“I have some contact with Lamp Comerford at the moment, for reasons I’d rather not go into. Anyway, I don’t think he and Lamp are exactly happy together. And if Lamp thinks Jack is trying to lay the blame for the Fogarty murder at his door, who knows what he might do?”
Sweeney looked at me with affected disapproval.
“And you’ll stir it up with no evidence other than hearsay? What your source said?”
“I’m a private detective. Stirring it up is what we do. I don’t work with evidence, I work with he said she said, with versions of the truth. When I get one I think fits best, if we’re lucky, there’ll be some evidence the cops, and better still, a prosecutor, can use. If there isn’t that, we hope for a witness or three, if someone’s left alive, that is. In the meantime, it’s he said she said until the sky cracks open and the truth comes falling.”
“Just like it does.”
“Just like it does. But it’s unbroken cloud for now, and the only thing falling is the rain.”
I looked at my watch. It was time I was leaving. I exchanged cards with Noel Sweeney, and told him I’d check in as soon as I had anything for him, and he suggested I get a taxi to wherever I was going since I had evaded my SDU tail for once, and by the time I made it to the door of the pub whose name I never discovered and which I looked for but never found again, there was a cab waiting.
I had wanted to ask Sweeney more about Aisling and Midge, the Fogarty sisters I hadn’t met, but I was on my way to see a Fogarty sister, after all, and if Anne didn’t tell me what I needed to hear, I reasoned that I would always be able to ask Sweeney again. I was mistaken in this, and although I make many mistakes, this one has stayed with me like flesh badly snagged on barbed wire, a wound you think will never heal.
CHAPTER 16
Anne Fogarty was waiting for me outside St. Thomas’s Church across from the Grand Canal near Adelaide Road. She wore a black dress with a red rose pattern and a tiny denim jacket and black cross-buckled boots that came to her knees; her honey-blond hair was tied up and her lips were the darkest red and from across the road I could see her work her braces against them so that I couldn’t think of anything except her mouth and completely failed to notice the small people who were waiting with her. Anne Fogarty kissed me on the cheek and presented two little dark-haired, dark-eyed girls to me. One looked about nine and the other about seven, but I couldn’t have sworn to it. They were both exceptionally pretty.
“This is Aoife and this is Ciara,” she said. “This is Ed Loy.”
“You have a black suit and a white shirt but no tie. Why?” Ciara, the younger girl, said.
“Ciara,” hissed Aoife, and clapped a hand to her brow in pantomimed embarrassment.
“I don’t wear one.”
“Daddy doesn’t wear one either,” Ciara said.
“That’s ’cause Daddy doesn’t wear suits, duh,” Aoife said.
“Actually, men don’t have to wear a tie anyore,” Ciara said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Ciara you are so embarrassing,” Aoife said.
That seemed to exhaust the immediate conversational possibilities, and the girls went back to whatever it was they had been doing before I arrived, poring over comic books by the looks of things. Anne smiled at me and I smiled back and we all went into church together and I had a strange sensation of familiarity, as if it wasn’t the first time I had done this, and it wouldn’t be the last. And then I flashed on Donna Nugent clawing my back and screaming in my ear and the sweat spiked my scalp and I wondered just who the fuck I thought I was kidding. It was enough to drive a man to prayer.
There were prayers at St. Thomas’s, but it wasn’t a conventional church service. There were Catholic and Anglican priests and Methodist and Presbyterian ministers on the altar, but the first speaker, a bearded man in a tweed jacket who looked like an academic and spoke like a poet, said that people of all faiths and of none were very welcome here today. He went on to say that Holy Saturday was a dark day in the calendar, perhaps darker even than Good Friday, in the same way the day after a funeral is more desolate because at least on the day of the funeral there is a certain kind of release, even in grief and in pain, an active participation in the intense process of loss, a catharsis, indeed, whereas the day after, when the mourners have departed and we are left alone, it is like the morning after the storm, and we are laid as low as we have ever been: there is nothing but silence and loss, and we have forgotten how to hope.
