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Greg’s eventual appeal against conviction was turned down, so I’d had to testify against him just the once. I was grateful for that. While my testimony included “nothing but the truth”, I answered only the questions I was asked. Lawyers and judges, they don’t like it if you stray off the point. He served nine years of the fourteen he was sentenced to and got out three years ago. I heard a rumour that he left the country. I’d rather not run into him, not that I think I’ve anything to fear from him, or any real reason to feel embarrassed. It’s just that I’m not good at confrontation.
So, here I am, back in Dublin after all this time. I don’t think I’m going to stay. I never actually lived in Dublin but, before I went away, I spent a lot of my spare time here and it always felt like my town. It was its own place, separate from the rest of Ireland. Now, it feels as Irish as condoms on prescription once had. Had the place changed so much or was it my perspective that was different? I could waste a lot of time fruitlessly chewing on that question but what was the point? There was no longer anything for me here. I went for a pint in Kehoe’s, which had never been one of my haunts in the old days but which was now one of the few places around Grafton Street where I could feel comfortable spending twenty minutes over a drink.
“There’s a face I wasn’t expecting to see!” I looked up from the screen of my phone. The man who’d spoken uttered my original name but at least he had the sense to keep his voice down.
“That name has long been retired,” I told him. “Or at least made redundant.”
“What are you going by now?”
“I dare say you could find out easily enough. Are you a journalist?” But as the question came out, I placed the vaguely familiar face. “No, I remember now. You were the expert who authenticated Greg’s voice on the …”
“It’s all right, everybody still says ‘tape’, though it almost never is these days. Like they say ‘rewind’, though there’s nothing to wind. Including people who have probably never seen even a cassette in their short lives. Yes, that was an interesting case. There were artefacts on the recording suggesting that an original digital source had been duplicated by analogue methods.”
“And that’s unusual?”
“Not particularly but it can raise suspicions. You have to ask yourself why it was done that way.”
“Are you saying it was faked?”
“Not at all. I found no evidence of splices or edits. I just wondered why the clean source had been copied the way it was.”
“Gathering evidence of criminal conspiracies is a messy business. I took what I could get without making Greg suspicious. Should we be talking about this?”
“Why not? Neither of us was on the jury. He’s served his sentence. The case won’t be reopened.” He nodded to the barman, who began to pull another pint. The recording expert swallowed what was left in his glass. “You know his businesses — the VAT fraud end — continued to operate in Europe for several years after he went to prison?”
“I don’t see how that could be. Just a rumour, it must be. You know how people gossip and always assume the worst. Aren’t there restrictions on phones and the internet in prison?”
“I’m not saying he ran it himself. Or even — necessarily — that it was done for his benefit.”
“Sorry, but that’s complete bullshit. Only Greg had the knowledge to keep it going. Nothing — literally nothing, except the legitimate stuff — was in writing. Even if Greg had told somebody, they’d need …”
“They’d need a memory as good as he had. At least as good.”
“It’s too far fetched. Where did you hear this, anyway?”
“I work with the CAB every now and then. There’s an accountant in there who I’m friendly with. We form a sort of alliance to protect ourselves from the cops and lawyers. Well, he said that, given the way Connell ran his operations, they expected the level of European VAT carousel fraud to fall off a cliff once he was out of circulation. That isn’t what happened. It tapered off gently, over six or seven years.”
“Other players, seeing the gap, rushing to fill it.”
“Not quite. If it had been simply that, you’d still expect some disruption. This was almost smooth.”
I finished my drink but didn’t call for another. “This is fascinating. But I’m afraid I don’t have time to sit around speculating. We’ll probably never know the answer.”
“I’m quite sure we won’t. Not for certain. So why not indulge me while I speculate a little? What harm can it do?”
“All right. I admit I’m curious.” I gestured at the barman. “But I’ve a feeling I’m going to be disappointed.”
“Connell can’t have kept literally everything in his head, right from the planning stage. What I mean is, he wouldn’t — couldn’t have started out with a fully formed picture, ready to be memorized. He’d have had to try things out, see how they fitted together. If he managed to do all that mentally — ”
“He didn’t. There were plans, sketches. He spent weeks over them, writing on old sheets of waste paper. But as soon as the plan was complete, before he took the slightest step towards implementing it, he burned the whole lot. In the kitchen range. I saw him do it. Nothing was left, I’m certain of it.”
“But suppose somebody else saw his drafts before he destroyed them. Suppose somebody was able to memorize them, maybe even make a physical copy. Photograph them, or — ”
“Impossible! He barely left them out of his sight. Greg Connell was — is, I don’t doubt — an extremely careful man. Nobody saw those papers long enough to work out what they were about, let alone memorize or copy them.”
“You didn’t need to work out what they were about, you already knew.”
“All right, that’s true. But I’d have needed … Are you saying you think I’ve got a photographic memory?”
“Have you?”
“I don’t believe there’s any such thing.”
And that’s the God’s honest truth. I don’t believe that anybody, even Greg, has a photographic memory. According to the proverb, the thing it’s essential for a liar to have is a good memory, and there’s no denying that, before my newfound dedication to the truth, I used to be an inveterate liar. I drained my glass, stood up and took my coat off the back of my chair. As I was putting it on, I pronounced my last word on the subject.
“What do you think the odds are against two people with the capacity to remember all the details of Greg’s scheme being present in his kitchen at around the same time? I’d say they were very long. You’d have a better chance of winning the lottery.”