Islandbridge (19 page)

“I hear you,” Malone said. His Dublin accent was muted now, almost a monotone. “Loud and clear.”

Minogue tried. He asked about Sonia's latest accountancy exam, and was there any sign of the parents, Mr. and Mrs. Chang, getting a bit less frosty. And were they really moving the restaurant out to Terenure?

Malone gave cursory answers. It was clear he had no inclination to talk further. Minogue felt the urge to apologize but did not. They ended the conversation with a “later.” Malone didn't tell Minogue he'd be in touch.

The afternoon dragged. Minogue was soon snared in a long phone call with a woman named Finnoula Morrissey from the Director of Public Prosecutions. She tried to explain why the offshore banking records he had gone to so much trouble to get would be shaky terms to introduce. He wanted to ask how some run-of-the-mill go-boys who had bought suits and BMWs and a few accountants' crooked expertise, could pay so much money to lawyers to tie this case up for four years now, within a soft lob of being thrown out due the length of time. He didn't ask her. Instead he scribbled a to-do list on his notepad while he listened to her. All the while, Minogue still registered his own slow and steady slide from anger to annoyance and then to something approaching numbness.

Things got better late in the afternoon when
Inspektor
Moser came through the section. He was chaperoned by Basically Lally, and some others began to turn up, faces from the session in the morning. There was a bit of a catered do for him in the conference room, a lame joke from Lally about the Sacher torte, the famous Viennese cake Minogue had never heard about, and yodelling. Moser chatted about Bulgarian criminals and people from Zagreb who had even harder-to-pronounce names. He also talked about Halstadt where the Celts had a big salt mine, and also about Celtic music and how many people actually spoke Irish for real.

Soon Tadhg Sullivan tried out his Kerry-inflected German. Minogue had to turn away so no-one would see his smile. Moser was studiously polite and an earnest listener. He made no attempt to help Sullivan, or to correct his pronunciation. Soon the talk shifted to Austria and Ireland. Minogue couldn't help but admire the conversational fluency and the sheer affability of this Viennese mastercop. He liked the lilt and the changing tones in Moser's accent, and the easy humour that was never forced, or over the top: Ah, but we are all consultants now, we police officers, are we not? Ah, like you, we too have a large, careless neighbour! And of course, we in Austria have our own version of their language.

There was some fair slagging about
The Sound of Music
from a fella Minogue recognized as Serious Crimes, but couldn't put a name on. Moser smiled, but then told them that the musical was quite unknown in Austria, and how ironic that was. Sullivan got some uniquely Austrian curse words from Moser, and practised them until they met Moser's approval.

Yes, the cake was crap, and the coffee was dire, but Minogue was glad of them. He had stopped brooding about Malone, or rather what Kilmartin suspected of Malone: that he had lost it, and was now dabbling in something that would turn out to be a set-up.

Moser remembered Minogue's name when they shook hands.

“Someday you will visit Vienna?”

Minogue was caught off guard.

“Certainly,” he managed.

“You are from the western county, I understand,” said Moser. “The county of Clare?”

“I am, to be sure.”

“The Burren, no? And the Green Roads that nobody knows about?”

Minogue had to return the smile, and the wink.

“Except you, em–”

“Peter. I wish to go back there. It is a very strange and beautiful place.”

“Strange, I grant you, yes.”

Had Minogue a card? Sorry. Email? Well . . . send it to the section, and it'd get to him for sure.

There was a look of polite bafflement to Moser as they parted, Minogue saw.

But then it was time to go home: transnational crooks could breathe a sigh of relief after half five Ireland time, as Minogue left the office of International Liaison for the teeming streets of the dynamic, maddening international city of Dublin.

He picked Kathleen up outside the auctioneers on Merrion Square. Waiting at the lights, he looked down the row at the Pepper Cannister Church by the canal and the clouds massing behind it. To her question, he answered that he'd had an interesting day. Not that he'd looked at the letter of resignation he kept in his drawer. Nor that he'd had a strong desire to drink ten pints at about half three. Nor that he wanted to pack a bag and head down to as remote a spot as he could find in or around the Burren for a couple of days.

Kathleen turned on the radio. They listened to someone being interviewed about the man in the garden. Already the name had stuck: The African Miracle. People had already been bringing bouquets and wreaths to lay outside the house.

“Ever since Princess Diana,” said Kathleen. “I'm telling you.”

“I saw a bit of it this morning. I was passing a shop and it was on.”

“Well, they are sure now he fell down when the landing gear was put down,” she said. “That's what I heard. He was frozen.”

Then there was news of the economy overheating. He kept his eye on the clouds to the south. They finally made it through Donnybrook.

“I'm kind of concerned about Tommy Malone,” he said.

Kathleen closed the magazine.

“What's it been now since the funeral?” she said. “Eight months?”

“About that.”

She looked out dolefully at the traffic that sped by, released as though by catapult from the lights at Donnybrook church.

“That's not long really,” she said.

They stopped at Stillorgan Shopping Centre. Minogue bought a bottle of Chilean wine along with the staples. Kathleen opted for fish.

He opened the wine immediately they got home, and he took a glass with him down the garden. There were undoubtedly the beginnings of some infestation on one of the apple trees. Painting would be needed on the garage door too, of course – and then there was the issue of windows that he'd been trying to avoid for the past few years. He looked back at the house. Sell, he wondered, and he imagined a non-existent acre in sight of the Atlantic, sheltered under the Burren heights, and an easy walk into the village. But he'd go mad for the buzz of Dublin.

