She sat back, took a long sip of wine, a crunch of salad and tried to see the case from Walker’s point of view. For all her helpfulness, the policewoman was never likely to have wanted to start unpicking a case that she’d already wrapped up neatly and put to bed. Not when she probably had new cases piling up all the time. Still less so when the victim was a non-national who was already buried in another jurisdiction. And then of course there was the small but unavoidable fact that there was no evidence whatsoever that anything untoward had occurred. Wasn’t that fair enough?
She ate another mouthful of salad, arranged her knife and fork beside each other and pushed the plate away from her. No, it wasn’t. Not when applied to a man who, only twenty-four hours later, killed himself, and whose girlfriend – former or otherwise – had subsequently disappeared. That wasn’t ‘fair enough’. It was a provocation. Something kept nagging her about the car hire as well, but what? Her thoughts swung back to the airport. She checked her watch again. An hour and a half remained before the flight. There wasn’t much she could do in the meantime, except maybe have another drink, and sit and think. She called the waiter over, ordered a small glass of wine and the bill, and asked him to book a taxi for her in about twenty minutes. Sitting back, the warm sun on her shoulders, she felt the tension in them ease a little. There was probably nothing much she could do about any of it, full stop.
The departures lounge in Bristol Airport was heaving, and the queue for Ryanair flight FR175 to Dublin was about as orderly as a queue for UN food relief in a disaster zone. Siobhan stayed seated at a table in the Soho Coffee concession, sipping a lukewarm cappuccino, reading a copy of the Irish Independent she’d picked up at WH Smith, absorbed in a follow-up story about an expatriate Irish drugs gangster who’d been shot out in Spain. There was no point joining the general melee; she’d rather wait it out in comfort for priority boarding to be called and then fight her way through when the time came. When it did, she elbowed and excused her way to the front and handed the steward her passport and boarding card. Only then, as she idly watched him scanning and tearing the piece of paper she’d printed out the night before, returning the upper portion for her to keep, did it hit her – like a lightning strike – what it was that had bothered her about Horgan’s boarding passes.
Siobhan felt herself jostled from behind as people pushed past. She was physically rooted to the spot by the realisation. Of course, that was it! It wasn’t the Amsterdam boarding pass that was wrong. It was the Bristol ones. But she hardly had time to think about it, swept forward as she was by the crowd stampeding through the terminal door and onto the airfield towards the waiting plane. Only when she was queuing again at the bottom of the steps to board did she get a chance to fish out her phone and flick back through the photos she’d taken of Horgan’s paperwork. She cursed, realising she’d only snapped the loose receipts, not his flight and booking information, but it didn’t matter. What she had comprehended didn’t have to do with the detail of the passes, but the mere existence of them. And if she was right, it would clear up some of her other doubts about Horgan’s movements as well, not least the question of the car hire.
She looked up the steps at the shoulders, rear ends and hand luggage of the people in front of her, fighting the frustration of knowing she wouldn’t be able to do a thing to prove herself right until she got back to Dublin. Back home, she’d have a broadband connection to confirm some things online, and the space and privacy to make one or two discreet calls. Whether they would bring her any closer to finding out what had happened to Gemma Kearney, she really didn’t know, but she could feel in her stomach the gnaw that always came with the start of a good story, when the knot of perma-stress dissolved, leaving a yawning hollow demanding to be filled.
Mulcahy spent every spare minute he had that afternoon trying to get in touch with Eddie McTiernan, but the fat man’s mobile went unanswered, and every message he left went unreturned. The number Mulcahy had for him at home in Leopardstown just clicked from dial tone into silence as if it had been disconnected. Eventually Mulcahy rang a contact of his, Paddy Halloran, in the Communications Unit and called in a favour. It was after half past six when Halloran rang back to say McTiernan had recently changed broadband providers and got a new number, but it was unlisted, and he wouldn’t be able to get the details until the following morning. Mulcahy looked at his watch. With a little imagination, Leopardstown could be thought of as on the way home, and with luck most of the rush-hour traffic would be gone.
