Islandbridge (25 page)

“Come on down here with me.”

Minogue eyed the smattering of dandruff on the collar of Moustache Guard Paul ahead, and thinning hair atop.

Garda Moustache tapped at a door, and opened it.

The man inside was Superintendent Eamonn Blake, the head of section for Internal Affairs. He was on his mobile.

Minogue scrambled to try to recall how or why Blake had gotten his nickname of Earthquake Blake. He vaguely remembered that it had something to do with an article in the
Irish
Times
, just after Blake had been given the job. It was when there had been a big fuss for years about the backlog of complaints against the Guards. Yes – he had it now: it was the phrase from the newspaper, something about a seismic shift in Garda accountability. Blake waved Minogue in. Moustache Guard pointed to a cloth-covered seat at the table, and closed the door again. He sat at a separate chair close to the door.

Blake said “fine” and put down the phone, and scribbled something.

Minogue refused to look over, but instead kept his eyes on the noticeboard where someone had pinned printouts of Web pages he couldn't read from here.

“How're you, Matt?”

“So-so,” he said. “But I have questions.”

“I see,” Blake said. “Always a good sign. Give me your first one.”

Minogue looked at the veneer on the table for a moment and then turned to Blake. He hoped Blake couldn't hear his heart hammering away, like he could.

“I went to bed last night an Inspector. Did I wake up a suspect in something?”

“A suspect in what, now?”

“I think that's my line.”

“I see,” said Blake again. “But you're nervous, are you? Why is that, now?”

“Well, why am I here?”

“You're here because of your involvement in something recently.”

Blake began tugging at his watchstrap.

“Recently? What happened?”

“Well, that's what we're trying to find out.”

“Tell me,” Minogue said. “Am I the only one you're talking to about this?”

“Well, who should I be talking to then, Matt?”

“Maybe you're making this up as you go along. Are you?”

“Ah, I see. A bit contrary, are we?”

“Me? We could play the man from UNCLE some other time, I'm thinking.”

Blake seemed almost indifferent to the remark. Minogue imagined a tape turning on a spool somewhere. But no, he thought, it'd be all digital now. He glared at the one-way glass covering the camera slot in the ceiling tile. Blake shifted in his seat.

“I was down in New Quay over the summer,” Blake said, as though it were a question. “New Quay, County Clare. And I spent a fair bit of time in the hinterland.”

Minogue studied how Blake was now turning his watch around and around on his wrist.

“There's a ton of McNamaras there,” added Blake. “Am I right?”

“There'd be plenty, probably. Too many, maybe.”

“Great Clare name, McNamara. My wife's a McNamara. She tells me McMahon would be top of the list for names in Clare though.”

“We disagree. But McNamara says it all. How you roll the R, is what counts”

“I see. Kings of the Burren, they say. Or was it the Davorens?”

“Neither. Look, why are we talking about this?”

Blake paused in his detailed calibration of where his watchstrap might settle. Then he went back to turning it again, with minute tugs.

“Just waiting for someone,” he said. “A person wants to join us.”

“Someone,” said Minogue. “Now who would that someone be?”

Blake looked up.

“The Commissioner,” he said, brightly. “He's running a bit late.”

The door opened. The woman Minogue had seen earlier had a manila envelope, and a lidded, but steaming, Styrofoam cup.

“Thanks,” said Blake and read something on the back of the envelope. He pushed back his chair and got up.

“Have a look at these while you're waiting, why don't you,” he said.

He tilted the envelope and spilled out the 8 by 10s. Their fresh emulsion scent came to Minogue almost immediately.

The red was almost ruby, and it led in jagged streaks up to the body. There was a moist glistening from the flash in the dark blood matted on the hair.

“What's this,” Minogue said. “Give these to one of those new Site manager fellas, over at the Technical Bureau. I'm a suit now, remember?”

“There's a French expression for this, I think,” Blake said. “What was done to him, I mean.
Coup de grâce
, is it?”

Minogue stared at him.

