Sabbathman (27 page)

‘And?’

Reilly was still staring out through the windscreen. Annie found herself wondering when he’d last had a shave.

‘There’d be no problem switching goods here. You could do it. You’d have to have another pack ready, another little parcel, like, with the same goods inside, plus whatever you wanted to get through. As long as you’d sorted it all out, there wouldn’t be a problem.’

‘But how would you lay hands on the replacement?’

‘You could have bought one.’

‘And leave a record? A name? An address?’

‘Sure,’ Reilly yawned, ‘or you could steal one. Earlier. Weeks earlier. Months earlier. O’Keefe’s stuff comes through here about every ten days. So you’d need to have been around a while.’

‘So one consignment, an earlier consignment, would have been short. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve checked?’

Reilly smiled, reaching for another mint, returning the supervisor’s wave when she caught sight of the car.

‘Dessie,’ he said at last, ‘Dessie’s checked.’

‘O’Keefe?’

‘Yes. It’s his theory, the switch, not mine. But I don’t blame
him for that. Yes,’ he yawned again, ‘he checked and he found a customer in the UK, a Mr Perkins …’

His hand disappeared into his jacket and he produced a crumpled invoice. With it was a photocopy of a letter. He gave both documents to Annie and switched on the interior light over the windscreen. She peered at the letter. Mr Perkins ran an insurance agency in Gloucester. Three of the items he’d ordered from O’Keefe Discount had arrived. The fourth hadn’t. Annie looked up. Reilly’s head was resting on the steering wheel. His eyes were closed.

‘I promise you,’ he murmured, ‘even the date makes sense.’

Annie looked at the invoice. Under ‘Description of Item’, against the missing piece of furniture, it read ‘G26SSCD-47 Space Saver Conference Desk’.

She glanced up, her finger anchored on the form. ‘You know how they found the stuff yesterday,’ she said, ‘at Fishguard?’

‘Sure,’ he nodded, ‘we all read the English papers.’

‘Same item number.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Same piece of furniture.’

‘Sure.’

‘Neat.’

Reilly said nothing, running a hand over his face and then leaning back against the seat.

Annie was looking at the invoice again. ‘May,’ she said. ‘That’s four months ago.’

‘It is. It’s plenty of time. You’d maybe need that.’

‘But it’s an age.’

‘Exactly.’

She glanced across at him, frowning. ‘So what are you saying?’

Reilly didn’t answer but opened the door and got out. Annie did the same, following him across the warehouse to an office. The window of the office had been repaired with masking tape. Inside, the woman with the clipboard was sitting at a cluttered desk, adding up a list of figures on a calculator. Reilly shut the door behind him and introduced Annie. The woman’s name was Mairead. She went to a drawer in the filing cabinet and produced a form. She gave it to Reilly and asked Annie if she’d like a cup of
tea. When Annie said yes, she disappeared into a tiny kitchen next door.

Reilly gave Annie the form. Across the top, in heavy black letters, it read ‘Flanagan and Co.’. Underneath, in childlike capitals, someone had filled in a series of personal details.

‘Flanagan’s the name of the shippers,’ Reilly said. ‘This place belongs to them. They’re the ones you come to if you want to work here. And that form’s the one you fill in if you want a job.’

Annie bent to the form. The man’s name was Sean Quinlan. He was thirty-three years old, married, and had last worked for Centra Supermarkets.

‘Where’s Ballynoe Road?’ Annie asked.

‘North Dublin. Corporation housing. Working class area. Just down the road here.’

‘But why’s the address underlined?’

‘It doesn’t exist. Not 205.’

Annie looked up.

Mairead had reappeared in the open doorway. She was holding a spoon.

‘Two, please,’ Annie said.

She looked at the form again. Quinlan had started work in the warehouse in March. His timekeeping had evidently been exemplary.

‘So where is he now?’ she said.

‘Gone.’

‘Where?’

‘No one knows. He didn’t turn up for work yesterday and no one’s seen him since. When we went looking for him this afternoon, that’s what we found …’ He smothered another yawn, indicating the heavy red line underneath the address.

