All the Dead Voices

by Declan Hughes

  Aisling D’Arcy’s face set with something between rage and pique; her lip quivered, and I thought she might cry again, and for one heartbreaking moment I saw the teenage girl, the eldest daughter who had lost her father long before his murder, and with him her map of strength, and independence, and courage.

  “I never saw Steve Owen in our house, or approaching it; I didn’t even know who he was until the trial. Is that it? Will you go now?”

  I nodded, and finished my drink and stood up.

  “In any case, you haven’t even got your facts right.”

  “How so?” I said.

  “You said I had the back bedroom.”

  “That’s what Noel Sweeney, the investigating officer, told me.”

  “Well, you can tell him he got his facts wrong too,” she said.

  “I would, but he was the detective who was murdered,” I said.

  “Because of this case?” she said, her voice strained and wavering.

  “It’s all because of this case,” I said. “His death, my scars, the gin, it’s all because of this case. How did we get our facts wrong?”

  “I moved out in 1990. I wasn’t even living there when Daddy was…when Daddy died.”

  “And who took your room?”

  “My younger sister, Midge. Margaret.”

  Before I left, I thought of another question.

  “Was your hair always straight? It’s just, in the house I found a woman’s comb, one of those…Afro combs, is that what they’re called, with the broad teeth and the handle? A dedicated comb for curly hair. And I wondered—”

  “My mother had slightly wavy hair, a bit like Anne’s. But Margaret’s was the curliest, a total tangle. She used that kind of comb.”

  “Would you have a photograph of her?”

  “Did you not get one from Anne?”

  “I don’t think I asked her,” I said, and she shook her head in dismay, as if yet again I had shown myself up as clueless and incompetent. When she came back downstairs and handed me a photograph of Margaret Fogarty, taken when she was fourteen but looked twenty, I was inclined to agree with her assessment of my investigative abilities. For when I saw Margaret Fogarty’s dark red head of corkscrew curls, I understood, if not exactly who had murdered Brian Fogarty, certainly who had not, and that, in a chastening rush of insight Aisling D’Arcy would have appreciated had I the voice to speak it aloud, almost everything I had thought about the Fogarty case up until that point had been absolutely wrong.

  CHAPTER 25

  Working a case sometimes feels like the growth of a family. When you start out, it’s very simple to keep it all straight in your head. But as it develops, there are all sorts of additions and complications, bringing with them new duties and responsibilities, and much and all as you’d sometimes like to get back to how it was before, because it seemed so simple then, you just can’t. I wanted to leave far behind me the world of Jack Cullen and Bobby Doyle, of the IRA and the INLA, of secret policemen and security policies, leave it in the hands of the people who dealt in smoke and mirrors and thrived there, and do what I was meant to do. But I couldn’t: not because Cullen and Doyle and George Halligan had a damn thing to do with Brian Fogarty’s murder, but because I had made a promise to Dessie Delaney that I would keep an eye on his brother Paul. And that was why, instead of heading across to Fairview to Paul’s funeral, I was meeting my second southside millionaire’s wife of the day in the Merrion Hotel.

  Before I went in, I made a call to Larry Roe, a contact I had in the Allied Irish Bank. For a small cash consideration I would have couriered to his house, he was willing to give me certain kinds of information, on condition that they could never be traced to him. And since, if they were, I wouldn’t be able to use him anymore, and most probably my range of contacts in other banks and credit card companies would dry up also, I made sure they weren’t. I gave Larry Margaret Fogarty’s bank current account number and sort code and he had her address and telephone number for me within a few seconds.

  The other call I made was to Tommy Owens, in reply to three missed calls of his. It was not a call I had been looking forward to. When Tommy heard what had happened to Charlie Newbanks, he took it hard, as I knew he would; moreover, he blamed himself for prevailing on Charlie to help us out. I reminded him that people like Lamp Comerford and Jack Cullen aren’t our fault, and we couldn’t be held accountable for their actions, but I don’t think it did much to ease the sting. When I started to explain that, since the INLA had admitted responsibility for Ray Moran and Paul Delaney’s deaths and claimed Simon Devlin and Dean Cummins as members, Jack Cullen would probably be on my tail, Tommy was ahead of me: Leo and he would get my back, he said. I told him where I was and where I thought I was going, and Tommy said I wouldn’t necessarily see them, but they’d be there.