‘In one hundred and fifty yards, turn right.’
Mulcahy slowed and indicated, then did as he was told by the sat nav, turning the Saab across Brewery Road and into the pleasant, tree-lined estate of large, detached houses where, according to his contacts book, Eddie McTiernan resided. In some splendour, too, by the look of it, but that was hardly a surprise. He continued slowly down the road, squinting at the numbers on the doors until, a hundred yards or so further on, he pulled up outside number seventeen. Like all the other houses on the street, it had been extensively refurbished in the boom years, and extended right across the generous plot. The garage had been converted, with an extra floor on top, and a massive porch entrance had been added to the house, running two-thirds the width of the façade. The former front garden had been obliterated, reduced to a few strips of flowerbeds bordering the obligatory expanse of block paving. On which, Mulcahy noted, there was no sign of McTiernan’s car, his beloved Bentley Continental GT.
An electronic peal of church bells greeted his ears on pressing the buzzer, but the temptation to genuflect withered the instant the door was opened by a formidable-looking woman in her forties, or maybe cosmetically enhanced fifties, with bleached-blonde hair and a permatan to match her husband’s. From behind her legs, the terrier McTiernan had been accompanied by the day before peered out at him accusingly, as if Mulcahy had interrupted some event of major canine significance.
‘Mrs McTiernan?’
‘Yeah. What do you want?’ she said. Not a fan of niceties.
‘I’m actually looking for your husband, Eddie. Is he in?’
‘No.’ She folded her arms beneath her substantial, probably enhanced chest and stared at him. Her impression of a brick wall was clearly well practised.
‘Any idea where I might find him?’ Mulcahy persisted.
‘I wouldn’t know. He never tells me anything,’ she said huffily. Her accent had the harsh clip-clop of once-rough Dublin in it, softened by money and years of living among the more rounded vowels of the suburbs. ‘He just takes off whenever he feels like it. Far be it from me to interfere.’
‘So what time are you expecting him back?’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘What’s it to you, anyway?’ She looked at him assessingly, then over his shoulder at the ancient Saab and pursed her lips. ‘Are you a cop?’
Mulcahy nodded, bracing himself for a tirade, but none came.
‘The one he gets favours off of?’
‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose,’ he said, taken aback. ‘Mulcahy’s my name. I thought you said he never tells you anything?’
‘Some things, y’know, stay between a husband and wife,’ she said cryptically, but the stony set of her face seemed to ease a little. ‘You let my kid off once, years back, gave him a chance. Turned his life around, that did. Scared him. He’s in the civil service now.’
Mulcahy did his best to look noncommittal. If he had helped her son, he didn’t remember it. More likely, McTiernan hadn’t wanted to admit that it was his own flesh and blood he’d asked a favour for. Pride worked in weird ways. The wife didn’t look too happy about it now, either. She was looking away, chewing her bottom lip like she was ruminating on a major moral quandary.
He decided to leave her to it. ‘Tell Eddie it’s important, Mrs McTiernan. I really do need to talk to him tonight.’
‘I can’t,’ she said, looking first at the ground, then the fanlight, then straight at him, her eyelashes blinking rapidly, like she
literally couldn’t believe what she was about to do. ‘He’s taking the evening ferry to Holyhead,’ she said in a rush. ‘You’ll have to hurry if you want to catch him.’
And with that she stepped back and slammed the door in his face.
11
By the time Siobhan shut the door of the flat behind her, she was bursting to get on with the job, but there were other things she needed to do first, practical things, mundane things, like checking emails and having a restorative half-hour soak in the bath. Nothing was so urgent it couldn’t wait for that. Keeping one ear on the gush of hot water in the bathroom, she used the laptop to quickly deal with the more urgent emails that had piled up, mostly ignored, on her phone during the day. Then she gave her publicist, Maura, a quick call to finalise the arrangements for some book signings that had been set up towards the end of the following week. Ten minutes later she was leaning back in the steaming-hot bath, letting the skin-prickling heat overwhelm her and leach away the ache of the day. There had been times in the previous twelve months – cold, heavy days of loneliness, hatred and crippling physical pain – when she’d have given anything to feel the weariness of a day like she’d just had. There is nothing so soul-sapping as the nothingness severe injury brings with it, the inability to think of anything but pain. Intense and frustrating as her day in Bristol had been, it was life; it was work. It was everything she had craved.
