Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  “Did you tell them that he once tried to get the agency to get people for him?”

  “No I didn’t. Of course not – are you mad? But he’s bulletproof, that bastard. We thought we had him but our man disappeared, no sign of him.”

  She put her hands on his forearms.

  “This is my outfit for tonight,” she said.

  He nuzzled her neck.

  “God you’re like a plank” he murmured. “Have a glass of something.”

  The doorbell still squeaked: the workmen hadn’t looked at it she told one of them.

  “Already?” he said, detaching himself a little.

  “That’ll be the caterer, the waitresses, I think.”

  “Waitresses? Jesus, in my house? You’re joking!”

  She grabbed his shoulder.

  “Jim, listen! Will you wake up? You’re in 1999! You’re a Chief Inspector. My job’s going great. Ireland’s woken up – haven’t you read the business pages? We’re not going to be standing around handing out little ham sandwiches like a wake. All right?”

  He looked back into her eyes.

  “You’re a fierce bossy woman,” he said, but there was no sting in it.

  “Just enjoy tonight, will you?”

  She headed for the hall.

  “Where’s Liam?”

  “Ah, he was a bit crooked after school. He’s probably back at Brian’s house.”

  She glanced back at him and for a moment was pierced by the frown that had come on his face.

  “He’ll be okay, love. It’s an age thing.”

  It was very short waiters carrying tableclothes and a bag of something. Just as she closed the door, she saw figures at the gate.

  “Perfect timing,” she murmured. It’d get Jim off to a good start tonight.

  “Are we allowed in?” Kathleen Minogue called out. Her husband was closing the gate behind them.

  Maura called out to them.

  “Welcome the pair of ye, come on.”

  She smiled back at Kathleen. That woman always seemed to be in good humour. It was infectious. Things would go great.

  She watched Matt closing the gate and something cold spread though her. He had dark hair and he was tall, a bit like that fella that had come with Rynn to the pub that day. His bodyguard, or helper, or picker-upper – whatever you called someone who worked for a criminal. Weekes. He had a nasty look to him, and bad eyes. Sometimes she had wondered what he’d done at Rynn’s bidding over the years.

  The money had been put into her locked car sometime during the day, in broad daylight. It wasn’t the slow mocking Dublin accent on the phone when Rynn phoned at the end of the day. He had spoken quietly. He hadn’t sworn or raised his voice.

  “Whatever else you can say about me,” he had said, “I keep my word, don’t I.”

  The face was Matt Minogue’s of course it was, and that boyish look to him that made you think he was half-preoccupied with something else.

  “There’s a nip in the air already, isn’t there?”

  It was Kathleen’s voice, and then she was beside her. A small look of concern, she noted, as Kathleen’s face came in and she felt her cheek on hers.

  “Gorgeous,” said Kathleen. “Way better than moving to mouldy old Foxrock! Wasn’t that the place years back . . .?”

  “Yes, I’d almost forgotten that.”

  Maura knew Minogue didn’t like the hug stuff. It was a shyness she liked. Since getting Matt on the Squad, her own husband had changed, and she was sure it was cues Jim picked up from him.

  “Tell his highness to get the apron off, Maura,” Minogue said in that reluctant way he often spoke. “His betters are here.”

  Kathleen elbowed him, but he had been expecting it.

  He stepped back and held out something with a bow on it.

  “A bit of art,” he said. “Iseult.”

  Maura drew Kathleen into the hall, enjoying the oohing and awing from her about the decor.

  She pointed out defects with the floor where the stairs stopped and rolled her eyes toward the bare patches of plaster still by the door they’d hung on the cloakroom.

  The waitress had gone straight to the kitchen. That seemed to be enough to eject Jim from there.

  “Look,” said Kathleen and rubbed her hand along the banister. “Is that oak?”

  “Bog oak, Kathleen,” Jim said, and leaned in to give her a hug.

  “Are we the first?”

