A battered Nissan van in steel grey drove along the Ballyfermot Road with Vinnie Dwyer at the wheel.
Its number plates declared that it had been registered in County Cavan four years ago but in reality it was of a slightly more recent vintage. The plates themselves had been on it only since yesterday, shortly after it was stolen from a builder’s yard at Blanchardstown, on the northern edge of the city. Several lengths of wood, which Vinnie had not bothered to clear out, still lay in the back.
It was eight o’clock on Sunday morning and most of Ballyfermot was still asleep. But, like a jungle, it was never entirely still. Day and night its worst dwellers prowled it, causing hate and fear and squalor.
Not that any of this worried Vinnie, whistling softly between his teeth along with the radio as he eased his way round the half-ramps set into the road to prevent excess speed. On the contrary, he thrived on it, especially the fear part.
He was a son of Ballyfermot, born there thirty years ago. Although he lived a few miles away now he was still one of its most savage predators and perhaps the most unsettling thing about him was the fact that he did not look it.
There was no ear-ring, no stubble, no tattoos, no narrowing of the eyes and puffing-out of the chest to signify that he was a hard lad. Instead, Vinnie was brown-eyed and cheerful and handsome when he smiled, although it made him look a bit chubby in the cheeks.
In contrast to this appearance, he could, when the occasion demanded, perform acts of outrageous brutality and he would maim or kill without pause, scruple or any perceptible change in his outward demeanour.
He had served time in the past for robbery but not for crimes of violence which was why there had been no cause for the State to subject him to any kind of an examination of his mental condition. There was no doubt that had there been such scrutiny, it would have established that Vinnie was a psychopath.
He drove past pubs and bookmakers’ shops and kebab joints and games arcades, all covered with shutters and metal grilles. A couple of gaunt youths with the shivers were hanging around outside a corner shop which was open for business but most of the people on the road this early were of a type for which Ballyfermot was not notorious. They were middle-aged or they were elderly and they were making their dutiful way to Mass where they would pray to God for deliverance from the madness they so often saw around them.
If you turned off either side of the road, you entered the real Ballyfermot, row after row of two-storey dwellings built on vast tracts of land and housing tens of thousands of people: huge families, dysfunctional families, single-parent families, no-parent families and, in some cases, perfectly normal families trying to get on with their lives.
Off to the right of Ballyfermot, there was the Naas dual-carriageway which would eventually take you to Limerick and Galway and other points west. Away on the far side of that road was the edge of the Phoenix Park, more than seventeen hundred acres of it, the biggest city park in Europe. This morning, its landscaped gardens, its woods and its meadows were vibrant with spring. Deer grazed on the dew-moistened pastures and the joggers had been out since dawn. In a couple of hours the zoo would be opening. And somewhere amid the park’s green splendour, the Irish President would be having breakfast in the elegant residence which the State maintained for him. So, too, would the United States Ambassador, within the secure walls of his own particular eighteenth-century mansion.
But all of that might as well have been in a parallel universe.
Ballyfermot had been constructed in the 1960s to provide new homes for the families living in appalling conditions in Dublin’s slum houses and tenement buildings. But once they had been transplanted to this environment many of the Dubliners of the inner-city felt rootless, deprived of their familiar, albeit grim, surroundings and alienated by their new ones.
Thus had begun Ballyfermot’s slide. The solution became a problem.
Vinnie made a left turn off the main road, then another, then a right, until he was deep into the most inhospitable territory. His was the only vehicle moving and, for the most part, it was the only one capable of doing so. Strange cars of mixed parentage and no wheels stood on wooden blocks. In a parking bay, there was the rusting carcass of a burnt-out Ford Sierra, long since separated from its rightful owner.
But in this, as in all jungles, it was animal life which dominated. A dispute involving Dublin County Council’s sanitation department had been going on for four weeks with the result that there had been no refuse collections in all that time. Soggy debris from overturned bins littered the road and packs of scary mutant dogs scurried from street to street, rummaging for scraps.
Stopping outside a house which appeared derelict, wooden sheeting over broken windows, Vinnie turned the engine off and got out. He was dressed in dark blue overalls and he could have been there to read the electricity meter or fix the gas, except that neither of them was connected in this house, at least not officially.
He walked up the short path through the gap where a garden gate had once hung before being uncoupled years ago during a dispute between two families and flung through somebody’s front window. The lock on the front door had been hacked off through repeated forced entry but something was propped behind the door to keep it shut. Vinnie gave a shove and felt resistance so he decided to go round the back and try the kitchen door instead. It was unlocked.
