“Last night, I saw Jack Cullen, who I believe was touting his own drug operation to the National Drug Unit in return for Garda indulgence or Garda protection of some sort, murder two members of his gang that he believed had been disloyal to him, Lamp Comerford and Charlie Newbanks, in the kitchen of a farmhouse somewhere, I don’t know exactly where. After they were killed, I was forced, at gunpoint, to dig a grave for them. Another man assisted me in burying the bodies, and filling in the grave. I had seen this man before when I first met Lamp Comerford at the Parting Glass pub on Talbot Street, where he was on duty as the barman.”
Still impassive, Steel Rim held up his hand and Conway switched the recording devices off again. Without a word, Steel Rim left the room, and after Conway had spoken in Hayes’s ear, Hayes followed the bigger man out also and I was left alone, maybe for ten minutes, maybe for half an hour. I tried to think of something positive, a cold beer, or having sex with Anne Fogarty, but the images wouldn’t stick; Anne’s face kept morphing into Donna Nugent’s, and Donna Nugent’s face was far from friendly: she shook her head pitilessly, as if at my culpable stupidity, and said she could do nothing for me anymore. Then I heard Jack Cullen’s voice shouting at me before everything exploded, shouting about Bobby Doyle. But what, exactly? And why?
Steel Rim came back in, accompanied by Conway and a slim, tall man with close-cropped brown hair I recognized as John O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan had been a DI in the NBCI the last time I had encountered him; last I heard, he’d been promoted to superintendent in the SDU. He was a good cop, and had been straight with me the last time I’d sat in an interview room with him. Whether being straight went with the SDU territory was another matter entirely. No recording equipment was turned on this time.
“Well Ed, been in the wars, have we?” he said, a slight smile on his face. “What is it about your face that makes people want to have a go at it, do you think?”
“I ask myself the same question every morning,” I said. “But by afternoon, the pain has worn off and there I am again.”
O’Sullivan nodded, the smile already gone. Down to business.
“Tell me about Noel Sweeney.”
“I can’t. I came to minutes before the Guards arrived on the scene. I have no memory of how I got there, or what I did. I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill him, but I couldn’t swear to it. But if the murder weapon is the same one that was used on Dean Cummins and Simon Devlin, then it’s almost certainly a setup; Lamp Comerford had the weapon, and once Jack Cullen murdered Lamp”—I noticed Steel Rim wince slightly here—“he must have gotten hold of the knife and killed Sweeney with it, and then set up the scene so I’d be caught red-handed.”
“And why should anyone believe that? It sounds absolutely incredible, especially when there’s a commonsense explanation the jury will be happy to lap up.”
“The jury? We’re in court already, are we? Why would I kill Noel Sweeney? A retired cop, he did nothing but help me on the one occasion I met him. What possible motive could I have to want him dead?”
But as the night before flared up in my mind again, I realized that I had probably been the cause of Sweeney’s death nonetheless. My face must have betrayed me; O’Sullivan looked at me with interest.
“I told Jack Cullen Noel Sweeney now believes that Lamp Comerford killed Brian Fogarty. Which wasn’t what Sweeney told me, I just said it because I needed everything I could throw at Lamp Comerford. Cullen might have decided that he’d be better off without Sweeney hanging around poking his nose into his past. And he saw a way to use the knife and to get rid of me into the bargain.”
O’Sullivan looked at Steel Rim, then back at me.
“What did Sweeney tell you?”
“About the brutality of Cullen’s IRA record, mostly. And about how nobody knows anything about Bobby Doyle’s past, he seemed to rise without trace and appear as if from nowhere. Sweeney said Cullen was favorite, if not for Brian Fogarty’s murder, for so many other vicious killings that pinning anything on him would represent justice for a lot of forgotten victims.”
“And is that your conclusion on the Fogarty case?” Conway said.
“What do you care?” I said. “You instructed DI Donnelly to tell Anne Fogarty to forget about it. The IRA connection makes it too hot to handle.”
