By the time I reached the ground, the sound of sirens filled the air, but they didn’t drown out the grief of Manuel’s family, who had all been watching from below; his distraught wife clutched her teenage daughter and a younger girl; two teenage boys were caught between the need to go to their father’s ruined body and the natural human urge to turn away; quickly, the ambulance men intervened, and then the fire service were running hoses through the house, and the family’s agony was buffered by official intervention. A fireman tried to get me to stay at the scene, but I slipped away and drifted in among the neighbors and the ghouls as the Guards arrived. It would be useful to know who Manuel’s last client had been, but I couldn’t ask his wife; it was probable she didn’t even know. All I knew was that Manuel was going to tell me what he had learned from Emily Howard, and now he was dead. It was hard not to believe those two facts were connected.
I caught sight of myself in the rearview and almost drove off the road; my face was blackened by smoke, my hair frosted with white ash; I looked like a photo negative of myself. I pulled in at a hotel in Donnybrook, walked quickly through the lobby to the bathroom and gave myself a wash and a brushup. It was twelve ten, and I’d been on the road since six this morning; I told myself it was time to pack it in for the night. I walked back across the lobby with every intention of listening to myself. But the bar was still open, with an extension for something they described as the “Halloween Festival”-not just a night but an endless weekend-and I decided any man who’d just seen what I’d seen deserved a drink. The bar was thronged with people who looked like they’d been at a party for too long and needed to go home, but had forgotten where they lived. My type of crowd. I sat at the bar and ordered a cup of coffee, then, when it arrived, asked for a double Jameson as if it were an afterthought. I put sugar in the coffee and added the whiskey and drank the whole thing in three drafts. It burned my throat and warmed up my gut and made me feel half alive again. I was doing 50 percent better than David Manuel. The voice in my head reminded me that I should go home, that a night’s sleep and everything would look, would even be, different. I pondered this, and all I could come up with were the facts: that there was a killer on the loose, that he or she had just killed again, that everyone I was working for: Sandra Howard, Shane Howard, Emily Howard, Jonathan O’Connor, Denis Finnegan, each of them was in danger of being the next victim. Equally, any of them- more than one-might be the killer. I was the only one who knew the extent of the connections and how they all joined together-to the extent that I did. The killer didn’t show any sign of stopping. That meant I couldn’t either. Maybe I could catch a quick nap, like the two old boys at the all-night Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament across in Woodpark. Maybe even that was unwise: neither of them looked like he was certain to wake up. I checked my phone to see if Martha O’Connor had called or texted with the information I’d asked her for. The phone I picked out of my pocket wasn’t my phone though; it was David Brady’s. I had checked the text messages before; I ordered another coffee and worked through the Received Calls and Dialed Numbers lists, comparing them to the numbers I had on my phone for the principals in the case. Several of the incoming calls were listed as “no number.” There had been calls made to and received from Emily in the days leading up to the murder; I noted Emily’s number, which came up with her name and which I didn’t have. I thought of ringing her, but it was close to one now, and I didn’t want to wake her if she was asleep. I sent her a text message hoping she was well and asking to speak to her as soon as I could.
I felt like I was getting nowhere; I couldn’t imagine what it would prove if David had rung anyone on my list. The green Jameson bottle behind the bar was flaunting its red crest at me again, and I was starting to give it the eye back. I thought of Tommy then, and how he had discovered the truth about his daughter Naomi by scrolling through the photographs on her phone. I wasn’t used to a phone that doubled as a camera, although it struck me that it would be quite useful, particularly for all that lovely divorce work that paid the bills and left me feeling so morally uplifted and optimistic for the human race afterward. I navigated from the menu to the picture gallery, opened the first folder and scrolled through the images. They were what I had been expecting: a series of women, including Emily and Maria Kravchenko, in sexual poses; there were a fair few of Brady and “the guys,” either in action on the rugby field or hoisting pints in what I now recognized as Seafield Rugby Club bar. Some images combined elements of both, though in a mildish form: girls flashing their tits for the guys, the guys flashing their bits for the girls. I experienced the kind of boredom and despair you normally associate with reality TV, and while one hand clicked faster through the images, the other was flexing itself in readiness for another shot of whiskey. So I was distracted, and three shots past the shot I wanted, and had to track back, and momentarily clicked myself out of the image gallery, and ended up having to start from the beginning and track through each image again, but finally I got to the shot I had begun to think I had imagined. There it was, two men and a boy having a pint together in the rugby club: Brock Taylor, Denis Finnegan and Jonathan O’Connor. Brock Taylor, who once worked for my da, and now had men shot to death for little or nothing, in Dublin, the city that shrank as you stared at it, until eventually, no matter who they were and what they had done, somehow, it all came back to you.