Kathleen was walking slowly down the garden too now, glass in hand, taking in the progress or lack of same in the flowers and shrubs along the way.

“That was Iseult who phoned,” she said. “She'll be out tomorrow.”

Minogue nodded. Their daughter showed no signs of letting up on a manic schedule to finish a commissioned installation of some kind, all metal and holes so far as Minogue could see.

“Any word of Pat,” he said. “Or from Pat . . . ?”

Kathleen shook her head and began to examine the small pears that were now spotted.

Minogue was sorry he'd asked.

He was able to salvage part of the day later on. He took Kathleen up to Dalkey Hill first, from the car park there. They took their time looking out over the city through the milky evening haze settling there, gazing from crane to church spire to crane again.

And instead of just driving home, he had turned down toward Killiney Strand instead.

The tide was in, as he'd hoped, and there were sizeable waves up, and Minogue had plenty of time to take in the darkening water and listen as the stones shifted and hissed at the water's edge. For a while, he watched a dog swim into the waves to bring back a stick, again and again. Two men began to take down their sea-angling rig. Soon, even the greys gave way, and the lights along the coast south began to form a line against the darkness. Kathleen had the light on in the car, and she was listening to the radio. She'd rather not stop off for a drink, thanks. He didn't mind.

1
Literally ‘Oisín seeking the Fianna,' the saying means a great longing for former times and company. This expression derives from the legends of the Fianna and its leader – and Oisín's father – Finn Mac Cumhaill. Oisín had gone to Tír na nOg with a beautiful maiden and had spent three hundred years there. Homesick, and believing he had only spent several days away, he returned to Ireland to find his friends and family long gone. He met instead a man who was struggling to lift a rock, and decided to help him. He remembered the warning that his feet must not touch the ground in Ireland or he would instantly become as old as the time that had passed in his absence from Ireland. Leaning down from his horse, a strap broke and he tumbled to the ground, immediately becoming a very old man. As in many legends reformed to suit Christian purposes in supplanting older ways, he was then baptized before he died.

Chapter 6

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
involved Minogue acquiring a low-grade headache almost right away. It was something he attributed to poring over copies of bank statements and correspondence, part of the State's information being prepared on Banba Garden Supplies. Banba had shipped in vases from Poland, in containers, four of which were found to contain hashish. This was almost exactly what the Garda Liaison officer in the Europol Centre in The Hague had detailed in the series of emails from last month.

The pages were very poor photocopies, with considerable markings on them from several different sources. One of them noted the discrepancy in spelling with the company's name, another the origin of the vases from a plant that had closed the year before.

By midmorning, and a second cup of coffee, Minogue's headache had receded such that he almost forgot about it. He was even able – with Tadhg Sullivan watching and listening, a carefully guarded expression of polite interest on his face – to engage in a reasonably productive conversation with an Interpol officer in Lyon. It turned out that the officer was actually Belgian, and had visited Ireland twice.

“Them French lessons of yours must be good,” said Sullivan. “Maybe I should think about trying them. Do you think I'd make a fist of it?”

Sullivan had not surrendered much of his Kerry accent in his two decades' work here in Dublin.

“Tadhg, if they can teach me, they can teach anyone.”

The beginnings of a smile played around Sullivan's face, but he said nothing. Minogue saw lunch imminent: things were picking up, then. He was slipping into his jacket when his mobile went off. Kilmartin's name displayed itself, irrevocably. He considered letting it ring, but somehow his thumb found the Receive.

“I happen to be free,” said Kilmartin.

“Still too dear. Free for what, exactly?”

“You don't go out for your dinner up there? Lunch, I mean? Come on now.”

Minogue hemmed and hawed. He considered lying. Then the door to the hall opened up slowly, and there, looking altogether too pleased with himself was James Kilmartin. He took the mobile from his ear with a flourish, and ended the call.

“A lousy trick,” Minogue said, meaning it. Kilmartin smiled.

Kilmartin's idea of an exciting lunch was still a pint and a sandwich. He ordered Minogue a pint without asking him.

“You can't beat a pub lunch,” he said. “Put you in a right good humour for the rest of the day.”

“It'll put me to sleep you mean.”

“Stop whinging, will you? If you don't want it, leave it for me.”

Kilmartin had his mind made up on Kelly's, one of the very few pubs in the area that had not been turned into an emporium.

Kilmartin drained almost a half of his beer with his first swallow. He wiped the head off his upper lip and sighed. He looked around with a satisfied air.

“One of Maura's crowd had a do here last year. They wanted somewhere centre city, somewhere old-style. There were highjinks that night, I'm telling you. But God, I suffered for it.”

“You weren't alone, I'd say.”

“Don't talk to me, sure it was a mob down from Longford, the half of them. My God, man, you think they'd been let out of jail or something. There were people Maura hadn't seen in years, a pal of hers from ages ago, Breda. Tons of people. A lot of scallywags entirely.”

Kilmartin took another, more considered, sip from a different side of his glass while he looked up at the screen.

“Look at that,” he said then. “There'll be no end to it, I'm telling you.”

Minogue had been watching two men at the end of the bar start into their soup.

It was a replay of the same clip from yesterday, the helicopter view and the Garda cars on that road in Malahide.

“The plane from Spain,” said Kilmartin. “The planes in Spain fall mainly – I shouldn't say that.”

“Right,” said Minogue. “You really shouldn't. You Mayo savage, you.”

Kathleen had watched the news after Minogue had gone up to the shed for another bash at the design for the rock path. The “alien” was from Chad, she called up, before leaving for Costigans. They had found something about Chad in his pocket, a letter. Where was Chad?