuration it held when I first met him. He winked at me and took a drink of his pint.
“It’s safe here. Always has been. Seamus might not look like much, but he can hold the line. A bit old-fashioned, but that’s not the worst thing.”
“Is his mother really alive?”
“She’s seventy-two. Sure Seamus isn’t much more than fifty.”
We ate and drank in the silence that was becoming habitual between us. For all the caution and unease he had displayed when he learned I might have a tail on me, Sweeney’s presence struck a natural pitch somewhere between calming and bracing. I found the vibration sympathetic. Once we had eaten and drunk, and follow-up pints, perfectly timed, had arrived—maybe Seamus was watching us on a monitor—Sweeney began to talk.
“Once they found Steve Owen’s conviction unsafe, once the evidence emerged that Brian Fogarty had these serious criminals with motives to kill him, I asked to be assigned to the reinvestigation. I was a detective inspector in Irishtown Garda Station up the road there. First I was refused because I had a full list of cases pending. Then it was made known to me that the case was going to be transferred to the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. I asked a friend in there: no sign of it.
“Next thing, it was the subject of a turf war between the NBCI and the Branch, some of whom had transferred into the NBCI, some of whom were in the SDU, and some of whom were hanging around Garda Headquarters getting in everyone else’s way. Then Veronica Guerin was murdered and the Criminal Assets Bureau was set up. Suddenly this was the new reality: it was too difficult to prosecute gangland figures, not to mention terrorists, for murder. But you could confiscate their assets if they were found to be the proceeds of crime. The mechanism that Brian Fogarty had anticipated was finally in place, with a legal right to seize property and cash if its owners couldn’t account for it legitimately.
“It wasn’t the reopening of the case that I had wanted, but it was something: it would bring some strained justice to the Brian Fogarty case if the criminals he had established cases against were finally punished, in however limited a way. So I waited, and I waited, and finally, and it seemed in retrospect inevitably, nothing happened, and I quickly learned that nothing would. At that stage I had been promoted out to a desk job in the Phoenix Park, head down, all passion spent, pension on its way.”
Sweeney took a long drink of stout and stared grimly into his glass; the life force seemed suddenly to have left him; he looked vulnerable, forlorn, almost broken. He took a second draft and do
wned the memory with it; when he looked at me again, it was business as usual.
“Bobby Doyle made a settlement with the CAB in 1998, didn’t he?”
“Bobby Doyle approached CAB to make a voluntary settlement. Bobby Doyle was an important conduit between Sinn Féin and Irish-American money on the one hand and between Sinn Féin and the business community in Dublin on the other. When the Good Friday Agreement was signed, and peace and harmony erupted throughout the land, Bobby Doyle was the subject of…well, you’d call it a whispering campaign, except no one was doing very much whispering. Where did he come from, how did he rise so far so fast, what did he get up to during the Troubles?”
“I understood the settlement was for undeclared rental income on the properties. Back taxes?”
“That’s right. But the suspicions lingered. The whiff of cordite. Was he on the Army Council?”
“So what are you saying? That such a person?”
“That such a person, exactly. Not that there weren’t a lot of them walking about, fully pardoned for slaughtering men, women and children. But they’re all community workers or sociology postgraduates or no-nonsense fuel smugglers and drug dealers, not developers lobbying for big government tenders in the south.”
“Not building flagship bridges to celebrate Irish independence.”
“That’s right. So the Branch finally piled in to investigate. Two of them rolled up to my house on a Sunday morning, wouldn’t give me the courtesy of letting me arrange a meeting on my own time. Pumped me for everything on the Fogarty case. No matter that it’s not your fault, if you see your case collapse, it’s your neck on the block, so I was on the back foot from the start. I was straight with them, no odds in not being, besides I had a mole in the SDU who was letting me know everything as it broke. The impression I got, and it was a true one, was that they wanted to know if I had uncovered any evidence to suggest that Bobby Doyle had had anything to do with the Fogarty killing. And the fact was, I hadn’t: when the Owen conviction was overturned, before I was warned off, I did a bit of digging and I found nothing to connect Doyle with any kind of gunplay or active paramilitarism. Not to say he couldn’t have paid a hit man, but I didn’t see any evidence of it.
“And I spoke to people in Jack Cullen’s gang who were never going to go straight: none of them particularly liked Doyle, thought him a sellout and so forth, but they laughed at the idea that he’d have someone killed, said that was the whole problem with Jack Cullen and with Sinn Féin the way it was going, too many people wanting to build things, not enough happy to blow them up anymore.”
“Doyle told me he was only involved peripherally in the north in the seventies: he might have held the odd coat, or bought the odd pint, but he was never on active service, never a volunteer. He was sympathetic for a time because he felt the Catholic, nationalist community were under siege, but he was never in the IRA. That said, he seems to have been in the wider republican movement a long time, raising cash and so on. The way he puts it, it was as if he was waiting around for them all to see sense and stop the killing. And finally they did.”
Sweeney’s cold blue eyes narrowed with interest.
“You spoke to him? How’d you get to Bobby Doyle?”
“Through his assistant, Donna Nugent. She’s a friend of mine. He was having dinner for some Irish Americans in Shanahan’s on Thursday night.”
