by John Brady
“But isn’t there supposed to be a Murder Squad or something?”
Kenny made no efforts to wipe the tears and snot coursing down now.
“There was, but cases are done now local to the district. Guards are trained in it.”
Kenny made to say something but stopped, his mouth half-open. He looked up from whatever he had been concentrating on to help him make some point.
This is it, Tunney guessed: it’s dawned on him, he just saw it.
“What am I saying,” Kenny whispered. “What?”
He pushed the palm of his hand hard into his forehead and turned away.
Tunney nodded at the door. Collins was back in no time with a couple. The man looked a bit like Kenny. They went to him, the brother on one knee by Kenny’s chair grabbing him, holding him as he sobbed.
Tunney passed the man he’d been introduced to as a doctor in the hall.
“Mrs. Kenny,” he said. “Do you think she’d be able to talk?”
The man tightened his lips and shook his head.
“I gave her a sedative,” he said. “She may look a bit settled but she’s phased now.”
Collins followed Tunney into the kitchen. There was tea left. They leaned against the counter. Tunney made notes in the book, put “murder” beside Colm Kenny’s conversation. He checked his watch and wrote in the time.
“Is the girl’s room locked up now?”
Collins nodded and blew on the tea. There was a long, descending moan coming from the other room, muffled talk, entreaties. Collins placed the cup down carefully on the marble top. He rubbed it with his thumb to the edge.
“We’ll head back down,” Tunney said. “Look in on any finds. Get a door-to-door going before he asks us why the hell we haven’t started. Jesus, huh.”
Collins nibbled on the ends of his moustache.
“My guess is the removal will be pretty quick.”
“They have a boy too, don’t they, the Kennys?”
“In the States. Training to be something there, finance or something.”
Collins poured the last of his tea slowly into the sink.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You have to wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“Ah, come on now. Like, ‘How could this happen?” These people, they’re not iijits. I mean they have everything going for them - it looks to me anyway. The edumacation, the money, all that. Right?”
Tunney thought of the work ahead, the phone calls, the interviews.
“Jesus,” said Collins. “The poor mother. God!”
Tunney threw his leftovers in the sink; ran the tap.
“They’re clued in, is what I’m saying,” he said to Collins. “You heard the da earlier on, didn’t you? ‘Club drugs’ and ‘kids drinking.’ They’d be on the ball, I’d say. They’d notice things.”
“So it’s not Red Bull,” Collins said.
“What?”
“Ah, the drink they get.”
“Oh, that. Right, the teenagers. Full of caffeine and that? Dance all night?”
Tunney studied Collins’ eyes for a moment.
“Just a joke,” Collins said. “Okay?”
A middle-aged couple with white faces and red-rimmed eyes stepped out of a parked car. They checked with the Guard assigned to the house.
“You’re getting every name?” Tunney asked him.
“I am,” the Guard said. “I get a driving licence too. No bother so far.”
“We’re going down in the park,” Tunney told him.
“‘Murder Squad’ he wants,” Collins said as they walked down the lane. The Technicals were in plain view now, like extra planetary visitors yet in their white containment suits.
“Ah, sure, people don’t know what they’re saying at a time like this.”
Priorities
It was midafternoon, the dead part, before the roof came in on Minogue. He had been working alternately on Jennifer Halloran’s statement, and on his list. He’d changed the names of his list several times. He’d started calling it The Now or Never List, but that had an edge of panic, he began to think. It was as though he was afraid he’d never get around to the things he wanted to do. Unconscious desire to fail, no doubt. He had settled on The Forbidden List.
The remains of a mediocre sandwich returned to the back of his throat his mouth as a burn. He returned to the list and began changing the numbers. Then he drew arrows to the new locations. 2 was now 1:
1 Letter rsgtn.
That he had word-processed a fortnight ago. Sullivan, the other new horse in Fraud, had shown him how to save it on a diskette. Minogue had been through probably ten starts. It is with regret that I must request . . . It is with deep regret that I am putting in . . . It is with some regret that I am tendering my . . .
