‘Who can say?’ Mulcahy shrugged. ‘Maybe it started out that way. Or maybe it was to do with his business. The UK economy isn’t as buggered up as ours. Maybe he had some property over there, or someone he hoped would throw him a lifeline, and when that didn’t work out … Look, I have no idea, but it strikes me as being a long way to go to kill yourself. The Cliffs of Moher would’ve been a hell of a lot closer, and easier. Beyond that, I wouldn’t want to speculate.’
‘I’m not asking you to. I’ve already been through the whole thing again with Paddy Griffin, my editor, this morning. The only thing we could absolutely agree on was how bizarre it is that Gemma’s office has been closed up like that, without anybody but her mother creating any fuss. I persuaded him to give me two days to get something definite on it. After that he’s closing me down.’
She felt his eyes on her again.
‘And you haven’t had any joy from Missing Persons?’
She shook her head. ‘They wouldn’t discuss the case with me, and when her mother tried, they just palmed her off again.’
‘Well, beyond that name I gave you, I honestly don’t see how I can help.’
He smiled in a semi-apologetic way and ran his hands over his thighs like he was about to stand up. ‘It’s been nice seeing you, Siobhan, really, but I’d better be getting back.’
She put up a hand to stop him. ‘Hang on, Mulcahy. I haven’t got to the really weird bit yet. I only found this out a couple of hours ago, and I honestly do think you might be interested.’
He aborted the move to stand up, and sat back down again, heavily, tolerantly. ‘Okay, what is it?’
‘Why would Horgan have checked in for two simultaneous flights but only taken one of them, and not to the city he ended up in?’
He looked at her like she’d addressed him in a foreign language, and paused as if translating it to himself before replying with a sigh. ‘I have no idea, Siobhan. The laws of physics, maybe?’
‘No, seriously, Mulcahy,’ she said. ‘This was the day before he died. He went to Amsterdam. How he ended up in Bristol I have no idea, now.’
She told him everything she knew about Horgan’s boarding passes, how her informant in Aer Lingus was adamant Horgan had taken the flight to Amsterdam, not Bristol. Mulcahy thought about it, agreed that this too was peculiar, but beyond that?
‘Why would you think I might be able to throw some light on it?’
‘Because the guy who gave me this information seemed to think it might have something to do with drugs.’
‘Didn’t you ask him why?’
‘I did, but he wouldn’t talk about it.’ She looked away. ‘Getting anything at all from him was like milking a stone. I can’t tell you who he was, but let’s just say he’s in a position to know what he’s talking about. I thought maybe you – being the great drugs expert and all – might have an idea. I mean, why would he put boarding passes and drugs together?’
Mulcahy drew a deep breath. ‘There’s only one reason I’ve heard of anyone doing that deliberately. And, with Amsterdam as the destination, I can maybe see why someone in security might think of it. But, honestly, I think this guy’s given you a bum steer there, Siobhan.’
‘Why do you say that?’ For some reason she didn’t want to admit that Sheeran hadn’t given her any steer at all.
‘Because what he was probably thinking of was an old druggie trick that used to be common enough a few years back. But this Horgan character? I just don’t get how it could be relevant to him in any way. He sounds completely clean to me.’
She couldn’t resist a lead in like that. ‘But what’s the trick? Go on, tell me, please.’
He looked at her like he was weighing up whether she deserved to know or not, then gave in. ‘Back in the 1990s when Ryanair and the other low-fare airlines started expanding everywhere through Europe, some of the bigger drugs guys who travelled around a lot, doing the really shady deals, they came up with this idea to mess up intelligence-gathering operations. They’d buy two or three cheap return air tickets to different places whenever they were flying anywhere, to confuse any surveillance operations regarding their ultimate destination until the very last moment. It made keeping a continuous eye on them extremely difficult for us, and it undermined the chains of evidence we relied on in court to establish patterns of movement in big drug-trafficking cases. Do you follow?’
‘Sort of, but I sense a “but” coming,’ Siobhan said.