  “Kathleen Mavourneen, you’ll be the first ones in that door to toast the goings on. Here, I’ll get a few glasses from the servant girl.”

  She looked from Kathleen to her husband.

  “They’ll all be along,” she said. “Róisín’s coming up. Ma too. A crowd from work. The Commissioner even. Oh I hope I don’t call him God Almighty by mistake.”

  Kathleen said something about the new one, a rumour about an Assistant Comm. Tynan.

  “But Jim’d know the day or the hour, I’m sure,” said Kathleen, as he returned with glasses and a bottle of Italian bubbly.

  “Let them take the coats off Jim, will you?”

  “Oh, are ye staying? Ha ha!”

  “Don’t you, Jim,” said Kathleen.

  “Don’t I what– Jaysus, don’t let me spill this.”

  “Don’t you know every move that goes on in the Guards?”

  “Bedad and I do,” he said. “And, I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

  He almost overfilled Minogue’s glass. Maura felt the twinge again and tried to fight it off. What was done was done – there was no going back. Ever. Weekes had been a criminal all his life.

  “Somebody has to know what’s going on, don’t they, Matt?”

  They touched glasses. The wine wasn’t cold enough; she should do something about the ice. The doorbell went again and Jim wrenched it open. Róisín, Tom. It was starting. Her chest began to lose the tightness and she tried harder to focus on what was going on around her. The laughter from Jim – Kathleen’s peculiar giggle – Róisín’s husband Tom’s new glasses.

  The phone now. She was nearest. She picked it up, tried to guess who it was needed directions.

  “How’s the party going?”

  She put down the glass and held her hand over her other ear.

  “I said how’s it going? Party started, is it?”

  Her shoulders went rigid and the rush of heat seemed to race up her neck. “Who is this?”

  “Oh, I know you’ll have to do the who is this bit. Don’t you have a second phone in that place of yours?”

  “This isn’t a good time.”

  “Oh, I think it is, Mrs. Kelly.”

  She followed the line to the box at the bottom of the wall, where it connected.

  “I’m phoning back in five minutes. That should be enough time. We’re still in business, aren’t we?”

  “I told you, I don’t want to do it anymore. And don’t call me here.”

  “You haven’t told me anything for months.”

  “There’s nothing to tell, that’s why.”

  “Well, start listening to your husband again, then, will you? What am I paying you for?”

  “I told you–”

  “Now you shut up,” he said, calmly. “Let’s have no more of this ‘I told you’ stuff! This is a two-way street. Five minutes.”

  He hung up.

  She had to keep things going, she knew.

  “Okay,” she said, and she put down the receiver.

  She smiled back at Kathleen.

  “Are we okay, Maura?” Kathleen asked.

  Did it show?

  “Can I . . . ?” Kathleen started to say.

  “Don’t you want your drink?” Jim called after her as she headed upstairs. She thought she heard someone, a man, say upset and then overwork. It would hardly be Minogue saying it.

  She closed the bathroom door. She considered taking a knife, a pliers or something to the telephone line.

  It was cold here. She opened the valve on the radiator and sat on t
he edge of the new bathtub. Jim, the slob, had left his razor out. She reached for it, turned it over. The edge of the blade had soap rime and whiskers. The steel was ice cold.

  Chapter 26

  MINOGUE SAID NOTHING after he got home, nothing, that is, about the latter part of his day. He ached. He went straight to the Jameson’s, all the while carrying on a strained but reasonable conversation through the door into the living room where Kathleen sat, watching the English news.

  “Anything about the African thing?” he called out.

  “What African thing?”

  He waited until the whiskey had gotten by his gullet.

  “I came across some kind of a concert going on there in Dame Street.”

  “No. But there was plenty of other excitement in town later on, I see.”

  “I heard something about trouble down in the Temple Bar,” he tried.

  “Trouble is right. Somebody fired off a gun. That place is, God, I don’t know. Iseult’s place is right there in the middle of all that, God almighty.”

