A Carra King (10 page)

“Emerald Rent-A-Car?” he tried.

“Not yet,” she said.

Minogue tried to map the days and places but he was soon stuck.

“This museum thing, John, if he says he's Leyne. What's going on there?”

“Maybe to get the royal treatment researching the forebears and all that,” Murtagh said. “The lig in, the ‘influence.' Researching the forebears and all that? Instead of lining up like Joe Soap at the genealogy office.”

“Garland,” Minogue said. “I've heard of him.”

“Wait a minute. He's got a fancy job title as I remember.”

Murtagh fingered his notebook. He looked up with a faint smile.

“‘Keeper of Irish Antiquities.'”

“I thought that was Maura Kilmartin,” from Éilis. Minogue gave her the eye.

“Garland does lectures too, so he does,” said Murtagh. “Public lectures on history. The Golden Age. Monks and what have you. How we civilized Europe.”

Minogue searched Murtagh's face for irony.

“Anyway,” Murtagh went on. “Shaughnessy's in Jury's Hotel until the Monday. He picks up the car at Emerald, down off O'Connell Street. He makes sure he's booked back into Jury's for the weekend, starting Friday. Plane's out on Monday. He's planned five days of touring then.”

Murtagh rapped the board with his knuckles.

“If Donegal is good, then Shaughnessy's there on Tuesday. Say he's on the road most of Monday. Donegal town's six hours driving anyway.”

“What if he went through the North, but . . .?”

Minogue rubbed at his eyes. He heard cracking sounds from somewhere near his sinuses. If this cold went to his chest he'd be shagged for a fortnight.

“Her Majesty's would give us time and place on this, John. Without much sloothering around the issue, I mean. It's not political.”

Murtagh scrutinized the map.

“Might have gone through Strabane.” He tugged at his lip. “Up to . . .”

“Letterkenny,” said Minogue, “and points north. Derry maybe.”

He squinted at the timetable again.

“Who exactly filed the C65 to Missing Persons anyway?”

Murtagh capped his marker. Éilis answered the phone.

“I don't know yet. But there were the calls from the States. And Billy O'Riordan.”

“All right so,” said Minogue. “Find out exactly, will you?”

Éilis was holding the phone up when he opened his eyes again. Three sneezes this time. His nose felt like a burst football.

“Fergal Sheehy,” she said. “He's on. Needs the money, says he. Will you brief him now or do you want him to stop by on the way to the airport?”

F
IVE

M
alone turned the Nissan into Beaumont hospital. autopsy was set for eleven.

“How many's this for you?” he asked Minogue.

“This'll be thirty-seven.”

Malone cleared his throat again. He yanked the ticket from the parking robot thing and drove through as the boom lifted.

Minogue hated this hospital. Unreasonable, he knew, but he couldn't shake the feeling that all this space here made it too quiet. Easy for him, was Kathleen's take on this. He hadn't been jammed into Mercer's Hospital or Jervis Street in the middle of a Dublin summer for a bloody delivery, had he?

“The ma got her knees done here,” Malone said. “Lovely place, says she. But glad to get out early all the same.”

Minogue stole a glance at his partner.

“Says it's haunted,” Malone went on. “Too long on the drip, says I, losing the head. No, says she. Saw them.”

“Saw who?”

Malone parked next to a plumber's van. He let his seat belt roll back slowly into its chamber, looked sideways at Minogue.

“Kids, she says. From the Starlight.”

Minogue tried to fix the year of the fire at the Starlight dancehall. He'd helped to direct the ambulances delivering the teenagers' charred bodies. How often he'd thought of the dozens of ambulances grouped around the front of the then new hospital, their sirens off, their lights still sweeping uselessly. He remembered it being so terribly quiet. Then, when some of the parents and families began to show up —

He checked the phone again, stepped out after Malone. Wind and unreliable sun had dried much of the tarmacadam now. There were pools still in the shadows by the walls.

“Still no sign of a wallet,” Malone said. “Passport or the like, huh.”

“I'll phone the lab again, I suppose.”

Malone scratched at his lip.

“Picked up a header, hitchhiking,” he said. “Bang. Took everything. What do you think?”

“Keep it in mind,” said Minogue. “But why's the car at the airport awhile?”