But as for Christians, the desolation is followed by the joy of the resurrection on Easter Sunday, so grief, in time, abates, and hope, at last, returns. That process takes longer—indeed, it may not occur at all—when the death mourned is an unnatural one. And that is why, on this lost day, this day that falls through the crack in time, the only day in the calendar a Catholic mass cannot be said, we are gathered to remember the deaths of some of those who lost their lives in the Troubles.
I heard Anne’s breath catch, and turned to see her eyes wet with tears. The girls were deep in their comics—the Teen Titans, kind of a junior Justice League of America—and paid their mother no attention. Anne made her mouth smile at me, and I offered my hand, and she clutched it as the bearded man outlined what shape the service would take. There was a book called Lost Lives, which consisted of factual accounts of every single person—British soldier, IRA volunteer, loyalist paramilitary, civilian—who had been killed during the Troubles. It was a huge book, and two copies of it were on the two lecterns at either side of the altar. Readers would come from the floor and read selections from the book for an hour. This would not bring the dead back, or console the living, but it would, amid the clamor of voices rushing to describe the Troubles as history, as politics, as conflict, be a still reminder of what was lost. It would serve as a bridge between the living and the dead. It would, for a short hour, give a voice to the dead.
Afterward, shaken, wrung out, but relieved to have found our way back across the bridge, we stood in the churchyard and on the street and by the canal, talking and smoking and embracing, the living. Anne’s ex-husband, Kevin, who had longish, very well-cut hair and rumpled, brightly colored, very expensive clothes, showed up to collect Aoife and Ciara. He had been at the service too, Anne told me, and a college friend of his, Gerry Coyle, was actually included in the book; he shook my hand and took off with his daughters, who made a point of saying goodbye to me and asking if I had a gun (Ciara) and apologizing for her sister (Aoife).
When they left, and anyway after the service, I wanted a drink, a whiskey in fact, but Anne said there was something she needed in her car, which was in a car park on or just off Mespil Road, so we walked down along the canal and into the car park and up to the third floor and Anne found her car, a navy Saab convertible, and there was no one around and she opened the back door and looked at me and I said, beginning to guess now from the way she looked at me, and wondering would I be able after last night, what was it you needed? and she said, you, I need you, Ed, I need you to fuck me, and once she’d said that I didn’t wonder anymore and she took me in her mouth and her braces felt weird but good and she said I tasted like beer with salt in it and kissed me so I could taste myself and she pulled me down on her and pushed her underwear aside and she tasted pretty good too only not like beer and then she guided me in and we fucked on the backseat with the door open, fucked like it was the last time either of us would ever have, and anyone could have heard us but I don’t think anyone did.
“I wanted to do that from the first moment I saw you as well,” Anne Fogarty said afterward, as we walked hand in hand down the canal toward Smyth’s Pub on Haddington Road, “but I thought it might seem a bit forward on Thursday morning. Seeing as how we’d only just met. And it wasn’t even lunchtime.”
“But now we’ve been to church together. And I’ve met your family.”
“Call me old-fashioned, but that’s the kind of girl I am.”
A couple of drinks later, I started forcing mys
elf to frown as a kind of prelude to getting my mind back on the case, and being the kind of girl she was, Anne picked up on this and did a bit of frowning herself, and finally spoke.
“So look, the other thing I didn’t tell you…and I don’t want you to think I’m being underhand or less than candid, I just didn’t, for reasons I’ll explain, okay, the house is for sale, the family home. Farney Park.”
“I know,” I said. “I was there this morning. Noel Sweeney told me about it.”
Anne Fogarty’s frown looked completely unforced at the mention of Sweeney’s name, until I explained that he had come to very different conclusions about who might have killed her father. This had been occupying my thoughts throughout the Lost Lives service, as I’m sure it had Anne’s, the idea that if Jack Cullen had killed Brian Fogarty in 1991, then he would have to be included in the next edition of the book, a victim of the IRA and yet another dead voice to be reclaimed.
“Well then, if he’s going to cooperate with you, that’s progress isn’t it?” she said, and I agreed, and waited for her to say something more about the house. When she didn’t, I had to.
“The house looked like it hadn’t really altered since. Is it still in the family? Why wasn’t it sold? It didn’t look like anyone had lived there.”
