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Chapter One
The quality of football played in the League of Ireland is not very high as a rule, and if you're not a committed supporter of one of the teams on the field, in this case Shelbourne and Monaghan United, it can tend toward the boring, to put it mildly, but when the bloke behind me said what we needed was a bit of fucking action, I don't think a guy in a balaclava piling out of the fans' car park with a submachine gun and spraying bullets around Tolka Park was what he had in mind. It was all over in a twinkling. The players hit the deck as soon as they realized what was happening, so it was impossible in the instant to know if any of them had been shot; the gunman scarpered toward Richmond Road with the Guards who had been on match duty in pursuit; before the supporters began their stampede toward the exits, I was over the barrier and making my way across the pitch toward Paul Delaney, the gifted Shelbourne number nine and the reason I had been at the game. He was curled in a ball by the goalposts at the riverside end with his arms over his head and a high-pitched, droning sound coming from somewhere inside his shaking torso. His teammates were slowly rising to their feet now and counting heads; the Monaghan players were doing the same.
"Paul, are you all right?" I said. "The gunman's gone, it's all over."
Paul lifted his tightly cropped blond head slowly above the frame of his arms, like a man daring to survey the aftermath of a storm from the supposed safety of his house. His face was drained of color; his pale blue eyes streaked red with fear. Before he had a chance to speak, Barry Jordan, the Shelbourne captain, was upon us.
"You all right, Paulo?"
"Sound, Jordo, yeah."
Who's this? You're not supposed to be on the pitch, mister," Jordan said to me. Though he was twenty years my junior, and clearly shaken by what had just occurred, he had a natural authority that made me feel like I was somehow in the wrong, even if the field was rapidly filling with panicking fans trying to get to the exits, or hoping at least to find some carnage worth gaping at.
"It's all right, Jordo, this is Ed Loy. He's a . . . a friend of mine," Delaney said.
Jordan looked me up and down. I'm six two, and I wear a black suit and a black overcoat. I don't look conspicuous in most settings, but I wasn't exactly dressed for a football match.
"I'm an old friend of Paul's brother," I said. "He asked me to keep an eye on him."
I should have kept my mouth shut. Jordan looked at Paul, glanced toward the car park the gunman had erupted from, then appeared to join a few dots with a shake of his head at me. He turned to Paul with a pointing finger, but something between anger and despair rendered him speechless; he nodded at the turf, as if to tamp down his emotions, then ran back to where the Shelbourne players had linked arms to form a circle in the center of the park.
"You'd better join them, Paul," I said, with something short of total conviction.
"Do you think so? After you mentioned my brother, Jordo knows now, or thinks he does. They've all heard the rumors. They probably think those shots were meant for me," Paul said, his voice plaintive with self-pity and fear.
"And what do you think?"
Paul Delaney's color had returned to normal. He shrugged, possibly aiming for nonchalant unconcern. All he hit was petty, and sullen, and scared.
"No one has any reason to take a shot at me," he said.
"Well, good," I said. "Glad to hear it."
Delaney made a move toward the huddle of red jerseys, then turned back to me.
"Look, Mr. Loy, I appreciate you know me brother and everything, and thanks for the concern, but I don't need any help from you, right? From anyone. Tell Dessie I'm grand. Tell him he probably knows Jack Cullen as well as I do. Tell him if anyone's to blame for all this, he is."
The Shelbourne players were chanting something to one another, their heads close together. Again Delaney moved toward them. Again he faltered, this time wheeling around his teammates and taking off on a run in the direction of the dressing rooms. The club stewards were on the floodlit pitch now, encouraging the ghouls and rubberneckers sniffing for blood to disperse; the PA system was announcing the abandonment of the game and urging everyone to leave in a calm, orderly fashion.
I joined the throngs queuing for the exit and replayed as much as I could recall of the incident in my mind. So exciting was the game that my attention had wandered, and I had been staring vacantly in the general direction of the Cash & Carry car park, so I had seen the gunman immediately, drawn to the balaclava masking his head, seen him produce the SMG, seen him start firing without any care as to where his target was. Because he wasn't shooting to kill, he wasn't some maniac—he was firing above everyone's head. I could picture him now, the SMG looked like an Uzi, held aloft for maximum effect—let as many -people as possible see the weapon first—and then a volley fired in the air. It was a warning, or a gesture. Had it been for Paul Delaney's benefit, or at his expense? Or was it nothing to do with Delaney in the first place? Maybe it was some anguished Shelbourne fan making an overdemonstrative protest about the need to return to the top flight in the league.
As I walked down Richmond Road and wheeled right through Ballybough heading for the city center, I turned it over in my mind. I had run up against Paul's brother Dessie when he was a junkie dealing drugs for Podge Halligan. Despite that, I didn't think Delaney was a bad man, and if at times he had been apt to forget it, he had a tough-minded wife ready to jog his memory, and two kids to shame him into toeing the line. With their help and mine, he kicked his habit, and I persuaded a rich client with a guilty conscience to buy him a stake in an Irish pub called Delaney's that Dessie's brother Liam ran on a Greek island whose name I could never remember. By all accounts the bar was a roaring success; every so often I'd get postcards wishing me well, and photographs of sunburned and heavily refreshed Irish folk I didn't know toasting a beaming Dessie.
Dessie wasn't beaming when he called me a few days ago. His brother Paul was eighteen years old and tipped, if not quite for the Premiership elite—he had already had trials with Arsenal and Liverpool, and hadn't made the grade—certainly for a professional career at English Football League level at the very least. And as Dessie said, that'd be Paul pulling anything from 200K to half a mil a year for fifteen-odd years, and then he's made for life if he's bought the right property and made the right investments and hasn't blown it all on the ponies or some gold digger or up his nose. Which was where Jack Cullen came in.
All the Dead Voices. Copyright © by Declan Hughes . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Excerpted from All the Dead Voices by Declan Hughes
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