A Carra King (9 page)

The last paragraph had pregnancy, love, rage. Then there was an admission that people would easily interpret this as a reflection on her own personal history as a woman in Ireland. An artist on fire. Minogue let the paper fall on his desk and he sat back.
Christ on the cross
.

“That's the first thing I thought of,” Éilis said.

He had said it aloud? She nodded at the paper.

“There's that iconography there,” she added. “It's obvious.”

“What's obvious?” Murtagh asked.

“Motifs,” said Éilis. “Plain as the nose on your face. See the cross there in the background? Behind the table there?”

“Motives,” Minogue said. “What motives?”

“
Motifs
, I said.”

“Looks good on you, boss,” said Murtagh. “And the missus, of course.”

The missus, Minogue wondered; the
missus
will freak.

“It's the rearing,” Murtagh added.

“Iseult's going to be famous,” said Éilis.

Minogue looked from Éilis to Murtagh and back. He studied the picture again. A greasy Irish breakfast. The barbed wire, the crucifix. Motifs?

“She makes a point of saying it's not her,” said Éilis. “Personally, like.”

Minogue let it drop back on to his desk. Murtagh picked it up and whistled.

“Don't you get it?” Éilis asked again.

“Tell me what to get, Éilis.”

“It's like that poem, Larkin. ‘Your mom and dad, they — well, have you heard that one? Philip Larkin?”

“He's dead, but, isn't he?”

“‘Your mom and dad, they . . . mess you up.' Do you get it now?”

The call from Kilmartin saved Minogue.

“What,” was Kilmartin's greeting, “are you bloody paralyzed and you couldn't use a phone? Too heavy to carry, was it?”

“Forgot, Jim. The battery was low. I must have forgotten to switch it back.”

“Get off the stage,” said Kilmartin. “Flemming lies there! Try again.”

“All right. I turned it off because I don't like the damned thing.”

“You're a bollocks, Matt. What use is a cell phone if you won't use it!”

“I'll try again. To adapt better.”

“I'll line you up for a course on it or something. How to
relate
to it.”

“You're on holidays, Jim. What do you want?”

“The fella at the airport. He's ours now, I take it. Who is he? The Yank?”

“Don't you like holidays, Jim? Give 'em to me if you — ”

“Shag off, will you. You'd only waste them canoodling around dives in the arse end of Paris or something. Who's the new case, I said.”

Minogue tried to condense it into three sentences.

“Leyne,” said Kilmartin. “He went big with frozen foods first didn't he? Potatoes, was it? Chips?”

“I think it was.”

“And the whole frozen food thing took off. Yes. What's the son doing here?”

“A tourist, it looks like.”

“Looking for his roots, was he?”

Minogue waited for Kilmartin to work his way around to asking about Tynan.

“Robbed at the airport? Then murdered?”

“We're not up on placing him yet.”

“Jesus. ‘Céad Míle Fáilte' et cetera. How long's he missing?”

“Six days. We can place him in a B & B in Sligo. He was booked into Jury's Hotel here, but never showed. Then he didn't appear for the flight either.”

“He travelled Bed & Breakfast down the country but then he went back to tycoon class when he hit Dublin?”

Minogue's eyes prickled. He held the phone away. The sneeze didn't come immediately. He tried squinting at the fluorescent lights with his eyelids half open. Kilmartin was still talking.

“That's right, Jim,” he tried.

“What time?”

“It was getting on for half-three when I jacked it in at the site.”

“What? He phoned you at half-three this morning?”

“What did you ask me again, Jim?”

“Tynan! I asked you if you'd heard from him lately!”

The sneezes rocked Minogue. Four in a row: he scrambled for paper hankies he hoped he'd kept in the bottom drawer. A final sneeze left him head down, dripping onto a file folder. He let the phone down and swivelled around. He wiped the phone last.

“Mother of God,” said Kilmartin. “That's dog rough, what you have. But I'll tell you one thing, we're all victims of foul play here. You getting pissed at a site last night, me getting the treatment from the Iceman. Eight o'clock this morning for the love of God. The frigging Inquisition. When did he pounce on you?”

“Nine or so.”

“What's he want to talk to you for? It's me he'd want to slice and dice.”

