Islandbridge (8 page)

Whoever had done it also knew that he'd be home before Eimear. Kelly had searched over and over again for a note or some sign from Rynn, but there had been none. He had wrapped the money inside two plastic bags, and then slipped it into a tin that he buried at the end of the garden. It was the day they'd officially moved in.

More days passed now when he didn't think about that buried tin, but many he did still. Often before sleep he had imagined, or felt, that some part of him was on a slow, meandering escalator that led somewhere he wasn't sure, like a path into the woods in some children's storybook. He had dreams that he held the tin under his arm, and someone was waiting for him to answer a question, but one he hadn't heard and couldn't know. It was a month ago when he had woken up crying. He had managed to let Eimear sleep, however.

Kelly had written down the telephone number for the Garda member's assistance line and had even phoned once. It was after a night shift and he remembered sitting in the driveway outside the house, with the rare sunny morning flooding through the car. He persuaded himself that what his ma had always said would come to be true, and that he wouldn't have to sit there ever again looking at his own house and hold back his panic. Time, she'd say, it just takes time. Or maybe it was like O'Keefe had said: sometimes things just take care of themselves.

October 28, 1983

They buried Junior Rynn out of Raheny Church on a Friday morning. It was one day after Eimear's birthday. Kelly parked out of the way, on a road behind the shops there. He had no umbrella, but the hood of his anorak soaked up enough of the steady drizzle. He bought the
Racing Post
and found a spot to stand in the bookie's office across from the church where he could see out of the fogged and barred window onto the road.

It struck him again that now he felt nothing, absolutely nothing. A thousand times in the past few days he had Junior Rynn being knifed, and shot, and slashed, and begging to be killed just to end his agony. In this endlessly revived play, Kelly poured acid on Junior Rynn's face, burned him bit by bit, put him on broken glass and walked on him. Then he shot him again and again, starting methodically from the toes up, and waiting a minute while between each shot, aiming six inches higher than the last shot. His shin, his knee, his groin: all the while alive and conscious, and roaring.

He had tried to find out more about what had happened to Rynn, but even O'Keefe had heard nothing more than the same rumour that Junior Rynn had tried to put one over on some people with connections to the IRA in the North. It was only speculation.

The church car park filled steadily. The group of men near the door grew larger, and the cigarette smoke gathered above them more. A heavy-set man in a leather jacket turned his fat, bright-red face every now and then to spit. In the door of a church, Kelly thought, if that didn't tell you something about this crew. He didn't doubt there'd be some Guards around the funeral somewhere, and not just the traffic men on point duty. He looked for vans where there'd be cameras, but he couldn't tell.

Two older men came into the bookies and began watching the screen.

“A big turnout,” said one to the other, and coughed.

Kelly went out onto the footpath now. He stood by the hairdressers' and lit a cigarette. Eimear had told him again last night that she hoped that'd be his last package, what with the baby on the way. He didn't smoke in the house. It was temporary, he didn't know why, he told her. It had been nine years since he'd smoked. He'd be off them soon, no bother.

There was a light brown tinge to the cloud cover, and no sign of any change from the drizzle. It seemed to get in everywhere, no matter what you wore. Then, from the direction of the city centre, came the headlights of the funeral cortege. The hearse, an old American car, seemed to float in a watery gleam over the roadway in. The door to the hairdressers opened beside him, and a woman with a towel wrapped around her shoulders came out. He glanced at the wet curly hair, smelled burned hair from the dryers.

“Is it starting,” she said. “God – there's tons of flowers, look.”

The hearse drew up close, and driver and the sidekick stared ahead under their brims. Behind came four other funeral cars, one completely loaded with flowers.

Kelly thought of Junior Rynn lying in the coffin moving by a hundred feet from where he stood. If it was to be an open coffin at all, Rynn's face would be plastered with makeup, or whatever they did in the funeral director's. He'd be all dolled up in a suit too no doubt, and holding rosary beads, like was done for everyone nearly. These were the same hands that had held the pistol, flashing and bucking, blasting the life from those two men in the laneway.

There were three Garda motorbikes. One of them was dismounted already and holding up the city-bound traffic. Kelly saw him wipe the beads of drizzle off his visor; and his white gloves raised and lowered sharply against the greys, chopping the air as he signalled. So a gangster gets the Guards to help with a funeral – no: but they did it for any funeral, any big funeral.

Kelly watched the way the people outside the church turned to the arrival of the cars. Most blessed themselves. These people were blessing themselves for a killer, he thought, and they were passing condolences, some of them genuine. People who should and did know better were now sympathizing with the parents who'd raised a mad dog of a son, a man who'd only have gone on to worse if he'd lived.

O'Keefe had heard from a detective that Junior Rynn had been taken out of a car as he was parking at a pub down the Naas Road. Rynn's girlfriend told the police there had been three men dressed in balaclavas, and according to her, one of them spoke with a definite Northern accent. Kelly remembered O'Keefe raising an eyebrow and repeating the “definite.” He told him that his friend-of-a-friend detective said that the Northern bit was only a screen. The Guards were quietly working on an assumption it was a turf war in Dublin.