“But poor Lawless didn't speak much French, I'll wager,” Blake said.

Minogue looked back down at the photos. They had none front-on.

Minogue's mouth was dry when he went to speak now.

“Prove what you just said.”

Blake began to uncap the coffee, and he blew into the cup.

“You mean you don't remember what Lawless looked like the other day, when you saw him?”

Minogue looked at the photos again. There was no way to be sure.

“No trick-acting now, if you please,” said Blake. “Yes or no?”

Minogue was aware of the detective with the moustache staring at him. Still he studied what he could, trying to ignore the lines of blood that had come down over the face.

“I don't know,” he said to Blake. “It could be. Is it?”

There was a knock at the door. Blake nodded at the detective, and he stood slowly and opened the door. Minogue tried not to look surprised to spot Brendan O'Leary, sergeant and also the Garda Commisioner's Sancho Panza, perched on the desk glancing in.

O'Leary's perpetually wary look did not change, nor did he so much as nod.

Blake slid the photos into the envelope, and pushed back his chair.

“Okay,” said Blake. “We can start.”

Minogue kept his eyes on the bin by the wall. The tension he'd been holding in his shoulders had turned to an ache. He looked back when he heard the footsteps enter.

Commissioner Tynan's eyes were baggy. Minogue couldn't decide if his hair had gone greyer or a haircut had made it look that way. Ruth, his wife, had been wearing a wig when Minogue and Kathleen had bumped into them on Dun Laoghaire Pier in June.

“So you've seen the photos,” Tynan said.

“I have,” said Minogue.

“You had a chance to pass on proper advice to Malone, then.”

Minogue hesitated. He wondered if Malone was here in a room on the same floor even now – or even Kilmartin.

“Right,” said Minogue.

“And you did, it's fair to say?”

Minogue looked at Blake for any clues, but saw none.

“That doesn't change what happened,” said Tynan. “Does it?”

“If I had even a tiny suspicion,” Minogue started to say. Something in Tynan's gaze made him stop. Blake made some hurried note.

Though he couldn't be sure, Minogue thought he heard a faint snort from Tynan.

“No,” said Blake, with enough irony for Minogue to look over. “You're taken care of only well in that department.”

“So . . . ?” was as far as Minogue got.

“Your session last night down on the Naas Road was verified already,” said Tynan. “There are two staff there who remember you and Malone a bit too well, it seems.”

“But why all the secretiveness?” Blake asked.

“It wasn't meant to be,” said Minogue.

“Well, maybe,” said Blake. “Malone backs you up on that aspect, you telling him he should be passing on his leads and his information. Fair enough. But at what point would you have stopped advising him, and actually made him contact us, or done so yourself?”

“I'm at a bit of a loss to explain that one,” said Minogue quietly.

“Leave that for a minute,” said Tynan. “And tell us what exactly the pair of you were up to in that place last night. Apparently there was a bit of a row.”

“We were looking for someone. Tommy thought he might have a lead on a woman, one that supposedly was with Emmett Condon.”

“‘With,'” said Tynan. “The late Garda Condon's girlfriend, I believe you're saying?”

“That was what was described to me, yes.”

“You know Garda Condon was married,” said Tynan. “Don't you?”

“I do,” Minogue replied. “I'd heard that, I mean. But if she could be found, well, we'd all be back in the game then.”

“Were she to be found alive,” Blake said.

“There's been no trace of her since it happened,” Tynan said. “Right, Eamonn?” Blake nodded. The word “alive” kept circling in Minogue's mind.

“Remember now,” Tynan said, “this young woman has been sought for, what, six months now? There are several possibilities, as I understand them. She's left the country. Or she's hiding out here somewhere, under one of several identities, or being sheltered by persons as yet unknown. The other possibility is that she may be dead.”

Minogue watched Blake turn his pencil over and over again, tapping its ends slowly and gently on his notepad.

“But evidently Garda Malone has such contacts that he can turn his head and instantly, he has a tip to this Roadhouse place out on the Naas Road. Does your visit there last night throw any light on this?”