Minogue let his eyes wander along the frosted glass wall of his cubicle. He lingered on the black-and-whites of the footprints from the Dun Laoghaire Park murder. Ninety-quid Nike runners, half-burned. His eyes finally settled on the roadmap of Ireland. Sligo. Had Shaughnessy been heading up to Donegal or down to Mayo? Where had the “touring the west of Ireland” bit come from anyway?

“Well, there's a series being done on the Guards,” he said to Kilmartin. “He said to watch what I say.”

“Talk about the understatement of the frigging century. Are we running a police force or a PR outfit, I hope you asked him. Where did he put in the knife anyway?”

“He got word of some items overheard at the Garda Club.”

Minogue thought he heard the intake of breath in the pause.

“Is that a fact now,” Kilmartin said. “Let me tell you about
that
. That's what has dropped us all in it. Hey, did you recognize her there? That bitch, what's her name . . .?”

The Holy Family, Minogue thought. Iseult on a rant about patriarchy.

“Well she sort of looked familiar but . . .”

“I only got word on this newspaper thing, this
profile
thing, at one of Tynan's come-all-yes there a month ago. I mean to say, does anyone actually go for this ra-ra stuff, open-house,
relationship
shite? Anyone who's been in the job more than six weeks, like? Anyone with time on the beat? Anyone with a brain bigger than a shagging
pea
? Anyone smarted than Lawlor trying to feather his nest for promotion?”

The counties had yellow borders. County Sligo was the collar on the teddy bear that was the map of Ireland. Donegal Bay there, then the ocean. He'd never liked Sligo. He didn't know why really. Maybe it was because it was in the way of getting to Donegal, his real destination on holidays years ago.

“Well?” Kilmartin said again. “Am I tarred with the Smith thing?”

“I don't know, Jim. Things get around though.”

“Ch-a-rrist! A man can't voice an opinion without some gobshite hiding in a corner and making a big deal about it! Had she nothing better to do?”

Minogue detached the phone from his ear. Hard to blame Kilmartin really.

“Well, how in the name of Jases did that bitch get into the bloody club in the first place anyway? Answer me that one, if you can! Lawlor brought her, that's how. It was Tynan started this whole thing, getting the press to play ball — and now look!”

Minogue's extension buzzer stopped Kilmartin. It was Murtagh.

“A few things coming in,” Murtagh said. “They had Shaughnessy on the news this morning. Woke a few people up. Four phone calls came in to Missing Persons. Donegal, the two of them, one from some place called Falcarragh. A local station. A call from a couple who run a Bed & Breakfast near town.”

“Falcarragh,” Minogue said. “Which days?”

“Early last week, before the Sligo B & B. The other one's a guest house in Glencolumbkille.”

Glencolumbkille, almost as far west as you could get in Donegal.

“Here's a wobbler for you,” Murtagh went on. “A call came from the Museum.”

“The Museum, here in Dublin? To do with Shaughnessy?”

“Yep, above in Kildare Street. There's a Seán Garland phoned. Says he thinks this Shaughnessy came in for a chat awhile ago. Yep, a week or ten days back. He thinks Shaughnessy was asking about something or other. But here's the thing: he didn't come in as any Shaughnessy, says Garland. Garland saw the picture in the morning paper. He thinks that your man used the name Leyne. So there.”

Minogue dabbed at his nose and pulled out his photocopy of the Fógra Tóradh notice. Missing person: Patrick L. Shaughnessy. L for Leyne? Why didn't he know the dead man's middle name?

“All right, John. Give me a minute here.”

He underlined Glencolumbkille, took his hand off the cell phone's mouthpiece.

“You're on the move it sounds like,” Kilmartin said.

“The news this morning seems to've stirred the bushes a bit.”

“I won't keep you — just keep me posted if Tynan goes haywire on this rubbish at the club, do you hear me? While I'm away?”

“To be sure.”

“Write this down, I forgot to give it to you.”

Minogue copied Kilmartin's son's address. The Palisades? White flight?

“If anything comes up, in the papers or otherwise,” Kilmartin said. Glencolumbkille, Minogue thought, the strand beyond the folk village there.

