Buoyed up with enthusiasm for the task, she set about making plans for a trip to Cork the next day, cursing herself now for wasting so much time going to Bristol. But even as she did so, her thoughts snagged on Horgan again, and what Sheeran had said earlier about him flying to Amsterdam. How could he have flown to Holland and then ended up checking into the hotel in Bristol at five the following morning, less than twelve hours later? Had Gemma ever really met him in Bristol?
She went over to her bag on the sofa and got out her mobile, remembering the photos she had taken in Walker’s office the day before. Maybe that bar bill would yield some sign of Gemma, some indication of a female presence. She opened the photos on her phone. As she flicked through them, they all looked just as innocuous as they had the day before. Except for one, which was very indistinct, but looked to be for a large amount: €129. The next was the bar bill she’d been looking for: £16 spent in the Gold Bar, Bristol, beverages and food … She looked at the photo again, then thumbed back to the one before. How had she missed that first time round? One receipt was in euros, the other in pounds sterling. She flicked through the other photos. All were in pounds except for one, for another sizeable amount in euros – €70.20. Had Horgan made some last-minute purchases before he left Ireland?
She maximised the top section of the photo on the phone screen and just about managed to make out what was printed at the top of that receipt: ‘Total Belmos.’ There was no indication whether it was Irish or not, but what she saw underneath it, now, in the smaller print below, made her stop: the date 03:09:10, followed by a time, 22.35. Five hours after he’d left Cork. She stared again at the name at the top of the receipt. Total Belmos. It was meaningless to her. She took a sip of wine and typed the name into Google, tutted when she saw that the top hits were all to do with the French oil company Total, then nearly choked when she clicked on the first site, anyway, which brought up a map and directions to a petrol station, a Total petrol station at Belmos, Belgium, on the main E19 route south of Antwerp – about a hundred miles south of Amsterdam.
She was sure she’d seen a reference to E19 somewhere else in Horgan’s stuff. The Moleskine notebook. The lists. Walker had said they might be road numbers, junctions. She’d taken pics of them as well. She clicked forward to those pictures, but they were illegible on the phone’s small screen. She thought of emailing them through to the laptop, blowing them up on that, but before she did, another number floated to the surface of her memory. Or not just one number: A18/E40. That was it. She was sure of it. She typed it onto the screen, hit search, breathed out as she saw A18/E40 listed on various sites as a motorway in Belgium, but this time south of Bruges, heading west towards the coast and on to …
She sat back, felt several pieces of the jigsaw click softly, simultaneously into place. The road maps, the lists, the early morning check-in at the hotel, even Amsterdam made sense to her now. But mostly it was what Gemma had said in the message she left for Horgan at the hotel that snapped into perfect clarity: ‘Told you crossing would be fine.’ Jesus Christ, even her subconscious had tried to flag it up for her in that dream and she’d missed it. Crossing. The crossing. She clicked on the map on her screen, saw the A18/E40 highlighted in blue on it, ran a finger down the E19 from Amsterdam, to where the roads connected and then ran west to Calais, from where the ferry crossed the Channel to England.
‘It had to be Ronson,’ Sweeney insisted. ‘Nobody else could have known where Hayford left the drugs and nobody else could have turned around such a large-scale smuggling operation in under two months.’
They were all in Mulcahy’s office, sitting around his desk. They’d been going at it for over an hour, refamiliarising themselves with every aspect of the Rosscarbery Bay case. Ford had done a good job while Mulcahy was out. Not only had he been in touch with the Dutch authorities – and confirmed in essence, if not in detail, everything Solomons had told them about Hayford’s murder in Rotterdam and the rumours of missing cocaine. He had also briefed Duffy and Sweeney thoroughly on what Solomons had said in the Clarence, and how it might tie in with the Atlantean. He had even got them to prepare quick profiles of both Ronson and Hayford from what intelligence information was easily available. All Mulcahy had to do was fill them in on what McTiernan had told him the night before about Begley’s possible involvement. Then they had started in earnest by making up a timeline. With Ford writing it up in bullet points on a whiteboard he’d pinched from the Surveillance Unit next door, and Duffy using his laptop to double-check the dates using press reports and intelligence bulletins, they went through each of the key events in detail.
What quickly became evident was that a clear line of possibility did, in fact, run from Steve Hayford’s murder in Rotterdam in April through the seizure of the Atlantean off Cork in June and on to the murders of Trevor Ronson and Declan Begley. So much for possibility. The question of probability was rather more elusive. As was the issue of who could have acquired the cocaine and arranged its shipment to Ireland in such a relatively short space of time – the subject of Sweeney’s current line of argument.
‘You can’t just throw a sophisticated operation like that together in a couple of weeks,’ she argued. ‘Not unless you have the organisation in place already.’
‘But it didn’t take only a couple of weeks, did it?’ Duffy objected. ‘As you said yourself, it took at least a couple of months – we can see that from the timeline. And it was only sophisticated in theory. They botched the job, for Christ’s sake. How often did Ronson cock it up like that? Not very.’
