“You haven’t told this to anyone else, have you Ed?” Donna was always quick to cry, but the squall passed as if it had never been there; her voice was a reed now, taut and shrill and urgent.
“I wasn’t the one who spotted your car outside Rollins’s house. Maybe they haven’t pieced it together like I have. Almost certainly they don’t want to. As far as I can see, the SDU want you to be respectable and aboveboard, open and transparent, Bobby. And if they want that, so you shall be.”
Bobby Doyle looked at the floor, and raised a hand to his brow. It was hardly the most extravagant gesture, but coming from him, it was like another man’s cry of abjection. When he lifted his face his eyes were filled with despair. Before he had a chance to speak, Donna cut him off and went to stand by his side.
“Bobby, listen: say nothing, this is Ed Loy, he’s a person of no standing, of no consequence in the world, no one will believe his word alone, and we know there is no evidence, there can’t be any evidence. It’s slur and innuendo, carping and begrudging, bitterness and spite from a failed person with a failed life.”
Donna’s eyes glittered with a fair degree of spite of her own as she said this. I wondered whether the contempt she spat was a tribute to the loyalty and esteem she held for her boss, the love, perhaps, or if she had truly despised me from the off. I tried to rally, but found her words had cut deep: it was true that I was a nobody, at best a kind of puppet the Guards used to buffer themselves from actions they preferred not to be associated with. I had no friends that weren’t either cops or criminals, I had no family, I had, in the popular expression, not so much a failed life as no life at all without what I did for my very modest living.
And yet. Maybe it was all true—although it made me wonder, since Donna had been so persistent about pestering me to fuck her, and so seemingly ardent when I did, whether some portion of the contempt she expressed could as justly be directed at herself—maybe it was all true, and I was a failure, a worthless, embittered nobody. And yet. I was right and they were wrong. I wasn’t doing it from spite, or begrudgery, or because I wanted to be on the viewing platform or the top table or the back page of the Sunday Independent, I wasn’t even doing it for myself anymore, except insofar as I had to get it done; no, at this point I was doing it for Brian Fogarty and Paul Delaney and Charlie Newbanks, and Gerry and Claire and Yvonne and Luke Coyle; I could hear the dead voices in my head, and I needed to bring it to a close so that we all could get some rest.
At some point, Bobby Doyle had begun to speak, and Donna had tried to make him stop, and now Bobby seemed to be talking her down.
“I’m not remotely worried about what Loy can do, or what kind of case the Guards might try and piece together. I don’t have any doubts about Rollins on that score, and he’s the only one in that organization who knows. I just…the man has suffered here, look at him. It demands respect. And I’m not exactly proud of what I’ve done. But it had to be done nonetheless.”
“What had to be done? Using the INLA as a proxy force to take Jack Cullen out?” I said.
In order to speak out, Doyle evidently felt the need to put some physical distance between himself and Donna Nugent. He walked up the aisle and sat in the front pew, turning around to face me. Thus excluded, Donna turned on her heel and stormed out of the chapel. Doyle made a comedy grimace, as if he’d been a very naughty boy.
“Very protective of me. Doesn’t like to see me come to any harm.”
“Lucky you. Whose idea was it to kill Paul Delaney?”
“I said I wanted Cullen and Comerford taken out, and after that, they had to be active dealers.”
“Paul Delaney wasn’t dealing.”
“Who told you that? Jack Cullen?”
“Ray Moran.”
“My source says he was. Heroin. It was some kind of deal Jack Cullen had done which wasn’t coming through the gang’s regular channels, I think, which was making Lamp Comerford suspicious.”
“Who’s your source?”
“Barry Jordan. He personally witnessed Delaney passing smack to young Shels players. Said he should have gone to the Guards straightaway.”
“Why’d he go to you?”
“I went to him. Shay Rollins heard about it, told me to ask Jordan myself if I didn’t believe it.”
“So chicken and egg…how the hell did you get into a situation where you’re dealing with someone like Shay Rollins?”
Bobby Doyle looked up at the altar and sighed.
