by John Brady
“Very creative,” said Kilmartin, sidling up. “Very unique. Is that normal for a Protestant thing nowadays, I wonder.”
“I’m hardly the one to ask.”
“Bet you liked it all the same,” Kilmartin said. “Right up your alley. That sort of pagan aspect. Unless you want to try telling me it was a hundred percent Christian.”
Minogue made a quick study of Kilmartin’s face for signs of mischief.
“It wasn’t bad, I suppose,” he said. “Pity you weren’t up to coming in.”
“Anyway. What was that plant she was talking about again, in the bogs?”
Minogue knew that Kilmartin had hung around the door to the church. He would have heard plenty from the speakers. Three women who had met outside the door to the church began to laugh like seagulls.
Kilmartin eyed Minogue.
“‘Celebration of life,’” he said. “Right?”
Minogue was reasonably sure now that Kilmartin missed the traditional, lugubrious funeral service he had hoped for.
“Ash–, As– Ash something, what was said in the service,” said Kilmartin then. “I must Google it.”
“Asphodel.”
“It’s a plant?”
“Bog Asphodel.”
“Grows on the bogs? Funny I never knew the names of the things you’d find growing in a bog. All the years I spent mullocking about in or near bogs too. Ironic, or what. And some legend? What was that about?”
“Persephone.”
“I’ve heard of her. Okay. But who was the other one? Dam, Dem…?”
“Demeter. Her mother looking for her every year, and she in the Underworld – Persephone, I mean. The seasons. All that class of stuff.”
“The Underworld.”
“That asphodel is Persephone’s flower.”
“That’s nice, I suppose.”
Minogue had had years of practice returning Jim Kilmartin’s goads with his own.
“It’d be a sacred flower too, then. Obviously.”
“Oh obviously. Very nice entirely.”
Minogue felt for his car keys. A bird scolded from a hidden place nearby. Was it the same one, he wondered, he had half-believed was calling to him in the middle of that old Irish hymn, Be thou my vision. For a moment, he took it to be a cry of grief and anger from the birds who themselves would miss Rachel Tynan, painter and worshipper in their domain.
“But why all the pagan stuff in a church? I’m only saying.”
“It had to do with resurrection,” Minogue replied. “I suppose.”
“Right,” said Kilmartin, thoughtfully. “Easter and all that. But you’d have to know poetry or that, mythology, to get that. Bit over my head. Other people too.”
Minogue did not agree. That disagreement was not sufficient to prompt him to discuss the matter further. Kilmartin shifted his feet so he was looking over Minogue’s shoulder into wilder Wicklow.
“Never in all my life did I think I’d hear people singing in Irish in a Protestant church,” he said. “It was Irish, wasn’t it? But fierce old Irish…?”
Minogue was suddenly weary of Kilmartin’s archaic approach. Maybe Jim Kilmartin would be wondering next why the hesitant fiddle playing of the nine-year-old girl for the hymn had brought everyone to tears.
“I want to ask you something now,” Kilmartin said, clearing his throat. “And of course it goes without saying, I understand your position.”
Minogue waited.
“Any word on whether Tynan is going to call you in?”
“Why would he call me in?”
“You know what I mean. A straight answer is all I’m asking.”
“He’s busy,” Minogue said. “As you can see.”
This drew a scowl.
“The whole Garda doesn’t just shut down if Tynan’s out of the picture, does it? All I want to find out is one simple thing: how long is he going to leave me hanging. He’s the man with final say. Something’s got to give here.”
Minogue spotted Sergeant Brendan O Leary emerging from the church. He was talking to a short, older man with a hearing aid. O Leary took his leave of the man, and he began to thread his way toward Minogue and Kilmartin.
“What more does he want,” Kilmartin went on. “Listen, Tynan has had all the documentation for what, three months now? What’s stopping him?”
Minogue pulled his coat tighter around his chest.
“Well,” he said, “if he calls me, in I go. I suppose.”
“Of course you do – but not without an AGSI go-ahead, right?”