Anne shook her head.
“After Mammy died, we…Aisling moved out when she went to college, earlier, she was the first to go. She got a flat, she worked in restaurants and…that’s what she ended up doing eventually, she runs Le Bistro on Harcourt Street. She did a commerce degree and…where was I? Sorry, I’m fucking…gabbling, Jesus.”
Anne Fogarty picked up her glass of wine and had to put it down again, her hand was shaking so much.
“What’s the matter? You don’t have to—”
“I fucking do have to, though, don’t I? I have to tell you everything, because maybe if I don’t, if I leave out some minor detail, that could be it, that could lead you to the killer. Couldn’t it? So don’t say I don’t have to, don’t try and be nice, Ed Loy. That’s not why we like you.”
Anne smiled at this last crack and tried to make the smile stick; she picked her wine up and sank the half glass she had left in one and gestured for two more drinks and drank half her fresh glass before she resumed.
“Sorry. When a murder…oh, I don’t know enough to generalize, start again, when my father was murdered, it wasn’t just his life, it was all our lives, it was the family that was murdered. And I wanted, I thought it was right that we should stick together, I don’t know, middle child perhaps, that if we weren’t crushed by it, then we could, what, recover. Not that I consciously thought that, or anything, but I think that was the shape I was following, the emotional shape, do you know what I mean? But first of all, Mammy was just in no condition, she couldn’t bear it, she was worse than she had been beforehand, when she had found out about Daddy, just tranquilized to oblivion. And then, none of us had known about Ma and Steve Owen. So the whole thing of the trial, the whole way that unfolded, was just such a shock to us all. And none of us felt very warm toward Mammy. But you know, Daddy had started it, and…maybe you had to dig deep to stand by her, but that’s what you’re supposed to do, you’re a family, you stand together.”
“And Aisling and Margaret didn’t see it like that?”
“Aisling didn’t give Mammy the time of day. Aisling didn’t speak to Mammy from the day she found out about her affair until the day she died. If I hadn’t gone around to Aisling’s flat the night before the removal and begged her, I don’t think Aisling would have come to Mammy’s funeral.”
“What about Margaret?”
“Midge was younger. She cried a lot, and…then I suppose she kind of withdrew. And she wasn’t let go to the trial. She made a lot of new friends around that time, and…I don’t know. After Mammy died…I was at college, but I stayed at home, to…because I was afraid of what might happen if I left.”
“How did your mother die?”
“Heart failure. She’d been smoking and drinking like it was her life’s work. Her heart couldn’t take it. Died in her sleep, fifty-five years old. And then there were three. I saw Midge at Steve Owen’s appeal. Aisling too. And I haven’t seen either of them since. I met Kevin, I was with Kevin then, and we got married, and…life began. I had a family of my own. And every so often, after house prices went mental, I tried to get them to agree to sell the house, but Aisling kept saying to hold on because prices were still climbing and Midge claimed she wanted to move back in, and I told her it wasn’t her house to move back into. Then Aisling called the top of the market, based on some stock analyst she was going out with, but by then, Midge had stopped returning my calls, and then I lost contact with her altogether. We’re all executors of the estate, which means if one of us disagrees, we can’t do anything. So we were paralyzed.
“Meanwhile the house has just been sitting there. I said, we could at least do it up and rent it out, but Aisling said, what would happen if Midge just walked in there one day, you know, on top of the tenants? It’s almost funny, actually, the…inertia, you know? And Aisling was really desperate for a while, and then she ended up marrying the stock analyst, he works for one of the brokerages, can’t remember which, anyway, none of them pay peanuts, so it kind of slipped off her urgent to-do list. Until now.”
“Until when?”
“Until about a month ago. Midge called me up out of the blue. Five years? God, more like eight. And I was all, how’ve you been, what’ve you been doing? Nothing from sister dear. Just, if you want to sell the house, go ahead, you have my permission. If you don’t mind handling it all, lodge my third to my account when it’s sold. This distant voice, like she was reading from a prepared script to someone she’d never met. And before I could tell her, for example, that I was divorced, or that my babies were girls now, or anything really, she hung up.”