“Jack Cullen…is unfinished business. It’s true that I was consistently an advocate for the peace process, and that I…after that day in South Armagh, I vowed never to get involved in violence again. But to see Jack Cullen down here, year after year, destroying his own community, feasting on it like this unholy pig, the sow that ate the farrow, and everything he did came to my ears, of course it did, and there were many times over the years when it was put to me that the least worst situation would be for Cullen to be taken out, and there were several operators who offered to do the deed in a manner that would look like just another gangland killing. And I said no. I’d made a promise. I’d taken a vow. And the old code dies hard, you know, one republican to another, you don’t inform, you remain loyal, however much you despise the man.
“And I don’t know what made me change my mind, to be honest, maybe this bridge coming to fruition, maybe the threat that Cullen might one day compromise me. Mostly it was the sense that people know he’s IRA, and they know he’s a vicious, psychotic drug dealer, and they think those things are equivalent. Like you. And that’s not so.
“And part of me thinks, if men like me hadn’t been so principled and peace worshipping and twenty-odd years ago we’d taken the twenty or thirty hardest cases in the Provos and shot them in the back of the head, there’d be a lot of innocent people walking abroad today, a lot of Coyle families watching their children grow up. And I think it was a failure of moral vision on my part not to see that, and a failure of moral courage not to do it. And maybe that…idealism, I think you’d have to call it, maybe I was full of it because of Independence Bridge, maybe it all blended together. And I didn’t want it known…even in republican circles…and I’d been told that, for all the mayhem that surrounds him, Shay Rollins could be trusted. As long as you made it worth his while.”
“So you approached him.”
“I approached him. I regret it’s fallen out the way it has, particularly about young Delaney, that was wrong, he was just a kid. I regret in particular that they haven’t done what they were supposed to do yet, which was to get rid of Jack Cullen.”
“You regret it. It was wrong. It shouldn’t have happened. Up the IRA.”
“You’re right, of course. But I was trying to do good. And if Jack Cullen is killed, I will have succeeded. The way of the gun is not the right way. But sometimes using a gun is the only right option.”
“I prefer it in the original Chinese. Kill them all and let God sort them out. You know Cullen suspects you.”
“I’d be amazed if he didn’t. He’s not stupid, and he’s always been incredibly paranoid. And he hates me just as much as I hate him. I’ll take my chances. I always have.”
I stood up.
“By the way, you’re off the hook for Brian Fogarty’s murder,” I said.
“That’s a relief,” he said. “Do you know who did it?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I wish I didn’t.”
As I walked down Bobby Doyle’s tree-lined drive, I was aware that Donna Nugent was looking down at me from an upstairs window. I felt humiliated and wounded by what she had said, and felt a desperate urge to prove how far from being a failure I actually was. Maybe that was the first reason God invented gin.
CHAPTER 27
Dessie Delaney couldn’t fucking believe it. On a day as solemn as this, and fair enough, Dessie had his mind set on more than grieving, but the solemn duty of avenging his brother had a certain necessary dignity to it, which would be compromised, quite frankly, by taking
his other brother’s head off with a bread knife and feeding the fat fuck to the dogs in Fairview Park.
Last night was bad enough, what with the INLA lobbing grenades and half the church getting hysterical and the other half repairing to the Parting Glass and getting locked and giving it hole talk about going out to Clondalkin and burning Shay Rollins’s house down, real The-Revolution-Starts-When-This-Pub-Closes stuff if Dessie ever heard it. And with Jack Cullen and Lamp Comerford AWOL, Liam was back to his clownish worst, crying and singing and threatening the INLA with all sorts (“If they walked in now,” he said, and Dessie was that close to saying, “We wouldn’t see you for dust”) and nearly letting slip that they had all Larry Knight’s guns stashed up in the house in Griffith Avenue.
It was lacking more than a little dignity, it was like a fucking knackers’ wedding so it was, with gobshites he didn’t know who’d never even met Paul coming over to tell him how sorry they were, looking for free jar is all it was, when they started getting barred for being sloppy drunk Dessie warned Liam not to be making an arse of himself and out the door with him, what it took to get you barred from a dump like the Parting Glass, for fuck’s sake.
