‘Thank you, I appreciate that.’ Passing the phone back to Maguire, Quinn smiled grimly. ‘For the first time in your life, Doyler, you’ve got the commissioner’s support.’
‘Have I now?’ Doyle muttered. ‘After thirty-two years, lad. Don’t be damning me now.’
Quinn returned his attention to the Polaroid. ‘What does this mean?’ he said. ‘A beach, is it? Sand, maybe? A stone, a pebble, a hunk of rock?’ Doyle didn’t answer. ‘And who sent it? Who abducted my wife a year to the day after my son was killed?’ Balling a fist, he stepped away from the desk and gazed through the glass into what was now an incident room. More and more detectives were arriving there.
‘Moss, notwithstanding what the commissioner just said, neither you nor Doyle can work this investigation.’
‘The fuck we can’t.’
Maguire lifted a placatory palm. ‘You know I have to tell you that, the commissioner knows I have to tell you that. The fact that you’ll be in the loop is neither here nor there, and what the pair of you do on your own is up to you. Just keep away from the cameras, all right? They’re going to be camped all along Harcourt Street, not to mention outside your front door.’
Outside, Quinn lit a cigarette. His phone rang and he stared hard, still hearing the voice in his head. He answered now but it wasn’t the caller, whoever he was; it was Paddy Maguire.
‘Moss,’ he said, a little breathlessly. ‘Jeeze, man, I’ve been trying to get you. Have you found Eva?’
‘No, Pat. She’s been abducted.’
‘She’s what?’
Quinn stared the length of the drive to the gate, where the press were already beginning to gather. ‘Someone took her: someone who knew it was the anniversary of Danny’s death.’
‘Who the hell would do that?’
‘I don’t know. But there are plenty both inside and out who’d like nothing better than to see me in the ground: maybe if they cannot get to me personally, this is another way.’
‘But Moss,’ Maguire said, ‘we’re talking about a guard’s wife for Christ’s sake. Who on earth would do it? None of the regulars, surely? Not Finucane or McGeady: they wouldn’t be so stupid.’
‘Of course they wouldn’t, this is nothing to do with them.’ Quinn drew hard on the cigarette. ‘It’s either some last anarchic faction of a war that finished years ago, or it’s one psychotic individual who doesn’t understand or doesn’t care what he’s getting himself into.’
‘Have you any idea who?’ Maguire asked him.
Quinn was thinking of the gold links he had found on the grave. He could see the man in his mind’s eye: sitting there in the dock, with dark hair and darker eyes.
‘Moss?’
‘Only one person, but he isn’t in Dublin.’
‘Conor Maggs,’ Maguire said. ‘Of course, who else. Listen, Mossie, I should maybe have told you before, but Eva made me promise not to. He’s been in touch. I know he’s phoned your house as least twice since the trial.’
Quinn stiffened. ‘He phoned Eva? What the hell did he want?’
‘I think perhaps he was trying to see her.’
‘But she didn’t see him, did she?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Jesus, he’s never left her alone, not since they were kids. But he’s supposed to be in London, Pat; I’m sure he’s still in London.’
‘So who else could it be, then?’
Quinn thought about that. ‘There are a few maybe with the balls. You’ve probably visited most of them at one time or another.’ He glanced up then as Doyle came out through the main doors. ‘Look, I have to go. I’ll be home with the kids tonight, though, and we should talk, Patrick. Maybe there’s something Eva said to you that might mean something to me.’
‘Call me whenever you want,’ Maguire told him, ‘and in the meantime for Christ’s sake keep me posted.’
Upstairs again, Quinn considered the portrait of his wife that Maguire had asked him to bring in so they could release it to the press. It was the most recent picture he had: Eva every bit as beautiful as the day he first saw her.
He looked long and hard at the necklace, the gold pendant, and he had to remind himself that her wearing it had been nothing to do with anyone else; it was what it symbolised that mattered. It was an icon, a popular symbol; it wasn’t that long ago you’d see the things made into broaches young mothers pinned to the hoods of their babies’ prams.
He and Doyle were alone, Maguire having decamped to brief the gathering of detectives next door.