He looked at the blinking cursor for a clue. MS Word supplied no templates for Resignation Letters from Former Inspectors in the Disbanded Murder Squad of the Gárdaí. He checked his list again.
2 Pat—29734218—after 3 pm.
Maybe he should drive down to Limerick and have a cup of tea with his son-in-law. Cup of tea? Dull enough. How about a few pints, maybe a jaunt up into Clare, and a stay-over? Pat would never admit that he found his father-in-law a bit intimidating still. Little enough use it was trying to be a normal father-in-law, inquiring about the job and the students and the holiday plans and all that. Iseult and Pat weren’t going to Italy anymore. Minogue wasn’t sure who had cancelled that. It could be the baby, simple enough.
Pat—Pat the Brain he no longer referred to him because he sensed Iseult didn’t like it—had gone quiet this last while. Shuttling between lecturing in Limerick and a home in Dublin that was now on the skids wasn’t any help. Iseult had more or less given up on any hope of buying a house in Dublin. Sometimes there are no solutions.
Number 5 had become Number 3.
Apartment.
As if he hadn’t, as if Kathleen hadn’t heard. He’d sooner leave Dublin than live in a place with no garden.
A wave of longing washed over him. He sat back and let the memories flood over him. Pathetic, it was, to be thinking of the kids all those years ago, chasing them in the garden. It was the late evening that they had liked the most, giddy and breathless and screeching with fright, the lights from the kitchen window flaring over the patch of lawn and turning the shrubs into dark jungle. It had gotten them all wound up, of course, and sometimes the laughter had turned to tears. Oh, but how Daithi had loved to run to him and be swept up, then to sit in his lap even in the dark. Sometimes to have him fall asleep then and there. It wouldn’t come back, would it, ever.
Number 4 had stayed steady: Early Irish TCD.
And why would he only go to Trinity? It wasn’t as though they were more biddable to mature student applications.
The Forbidden List from then on got more air-headed. It was impossible to put them in order: 6. Santorini 2 wks; 8. Lough Derg, ask Kilmartin (!!!); 9. Concern—Africa?; 10.Freesia bulbs; 12. Piano lessons. . .
He looked around the office. There was no sign of Fiona Hegarty since he’d come back from his excursion with Malone. He didn’t want to read anything into her absence. But what was Jennifer Halloran doing at the minute? Would she stay away until five and then go home on the bus as usual, try to break the news gently to the mother? But neighbours would have seen her stepping into the squad car.
“Cup a tea,” Sullivan said and he slid it across the desk.
“You’re a doll, Paul.”
“Before you start to snore entirely.”
Minogue gave him a serious scrutiny. It wasn’t the first time Sullivan had pushed it to see how far he could go with a veteran.
“You’re coming over to us tomorrow still, are you?”
“I am,” Minogue said.
Sullivan’s case was petrol station receipts falsified by a fella used to work with computers and cash registers, he remembered.
Sullivan perched on the edge of the desk.
“We
ll. How do you like it, so far?”
Minogue sat back. Sullivan wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t so obvious. He had grilled Minogue solid over lunch last week on where the rest of the training was taking him. Foreign language? Miserable French, self-taught, Minogue had conceded. There was hope for us all in the foreign language end of things then, if a Clare man could speak French? Minogue, long a convert to the give-them-an-inch-etc. field guide entry under “Kerry men,” wasn’t about to let that one go. Sullivan’s own Kerry accent was enough to qualify as a foreign language, he had told him. Maybe that’s when the cheeky guff started.
“I’ll tell you soon as I have the paperwork done on this one,” he said.
“Oh,” said Sullivan and he nodded in the direction of Hegarty’s empty chair. “Herself is after giving you the reins, is she?”
Minogue sipped at the tea. Sullivan must have put the whole bag of sugar in.
“But come on now,” Sullivan said. “You’d have to miss the other work now. Grim enough, to be sure, was it? The murder business?”