But last night was nothing compared to this morning. First, Dessie was woken at six by the sound of Liam sobbing. Couldn’t get back to sleep, so up and down to the shops and bought some rashers and sausages, get a decent breakfast going, start the day off on a solid footing. Halfway through, Liam bursts out crying again, has “a confession” to make. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Dessie thought Liam was tripping when he heard what unbelievable piss he was coming out with.
Apparently, Liam’s wife Rita, the lazy-arsed one with the dying mother, had been having an affair with Jack Cullen, long-distance, every time she went back to Dublin. As if that wasn’t Technicolor enough, hadn’t Liam got wind of it, and instead of beating the head off her or slinging her out on her ear, he encourages her to see if Jack needs any favors done, as if he hadn’t been getting enough of Rita’s hospitality as it was.
Next thing, Liam has glommed onto a Greek smack dealer whose brother drinks in the bar, who runs the product from Turkey via Greece and on through the Balkans, and doesn’t he order a regular package for himself, which Rita, working as Jack Cullen’s fucking drug mule, God have mercy on us all, brings through customs, concealed about her person in ways Dessie didn’t want to even think about. Dessie told Liam it was a fucking sin to have dropped acid the day of Paul’s funeral, and Liam said he was straight as a die and that Dessie hadn’t heard the worst of it yet, and then Liam burst into tears again.
The worst of it turned out to be that Paul Delaney had been dealing heroin, just on a small scale, to friends and teammates and so on, and that Liam had known about it. Dessie didn’t know where to start. Liam said that, according to Rita, Paul had pestered Jack Cullen, who was fond of Paul in a fatherly way and didn’t want him involved in anything to do with drugs, to let him do it, and Cullen, indulgent to the kid, gave in. Dessie asked Liam if he believed that, and Liam said he was so bewildered when he discovered Rita was having an affair that anything extra came as an anticlimax.
Dessie couldn’t get his head around it. If Paul had brought it on himself—but Cullen was responsible for the heroin, always had been, brought it in and got people hooked—but this time, Paul’s brother was the supplier. And Paul was considered a legitimate target by the INLA because he was dealing smack, he was a member of the Cullen gang in all but name. Liam said Cullen was to blame, that it all started with him, and that was true, but what was Liam doing conniving with the fucker? That’s what all the whispered words between them were about last night, he supposed. Dessie needed to kill someone, that was the simple truth, and he couldn’t kill Liam, it wouldn’t have been right. It might have been justified, but it wouldn’t have been right. Loy sent him a text message saying he’d have something for him later on today. Promises, promises.
Dessie had a cold shower, and then a hot one, and then another cold one. He shaved and dressed and loaded two Glocks and put them in his coat pockets. Then he loaded a third one and gave it to Liam, warning him first that he was very lucky not to have it shoved up his hole and fired. Liam, grateful for the reprieve, burst into tears again. Dessie waited for him to stop crying, and then he told him what they were going to do.
The only problem with what they were going to do was, you couldn’t kill a man if you couldn’t find him.
The funeral was quiet—compared to the Removal, a football match would have been quiet—Dessie reckoned a lot of people had been scared off, or reckoned they’d paid their dues, or both—and afterward, it was just the brothers at the graveside in Glasnevin. The barman from the Parting Glass had asked them to come back afterward, and though Dessie wasn’t keen for a reprise of last night, they didn’t have anywhere else to go. Dessie thought it was a shame that Ed Loy hadn’t made it to the grave at least, but he had to trust that Loy would come up with something.
By the time Dessie and Liam got back to the Parting Glass, it was like they’d arrived in a different country: there were lads in corners muttering and other lads shouting and there was just one topic on everyone’s lips: the disappearance of Lamp Comerford and Charlie Newbanks, and the discovery of two bodies buried on a farm in Kildare. That farm was an IRA safe house, according to the talk, and had been used in recent years by several Cullen gang members. No way would the INLA have known about it, let alone used it.