Duffy sat back in his seat like he’d delivered the coup de grâce to that particular line of argument, but Sweeney was having none of it. ‘The fact remains that Ronson must’ve had some idea where the cocaine was left in storage,’ she insisted. ‘I mean, a €100 million worth – you’re not going to just lose it, are you? He must’ve had an idea of what Hayford planned to do with it.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Especially if Hayford was running the day-to-day end of the business.’ There wasn’t much point reminding Sweeney how drugs organisations and hierarchies were usually structured, how the people at the top were cushioned from risk by the layers below them, how details of movement and shipment were always on a need-to-know basis – for the protection of everyone concerned. Sweeney knew more about the theory of all that than many a Garda detective with five times her experience on the streets.
‘Look, we know from what Solomons said that Ronson told the Colombians he had no idea where the consignment was,’ Mulcahy repeated. ‘He must have reckoned there was a chance they would believe him.’
‘Yeah, but he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ Sweeney jumped in. ‘It would have had to be his starting position either way, whether he was telling the truth or lying to them. My point is, on the balance of probabilities, Ronson has to be the most likely candidate. Like Liam said, what better way could he dream up of making the Cali Cartel pay for topping Hayford than by nicking a tonne of their cocaine?’
Mulcahy squeezed his hands together in frustration and sat back in his chair. ‘But why would Ronson even risk it? It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that you can’t get embroiled in a feud like that with the Colombians and come out ahead. And the one thing that emerges consistently from the intel on Ronson is that he was exceptionally intelligent. He must have known there was no chance he could take on a cartel and win.’
‘He wouldn’t be the first cokehead to get grandiose ideas about himself,’ Ford said.
‘Yeah, but he wasn’t, was he?’ Mulcahy said. ‘Everything we have on him says he steered well clear of the product.’
‘I thought we were supposed to be thinking outside the box here?’ Sweeney broke in again. ‘I mean, just supposing your guy Solomons is wrong and Ronson did know where the drugs were and decided to chance his arm with them.’
‘Solomons did say Ronson wanted out of the game, boss,’ Duffy joined in now. ‘And €100 million worth of coke is a hel
l of a pension pot.’
Mulcahy had to concede that one.
‘Look, I think we’re getting way off the point here,’ Ford complained. ‘Surely the question is not why the Colombians might have killed Ronson. It’s how we make the link between the cocaine that went missing in Rotterdam and the cocaine that turned up on the Atlantean. I thought that’s supposed to be what we were about here.’
‘It is, Liam,’ Mulcahy said, ‘but so far Ronson is the only plausible link between the two that we’ve come up with.’
‘Sorry, boss, but I think Liam might be right,’ said Duffy, who’d been looking off into the distance for the last couple of minutes. ‘If we concentrate on Ronson, we’ll only end up going round in circles. I think there might be an even more obvious link.’
Duffy paused and all three stared over at him. ‘It’s the wrapping,’ he said, a light-bulb look in his eyes now. ‘That’s the thing that ties it all together.’
Mulcahy watched, amused, as Sweeney made an elaborate job of throwing her eyes heavenwards and tutting loudly. ‘What are you on about, Aidan?’
But Duffy had turned away and started clacking furiously on his laptop as the others looked at each other. As the one member of the quartet who hadn’t worked closely on the Rosscarbery Bay case, he had already made a few suggestions that elicited derisory responses from them.
‘What wrapping, Aidan?’ Mulcahy asked.
‘The stuff the bales of cocaine were wrapped in.’
‘What about it?’ Ford’s exasperation was getting the better of him.
Duffy swivelled his laptop round towards them. On the screen was a blown-up news photo of the ninety bales of cocaine stacked on the quayside beside the Atlantean in Baltimore, the day after they were seized. Mulcahy recognised the shot instantly – he was probably somewhere just off the edge of it himself.
‘Don’t you see?’ Duffy said, like they were all as thick as planks. ‘The cartel guys wouldn’t have whacked Ronson straight away, because at some level they trusted him. They’d been doing business for years. And they only had proof that Hayford got the cocaine, but not that it had ever got to Ronson afterwards. So what if – after a couple of months go by, say – they suddenly discover a really good reason to think Ronson was taking the piss all along. Like, if they found out he was trying to get the stuff out of Holland by some other route.’
Duffy looked on expectantly as he waited for the others to digest that. Ford was the first to come back on it. ‘Aidan has a point, boss. If Ronson did decide to hang on to the cocaine, he wouldn’t have wanted to risk bringing it into the UK through his normal channels. The Colombians might’ve got wind of it.’
Mulcahy nodded. It made a lot of sense.
‘That’s right,’ Duffy said enthusiastically. ‘So Ronson might have tried bringing some of it in here to Ireland, to disguise where it came from, which would have worked perfectly if the trip had gone smoothly. But it didn’t. The Atlantean got seized and her cargo displayed for all the world to see on the quayside in Baltimore. That’s what I’m trying to say. Those bales were all in their original wrappings.’ Duffy looked around at them as he pointed to the address bar on the photograph. ‘This is a Reuters picture. There must have been loads like it splashed all round the world. What if these Cali guys saw one and recognised their missing product? They’d have figured out for sure that Ronson really had tried to pull a fast one, wouldn’t they?’