‘Does the firm have a photo?’

‘Only the one for the ID badge. That’s gone, too.’

‘Nothing else?’

Mairead came in with the tea. She gave it to Annie. Annie sipped it, glad of the warmth. The office was freezing.

‘There’s one lead,’ Reilly said at last. ‘Quinlan made a friend here. Young lad. Name of Jimmy. They were both football crazy. Used to play against the far wall there, during lunchbreaks. So Mairead says …’

Annie looked across at Mairead.

She nodded. ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘both of them mad for the game. More’s the pity.’

‘Pity?’

‘My window.’

‘Ah.’ Annie grinned, looking at Reilly again. ‘So? You’ve talked to this Jimmy?’

‘Aye, I have. And it turns out yer man Quinlan may have been from the north. Talked about one of the Derry teams. Linfield. Knew Windsor Park as well.’

Annie nodded, looking at the form again. Windsor Park was the biggest stadium in Belfast. The Northern Ireland team played internationals there, and she’d been a couple of times, once with Kingdom.

‘What else does Jimmy say?’

‘Nothing. Except he thinks he may have a photo. One of the guys here was leaving, back in the summer, and they had a drink or two. Jimmy took some snaps. He thinks Quinlan may be in one of them.’ Reilly smiled his soft country smile. ‘Now how’s that for starters?’

An hour and a half later, Annie and Dermot Reilly met Jimmy at a bar in Drumcondra, an inner-city area just north of the Liffey. The bar was shabby. The walls were yellowed with nicotine, and the floor was littered with discarded crisp packets. There were curling sausages in the hot cabinet on the counter and when Annie made her excuses and found the lavatory, the light bulb had been stolen. She sat in the dark, thinking about Reilly, and when she got back to the bar she found him talking to young Jimmy.

The boy had arrived late. He was barely sixteen: pale, thin, freckled, with a shock of red hair. His accent was even thicker than Reilly’s and when Annie asked him what he wanted to drink, he settled for a Coke.

Annie got the drinks. Back at the table, the two men were bent over a handful of photos. They spread them over the greasy formica, peering at them one by one. Annie sipped her drink. The second Jamieson’s was beginning to soften the pub’s harder edges.

She looked down at the photos. Jimmy must have had problems with the flash on his camera because most of them were very dark, but she recognised the ghostly bulk of the big containers in the background, and Mairead’s face under a green crêpe paper hat. Jimmy picked up one of the photos and showed it to Reilly. Reilly held it up to the light, nodding. Then he passed it to Annie.

‘The one on the right,’ he said. ‘No marks for focus.’

Annie examined the photo. It had been taken outside the office where they’d been earlier. The window was intact, no masking tape. Two faces dominated the photograph, big men, clearly drunk, one holding a can of Harp lager. In the background, on the right of the photo, was another man. The focus was awful and his face was in near-darkness but there was enough to register certain features under the thinning hair. The mouth, for instance: wide, with fleshy, almost feminine lips. And the eyes, deep-set, with a startled expression.

Reilly was looking at the boy. ‘Just the one photo? That’s all you’ve got?’

Jimmy explained that Quinlan hated having his photo taken. Famous for it in the warehouse. Never looked a camera in the eye.

Annie gave the photo back to Reilly. ‘How well did you know him?’ she asked Jimmy.

The boy looked nervously at Reilly. Reilly told him to go ahead. He turned to Annie and explained they’d played football a lot, but not much else. He’d often suggested they went into the city together, maybe even get a ticket for one of the end-of-season cup games, but Quinlan had never been keen. He’d said his wife was an invalid. She needed looking after. She spent most of her time in a wheelchair.

‘Did you ever see her?’

The boy shook his head. ‘I don’t even know where he lived,’ he said. ‘He never told us.’

‘Wasn’t that odd?’

Jimmy shrugged. A job was a job. People came and went, and it was just nice to kick a ball around with someone who really knew what they were doing. He gazed at his drink, uncomfortable again.

Annie watched him a moment, then nodded at the photo. ‘Can
I keep that?’ She found her bag and put an English ten-pound note on the table.