Malone held the door open for the Inspector. Minogue paused, eyed Malone rolling his free shoulder. A boxer's reflex as the bell went, he wondered. Was Malone so twitchy before every PM?

“Okay,” Malone said. “He meets another Yank on the road somewhere. He gives him — or her — a lift to the airport. This hitchhiker sees Shaughnessy's loaded. Right? Shaughnessy's a yapper, say, likes to spoof a bit. So he let's things slip, about his da, et cetera. Moneybags, all that. Name-dropping, see? He digs his own grave with his mouth. This hitchiker's back in Reno or wherever the hell he came from. And we're fu — we're banjaxed.”

The hallway was busy. Minogue watched a man with papery skin pushing his own wheelchair ahead of himself. Two kids being walked quickly by their mother, flustered, annoyed; one of the kids with tear stains on his cheeks, the other one looking blankly around.

He slowed to take in the monument to the Starlight kids:
they shall never grow old
.

“Come on,” he said to Malone. “It's gone eleven.”

An orderly stood by the window next to the lab offices eating a KitKat. Through a window Minogue spotted Pierce Donavan's battered Land Rover. The state pathologist had brought it to every site since Minogue had started with the squad. Gerry Hanlon, Garda photographer, was reading the paper at a table. There were voices from the change room.

“Are we all aboard, Gerry?”

Hanlon closed the paper. A pathology assistant whom Minogue had once mistaken for a cleaner two years ago came in from the door behind them. The door to the change room opened.

“Ah, well now. The Clare connection, by God!”

Donavan's greeting put Minogue in mind of a genial uncle, the sort of man who'd fart for the entertainment of children; a man who'd show kids how to make the best bows and arrows. A man who would always wave at trains.

The reserve that Donavan's ebullience concealed was not widely known. A heavily armoured introvert, he had married late to one of his students. She practised as an obstetrician now. Minogue wondered what their dinner-table chat was like. A sometime insomniac who wrote poetry at night, Donavan had given Minogue one of his self-published volumes several years ago. It was after Minogue had become distraught during the autopsy of a child beaten to death by his mother's fella. The mother had been out trying to borrow money to buy heroin.

Donavan had stopped the PM, sealed the room, bought a packet of fags. He had stood smoking with Minogue at the delivery door to the lab for a half an hour. Later he and Minogue had gone for a walk near his home in Howth. The Inspector often recalled that cliff walk. The sun blinding them from the bay, the wind freshening as they rounded the outer edge of Howth Head. Minogue's fury and despair and hatred had ebbed as if by magic then.

“Garda Malone,” said Donavan. “Is it?”

“How's it going.”

“You're travelling in high society there, Garda Malone. Mind that boss of yours.”

“How's the care at home, Pierce?” Minogue asked.

“Orla's fifteen. She has a boyfriend with a ring in his eyebrow. You decide.”

“You want him to move it to his nose, is it?”

“She'll do that handy enough, I'm thinking. Well: the both of ye in attendance for the American, is it?”

“I'm principal, Pierce. Tommy'll be in and out.”

Donavan glanced at Malone before he headed back to the change room. Minogue heard him break into song.

“Are you right there Michael are you right?

Do you think that we'll get home before the night?”

Minogue shook his head and turned to Malone.

“Check on anything coming in on the squad lines, if you please, Tommy.”

“You don't need me in on the . . . the thing here?”

“Later, maybe. See if we can start a paper trail on his credit cards. He's hardly travelling without any, now. Find out what the interviews are looking like at the airport. I'm a bit worried that we'll need to be getting a lot of staff in a hurry.”

“I'll tell Sheehy.”

Minogue stared at the pattern of the floor tiles again, the marks from wheels. Fergal Sheehy would hardly be at the airport yet. The site van and four forensic technicians were working the car park. Swords and Finglas stations had coughed up eight staff between them to keep up with interviews.

He looked up at Malone.

“We'll be there by dinner time, tell him. One or so. Tell him to push Fogarty. The security log books, thefts and break-ins at the airport. Any gang-related especially. Allegations even. Bang heads if he has to, tell him. All the way up to Tynan.”

“Okay,” said Malone. “But let me ask you something. This Fogarty fella, the security chief there. He was shaping up kind of cagey last night. What do you think?”

“He was edgy all right.”