“So what is your conclusion on the Fogarty case?” O’Sullivan asked me.
I allowed myself a very hesitant smile. I found that it hurt my face to smile, but there was something about the air in the room that had changed for the better, so it was hard not to. They were protecting Cullen, or Doyle, or both, and the last thing they wanted was to charge me with a murder they knew I almost certainly didn’t commit, not out of affection for me, but for fear at the very least of what I might say about Cullen in open court. For now, hold on to the truth that serves you best, Loy.
“The case hasn’t concluded. I very much hope it will. But for what it’s worth, I don’t believe Jack Cullen murdered Brian Fogarty. And I doubt very much that Bobby Doyle was responsible either. And that’s all I have to say at this stage.”
Steel Rim stood up and left the room. O’Sullivan and Conway followed him. After a relatively brief interval this time, O’Sullivan came back on his own and sat down.
“Why were you having me followed?” I said.
“What do you mean, were? We still are. For operational reasons, of course. And I think you’re still bleary from all the beatings and concussion and medication: you don’t ask the questions, we do. You have no idea where this farmhouse was?”
“No. Somewhere in flat country, the midlands I reckoned. I could see for miles around. But I couldn’t see the road.”
“Did Jack Cullen say anything about Bobby Doyle?”
“No.”
O’Sullivan looked me in the eye.
“There’s a man out there who thinks we should keep you in long enough to teach you a lesson. And depending on where you were kept, you might learn more than you were able to handle. But we’re not sure we have enough for the DPP. And frankly, I think you’re more useful outside than in.”
O’Sullivan looked at me again, this time as if he was inviting me to ask a question.
“Is Cullen being protected? Or is it Bobby Doyle?”
O’Sullivan nodded and stood up.
“I’m glad you asked me that question. And discovering the answer would be interesting for everyone, including those law enforcement officials who have conflicting opinions on the current policies being pursued. All right, Mr. Loy, you’re free to go. Although given the confused and wayward mental state you’re exhibiting, I would advise you to stay in hospital as long as they let you.”
O’Sullivan didn’t actually wink at me, but if he had, it would simply have completed the face he made as he was leaving. At the door, he turned, and presented quite a different face, the face that got him where he was, I suppose.
“And don’t forget, this is all work in progress. We still have the knife in good chain-of-evidence order, we have DI Hayes more than ready to give a vivid account of the compromising situation you were in, we have interesting traces of several illegal drugs in your bloodstream, we have photographs of you in the Parting Glass, accepting a brown envelope from Lamp Comerford. You should have known we’d’ve had that dump watched. Altogether, we might not have enough for a case, but we’d have plenty to fuck you up in the eyes of every copper in the country.”
The last time I’d heard that threat it came from Lamp Comerford. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy with the kind of mind that reveled in the occasional equivalence between law enforcement and organized crime, but I wished I could stop spotting the parallels.
By the time the nurse came in, I was dressed. She made a fuss, but I said it was nine o’clock on Easter Sunday night, and if there was a consultant to be found in the hospital right now, I’d do exactly as he or she told me, and by the way, which hospital was I in? There wasn’t, of course, and I was in Vincent’s.
I got a ca
b to Farney Park, where I’d left my car outside the Fogarty house, and I stood unsteadily in the rain outside the shabby old suburban semidetached and marveled at all the bloodshed it had been the occasion of.
On the short drive to my apartment, I noticed two things about myself, and remembered a third thing, and when I parked the car to the rear of my building, the first thing I did was switch on the light and study myself in the rearview mirror. Ignoring the bruised and rotting fruit texture my skin had, and setting aside the swollen and distended death’s-head aspect that made me look like a human fright mask, what I noticed of particular interest was that my eyebrows and eyelashes were singed at the tips, as was my hair. The second thing I did was identify the smell that had been clinging to my fingertips and lingering in my nostrils: it was smoke. And the thing I remembered, the last screen memory from a nightmare, before Jack Cullen and Big Sean and the Barman had cast me into darkness for the last time, was a flash of red flame. I didn’t know where the farmhouse was, but I knew the farmhouse had burnt down.