Minogue had already had two calls from the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors on the matter. He had not told Kilmartin.
“Maybe you should give me your script and I’ll just memorize it.”
Kilmartin took a step back.
“Kick a man when he’s down. Very nice, I’m sure.”
Minogue watched the Commissioner’s aide, Sergeant Brendan O Leary, talking to a grey-haired, fiftyish man in a navy-blue Loden overcoat. O Leary eyed Minogue, and the man looked over too, squinting against the unexpected patches of sunlight. He began to make his way toward Minogue.
“Barry,” he said to Minogue. “Barry Conlon, Foreign Affairs.”
Kilmartin had already made himself scarce.
Conlon’s vigorous handshake was rendered uncongenial because of his bony hands and long, skeletal fingers. Minogue had dropped his cigarette behind, and now attempted to locate the smouldering butt with his heel. He noted that in contrast with the out-of-date cosmopolitanism in his overcoat, Conlon’s shoes were a generation too ambitious, going on forever to narrow, squared-off tips that curled upward.
“I’m glad I was able to reach you,” said Conlon, his eyes blinking rapidly under thick iron-coloured hair, trimmed tight. Impatience showed only around his mouth.
“We wanted to be sure you were on track concerning this man Klos.”
“Yes.”
Conlon raised his eyebrows.
“Didn’t want to leave anyone out of the loop.”
Minogue waited several moments for the slurs to subside within.
“Well I know where I’m going anyhow,” he said. “And why.”
Conlon nodded, as though a weighty issue had been settled.
“We don’t want to step on one another’s toes, now. Last thing we need.”
Minogue hadn’t a clue who or what Conlon meant.
“True for you,” he said.
He could no longer see Kilmartin. For a moment, he imagined him sprinting in panic through the fields and across the vast bog to the southwest.
“And it goes without saying,” said Barry, “that it will be comfort to them, the man’s mother, I mean, to know of your background.”
“Grand, so.”
“As long as it’s brought up with, you know, with sensitivity to the situation we find ourselves in.”
We find ourselves in: the phrase ran back in Minogue’s mind a few times.
Conlon seemed to be waiting for his reaction. Minogue thought he saw Kilmartin disappear around a bend in the laneway
“Your former work?” Conlon said.
“Oh, the Murder Squad, you’re referring to,” said Minogue, caught between embarrassment and annoyance that he had missed the hint.
“That sort of expertise, yes.”
“Well, I’m – the team on this case, the people at Fitzgibbon Street station – they would… Well they would be the people who would…”
“We’ll touch base then,” said Conlon.
“We’ll talk anon, em, Barry. Yes.”
“Feel free to phone – me, or the department. Any time.”
“Well, thanks very much now.”
He took Conlon’s card, and set out to find Kilmartin.
He and Kilmartin had a free run all the way back to the city. Minogue considered parking, and going into the shopping centre for a cup of coffee, but Kilmartin would keep him there for hours, yapping.
“Thanks,” said Kilmartin, pu
lling open the passenger door. “Glad I went.”
He paused and looked over.
“But that was funny,” he said, and winked. “You have to admit, those papers blowing around like that.”
Minogue waited until Kilmartin had started his relic of a Jetta, and as the sooty cloud from the exhaust settled over the street, he gave Kilmartin a salute and headed into town. The Dublin area had fared even better than Wicklow with clearing skies. Except for the usual curse-of-God Donnybrook village and the Mercedes cluttering up the kip there while their owners shopped for courgettes and sun-dried tomatoes, mid-day traffic was obliging.
The Garda at the barrier in Harcourt Terrace was unfamiliar to Minogue. He looked up from the HQ parking sticker that Minogue had slid down the dashboard. “Doesn’t work here,” the Guard declared.
“They usually make an allowance here in the visitors’ section.”
“They put in bike racks there last month,” said the Guard.
“But sure I’m only coming from the funeral.”
The Guard’s expression didn’t change.
“So I imagine that there’s at least one spot that won’t be used today.”
