A Carra King

by John Brady

  “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, Tom.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Minogue watched Malone working a stone out from between the cleats of his Nikes with a large version of a Swiss army knife. Seventy, eighty quid for the boots. Thirty-odd quid for the knife. Where the hell was O’Leary? The earpiece irritated his ear. An attendant wheeled a toothless man by on a wheelchair. Minogue eyed the drip feed on a stalk. Malone wiped the knife, watched the pair move down the hall.

  “Sorry,” said O’Leary. “I was on another line.”

  “You’re all right. We’re indoors here.”

  “What’s the story with this woman’s car? I’m asking for himself, like.”

  “Hard to say, tell him,” Minogue said. “There’s an identification going on the body.”

  “But it’s her, is it? Unofficially?”

  “It looks like it, Tony. The body’s going to Dublin tonight for the next of kin before the full PM. I’ll phone it through to the squad as soon as I can get positive here. We have the photos to match. John Murtagh’ll pass it on. Now: is that enough to do you?”

  “Got that,” said O’Leary. “And thanks. I have to pass on something to yous. The boss is busy until about seven. He was talking to Leyne’s minder. Freeman? Well, he phoned us. They’d heard the car was found. It was on the radio news.”

  Minogue watched the wheelchair heading back his way. Skin and bone: eyes vacant, inward turning on . . . nothing, maybe. He nodded back at the attendant.

  “They’ll hear in due course,” he said to O’Leary.

  “That’s ‘go to hell and leave us to hell alone to do our job,’ is it?”

  “Approximately, Tony. Look, it’s tough enough.”

  “Okay, I’ll translate that. Any help knowing himself said the same to them?”

  “Nice to know, I suppose. The same phrases, I wonder?”

  “You must be joking,” said O’Leary. “He gave it out in theologian mode.”

  Minogue had to smile. Tynan’s code when he resorted to the biting irony and the endless clauses would be harder to take than a clear FO. That it would have been over Freeman’s finely coiffed American spin-doctor, legal minder, courtier’s head might have made it even funnier to witness.

  “Here’s the thing though,” said O’Leary. “Why I had to call you now. Leyne took a turn. He’s in the hospital, the clinic out in Blackrock.”

  Minogue thought of the scar tissue he’d seen in the open-necked shirt. An unconscious thing with Leyne, he had wondered, displaying his wound, exposing it to the healing of the light and air. Or an I don’t-give-a-damn?

  “He’s had bypasses and open heart,” said O’Leary. “He’s not out of the woods at all. He took dizzy or something, said Freeman, so he’s signed into that clinic.”

  “Before or after he’d heard the news about Aoife Hartnett?”

  “Two and two makes five,” said O’Leary. “You decide. He’s ‘comfortable,’ says Freeman. Cohm-foht-abbel.”

  “Well, they worked,” Malone declared. He left his mountaineering boots by the wall, picked up their trailing laces and dropped them inside. Minogue tugged on his change of socks. He noted half-past four looking back skew-ways at him from his watch.

  “Dry as a bone, man.”

  Minogue looked at his own wellies.

  “Bet you it was the shock,” said Malone. “Maybe he knew all along.”

  Minogue looked up sideways at him.

  “You say Leyne knew the son murdered her?”

  “Capable of, I’m saying. Want to bet the son phoned him from here, from Ireland, I mean?”

  “How will we know that until he gets out of hospital, is the question.”

  “Ah,” said Malone and threw his head back. “What they call diplomatic flu, boss. The timing?”

  Minogue looked up at his colleague. The scorn was plain enough.

  “What,” he said to Malone. “He’s putting moves on us?”

  Malone rested his chin on his knuckles and stared at the boots.

  “Why’d he bring the handler with him? Covering up for the son, boss.”

  Malone brushed his hair with his fingers, ran his palms around his face and breathed out heavily. He shook his head once. Minogue reached down to zip his bag tighter. Then he stood and moved his toes around in his shoes. There’d been no offer of lab coats or even aprons. He and Malone had been steered into this changing room and left to themselves. He glanced down at Malone, still immobile.

  “Are you any better now?” he asked.

