The Organised Criminal

By Jarlath Gregory

Jay O'Reilly returns home for a family funeral after an absence of three years. His father, the most successful smuggler in Northern Ireland, asks for his help in return for one hundred grand. Jay is tempted by the money, and the chance to help his cousin Scarlett escape her abusive relationship. He turns to his friend Martin, a gay half-gypsy, for advice. But nothing goes according to plan...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Salt
• Release date: Oct 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784630164

Jarlath Gregory

Jarlath Gregory is from Crossmaglen, Co Armagh, and currently lives in Stoneybatter, Dublin. He is the author of Snapshots (2001), G.A.A.Y One Hundred Ways to Love a Beautiful Loser (2005), and The Organised Criminal (2015). He has also worked as a bookseller in Chapters Bookstore, and written for Attitude, Esquire and GCN magazines. He recently completed the M.Phil in Creative Writing in Trinity College Dublin and currently works as a freelance copywriter.

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THE ORGANISED CRIMINAL

Jay O’Reilly returns home for a family funeral after an absence of three years. His father, the most successful smuggler in Northern Ireland, asks for his help in return for one hundred grand. Jay is tempted by the money, and the chance to help his cousin Scarlett escape her abusive relationship. He turns to his friend Martin, a gay half-gypsy, for advice. But nothing goes according to plan…

"The Organised Criminal is a masterly novella of male friendship, family betrayal and economic corruption. By turns brutal, beautiful and funny, it’s an astute exploration of a Northern Ireland rarely seen in fiction." JAMIE O’NEILL, author of At Swim, Two Boys

"Jarlath Gregory’s The Organised Criminal has themes which are familiar - family, betrayal, love and death - but the setting and the characterisations and the telling of the tale make this a distinctive and fresh book, one that can read like a thriller but linger like something much more dangerous." KEITH RIDGWAY, author of Hawthorn & Child

"The Organised Criminal is a hugely enjoyable read. A book brimming with rage and indignation, hewn from the very darkest of materials but always tempered with well judged humour and sharply observed detail. It is a novel of ideas as well as a cleverly drawn crime thriller. It demands to be read." MARK O’HALLORAN, writer and director of Adam & Paul

JARLATH GREGORY is the author of Snapshots (2001) and G.A.A.Y One Hundred Ways to Love a Beautiful Loser (2005). He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin.

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Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

Copyright © Jarlath Gregory, 2014

The right of Jarlath Gregory to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2014

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-78463-016-4 electronic

01. Wake

Duncan was being waked in his mother’s semi-detached home. Dozens of cars were parked in and around the labyrinthine innards of the concrete estate. Kids with plastic toys played on the kerbs, oblivious to death and its aftermath. I flipped down my sunshade and looked in the mirror. My eyes were anxious. My palms were sweaty.

Weddings, funerals, what was the difference?

I prepared myself for duty.

My mum calmly straightened her necklace, applied another layer of lipstick, and patted her hair.

Look lively.

I flicked my smouldering cigarette butt into a ditch. It had once been a laneway between neighbouring estates where kids from either side of the divide had come to wage mock wars, but it had since been cleaned up, landscaped, and fenced off. A peeling piece of graffiti spelled I.R.A. in bottle green, off white, and burnt orange.

Dolores walked briskly ahead. The first person we met at the door was Duncan’s brother Seamus. We’d never got on.

Seamus, I’m so, so sorry, where’s your poor mother?

Dolores sailed onwards, leaving me to shake hands awkwardly with my cousin.

Jay, long time no see. Get yourself a drink, man. I’ll catch up with you later.

The usual herd of extended family milled in and out of rooms. I caught glimpses of familiar faces, those faces you only ever see at weddings or funerals. There’d be time enough for conversation later. I went upstairs to pay my respects.

All the blinds in the house were drawn. Plates of sandwiches and tea were doing the rounds, attached to various capable women, the sort of women who always seemed to be at wakes. I could smell the whiff of booze from downstairs.

I braced myself to walk through the door to Duncan’s old bedroom.

The room was crowded with mourners, interspersed with the tricks of the Catholic trade – candles, holy water, a priest. Weird, that there was still a market for all that holy tat. The murmurs died for a second as I entered the room, then picked up again, slightly louder than before. Dozens of pairs of eyes took me in while pretending not to. I stared at the coffin.

It lay lengthways across the room, side on as you entered.

It was mahogany with brass fittings.

It was open.

While silk ruffles cushioned the dead, sewn shut, made up face of my cousin. Duncan looked both bloated and drained, if that was possible. It made sense when you realised he’d been bloated by booze before death, and drained of blood by the embalmer afterwards.

A wad of padding had come loose from one nostril. Someone ought to fix it, in case Duncan’s face leaked, in case that became the last image I’d ever be able to conjure up of my cousin again – the spongy face, leaking brain sewage through its nose, down its drawn lips, dripping from the chin. But I couldn’t bring myself to reach across and touch the body. Like everyone else, I pretended the dislodged nose plug wasn’t there.

I stepped forward.

Several bodies melted away in deference to a relative of the deceased.

I forced myself to look down upon the face of Duncan Goodman for the last time. I clasped my hands together in what I knew the room would take for silent prayer, although no prayers came to mind, only a contemplation of the dead.

My earliest memory of my cousin was just an image, sun-bloomed, hazy, and faded round the edges like an overexposed photograph from the Nineties – which it was, in