by Jane Ryan
Without realising, we’d exited the park onto Grafton Street.
‘Will my accessing accounts without court orders get you into trouble?’ she asked.
‘No, shouldn’t be a problem,’ I said, with more bluff than accuracy.
We needed a little treat. ‘Want a sticky almond bun and chai latte in Bewleys?’
She beamed sunshine at me.
‘Hold off on looking at any accounts until I have the necessary paperwork, will you?’ I said. ‘It won’t take me long.’
Which wasn’t entirely true. I’d have to bring back a bun for Joe and Muldoon if I was to get out of this. The current Ombudsman didn’t want her gardaí snooping where they’d no right to be.
Chapter 36
My phone danced with an international number I didn’t recognise, hissing on my desk for attention despite its silent setting.
‘I thought when you muted these things it meant you didn’t have to hear them?’ I said.
Amina sat across from me. ‘Bridge, you don’t own that device. It belongs to Google. Sergey and Larry are listening to every word.’
‘Christ, that would be funny, if I couldn’t hear Siri and Alexa laughing in the background.’
I picked up the call and made my way out onto the second-floor corridor.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘Hello?’ said a rural accent. ‘Is this Detective Garda Bridget Harney?’
‘Speaking, who’s this?’
‘Sergeant Brendan O’Driscoll based in the embassy in Madrid. I was Kay’s friend when I worked in the Interpol offices in Ireland. We met on a course couple of years back.’
A match struck behind my eyelids, a nebulous memory flared of a jammy posting.
‘Yes, I remember, we were looking for a bit of help identifying a victim. Kay mentioned you’d been transferred to the embassy.’
‘She was a fine woman.’
There was no arguing with that.
‘She was. What can I do for you, Sergeant O’Driscoll?’
‘Kay and I discussed Seán Flannery. She said you were hunting him.’
It sounded obsessed and cold put out on a shingle, but accurate.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve sent an update to DCS Muldoon. A flag went off. Flannery was spotted in Barcelona.’
Colourless sentinels of hair rose in one sharp movement, all over my body.
‘When? Do you have an exact location? Who’s he with?’
‘No more,’ said O’Driscoll.
I pictured a large countryman with his hand raised in a five-finger splay.
‘This was a courtesy for a dead friend. If your DCS wants you on this, you’ll get the necessary update. Good day.’
The stairs blurred in front of me as I ran, belting into co-workers and flattening them against the wall. The sixth-floor lobby had the kind of airless quiet I couldn’t ignore. It halted my gallop. Barging in on Muldoon wasn’t the smart move. The lift pinged as I made for the stairwell and better choices.
Choppy male voices heralded the arrival of senior management.
‘Harney!’ It was a bark at my too-slow retreating form. ‘To me.’
DCS Muldoon spoke as though summoning a wilful dog. Joe gave me a raised eyebrow and made space in the copse of men following DCS Muldoon. I slunk in and caught Joe’s eye. He mouthed ‘Flannery’ at me. DCS Muldoon charged ahead and I whiffled in his wake, the aftershave and porcine smell of midday men choking me. I held my breath and waited for Muldoon’s entourage to disperse. When they’d moved off, Joe and I followed DCS Muldoon to his office.
Muldoon bristled with energy, his short spiky hair capable of conducting electricity. He stood behind his desk and indicated his visitors’ chairs. I sat down, but Joe put his hands on the back of a navy padded chair and used it to support his weight.
‘We’ve had a sighting of Flannery,’ said DCS Muldoon. ‘One of the lads in the embassy rang me. It’ll come through headquarters in the Park soon enough. Flannery’s in Barcelona. He was spotted on CCTV in Plaça de Catalunya – feed came in via Mossos Esquadra to the Irish embassy – they bypassed Interpol.’
‘Unusual?’ I said.
‘A little,’ said DCS Muldoon, ‘but I wouldn’t read anything into it. We don’t know how the Spanish run their shop and Interpol can take its own sweet time to disseminate information.’
‘But it’s a confirmed sighting?’ I said.
I didn’t need to fake excitement to cover my prior knowledge and stood up to contain the plans flashing around my mind with luminous intensity. Joe’s eyes were full of misgiving. He looked at DCS Muldoon and a cold finger quenched the wick of my plans.