  Dee Dee Doyle sat on a sofa in the lounge of the Merrion Hotel looking like she had her own personal lighting, such was the glow of opulent glamour radiating from her newly set golden blond hair and her freshly and impeccably applied mask of paint and cream. She patted the cushion beside her and I air-kissed her and sat down. Stung by Aisling D’Arcy’s scorn, I had already removed most of the bandages on my face; the effect was rough and raw, but I no longer looked like I had leapt from the back of a moving ambulance; I left the shades on; neither the Merrion Hotel nor Dee Dee Doyle was apt to think me a bozo for wearing them, or at any rate, neither would say so.

  Dee Dee had other things on her mind. Her face was a picture of wifely martyrdom, of tremulous courage under domestic fire, but there was something about her eyes that looked vaguely unhinged. If marriage was for better or worse, Dee Dee looked like she couldn’t remember which was which anymore, and in any case, she’d had enough.

  “Up in the house, at this very moment, supervising the preparations for the party that will take place after the opening ceremonies for Independence Bridge, my party, in my house, who do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Dee Dee.”

  “Donna Nugent,” Dee Dee said, and paused significantly. I nodded, as if I understood the full implication of the pause (which I thought I did), and then Dee Dee resumed.

  “I was willing to tolerate a certain…men are men, and Bobby couldn’t manage without Donna, and if they were willing to keep it discreet and not embarrass me in my own town, among my own friends, for God’s sake, then…well, as I say, men…I don’t know any woman of my age whose husband hasn’t…and it’s a question of simply finding something to occupy oneself…Bobby and I are…I thought Bobby and I were too good a team to throw it all away. I’m not a prude, you understand. Don’t you, Ed?”

  “Of course I do, Dee Dee, of course I do,” I said, taking the hand that was offered me, and wondering idly if, by pressing it in a certain way, I could get her to speed the fuck up.

  “Not one of those hopeless women, wailing and raging and making scenes, Lord God you want to say to them, if he wasn’t having an affair before, he certainly will now, after witnessing all that. A deal more sophisticated, a deal more…French about it all. But there are limits. I am a hostess, Ed. I am known for my balls. Parties, dinners, receptions, black tie, full dress, balls. Known for them.”

  “That’s how I knew you, Dee Dee. Before I met you, that’s what I knew about you.”

  Dee Dee’s eyes seemed to mist up at this tribute. She squeezed my hand and continued.

  “How is it, then, that I am not considered sufficiently qualified to organize the Independence Bridge party? How can it be that I was told my skills were not appropriate for the particular kind of guests expected? I’ve given a reception for the Vietnamese Ambassador, Ed!”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And suddenly little Miss Great Gas Altogether Cheeky Little Snip knows everything there is to know about the combination of dignitaries and politicos and cultural types and how they don’t want anything too stiff and formal or too elaborate or showy, I was waiting for her to say vulgar, and I tell you, the smirk would have be
en on the other side of her face if she had. Cocky little wagon.”

  Dee suddenly turned her head and stared into the full-length mirror by the fireplace.

  “Ed, do you think they dyed this a shade too pale?”

  I made a show of considering this.

  “No, it’s just so, Dee Dee.”

  Dee Dee checked herself again in the mirror, all business, nodded, and turned back.

  “I know what they’re saying, I heard Bobby trying to explain it, they think I’m fine when it comes to a whole bunch of TV celebrities and businessmen’s wives and nouveau riche builders and footballers and models, but this has to be a bit more…cultural…you know? Sprung on me, the Saturday morning. I had the Corrs booked, Ed. The Corrs. Told to cancel them.”

  “And so…”

  “And so I’ve just had it with the bullshit. I mean, poets and painters and the fucking Chieftains, it’s far from that Bobby fucking Doyle was reared.”