Everyone in the room went quiet. They all remembered the press frenzy that had surrounded the seizure. They’d lived through it, facilitated it, been a first point of contact for the rush of interest that had flooded in from other enforcement agencies around the world on the back of it. Mulcahy himself had stood on the quay in Baltimore and looked on as the slavering press pack – photographers, TV reporters and print journalists – were given access for the carefully choreographed press conference. The Atlantean moored up, the bales of cocaine stacked for maximum visual impact behind the Garda commissioner and the Minister for Justice, who’d been helicoptered in specially to share the credit for this victory in the global war against drugs, as rare as it was spectacular. Duffy was absolutely right. The pictures had been splashed on front pages, and the film footage on TV news reports, all around the world. Every publicly released detail of the operation had been written about – including descriptions of the bales and their thick, sealed white plastic wrapping, each one bound with heavy-duty twine.
‘The way that twine was tied on the bales was distinctive,’ Ford said to Mulcahy. ‘You said so yourself at the time.’
He had. The packaging itself was fairly standard Colombian: each of the ten-kilo bales had been heat-sealed and waterproofed in thick industrial-grade white plastic. But the thick vegetative cord round each bale, run twice round the width and once along the length, and knotted at every intersection, was unusual. Presumably it was there to make the bales easier to carry across the mountains into Venezuela and on to whichever Atlantic port they had been shipped out from. The investigation team had sent samples of the twine to the DEA in the US for testing, and they had confirmed that it was made from Colombian sisal. It was another of the reasons everyone initially assumed the Atlantean had sailed up direct from the region. Those bales looked like they hadn’t been tampered with since leaving the jungle compound they were made up in. And the way they had been tied, every time with just one length of cord, all bound and knotted apparently by the same hand, really had been individual.
‘I think we might be on to something here,’ Mulcahy said quietly. ‘If you’d been the person who prepared that consignment, or even handled it, one close look at that photo and you’d recognise it straight away. I’ve no doubt about that.’
‘Jesus, that’s got to be a possibility all right,’ Ford said in a low voice. ‘They waited until they had the feckin’ proof.’
Sweeney coughed and drew their attention towards her. ‘And if everything between Ronson and Begley really was as your pal McTiernan described it, boss,’ she said, running with the idea now, ‘you know, all super-pally and that – well, it could give us the Begley connection as well.’
‘You’re right,’ Mulcahy said. ‘If Ronson wanted to get stuff in through the back door via Ireland, who better to turn to for help than his new best pal, Declan Begley.’
16
Mulcahy was sure they were on to something, but doubts lingered about whether it could ever tie up quite so neatly in reality. Few major investigations could be wholly resolved by a two-hour brainstorm, and they still hadn’t moved beyond the point of pure speculation. But it was a start. He told Sweeney and Duffy to devote all their efforts to it: her priority to liaise with the Spanish murder team and get everything they had on Begley, Duffy’s to work the Dutch angle and gather as much info as he could on the fallout from Hayford’s murder in terms of the missing cocaine. Meanwhile, Mulcahy said, he and Ford would approach SOCA regarding Ronson. They could all reconvene the following day at the same time, and he wanted tangible progress made, no matter how hard they had to push it.
As the others got up to leave, he asked Ford to hang back, waiting to speak again until Sweeney had pulled the glass door shut behind her.
‘Before we get into all this, I wanted a quick word about something else that’s come up.’
Ford cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘Oh yeah? Like our lives aren’t exciting enough already?’
‘I’m sure this won’t do anything to push you over your thrill threshold. It’s just a name I came across. Klene Records? Ring any bells with you?’
‘Klene with a “k” and two “e”s?’
‘Could be,’ Mulcahy said. ‘They were some punk-music outfit, so they probably couldn’t spell. Did they come up in anything we’ve been looking at recently?’
‘Not recently,’ Ford said, ‘but you’ll have heard the name all right, years back. Around the time you went off to Madrid, or just after, maybe. Yeah, you probably would have been gone by then. We shut down a place with that nam
e, or at least the Criminal Assets Bureau did, with our help. The place was a total front. Drugs money in one end, CD sales and supposedly legitimate profits out the other. It was Klene ha, ha – as in laundry. The CAB confiscated the lot – property, recording equipment, even the stock of CDs and master tapes or whatever you call them. There was a massive shit-storm about it at the time – you know, suppressing the creativity of the nation’s youth, all that liberal bollocks. I suppose we did deprive a few lousy bands of their fifteen minutes of fame.’
Mulcahy couldn’t help wondering why Siobhan hadn’t mentioned anything about that. Was it possible she wasn’t aware of it? It wouldn’t be like her to not be fully in the know, but then she hadn’t been firing on all cylinders, had she? He thought of the haunted look in her eyes again. Christ, how had she even recovered that much from what Rinn had done to her?
‘You okay there, boss?’
Ford was staring at him with that look on his face again.
‘Yeah, sorry, Liam. Did you work on the Klene job?’
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