Twenty-two
DENIS FINNEGAN’S OFFICES WERE IN MOUNTJOY Square, about as far from the river on the northside of the city as Fitzwilliam Square was on the south. Before I left Dublin twenty-five years ago, you would have ended the comparison there: while there had been some major demolition and deterioration among the Georgian houses on the southside, not least on the adjoining Fitzwilliam Street, Fitzwilliam Square itself had survived relatively intact, whereas Mountjoy Square had been gutted, often without the demolished houses being replaced; vacant sites and derelict houses made it look like a cross between a bomb site and Skid Row. But the gold rush had changed the fabric of the city, for better or worse: Mountjoy Square fell firmly into the former category, with the gaps having been mostly filled either with restored originals or plausible facsimiles; it now looked like a square again, and tonight, high above the river, its park dense with shedding trees, the ashes already skeletal, in the swirling fog as a church bell struck one, it gave the impression simultaneously of being absolutely real in the concrete here and now, and an illusory dreamscape from the past, an ethereal evocation of times and lives now dead and done, as if whatever actions I might take, whatever my striving, it would be to the same end.
Finnegan’s house was on the north side of the square. He was as good as his word: hale and hearty, if a little drunk, he greeted me enthusiastically and led me up the stairs to a second-floor sitting room that overlooked the square and much of the city. The room was painted dark green, with a cream ceiling and a rich amber carpet; a gold chandelier with tulip bulbs hung from an ornate centerpiece; a turf fire seethed in the grate. Over chalk-stripe trousers, shirt and bow tie, he wore a peculiar-looking burgundy velvet smoking jacket brocaded in a faintly Turkish manner that looked like it had last seen use in a comic opera. He offered me a range of things from a groaning drinks table by one of the big sash windows; all I wanted was a bottle of Guinness, which was good for keeping the alcohol in the blood steady while not really counting as a drink. But since Finnegan was oiling himself with a ten-year-old Macallan, which may have had something to do with his face glowing a shade or two brighter than his jacket, I asked for one as well, and commandeered the bottle on the pretext of reading the label. I had such a number of things to charge Finnegan with that it was hard to know where to start, but I didn’t think asking him how many people in total he reckoned he had murdered was a great icebreaker. And the only one I was confident he had killed was Richard O’Connor, and that would be impossible to prove. But since I’d last seen Finnegan in south Dublin, indeed, looking like an exemplar of that zone, there was a time-honored city-sensitive way of kicking things off.
“So Denis, you’re here on the northside. What’s that about?”
“I made a little money in the eighties. These houses were tumbling down at the time, it was a civic disgrace. But it did mean you could pick one up for a song. I had it restored, over time-living on one floor while another was overrun with builders. And of course, I based my practice here.”
“During the eighties, the early eighties, while you were teaching in Castlehill School?”
“It would have been after that, about 1985.”
“You left in 1985? And what, you went back to university?”
“Oh no. I had already taken a degree and so forth, I just had to complete my apprenticeship. There weren’t many of us who hung around. But I had location on my side. Back then, before we had what the newspapers insist on referring to as ‘gangland,’ we just had a clutch of ordinary decent criminals. And the bulk of them came from within a stone’s throw of my door. Although, having represented many of the gentlemen concerned, I shouldn’t have considered it in the leastwise prudent to throw a stone at any of them.”