It didn’t take long for her to have her fill of relaxation and for her mind to swing back to the brainstorm she’d had in the queue at Bristol Airport. She had gone over and over it again on the hour-long flight, and during the slow journey home through rush-hour Dublin. More than ever now she was sure that she was right: it wasn’t only the return leg of Horgan’s flight to Bristol that had gone unused; the outward one hadn’t been used, either.
She cast her mind back to when she had seen both of the boarding passes, outbound and return, in the interview room at Walker’s offices. She’d held them in her hand, and they were both exactly the same: both on fresh sheets of A4 paper, obviously printed out at the same time, presumably on Horgan’s printer. Exactly the same. Folded, yes, but otherwise pristine, unsullied. Neither of them had been rent, torn or otherwise interfered with. Understandably, for the homeward leg. But on the outbound pass the lower portion that should have been retained by the airline for security and immigration control was still there, still intact. It had not been torn off by the ground staff; it could not have been used to board the plane. Which in turn meant Horgan couldn’t have flown to Bristol on the evening of Friday 3 September, or leastways not on the flight he had booked and checked in for online. And she was convinced now that the explanation for that lay in the other boarding pass, the one to Amsterdam.
But how could that be? As Walker had forcefully pointed out to her in the car, there could be no doubting that Horgan had turned up in Bristol at some stage in the following twenty-four hours and met his death there. Had he just missed his flight and caught a later one? Siobhan didn’t think so. Wrapping herself in her heavy white cotton bathrobe, and turbaning her hair in a hand towel, Siobhan went back out to the dining room. Sitting down at the table with her laptop, she Googled rapidly through to Aer Lingus’s online flight timetables.
Within seconds she established what she had guessed would be the case: that there was only one flight from Cork to Bristol on Fridays, or on any other day of the week for that matter. It was a niche route; why would they need any more? What she had to do now was check departure times for Saturdays. She noticed that she was holding her breath waiting for the page to load – then she gasped with satisfaction and slapped the table with her hand on seeing that the only flight to Bristol on Saturday 4 September had departed in the early afternoon. In which case, how come Horgan had managed to pick up his hire car in the centre of Bristol at eleven o’clock that morning? There was definitely something dodgy about this, and it had to do with that flight to Amsterdam. She knew it did. She could taste it in her mouth like a metallic tang.
Mulcahy saw the boxy white bulk of the Stena Line ferry berthed at the terminal in Dun Laoghaire as he crossed the narrow bridge onto Harbour Road. A cloud of dark smoke belched from one of the stacks at the stern. She was getting ready to sail. He swung the Saab to the right, past the lantern-like glass and steel drum of the Irish Lights building and down onto the terminal approach road. Behind the security gates, the concrete apron was crowded with cars, vans and lorries, two hundred at least, maybe more, lined up bumper to bumper in the numbered lanes, waiting to board for the trip across the Irish Sea to Holyhead.
He pulled over as a security guy in a cap and yellow hi-vis vest emerged from a cabin at the gate, gesturing at him to stop and show his ticket.
Mulcahy held up his warrant card. ‘Garda Siochana. I need to talk to one of your car passengers. Don’t want any fuss.’
‘You’d better get a move on. They’ve already starting loading the lorries.’
The steward raised the barrier and let him through. Mulcahy parked the Saab and walked towards the ranks of cars, trying to spot McTiernan’s distinctive ride. There were plenty of big cars, Mercs, hulking Range Rovers, BMWs and Porsche SUVs, but it wasn’t until he hoisted himself up on the chainlink fence to gain a better view that he saw the sleek silver Bentley over near the back of the second last row. He looked towards the loading area. The open bow section of the ferry was yawning like a hungry whale, already sucking in cars like so much krill. Running over to the Bentley from behind, he saw a fat elbow clad in a familiar blue jacket crooked out of the open window, a trail of tobacco smoke leaking from within. As he drew alongside, a pudgy, tanned hand emerged and tapped a grey stool of ash from a fat cigar onto the concrete.