‘You’d be right. As I was about to say, that was then. We’ve since come up with ways of countering that kind of dodge. It’s also much easier to monitor people’s movements electronically nowadays. I mean, do you have any real reason to suspect Horgan was involved in drugs, as opposed to someone with odd travel arrangements?’
Siobhan wished she could come up with some riposte to that, but she felt pretty much shot to ribbons by it. Her one potential lead of the morning lay in tatters.
‘No, not really,’ she said with a big sigh. ‘It just seemed to tie in with something I heard about Gemma, that’s all – about how she got into trouble when she was younger. I rang her mother last night to tell her what I’d found in Bristol. She’d had a few drinks, I think, and she started telling me all sorts about how Gemma had been this bright but difficult kid who ran off to Dublin as soon as she finished her Leaving Cert. This was a few years before she went to college and met Horgan. Mrs Kearney said Gemma got a job up here as a receptionist for a record company, Klene Records. They used to do all that retro-punk stuff in the late 1990s, had a few good bands – the Reeraws, the Ballgags and some others. Do you remember them?’
‘It rings a bell,’ Mulcahy said, looking like he didn’t like the sound of it but couldn’t think why.
‘They were an edgy sort of crowd, anyway,’ Siobhan continued, ‘and it sounds like Gemma embraced the sex’n’drugs even more than the rock’n’roll. She got herself involved with some scumbag manager who did the dirt on her. I mean properly, got her hooked on all kinds of drugs and shit, then kicked her out when he got sick of her. Brought her very low, suicidally so, by the sound of it. Anyway, Mrs Kearney let slip that Gemma got into serious trouble with you lot during that time.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. As soon as Mrs K realised what she’d said – or who she’d said it to, more like – she got upset. Gemma’s career, good name and all that. She wouldn’t tell me any more, insisted it had nothing to do with Gemma’s life now, but it was obvious she was thinking exactly the opposite, that it was at the root of all her worries, really. Which is why I called you this morning – you know, drugs. And then, when I heard this airline security guy talking about drugs, I thought—’ She broke off, looked up at him and shrugged.
‘You thought what?’
His mood seemed to have changed now, his expression critical, like he knew what she was going to ask him but he wanted her to say it, anyway. Not that that was ever going to be a problem.
‘I thought you might look up your database for me, see what it was she was done for – whether it was more than once, whether it ever came up again, whether Horgan had any drugs connections in his past. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched, does it?’
She could see his face going red as she said it, but wasn’t quite prepared for the blast of heat that came at her when he answered.
‘Jesus, I don’t believe you, Siobhan. The first time I see you in over a year and within five minutes you’re asking me to hand you over confidential information about drugs offences from Garda records.’
‘Oh, come on, Mulcahy, lighten up. It’s probably all in the public domain, anyway.’
‘So you can get it yourself, then.’
‘Not easily, like you can. You know that. All I’m asking is for you to look up your computer. It wouldn’t take you more than a minute and it would at least fill in that blank for me. Nobody needs to find out. Christ, it’s not like I’m trying to bring down the government or anything. I just thought, you know, if there’s a d
rugs element to this, then maybe you might get some mileage out of it as well.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘For God’s sake, it’s just a little crumb of information. It could never be traced back to you—’ She broke off, tried to up the level of pleading in her eyes. ‘I need this, Mulcahy, please. I don’t even know why, but I need to do this story.’
‘Fine, but you’ll have to do it without me. Christ, Siobhan, you of all people should know how I feel about crossing that line.’
She shook her head in disbelief and smiled at him bitterly. ‘You cop, me hack. Is that it?’
‘That’s not fair, Siobhan. You know what happened last time. I nearly fucked up my career for good over what happened with you and Rinn. How can you forget that? How can you think that’s just gone away?’
‘Gone away?’ She choked on that, felt a glob of dark emotion bubble up from somewhere she hadn’t fathomed in a long, long time. ‘Nobody remembers better than me, Mulcahy. Believe me.’
Without even really realising what she was doing, she held up her hands in front of his face, turning them so he could see the scars on both sides. ‘I saw you looking earlier. Don’t you think I see them, too? Don’t you think they remind me every minute of every fucking day? And what about my career? Don’t you think I might have lost more than you? Don’t you think I would give anything to have the last year of my life back, to have things the way they were before?’
