So, on the night of December 28, I made my final call to the press office of the Garda Síochána, as the Irish police are called. I was about to go home, and I was expecting nothing different from what I’d been told a number of times already that day: all is quiet.
But that was not what I was told. Instead, the officer informed me that a young woman’s body had been found in an apartment at Mellor Court, on the north side of the city not far from the newspaper’s offices on D’Olier Street. She had been badly beaten, so the gardaí were treating it as a suspicious death. And, since there was nobody else in the sparsely staffed newsroom who was free, and as I had made the call, the story was mine.
This was something of a mixed blessing. On any ordinary news day, the crime correspondent or a more senior reporter would have been assigned to the story, but as it was Christmas, I was as good as it was going to get for the newspaper. It would be a front-page story, and an above-the-fold byline, which all journalists love. On the other hand, I had already been working for nine or ten hours, and it was raining outside. It would be a long night.
I walked down to Mellor Court, and there I did all of the things that give journalists a bad name: I stopped people going into the apartment building to ask if they knew anything of what had occurred; I talked to the security guard who was manning the door of a nearby convenience store; and then, when my efforts had come to nothing, I simply waited in the rain for someone from the gardaí to emerge and tell me what was happening.
When the detective in charge did eventually come out, he looked pale and shaken. No formal identification of the body had been made, he said. A passport had been found in the apartment, and a preliminary identification had been made from that, but the victim had been so badly beaten that there was no way as yet of being sure she was the girl in the passport photo. All he could say for now was that she was not an Irish national, and she was dead.
I went back to the newspaper office and wrote up the story. Later that night, the girl’s identity was revealed: her name was Belinda Pereira, a child of Sri Lankan parents living in London.
Dublin, at that time, was not a very violent city. In fact, Ireland still has one of the lowest homicide rates in Europe, although gangland killings have inflated that figure in recent years, and we have become increasingly inured to casual homicide. But in 1996, Belinda Pereira’s death was shocking to the Irish public. Here was a young woman, far from home, who had been brutally murdered, and at Christmas too, a season of peace. It was felt that the person or persons responsible for her death should be found and punished. Her murder was headline news in every Irish newspaper.
Then, a few days after her death, it emerged that Belinda Pereira had come to Dublin to work as a prostitute. It wasn’t the first time that she had done so, and she had also worked as a call girl in England. A convent-educated schoolgirl, she was studying to be a beautician in London. Prostitution appeared to be a way to supplement her income. In addition, there were reports that her parents had decided to separate, and her mother wanted to return to Sri Lanka. A week’s work in Dublin would have allowed Belinda to earn the money to help her mother get home.
When the details of her lifestyle were revealed, public attitudes toward her death changed. I think people made two judgments upon her. The first was that her murder was not as terrible as it had first seemed, and was certainly not as tragic as it might have been had she worked as, say, a nurse or a secretary. The second was that she had asked for what had happened to her. After all, she was working as a prostitute. She should have expected to meet people who were less morally scrupulous than the norm. In fact, she was obviously less morally scrupulous than many other young women. She had put herself in harm’s way, and she had suffered for it. It was her own fault.
I did not feel that way. Perhaps it was because she was young-two years younger than I was-and beautiful. It might have been because it was the first murder I had ever covered, and I had not yet grown used to such matters. Whatever the reasons, I believed that there was nothing this young woman could have done in life to merit the terrible death that was visited upon her. In fact, there was nothing that very many of us could do to deserve such an end. When the tabloid newspapers began routinely to refer to her as “the Sri Lankan hooker Belinda Pereira,” I felt ashamed and angry. That was what she had been reduced to: a foreign hooker. Such casual dismissal of her life was the first step on the road from caring about what happened to her to not caring at all.
And so Belinda Pereira’s death stayed with me, even as the public gradually forgot about her.
II
I have always written.
That sounds like a rather arch statement to make, but it’s true. When I was a young boy I began reading Enid Blyton books, struggling phonetically with unfamiliar words. (As a consequence, I believed for many years that the word cupboard was pronounced “cup-board” instead of “cubbard.”) The next natural step seemed to be to tell stories of my own. I was addicted to Ron Ely’s Tarzan TV series and the adventures of Casey Jones, both of which were shown on television in Ireland on Saturday mornings, so they became the subjects of my first stories. I was six. My teacher, Mrs. Foley, would pay me five pence for each tale I submitted, so I was, I suppose, a hack from an early age.
I read voraciously, as all writers should. Like many boys, I flirted with the horror genre and then, in my early teens, I read my first mystery novel. Each summer, my father would take us to spend two weeks with my grandmother in Ballylongford, a small village in County Kerry. She had bookshelves that would be regularly raided and refilled by visiting relatives, and at the beginning of each vacation my father would engage in the solemn ritual of the Choosing of the Book. Only on vacation would my father read a novel, preferring newspapers for the rest of the year, so the selection of the right book was of paramount importance to him. (He once chose I, Claudius, which was a grave error, as it took him two years to finish, a mistake he never repeated.)
That summer, my father chose a book entitled Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man, by Ed McBain. I think he chose it because it was short, and after the I, Claudius debacle, short was good. One day, he put it aside to tackle the newspaper, and intrigued by the title, I began reading. That book became the first, and only, book over which my father and I fought for possession. Thereafter, I read every single Ed McBain book I could find. It was my introduction to the genre of which I would ultimately become a small part.
I met McBain, whose real name was Evan Hunter, shortly before he died. There had been a misunderstanding between us early in my career when, as a means of paying homage to him, I had given some characters in my first novel names that echoed his own work. There was a Fat Ollie, and an Evan Baines-awkward, I know, but well-intentioned. McBain was incensed, misinterpreting it as an act of theft. Years later, when we met at last, I explained to him the reason for what I had done and subsequently received a gracious and apologetic e-mail in reply. It was a great relief. It’s possible that I might not have ended up writing what I do had it not been for him, and I did not want him to think ill of me.
Now that I come to think of it, my encounters with my literary idols have usually involved a dollop of mild humiliation for me. When interviewing James Lee Burke in Montana, I managed to get lost for a time in the Great Rattlesnake Wilderness while out for a walk with him, and was eventually found by his neighbor’s dogs. I interviewed Stephen King, and managed to cause my pile of first editions, ready to be signed, to fall on his foot. Sometimes I wonder if it’s really safe to allow me out on my own.