‘No, it was GNDU all right, but before my time. I was still over in A Division then. But I know some lads who did work on it. Do you need some background? It’ll all be in dust-wrappers in the archive by now.’
‘Can you pull the file on it for me?’
‘The file?’ Ford snorted. ‘Jesus, there’s probably hundreds of files. Like I said, it was a major deal at the time. Was there anything in particular you were interested in? Could you give me a name or something to concentrate on?’
Mulcahy rubbed his forehead, the frustration building up in him again. There were far more important things to be getting on with, and no way should he be involving Ford in this as well.
‘This has to stay between the two of us, okay?’
‘Fair enough,’ Ford tutted, clearly insulted. ‘Who else would I tell?’
‘Look, I only say that because it’s important for me to keep it quiet. I need to find out about a woman called Gemma Kearney, DOB October 1978 or thereabouts. I think she worked at Klene Records around the time it was shut down, or before that, maybe. I’d really appreciate it if you could have a squint at what we have on her – you know, arrests, mentions in dispatches, anything at all. Apparently she was picked up by us at some stage. I need to know when and what for. Okay?’
Ford couldn’t let it go at that. ‘Can I at least ask what it’s in connection with?’
‘I’d prefer if you didn’t, Liam. Like I said, it’s between you and me for now. If anybody asks, say you’re pulling the files in connection with Rosscarbery Bay. That should shut them up. And if there’s a problem, refer them straight to me, okay?’
‘Sure, if it’s that important.’
‘Thanks, Liam,’ Mulcahy said, turning to his computer screen and clicking on his contacts book. ‘I’ll crack on with the SOCA side of things while you’re doing that and get the ball rolling. What did Solomons say the SIO’s name was? Commander Gavin Corbett, was it?’
‘That’s right,’ Ford said, getting up. ‘I don’t know whether he’d be London- or Liverpool-based.’
‘Probably a bit of both—’ Mulcahy broke off, and looked up as Duffy rapped on the glass door and opened it far enough to stick his head into the room.
‘Boss, are you done there? It’s a call for you. Sounds urgent.’
‘Who?’
Duffy winced like he’d been caught out. ‘Some detective inspector, says she has to talk to you right now. Not sure of the name, she said it so quick. Gogan or Grogan or Brogan, I think.’
‘Brogan?’ Mulcahy exclaimed. ‘Claire Brogan?’
For the second time that day Mulcahy found himself completely at a loss. He’d worked with Brogan the year before on the Priest investigation, or at least until she had used the case as an opportunity to leap-frog over him and get herself a transfer out of Sex Crimes and into the Murder Squad. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since, save for a whisper on the grapevine that she had left her husband and taken up with the head of Murder, a guy called Lonergan. Hearing Brogan’s name out of the blue just hours after meeting Siobhan, it was all getting a bit too weird for him. What in the name of God could Brogan want?
He shook himself out of it. Both Ford and Duffy were giving him that perplexed look again.
‘Did she say what it was about?’
‘No.’ Duffy grimaced, like he was being accused of something,
‘Okay, put her through, thanks,’ he said, finally regaining some of his composure.
He picked up the phone. ‘Claire, how can I help you?’
She told him exactly how he could help, and in no uncertain terms. He began to feel sick in his stomach, too shocked by what she was saying to do anything more than mutter occasional single-word responses and assurances. As he put the phone down his hand was trembling, his entire body numb with anxiety and disbelief.
‘What’s the matter, boss? You’ve gone grey as bone.’
Mulcahy looked up at Ford. He hadn’t even been aware that he was still in the room. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he whispered, more to himself than to Ford. ‘It’s Eddie McTiernan … ’
It took Siobhan just another hour or so to put flesh on the bones of Horgan’s itinerary the night of Friday 3 September. He had flown from Cork to Amsterdam, she knew. At some point he must have picked up a vehicle, driven it south through Holland on the E19 for two hours or so before refuelling somewhere near Rotterdam, then driven on for another couple of hours down through Belgium and France, before taking the midnight ferry across the Channel to England. All this she gleaned from the two receipts for purchases in euros. The first must have been for fuel, she surmised, when the second revealed itself – enlarged on her laptop – as both a receipt and ticket for the 11.30 p.m. SeaFrance ferry from Calais to Dover: €120 for one van utilitaire and one passager. She didn’t need to be a genius at French to figure out what a van utilitaire was: a van. And from Dover, Horgan had driven it another 200 miles on to Bristol, arriving at around 5 a.m.