She grabbed her handbag and stood up, overtaken by fury, stabbed a finger out at the brown paper bag on the ledge by his leg. ‘Do you think I wanted to write that? Jesus, what a bloody fool I was, thinking it might mean something to you, too. That you might actually want to help me salvage something from all this shit that would get me back where I was before. Nice to fucking see you again, Mulcahy.’
She turned on her heel and stormed away. How could she have been so stupid and delusional as to think that he might actually care? Did he seriously believe she wouldn’t give anything, anything in her power to forget the past year of hurt and misery, and have her life the way it was? And what does he do? Spout rules and fucking regulations at her. Christ, to think there was a time when she thought that he might be the one, the one who actually got her.
Behind her she heard a rushing noise, a heavy tread of feet and felt something pulling at her elbow. Muffled by the billowing clouds of anger, a voice said, ‘Hang on, Siobhan.’ But it was a whisper compared to the rush of blood pounding in her ears as she felt herself pulled back, just as she’d been pulled back fourteen months before as, in the darkness of a garage in Rathgar she saw a claw hammer swing out from behind her and strike her photographer, Franny Stoppard, on the back of the skull with a sickening crunch. A prelude to her own night of terror.
Everything went quiet. The world stopped. She knew she had screamed, and when she opened her eyes, all she saw was Mulcahy taking a step back from her, his face pale, his hands up, palms out, a look of shock and deep concern in his eyes.
‘It’s okay, Siobhan,’ he was saying. ‘It was me. Everything’s all right. It was only me.’
In her confusion, she was looking around, seeing every face in the small stone garden turned to her, agog, sandwiches and plastic forks frozen midway to mouths, wondering what was going on, fearful they might be expected to intervene. With a snap of realisation she came back. Knew where she was. Knew what had happened. She felt something tear inside her.
‘Siobhan, look at me,’ Mulcahy was saying. ‘Everything’s all right. It’s okay. You’re safe here. Look at me.’
So she did look at him, and she watched him lower his right hand and hold it out to her. ‘Only if you want to,’ he said.
And she found she did want to, because everything was beginning to fall apart inside her now. Her legs were shaking, and her lungs were heaving with something that wouldn’t be contained, so she held her hand out, felt it folded into the bigness of his and found herself sitting down with him again, allowing him to put his arm around her shoulders as, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt the consoling warmth of another human being press against her, and the tears fall from her eyes.
*
Such was the clamour of emotion in Mulcahy by the time he got back to Dublin Castle, he stormed up the stairs and stomped through to his office and flung the glass door shut behind him, logged on to his computer and sat there staring unseeingly at the screen. What the fuck had all that been about? Jesus. The intensity had overwhelmed him. Sitting there with Siobhan in Stephen’s Green, his arm around her, it had all come flooding back: the Phoenix Park the year before, Siobhan blood-drenched, hanging from the Papal Cross, and Rinn, screaming at him to get back, get back or he’d … Fuck. He’d pushed so much of it out of his mind. Especially his own failure afterwards, after all the fuss died down, after she’d rebuffed his attempts to see her twice, was it three times? And he’d just accepted it. Turned round and tried to forget her, like she deserved it. And when she’d come to him about the book, told her to take a hike. Like a petulant child. Christ, how could he be such a prick? No wonder she’d gone mental at him.
How long they’d sat there for, he didn’t know. But not very. Her pulling herself together, embarrassed, him saying the little he could think of to make her feel okay about it. After a few minutes she’d pulled away from him again, sat stiffly apart, apologising for being such an idiot, for losing it. She said things still crept up on her occasionally, got the better of her. She hadn’t slept well and … she was sorry. That was the gist of it, anyway. He’d asked her if she was okay, if she was well enough to be back at work at all, but she said work was the only thing that kept her going, and that she’d better go do some. Then she’d apologised again, for calling him, said it had been a stupid idea after all that time. He’d never seen anyone look so lonely as when she walked off towards Dawson Street.