Sullivan had told him that he knew Plate-glass Sheehy well. His old brother had played hurling with Sheehy on a team out of Tralee a good number of years ago. Yes, Sergeant Fergal Sheehy had gone back to plainclothes out of Cork City. Sheehy had told Sullivan that the four cases he’d worked with the Murder Squad had been anything but plain sailing. He’d also told Sullivan that he didn’t understand why he’d do it again this minute if he were asked. Conflicted, they called it, Minogue remembered. Herlighy, the psychiatrist that saw the most Guards, used that word a lot until Minogue asked him to drop it for something else.
The epiphany that recall of Herlighy brought to Minogue caused him to sit up and put the cup back on the saucer. Why hadn’t he thought of something that simple. That would do it: talk to Herlighy, for the love of God. Herlighy could map it out, the guilt, the duty thing, the unconscious, all that stuff.
“What,” said Sullivan.
“I just thought of something.”
Minogue pencilled Herlighy into Number 1 on the list. When he looked up again, Sullivan had eased off his desk. It was Moriarty standing by the partition now.
C.I. Dan Moriarty hadn’t wanted Minogue, or any other Garda officer on a skite, coming through his section. He hadn’t told Minogue straight out, no hard feelings, etc. Minogue had soon pegged Fiona Hegarty’s I’ll-do-it-if-I-have-to on Moriarty’s lead. Moriarty ate, drank, slept, and dreamed Fraud, Kilmartin had heard. Like a badger, he was, but well thought of. No fan of Garda Commissioner Tynan, was Moriarty. How discreetly he had let it be known too that he believed Tynan feathered nests for officers he favoured, i.e., Minogue, an Inspector with a past and a way of making you smile, but who put you on edge somehow too.
“A word will you, Matt?” from Moriarty.
Sullivan winked and made an O with his mouth.
Fiona Hegarty was sitting in Moriarty’s office. Minogue felt himself holding his breath. He cursed himself for being dopey. But you couldn’t tell with Moriarty. He always looked grave as though it was a way to get more done or something.
Fiona Hegarty gave Minogue a weak how-do. There was something different about her, he knew, but he didn’t want to stare. Moriarty invited him to sit. He heard Moriarty draw in his breath. He watched him scan a page before he looked at him.
“Fiona here got a call,” Moriarty said. “We have a problem here now.”
Moriarty’s eyes flicked over to her but she remained staring at the edge of his desk. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his desk.
“Jennifer Halloran,” he said to Minogue.
Minogue nodded.
“She left here,” Moriarty said. “After she spoke with counsel.”
Fiona Hegarty shifted in her chair.
“She spoke to him for . . . maybe half an hour, was it, Fiona?”
Fiona Hegarty nodded. She had a paper handkerchief in her fist, Minogue saw. She would not look up from the desktop. The crease on Moriarty’s forehead deepened.
“She left in his company,” Moriarty went on. “There was no bail sought, right?”
“That’s right,” Minogue said.
“A young fella,” said Moriarty. “Still articling, by the look of him. The release was routine. He took a copy of the statement with him. Didn’t make a fuss, but he did register with Fiona here that he believed the statement was improperly obtained. Said he’d need to wait before filing that because well, Miss Halloran, she needed a bit of time to recover.”
“Recover from what,” Minogue said.
Moriarty opened his hands; shook his head once. So, Minogue thought, Fiona Hegarty had been right. Duress would be big. She’d go for inadmissible. Now might be a good time to take his own turn at sliding off the chair.
“The tapes will show we’re in good order,” he said.
“Yes, she waived,” said Moriarty. “We’re sound on that. But that’s not it. Oh no, no, no.”
Minogue was in no humour for sarcasm. He waited.
“He went to a restaurant with her,” Moriarty went on. “He thought she could use a cup of tea, a bit of grub, to compose herself.”
The swoon, Minogue thought. Maybe she had some terrible condition, cancer or something. How would that look in a deposition? But she hadn’t said a word about anything like that.
“Well, she left the café when your man went to the jacks,” Moriarty said.
Why was he pausing, Minogue wondered.
