All the Dead Voices

by Declan Hughes

  “My name is Ed Loy. I’m a private detective—”

  “You’re a what? Jesus Christ. How did you get this number? No one has this number.”

  “I’m sure someone does. Maybe Steve Owen?”

  “Did Steve…?”

  There was a long silence before Margaret Fogarty spoke again.

  “What do you want?”

  “Your sister Anne hired me to reinvestigate your father’s murder.”

  “And how’re you getting on with that?”

  “I think I know who killed him. But there are just a few final questions I’d like to ask.”

  “And I’m the lucky girl you’d like to ask them of.”

  “That’s right. I have your address. I should be at your house in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Why, are you disabled? Are you gonna crawl across the street on stumps? That’s you in the old Volvo, isn’t it? You think I was gonna make a run for it?”

  “Something like that. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, we’re all sorry. Sorry is just being alive. No, you tracked me down. You’re a private detective. Your name is Ed Loy. Come in and ask me some questions. It’s been a long time.”

  Margaret Fogarty opened her front door and turned and I followed her through the shabby, damp hall to the kitchen, where every tired stick of furniture and battered appliance was transformed by the great picture window that looked directly out over the sea. Margaret Fogarty at fourteen had looked beautiful beyond belief; in her thirties, she was a beautiful woman, but her looks hadn’t weathered the years as well as they might have. She still had a magnificent head of red corkscrew curls, and her dark eyes were alert and alive, and even in jeans and a plaid shirt, her body looked supple and slender, but her face was prematurely lined, and gin blossoms scarred her forehead and cheeks; she was smoking and drinking on her own at lunchtime; judging by the overflowing ashtrays and the empty gin bottles, this was not a special occasion.

  The room smelt of stale smoke and sickly-sweet alcoholic decay; I could never make up my mind if I found that particular aroma comforting or unsettling; looking around the damp room at the piles of newspapers and secondhand and library books, the unwashed dishes and the baskets of laundry, I was tending toward the latter. Seated now at the grimy kitchen table, her back to the blue sea, a completed crossword by her side, Margaret Fogarty gave me a glass and a crooked, ironic smile and pushed the gin and tonic bottles toward me. I thought I didn’t want a drink, but as tends to happen, when I’m put on the spot, it turns out I do.

  “Private detective. Is that a joke?”

  “I found you, didn’t I?”

  “We’ve already established that. Shouldn’t you have a hat?”

  “That’s a very personal question. Shouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t want to get ahead. As you can see. Loy. As in Myrna? Or in spade?”

  “As in both, I guess.”

  “Make up your mind.”

  “You first.”

  “I did,” she said. “And look where it’s got me.”

  “There’s not a lot wrong with the location,” I said.

  “I know, I know, it’s the decor that lets it down,” she said, gesturing to herself. She had a cynical drawl that was very attractive, and I got the impression she hadn’t spoken to anyone for a while.

  “Not from where I’m sitting.”

  “Oh Mr. Loy, how you talk. I bet you’re a big hit with the girls. Let me guess: Anne thought you were gorgeous? I’m guessing you’re quite gorgeous behind all those cuts and bruises. And Mrs. D’Arcy thought you were something she’d stepped on.”

  “I wouldn’t say gorgeous. But that’s about right.”

  “Loy. Spade. Digging things up. Very good. And have you been digging things up, Ed Loy? Is that what has your head in such a state? Did people object to your digging?”

  “Not all of them. Just enough to make a difference.”

  “And now you’re here to do some more. Well, I promise, at the very least, if I have to hit you a dig myself, I’ll aim it lower than your head.”

  “Thank you. Where was the telephone in your house in Farney Park?”

  “Where was the telephone? In the hall. There was a table in the hall, called, if memory serves, the hall table. And that was where the phone was.”

  “Was it always there? Or was it moved?”

  “Was the telephone always there or was it moved? I’ve got to say, I don’t quite feel I’m getting your best private-eye stuff here today Ed. I was hoping for a bit of where were you on the night of, is this the dress you were wearing when, I put it to you that this is the murder weapon and so on and so forth. And your big question is, where did you use to keep the fucking telephone? Who gives a fuck?”

