Islandbridge (28 page)

Minogue yawned again.

“Dear Diary,” Malone started out. “I am going down to my colleagues in Kilmainham Garda station to see what a bollocks they made out of the Emmett Condon case.”

“That'll go over well there, that approach. You'd have a matching clout on the other side of that thick head of yours, I'd be thinking.”

The Nissan was not designed for what Malone seemed to want to do in his detours through the laneways and cramped streets behind Thomas Street.

“What's your hurry, Tommy? Slow down, will you.”

Malone crumpled the empty bag and tossed it into the back.

“Easy knowing you didn't get battered last night.”

“This isn't about settling scores with some George character. This is about us looking over the case files asking a few polite questions – watch that van, will you.”

“So,” said Malone. “He'll show up along the way. I'll bet you anything.”

“And you'll do what if he does?”

Malone looked over for long enough to get a rise out of Minogue.

Minogue looked back at the report to check the detectives' names again. Fintan Donnelly was supposed to be waiting for them at Kilmainham Station to give them the rundown. Never heard of him. He wondered if Donnelly was newer, or if he and Malone would be facing a veteran who'd be only as helpful as his orders had told him.

Malone got them back out onto James's Street just before the road forked. He accelerated through the light at the stop of Stevens' Lane, the road that Minogue had taken hundreds of times before on his way to work in the Murder Squad, across from Kingsbridge, or Heuston Station as he refused to call it for decades now.

“Where the legend began,” said Malone. He looked over.

“Do you miss it?” he asked Minogue. “The Squad?”

“For all the wrong reasons.”

“You don't fit parlez-vous and all that, the nine-to-five?”

Minogue knew from the voice that Malone was slagging.

“‘Ah by jayses, they'll rue the shagging day they ever broke up the Squad, so they will!'” Malone said. It wasn't the worst take on Kilmartin's accent he'd heard from Malone. “‘The so-called experts will be begging to put it back together, and they should kick the arses of every lousy, jumped-up Superintendent that moaned and whinged until they finally dragged us down! The jackals!'”

“Dingoes, he called them too,” said Minogue.

“The fecking dingoes! They couldn't fault us for our record! No! So they had the nerve to persuade the boss that they had staff trained
too
fecking well already! By who?!'”

“–By whom–”

“–By the very Squad they want to drag down to their level! All in the name of some fecking decentralization fad that'll blow up in their won snots in short order . . . ! The
bashtards!
”

“Not bad,” Minogue said. “But he does a good one of you too.”

The Nissan made its way with much less urging from Malone, to within sight of the lights at South Circular Road, before Malone turned it onto Kilmainham Lane.

There were two squad cars parked by the door in from the yard. Four Guards, the whole complement of both cars, were in a bunch holding a very fat man. They carried him sideways through the staff door. There was no fight in this client. His shirt had gone up to his chest and his one shoe was unlaced. To Minogue, he looked relaxed and even happy, like a child being brought to bed.

The air held a dank staleness. The River Liffey, Minogue decided, with that faint, malty scent that was actually hops. It was the same smell he'd noticed the first time he'd ever visited Dublin, carried up through the city from Guinness's brewery from nearby Islandbridge.

They were let in through to the staff office crowded with furniture. There they waited by a desk, in two chairs that a Guard found for them.

Donnelly was all business, so much so that he'd skipped upstairs two steps at a time ahead of Minogue, and waited there to usher the two detectives into a smallish, cluttered room that seemed to do treble duty as storage room, cloak room, and place to hide in. There was a bockety table, probably saved form the scrap heap Minogue decided, and creaking foldaway chairs that Donnelly ripped from a stack.

“Well, Fintan,” Minogue said. “Thanks very much now. Sorry about the short notice and all.”

“No bother,” Donnelly replied, a little too quickly.

Minogue looked down at the box Donnelly had brought with him.

“Hurling?” Donnelly asked Malone, who didn't get the connection until Donnelly touched his own cheek.

“God no,” said Malone. “I got it going to the toilet.”

