Dublin Dead Read online

  Mulcahy put his hands up. ‘Obviously that’s what the press reckon, but our friends in Spain are more interested in Bingo’s past troubles here in Dublin, and seem to think it could be drugs-related. No surprise there, really.’

  ‘But that was all ten years ago or more. He’s hardly been back here since.’

  ‘Yeah’ – Mulcahy nodded – ‘but maybe they know something we don’t. Either that or they’re in denial. I mean, look at the name on these JPEGs.’

  He pointed at the picture thumbnails in the folder on his computer screen. Each one had the tag ‘muertodedublin’, followed by a number.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Muerto de Dublin,’ Mulcahy said in his best Spanish accent. ‘Not to put too fine a translation on it, “Dublin dead”.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’ Ford shook his head. ‘They’re just trying to push the work on us.’

  ‘That may be so. Either way we’ve had an urgent request to send a full background report to the murder team in Malaga, plus any “relevant current intelligence”.’

  ‘Like whether any of our bozos are out there topping up their tans just now?’

  ‘You got it in one,’ Mulcahy agreed. ‘So don’t bother hanging up your coat. I thought we could go have a gander at who’s where this morning, see if we can stir up some sleeping beauties.’

  ‘Did you see yer one on the box this morning?’ Ford asked, as they trotted down the stairs.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Mulcahy pulled open the heavy door.

  ‘Yer one – your one,’ Ford emphasised. ‘That reporter Siobhan Fallon. She was on the breakfast show, promoting her new book – y’know, about Rinn and her. And you, too, by the sound of it.’

  It wasn’t the cold whip of rain in his face as he stepped out that made Mulcahy feel like he’d been slapped. He’d been dreading this news for months, ever since Siobhan Fallon had phoned him and asked him to work on the book with her. It was his story just as much as hers, she’d insisted. He was the one who’d caught up with Rinn, saved not just her life but others’ as well. But he had flatly refused to have anything to do with a book, or her, still messed up in his own mind over the case, still smarting over how she had so casually betrayed him for one of her precious stories.

  ‘She was looking good, I’ll say that for her,’ Ford rabbited on, ‘but, Jaysus, she can’t half talk. Said your name should be on the cover as well, y’know, that you were the real hero that night but you wouldn’t take the credit for it. Is it true? Did she ask you?’

  ‘I didn’t even know the book was coming out,’ Mulcahy said, sidestepping the question. He’d heard nothing from Siobhan since that call. He’d buried it away at the back of his mind, praying she might forget about it, too.

  ‘I reckon she’s still got the hots for you, boss,’ Ford laughed, elbowing Mulcahy. ‘You’d better hope Orla didn’t see it.’

  ‘Just shut up and get the car, would you,’ Mulcahy said, pushing Ford in front of him, straining to keep a note of good humour in his voice. It wasn’t Ford’s fault; nobody knew what really happened between him and Siobhan Fallon the year before. He hoped to Christ they wouldn’t find out now either, and that her damned book would be discreet. He wanted to believe it, but going on her past form, it wasn’t entirely likely.

  ‘It’s that one over there,’ said Ford, clicking the key fob and getting an identifying flash of lights from one of the pool cars, a blue Mondeo, parked at the base of the castle’s brooding medieval Record Tower.

  They climbed in and Ford reversed out and turned, then waited a moment for the barrier to rise at the massive stone gateway before heading out onto Ship Street, the dark cobbles rattling the car’s stiffened suspension. Then it was straight into the mid-morning traffic, a slow crawl up through the Coombe and Dolphin’s Barn, the rain getting heavier the further out they got.

  Mulcahy forced himself to push all thought of Siobhan Fallon from his mind. Where he and Ford were heading, you couldn’t afford distractions. For years now, a vicious turf war had raged between the gangs that controlled the drugs trade in the blighted inner suburb of Drimnagh and rivals who ran the similarly grim Crumlin estates bordering it to the south. The deepening recession had only made matters worse, the dwindling market for recreational drugs sparking off outbursts of vicious gang violence. So far the dispute had cost twenty-two lives in tit-for-tat killings, nearly all of them kids in their teens and early twenties. A terrible waste, some said, although the most any of them ever aspired to was waste, anyway.