‘Bridge, it’s not a certainty you’ll go to Barcelona. It may be the Spanish won’t want any Irish involvement in the apprehension of Flannery or they might have a sting operation ready to go,’ said DCS Muldoon.
‘What do we know about it?’ I said.
‘We?’ said DCS Muldoon. His intonation wasn’t to be missed nor the intent in the hard flint of his eyes. ‘Have few details, but those we have are not for sharing. As I said, if you are assigned to this case you will be briefed, but Joe and I have some work to do before any decision is made.’
Joe nodded at me as DCS Muldoon swung away in his chair, as though I needed a further dismissal.
I took my anger out on the steps as I thumped my way down the stairs, texting Liam O’Shea to join me at the Ritzy.
He was already in the doorway of the café by the time I got there and raised a meaty arm, signalling to join him at the top of the queue. Even the smell of toast and sizzling bacon couldn’t deflect me.
‘You’ve a face on you like a smacked arse,’ said Liam.
‘Do you think that’s in the spirit of collegiality?’
I was a comic-book harpy, all claws and high-pitched voice. What I wanted to say got caught on my intentions and Liam’s laughing face.
He grabbed his toastie and two frothy coffees and we barrelled outside into the soft rain stippling the city.
‘They’ve spotted Flannery in Barcelona,’ I said.
‘Jesus! When are you off, Bridge?’
‘I don’t know. I may not be going. Muldoon isn’t sure we’ll be wanted by the Spanish and Joe is being all . . .’ I searched for the word, ‘squirrelly.’
‘Technical term so.’ Liam smiled.
‘Please, Liam, I need a bit of support. If Flannery is in Barcelona it may be a pitstop on his way to Central America. If he gets there we’ve lost him! There isn’t a hope of us finding him outside Europe. This could be my last chance.’
Liam chewed a mouthful of crunchy bacon, food snagging on his even teeth, but it wasn’t the time to talk about table manners.
‘What do you want from me? To speak to Joe?’
‘Yes, if he’ll listen to you. Muldoon is discussing it with him and they asked me to leave.’
‘Flannery’s your pet project,’ Liam waved me quiet, ‘and you got lucky with Chris Watkiss smoothing the waters for you in the UK, but don’t for a second think it’s going to happen again. Not in Spain. Costa del Sol is packed with nasty articles that should be extradited, but the Spanish won’t budge them.’
An outline of where his frustration lay started to appear.
‘Fair enough. Tell me more about Spain?’
He shrugged. A tight movement, more the tensing of shoulders than relaxing throwaway body language.
‘Gardaí in Madrid are toothless – they and the Irish embassy staff bring home the bodies or translate. The Spanish won’t let us carry guns. We went over two years ago, down to Benalmádena to pick up one of the Dunnes. Guardia Civil wouldn’t let us near the place. And their system’s shambolic, with infighting between the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of the Interior. You might get agreement from one and the other will stop you when you’re on site. You don’t know if their police are coming for you or the criminals.’
His dissatisfaction spun out between us.
�
�Didn’t work out with the Dunnes?’ I asked.
Liam shook his head. ‘Oul’ man Dunne is still out there. Giving us the finger. It’s dangerous too, Bridge. Remember that. Place is rotten with officials on the take. It’s the gateway to Europe. All the cartels have a presence there. I wouldn’t want you or anyone going there on their own.’ He looked right into my eyes. ‘Don’t let O’Connor use your mutual animosity to send you to Barcelona alone. You’ll come back in a bag. Do yourself a favour and let Flannery go.’
I leaned up on my tiptoes and was nose to chin with him.
‘Can’t do that, Liam.’
‘So you’re going to have Muldoon on your case as well as O’Connor? Not a smart move, Bridge.’
Chapter 37
2007
‘It’s time for you to meet the chemist,’ said Seán.
‘Jaysus, not before time,’ said Gavin. ‘I thought you were keeping her all to yourself.’
‘I was, but she needs to know the consequences of non-cooperation. She’s finding it “stressful”, so it’s time she met you. I don’t like hitting women, they can’t take a beating. Don’t touch her head or her hands, mind. She works with the public.
‘Fair enough,’ said Gavin.
