by John Brady
“Is that it so far then?”
“Well, I’m finding out about culture on the side. Heritage.”
“Spare me, Matt. What I’d like to know is if you can connect anything. Or where you’re headed with both cases.”
“Too early. Sorry, but.”
“Is the PM on her done yet?”
Minogue found dust in the corner of a window sash. Maybe Malone had the right approach with bouts of bad language.
“I’ll phone you when I know, John.”
“She was a higher up. Right?”
“Yes. Hardworking, a lot of responsibility. Knew her stuff. She mixed, ‘networked’ — all that.”
“How does she, how did she, connect with Shaughnessy?”
“Still don’t know,” said Minogue. “Maybe we can put him in her apartment. There’s a team collecting there. An affair, I don’t know. A few things seem to be coming through. They seem to have traveled together. They didn’t want to attract attention, maybe even to the extent of sneaking into bed-and-breakfasts separately.”
“The lack of stuff coming in from the appeal, is it?”
Minogue wondered how Tynan knew
“I’d be thinking they went to some trouble to avoid people.”
He heard something rubbing over the mouthpiece at Tynan’s end. Muffled voices in his office. The rubbing stopped.
“You’re sure?” he heard Tynan say to someone else.
“Excuse me,” said Tynan then. “Two conversations going here. So I’ll be hearing from you later in the day on this. Even if you’re annoyed.”
“Fair enough. ”
“No word from James?”
“No. Am I to pass on a message if he does phone?”
“You could. We may shortly be getting information which would allow him off the stage here with the media. In relation to Mr. Smith.”
“Is it solid?”
“I don’t know. It happened a half hour ago. This fella has been known awhile but didn’t stand out for any particular reason then. ”
“Do I know him?”
“It’s not a Guard, that’s what I want you to know. A certain person started asking his barrister some very odd questions today at the Special Criminal Court. He’s facing a third conviction for an armed robbery a few months ago. He’s looking for a soft spot to land on.”
“Does anyone know about this outside the Guards on the court yet?”
“No,” said Tynan. “I’ll be phoning an editor in a few minutes. If they’re smart they’ll hold fire on the first article until we get a proper look at this fella.”
Minogue pushed the top of his Biro harder into the paper and let it go. He didn’t realize how annoyed he had become in the past few moments.
“So it’ll be okay again to have a few jars and wild blather with our colleagues above in the club?”
“Was it ever otherwise? Listen, now. There’s something you need to know. This Freeman character phoned me.”
“Leyne?”
“Yes. I asked to be kept informed. It’s to be kept quiet, but Leyne had told him to keep me up if anything happened. Very confidential.”
Minogue looked at a break in the clouds over the south city.
“You won’t be able to talk to Leyne, Matt.”
He thought of the old man grasping his arm: anything, he’d said. The yellow skin, the scar reaching up to his neck. Had Leyne known?
“This Freeman character, his potboy,” said Tynan, “he phoned. They have Leyne on a machine. The consensus there is that he won’t be coming back to us.”
CHAPTER 21
Eileen Brogan looked up from the page at him. Minogue had been thinking of a hospital room. Machines, tubes, wires.
“Sorry,” he said.
“July,” she said again. “That was the end of that stage. There was a do here, a reception. We went over to Sheehan’s pub after the approval was confirmed.”
“Then it passed on to the construction phase, did you say?”
“Yes. All the approvals were in, I heard.”
“The exhibition was the launch of the actual building for the center?”
She nodded.
“I don’t recall seeing any building work started there,” he said.
“I only know what I read from typing up letters and minutes and that or what I’d hear. But I did I hear her complaining here not too long ago. There was some holdup with one of the tenders for drainage work or something. The County Council there weren’t doing their job fast enough.”
Her voice began to quiver again.
“She was so meticulous, so… She worked so hard. I’d go at half-five and I’d tell her, Aoife, go home would you, for God’s sake. I’d feel guilty, and me only a clerk typist really.”
She was trying to stop shivering.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hadn’t realized.”
“No, no,” she said with an edge to her voice now. “I want to do the best I can here now. For Aoife.”
She stared at the Biro Minogue turned against his thumb.
“She wasn’t the kind to talk about home life much. Maybe that’s because she wasn’t married or that. She’d talk about her niece now, or about people she knew.”
“Did she maybe mention things that were on her mind? Upsetting her?”
“You asked me that earlier, I know, and I’ve been trying to think. I didn’t know anything about that few weeks she took off until the afternoon before.”
“You got no impression she resented it?”
“No. I knew she was tired. She wouldn’t complain and she’d just carry on, but there was something missing. I’d never have asked her. I used to ask myself well what would Aoife want, like. Me — I’m just, well, there’s Ronan and me. Not much room for anything else. No holidays or car, not even a house for God’s sake, but me ma and da are great. They’re my family again, sort of. Since Tony and that. Aoife hadn’t been lucky well in the marriage stakes, I suppose — I thought.”
“You knew something about that?”