There was only one reason Siobhan could think of why anyone would do all of that, and try to cack-handedly cover up the fact by booking another flight to Bristol at the same time. There was one big question in her mind now, too: why would anyone go to the enormous trouble of doing all that and then kill himself twelve hours later? Shortly after meeting Gemma Kearney.
Eddie McTiernan lay slumped against the bodywork of his silver Bentley, the heavy driver’s door gaping open, a pool of viscous brown blood congealing around his legs and hips, and seeping away behind him beneath the car. His face was a horror show, eyes and mouth frozen open in shock, the leathery brown of his features drained to a dull grey. Behind and above him, the coachwork of the car was peppered with shot and plumes of dark dried blood, spattered about with gobbets of flesh and bone ripped from the football-sized hole in his chest by what could only have been a shotgun discharged at very close range.
Mulcahy stepped out of the stifling forensics tent, both hands covering his nose and mouth, the bitter stench of blood, hot air and what must have been McTiernan’s spontaneous terminal bowel movement threatening to overwhelm his stomach. He pushed back the hood of the thin, papery coverall he was wearing, to get some air on his forehead. Turning towards the slew of Garda cars and Technical Bureau vans parked up on the road outside McTiernan’s house, he walked over to the low wall at the front of the garden and bent over it, trying to catch his breath, determined not to throw up.
Guilt sat on the back of his neck like a dead weight, shooting darts of pain between his shoulders as he straightened up again. All the way out to Leopardstown, he had been unable to staunch the suspicion that, if it hadn’t been for his intervention, McTiernan would have caught the boat to Holyhead the night before and been safely out of the country when his killer came calling. Again and again he replayed in his head the look of panic that had flashed in McTiernan’s eyes when he realised he might miss the ferry, and felt a sharp twinge of shame every time for having laughed about it with Ford earlier – maybe at the same time poor Eddie had been lying there, rasping out one last breath. He felt an even greater wave of it crash in when he recalled why McTiernan’s wife had given him the information. Christ, what must she be feeling now? And what the hell had McTiernan been running from? The evidence of his eyes forced him to wonder if it hadn’t been the same thing as Begley. And Ronson for that matter. All three of them ripped apart by shotgun blasts. But what the hell could McTiernan have had to do with all that? He had said he was out of the game. Could he really have been lying about it all these years?
Mulcahy turned round and took in McTiernan’s house, the extensions, the swagger of it, in a markedly different light now. A huge white plastic forensics tent covered at least half the expanse of block-paving drive, shrouding the corpse, the car and anywhere the gunman might have stepped, all the way up to the front door. The silver Bentley, he remembered, was on a 2009 registration plate, so McTiernan hadn’t traded up to the current year. Still, what was it worth – €120,000, maybe more? And McTierna
n had been moaning about having to offload properties in Spain?
He was stepping out of his coverall and bagging it up for one of the lads from Technical Bureau when he saw DI Claire Brogan emerge from round the side of the tent where the front door of the house was. She stopped briefly to say something to one of the uniforms, raising a hand to Mulcahy to indicate he should hang on, that she would be over in a second. She looked just like she had the year before, when he had first met her, in St Vincent’s Hospital – her red hair plaited at the back, her suit dark grey and clearly expensive, her shoes sporting a bit of a heel despite her height. As she walked over to him, he detected even more confidence in her stride than she had possessed before.
‘Seen everything you wanted?’ Brogan asked.
‘Too much,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Like I said before, I knew him for years. He was a terrible chancer, but you couldn’t help being fond of him all the same.’
Brogan nodded. ‘I just had a word with one of the lads in the Organised Crime Unit over at Harcourt Place. He confirmed more or less everything you told me about Mr McTiernan and his criminal acquaintanceships. It looks like I’m going to be spoilt for choice on this one.’
