by John Brady
“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, pulling 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 hi
s 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.”
“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.”
“No grudges or bad feeling with people in the hostel? A row at all?”
Hughes shook his head.
“No-one checked out in a mad hurry either. We got ahold of every one of them who was there that day. Only two we had to go foraging for, one girl went to Cork on the train. Another fella, a Swedish lad, was doing his biking around Ireland thing. We found him down in Waterford.”
Minogue remembered then that all of Hughes’ information had been gathered in only two days.
“That’s a hell of a lot done since the murder there, Kevin. I just realized.”
Hughes shrugged, and tried not to show his pleasure at the comment. He winced then, and took a breath.
“Are you all right?”
“Grand. I’ve been getting these little I-don’t-knows in me belly since yesterday. No more curry for a while, says I.”
Minogue took in the rueful grin.
“So, no sign of the man’s phone at all,” Minogue resumed. “Passport?”
“Ah. It was locked in a safe they keep for the people staying there. So he had a head on his shoulders, you might say.”
The crane began to swivel again, its hopper of cement emptied.
“All bagged,” Hughes said. “All gone to the lab.”
“‘Hurry up and wait,’ is it.”
Hughes shrugged.
“They’re inundated, I hear,” he said. “As usual.”
“Okay,” said Minogue, and looked at his watch. “Thanks for all that. Now. Have we a notion of how we’re going to present this to the family inside?”
“I have a plan I suppose, yes.”
“Spare her the details I’m thinking?”
“I’m with you there.”
“Unless she insists, which is unlikely.”
“We’ll be talking through the embassy one anyway. The language issue.”
“So: ‘wrong place, wrong time’ etc.?”
“That’s about it.”
The image of a man being mobbed, and taken down had come to Minogue several times today already. It brought to his mind something from a nature series on the telly. Hyenas, jackals, ravening, tearing at an animal they had cornered.
“Really not looking forward to this,” said Hughes.
“No easy way, Kevin. No easy way here.”
Chapter 11
Fanning was surprised that he had forgotten about the stink now.
There was hardly any movement in the small crowd of men now. He did a rough count: thirty something, maybe upward of forty in the crowd here. He had been to enough race meetings to know the steady, building charge of anticipation before a race, the burble of talk and the last shouts before the race began. This was different. The quiet seemed to deepen, making way for the sound of traffic in the distance. Then he heard footsteps and scratching close by, and then a low, intermittent sound that he did not like to think was a dog growling.
Fanning felt that he couldn’t draw a proper breath, and was suddenly seized by the urge to be out in the open air. He pushed back at it, distracting himself by watching Murph wait his turn to hand the bet to Delaney. Then he pretended to yawn, and as he stretched, he took in the faces through his almost closed eyelids. There were thoughtful expressions on many now, and a quiet expectancy that on one or two faces that looked like the beginnings of a smile.
It was vital that he remember details like that. Just had to find a way to convey this sense of something primeval in this ritual. With his mind falling into the habit of searching for words and phrases, Fanning felt his breathing begin to ease.
A blue haze of cigarette smoke had gathered by the skylights. The man in the leather jacket was edging his way by some of the men, extending his arm to
hand over a bet to Delaney. Something about his expression — distraction or detachment, Fanning couldn’t decide — and the way he waited while the others milled around Delaney, kept him watching.
He wasn’t quick enough turning his gaze away. Their eyes met for a moment. Fanning felt the man’s eyes on him for several moments after.
“What’s that face for,” said Murph. “Are you going to puke?”
“Two hundred, in the space of five minutes? You could have told me.”
Murph shrugged, drew out a cigarette, and lighted it from his finished one.
“That’s the going rate,” he said. “A hundred’s nothing here.”
“Not to you, it’s not.”
“Don’t be fussing. You’ll get it back with Tony’s beast.”
“What about the other one? The ‘wouldn’t be here for no reason’ one?”
Murph blew out more smoke.
“The tinker’s dog? Another time, maybe.”
“What are the odds?”
“They don’t do odds here. Jacko and them, they get their cut, for holding the thing. Then the owners get a quarter of the pot each. The rest of it, the losing bets pay for the winning ones.”
“Who’d waste their money with these odds?”
Murph coughed, and gave him a disbelieving look.
“It’s not just bets,” he said. “It’s the whole vibe. The scene. Get it?”
Yet another sour reminder of Murph’s B.O. came to Fanning, and he shifted and turned away. When he glanced around at the faces again, it was the man in the leather jacket, the one with the peculiar accent, who looked away.
There was fervour on some of the faces now. Strange sounds came from one of the dogs behind the plywood divider. It sounded like a hum or a small whirring engine. Delaney wrote something on a yellow stickie note he had been attaching to the money, and then pocketed it. He looked around the room.
The light seemed dimmer now. Murph’s face had grown more pale, and the bags under his eyes even darker. Fanning’s neck and scalp began to prickle. His chest had tightened again. He tried to breathe deeper. It wouldn’t take long, he thought. And these were animals, not people. He didn’t have to look directly at it when it happened.
“Scratch,” Delaney said. “…And let them go!”