He heard a knock on the glass door and looked up to see Ford, leaning in round it, his expression one of superficial concern masking far greater curiosity. Behind him, still sitting at their desks, he saw Duffy and Sweeney staring in after Ford, their faces full of unabashed, almost gleeful interest. The boss in a state – what a laugh. Christ, had Ford said something to them about who he’d gone out to meet?
‘You okay, boss? You look like you’ve seen your nana in the nip. Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine, thanks.’ He said it in a low growl and turned back to his computer screen, only looking up again when he realised that Ford hadn’t moved but was still standing with his head round the door, looking in expectantly.
‘What is it?’ Mulcahy barked, more a challenge than a question.
Ford looked like he was about to lob that one back at him but, for once, decided that the smart-arse remark was not the way to go. ‘It’s five past three, boss, and you did say we had to have this brainstorm session at three o’clock. Do you want to cancel? Will I tell the lads to get on with something else?’
Shit. He’d completely forgotten about that. This was what he should have been thinking about on the way back. Not spent every step of the way, head down, fretting about whether Siobhan would be okay. What sort of idiot must he have looked like to the others storming in like that? He rapped his fingers on the edge of the desk and stood up, going over to the door, pulling it open as Ford stood back.
‘No, Liam, thanks,’ he said with as much authority as he could salvage. ‘I was … uh … checking something. I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes, okay? I’m just going for a quick … ’ He jerked a thumb towards the bathroom down the corridor.
‘Okay, boss, whenever you’re ready.’
He went in and turned on the tap, scooped up a double handful of water and buried his face in it. He repeated this three times, letting the cold shock of water on his forehead and eyes calm him and bring him back to earth. He grabbed a paper towel and stood up straight, staring at himself in the mirror, seeing a man with a jaw that was too big to be handsome and a nose with a
kink on the bridge from where Seaspray’s tiller hit him full in the face during a squall when he was thirteen. He wiped his face again and got his hair in order. A man, he said to himself, as if his father’s hand was resting there on his shoulder. He took a deep breath and cleared his mind of everything but what Solomons had told them earlier at the Clarence. If Donal Murtagh thought the ILU needed some sort of coup to ensure its survival, then finding the source of the cocaine on the Atlantean would be the best chance they were likely to get of delivering something spectacular. That’s what he had to focus on now. If they could establish that link, maybe they would be able to push it even further. If the link was there.
15
As soon as Siobhan got round the corner onto Dawson Street, she had started looking out for a taxi. No way was she going back to the office again, despite what she’d said to Mulcahy. She wasn’t fit for anything after that scene, and it wasn’t like she’d be missed at the Herald. Eventually she saw a cab coming and hailed it, climbed in and slumped in the back like a stringless puppet, slack, spent, oblivious to the driver’s line in amiable jabber. Fifteen minutes later she was back in the safety of her apartment, feeling cold, pulling a blanket from the box at the end of the bed and wrapping it around herself. Looking for excuses. Mulcahy had been a bit of an arse, sure, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t provoked him. She met worse than him most days and it didn’t plunge her into full-on meltdown mode. What the hell had happened there? Was it the nightmare? The lack of sleep? Was it because Mulcahy was the only tangible reminder she had – the living proof in so many ways – of exactly what she had allowed Rinn to take from her?
She went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine, went back to the living room, wrapped the blanket tight around herself again and turned on the laptop. Anything to stop dwelling on herself. What had happened to Gemma? That was all that mattered now. She was determined to get somewhere with it, but the problem was that the woman herself remained like a ghost to her. She had gathered all this information on Horgan, yet Gemma was as elusive as ever. So far everything she’d learnt about her had come from either Mrs Kearney or the one or two of Horgan’s friends who’d been willing to talk to her. Even the accountancy governing body hadn’t returned her call. The only thing for it was to go back down to Cork again, she decided, put some old-fashioned legwork into it, track down that PA of Gemma’s. Surely she would know what Gemma had been planning. There had to be someone around those offices who knew who the PA was. Or she could get in touch with the landlord, maybe, find out if they knew why the office was closed up. If he was the right type, or aggrieved, he might even let her have a poke around. It had to be worth a try, anyhow, didn’t it?
Dublin Dead Page 15