  Not for long, he didn’t call out.

  “She phoned anyway,” Kathleen said. “She got her contraption put together.”

  “She’s a welder now, is she,” he replied, and took another swallow of the Jameson’s. “That’s a good skill to pick up.”

  In the light cast out from the window, he could see some of the results of his tentative efforts to relocate the rockery. Rockeries are not supposed to migrate, he had been telling himself for quite a number of years now, but somehow his efforts here each year had become almost a habit. He almost enjoyed Kilmartin’s slow surveys of the rockery in transit, as it generally was, when he’d look over the latest effort. Bizarre, was Kilmartin’s latest term, delivered in a murmur that was more curious than dismissive.

  “Aren’t you coming in?”

  Hint, hint, he knew.

  “I’ll plug in the kettle first,” he replied.

  He headed for the living room, and flopped down in the sofa beside her. She eyed him.

  “I’m glad that day is over,” he said. “It was brutal, all the running around.”

  “You’re back to the eighteen-hour-day madness, are you?”

  “Temporary.”

  “A temporary posting,” she said.

  He didn’t let on he had registered the leaden tone.

  “Me and Tommy were ready for a bit of, well, you know.”

  “A pint after work.”

  The ads were over. The announcer told them a Special Report was coming up later. To prove she was not fibbing, the screen was taken over by a view of some dusty plain with a few sparse trees, and African faces.

  “Is that what’s-his-name?”

  “It is,” said Kathleen. “Look, it’s Africa – Chad, it says. Is that a coinicdence?”

  The famous reporter looked like he was being boiled red by the heat there, and he was surrounded by children, their brown heads like large eggs.

  The children laughed about something. Several of the kids had baseball and basketball logos on their T-shirts. This released a strange dismay in Minogue. What could you expect, he thought then? Were Africans supposed to stay in loincloths? He remembered the picture of the dead man’s family, all in their Sunday finery. They could as easily have been at one of those gospel churches in the American South. There was a sweeping shot of a hut with lots of kids in it, clapping hands and swaying.

  “I heard there’s a church group wants to sponsor the man’s family here,” she said.

  “Presuming they’d want to come here,” Minogue said, unwisely.

  “Why wouldn’t they?” she asked. “We’re well on here now, aren’t we? There’s tons of less deserving landing here anyway, isn’t there?”

  “They’d better like rain, then. Long nights in the winter.”

  She gave him a hard look.

  “You’re missing the point here,” she said. “The poor man probably hadn’t intended to come here.”

  “The point is what?”

  “That there’s somebody pulling strings, Matt. Someone is making it happen like this.”

  She glanced up to the ceiling.

  “Things don’t just happen for no reason,” she said.

  Kathleen muted it, and sighed.

  “When do you think you’ll be finished this, what is it again?”

  “A case review.”

  “Shunted over to Kilmainham, or Islandbridge, is it?”

  “That’s it. Not the most salubrious of environments, but sure, that’s that.”

  She finished her survey of his profile and turned to the television too.

  He stifled a rising bubble from his gorge and held his breath so the smell of Jameson’s would not escape. It was a bad plan. The first hiccup was massive.

  “Cleaning up someone else’s mess, it sounds like,” she said. “Is that what you want to be doing now?”

  “I suppose I should have told Commissioner Tynan to shag off.”

  “It’s Tommy Malone you should have told that to.”

  “‘Shag off, Tommy. No offence, like?’”

  “I like Tommy,” she protested. “I really do – and I feel sorry for him. But if you’d have stayed away from that place . . . God, I suppose there’s a funny side to it: the only time you go inside a church – willingly – and look what happened.”

  “No-one would have known that in advance.”

  “Says you. But you know yourself that Tommy is, well, he’s not himself.”

  “Tommy might have been on to something. There are leads.”

  “Leads? Can’t the others do that? Why does it have to be you?”