The kitchen floor was covered in a film of grease and it was sticky under foot. There was no table and there was no cooker, just braids of wiring jutting from the wall where one had stood once upon a time. The only domestic appliance was an electric kettle on a work surface at the sink beside a collection of tin foil trays containing the slimy remains of an ancient Chinese take-away.
He stood for a moment with his head cocked as he listened to scuffling noises, sounds of haste, coming from upstairs.
‘Dezo,’ he called. ‘It’s me, Vinnie. Are you there?’
He went into the hall and found where the kitchen table had gone. It was what had been blocking the front door.
A young man appeared at the top of the stairs. He wore jeans and was barefoot and he finished pulling a tee-shirt over his head.
Dezo stammered when he was nervous.
‘Jay-jay-jaysus, Vinnie, I didn’t know who-who it was.’
There was a room to Vinnie’s left and he looked into it. The floor was bare and the room was empty apart from a stained grey settee, its undulating shape indicating that the springs had gone. An old copy of the Star left open at the racing page lay beside it and there was a milk bottle, almost empty except for a substance at the bottom which looked like cottage cheese. A rucksack lay in a corner.
Vinnie did not wait for Dezo to come down but made his way up the stairs towards him. The wood creaked under his heavy boots.
Dezo was about twenty-two and scrawny with lank, unwashed hair normally tied back into a pony tail. Track marks and sores on his bare arms imprisoned him just as much as if they had been a cell.
‘Vi-vinnie, this is—’
‘Unexpected surprise, eh?’
Vinnie beamed, still looking round.
There was a noise from a room on his right and he stepped into the doorway.
Beside a rumpled bed stood a girl, not more than sixteen or seventeen, pale and hollow-eyed. She wore a bra and pants which had been white once and she was thin to the point of emaciation, with thighs like wrists. The room was rank with the odour of unwashed bodies.
He smiled again.
‘Ah, Aileen, me darlin’. Fresh and well you’re looking.’
He seemed to study her for a moment. Then he turned back to Dezo.
‘Come on. Get dressed, the pair of you.’
Dezo had come back into the room and was pulling on a pair of sneakers. No socks.
‘What’s, what’s the score, Vinnie?’
‘He’s got a job for you. Something that might put a bit of money your way.’
‘Great,’ Dezo said, less nervous now. ‘Tell us what it is.’
Vinnie shrugged. ‘Can’t. Don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. He just said to come and get you.’
The youth stared at him. ‘What’s with the overalls?’
Vinnie looked down at himself and plucked at the rough cotton. ‘This? Ah, nothing. A bit of manual labour to do later. No rest for the wicked.’
The girl had got into jeans and a grubby sweatshirt which said Nike on the front but was nothing of the kind.
‘And he said to bring both of us?’ Dezo asked.
‘Yes, why not?’
Dezo looked at her. ‘You – you know – okay?’
She nodded.
Vinnie led the way down the stairs, whistling through his teeth once more, but he started to laugh when he saw the table in the hall again.
‘Christ, Dezo. That’s some barricade you have there, eh. That’ll keep people out all right. My arse, it would. I walked in the back door. And what are you worried about anyway? Sure there’s fuck all here to steal.’
They pulled the table out of the way and went out of the house, leaving the door ajar.
Dezo looked a little agitated.
All the same, Vinnie,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the thought of somebody breaking in.’
Vinnie threw his head back and laughed.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Sure that’s what you did.’
They climbed into the Nissan. There was room for all three in the front. Aileen sat in the middle. Vinnie turned to her and winked as they drove off.
As they passed the entrance to a passageway which led along the backs of some of the houses they did not notice a figure which had ducked in there once it spotted them. When they had rounded the corner and were gone from sight, it re-emerged.
Out of the shadow of the entry, the figure revealed itself to be a young man of about twenty, sturdy and of medium height, dressed in chinos and a denim jacket.
Dermot Davis did not look abused and sickly like his sister, Aileen, or her boyfriend, Dezo, but then he did not see heroin as life’s sole purpose. In fact, he had never used it at all and the more he saw of what it did the less likely it became that he ever would.
He was not like Dezo. Dezo was a dealer, dividing and bagging the heroin in a string of different houses, although not this one. He and a team of pushers sold the stuff and gave the proceeds to Vinnie, for which Dezo got a small cut.