  It was the hair. As soon as Aisling D’Arcy showed me the photograph, I knew. Janet Ames’s hair was good, but it wasn’t a patch on Margaret Fogarty’s. I bet that thought occurred to Steve Owen every day of his life as he sat in his chair, looking out across Dublin Bay toward Howth. I wonder if he knew she was here. The Fogarty he fell in love with. The daughter, not the mother.

  “You give a fuck. Because you know where the telephone used to be. Because your father ran to the telephone, and he had to be stopped. The telephone that used to hang on a wall bracket just outside the kitchen. Steve Owen had to stop him telling anyone what he’d just seen. Was it upstairs, or in the living room? You and Steve Owen, a teacher and a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl.”

  There was a split second of shock, when I thought she might close down on me. But that was soon overwhelmed by what looked to my eyes very much like relief.

  “I taught Steve more than he ever taught me,” Margaret Fogarty said, her eyes flashing with the recollection. “He wasn’t the first. But boys my age were idiots. You can be old enough at fourteen, and too young at forty. You met Mrs. D’Arcy there, my big sister. She’s someone who’s always going to be too young for sex, who thinks it’s horrid and nasty and filthy and messy and really not quite right.”

  “Maybe that’s because her father was murdered when she was a teenager.”

  “And maybe it was because she didn’t get a bowwow when she was a baby. Who knows, Ed? Who knows what makes us want what we want? Aisling wanted a big palace and no risks, and she got it. I wanted Steve, and I didn’t get him.”

  “He killed your father…don’t you feel anything about that? Anne said when she got home from school, she found you weeping in the porch. And you never said anything, at the trial or at the appeal.”

  Margaret Fogarty sat silent, a curious smile on her face; it looked like bravado, like she didn’t care what I thought, but that couldn’t be right. The disconnect between what I was saying and what she appeared to be feeling was giving me vertigo.

  “You were an eyewitness, for God’s sake: fourteen years old, to see your father get beaten to death in front of you, and then to remain silent all this time. Look at you, in this cave. Drinking and smoking yourself to death, it’s like you’re in hiding, all to protect a man who…you know he has a girlfriend, about your age, with hair like yours?”

  “Janet Ames,” Margaret said, shaking her head sadly. “Fat ankles. The poor girl. What can you do?”

  “It’s not just about you, you know, there’s Aisling and Anne, they have a right to see justice done. Why are you protecting Steve Owen?”

  Margaret looked out the window for a moment. When she turned back, her expression had altered; the flip cynicism had gone, and her eyes were full of tears, though she still tried to blink them away with a smile, and as she spoke, it seemed to me that I had heard the words already, that somewhere in the pit of my stomach, they were exactly what I was expecting, and dreading, to hear.

  “I’m not protecting Steve Owen. Steve Owen is protecting me.”

  I WAITED, POURED another gin and lit another cigarette and waited, and finally, she told me what had happened.

  “I was in love. We were in love. He didn’t want to at first, because I was
too young, I was a schoolgirl, de da de da, but I persisted, and I prevailed. Christ, he was doing it with the mother and the daughter, how cool was that, why wouldn’t he’ve? I’d seen him from my bedroom, hopping over the back wall to see Ma, I was the only one who knew what was going on. But with Ma, it was a fling, they were using each other, I don’t care what the letters said in court about him wanting her to leave Daddy, that was all talk, Steve wasn’t serious about her. It was me. I was the real thing. I mean, he doesn’t have a girlfriend who looks like Ma, does he? Janet Ames looks like me.”

  “You were fourteen, how serious could he be?”