‘Taking a trip across the water, are we, Eddie?’
McTiernan whipped his face round as fast as its folds of flesh would let him, choking on his smoke. ‘Christ, Mr Mulcahy,’ he coughed, the whirring of his brain all but audible. ‘You nearly put the heart crossways on me. What in the name of Jaysus brings you down here?’
‘I left you lots of messages, Eddie, but you never got back to me.’
McTiernan looked flustered and held up his hands. ‘Ah, sure, it must’ve slipped my mind what with the trip coming up and all.’
‘A bit urgent, is it?’ Mulcahy put his hands on the sill and leant into the interior of the two-seater car. Plush, with plum-coloured leather upholstery and brushed-steel fittings, it was as roomy as a small aircraft hanger inside. He looked into the passenger area and the footwells, noticed McTiernan’s eyes following his gaze and flicking anxiously behind towards a red plaid car rug that was covering something in the gap between the passenger seat and the rear chassis.
‘Ah, y’know yourself – opportunities arise and you have to grab them. Something came up on the retail front and I’m just popping across to have a look-see. At least, that’s what I told the wife, anyway, eh?’ McTiernan winked lasciviously at Mulcahy.
‘What were you holding back on me yesterday about Begley, Eddie? I don’t have time for messing around.’
‘Holding back? Ah, c’mon now, Mr Mulcahy, you know me better than that. Didn’t I do my best to help you out?’
‘Eddie, I know you’re not giving me the full picture. You said as much yourself.’ He stood up straight again and looked over at the ship. The loading was unbelievably quick and efficient. Already two lanes of cars had been directed up into the ship’s maw. ‘They’ll be coming to this lane in a minute and unless you start talking to me I’m going to haul you off and tell Customs I have reason to suspect you’re carrying contraband in this car. Then you’ll have all night to tell me about Begley.’
‘Contra-what?’ McTiernan spluttered. ‘For God’s sake, there’s no need for that. Why are you hassling me? I told you everything I know about Bingo yesterday.’
‘I don’t think so, Eddie,’ Mulcahy said, leaning into the car again. ‘By the way, what’s under the rug?’
McTiernan threw his head back in
frustration. The plum leather headrest absorbed the impact with a gently yielding hiss.
‘Nothing you need to know about, Mr Mulcahy.’
‘So tell me about Bingo and Ronson.’
The cars in front of McTiernan’s were being called forward by the stewards now and McTiernan went to push a podgy finger at the ignition button, but Mulcahy grabbed his hand and pulled it back.
‘Don’t even think about it, Eddie. You’re going nowhere until you tell me.’
The cars behind began hooting. Mulcahy stepped back and signalled at them to move around the Bentley. First one, then another slid out and zoomed ahead, the drivers glaring out the windows. A steward ran up to see what was causing the hold-up, but backed away when Mulcahy held up his warrant card at him with a growl of ‘Garda business.’
‘Come on, Eddie, out with it. What else do I need to know?’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ McTiernan cursed, glancing round at the stream of vehicles being directed around his car now. ‘All right then, but you didn’t hear it from me. I’m serious. Never more so. I don’t want to draw any of this on myself, okay?’
Mulcahy nodded. ‘So tell me.’
‘Ever hear of a guy called Steve Hayford?’ McTiernan asked with a sigh.
Mulcahy thought about it. The name rang only the vaguest, most distant bell. ‘Here, or out in Spain?’
‘Neither. He was a Liverpool lad.’
‘One of Trevor Ronson’s?’
McTiernan nodded. ‘Right-hand man. Like I said, Ronson was spending a lot of time in Puerto Banus. I never met Hayford, but I know he ran the show for Ronson back in the UK.’
‘And what – he decided it was time to get rid of Ronson?’
Dublin Dead Page 11