But he had also developed what he thought was the bright idea of cutting out some of the gear and selling it for himself while diluting the rest even more than usual to make the amounts look the same.
It was dangerous. What if Dezo got found out? More and more, Dermot wanted to get Aileen out of there, back home to Waterford where she belonged, which was why he had come to Dublin to find her, but he knew he would have to bide his time, work on her gradually, otherwise she would just disappear again. In the meantime he would try to keep her alive.
In his hand he held a flimsy blue carrier bag which contained a fresh pint of milk, a loaf, a small packet of butter and some tea bags. He had gone to get them while Dezo and Aileen slept.
As he had watched the couple over the past few weeks their slumber had often looked more like coma and he worried about them vomiting and choking to death. He had checked them this morning before leaving. Each day they seemed to deteriorate a little more and the shadow of disease loomed larger than ever in the room.
Dermot had never seen Vinnie Dwyer before but he had guessed who he was, even before he heard Dezo using his name while getting into the van.
Aileen had talked about him. He was a spooky kind of guy, she said, laughed a lot, seemed good fun, but everyone knew what he really was, everyone had a story about something he had done, each tale more bloody than the last.
Dermot did not like the look of any of this.
He walked towards the house, glancing back over his shoulder once, just in case. The road was still empty but people were beginning to come to life behind their grimy walls. He could hear a baby howling. A second one joined in. Music began to blast from a house further down the street and then came a woman’s voice – ‘Turn that fucking thing off!’
He had warned Dezo of the consequences of being caught and he hoped that that was not the reason for Vinnie Dwyer’s unusual early call. In the end, though, Dezo would have to look after himself; what he got up to was his own affair. But Aileen – she should not be involved in any of this. Where was Dwyer taking them?
There were practical matters to be attended to first of all. He would have time to worry later. For the moment he would work on instinct.
He had left the house by the back door, which he had unbolted, but now he just strolled in the front. He walked straight through to the kitchen and stood looking around. On the window ledge he spotted what he wanted. A chisel.
He grabbed it and went into the front room where he shoved the settee to one side. Its castors rattled across the bare floor. Where the settee normally stood, there was a section of floor board which was not nailed firmly in place but had been left to look as if it were. Dermot prised it loose easily then lay with the side of his face on the floor and stretched his arm in as far as it would go, across under the more secure woodwork, until his hand touched something. He grasped it with his fingers and tugged.
He pulled out a Dunnes Stores shopping bag.
As soon as he opened it he could smell the money.
It was in half a dozen bundles of much-fingered notes of mixed denomination, each in a rubber band, and there was a small plastic bag of pound coins as well. He would count it later but he knew from talking to Dezo that there was the best part of five grand there.
He put it all into the rucksack. Someone might come back looking for this but neither he nor the cash would be here when they did.
The van was a few miles along the dual carriageway when Vinnie turned off to the left.
‘Whe-where are we going?’ Dezo asked.
‘You’ll see when we get there.’
This road led to an industrial estate which was in the process of being built. The Dublin outskirts had many such business parks, all eating away at the soft fringes of the countryside. On weekdays, the area was alive with the sound of excavating, of drilling and pipe-laying, but on this Sunday morning it was quiet. None of the buildings was yet occupied, most were still shells, if not just bare frames of steel girders, and it would be some months before the first tenants moved in.
Vinnie stopped at a gate which appeared to be tightly secured by a huge lock but was not. He unhooked it and pushed the gate open, then got back into the van and drove in.
A blue Mazda was parked alongside a long low warehouse which had a gaping hole where the doors would eventually be.
‘That his car?’ Dezo inquired.
‘Yep,’ said Vinnie and drove right in.
He turned off the engine and there was a moment of silence.
‘Right, everybody out,’ he said. He hopped to the floor and went round to the back of the van, opening the rear doors and taking something from inside as his passengers stepped down.
‘Where is he?’ Dezo asked.
The baseball bat hit him viciously in the back of the knee and he buckled with a gurgling cry that came from deep in his throat.
Aileen screamed, her arms jerking in shock like a string puppet’s. Vinnie held the bat in his right hand and swung it forearm, striking her hard on the side of the neck.
She crumpled to the concrete floor as if her whole body had broken apart from within, then lay still and silent with her head at an uncertain angle. Her eyes were open and they had rolled up to expose the whites.