“And here's Brian's fax number.”

Minogue scribbled it down.

“And his email — “ “It's all right, I'll phone if there's trouble.”

“Here: is it Jamesons with you? Or do you expect Bushmills?”

“Don't trouble yourself.”

“Oh, and what does Kathleen dab behind the ears, Maura wants to know.”

“Bushmills, too, I think.”

“I bet you don't even know. You bostún.”

“Chanel number something. A black lid. It's pricey.”

“What isn't these days? All right oul son, mind the trams now.”

“Jim?”

“I know, I know — you're in a hurry. I'll be off if you'll let me. What is it?”

Minogue pinched hard at the bridge of his nose. What had possessed him to come up with this question now?

“Larry Smith, Jim.”

Minogue stared at his notebook while he waited.

“What about him? What's your question exactly?”

“Just wondering, that's all. You were the conductor on it.”

“Well, I had to be, didn't I? It was hot from day one. It had to be done right. I took it because there'd need to be high-level consult. . . . Wait a minute. What are you saying? What do you want?”

“Is there even a remote chance . . .?”

“Well, Jesus. That's how the damage gets done, isn't it? Not by direct inquiry, oh no, never that way. It's the slow way, the innuendo, the bloody gossip eating away like an acid at the thing until finally — you're actually asking me? You who worked on it with me, you who sat in on all those briefings with Serious Crimes and those gunslingers, those bloody
headers
from C2? You can't be serious. No way.”

“Just asking.”

“You already said that! ‘Just asking' my arse. See? She's gotten to you even!”

Minogue wondered if Leyne's Foods was the first of the frozen foods which had shown up in the supermarkets years ago. American Style Frozen Foods.

“Look,” Kilmartin said. “It was one or other of a pack from Belfast, I'm telling you. Devlin or Harte — they're known hit-men who take contracts. You know we can't get them on this. Come on now — you spent two days at the site with me, didn't you? There was nothing. Are you forgetting? The dum-dums were down to bloody bottle caps by the time they went through him. Don't you remember? Is it her, the widow, what's her name? Or is it the brother, what's his name, Charlie, rabble-rousing for an inquiry? He's an iijit, but he's sly. The fucker. But they're all like that.”

“Neither, Jim. No. Look, mind yourself over there now.”

The rueful tone in Kilmartin's voice then didn't surprise Minogue.

“Hah,” Kilmartin said. “The FBI. We could show them a thing or two, couldn't we? I'm telling you, we could. The cases where the crime lab is between your ears, hah? The Yanks . . . don't talk to me.”

Minogue thought of the cocked thumb last night, Kilmartin's squint as he aimed: Smih' goh' hih'.

“You're telling me,” he managed.

He ended the call, eyed the duration. The State could pay the airtime on that one. He had kept the newspaper clipping from last week's newspaper, the preview for the forthcoming series on the Guards. He took it out of the drawer. “The Changing of the Guard”: a bit glib really. But that was good journalism, wasn't it. “The Old Guard” later on: well, there was something noble and steadfast about that. Holding fast against a tide of criminality. Plain and simple stuff, no guff and cant. He slipped the pages back into the drawer and stared at the phone. No he wouldn't phone Kathleen right now. He sat back, tried to plan his next hour. Couldn't.

Larry Smith and Company, limited. The simple fact of the matter was that Larry Smith had played cowboys and he wound up in the middle of a road in Baldoyle with bits of him all over the tarmacadam. Hollow-point bullets, brutal. James Kilmartin, a senior Garda officer no less, and no more frustrated than ninety-nine percent of the Gardai, had been caught off-guard voicing his satisfaction outloud. So. In the heel of the reel, who cared about how the streets of Dublin had been cleaned of at least one serious, lifelong gouger. A vicious little bastard in his own right, incurable.

He eyed the page on Iseult again before folding it and slipping it into his pocket. He headed out into the squad room proper. Murtagh had already entered the times on the board. The credit card trail, he thought. Receipts from the States cleared in about a week now. Éilis was copying the file.

The green light from the photocopier flared and died by the corners of the cover, but some escaped to run across Éilis's neck. He returned her blank gaze for several moments. What was bothering her?