  “Oh fuck that. Toytown rules. Over-eighteens only. What a fantasy world people live in now, scared of their own shadows, so panicked about fucking child abuse they’ve become terrified of giving children any freedom at all, they’re twelve or thirteen before they’re let out on their own, they may as well lock them up in the cellar, like in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, you know what it’s about? The parents’ peace of mind. Because everyone is so fucking anxious all the time. So lock the kids up with computers and so on and you don’t have to worry about them, at least. That’s the abuse. Anyway, fourteen isn’t a child: end of story. We were in love. When you fall, you fall. And that’s the way it was.”

  “And that day…”

  “And that day I ducked out of class after first period and met Steve in the house. We were going to do it in every room in the house, a different position in each room. The clock was ticking, because Anne would be home for lunch. And we’d done all the upstairs, and we were in the living room, and I was on top, and Daddy, who had this big meeting in town and was due to be out for the whole day, came home unexpectedly, and we were making so much noise we didn’t hear, and Daddy walked into the living room and caught us. Caught us rapid, as we used to say.”

  Margaret Fogarty attempted a laugh then, but she didn’t get as far as a smile; her hands were shaking and her voice had receded to a dry crackle at the back of her throat.

  “And the thing was, I was so fucking angry to see him. I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t upset, I was raging: how dare he come back when he’s not supposed to, how dare he interrupt me in midride, how dare he see my tits? In my head, of course, I didn’t say anything, but that’s how I felt. And when Daddy saw it was Steve, he just said, I’m calling the Guards. You’d better get dressed, and went straight out of the room. I didn’t even think, I just knew I had to stop him, I leapt up and I picked an ormolu clock off the mantelpiece and I went flying after him, and there he was at the phone, his back to me, and I just smashed him over the head I don’t know how many times. Steve said I was screaming and swearing and ranting, hysterical. It was all over in twenty or thirty seconds. Daddy was probably dead on the first or second blow.”

  “How did you clean it up?”

  “Didn’t really need to. Steve got my clothes, and I got dressed, and he said, Anne will be here soon, if you say you came home and found him like this. The hardest part…we thought if I had done that, I would have run to him and held him. And that way, I could be all bloody and it would be natural. That was hard, because…I was pretending, and then it was real as well…and that’s the way it’s always been, grieving, and not feeling entitled to grieve…I never wanted to kill him. I’ve never felt like that again. I…I’m sorry, it’s such an entirely inadequate cliché, but it’s the only thing that fits: I don’t know what came over me.”

  “And Steve got rid of the murder weapon.”

  “Steve got rid of the clock, and the towel. And that was that, really. Ma thought Steve might have killed Daddy, and Steve broke with her—and he point-blank refused to see me before the trial, and then…and then he was in prison. He went to prison to protect me. If there are ways of knowing what love is, I think that might be one of them, don’t you?”

  “And you never thought to speak out on his behalf? To say, he’s not guilty, I am, I did it, I killed my father.”

  The tears flowed freely down Margaret Fogarty’s cheeks now.

  “Of course I did, every day I did. But I never said a word. I was too frightened of what it might do to me, to my sisters, to my mother. And even after she died, I said nothing. And after the appeal…we met after the appeal. Because I kept writing to him, trying to contact him. And he still wanted me. After all I’d put him through. And that’s when I knew we couldn’t be together, that it would be wrong. That I didn’t deserve it. I let him help me though. This is his aunt’s house, and he let me live in it for nothing. Only his aunt died, and left the house to him and his sister, and now he has to sell it.”

  “And that’s why you contacted Anne, to put Farney Park on the market.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why did you block a sale for so long?”

  Margaret Fogarty shook her head, and her titian curls swirled against the blue of the sea behind her.

  “I don’t know. I sometimes think, to punish myself. I didn’t want the money. I don’t really work, I live on benefits. I read, and I drink, and I don’t do much else. I don’t…‘have a life.’ I don’t really know that I deserve one. Imagine how much pain my sisters would go through if they knew I’d killed Daddy. Even though I don’t care about Aisling, I care about Anne.”

  “Why would they have had to know? You could have built a new life. You could have left the past behind.”

  Margaret Fogarty stared at me as if I was insane.

  “But the past is all I have. Maybe that’s why I wanted Farney Park to remain as it was, to fix it in the past. Sometimes you can’t just pick up and start again. Sometimes it would be wrong to.”