“Not really,” she replied. “I mean, nobody told me. But I saw her here — right over there, by the window I knew she’d been crying. This is months ago. And I kind of knew — well, there was a feeling — it was a letdown with a fella. I didn’t want to be putting me foot in it. Aoife had her own sort of territory. What would I say?”
“Reserve, do you mean?”
“I suppose. Not snobby now or that. The way a good boss is, not trying to be pallsy-walsy or that. Some people found her cool because of it, or they were a bit put out by her being so smart and all. I liked that about her. But I felt so bad for her then. ‘Plenty more fish in the sea,’ I remember saying to her. Stupid things you say, you know? She sort of smiled. She knew, I think. That I knew, like. Do you know what I’m saying?”
He waited for several moments. She frowned and looked at her hanky.
“What else did you know of that side of Aoife?”
“That’s it. There should have been someone for her, that’s what’s been getting to me this last hour, yes.”
Her eyes went to a corner of the ceiling.
“What about Dermot Higgins, maybe?”
“Dermot here?”
Minogue nodded. Her lips twitched.
“Ah no, that wasn’t on. You’d easy fall for him though, wouldn’t you? If you were a girl, like. No. Dermot doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Everyone knows ”
“What, now?”
“Dermot’s gay.”
Minogue tried not to let his bewilderment show. Didn’t gay men all have short hair and earrings these days? The giveaway voice and mannerisms?
“She did say something that day, now,” Eileen Brogan began again. “Now, if only I can remember it. I thought it was a person she was talking about. Her ex maybe, but I didn’t ask. It was like she was making a crack about it, I don’t know, a fish or something. It was something else though, I suppose ”
“What did she say, can you remember?”
Minogue watche
d her face as she seized on some recollection, met his gaze, then frowned again as she lost it.
“Oh God, if I could remember it… it was just that I thought of it when I said fish. Something that sounded like a sissy. I was thinking to myself, what kind of a fish is that, a piranha or something? You’re no sooner at the top of a hill than you’re right back at the bottom again, I think she said. Back where you started. A sissy…?”
She dabbed at her eyes again. Minogue didn’t push it. He began to arrange the pages. He looked over the poster of the Carra Hill. How many people, how many centuries had it taken to make it? The size of the rocks, how could one person — he looked up at her then.
“Sisyphus?”
Her eyes widened. She nodded once.
“That’s what it was, yes. How did you know that?”
Malone leaned against the doorjamb. Minogue looked down at the files he had scanned already.
“Well,” said Malone, “not one of them worth getting a proper statement out of. How do you like that?”
Minogue sat back.
“Well-respected,” said Malone “Not a bad word about her. Bit of a workaholic. Is that what you’re getting too?”
Minogue nodded. He closed the folder on the pages from O’Reilly’s booklet about Carra Hill and the stone.
“Here, that’s the book your woman had down there yesterday,” said Malone. “It’s another copy, Tommy.”
Malone sat on the edge of the desk and looked up at the pictures.
“What’s that?” asked Malone and pointed at one. “It’s like a giant soccer ball there. That big rock.”
“That’s the Burren.”
“Who put that big boulder there?”
“God. Some giant. Finn MacCool maybe.”
“You were there when it happened, were you.”
“It was always there. The weather did that to it.”
“Don’t you just want to put the boot to it, like? Give it a little shove, watch it rolling — hey, wait a minute. Haven’t you got a picture of something like that back at the office? That Magoo, Magray…?”
“Magritte,” said Minogue. He’d phone Mairead O’Reilly.
“There was something at the place, Tommy.”
“What? She was strangled, and her car pushed over the cliff, yeah.”
“Something at the place…”
“Like?”
Minogue looked up from the cover of the folder. He thought of O’Reilly’s decades of digging, the patient, stubborn mind refusing to give up its belief. Maybe he needed to believe in things to keep going.
“I found these inside that book.”
Malone picked up the photocopies.
“What are the numbers there — wait. They’re measurements, yeah. This is part of her job, isn’t it?”
Minogue didn’t answer. He watched Malone turn some sideways and return each to the back of the sheaf.
“Seen some of ’em before,” said Malone. He dropped them on the desk and looked at Minogue. “In pictures and that.”
Minogue plucked one out and put it on the desk in front of Malone.
“Seen it.”
“Boa Island.”
He dropped another.
“No,” said Malone. “Don’t know it.”
“Drumlin. County Roscommon. This one’s in the museum already.”
“Okay,” Malone said. “But so what?”
“I don’t know.”
Malone gave his boss a long, slow blink.
“So we’d better get back to work then.”
Minogue gathered the pages again and slid them into the folder.
“They’re all heads, Tommy.”
“Good. Try tails next time.”
“She knew the Carra Fields stuff inside out.”
“Right,” said Malone. “That was her job, yeah?”
“That history, the one O’Reilly wrote, the one I took home the other day. There’s a page and a half on a description of the stone, the one they say had to be carried up the hill.”
“For the new fella to be crowned? The next king, like?”
“Yes. Why has she all these pictures from all kinds of books and magazines and even tourist brochures in next to that page?”
Malone rubbed his palm on the short hairs over his crown.