‘Sure.’ Jimmy brightened visibly. ‘It’s yours.’

Reilly drove Annie across the river and into the city centre. It was gone ten now but the streets were still busy. Cousins’ secretary had booked Annie into a hotel by St Stephen’s Green, and Reilly took her to a restaurant nearby, a newly-opened place he’d seen written up in something called
IT
. Annie said she insisted on paying but Reilly shook his head. Orders, he said, were orders. Nothing but the best. Courtesy of his bosses at Harcourt Terrace.

‘What’s
IT
?’ Annie asked, settling behind a table near the back of the restaurant.

‘It’s a fancy magazine.
IT
stands for the
Irish Tatler
. I read it at the dentist’s,’ he winced, ‘last week.’

‘Ah,’ Annie nodded, ‘you spend a lot of time at
the
dentist’s?’

‘Too much.’

‘Serves you right.’

‘Why?’

‘All those peppermints.’

The food was superb. They had a big dish of scallops and fillets of John Dory and a huge helping of buttered potatoes that the Irishman swore were the best he’d ever tasted. They talked about their respective jobs, what made the pulse quicken, what didn’t, and they were onto the third bottle of Chablis when Reilly mentioned Sabbathman. Evidently the story was very big in Ireland. The government might be outraged but the rest of the country thought it was a gas.

‘You solving that one too?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Annie grinned, ‘me and a friend of mine.’

‘Friend?’

‘Boyfriend.’

‘Intelligence? Like you?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Special Branch. Like you.’

‘Ah … then I was right.’

‘About what?’

‘That good taste of yours.’

He lifted the glass, a silent toast. He’d already told her he was married. His wife’s name was Bridget. They had three kids and were saving up for a new second-hand car. Annie smiled at the phrase, thinking of Kingdom, what he was up to, who he might be with. She’d tried to phone to thank him for the flowers but apparently he was away for a couple of days. South Coast somewhere. Maybe Portsmouth. The name had made her stomach lurch and now she knew why. She missed him. Badly. She didn’t want him talking to some pretty young doctor. She wanted him back home, in her bed, telling her how much she mattered. This was new territory, a journey she’d never risked before, and she found it oddly overwhelming.

Reilly had gone back to Sabbathman.

‘You really think there’s a link?’ he was saying.

‘To what?’

‘To O’Keefe? To the north?’

‘O’Keefe, no.’ Annie shook her head. ‘I don’t see that at all. The north?’ She shrugged. ‘I like Quinlan. That sounds OK to me. You should put in for a commendation. Very neat. And very plausible.’

‘We have a customer?’

‘Definitely.’

‘You’ll be wanting it wrapped? To take home?’

‘Please.’

Reilly beamed at her, lifting his glass again.
‘Tiocfaidh ar la,’
he said, ‘thank fuck for the armed struggle.’

Annie awoke to the soft flutter of the bedside telephone. She struggled upright, peering at her watch. She had a headache. It was 07.38.

‘Annie Meredith? Hugh Cousins.’

Annie settled back against the pillow. Outside the hotel, through the double-glazing, she could hear the growl of the morning traffic. She began to massage the ridge of pain above her eyes, giving Cousins a brief summary of what had happened. She was about to double-check the name of the head of the Garda Special Branch when he interrupted.

‘You say you’ve got a photo?’

‘Yes. It’s not wonderful but I’m sure our guys can enhance it. All they need–’

‘And you’re saying the man’s disappeared? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes. A couple of days ago. According to the locals.’ Annie closed her eyes, trying to will the pain away. ‘I’m seeing Reilly again this morning. He’s got some documentation for me. They’re very keen. Give me a couple of days and God knows what they’ll be offering. I’m serious. It’s wine and roses. Literally. Reilly tells me–’

Cousins cut across her again. ‘We need to meet,’ he said quickly. ‘Lunchtime would be best.’

‘But–’

‘Listen to me. Go to the airport. Get the first plane you can.’

‘Plane?’ Annie stared at the phone. Belfast was ninety miles up the road.