Minogue flipped through the pages. The colour photocopies were improving by the day. Then he smiled up at Donnelly.

“Could we maybe take these with us, Fintan? We'd bring them back, to be sure.”

“Fire away. You know Internal Affairs have copies of everything?” Minogue nodded, to avoid a fib outright. He had a smile ready.

“Was there mention of a girl somewhere along the line?”

Donnelly had found something on a wall to concentrate on for several moments.

“There was,” he said then, and Minogue knew the tone had changed. “One of the blokes said she was maybe Russian.”

“Any way of verifying that?”

“Verifying the fella told us?”

“No, I mean if what came of an interview with her.”

“Nothing did.”

Before Minogue could say anything, Donnelly broke in.

“'Cause there was no interview. 'Cause we haven't come across her.”

“Are you concerned maybe she's, well, let's say prevented from speaking with you?”

“Like you mean maybe dead?”

Minogue raised an eyebrow and watched to see if Donnelly read his lack of immediate reply right. He saw that Donnelly was no gom in that department, but the same Donnelly wasn't going to pass the ball without lobbing a few more at these two fly-ins.

“Who's the source on this woman, this girlfriend?” Malone asked.

“It came from a fella knew Condon off the street, a right louser the name of McHugh. An addict – in and out of prison. All he had was something about Condon and a foreign bird.”

“McHugh's term?”

“More or less. The transcript is there, I think?”

“People still say ‘bird' in this day and age? For a girl?”

“It's back,” said Donnelly. “You hear it a fair bit. It's a sixties thing, the ‘lad' bit.”

“Well, did he ever see her, meet her?”

“He says he saw her once, but it was across the street. . . . He can't remember which street. He can't remember when. But he took two hours with the Ident man jigsawing that composite. Your man had to give up with him after the two hours I heard.”

“Is he the only source for the composite that Missing Persons used?”

Donnelly nodded slowly for ironic emphasis.

“Jesus,” Minogue heard Malone mutter.

“The way he is, I'm surprised he could describe his own mother. Much less see her.”

After a few moments, Donnelly seemd to think better of what he had said.

“Ah who knows, maybe I'm wronging him.”

“How so?” from Malone.

“Well, maybe he was a pal of Condon's, some might say.”

Malone sat back and gave Donnelly a long, neutral look.

“Which would you say?” Minogue asked.

“Couldn't say really.”

Minogue was beginning to seriously dislike this detective. Eight or ten years in, Minogue decided, and probably half that in plainclothes. Long enough to be brazen. Again he wondered if the rest of the Guards who'd worked this case had talked it over about how to treat himself and Malone. “A Sergeant Daly was lead. John Daly?”

Donnelly nodded. “John's out.”

Minogue let the brittle silence last a while. He pretended to read a Statement Summary from Mr. Edward McHugh, source of the “foreign bird.” A total of eight years and some months of McHugh's twenty-six years on the Emerald Island had been in the custody of the State.

“So I'll leave you to it then,” Donnelly said.

“Where will you be if we need a bit of elucidation?”

“Well, there's Dispatch, I suppose, if I'm gone out.”

Minogue wanted to ask him if everyone who'd worked on the case was similarly hard to meet with. Instead he watched the door close behind him.

Malone stretched and pressed his bruise delicately.

“There's a prize bollocks for you,” he said. “No prize to you, but, for guessing his take on all this. And the rest of his crew.”

In the hour that followed, Minogue read and made notes. He mostly ignored Malone's low humming and scratching as he read also. Finally he stood up to stretch.

“The Naas Road,” he said to Malone. “Did you get that?”

“Yep. Interesting. I'm betting he was in that Roadhouse place too.”

Minogue looked at the window.

“What?” said Malone.

“Did you ever think maybe Condon was looking for this woman too? That maybe she left town on him, or the like?”

Malone rubbed gingerly at his bruise. Minogue imagined Condon arguing with a woman, her storming out, shouts.

“But nasty company Condon kept,” Malone murmured after a while. “I can say that for him. That's the job though, isn't it. You get your grasses and your snitches, the more, the better.”