Dezo was groaning in agony but he was trying to crawl towards the open doorway. Vinnie ignored him for the moment and crouched to study the girl.
‘Fuck,’ he said, disappointed. ‘That didn’t take long.’
He straightened up.
‘Ah, well. Better make sure.’
He held the baseball bat above his head with both hands, then brought it down and smashed Aileen’s skull.
Deep red blood flowed across the floor behind him as he walked over towards Dezo.
‘And now, my boy,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you why it’s not a good idea to rip off Sean Donovan’s gear and sell it for yourself.’
He twirled the bat and got a good grip on the handle.
He would start with the other knee.
An hour later, the van stood some miles away at a landfill site, a municipal dumping ground.
Vinnie had brought his own rubbish from Ballyfermot.
Seagulls flapped and squawked along dunes of decaying waste which stood waiting for the bulldozers to come and plough them into the ground. A fire was smouldering somewhere and bits of charred paper blew in the wind.
A fragment fluttered past Vinnie and into the shallow pit towards which he was dragging Dezo’s bloody and broken body. He had him by the feet and he hauled him along with his face in the mud.
At the edge, Vinnie stopped and looked down. In a pool of brown water with an oily sheen on its surface lay the gnarled frame of an old pram. He put his foot against Dezo’s side and rolled him down to join it, then he went back to the van for Aileen.
When they were both in the pit, he stood for a moment studying them. The girl had fallen right across Dezo so that he was practically submerged in the water. Once they were found, the message would be clear to anyone who might even for one moment think of following in Dezo’s footsteps: you’re all disposable.
He got into the van and went back to the warehouse, driving right into it again. There was blood all over the floor now and some was spattered up the wall in the corner where he had finished Dezo off.
There were two cans of petrol in the van and he emptied most of the contents over its interior. When he had finished, leaving the van’s rear doors wide open, he went out to where the Mazda was parked and took a bag out of the back. In it were clean jeans and shoes. He took his overalls and boots off and threw them and the baseball bat into the van.
Dressed afresh, he got into the Mazda and brought it round to the doorway to leave it with the engine running.
From the floor of the warehouse, he lifted an empty milk bottle. He poured some of the petrol into it then soaked a rag and stuffed it into the neck. He stood near the door and gave a last look round, before he took a lighter from his pocket. He lit the petrol bomb and hurled it into the back of the van.
With a whoosh, great sheets of flame billowed out of the vehicle. Vinnie gunned the Mazda and he had barely reached the gate before the van exploded, taking part of the roof of the warehouse off.
‘Woo-hoo!’ he shouted with excitement.
Out of the industrial estate, on the main road, he slowed down, slipping easily into the traffic, then headed at an even speed in the direction of Sean Donovan’s house at Tallaght.
He realised after a couple of minutes that he would have to make a stop along the way. He had a lighter but he had no cigarettes.
Donovan’s home was in a private residential development. There were ten houses in a small cul-de-sac, all of them built of yellow brick, with colourful gardens and neat lawns, although the one at the end, towards which Vinnie now headed, was a little less well-tended than the others.
In fact, it was a mess, with grass which only the wind tamed. Weeds smothered the flowers as they struggled towards the sunlight. Sean Donovan was no gardener.
There was a for sale sign at the house beside it and at the one opposite, too, but the sellers did not have a hope of getting a buyer, not while the neighbour from hell lived there.
Vinnie pulled up into the short driveway and got out with a couple of Sunday newspapers. He did not ring the doorbell but went round to the kitchen and walked in.
Donovan was in a satin dressing gown. A mug of tea in his hand, he leaned against the work surface where a monitor showed what the security cameras were surveying. At the moment the screen gave him a black and white version of the parked Mazda but now it switched to the back doorstep.
‘All sorted out?’ Donovan asked.
‘All sorted out,’ Vinnie confirmed. ‘Lesson learned, I’d say.’
He threw the papers on the table.
Donovan sniffed.
‘You smell of petrol. What’s all that about?’
‘I know I do. I better wash my hands,’ Vinnie said, heading towards the bathroom. ‘It’s nothing,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Just a wee problem with a van.’
There was the sound of running water and soap being lathered.
‘What time’s your flight? Half one?’ Vinnie asked.
‘Half two.’
‘For God’s sake, that’s plenty of time. By the way,’ he said, coming back into the kitchen, drying his hands on a pink towel. ‘They’re writing about you again.’
Donovan was sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper spread in front of him.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve just found it.’