  The hypnotic whump of the windscreen wipers filled the car as Ford slowed to a stop and waited for a break in the traffic to turn into Gandon Road. It looked like any other grey residential estate in Drimnagh, ranks of ill-kempt council houses staring soullessly at each other across the street, but no one who knew the area would venture in there without good reason. Mulcahy spotted three youths in hoodies in the porch of the corner house opposite. As Ford eased the car across the junction and past them, one of the boys raised his right arm and took a sight along it – index and middle finger extended, thumb cocked – and loosed off an imaginary round at them.

  ‘Even this feckin’ downpour doesn’t keep them off the street,’ Ford muttered, more by way of acknowledgement than anything else.

  Mulcahy noticed that another of the boys was on a mobile, doubtless letting Tommy ‘the Trainer’ Hanrahan know that the boys in blue were on their way. That was par for the course. Hanrahan was one of the biggest players among the loose coalition of drug-dealing thugs who ran Drimnagh, and nobody got anywhere near without him knowing about it in advance. He had secured his position not only by engaging in more psychotic levels of savagery than anyone else around him, but also by running an extremely efficient network of dealers, enforcers and informants. His nickname referred not only to his obsessive working out in local gyms but also his ability to bring out the brutality in everyone he brought into his circle, teaching them how to bend the world to his will through threats and physical persuasion.

  ‘Over there, number twenty-seven,’ Mulcahy said. ‘On the right, behind that wreck.’

  Half on the pavement and half off, a burnt-out car was angled slightly out and away from the scrubby patch of bare earth and dismantled engine parts that passed for a front garden. It resembled nothing so much as a tank trap.

  ‘Do you think he’s worried about a ram raid?’ Ford snorted, as he pulled in across the road and cut the engine.

  ‘It’s not for the Dublin in Bloom judges, anyway.’

  A flurry of wind brought the rain spitting full force into Mulcahy’s face as he got out of the car and cursed, gathering the collar of his coat to his neck as he crossed the road. Before their feet hit the footpath, the front door of number twenty-seven opened and Tommy Hanrahan appeared in the entrance.

  He was a tall man, about Mulcahy’s height, but bigger around the shoulders and chest from all the working out. Black hair cropped close to the skull lent his brow a primitive cast, accentuated by heavy eyebrows, a square jaw and a neck that looked thickened by steroid use. His other facial features were correspondingly broad, apart from two small, close-set brown eyes, which held absolutely no warmth.

  ‘It’s yerselves, is it?’ Hanrahan said, as if he’d known them all his life. ‘It’s been a while since we had youse lot out here.’

  The door may have been open, but the wrought-iron security gate in front of it stayed shut, forcing Mulcahy and Ford to huddle up, backs to the elements, under the porch’s tiny canopy.

  ‘Aren’t you going to invite us in, Tommy?’ Ford asked.

  ‘Ah, y’know, the place’s a bit of a mess and the missus would only be getting embarrassed.’ Hanrahan smiled back. ‘If you’d phoned ahead, now, the lads an’ me might’ve had a chance to tidy up a bit.’

  A chatter of moronic laughter leaked from the three goons lined up in the hallway behind Hanrahan. If it’d been a movie, they would’ve been big guys, muscle, proper apes, but this lot made a pat
hetic-looking crew. In their knock-off trackies and thin Dunnes sweaters they could have passed for any of the string-of-piss junkies they made their living off. Their eyes, though, had an edge you never got in a smack-head’s dead-eye stare. These creeps would knife you as soon as look at you.

  ‘You heard about Declan Begley?’ Mulcahy asked.

  ‘Good riddance to bad fuckin’ rubbish.’ Hanrahan scowled. ‘That low life was begging for a vent in the head a long time ago, and if I’m honest, I’d’ve been happy to put it there myself. But you don’t need me to tell you that, right?’

  ‘We know you put the word out on him,’ Ford said.

  ‘Yeah, well, that was years ago and the yellow gobshite went and done a runner, didn’t he? So, like I said, I’d love to take credit for it, but I can’t. I had nothin’ to do with Bingo being topped. True as God.’ Hanrahan folded his arms and adopted an expression of innocence that could have graced an angel’s face in church. One of the fallen ones, next to Lucifer.