Minogue turned over the pages to get back to the composite they'd made of the woman's face. He paused at the Scenes pictures. Condon had been found under a bridge. The flash showed blackened cement supports in the background. All about him had been the detritus of fires and half-burned clothes, sticks and tins and bits of cement blocks and plastic bags.

The lab work on all the debris was a dizzying amount of baffling inconsequence. You could guess from the pictures even that people had their fixes there, gotten drunk there. They had eaten and opened their bowels there, by choice or necessity. No doubt they'd probably fought there, passed out, beat others, and probably even raped there. And there was Emmett Condon's body, with an arm under him, his head twisted toward the darkness higher up where the bridge joined the earth again.

He went on to the composite of the woman. Malone looked over.

“If that's the best they can do with their fancy computers over in Ident, I'll stick to me PlayStation.”

Minogue went back to the transactions on Condon's cards and his mobile record. He'd bought a stereo a week before he'd died. He'd paid for petrol down by Clondalkin, a hotel room at the West Land Hotel out on the N11. He found the report from a Garda Tracey who'd followed up: no additional info. There was a chambermaid with a Spanish-sounding name.

His mobile had placed calls to his ex-wife – a long conversation in two of them – a garage, three people, one of whom was found to be an informer for a detective working out of Kildare, and the others with criminal records. Their alibis were holding up so far.

Malone stretched.

“You have to be bloody good at reading between the lines here,” he said, and groaned and yawned at the same time. “I'm going down and beat a cup of tea out of them. You want one?”

Minogue said he did. He took up what Malone had been reading.

Condon's section head, one Mick O'Toole, had spoken to him twice in one month. He'd told Condon one of the detectives on the unit had complained about him. There had been lousy paperwork from Condon, even no paperwork. One incident had made O'Toole suspicious, according to what he told them. Bait money – the money they'd used to get or pay informants – didn't get due authority several times. Condon had not made satisfactory representations to him on at least one of them, according to O'Toole. And here was something to stand out from the oddly muted summary, beyond the cover-your-arse descant: O'Toole said that he would have moved sooner had he not been overloaded with other casework. Did O'Toole mean Condon's removal, Minogue wondered, or a disciplinary charge? He scribbled down a memo to phone O'Toole.

A rain shower lashed the window now. Minogue stopped reading to study the patterns that were slowly spreading and twisting on the glass. A minute passed, and his mind stayed on hold to the sounds of the rain. Footsteps in the hall outside and a raised voice, a man's, brought him back. Minogue realized that he had been thinking again about this woman. He found the page with her composite on it. It still looked like a weird cross between a Barbie ad, and one of those old science-fiction puppets on the telly.

But Daly had gone by the book, sending out the composite to Missing Persons the second day of the investigation, after a day's search in Immigration. All the eleven Missing Person contacts had been duds. Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian – no-one knew which the woman could be. Somebody McHugh, listed as an informant to Condon, couldn't offer more than “He was involved with some foreign bird.”

Minogue couldn't conclude otherwise really – this case had cooled pretty quickly. The immigration and work-permit search had been finished two days after the request. An aid organization for foreign workers had been tried, three charities too. A copy of the composite sent to Europol, even. This was solid work from the currently unavailable Daly, right down to door-to-doors where Condon's flat was, to see if any girl had shown.

There had been no paraphernalia in the flat. A search on floors and ceilings had been done. “No items of female apparel or effects.” Mira, Marina, Maria: Mary? Where did that name start anyway? Minogue had almost forgotten – McHugh again. Not for the first time, Minogue began to weigh more heavily a suspicion that McHugh might not be as stupid, or as addled as he'd let on. McHugh's information amounted to nothing much, a nuisance maybe. A diversion, though?

Minogue began to remember the bumblers and the gobdaws he'd dealt with over the years. There were hangers-on with a slim enough grasp of things, and plenty of others who were half-cracked or just simple-minded, but driven to believe they could help. Help? They weren't lying, many of them, he'd learned. They wanted just to be listened to, to be part of some excitement, to be part of the story, to be in the light.