“It’s her job, boss. Same as we’d, I don’t know, make points of comparison with statements or MOS. Scene summaries?”
“There’s more to it than that, Tommy.”
Malone stood away from the doorjamb
“Well, let me ask you something, so,” he said. “How much of what your man wrote is true? I was there yesterday. Even the daughter knows there was stuff made up. Your man was into it all his life, you know. All the legends and stuff- well, I mean, how much of that is just his own inventions? Like, bullshit…?”
Minogue made no reply. He looked at his watch instead. Half-two. Well? he heard from Malone. Still he said nothing. He let his cuff over his wrist again. O’Reilly had no sources for what he’d written. A stone the weight of a bull, carried up a hill? Heroic entirely, but best left in myth. Damn. Why hadn’t he heard what they’d turned up in her apartment? Phone Murtagh.
Murtagh went slowly down his list.
“Spell that again, John. What’s it for, do you know?”
“Antidepressant. It’s just the label bit you get from the chemist. She probably took the stuff with her.”
“Current, is it?”
“It is,” Murtagh said “There’s other paraphernalia. Old antibiotics too.”
“Can we put Shaughnessy at her place? Visiting even?”
“No answer on that. Yet, like.”
“Cigarettes — what did he smoke again?”
“I’ll pass it on to them, boss.”
“Any life on the phones?”
“Nothing.”
Minogue released the Biro he’d been bending.
“When’s the PM scheduled, John?”
“Hers? There was a phone call in from Donavan’s office to notify for attendance. He can do it this afternoon or early tomorrow. Who will we send?”
Malone, that’s who, Minogue had to conclude.
“By the way,” said Malone. “Now that I think of it, when are we ever going to pick up your hardware?”
“What hardware?”
“Come on, you know. We were issued, remember?”
“Not now, anyway.”
“Why not? Didn’t you tell me that fella Kevin Whatsisname passed on something, something about the Smiths?”
Minogue stared at the clock on the dashboard, willing it to change its numbers. He shouldn’t have mentioned what Kevin Kelly had told him in Bewleys.
“Is it the Smiths blathering has you thinking about this again?”
“Maybe,” Malone said. “What about back when you and the Killer were up against a crowd down from the North? When was that, seven or eight years ago? There was bullets flying then, wasn’t there?”
“Seven years, yes,” said Minogue. “The time of the Christmas bombings.”
“Did you then?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
Minogue studied the tips of his shoes. More than scuff there now. They’d go in a few months.
“Well, I wouldn’t have one in the house, Tommy. That was all.”
Malone jammed the gearshift into second and floored the accelerator Minogue heard him swear under his breath.
“I don’t get paid enough to try to talk sense into you,” Malone said. “Why don’t you just sign it out and park it in the cabinet then?”
“It’s still optional, Tommy. ”
“They should make you.”
“They can’t make me bring a gun into my home. And that’s that.”
“Even if it went to compulsory issue?”
“They’ve never made us. We call in the heavies if we think there are guns.”
“You think Larry Smith’s mob doesn’t have guns?”
Minog
ue studied his shoes again.
“There’s seventeen holes in that squad car,” said Malone. “I’d say that’s a serious message.”
Maybe they should really send the bill to Gemma O’Loughlin, Minogue thought. Printing that drivel about the Larry Smith solution from a lubricated, giddy Kilmartin showboating for his cronies at the Garda Club.
“They’d know where we live, you know,” said Malone.
Minogue couldn’t disagree. He’d heard enough over the years of the open threats delivered one-on-one to Guards by the Smiths. The names of their children, even; where their parents lived.
“Hold the horses there,” he said. “Are you going to tell me it’s at home I should be strutting around with a gun in me apron and me doing the dishes?”
“Apron is right,” said Malone, and looked away. Minogue let the silence hang.
“I can’t win this one, can I,” said Malone at last. “You get that thick culchie head of yours down and you won’t budge.”
Minogue let the silence hang. He thought of Mick Fahy’s halfhearted attempt to convince him when they were signing out Malone’s at the armory. It’s not the old days, Matt: they all have them and they use them; there’s no respect for the uniform anymore. He thought about Trigger Little, the heaviness in the air around him. Wife and three kids, separated. Did Malone himself actually like guns, he wondered. And why did he not know this about a man he’d worked with for over a year? Driving around Dublin with an automatic pistol in the back of your pants, now that was progress.
“Back to the case, Tommy.”
“What about it?”
“If the airport is beginning to dry up, well, that’s not the end of the world. We have a couple traveling together and two cars waiting to give us leads. It takes so long though, that’s the frustrating part.”
Malone turned into the Coombe. Minogue returned the stares of two nattily dressed men leaning on a silver BMW. One of the men looked away.
“Want to bet how that was paid for,” Malone said. “That Beemer, with the two music video charlies lying up against it?”
He rolled down the window and spat out a piece of a nail he’d been nibbling on. The air smelled of decaying fruit and exhaust smoke. A pound shop was playing “Only Starting” from the Works’ first CD. One of the speakers seemed to be blown. A tweeter.