  “Wrong?”

  “I killed my father, Ed. And I wasn’t properly punished for it. And that’s why I live like this. Every morning, I look out across the bay, and know that Steve is over there, with a woman that looks a bit like me, only plainer, with fat ankles, poor thing, wishing it was me, and I’m here wishing it was me too, but knowing it’s right that it isn’t. You can call the Guards and have me arrested and I’ll tell them what I told you, but I don’t think I’ll be the one to suffer if it all comes out and I have to go to prison. Anne will, and Aisling will, and Steve will.”

  Margaret Fogarty lit another cigarette, and took a long belt of her gin, her third since I had arrived, and looked at me.

  “I don’t think I could suffer any more than I do each day, and will until I die, which please God won’t take too much longer.”

  CHAPTER 29

  It would have been natural to drive along the coast and cross the river to get to Steve Owen’s place on the other side of the bay, but Docklands was closed to traffic from the Eastlink onward on account of the Independence Bridge opening ceremonies, so I cut off up the other direction and headed south via Christchurch and the N11 to Blackrock. Steve Owen was reluctant to let me in, but when I told him where I’d been and what I’d been told, he buzzed me up.

  “This will have to be quick,” he said. “Janet will be back soon.” His face had the same mournful, hangdog expression; when we’d met before, I attributed it to weakness on his part; I knew better now. Without asking, he went to the kitchen and emerged with two drinks. We sat in the sunroom as before, and I looked out across the bay toward Howth.

  “You can see the house, if that’s what you’re wondering. I suppose if I had a telescope, I could see her wave. But she wouldn’t wave. And I’d know better than to hope.”

  His voice was composed, and laced more with resignation than self-pity.

  “You’re a good man,” I said, and was pretty sure I meant it.

  “You know, I used to think that. How noble I was, how I’d suffered. But it was me where I shouldn’t have been that got me into trouble, involved with a fourteen-year-old girl. At best, I think I was just unlucky.”

  “More than that. You went to prison, you never spoke out against her.”

  “I think most men would have done that. I can’t see many saying, it wasn’t me, it was the kid. What I wonder is, wo
uld it have been better if I had told all? Better for Midge, I mean. Because what she’s done to herself…”

  He came to a halt and shook his head.

  “How did she look?”

  “She drinks and smokes a lot. And you can see that in her face. But she’s still an amazing-looking woman. That hair…” I said.

  Two large tears appeared in Owen’s eyes and rolled down his cheeks. He started to say something, but couldn’t get it out before he broke down completely and just sat there, a grown man in the afternoon sun, crying his eyes out. It wasn’t easy to watch, but I thought it was the least I could do.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when he had got himself together. “I just…can you make any sense of it? I mean…we could be together. We could still be together. We wouldn’t have to tell anyone what happened. Anne might not like it, but God, she’d get over it. In this day and age.”

  “I don’t think Margaret can get over it. In this day and age or any other. I don’t think she wants to. Maybe you’re right when you say if she’d paid for it at the time. Because now it’s like she’s serving a life sentence. One she’s imposed on herself.”

  “Is she…do you think she’s happy?”

  “I think she’s waiting around to die. I understand she has to move, you need to sell the cottage.”

  “Did she tell you that?” he said, his voice cracking.

  He shook his head, closed his eyes and breathed deeply in.

  “She’s welcome to stay, I told her so, as long as she wants. She’s moving out for her own reasons, whatever they are.”

  “She said your sister has a half share, after your aunt died.”

  Steve Owen shook his head and scowled.

  “My sister. I don’t have a sister. My aunt died twenty years ago, the cottage has been mine since then. Janet doesn’t know about it though, so…if you don’t mind…”

  “How much does Janet know? Because it was the hair that did it for me. When I saw a photograph of Margaret, and clocked her likeness to Janet Ames, the whole thing made perfect sense to me. Of course, I thought, after seeing her, I’d be sending the cops here to arrest you.”