Quinn was staring at his wife’s picture but all he could see was Mary Harrington with ligature marks on her throat. They were not what killed her, though: Mary had died of thirst.
The pathologist believed that, due to a combination of hypothermia and the fact that she had been tied up, after seventy-two hours she had probably developed postural asphyxia and gone into a coma. Dizzy at first, she would gradually have grown faint, the potassium levels in her body rising as the fluids started to go down. Then she started to cramp. She would have been crying without any tears; her skin, her lips cracking; her tongue swollen; sickness and dry-heaving as her stomach and intestines dried out. Quinn could see the plastic tarp and black tape that swaddled her; he could see dried blood on her upper lip where the mucous membranes in her nose had withered to the point of breakdown. He could see the skin of her face with no elasticity, wrinkled like a woman three times her age. After that, her blood pressure had dropped to the point where she slipped into the coma. Not long later, there was no blood pressure at all.
In Doyle’s car, they headed for the river. Quinn was on the phone to ‘Busy’ Phillips, his best informant; Doyle was speaking to ‘Jug’ Uttley, an old water rat of a man who prowled the Bridewell area in his Hush Puppies and raincoat like some back-street solicitor. Doyle had him on a retainer and paid for his mobile phone. They found him waiting at a café across the cobbles from the viewing tower at Smithfield.
He had black hair, flaked with dandruff, heavy-lens glasses hooked over the mighty, hobbitlike ears that gave him his nickname. He was drinking a latte and chewing a Danish pastry. He considered Quinn with a little compassion in his booze-reddened eyes.
‘’Tis a bad business when they start in on the guards,’ he said. ‘It’ll bring war to the street, so it will. You mark my words.’
‘What is the word, Jug?’ Doyle rested on his elbows, leaning across the small table and peering into his face.
Uttley loosed an audible breath. ‘Shock, Mr Doyle. I suppose the word is shock.’ He looked a little furtively at Quinn. ‘Grace O’Malley, Lorne “The Thorn” McGeady, they’re not saying it out-right, but if it’s help you’re wanting, Inspector …’ He swept the room with his hand. ‘All the old Dubs: they need something like this as much as they need another hole in their arse. Notwithstanding the personal hurt to yourself, Mr Quinn, this kind of situation is very bad for business.’
‘So who’s heard what?’ Quinn demanded. ‘Somebody must know what this is about.’ Uttley sat back and looked reflectively at him. Arching his brows, he crossed one skinny leg over the other. ‘It’s a puzzler,’ he said. ‘Really it is. There’s no word. I don’t know if it’s shock or that some people do know and they’re not saying, but in all my years on the street I’ve not seen the city so silent.’
‘Are you telling me nobody has heard a whisper?’ Quinn asked him.
Uttley shrugged. ‘I’m telling you the street is quiet.’
Quinn got to his feet. ‘Well it better get unquiet, and it better do so quickly. Spread the word, Jug: let everyone know I’m calling in favours. Somebody has my wife. The last time anyone spoke to her was ten o’clock last night, and if we don’t find her by Wednesday, she’ll be in a coma she might not come out of.’
Monday 1st September 2.30 pm
Murphy was shuffling between her desk and Quinn’s office, where Superintendent Maguire had set himself up. They had divers in both canals and at intervals along the Liffey. Th
ey had people going door to door in Glasnevin with questionnaires, and the incident room was in full swing.
Maguire had been over to Phoenix Park to brief the deputy commissioner for operations, and now he kept looking at Murphy as if there was something he wanted to bring up but wasn’t sure how to do it. She didn’t give him a chance. She was on the phone and on her computer; she was liaising with the detectives flocking in from all over Dublin, as well as those coming up from the country.
A young guard who’d been seconded to plainclothes came over to her desk. ‘Murph,’ he said, ‘the photo is back from the lab. No prints, no marks, nothing.’
Maguire was hovering in the doorway of Quinn’s office. ‘There’s nothing at all?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid not, superintendent.’
‘They don’t sell Polaroid cameras any more,’ Murphy told him. ‘They went out when the world turned digital. But they do still sell the paper. The batches are all numbered, so we should be able to find out roughly where that print came from.’