PART VI
EASTER MONDAY
CHAPTER 23
In the morning, Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly said, “Fuck’s sake Ed, you’re going to have to get a new head if you don’t take better care of the one God gave you,” and I thought to myself, Dave Donnelly is a better class of dream than Jack Cullen and Lamp Comerford, but it’s still not a patch on sex with Anne Fogarty. Then I thought, this seems amazingly real for a dream, and I can smell coffee and bacon. And then I realized that Dave Donnelly, in a navy-blue anorak, with two cartons of coffee and two breakfast rolls, was actually in my bedroom at half eight in the morning, opening the blinds and rubbing his hands and asking me if I took sugar, he couldn’t remember, would this rain ever end?
“I’m certain I didn’t give you a key, Dave. Did you just break in? And if so, what kind of security do I need to stop it happening again? You’re in my bedroom, Dave. You’re the wrong shape and size and smell, never mind the wrong sex, to be in my bedroom, Dave, but here you are, in my bedroom, Dave, in my fucking bedroom.”
“Yeah, Tommy let me copy his key. Come on, eat your roll before it gets cold, the grease is not so clever when it solidifies.”
The breakfast roll is fried bacon, sausage and egg in a bread roll, with, in Dave’s case, brown sauce and mustard. It’s a fearful wodge of carbs and fats much beloved of builders and white van drivers, and I liked to consider myself above such things. But on this particular morning, with shaking hands and five different pills to take and an eye that still hadn’t opened and an awful feeling that everyone I had ever met, if not actually dead, was about to die, soon, and horribly, and an equally strong urge to burst into tears, it was in fact extremely comforting. And I was grateful for the company. Not that it would do any good to let Dave know that.
“Get off the fucking bed, you big shite. There’s a chair there, and I didn’t realize until now what it was for: unruly big heaps of Garda inspectors when they come to visit.”
“Conway was onto me last night,” Dave said. “The boss. Very interested in the Fogarty case all of a sudden. Ed, it was Conway who told me to shoot it down when Anne Fogarty approached me a few weeks ago. And now he’s giving it you and Ed are old mates, no harm the SCRT lending a hand there, calling me at home on a Sunday night to encourage me to share information with Ed Loy, Jesus Christ almighty.”
“What’s the fucking world coming to?”
“Is my question to you.”
“I got the impression John O’Sullivan was giving me a nudge.”
“Well, some of this originates with the SDU, so I assume O’Sullivan has briefed Conway. Here’s what I know: this is basically what you might call a turf war. Cullen was off-limits because of his IRA background, never mind that he’s always been a scum-sucking drug dealer, Special Branch were under orders to look the other way. But now the IRA has stood itself down, things have changed: they went after Slab Murphy in South Armagh and they want to go after Jack Cullen in Dublin. At very least, the Criminal Assets Bureau want a major settlement; the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation would like to explore his current gangland activities, and we have a file the size of the phone book dating back to the late seventies on the cunt, courtesy of the SDU. Not to mention what our colleagues in the north might have in store for him. So there’s all that on one side, and on the other, there’s the National Drug Unit in Dublin Castle.”
“What, Jack Cullen really is a tout? I don’t believe it.”
“This is where it gets messy. Cullen is old school in his private life. He’s been married for years, lives in a modest house, wife does the flowers for the local church and looks like Cullen’s mammy, football, the few jars, very ordinary old-style working-class Dublin. And then word gets out that Jack has a lady on the side. And the lady turns out to be Rita Delaney, Dessie’s brother Liam’s wife.”
“Small world.”