Half an hour earlier Brogan had been professional rather than friendly when Mulcahy had turned up uninvited at her scene. On the phone she’d only said stiffly that she needed to interview him urgently because Mrs McTiernan had said an Inspector Mulcahy from Drugs had been looking for her husband the night before. Obviously Brogan was intrigued to hear what Mulcahy had to say about that, but she had insisted on him leaving any explanation until the interview. Yet while she hadn’t been overjoyed, exactly, when he arrived at the house, nor was she as suspicious as he thought she would be. As she would have had every right to be. Instead, she had listened carefully as he set out exactly what his connection with McTiernan had been, and filled her in on the events of the night before – without going into too many specifics. She had asked a few smart questions, satisfied herself for the moment that his presence wasn’t obviously suspicious, and repeated her wish to interview him on a formal basis at a time more convenient for her. She had even relented when he asked to see McTiernan’s body for himself. Something he wasn’t sure he would have allowed her to do if their positions were reversed. But he had been quite insistent. As soon as he’d heard a shotgun was involved, he had to see it for himself.
‘Was there anything else you thought of, inside?’ she said, inclining her head towards the forensics tent. ‘You know, as to why or who?’
‘One thing did cross my mind,’ he said, rubbing his eyes tiredly. ‘When I spoke to Eddie last night, he had something wrapped in a plaid rug behind the car seat. He seemed kind of desperate to keep it to himself. I had a squint inside the car just now and it’s not there. Do you know did it turn up in the house at all?’
Arching an eyebrow, Brogan looked a mite more suspicious than she had before, like she was wondering if his interest in the item was more for himself than for her. ‘Why would that be important?’
‘I don’t know that it is, but, looking back, he seemed scared of it somehow. I just wondered if it might have had something to do with this.’
‘I didn’t come across anything like that.’
Brogan called over a uniform and asked him to send the head of the search team out to her. A minute later a man clad in a proper tech’s blue antistatic coverall emerged from the house. Mulcahy repeated the question for him.
‘I thought that was a bit weird,’ he said to Brogan. ‘It was in the hall. An old oil painting wrapped in a rug. As soon as I saw it I thought of that break-in at Kanteeley House a few weeks back – you know, the big art and antiques theft over in Mayo.’
Mulcahy had read something about it in the papers.
Brogan nodded as well. ‘Maybe he was trying to shift it across the water last night, get it off his hands,’ she suggested, turning to Mulcahy. ‘The guy in OCU said McTiernan had a rep as a high-end fence.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past him,’ Mulcahy sighed. ‘I did hear about him being involved in that kind of thing. Not so much fencing the stuff as brokering its return.’
‘Same thing, these days,’ the search officer said. ‘They get more from the insurance companies for giving it back than they ever would on the black market.’
‘Was it hidden away?’ Mulcahy asked. ‘Inside, I mean.’
‘No, it was propped up against the hall table,’ the search guy said. ‘It was the first thing I saw when I walked into the house.’
‘In which case,’ Brogan said, ‘unless our gunman was blind, I think we can probably rule it out in terms of motive.’
‘Unfortunately, I reckon you can,’ Mulcahy replied.
17
Mulcahy turned the Saab in at the Ship Street gate and held up his warrant card for the uniform in the security cabin. Mulcahy looked at him, saw a man in his early fifties, greying hair, sagging skin around the jowls, sitting in a wooden box and waiting for retirement. The barrier began to rise and the uniform waved him on. As he put the car into gear Mulcahy felt a rush of weariness come over him, wondering what it must be like to spend an entire working life on the lowest rung of the ladder, but nothing came to him beyond a vague, unwelcome sense of passiveness and bad luck. He shrugged off the thought and cursed to himself when he saw that all the GNDU’s allocated parking spaces were full.
He pulled up outside the dungeon-like door of the Garda Museum at the base of Dublin Castle’s massive medieval Record Tower. The museum was locked up for the night, so he wasn’t going to be blocking anyone’s access, and he wasn’t intending hanging around for long, anyway. He crossed over to the GNDU building and was running upstairs when his mobile trilled. Ford, wondering whether he was coming back to the office or not.