‘Good thinking,’ Maguire told her.
‘There’s another thing,’ she added. ‘The action is mechanical; inside each camera there’s a tiny set of wheels which rolls the picture out. If we can locate the camera, we can match the picture to it.’
‘OK, we can work on that,’ he said. ‘Are there any other leads? Anything else come in while I was at Phoenix Park?’
‘There’s Blackrock, sir.’
He furrowed his brow. ‘Blackrock?’
‘The stone in the Polaroid is almost black,’ she said, ‘and it looks to me as though the picture was taken on a beach. I was thinking about Blackrock beach, sir.’
‘That’s a good point,’ he said. ‘Organise a search. While you’re at it, organise searches of every beach within a thirty-mile radius of the city. Get people out to Dun Laoghaire and Shelley Banks and, as you say, Blackrock.’
‘I’ll get down there myself,’ Murphy told him. ‘We should appeal to the public as well, get them involved. The more people we have looking, the more chance we’ll find her.’
Back at her desk, she organised a search team with dogs, then called the police in Dundalk and asked them to get officers over to Blackrock right away. While she was on the phone, Maguire went downstairs, where live-TV cameras were waiting.
Just before she left the office, Murphy phoned Quinn. ‘Moss, it’s me,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
Quinn was sitting outside his daughters’ school waiting for them to come out. ‘I’m all right,’ he said.
‘What’s going on?’
She told him that the crime-scene technicians had come up with more links from the gold chain, including the one they thought might have been attached to the jump ring. There were also some decent shoe prints and a couple of fibres that had been taped and sent to the lab.
‘They’re still doing a fingertip search,’ she said, ‘but they did say the striation marks on the chain links were pretty distinctive, so that might give us something.’ Then she told him about the search of the beaches and what she’d thought about Blackrock.
‘That’s a great idea,’ Quinn said. ‘You know, you might be on to something. Look, I’ll come down and join you.’
‘What about the girls?’
‘I’ll find someone to sit with them until I get back.’
‘The super doesn’t want you visible, remember.’
‘Fuck what the super wants, Murph. I’m not going to worry about him.’
‘Well, if you’re coming, bring something of Eva’s so the dogs can get her scent. Listen, Moss,’ she added, ‘this is hardly the time, but I get the feeling Maguire knows. It’s like he can smell scandal, you know. Do you think he suspects we’ve been seeing each other?’
On the other end of the phone, Quinn was silent.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. Hardly appropriate now, is it. God, what am I thinking?’
‘Forget it,’ he told her. ‘We’ll talk later. Look, you get down to Blackrock and I’ll join you as soon as I can.’
An hour later, Quinn parked his car on the headland at Sandymount. He’d phoned Pat Maguire and asked him if he would come over to the house and stay with the girls. They knew him well, of course: he’d been a frequent visitor when he was counselling their mother. He was more than happy to help, and cancelled his appointments.
From where he stood now, Quinn could see the uniforms scouring the beach: volcanic sand broken by clusters of black rock. At low tide, the sea went out three miles, leaving sand and mudflats in its wake. Closer to the road, there were larger rocks split by crevices deep enough to hide a person Eva’s size. They searched them all; the dogs with her scent now from the blouse she’d been wearing yesterday. But as the tide turned and the time slipped by, they didn’t find a trace.
Quinn could hear the hiss of the smaller waves that were gradually chewing up sand. He studied the landscape: the Cooley Mountains behind them in the west. His mind was running with questions, ideas and possibilities. He kept asking himself: why send them a photo if there was no chance Eva would be found? He was a detective; his job was to sift possibilities. He tried to separate his fears and suspicions; he tried to think about it rationally. What did the picture hide? Where was the message? Was it the sand, the stone, the beach. Was it a beach at all, or just a patch of sand?
Blackrock was man-made. Back in the 1960s, people used to come here on holiday from Cavan and Monaghan. There were still a few guesthouses and a handful of old beach huts, but it was no longer any kind of resort. A few new-agers still came, however – in August, mostly, around the harvest time.