  “To make a long story short, it’s that Tommy got a tip on someone who might be able to bring us to someone else. . . . Who could open up the investigation. The team on the case never got that far, so Tynan wants to go with the one who seems to be able to make the progress.”

  “‘Someone else,’” she murmured.

  “She would be a good source for this case. If, well, you know.”

  He had been caught, and he knew it. She looked at him.

  “If what?”

  “I think, well, we think,” he said. “We think she’s out there still. So, well, that’s part of it. We can only see how far we get.”

  “You’re delighted,” she said. “Admit it. It’s back to the old line of business.”

  He concentrated more on the screen. A shampoo that conditions as well as makes you look like a model.

  “A one-off,” he said. “Then I’ll be back on the Euro beat. The glamour, all that.”

  She gave no sign of receipt of the peace offering.

  He looked over at her, and took in the lines on her neck, the greying strands above her ears.

  “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous, D–”

  She laughed and batted at his roving hands. It was warm under her arm. His finger traced the straps of her bra.

  “Full marks for trying,” she said. “But when the French comes spouting out of you, I know you’re covering up.”

  “Why would I want to do that, chérie?”

  He had her laughing now. It was a good time to press home the advantage.

  The phone echoed in the hall. They stayed still, his chin on her neck, his hands flat. It rang again.

  “Like I said. Cleaning up somebody else’s mess again.”

  “What?”

  “That’ll be Jim again. He’s after phoning twice. You promised you’d try harder with that stupid bloody mobile, Matt. Come on now. I’m not an answering machine.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “(A) ‘Turn on his damned phone’; (B) I don’t know. Answer it, will you?”

  Minogue listened for another ring. Kathleen stirred under him.

  “Leave it,” he said. “He’s been annoying the heart and soul out of me this past while. You think I’m bad, not being able to shake off the Squad. Leave him.”

  Her voice was soft now, serious.

  “An
swer it, Matt. He sounds, I don’t know. A bit lonely or something. Maybe he was drinking. I don’t like to think . . .”

  Minogue took his time. He went through what he’d say: do you know it’s nearly eleven o’clock at night; buy a bloody ticket to the States and drop in on your son and don’t be waiting on him; grow up, move on, stop looking over your shoulder.

  He took the receiver but didn’t lift it until there was another ring.

  “Matt?”

  “Yourself.”

  “Where were you? I was trying to get in touch with you.”

  Minogue absorbed the hurried tone, the odd flatness and almost accentless voice coming from Kilmartin.

  “Kathleen said you were looking for me.”

  He stopped immediately he heard the voice in the background, a woman’s. She was upset. Kilmartin put his hand over the mouthpiece but Minogue still heard the raised male voice and a faint reply.

  “Jim,” he said when he heard the scruffing again.

  “I need to talk to you. Are you listening?”

  “Jim, I’m jacked. I had a day of it today, let me tell you.”

  “Did you watch the news earlier on?”

  “I’m only after getting in the door.”

  “But did you?”

  “No, how could I?”

  “Okay, look. Come over to the house, will you?”

  Minogue looked at the photo of Eamonn that Kathleen had mounted in the hall.

  “It’s ten o’clock at night, Jim.”

  “I know what the goddamned time is,” said Kilmartin, but his voice hadn’t changed from the deliberate, slow intonation.

  “Whyn’t you have your phone on?” he asked. “I could’ve reached you then.”

  “Can it be in the morning?”

  “No. That won’t do. No.”

  An explanation would go a long way, he wanted to say. But it would only draw him in deeper.

  “Did you see the news at all?” Kilmartin asked.

  “No. What did I miss?”

  Kilmartin waited a moment.

  “Nothing. When you think about it. So come over. It’s important.”

  “Has something gone astray on you?”

  Kilmartin didn’t speak for a moment. Moniogue was sure he’d heard a glass, or a bottle.

  “I’ll tell you when you get here. I need your advice. Matt?”

  “I’m half-jarred, Jim.”