They walked down Tolka Road past the terraced houses and miniature gardens concreted over to accommodate vehicles. East Wall was Seán’s place and a sense of unease dogged him when he was too far away from it, a monster who could find no rest unless on his native soil.
‘Where d’you find her? Is she a real chemist, like college and that?’ said Gavin.
‘Don’t be a knob, Gavin.’
‘I’m not! The only birds I’ve seen working in chemists’ are the dollies selling perfume.’
‘She’s a qualified pharmacist and will do what we need. She gets us prescription stuff too – the benzos are going a bomb on the Southside at the minute. There’s kit I need to buy for the Farm as well – she can order that for me.’
‘Sounds good.’ Gavin gave a small grin and pulled at a piece of summer lavender poking its head through a garden fence. He rubbed the seeds in his palms and they let out a sweet, woody oil.
‘This is Whack O’Neill’s house, lad who grows all the weed out in Rush? Green-fingered fucker all the same.’
‘Don’t swear, Gavin, you let yourself down.’
‘And you let me down – I know the drill, Seán. Was Sister Assumpta so good to you that’d you’d carry her hate of swearing through your whole life?’
Seán shrugged. What he had taken from Sister Assumpta was the idea he was doused in a blackness nothing could wash away and anything he could do, even small things such as never swearing, would be stored in God’s bank for the final day of reckoning. A reckoning he didn’t believe in, but a younger version of himself struggled to shake off these old superstitions when the darkness inside him massed to a point and pulsed. He had known from the start where the problem lay – in his blood. Not the kind he was born with but the blood he was born into. The nuns and the Vicars of Christ had created this shadow in him.
‘No, I don’t think she was good to us,’ said Seán. ‘Looking back, she was a spiteful woman, but hid it well. We weren’t old enough to have the words for what she was. If she said it was night in the middle of the day we’d have gone to bed.’
‘We had no choice, Seán. They ruled us, looked down on us like we were scum. You know I feel sh–crap about leaving you there. You know that, right, man?’
Seán looked at Gavin and saw truth in his words, recalling the day Gavin was taken by his grandmother to live in East Wall. Gavin’s mother had been useless and left for London after Gavin was born. When she had eventually told her mother she had a grandson and where he was, the old woman had taken off running. Sheila Devereaux had stood in the Home’s grand front hall roaring for Sister Assumpta and slapped her across the face when she had declined to let Gavin leave. A picture of Gavin pulling at his grandmother’s hand, refusing to face forward or take his eyes off Seán standing at an upstairs window, clicked through his mind like the colour photographs in an ancient red View-Master.
‘I know, Gavin.’
They walked in silence, Gavin content to let Seán lead as they walked over the East Link bridge, towards Ringsend and Sandymount.
‘What’s this chemist’s name?’ said Gavin, taking out a tin of tobacco.
‘Shouldn’t smoke, Gavin. Bet you’re smoking more than you realise.’
He bobbed his head. ‘At least I’m rolling them, so not as convenient as a pack and I never smoke more than ten in a day. Look.’ He showed Seán the inside of his tin lid with a list of times written in stiff card. The smell of green wood rose out of the tin, until a sea breeze tore it away.
‘That’s something,’ said Seán.
‘Is this chemist expecting us?’
The impatience in Gavin’s voice was growing, getting an edge. Seán calmed him with details.
‘Her name’s not important. She has a pharmacy in Sandymount off the green. We’re going there now. I have everything in place. The Farm’s rented from an old couple in Kilkenny. They’ll stay in the house and have hired out the land to us. Wife is half dead but the oul’ fellah’s all there.’
‘You sure he’s OK?’
‘Vouched for by the lads in Monaghan. He’s a supporter from way back. He spends most of his time looking after his wife, no family apart from a niece in America.’
‘You know a lot about him.’
‘The boys from Monaghan are thorough,’ said Seán.
Gavin supressed a snort and licked his cigarette paper, giving it an expert twirl and putting an unfiltered end into his mouth. The fizz of a struck match and clouds of white smoke left his lungs.
‘So what’s next?’
‘After the chemist?’
‘Yeah, Seán, what happens after the chemist? When do we meet the next shipment? You said it would be our biggest yet. Take us off the street corners. You’ve been promising that for a while.’