  Minogue had known straightaway it was her. He’d heard Malone gasp at the bloated body. Whatever had been feasting on her legs and her belly had seemed to be methodical. Dr. Kelly, a man so like Minogue’s dentist that the Inspector had asked him if he was related, had made two pages of notes. His hands had been shaking, Minogue had noticed. He looked down at his own notes. He’d been studying his own handwriting too long not to notice the dropped endings of the letters and even the words, the scattered look to the page.

  “Looked like she was pregnant,” Malone murmured. “The bloating, like.”

  He lifted his head and squinted at Minogue.

  “Crabs, is that what he said?”

  “I think so, Tommy. A guess.”

  “Jesus. If I had a known that.”

  Minogue closed his notebook and slid it into the pouch in his carry-all.

  “I didn’t write a bleeding word, boss. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Do you think you’ll make it?”

  Malone looked around at the lockers and the stacked boxes.

  “Well, Jases, I’m not staying here and that’s a fact.”

  An orderly came in and began taking his clothes out of a locker. Minogue exchanged the greeting with his own estimates of the weather and quick agreement with the orderly’s scorn for forecasts. Malone wrapped his boots in a plastic shopping bag and closed his travel bag.

  Malone didn’t look much better by the time Minogue finished his call from the phone at reception. Noonan would have a car over for them in five minutes.

  “Cup of something, Tommy?”

  “Not in here.”

  They watched an elderly woman inch her way down the hall using a walking contraption. Is that in his own near future too, Minogue wondered.

  “Well that was the worst yet,” Malone said. “She must have broken every . . . Ah well, what’s the point of talking about it.”

  At least five days in the water, was Kelly’s estimate. The marks of the string or rope had gone maroon. The x-rays showed a broken spine and a fractured skull from the impact of the drop. Her lungs did not have enough water in them to suggest drowning. Minogue had welcomed with relief that numbness that had come over him when he had looked over Aoife Hartnett’s body for the first time. His hands had made notes, while some other part of him had issued the questions of Kelly. He remembered his repeated queries for clarifications, the patient fencing with Kelly’s irritated and defensive reluctance to say anything conclusive about how long ago Aoife Hartnett had been killed.

  “Hoey told me he never got used to it,” Malone said. “It’s why he walked.”

  The drive outside was wet but it had stopped raining again. Minogue was pleased to see the expansively moustached and double-chinned Garda McGurk of the drooping eyelids and the rock concert query driving the squad car up to the door.

  “There’s our man,” he said.

  “Are they looking after you?” was McGurk’s greeting. Minogue sat in beside him and sized up the face offering the gently mocking glances.

  “In a manner of speaking now, and thanks.”

  “Back to the station is it,” McGurk said.

  “To be sure. CI Noonan’s in residence still?”

  “He is, he is. Ye’ll save the barley sandwiches until later on, will ye?”

  “For a while, I’d say.”

  “Six months or so,” said Malone.

  McGurk leaned over the wheel to check traffic by the entrance to the hospit
al.

  “Bad, was it?”

  “As bad as you’d expect,” Minogue said.

  “The poor woman,” was all McGurk said for the rest of the trip to the station. Minogue noted the frown settling over this affable, overweight rock fan he had taken a liking to. A Romeo, he wondered, charming them into bed with drollery and consideration.

  Noonan had tea ready. He finished a radio exchange with a patrol car about registration numbers on a traveller’s van. He ushered them into his office.

  “There’s a long day’s work done,” he said. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

  “It is that. It is.”

  Noonan slid out a sheet of photocopy paper from under a tray.

  “I phoned about the car,” he said. “Here’s a partial list so far. She was in the back seat.”

  “There’s no key in the ignition?” Minogue asked.

  Noonan shook his head.

  Malone looked over Minogue’s shoulder at the list.

  “A tent bejases,” he said. “Sleeping bags . . . no stuff that’d be worth robbing? Didn’t she have a camera or stuff?”

  “No wallets or valuables yet,” said Noonan. “Now isn’t that something. What was the story with the American’s car up in Dublin?”

  “Nothing there either,” muttered Minogue. “No.”