The Guard gave no sign that he had gotten the hint.
“Well try your best with the visitors’ spots,” he said, and turned away.
Minogue pulled in to the Commissioner’s spot, wrote his mobile number down on a piece of paper and placed it on the dashboard. He checked the file again and decided that there were indeed five pages missing at most. Locking the car and taking in the Dublin-filtered spring air about him, he imagined his missing pages fluttering against a hedge, and then being suddenly whisked into the air again higher up into the Wicklow Mountains.
He was waved by the desk by Moo, the near-to-retirement Garda Mooney, a man with a fearsome memory for hurling games, teams, errors, players, catastrophes, and tactics back at least thirty years. Minogue recognized several of the faces that he passed on the stairs, and he returned the nods and one “How’s the man.” Two flights above him he heard two men with heavy Midland accents, laughing. “What odds says I,” one man said quickly between guffaws. “Isn’t that what we have car insurance for?”
A short hallway opened out into a room sectioned off by a half-dozen cubicles. Newish dividers covered in grey cloth and lateral filing cabinets filled in the spaces. Beyond it was an open area where desks and tables faced one another. Minogue remembered that there were two conference rooms at the far end of the open area.
There were only two people he could see in the whole room. One, a woman, was on the phone and smiling, the other, a detective who looked or at least dressed and coiffed like a rowdy film star.
“How are you. I’m looking for a meeting…?”
The detective put down his sandwich.
“The Polish man? In 207 there. People there ahead of you.”
He gave Minogue the eye and he tapped his nose.
“Thanks.”
The door was half ajar. Minogue passed and glanced in. The two women there turned toward him. No Detective Hughes. He smiled sympathetically at the two and headed for a man’s voice.
Kevin Hughes was on his mobile by a window. He raised his eyebrows at Minogue and he shifted his feet.
“We’re starting now,” he said. “I’ll be off.”
But before he closed the phone, Hughes listened, and his eager look, with Viking blue unfocused eyes resting on the view across Harcourt Street. The brace of fat pigeons on a parapet seemed to make him half grin. His lower jaw moved from side to side.
“No,” he said finally, with a smile. He closed the phone, pocketed it, and extended a hand toward Minogue.
“Kevin Hughes, Fitzgibbon Street.”
“Matt Minogue. I’m up in the Park. Next to the Zoo, as they say.”
Hughes smiled. Minogue saw that his front teeth crossed slightly.
“With International Liaison,” Minogue said. “I had better say.”
Hughes stooped to pick up a slim leather briefcase. Late thirties, Minogue decided, thinning a bit up top, and filling out his jacket with little enough room to spare. Hughes rummaged in his briefcase and then he looked up.
“How’s the weather in there?” Minogue asked.
“Not bad at all,” said Hughes. “Stoic, is the word. The mother was prepared for it, so she was.”
“So, no changes? We go ahead with this meeting?”
“Information session, we’re calling it. Yes. You had a look at the file we sent over yesterday evening?”
“I did, Kevin. Yes.”
“You don’t read or write Polish, anymore than I do, I take it.”
“True for you. Has the mother any English at all?”
“Little or nothing. The one from their embassy will be helping. I have her name here, starts with a D. See if I can say it.”
“Danutay?”
“Danute Juraksaitis.”
“You do speak Polish,” said Hughes.
Minogue waited for the humour to do its work.
“What do you see then, er, Kevin?”
Hughes hesitated. Then he spoke carefully.
“Well what we’re seeing is this man, Mr. Klos, and he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. Basically. The old story, I know.”
He looked to Minogue for some approval.
“Here’s a man doesn’t know his way around Dublin,” he said. “A newcomer. He’s had a few jars – but he’s not drunk. He’s nowhere near his place, the hostel. Is he lost, wandering about? Or is he tagging along with somebody? Was he told to go down there off the quays? Was he lured?”
Minogue’s inner eye moved through the streets and lanes that led back from the Liffey quays.