  ‘And none of your lads just happen to be out in Spain this week, getting in a bit of autumn sunshine?’ Mulcahy asked.

  ‘Not that I know of. But, fuck me, with all that high-tech surveillance at the airports nowadays, youse fellas’d probably have a better idea about that than me, eh?’ Hanrahan laughed and looked behind him again, eliciting another round of whooping from the crew.

  ‘Glad to hear it, Tommy,’ Mulcahy said, ‘but, just to let you know, I’m calling in on Martin Lynch on my way back from here, and if he says anything to the contrary, we might have to come back and get you in for a proper chat.’

  Hanrahan’s expression darkened. ‘You wouldn’t want to believe a word that wanker says. And I wouldn’t bother comin’ back, either.’ He unfolded his thick arms and grabbed the wrought-iron gate, rattling it. ‘I’ve got bars on all the downstairs windows and doors. To prevent unwelcome intrusions, y’know.’

  ‘Makes you feel at home, Tommy, does it?’ Ford asked.

  Hanrahan didn’t like that. Despite being hauled into Garda stations and courtrooms all his adult life, he had only been convicted twice on minor charges and on both occasions the sentences had – all too typically – been suspended.

  ‘Fuck you, copper,’ he snarled. ‘You know I’ve never done time.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Ford said, bending forward, his face glowering over Hanrahan’s through the grille. ‘But with those three monkeys you’ve got in there with you, Tommy, it wasn’t prison I was thinking of. It was the zoo.’

  2

  ‘It’s awful warm for that get-up today. How do you stand the heat in it?’

  Siobhan Fallon tugged at the damp collar of her cashmere twinset in a futile effort to cool herself, and silently cursed the elderly Cork woman who’d made the remark. Of course she was too bloody hot. She’d nearly passed out in the church during the mass. And it was no better now that they were all outside, waiting for the hearse to depart, the sun all but cracking the flagstones of the old churchyard they were standing in.

  It had been cold and lashing rain in Dublin when the taxi collected her from the TV5 studios at a quarter past eight and raced across the city to deposit her at Heuston Station, just in time to catch the train to Cork. That was the weather Siobhan had dressed for. How the hell was she to know it would turn out to be one of the hottest days of the year in Cork, just a hundred and sixty miles to the south? And how could a small island like Ireland even encompass two such ridiculous extremes of weather, anyway? There wasn’t much she could do about it, short of strip off right here in the churchyard. She’d love to see the old woman’s face if she did that.

  Instead Siobhan closed her reporter’s notebook and stuck her pen into the spiral of white wire along the top. ‘I think I’ll be getting off now, Mrs … eh?’

  ‘Burke,’ said the woman. ‘Teresa Burke, with an “e”.’

  ‘Yes, goodbye,’ Siobhan said, amused the woman could think she’d said anything worth quoting. She walked away, circling the crowd of mourners still milling outside the church doors. A fine turnout, as they say. Cormac Horgan, the young Cork estate agent whose suicide in Bristol she’d reported in the Sunday Herald a week earlier, was getting as good a send-off as could be expected. She scanned the faces: bereaved relatives and friends, the parish priest, local politicians and a smattering of former colleagues. She’d spoken to most of them and collected some decent, if uniformly uninspired, quotes. She’d only hung around to see if the cranky old priest would say anything out of the ordinary in his sermon, but he hadn’t, just the usual dull obsequies. She’d spent most of the long, stiflingly hot ceremony fanning herself with the order-of-service booklet and putting the piece together in her head, ready to knock it out quickly on the train back to Dublin.

  Why Paddy Griffin, her news editor at the Sunday Herald, had thought Horgan’s funeral would be worth her while going all the way to Cork for, she had no idea. He knew as well as she did that funerals rarely make good copy, and he could just as easily have put a stringer on it. Yet he’d been utterly resistant to her argument that it was a waste of her time. Much as she loved the old tyrant, he’d been a complete pain in the arse since she started back at work, clucking around like a mother hen, watching her every move.