‘I’m just coming in now – where’re you?’
‘Over in the Companies Office. Hang on there a few minutes, would you? I won’t be long and you’ll want to see this.’
Ford hung up before Mulcahy had a chance to say anything else. He looked at his watch, wondering if he hadn’t misheard Ford. It was past seven. How could he be in the Companies Office? It was a public building and should have closed hours ago. And what the hell was he doing over there, anyway?
He shrugged off his jacket and logged on to his computer. Duffy and Sweeney had already gone, so he had the ILU to himself. Getting a few notes down about McTiernan and the events at the ferry terminal, while they were still relatively fresh in his mind, would not go amiss. He started bashing away on the keyboard, but the work didn’t come easily. Every time he thought of McTiernan in the car the night before he got a corresponding image of his slaughtered face hanging grey against the Bentley’s bodywork, and a strong sensation of a large, judgemental finger pointing at himself. Christ, how in hell was he ever going to live with that? He could imagine all too clearly his dreams being haunted by McTiernan for months, just as they had been by Rinn the year before. He was so caught up in it he nearly jumped out of his skin twenty minutes later when Liam Ford materialised beside him.
‘Jesus, Liam, you nearly gave me a heart—’ He exhaled heavily rather than complete the sentence, or the thought.
‘Sorry, boss,’ Ford said. For once the sentiment seemed genuine. ‘You look shattered. Was it that bad out in Leopardstown?’
‘Brutal.’ It was the only word he could think of to sum it up.
‘They on to anyone for it?’
‘Not a clue as far as I could tell. No witnesses, anyway, but it’s early days. Brogan’s a good detective. I’m sure she’ll get to the bottom of it.’
‘It’s too fucking weird he was done with a shotgun, though, isn’t it? After everything he was saying to you. Don’t you think?’
Ford shook his head ruefully, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. Mulcahy wondered whether it was because he didn’t give a damn one way or another about McTiernan, or because he was thinking of something else.
‘What is it you wanted me to hang on fo
r? Is it something to do with the Atlantean?’
‘No, I left Aidan and Aisling to get on with all that like you said,’ Ford said, pulling up a chair. ‘They rang me before they left, said they’d come up with some interesting leads. I actually got the impression the two of them were heading off together to do some more work on it, over a drink or something.’ He paused, smirking at Mulcahy, as if to say he wouldn’t mind being in Duffy’s position, getting up to extracurricular activities with Sweeney. Then he brightened again and smacked a fist enthusiastically into the palm of his other hand.
‘To be honest, boss, I was totally caught up with this Gemma Kearney bird. How did you pick up on her? It’s mental.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Gemma Kearney – how did you know about this whole Klene Records connection?’
Ford’s face was more animated now than Mulcahy had seen it all day. He looked like a man bitten by a bug – an infectious one. Mulcahy sat up, energised himself now, or at least intrigued. ‘I told you earlier. She worked there.’
‘No, no. I mean the connection with Bingo.’
‘Bingo?’
‘Well, yeah, I kind of assumed you knew that when you asked me to look into yer one.’
‘No,’ Mulcahy said, flabbergasted. ‘I mean, all I heard was that she worked for Klene Records.’
‘Jesus, you’re going to love this, then.’ Ford beamed. ‘I think her and Bingo might have been an item at some stage. Look.’ Ford held up the sheaf of A4 documents he had in his hand. ‘From what I’ve been able to gather, Begley was up to his neck in Klene.’
‘I don’t bloody believe this.’ Mulcahy stood up, gripped by a new anxiety. Had Siobhan Fallon been playing him again? Was her real interest in Begley? In the murder? Had she been feeding him info about one thing hoping to get something on another? But that was ridiculous, surely? There was no way that could even begin to make sense. Siobhan hadn’t so much as mentioned Begley in passing, and she’d seemed genuinely concerned about the Kearney girl, and this other guy, the one in Bristol, whatever his name was. It had to be a coincidence. He shook himself out of it, looked up, saw Ford staring at him like he was waiting for permission to continue.
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