  “There could be stuff down in the rocks there,” said Noonan. “At the bottom of the cliffs. It must have hit a right wallop.”

  Minogue looked up, met his eyes.

  “I daresay. Yes. We’ll need to look into that.”

  Noonan refilled his cup from the teapot.

  “You’ll be wanting to make calls here, is it?”

  Minogue watched Noonan fill his own cup. Bony fingers, sinews: a townie. Minogue tested the chair back and crossed his legs.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Will you release the remains to Dublin for the PM?”

  “I will, indeed.”

  “I’ll be wanting the car to be loaded on and sent up, too.”

  Noonan nodded. Minogue looked down Noonan’s list again.

  “They had a bad time of getting her out of the car,”

  Noonan said.

  “Well, you’re ahead of us there, er, Tom.”

  “Ah, there was talk. The fellas taking the car in off the boat there.”

  Minogue nodded.

  “Car’s rightly smashed up now after that. A straight drop so far as I can see.”

  “I imagine so,” Minogue agreed.

  “The remains would be, well . . . sure I suppose it’d be the same as a head-on. Without the seat belts maybe?”

  Noonan looked from Minogue to Malone and back. Malone jiggled his mug and took a mouthful of tea.

  “I’d be obliged for the use of the phone for a while.”

  Noonan sat back and then stood.

  “Fire away. It’s all yours.”

  “We can — ”

  “Not a bit of it. Go right ahead and use the office. I’ll be outside there.”

  Minogue took out his notebook and flipped to his telephone list. He looked around Noonan’s office again while he tried to muster his instructions and queries for Murtagh to relay to the teams in Dublin.

  The photos of Shaughnessy at the dos, the call-ins from Donegal needed mining properly. He lingered on the wood-framed photo of the group by a door somewhere. Noonan’s broad smile, the uniform, Sergeant’s stripes on the ceremonial grey uniform. The hair looked wispy and soon to be departed even then. Ten years ago maybe? Minogue fingered the number for Castlebar Garda station from the photocopy he taped into each of his notebooks. He turned the phone around and found a line out.

  “I’ll try Castlebar, Tommy. See if there’s anything from the Micra before they wrap it.”

  A Sergeant Gerry Murphy handled scenes of the crimes. He had bagged the loose items and wrapped the car again.

  “Thanks very much, now. Do ye have transport for it to the State Lab up in Dublin?”

  Murphy replied that they did indeed. Had he time to go over a preliminary with Minogue? He did.

  Minogue added to the list Noonan had given him. Accordioned: was that now a technical term? Passenger compartment had been severely crushed. All seats out of their anchors. Anchors, Minogue wondered. Roof down at the front. Impact seems to have been on the bonnet, shared with the edge of the roof. The weight at the front, Murphy tried to explain. Minogue drew what he hoped looked like a hatchback. It had gone over nose first then? Most likely forward, yes. A bit of momentum seems to have carried it over the ninety degrees as it fell. Maps, carry-all bags with clothes, a rucksack, women’s shoes. He waited for a pause before interrupting.

  “Still no effects, Gerry? Handbag?”

  “None, no.”

  “How much have ye done?”

  “Well, we’ve emptied the car in actual fact.”

  “The boot, too?”

  “We have.”

  Minogue looked down the list again.

  “Is there something we should maybe have an eye out for, er, Inspector?”

  It wasn’t sarcasm, Minogue realized. He breathed out and rubbed at his eyes.

  “Bits of string,” he said. “A rope maybe?”

  “No sign.”

  “Ashtrays?”

  The dashboard had been shattered but the ashtray had stayed in place. There had been a gap and the water had worked in. Some fibres from the filters floating free had been bagged for the lab.

  “I’m surprised there’s not more. Stuff belonging to a man — shoes, clothes?”

  “No,” said Murphy. “Not yet identified, I’d better say, I suppose.”

  Had he come across that pushy, Minogue wondered.

  “We’re not playing paper chase here now, Gerry. Say what’s on your mind.”

  “Well,” Murphy said. “We don’t want to make a slip here now, being as, well, it’s tied in with the thing up in Dublin. The American?”