  She took one last look around but saw nothing of interest. By now the crowd was clumping into small groups of five or six, shaking hands, chatting in hushed tones as the coffin was loaded into the long, black hearse for its slow procession to the ‘new’ cemetery, a couple of miles down the road. The old graveyard around the church probably hadn’t seen a burial in a hundred years.

  It was definitely time to get out of there.

  She was making her way along the gravel path through the graves to the gate when her mobile rang – Griffin’s caller ID.

  ‘Paddy, what’s up?’ she said, praying that something more exciting had appeared on the horizon.

  ‘Ah, nothing,’ Griffin said, the rasp in his voice betraying a lifetime’s devotion to cigarettes and coffee. ‘Just wondering how you were getting on, whether that Midas touch of yours had worked its magic down there.’

  ‘It’s a funeral, Paddy. How exciting could it be? I’ve got some okay quotes, but it’s not going to be worth more than a couple of pars. I’m on my way to the station now. There’s a train in half an hour. If I catch that, I can be back in the office by four o’clock and—’

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ Griffin interrupted. ‘Why don’t you just head on home from there? Take it easy. There’s nothing going on in here, and if anything comes up, I can get Cillian to do it.’

  Siobhan stiffened at the mere mention of that name. She knew Griffin meant well. For all the years she’d been at the Sunday Herald she’d been his favourite, his star, but this wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. She was supposed to be indispensable, his chief reporter. Telling her to go home wasn’t just patronising, it was worrying, like he’d forgotten completely who she was in the months she’d been laid up. And as for that weasel Cillian O’Gorman, who’d been covering for her while she was off, he’d got his feet too firmly under the desk for her liking. His tongue was lodged up Griffin’s arse as well. The last thing she needed was to give Paddy an excuse to keep him on a moment longer than necessary.

  ‘Listen, would you take off the kid gloves, Paddy, for God’s sake?’ she groaned. ‘All this molly-coddling, it’s complete bollocks. I don’t need it, and it’s not really you, either, is … ’ She searched for the next word, but it wouldn’t come to her, tiny as it was. She felt the sun on her neck again, as if all its vast cosmic density were bearing down on her. At once a prickle of cold perspiration broke out on her forehead and an overwhelming weariness enveloped her, every scrap of vitality she possessed draining straight from her legs into the ground below. Next thing she knew, she was clawing at a granite headstone for support, her knees going slack, the mobile falling from her grasp, tumbling through a slow arc as it bounced from a mossy mound onto the gravel path.

&nb
sp; A second or two of black void. Then, through the numbness that was swamping her, she heard Griffin’s voice again, tinny and distant, crackling concern from the phone on the ground.

  ‘Siobhan, are you there? Siobhan?’

  Somehow, she recovered herself. With a will she hardly knew she possessed, she bent and snatched up the phone, forcing a semblance of calm into her voice.

  ‘Sorry, Paddy. I’m here.’ She was fighting back the emptiness, straining to keep the trembling in her voice, her arms, her legs under control. ‘Bloody graveyard. I tripped and dropped the phone. No panic. Like I said, I’m fine. I’ll see you later. No argument. Okay?’

  She didn’t wait for his response, couldn’t afford to. Instead she killed the call with a jab of her thumb and bent over the gravestone again. She leant into it, allowing its polished stone-coldness to seep into her forehead and temples, embracing its solidity while waiting for the dizziness to pass. Focusing on her breathing, forcing normality to return. Everything she was wearing felt clammy against her skin, a chill had settled between her shoulders, and her stomach felt hollowed out. She remembered that she hadn’t had anything to eat all morning, just a cup of foul-tasting coffee before the Full Irish interview.

  ‘Excuse me. Are you all right there? Do you need a hand?’

  The question from behind was accompanied by a gentle touch on her elbow. Siobhan straightened up and turned, embarrassment now added to the stew of emotion inside her. A kindly-looking woman in her late fifties, tall, with short, greying hair and a plain black suit was staring at her, concerned.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Siobhan said, struggling to adopt an air of normality. ‘Just catching my breath, thanks.’

  The woman glanced over her shoulder to where the funeral procession was finally getting under way, then back at Siobhan, sympathy in her expression.

  ‘I used to get that way sometimes, when I was having mine. Is it your first?’