The door of the bookies opened and the two men came out. As though it were a design laid on people everywhere, Kelly thought, they had to sidle over his way, to stand together in a group.

“There they are,” said one.

“God rest him,” said the woman of the interrupted hairdo. “The only son.”

“Isn't there another one?”

“It's a girl. There – she's there. That's her in the car, I think.”

“She's dug out of him, isn't she?” said the woman. One of the men coughed several times.

Kelly dropped his cigarette into a puddle. He watched the gaberdined men from Fanagan's open umbrellas over the doors to the cars.

“God forgive me.” He heard one of the men, the cougher, say. “But it'd put you in mind of that film.”

“Look at all the stuff in the car. Flowers, wreaths, what have you. Jaysus, there's hundreds of quid in it. Thousands, maybe!”

“No wonder they call him the Godfather,” said the other. “But not to his face, bejases!”

Kelly knew the cougher was angling his comments to draw him in.

“The biggest one I ever seen, I'll tell you that – no, wait. No that was only on the telly, the Bobby Sands one. Was that last year?”

“It was two years back,” said the other. “Eighty-one.”

“Well, you remember Dev's funeral, don't you?”

“No. Why would I remember Devalera's funeral?”

“I'm only saying.”

“I know. I'm only saying too, amn't I.”

They fell into a touchy silence then. Kelly watched the umbrellas seem to carry the emerging legs and trousers and black coats across the pavement to the church door. It was quite unbelievable, he decided, and most of all it was because it looked so normal. Here were the lugs and thugs and low-lifes, every variety of the scuts that Dublin produced so effortlessly, all pretending reverence here at a church they'd gladly rob or set fire to, if the humour took them.

The cougher cleared his throat

“Oh, I'd say you'd have to be counted today,” he said. “Put in an appearance, as they say. There'd be notes kept by some people, if you know what I mean. Both sides.”

“You're dead on there. There's Rolo Murphy. He must be sixty now. Weren't the Rynns and Rolo on the outs for years?”

“I heard. But like you said. That's all by-the-by now – look, that's Yo-Yo Keogh, isn't it . . .? It is. Look there he is, Jumbo Rynn. The father. God, but he looks shook.”

Kelly watched Rynn shrug off the offer of an umbrella and glance at an outstretched hand before he turned to wait for the coffin. He pulled the drawstrings on his hood tighter under his chin.

With the traffic stopped now, he heard the gurgle of rainwater from a drain, the grumbling transmission of the bus waiting for the Guard's white glove. The only movement by the church now was the slow, silent work of one of Fanagan's men to draw the coffin out to the waiting men.

Kelly watched them take the weight, saw the sways and bobs before they had their balance, the arms go out to the shoulder opposite.

“By God, that crowd must have practised,” said one of the men. “They have the drill down pat.”

Kelly's stomach felt like it was welling up under his ribs. He smelled the cigarette off his own breath still. Soon the praying and the holy water and the incense would get going in the packed church. There'd be people Rynn paid to do all his dirty work, who bided their time in jail over the years knowing he kept a place for them, people who thought nothing of taking a drill to your knees or selling heroin to your daughter. But there'd hardly be one member of a family who had suffered because of the bastard, no one to stand up and tell the truth: The man in that coffin deserves to be there on account of what the bastard has done to people.

“Ah well, we all get our turn, don't we?”

It was one of the men, Kelly realized. It was him they were talking to.

“You're right,” he said.

“We'll hardly be shuffling off with this kind of a classy effort though, hah?”

Classy, Kelly thought. His arms tingled when he imagined grabbing this Dublin gouger beside him, and shoving him along with his mate into the window behind.

He nodded, and watched the church door. The long strands of hair that Rynn had tried to keep over his baldy head were now sliding down with the drizzle. Mrs. Rynn, to judge by the cut of her, had appeared now, and she was in a bad way, hanging off other women. Kelly was pretty sure that one of them was the daughter. With her dark, bruised-looking eyes and the ruination all over her face, the mother looked so doped up that she wouldn't see much beyond the tip of her nose.

Then Kelly sneezed. He hadn't felt it coming, and it wasn't going to be the only one. He turned away and pulled down on the strings of his hood just as the second sneeze came. He searched around his pockets for hankies and found some, fairly mashed, but unused. The one he tried to separate and spread out on his hand escaped his fingers and fell to the wet cement. He took another, and wiped his nose, and then balled up the hankie and put it back in his pocket.

When he let his eyes find the front of the church again, he froze. His blood began pounding in his ears. Slowly he let his eyes move to the trees and their sparse leaves to the side of the church car park. He did not want to make any sudden moves. He could see that Rynn had still not moved. He didn't want to look at him to check he had stopped staring. Had it been the sudden movement when he sneezed, he wondered, or the clumsiness with the hanky that had drawn Rynn's eye over here.

The two men beside him were blathering again, something about the 2:30 race at Cheltenham. For a moment he let his gaze go back toward Rynn's figure in the church door. Strangely, it was no surprise really, none at all, when he saw that Rynn was staring his way still.

November 8, 1983

He was a half an hour from the end of the shift, with more than half of the statement typed when the phone call came. Cullen, the new Guard, held up the receiver.