“Then,” Hughes went on, “they – there were two different sets of shoes – start to kick the shite out of him. It’s a sudden attack. Full speed right from the start. And down he goes. Pretty soon he’s defenceless. His hands and his nails tell us nothing, except that he didn’t put up much of a fight. Didn’t get the chance to put up a fight? He had marks – ruptures, bruises – all along the small of his back. It looks like there were people taking penalty shots at his head.”
Minogue winced.
“Swarmed?” said Hughes, with a sigh. “I’d say yes. A gang, some savage initiation thing? Don’t know. Onlookers, kickers, I’m thinking – or I’m hoping, I should say. It’s the ones who looked on will grass the others. How many’s a swarm? Was he with someone, someone offering him something? Don’t know.”
“Substance abuse issues with him?”
“Not known.”
“What’s top of the list for pending? Closed circuit? Door to door? Site material?”
Hughes sighed and stroked his Adam’s apple again.
“The post-mortem?”
Hughes stopped stroking.
“Say he’s dropped there,” he said to Minogue. “Afterwards, like.”
“Bouncers at some club, or a pub, and they went too far? Dropped him there?”
“Yes,” said Hughes. “That’s open. We’re working on it.”
“What have they given you from the lab so far?”
“There’s dust and things on his clothes. He was dragged, or he was falling around, or being thrown around. Roll-up papers. Tiny traces of dope. Marijuana, I mean.”
“And all you have from the pathology so far for cause is on the file that I got? The brain hemorrhage, the fractures?”
“Skull fractured. Eye sockets broken, broken nose. Teeth out. A dozen and more serious soft tissue injuries. Several fractured ribs, fingers broken.”
“Toxicology, how long are they telling you for that?”
“Monday. Hopefully.”
Something scattered the pigeons from the roof opposite. Minogue followed the movement of a crane as it slid across the rooftops.
“It was wet that night,” Hughes said. “So what we got at the site isn’t clear. I don’t know if it will ever be clear. We pegged it all out, lasered it.”
<
br /> “Footprints, shoe markings?”
“Yep. Incomplete, the lot of them. Mixed and mucked up with the rain.”
“You tapped into the station for local info.”
“First thing, yes. There’s plenty of lowlife roving about the area. In spite of the fancy, what d’you call it, rehabilitation?”
“Gentrification, I believe they call it.”
“Yes,” said Hughes. “A lot of people passing through the area. Not just the office people during the day. Dealers, we know them, most of them. There’s sex trade. Low key. It’s a zone for a particular group, or shall we say family.”
“Let me guess. Egans?”
“Fair play to you. We have it – via some Guards in that area – that the Egans have nothing to do with this though. Legit.”
Minogue had checked area stats twice on the computer, but the GIS plotted only three years back. He had clicked through each year watching the lanes and buildings appear as the map changed. The whole area had been transformed in a very short time indeed.
“So he’s off the map a lot that evening?”
“So far, the only times we can place him are leaving the hostel. A Slovenian – where exactly is Slovenia anyway? I forgot to find out.”
“I’m not sure. Across the water, anyway.”
“A Slovenian fella said he had a few words with him. Like, the Polish lad asking if he wanted to go out on the town a bit.”
“‘A bit.’ What’s a bit?”
“Fella says he had the impression that it was whatever he could find – pubs, clubs. That’s just before eight. But there might be something from a shop there in Abbey Street. Maybe bought some papers, like roll-ups. The girl’s not sure.”
“What’s the story at the hostel? Any talk of him there, pals? His effects?”
“Well, Slovenian boy alluded – is that the right word? … Well he says that they’d be doing a little pot at the hostel – no not inside, obviously. Everyone does, says he. He had – the Polish lad now – he had a suitcase back at the hostel, and a rucksack. Clothes, toiletries, magazines, some johnnies. Some class of foreign booze, Polish writing on it. Biscuits – local. Gum, matches. A few bits of paper with writing on them, turned out to be names of organizations and things here to do with Polish living here now. I got it all handy from people down there at St. Michan’s. That’s their church now, you know, the Poles.”