‘Trawler in Donegal. We’ve rented it, the lads from Monaghan recommended the fishermen. We go out deep-sea fishing and meet a cargo ship on the way to Rotterdam. It’s taking a detour about two hundred nautical miles off the west coast.’
‘What!’ Gavin coughed puffs of smoke, a string of saliva attached to the hand wiping his mouth. ‘Two hundred miles out to sea? We’ll be killed.’
Seán allowed himself a small shrug. He’d had the same reaction when the fishermen had told him where their trawler would meet the cartel’s cargo ship.
‘It’s nautical miles and the trawler’s a deep-sea vessel. Two hundred miles is nothing to them, even in rough weather.’
‘Rough weather? In June?’
Seán looked away. He had no desire to concern Gavin further. Weather on land had no bearing on climate so far out to sea, but Gavin sensed something in the quality of Seán’s silence.
‘Why do we have to go so far out?’
‘We can’t look suspicious to the coast guard or the navy,’ said Seán.
‘Won’t they see us on a radar or something? They’re not as useless as they used to be.’
‘Not true, Gavin. They were never useless – ask the fools who dumped bales of cocaine into Dunlough Bay if the coast guards don’t know what they’re doing. We have to be smart, so we’re meeting the cargo ship on the Sunday night of the Round Ireland Yacht race.’
‘To unload pallets of drugs, in the middle of the night at sea while a yacht race is on? How is that smart?’
Seán laughed at Gavin’s open-mouthed disbelief.
‘We’ll be out miles further than the yachts can go and even if the coast guard want to have a go, the race will keep them busy. Our coast guard and navy can only handle so much. The LÉ Eithne and Orla are in port for up to twelve months. The LÉ Niamh is the boat we have to worry about according to the fishermen – she has a savage crew and is built for the North Atlantic.’
‘So we have Master and Commander Mick comin
g after us in his boat?’
Seán allowed himself a smile. ‘No, they’ll be focused on the yacht race in case any of the boats get into trouble. And don’t worry about the radar – it will look like two parallel shipping lines. The vessels will pass by one another, not too fast not too slow. The cargo is waterproofed and dropped into the ocean, the trawler uses its nets to pull the catch in. The fishermen have done it dozens of times.’
‘And we’ll be on this trawler?’
‘We have to be. Look, Gavin, what are you afraid of? It’s a floating warehouse. We’re safe, but we need to make sure the crew don’t mess with anything. These fishermen aren’t playing by any rules. The reason we’re being looked after is because the lads from Monaghan have backed us.’
‘Speaking of the lads from Monaghan, how much will we have to pay them?’
‘Half the value of the haul.’
‘Fuck!’
‘Upfront.’
‘How are we doing that?’
‘Guy,’ said Seán.
Gavin was quiet, his mind ticking over in the bright June sun.
They’d walked over the Tom Clarke Bridge and passed a football stadium, the scrubby sea grass taking hold as they moved nearer the strand.
‘And we have to use Guy and the Monaghan lads?’
‘No way out of it, Gavin. We don’t have enough backing or money of our own. Yet. We’ve an army who need paying and product to sell. I’m going to brand the coke with a five-point star, stick the molly in a pillbox and call them ‘Umbrella’ after Rhianna. We’ll make a killing at the festivals, especially with the oul’ ones at Electric Picnic.’
Gavin smiled and pushed his fringe off his forehead. It was hot.
‘When we have wholesale customers, then we can expand, stop using the lads from Monaghan, but we’ll have to pay them a tax if we want to supply the North.’
‘All right, Seán.’
The words had weight to his ears, because they were laced with the comfort of Gavin’s trust. Seán had formed this plan, looked at it from a business angle with financial ratios and strategic planning. This was a new time in Ireland. The property bubble would never burst, people had cheap money, a gaping hunger and not enough orifices to snort it into. Seán was going to help them. When Gavin came out of prison with an army as likely to shoot themselves as the target, the men in Monaghan had taught them how to handle their weapons. They’d seen something in Seán as well and had offered to help with his plans. They were not men he could refuse. However, he knew the biggest problem for drug dealers when business started to flow was cash. Where to put it and what to do with it. Seán wasn’t going the way of Larry Dunne, caught on a bridge in Dublin and trying to explain two hundred grand in his mother’s garden shed under the cat litter.