‘Lughnasa,’ Quinn told Murphy, who was standing alongside him. The sky was darkening now, and any hope they had of finding Eva was beginning to fade fast. ‘It’s a festival. Old Irish; the word means “hand-fasting”.’
‘What’s hand-fasting?’ she asked.
‘It was a trial marriage. In pagan days, people would get together for a year and a day to see how it would work out. If it was no good, they’d part, but if they got along, they’d make it permanent. A marriage that lasted a year and a day: is there something in that, do you think? Yesterday was a year to the day that Danny died, so today is a year and a day. Jesus Christ, would you listen to me.’
Murphy could see him struggling; she wasn’t sure what she could say. She thought about last night and how she’d known that sooner or later it was going to happen. They had worked so closely for so long, and Quinn’s home life had been so chill and empty. Her own marriage, young as it was, was not all she’d hoped it would be. She knew she had feelings for him, deep feelings, but standing there with the tide coming in, she didn’t know what she could say. The radio crackled, and word came that the team searching the southern end were packing up.
Murphy acknowledged the call, then slipped the handset into her bag. ‘When I spoke to the crime-scene manager, he told me that Eva’s necklace had been ripped from her throat,’ she said. ‘The way the links were scattered, the striation marks – it had to have been violent.’
Quinn nodded.
‘It might’ve been just because of the struggle,’ Murphy said.
He didn’t say anything.
‘Then again, it might not,’ she continued.
Quinn watched as grey waves broke on a rock. ‘The necklace was the one Maggs gave her,’ he said.
She was silent for a moment, then said: ‘Moss, if it was deliberate, the only person who’d rip it off is someone it meant something to.’
‘That’s what you’d think, isn’t it?’
‘There’s only one person then, isn’t there?’ As she turned her back to the sea, the wind caught her hair and blew it around her face.
‘Again, that’s what you’d think, but Doyle’s been keeping tabs on him, Murph: he isn’t in the country.’
They walked back to his car, and Quinn considered the battered old beach huts they’d searched and searched again: they’d asked in every
guest house, every shop; teams of volunteers had fanned out as far as the mountains. With the window rolled down, he smoked a cigarette; he picked up the phone and spoke to Paddy Maguire.
Murphy was sitting next to him, wanting to hold him, wanting to comfort him, but not knowing how.
‘You and Pat go back a long way, don’t you?’ she said when he hung up.
Quinn nodded. ‘We played rugby for Dublin seconds; he was a pretty good scrum-half, and at one time there was talk of him having trials with Leinster.’ He looked sideways at her then. ‘We were on a rugby tour in Kerry when I met Eva. Back in the days when Maggs was convinced she was his girlfriend. What she was was the only girl in Listowel who had any time for him: because she was a nice person, Murph – she had time for everyone.’
‘But he took it that there was something more between them?’
He nodded. ‘When they were kids, he persuaded his auntie to buy that necklace so he could give it to her at her First Communion. That’s how far back they go.’
Murphy was still for a moment. ‘I didn’t work that case, but I remember seeing Maggs on the TV outside the Four Courts. That eulogy he gave: all that bullshit about forgiveness, Christ in his cell in Rathfarnham.’
‘I suppose you can sort of see where it came from, what with his mother and all,’ Quinn said.
‘His aunt was the religious one. When he was a boy, she got him down to the church and I guess the old priest gave him the benefit of the doubt.’ Dragging on the cigarette, he added: ‘But when he was sixteen, his mother died after drinking drain cleaner, and Doyle believes it was no accident that she found it in a wine bottle.’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘He knew the history long before I’d ever been down there, and that was why, when Mary went missing, he was so adamant Maggs was our man. ‘
‘But Eva was his friend?’
‘She took some notice of him, Murph: I’m not sure she ever really liked him. Everyone liked her, though; she was that kind of girl. She was one of those people who could never see the harm in anyone, and as far as she was concerned, Maggs was the victim of a set of circumstances, so she treated him as she did everyone else.’ He broke off then, realising that he was speaking in the past tense.
The Gathering of Souls Page 8