“Well the lug who walloped Tommy and ran . . . ,” said Minogue, “he goes by ‘George.' He had an accent.”

Tynan looked over at Blake.

“That name hasn't come up,” Blake said.

“He might have nothing to do with this at all,” said Minogue. “It's a bit out there, the tip that Tommy was working on.”

“Really,” said Blake. “How far out?”

“Apparently there's prostitution and the like out there, and he thought maybe the girl was mixed up in it. Being an illegal, I think, that was the logic.”

Tynan seemed to consider this for a while.

“Okay,” Tynan said then. “But let's go back to Lawless for a minute here. Father Coughlin tells me he finished the session abruptly.”

Minogue nodded.

“Father Coughlin and I, we know one another,” said Tynan. “He says that Lawless was very shaky that day. Nervous, agitated. What was your take on him?”

“Maybe both. I couldn't tell the difference. He might have been climbing the walls. Maybe he wanted a fix. I don't know.”

“You think he had more to tell than he did?”

“I got the impression pretty quickly that he wanted money before he'd come up with anything more specific. But as to whether he was spinning us one . . .”

Blake paused in his notes.

“Yes,” he said. “But you're in no doubt he referred to ‘Garda higher-ups'?”

“That's right,” Minogue replied. “What I heard was, on one of his visits to his brother in jail, Lawless's brother told him that he'd heard about criminals being so well set up now that they had Guards in their pocket. ‘Even higher-ups' he'd heard, and it had gone on a while. For years, he said.”

“Did nobody push him for details on that?” Blake asked.

“Of course we did. Tommy asked a few times. But he wasn't forthcoming. He'd always go back saying there'd have to be arrangements made if we wanted to go ahead.”

“‘Arrangements,'” said Tynan. “Was he specific on what he wanted?”

“No.”

“And when exactly did he bring the name Emmett Condon, up?”

Minogue wanted to ask them what Malone had said.

“He didn't,” he said instead. “What I mean is he never mentioned the name. He just said, ‘that Guard with the overdose, the one they found a while back.'”

Blake cleared his throat with a single, soft cough.

“Specifically . . .?”

“That Condon's death was ‘down to them.'”

“‘Them' being . . . ?”

Minogue shook his head.

“That's the problem,” he said. “It was ‘they can do this,' ‘they can do that.'”

“What else did Lawless have to offer, then?”

“Well he did a bit of rabbiting-on about gangs and the likes in Dublin, especially, and how the bad guys from the continent are setting up here, bit by bit.”

“Specifics? Names? Places? Dates?”

“Very slim,” Minogue said. “Very slim entirely. It's only what you'd read in the newspapers, to be honest.”

He met Blake's eyes for a few moments.

“That's partly why I didn't push Tommy more to contact the investigation team on Condon.”

“I see,” said Blake. “But at the time, did you think Lawless was on the level?”

“At the time, I couldn't figure it out one way or the other.

But tending toward the skeptical.”

“And later on?”

“Closer to disbelieving. Much closer.”

Tynan looked down at his mobile, frowned while he twisted his wedding ring slowly around his finger once, and then back. Tynan never had idle thoughts, Minogue had learned a long time ago. He glanced at the Commissioner's hat, the braiding.

“All right,” Tynan said then. He exchanged a glance with Blake. Blake nodded, and then gathered himself more over his notepad. He looked across at Minogue as though for the first time he had met him.

“I have a question for you now,” Blake said. “And I don't want you to feel you have to answer it right away. But just consider it, and when you're ready, you know?”

Tynan had begun a scrutiny of the cabinets along the wall.

“Fair enough,” Minogue said.

“Did you consider the possibility,” Blake paused, as though to allow Minogue to reflect more deeply, “did you consider that something else was perhaps going on in that meeting you had in Clarendon Street Church the other day?”

Minogue searched Blake's face for a clue.

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't know what you're getting at.”

“I see,” said Blake. “Now you are aware of Detective Malone's family, of his brother Terry and his situation?”