Sweeney didn’t exactly whistle, but his features creased as close to a smile as they’d come. I was smiling too, with embarrassment: every time I thought of Donna Nugent, I wanted to shout NO NO NO and I couldn’t so I smiled instead, the kind of smile when you slip on ice in a crowded street and leap up immediately as if nothing has happened. And nothing had, Ed Loy: you just had a major dose of the Fear. Donna Nugent was your kind of girl, and you should just knuckle down and accept it. And read one of the seven texts she’d sent you since you left her bed. Sweeney was nodding his approval, as if his rookie colleague had acquitted himself well.
“That’s pretty good access, Ed, well done. And how’d he strike you?”
“I guess, the way you’re saying. A big beast, a player, used to being in charge, being listened to, a certain amount of charm. I wouldn’t want to get the wrong side of him, but if I did, I wouldn’t be worried about getting a bullet behind the ear.”
“I was skeptical, you know: I thought, this is what they want, for him to be clean. But there was nothing on him, certainly nothing in Dublin.”
“And what about earlier, in the north, did his version tie in with the facts?”
“I was never told officially. None of my business. Again, not even the courtesy. But my man in the SDU told me what they came up with.”
“Which was?”
“Nothing. There’s no record of Bobby Doyle among republican circles anywhere in the north. The house he said he grew up in was demolished, the neighbors don’t remember the family, said that house was derelict for years before. No one who was on active service in that area recognized the photograph or the name. And they didn’t just talk to Provos, they checked him out with dissidents: the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, the INLA, it’s not some kind of conspiracy to make out he’s always been clean, like pretending Gerry Adams was never in the IRA. There are plenty of people out there, like with Cullen’s boys, who’d love to smear Doyle any way they could: he’s everything they despise. He has no police record under his own name, his photo doesn’t match any mug shots the RUC had. It’s as if he was never there at all, as if he emerged out of the ether in San Francisco in the eighties.”
“That’s weird. He didn’t strike me as American, if that’s what you’re suggesting. And he referred to his past as if it was an open secret.”
“Well, it’s a secret anyway. So there you have it. Not ruled out, but not likely. I have to say I don’t like those murderous fuckers he consorts with, I don’t like to see them in power in the north, and I’d do anything I could to stop them here. But I don’t think Bobby Doyle is our man.”
“A source I have thinks it was Jack Cullen, or more particularly, Lamp Comerford.”
I took Sweeney through what Tommy had told me about Lamp, Cullen and Ray Moran, the scuffles over drug territory, the rivalry within the Cullen gang, the possible involvement of the INLA, the way in which Ray Moran was Jack Cullen’s creature. I didn’t mention my visit to Moran’s office with Tommy and Leo Halligan. I was still trying to pretend it hadn’t actually happened.
“It’s worth keeping Jack Cullen personally in the frame,” Sweeney said. “It’s always been a bit of a joke to me that Lamp Comerford was Jack’s enforcer. Jack needed a bagman like Moran, and he found himself a good one, but Lamp’s just a common or garden hard man: Jack was always vicious enough to do his own enforcing.”
“I assume Jack Cullen had a more visible career in the IRA then.”
“You could say that, yeah. He ran a gang across the border for specific operations. He was known particularly for his scorched-earth policy: if there were innocent bystanders, family members, wives, children, that was nothing to Jack Cullen. He killed anything that moved, and he liked to do it himself. A prayer meeting in an old timber-frame church hall, twelve people, most of them in their sixties and seventies: Jack broke in on top of them with a Kalashnikov and shot them to pieces. In retaliation for some piece of Loyalist butchery, as if that’s what retaliation meant: why not kill the Loyalists? Because it’s too hard, and blood must be spilt right now, tonight. So kill a crowd of old Protestant ladies, that’s what Irish freedom is all about.
“He tortured one of his own gang, Gerry Toal, grew up on Richmond Road there, father of two, not a bad lad, tortured him as an informer, broke his little fingers and pulled out four of his teeth, then fed him whiskey, a lad who was in the room told me this, Toal drinking whiskey and looking at pictures of his kids and crying, twenty-three years old, crying like a child himself until Cullen put a gun to his head and killed him. The lad that told me that also told me Cullen interrogated a mentally handi
capped sixteen-year-old who claimed to have killed someone everyone knew the UVF killed, a grocer’s boy on his way home from the chipper. And despite it being obvious the poor unfortunate was raving, Cullen ordered his death, his execution, they called it, as if they were an actual country, which in their own heads they were, of course, had a sixteen-year-old shot and buried in sand dunes on the Antrim coast.
“And do you know what Toal supposedly informed on? An arms dump that had been abandoned before the Troubles ever began, it was well known as having been used during the IRA’s border campaign of the late 1950s. A disused IRA arms dump that every kid in the area knew about. That’s what Gerry Toal’s kids had to lose their daddy over. And there’s a dozen more stories like that. ‘Jack Cullen was a staunch and devoted physical-force republican who has always supported the Peace Process,’ was Sinn Féin’s line when they were challenged about Cullen’s alleged involvement in organized crime. And when you hear those words in future, staunch, devoted, peace, you can think of Gerry Toal, crying over pictures of the children he’d never see again.”
Sweeney finished his pint and looked at me, his face set, his blue eyes blazing. The passion was in the content of his words; his tone was even and cold.
“In a way, I don’t care whether Cullen is guilty of Brian Fogarty’s murder or not, unless it’s a way we can get him. He’s guilty of so much wickedness it’s obscene that he’s still walking about.”
All the Dead Voices Page 16