  Dee Dee swearing was so unexpected and yet so absolutely right I burst out laughing, and in fairness to her, she was in on the joke, and laughed a little herself.

  “I mean, come on, you know? I don’t see Jack Cullen on the invite list and we all know he may as fucking well be.”

  “Do we? How do we all know that, Dee Dee?”

  “Ah come on,” she said. But I wasn’t laughing anymore.

  I removed my hand from hers and took the lavender scented envelope I had received that morning out of my coat pocket.

  “You sent me this, didn’t you?”

  “What if I did? You can’t prove it, can you?” Dee Dee said.

  “I don’t need to prove it, I…what has it to do with Bobby? Was he responsible? Was he in the IRA when the Coyle family were killed? Did he give the order? Did Jack Cullen carry it out?”

  Dee Dee looked around her and leant in close to me.

  “Bobby and Jack were the active-service unit. They did the operation together. The pair of them. And of course, not a bother off Jack Cullen. But that was it for Bobby, when he found out what they’d done. Some judge had the same car and that’s who they were targeting. Bobby took a long time to get over it. And after that, he did everything he could to push the movement toward peace.”

  “And you’re saying, if people found out about this…”

  “They’d have a different opinion of Bobby Doyle, all the high and mighty, the great and the good. They’d think twice about lining up to celebrate his fucking bridge. Wouldn’t they?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t think so, Dee Dee. I mean, there’s Sinn Féin people in power, in government in the north, and I’m pretty certain there’s stuff like this you could dig up about them. But nobody does, or if they do, nobody publishes it in the press, and it doesn’t deter anyone from lining up to shake their hands and have their photographs taken with them.”

  “But Bobby Doyle and Jack Cullen…I mean, it’s priceless, isn’t it?”

  “I agree, it is. But I don’t think it will make any difference.”

  Dee Dee looked at herself in the mirror again and sighed.

  “I suppose you’re right. I suppose when it comes down to it, it’s in everyone’s interest to pretend Bobby Doyle is completely respectable…”

  Dee Dee Doyle fingered her white-gold charm bracelet, and then completed her thought.

  “Including mine,” she said.

  I HAD TOLD Dave Donnelly that, while I didn’t know where the farmhouse on whose grounds the bodies of Lamp Comerford and Charlie Newbanks were buried was, I was pretty sure it had been set fire to, so if it burned to the ground, there shouldn’t be too much difficulty about locating it. And so it proved: as I drove to Bobby Doyle’s house, it was the first item on the midday news: two bodies had been found in a freshly dug grave at a burnt-out farmhouse near the Kildare-Offaly border.

  I didn’t know whether my SDU detail was still on the case, and I decided I wouldn’t keep checking. Tommy Owens had texted me after I had left the Merrion Hotel to say: Glad to see you with a mature woman for a change, instead of running after young ones.

  It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

  CHAPTER 26

  Donna Nugent was pacing the ballroom of Bobby Doyle’s Clyde Road home, a huge detached Victorian stone pile set among mature oaks and elms in a garden the size of a park. She was shouting something about amps and arc lights into a phone and getting nowhere fast, when a dumpy bloke with a beard dressed entirely in black who was tidying loudspeaker cable took the phone off her and sent her across to me.

  “Not my phone, not my call, you’d think I had enough to do, but no, Donna must be busy! Here you are, Laminate City, access-all-areas pass that ensures you’re right in among the VIPs and up close to the man himself, in fact this pass has you seated right beside my very horny to see you self the closer you get the better you look. Or in fact not, God Almighty Ed, what have you been doing, arguing with a horse? You should be in hospital, I’m serious Ed, those wounds are weeping, Jesus. Here, let me call you an ambulance.”

  I pocketed the laminate and put my hand on Donna’s phone to stop her using it.

  “I was in hospital. I came out, because there’s some unfinished business I need to attend to.”

  My hand was shaking, and so was my voice. Donna looked at me curiously, as if human weakness was something she was entirely tolerant of in the abstract, but found distasteful when confronted with it in person.

  “What happened to you? Or should I not ask?” she said, trying to keep the tone as Donna as possible, but not entirely succeeding.

