by John Brady
He looked at his watch: five minutes to get to the Distillery Building, the far side of the Markets where Úna Fahy had her office. Full of barristers’ and solicitors’ offices now since they’d done it up. A shame really.
He made it across Church Street at a trot. How could he whinge about that grinding ache in his knee, while Malone had lost nearly two litres of blood? He stopped at the SPAR by the Distillery Building, his hand on the change in his pocket.
He had no fight in him this morning. He watched a woman with a bockety leg step out the door, tearing the cellophane off a package of Carrolls. She let it fall to the ground, drew out a cigarette, and lit up. She noticed Minogue watching. She frowned at him before she headed off up the path, her body swinging around the bad leg.
Somehow, Minogue got through the door of the Distillery Building without a packet of cigarettes. There was light overhead in the foyer, a catwalk style of a bridge or corridor crossing to join two parts of the floors upstairs. Fierce mod entirely, the cement and bare brick.
The porter at the desk was on the phone. Two gowned barristers swept out of the lift, passed him. The accent off one of them, the way he marched, as much and more than something about the gown and the suit and the shine on his shoes scraped at Minogue’s patience. He took the Mirror from the end of the counter.
They’d gotten a picture of Quinn somehow, and put it in the corner of the only one they got of him wrapped in a flak-jacket being shoved into a car by two detectives. “I knew my family was next!” was the headline. There had been no pictures of that Grogan fella yet, but old ones of the godfathers in Belfast had been on the television after the arrests. He’d never heard of Roe before.
The fox killed by the van up in Goatstown had been deemed a front-page story for Indo readers too. Some Environment Officer—did they have such things now?—was snapped beside the outstretched body.
The porter put down the phone, but when Minogue looked up to answer him, the woman walking across from a doorway under the catwalk was Úna Fahy.
She put away her glasses before ordering coffees. Minogue didn’t remember her being so compact in her movements, her eyes so tired-looking.
She chose a table well away from a chattering bunch. Minogue sipped and looked around while she went back to get brown sugar. A swell joint here.
“Thanks for coming in,” she said.
“I was in the area.”
“Special Criminal Court? Green Street . . .?”
He didn’t answer. She stirred here coffee and scooped off the froth.
“It’s still a small town,” she said.
He considered asking her how he thought she was entitled to say that, being as she was from the country. He watched the man behind the counter instead.
“I wouldn’t want to compromise your position,” she said.
“Why isn’t this about Niamh,” he said.
She paused as if to absorb the rudeness. She spoke in a very soft voice then, her eyes on the saucer.
“It doesn’t need to be. Colm and all the family are very grateful for . . . well, for what was done. They’re coming around. Colm is, I should say.”
Minogue waited.
“He won’t be launching actions against the State, the Garda Síochána, and anyone else he can think of,” she said.
“He’s not doing anyone any favours there.”
“Do you think I don’t understand my own brother?”
“Then you’d have told him that he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Being as you’re a solicitor and all that?”
She sat back and looked around the room. He thought about the fox in his garden, if it had been the one run over, about why he felt so badly about it.
“I was going to give a speech from the dock here,” she said.
“What, a pre- sentencing model?”
“Just about.Or maybe an explanation. It’d have to do with denial, and guilt, and anger. A lot of other stuff too.”
“And you assumed your audience would sit through it, did you Mrs. Fahy.”
“Ms. I was Mrs.”
“None of my business.”
She searched his face for sarcasm.
“I got rid of him,” she said. “He was like Colm.”
He kept his eyes on the pattern on the surface of the coffee.
“Jennifer Halloran,” she said.
He looked up.
“No,” she said. “I’m not acting for her family. And I told Mrs. Halloran that too. I mean, that I declined.”
“A small town, you were saying.”
“Our office handles a lot of cases in that line. Compensation. Labour law. That sort of thing.”
“Why did you decide to tell me this?”
“I’m not sure that I should say anything more.”
He sat forward in the chair and felt the Elastoplast on his knee. Malone had a bruised bone. The bullet had gone by only two millimetres away. How could you ‘bruise’ a bone? But Malone’s karma was no flash in the pan: he’d managed to kill Roe outright with the one, the only, shot that had hit him. They were talking about it all over still.
“I’ll be on my way, so.”
“You’re not curious about it?”
“I am,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to compromise your position, to be sure.”
“Colm,” she said and paused. “Colm. You know why he is the way he is?”
“I could guess, I suppose.”
“Guilt, would you guess then?”
“That’d be on the list there, yes.”
She nodded slowly.
“I want you to know that I told Mrs. Halloran. That in my opinion, she had no case or cause against the Guards for what happened.”
Minogue sat back. He tried to keep his face from showing his anger.
“I’ve seen what guilt does, Inspector.”
He kept up his stare.
“It might destroy Colm yet. And his family. It’s why he was so angry at you, at the other Guards.”
Minogue began to imagine pulling at the cellophane, the little tag that released the two parts of the cellophane. The silver foil off his thumb, and crushed quickly against his forefinger. He’d hold the packet up to his nose, of course, to smell the fresh tobacco—the fresh, chemically saturated tobacco, that is. The first drag on a cigarette after years would have him dizzy.
She was looking at him.
“So here is my chief impertinence now,” she said. “The point of me chasing you down.”
He was having a hard time keeping his eyes in focus now. He looked down at his cup.
“I told you about Mrs. Halloran for a reason. It’s because I think that nobody should not go on with a big weight of guilt around his neck.”
He ran his finger along the handle of the cup. How much of a racket would it make, he wondered, if he fecked this across the room.
“I did some checking before I gave that advice to Mrs. Halloran. So I’ll just say this – she’d’ve done what she did anyway. Her mind was made up that if she was caught . . .”
“Tell me something so. How do you know that?”
“In her office, in her desk, there was a letter. She had written it, a sort of a diary thing, not long before she went away on a holiday. I haven’t shown it to the mother yet.”
The last of the coffee was bitter enough. He thought he heard light rain now but the skylight glass was so distorted he couldn’t tell. Somebody’s mobile went off, an awful piece of Beethoven.
“That’s private information,” she said.
“Fair enough. But I’m going to pass that information on to two people. Two people only. Two Guards.”
“Your assurance that it’ll stay private?”
He nodded. She began to fiddle with her teaspoon. There was some grey in her hair he hadn’t noticed before.
“Did somebody the name of Tynan and you have a conversation recently?”
It wasn’t really a smile, he thought as he headed out onto this evening’s version of Church
Street, one of the city’s oldest streets, as grey and flittery-looking as ever he had seen it in all his years in the city.
More than once on the drive home, it struck him that the car was pretty-much driving itself. He stopped at a SPAR. There was a line up at the counter; he was possibly the only person there who didn’t mind. He was late already for something, he’d forgotten what.
Dedication
For Hanna
Éist le fuaim na habhann mar gheobhaidh tu bradán.
If you want to catch a salmon, you had better listen to the river.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction, the characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Copyright © 2015 by John Brady
First Printing 2002
All rights reserved.
Photo: Desmond Kavanagh
ISBN-13: 978-0-9948106-6-3 (eBook)
ISBN-13: 978-1-988041-07-0 (Print)
Also by John Brady
The Inspector Matt Minogue Series
A Stone of the Heart
Unholy Ground
Kaddish in Dublin
All Souls
The Good Life
A Carra King
Wonderland
Islandbridge
The Going Rate
The Coast Road
The Tommy Malone series
Haywire
Nobody’s Fool
The Felix Kimmel series
Poachers’ Road
www.johnbradysbooks.com