“Don’t be talking. Rita comes back here to visit her mother, or at least, that was the story to begin with. So Cullen’s taking her to the kind of places he’s not likely to bump into anyone who knows him, country-house-hotels type of thing. Quite by accident, a detective in the NDU spots him having Sunday lunch in some organic restaurant below in Kilpedder, all cozy with his lady friend, and then walking through the gardens afterward, getting cozier still. And doesn’t our man take a few snaps on his mobile, and his bosses think to themselves, well, it’s worth a tumble, and they confront Jack Cullen with the incriminating evidence, not hoping for very much, because he has a fearsome reputation which, as you don’t need me to tell you, is well earned. And Cullen goes to pieces. Seems the wife and the stable home life is crucial to him, he can’t tolerate the idea of losing it, is willing to do anything to keep it in place.
“So first they ask him to give someone up: they suggest Lamp Comerford, because this is around the time Lamp starts getting wayward and shooting up the Viscount and so forth. And Jack point-blank refuses: no way will he inform on a friend, he says. Turns out he’ll shoot them, but he won’t inform on them. What he will do is, give up product. He says he’s willing to tell the NDU details of the shipments he has coming in. He’s undermining his own business, the very reason for his existence.”
“Where’s that going to lead?”
“Well, you’d be surprised. This is early days, but already the NDU has seized drugs with a street value of one and a half million. Now, Cullen isn’t giving them everything, but he’s giving them enough to get them in the papers and to more than hit their targets so the Garda Commissioner can modestly announce that while the war against drugs won’t be fought and won in a day, it’s always encouraging to see a string of victories on the battlefield.”
“So it’s like protection money. Cullen is paying off the NDU with enough action to make it look like they’re tackling the drug menace. Meanwhile, he’s got enough product coming through to keep the home fires burning. Everyone’s happy.”
“Provided the shipment seizures don’t get the troops down.”
“That was the problem Lamp had: he knew there was a tout. I don’t know if he suspected Jack, but he had to have known it was someone near the top.”
“Well. I understand that’s nothing Lamp has to worry about any longer.”
“And come here, is Rita Delaney caught up in this too? Because I noticed at Paul Delaney’s removal on Saturday, Jack Cullen shook Dessie’s hand but he had the few quiet words for Liam. What was he, thanking him for the use of his wife?”
Dave Donnelly burst out laughing at that.
“As you do. Actually, I don’t know what that’s about.”
“Dessie noticed it as well, and didn’t seem impressed to me about it.”
“Well, that’s one for you and Dessie.”
Unfinished business. I had to get it out of the way today, because the way I felt, already, I didn’t think I could take this case much longer: nine in the morning and my head alternately burned like my brain had been scalded and
swirled in a fog of medication. Maybe Dessie could get along without me. On the other hand, Dessie had a gun. Maybe I couldn’t get along without Dessie. Try to decide. No, pay attention to Dave, he’s still talking. Mind you, he hasn’t stopped talking since he came in. Look at the sauce he’s got all over his tie, the state of the big eejit.
“So the NDU have been warning everyone off Jack Cullen, basically. But as of now, the gloves are off: after what you told them, they’ve decided they have to shut him down, basically. On top of which, there’s no way he’s going to take yesterday’s INLA attacks lying down. There’s going to be a major gang war if Cullen isn’t stopped, is the reasoning.”
“Cullen murdered Lamp Comerford because he thought Lamp killed Paul Delaney and Raymond Moran, because I persuaded him that Lamp had simulated all the INLA attacks as a smoke screen behind which he could operate.”
Dave passed me a handful of newspapers.
“Well, these might persuade Jack otherwise,” he said.
The covers of the tabloids all had the same story: WE RULE GANGLAND, SAY INLA; TERROR IN THE CHURCHYARD; INLA MOUNT CITY DRUG-TRADE TERROR TAKEOVER; INLA 2, IRA 2; INLA: DUBLIN FOR THE TAKING. There were grotesque photographs of Shay Rollins drinking champagne and posing in boxing gloves, and a statement admitting the “execution” of Paul Delaney and Ray Moran for “antisocial behavior” was attributed to an INLA source.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “They’re boasting about it now.”
All the Dead Voices Page 22