  “Jack Cullen and his thugs happened to me. They were very upset about the attacks on his gang by the INLA.”

  Donna nodded, her expression simultaneously serious and slightly puzzled, as if no one should expect her, a girl, to have an opinion on the INLA or on gangland crime.

  “And I thought it was interesting that Bobby Doyle and Jack Cullen used to be such close colleagues. They don’t see each other anymore, do they? Or do they? I don’t imagine so.”

  Donna looked across at the bearded technician, who was taping a hank of cable behind a long drape, and scowled.

  “Let’s go somewhere we can sit down, Ed. We don’t want you to get delirious.”

  I followed her out into an atrium off which there were half a dozen corridors; she led me down one and through a heavy oak door into a small Victorian chapel, complete with a full stained-glass representation of the Last Supper on high behind the altar. We sat in pews across the aisle from each other, and Donna’s serious, possessed face gave an inkling of why Bobby Doyle put so much faith in her.

  “Okay, first of all, where did you get this? Has that silly cow—” Where did I get it? I’m a detective, it’s what I do. Bobby Doyle and Jack Cullen, the Coyle family, roadside IED. Four innocent people, an entire family wiped out.”

  “And Bobby Doyle has paid for it ever since. I’ve seen him cry his eyes out, last year, last week, and say that no amount of tears could ever be enough. He’s had mass said at dawn in this chapel every day for years. What he’s done with his life, to atone insofar as he could, was devote himself to making sure such atrocities would become part of history.”

  “History, it’s always fucking history with the IRA, isn’t it, never just murder, senseless fucking bloodshed. And in making their precious history, they managed to destroy the Coyle family’s history entirely, didn’t they? You know the parents were only children? Gone, forever, like a black hole, no descendants, no one to commemorate them in flesh. And that’s what everyone will be celebrating today, won’t they, with their fucking bridge? Nineteen-sixteen? History? Bloodshed and glory and death.”

  “Nice speech. Shame not to deliver it directly to its intended target,” Bobby Doyle said. He stood at the back of the chapel. Donna, who had been crying, leapt to her feet.

  “I’m sorry, Bobby, I didn’t know he was going to—”

  “How could you? God might move in mysterious ways, but
He’d still pick up a few tips from the boy Loy here. Not impressed by my…what would you call it, my hypocrisy? Or do you not think, having made a mistake, a man’s not allowed a second chance?”

  “I guess that’s one way to look at it. But there’s second chances and building monuments to yourself, and that’s what this bridge is, don’t you think? A means to glorify the gunmen, from 1916 right down to the IRA of the troubles, a cathedral in their honor, a vindication of every informer buried in a shallow grave, and every child blown to pieces in the noblest of causes: Ireland’s fucking freedom.”

  “You know that’s not the way it’s playing at all. The Irish government have taken it on, it’s official Ireland all the way, and it’s reclaimed 1916 to keep it out of the hands of the IRA.”

  “But there’ll be plenty of people there today with blood on their hands, sitting pretty and looking respectable. Yes, it’s the hypocrisy, it makes me sick.”

  Bobby Doyle shrugged.

  “By that token, it’d almost be a sign of greater integrity to be Jack Cullen, and continue to shoot and kill for no higher motive than profit,” he said.

  “Maybe it would. Isn’t that that remains when history winds itself up? After Politics, Profit? You’re not building the Independence Bridge for nothing, are you? Here in Clyde Road with your own fucking chapel, Jesus. But maybe you aren’t as different from Jack Cullen as you think, Bobby. Maybe you weren’t then, and maybe you’re not now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sure Donna could explain it to you. Refresh your memory, that is to say. About her ’08 reg red MINI parking outside Shay Rollins’s house half a dozen times over the past week. Coinciding mysteriously with the great INLA onslaught against Cullen’s gang. I’m trying to get it straight in my head. Because I genuinely believe you’ve been a force for good, you’ve helped to steer the republican movement away from violence. You’ve worked very hard for a very long time. And then, to jeopardize that work for…for what?”