“She went to Tara Street station. He had phoned her ma at this stage. They had a peculiar conversation. The ma got frantic. She phoned us. She said she thought her daughter was drunk. Anyway. Miss Halloran showed up at the station about a half-hour later, it appears.”
Moriarty ran his tongue along his upper lip. He rubbed at his eyebrows.
“She, er, put herself in front of a train.”
The room was engulfed in some kind of light, like a flash Minogue somehow couldn’t see. The tremor ran up to his scalp, seized it. Moriarty was looking down at the same desktop as Fiona Hegarty. Minogue wanted to say something. Moriarty glanced up and his eyes were set in a bleak gaze.
But we did everything right, Minogue wanted to say. Even calling off Fiona Hegarty from putting her through the wringer again. Why would she . . .?
“So that’s what’s happened,” Moriarty murmured. “God love her.”
An Eye-Opener
Quinn spotted Canning talking to a crony on a forklift near a door into the Markets. The place wasn’t as mad busy as he remembered it. The smell of rotting fruit hanging in the air was a comfort to him.
Canning noticed him and he pushed off from the wall. The sun had come back out on this side of the street. They stood by the locked door of a fruit wholesaler.
“I don’t know the other fella,” Canning said.
“Who did the talking?”
“The other one, the older one.”
“Tall, you said.”
“Maybe, yeah. A culchie. Easy going look to him, until he got to business.”
“Are you sure he didn’t identify himself?”
“Well, he flashed the badge a second. But I didn’t see. And I didn’t want to ask, you know, look like I gave a shite.”
Quinn stared at the metalwork over the entrance to the Market. Canning held out his packet of Majors.
“Malone used to be in that crowd,” he said to Quinn. “What do you call them?”
“The Murder Squad.”
“That’s right. Jaysus Bobby, you’re an encyclopedia so you are.”
Quinn drew the smoke deep. He’d have to phone Grogan.
“Well,” Canning said. “That’s Doyle for you. What a massive gobshite.”
Quinn thought about the van, the drums being rolled out.
Canning drew back and spat far out onto the cobblestones.
“Tell you one thing,” he said. “Malone’s got some bottle. I don’t see his crowd telling him to go in there and act like a hooligan. Officially, like. That�
�s not how they work. Anyone could tell you that.”
It just couldn’t be, Quinn decided, it couldn’t. Doyle had only driven into the garage the same time as the two cops had marched into the office.
“Where is Doyle anyway,” Canning said. “We should sort him out.”
Quinn shrugged.
“The bollocks,” said Canning. “I mean, he’s not just a dawbrain, is he. He’s a dangerous dawbrain. Didn’t I tell you that before, didn’t I?”
Quinn watched Canning work himself up.
“Speaking for myself personally like, I’d give Doyle a good hiding, so I would. Straighten him out for good. You know? Want me to get things going there?”
Quinn shook his head.
“What, you think he’s onside or something?”
“No, I just need to think things over.”
Canning looked at him.
“I have to say this, Bobby, I do. Don’t get me wrong now, okay?”
“About what, are you talking about?”
“About this. Listen, if you said to me, ‘Beans, head out with Doyle and get us into, say, a factory,’ I’d say to you take a running jump. I would, Bobby.”
To Quinn the clouds in the panel of sky over the street were like cotton balls. He’d spent a happy, surprising morning by the hotel pool in Portugal looking at them not that long ago. Catherine laughing at him because of it, but he liked it.
“I’ll tell you what I heard too,” Canning went on. “About Doyle. I heard he’s on the needle, is what he is.”
He waited for a reaction, but Quinn’s face had set into a foggy stare at a forklift buzzing around.
“I heard it on good authority, so I did.”
“Did you.”
“Delusions, I’m telling you, that goes with it. It’s no joke. He thinks he’s the Godfather or something, I don’t know. I mean to say, how long can that go on? If he’s taking your name in vain . . .? You know?”
“Working his way through all the Commandments, is he.”
“And I heard he was dealing, Bobby. What’s worse, he was getting it off those Russian fellas, the Bohemians or whatever.”
“Where’d you hear that one? Same fella you heard he was a user, is it?