  How could they not know, Minogue heard the voice mock him within, Murphy and Noonan and McGurk and half the bloody country, and it on the radio and telly?

  “It’s a tin opener you’d be needing to get at some bits,” Murphy added.

  Pushed up that track, Minogue wondered. Shoved off with another car? The keys could be anywhere off the cliffs, too.

  “The ignition was definitely off?” Minogue tried. “No bit of broken-off key?”

  “No. We have the steering column in one piece.”

  Minogue let his Biro drop on the paper. He had drawn a box with a circle inside, and another box inside the circle. Put Shaughnessy in the damn car for us, he heard the voice again: that’s all we want. Make one thing easy for us today, for the love of God. He looked down the list again.

  “Rubbish in the car, Gerry? Tins of Coke or that?”

  “Pepsi, actually. Two empties, one torn up in bits — by hand. You know the way people do it with the aluminum ones?”

  “Not from the smash?”

  “No. Peeled, one of them.”

  “Pepsi,” Minogue said aloud. Malone looked over and raised his eyebrows. A sign of nerves, the shredding of a can during a row, to keep the hands busy?

  “I wonder what we could lift off them after a few days of seawater . . .”

  “Depends,” Murphy said. “Ask Eimear above at the lab in Dublin. Alkaline deposits and brine . . . could be. They’re bagged and ready to go to the lab anyhow.”

  As in: don’t be asking things we can’t deliver. Minogue wondered if he had missed other hints earlier. He thanked Murphy and remembered to ask for his phone number again.

  McGurk was sitting at a desk by the door to the public office of the Garda station pretending to work. Minogue paused in the doorway. Noonan again told him it’d be no bother to set him up in the Western Hotel.

  “Thanks now, but we’ll go along now tonight as soon as we have the items from the car and the remains.”

  Noonan looked skeptical. Minogue couldn’t tell if it was annoyance.

  “Sure there�
��s expertise already over the site now,” Minogue added. “And ye’re doing a first-class job of it over at the Fields.”

  “An oul newspaper,” said Noonan. “Cigarette packages. That’s not much.”

  “You have a driver who’ll do the run to Dublin tonight?”

  “I do,” said Noonan, and made a shy smile. “Beamish, the undertaker will do it. ‘There are no complaints about Beamish’ as they say. Will you take a lift with him?”

  Minogue didn’t know, as he thought about it later, if he’d done it for a dare, or because Noonan had said the driver was fast and knew the routine. Malone muttered something about the culchies looking for a chance to slag them, sending them back to Dublin in a hearse. Minogue shrugged that off.

  McGurk led them out to the yard. There was a break in the clouds to the west and beams of light had broken through in the distance. The air had gone cooler. Malone still had no appetite.

  “A bit of cake before we hit the trail,” said Minogue. “And brewed coffee?”

  McGurk piloted them to the Western Hotel. Vivaldi was playing in the foyer. They sat at a table across from the reception desk. Malone walked around, stopping to eye the goings-on in the street outside. Then he went wandering.

  McGurk ordered a piece of cheesecake. He asked Minogue about prices in Dublin: the pictures, a dinner for two — not an all-out type dinner now, just a good one — a flat in Donnybrook. Minogue almost smiled. McGurk had heard there were new nightclubs in Dublin, really quite the thing. Had the Inspector heard of them?

  Minogue was about to try an answer he’d heard from gossip with Éilis and John Murtagh about prostitutes setting up in those new apartments when Malone reappeared from the lounge. He flicked his head toward the doorway. Minogue followed him into the lounge.

  There were a half-dozen men at the bar, some couples at tables. The television was high over the bar, ignored. Beside Kilmartin’s face were some kinds of charts. Another one slid out. Direct quotes and the date prominent . . . “no developments in the case . . .” Four months ago. Larry Smith’s brother walking with his widow down a Dublin street. Another clip of a taped scene: the sheet over Smith out in Baldoyle with the blood from his pulped head soaked in. Minogue caught a glimpse of his own back and the bald spot Kathleen had taken to tickling after a few jars had made her frisky, as he stood with Kilmartin by the sheet.