People he didn’t know kept coming up to Dessie, the same people who had come up to him last night, only last night they had wanted something from him, today they wanted to support him in some way. The message was the same: Jack Cullen had lost it, he had let the INLA in, whether deliberately or through a lack of vigilance, he had killed his own comrades to secure his position. Worse, he was a tout. Lamp had said he was, and look what happened to him. Jack Cullen was done. It was being said openly in the Parting Glass. Paul Delaney would be alive were it not for Jack Cullen. So would Charlie, so would Lamp (no one in the Parting Glass seemed to care about Ray Moran). Dessie watched the barman with the straw-colored hair and the red face, who looked like he was capable of dispensing barroom justice with a bat or a gun and dumping the result in the back lane. The barman was biding his time, Dessie reckoned. The talk grew wilder, the shouts swelled in volume. Last night it had all been pub talk, hole talk. Today, Dessie wasn’t so sure.
When Jack Cullen walked in, he was greeted with absolute silence. He approached Liam first, but Liam affected not to have seen him, and turned away when Cullen was halfway across the floor. Dessie wasn’t going to playact like that. When Cullen turned to Dessie, Dessie acknowledged him with a nod. Dessie noticed out of the corner of his eye the barman reaching below the counter.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there this morning, Dessie,” Jack Cullen said, his voice low but steady. Dessie nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to say, and neither could anyone else for an awfully long time. Then a voice broke the silence.
“Where were you then?” someone from the crowd shouted. “Down on the farm, were you?”
Jack Cullen’s head whipped around toward his accuser, and for a short while there was silence again. But it didn’t hold.
“Are you sorry Lamp and Charlie weren’t there either, are you?”
“Maybe he was up in Dublin Castle having a cozy little chat about when the next shipment was due.”
“Fucking tout! Rout the tout! Rout the tout!”
Dessie had never seen it happen so quickly: it was like a jester had stolen the king’s crown, and the crowd had immediately forgotten everything the king had done for them, or resented him for it all along, and either way wanted him gone; Jack Cullen could sense it too; Dessie saw an unaccustomed look in those cold blue eyes: fear.
“I’ve just avenged your brother,” he said, his voice cracking a little. “I’ve just killed Shay Rollins. Done it myself, out of respect. Because Paul Delaney was like a son to me. And that should be an end to it.”
That should have been an end to it, but it wasn’t. There was another silence, but not as long a silence as Dessie had been expecting. A noise had begun to ripple through the crowd, a kind of muted growl, a guttural throb, like the sound of wild beasts holding themselves back from the kill, but only just, which fell away briefly when Jack made his announcement, but resumed again almost immediately.
“How much respect did you show Lamp and Charlie?” someone shouted.
“Did you bury them yourself, did you? Or did you get them to do your dirty work one last time?”
“That’s how he knows where all the bodies are buried, he put them there himself.”
“The filthy fucking tout.”
“Well now he can fucking join them.”
The animal drone of the crowd had built, not so much in volume as in intensity. Tables shifted and stools tumbled as men came to their feet and began to advance on their leader. The front door was slammed shut and the bolt run home and the rear exit secured. Dessie felt himself being elbowed firmly aside as bodies piled forward like they were all part of one living organism. He saw the first glass smash into Jack Cullen’s temple and Cullen brandish a gun that was knocked from his hand before he could let off a shot. He saw the barman rise to his full height and lay his hands empty on the bar and listen impassively to the grunts and roars, the crowing, jeering laughter and the obscene taunts as the customers of the Parting Glass punched and kicked and stomped and glassed Jack Cullen to a bloody, painful death.
Liam couldn’t watch.
Dessie wished he could have watched at closer quarters. His major regret would always be, he wasn’t able to do it himself, alone.
CHAPTER 28
Larry Roe from AIB had given me Margaret Fogarty’s mobile number as well as her address, and now I sat in my car across the street from her house in Howth and keyed in the number. I could have called on my way to make sure she’d be there, but I was afraid she’d bolt if I did. She said hello in a tone of utter disbelief.
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