“Did you get her number?”
“It was withheld. She said she’d call me, to advertise the house in the Times. I have her bank details, if they’re any use.”
“They should be.”
“Don’t go to any trouble on my behalf. I mean, if she doesn’t want to see me, fine. It’s not as if my weird sister has any bearing on which of Jack Cullen, Bobby Doyle or George Halligan killed my father, is it?”
“I don’t suppose so. Just, I like to get the full picture, you know? I want to talk to Aisling as well. You never know what people remember, what people knew all along and they don’t even realize.”
“Well don’t expect me to set you up with Aisling, when I told her I was going to hire a private detective she went mental. She doesn’t want to go back there, she doesn’t want to remember.”
“Was it Margaret’s phone call that gave you the idea?”
“I’d had the idea for a while. Midge’s call spurred me into action, is what it was. I guess the fact the house had been hanging unresolved for so long had stood for everything to do with Daddy’s murder, the sense of unfinished business. And when I went down there—originally I was going to give the place a complete makeover, that’s what I do, new kitchen, bathroom, the whole bit, but the estate agent said there was no point, house like that, people want to put their own stamp on it anyway, just make sure it’s clean and full of light—but walking around the house, I just felt it so vividly, like it had happened yesterday, you know? And if I didn’t try one last time to get at the truth, it would be too late. The house would be gone, and so would all that goes with it, our family, our…my…daddy.”
Anne Fogarty’s face creased with misery and tears filled her eyes. She apologized, but couldn’t stop, and finally, weeping, went out to the bathroom. I was treated to the kind of glares befitting a man who breaks up with his girlfriend and doesn’t even have the decency to buy her dinner first, does it over a bar stool. I was glad of the reminder though: Brian Fogarty may have been eighteen years dead, but there were still people who wept for him. Like each lost life, it still mattered. It always would.
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Anne came back with fresh eye makeup and a fierce smile; I smothered her apologies in an embrace, attracting even more glares as I did so, and told her I had to go.
Outside the pub, she pulled me close and we kissed, and I muttered something about not necessarily being the kind of man who could be trusted, and she said she wasn’t made of china and no promises could be broken unless they’d been made first and neither of us had made any, and I said that sounded pretty tough and what if I wanted to make a promise or two, and she said that I didn’t have time, that I had to go to work, and she kissed me again, and we left it at that, each knowing, or at least hoping, that there’d be more, a lot more.
CHAPTER 17
Dessie Delaney knew there was something up the moment he stepped off the plane. Not from what he saw at the airport, not from anything in the arrivals hall, not from anyone at the concession desks or at the exit doors or in the taxi queue, Dessie had a keen enough eye for the kind of rubbish that might be sent out to clock them through to be reasonably confident no one was watching their flight, and little wonder, on one level, weren’t they going to show up at the church anyway, that was an appointment they couldn’t exactly reschedule, so if anyone wanted to keep a tail on them why not start then? No, Dessie knew there was something up with Liam. From having been a drunken shambles, he’d suddenly pulled himself together, gotten all efficient and businesslike and serious and…sober, that’s what it was, Liam was sober, not technically, he’d been drunk five hours ago, but he looked sober, maybe that’s all it was, it had been so long. He wasn’t shooting his mouth off like a blowhard, he wasn’t weeping, he was quiet, reserved, like the Liam Dessie had vague memories of, his big brother, before he’d turned into Paddy Irishman, the professional fucking eejit.
But there was something else. He was sure of it. A look in the eye that said Liam was holding something back. They’d got to the hotel about eight, and cleaned up and changed and eaten breakfast and they were at the funeral home in Fairview around half ten, eleven. Fuck, that wasn’t easy. Dessie was the one in tears now. Paul didn’t look like himself for a start, whatever way they’d done his lips he looked like a fucking Presbyterian, although in fairness if Dessie had taken two behind the ear he’d be looking a bit miserable too. They’d done a good job of hiding all that, and he hadn’t been shot in the face, so all in all, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Still, it was Dessie’s brother and he was lying there dead so it wasn’t exactly good either.
All the Dead Voices Page 17