“He knew the patrols were bollocky,” Malone said. Minogue nodded.

“That's on the menu to be sure,” he said. “But what's the story on video at the airport?”

“It's a bit dodgy yet,” replied Malone. “There's surveillance indoors but . . .”

“While you're at it,” Minogue said. “Phone Eimear at the lab and see what they've turned up from the car that we'd need to move on right away.”

Malone had his notebook out but he hadn't written anything. He nodded as Hanlon and the assistant moved around him and entered the change room.

“I'll see you inside then,” said Minogue. “Later on. No hurry.”

A second pathology assistant was putting on a plastic smock next to Donavan. Minogue slipped off his jacket, introduced himself, eyed the headline on the sports page left on a chair. His nose began to tickle, but the sneeze didn't arrive.

“Tipperary always pull one out of the bag,” Donavan said. “The whores.”

Minogue felt his nose block, blotting out the stale, sweet smell he'd had with him since he entered the lab. A mercy, the timing.

“Well the Clare crowd let us down badly this year, I'd have to allow, Pierce. Maybe we should stick to the football for a few years.”

Donavan rearranged x-rays in a folder.

“How are yours?” he murmured. “Is it different when they're grown?”

Minogue shrugged.

“Did I tell you I'm going to be a grandfather?”

“You did indeed mention it. Ye're all fired up and ready?”

“We'll have to get the clautheens out of the attic, I told Kathleen.”

Donavan clipped the x-rays on the panel.

“How well you kept them,” he said. “Up beside your Communion money?”

Donavan had eyebrows like a damned haystack, Minogue decided.
Hirsute
, that was the word. Donavan waved at the x-rays and tugged at his beard for several moments. Then he tapped one with his knuckles.

“There,” he said. “There's sure to be brain damage. The skull is fractured here. And here. You can see actual bone fragments there. Look.”

A male, Minogue thought. Rage, strength. He tugged the cuffs farther down on his wrists. Was the elastic tighter on these new ones? The assistants wheeled in the body from the cooler room. Hanlon placed spools of film on the bottom shelf of a cabinet over the sink and closed the door. One of the wheels on the trolley squeaked. It caught and spun and squeaked again.

“I'll be wanting to see how many separate impressions we can see in that area,” said Donavan. “How many times he was hit.”

Minogue's nose felt ticklish again. He heard the assistant grunt as he lifted the top end of the bag. He retrieved the clipboard and tested his Biro again.

The trolley was being pushed to the wall now. The white plastic bag lay like a pupa on the table. The decay had been slowed by confinement in the car, but the heat had bloated the body. The seal on the zip still reminded Minogue of a tag at a sale. He looked around at the shelves and the cabinets, the clock. The second hand crawling, stopping almost if you looked at it directly. Christ. Half-eleven. The sharp click of instruments being laid on the table seemed very loud. The squeak of Donavan's crepe soles on the terrazzo slowed.

“Good,” Donavan said.

Minogue moved back to let Hanlon prepare for a set of photos. Donavan wheeled over a cabinet with four drawers. On top lay a clipboard with a schematic diagram of the body. Donavan had written “Patrick Shaughnessy.” Another clipboard had a sheet of graph paper topmost. Donavan eyed the clock and scribbled the time on the graph paper. He nodded at the assistant.

“Cut the seal, Kevin. And thank you.”

Minogue listened to the high-pitched wirps of the flash recharging. Hanlon took seven, eight photos of the back of Shaughnessy's head. He took the ruler from beside the head and replaced it with the others on the table. Donavan stood to the far side of the table. His eyes remained fixed on Shaughnessy's neck.

“Good,” said Hanlon.

The assistants rolled the body over. Minogue glanced over at the tagged bags of Shaughnessy's clothes in the corner. The long-sleeved polo shirt might even be a wool blend. The green khaki-style trousers and the jacket were outdoorsy, were they not? He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. Was it himself, he wondered, or had the light gone dim a little? Radio Na Gaeltachta continued to play faintly from an aged transistor radio jammed between specimen jars over the sinks. A subdued conversation with odd episodes of forced humour between the interviewer and his guest, a poet now deceased, gave way to a spirited tune on a concertina. Minogue concentrated on the meandering notes. Why did a concertina always sound like it was about to fly out of control?