by John Brady
Runner: Minogue had to think. Right: he called immigrants and asylum-seekers runners.
“‘Come to Ireland, land of a 1000 welcomes’ is written on every wall over there. ‘We’ll pay you to come and sit on your arse—and give you bed and board too.’ The state of things, I’m telling you . . .! What do you think?”
“I’ll find out for you.”
“Look, I’m making a point here. It has to do with a stupid refugee UN law or something, they made back in old God’s time in 1951.”
Donnybrook Garda station always looked grim. There had been no changes to the outside in all the years Minogue had driven by.
“Is this going to be about having enough poor of our own,” he asked Kilmartin.
“Well, as a matter of fact, it may very well be. You think everyone in Ireland is a millionaire with this Celtic Tiger shite, do you?”
“I know that I don’t have to grow spuds if I don’t want to.”
“Oh I know what we’re going to hear now, by Jesus. ‘It’s our turn now,’ that kind of a stunt?”
“It’s our turn, Jim. Right.”
“You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t some Famine thing all over again. This is about the doors being wide open to seasoned criminals. They’re laughing themselves off the boat here. Tell me this: did you ever expect to be handed money, to be given a place to live when you came up to Dublin? To be taught a new language? And then, for Christ’s sake, actually encouraged to go out and have it off so’s you could get pregnant in time to have the baby here? ...So, bingo, the babby's an instant citizen—and thus and therefore its mammy gets to stay forever?”
Minogue turned off the engine. He thought about the years he’d gone walking up the green roads and the tracks with Iseult down in the Burren. The tumbled walls of the clacháns where hundreds had fled from the Famine were everywhere amongst the willows. How many drawings Iseult had done of the ivy that had invaded the dry stone walls?
“So this is not about the mighty spud. Or the Famine. Do you hear me?”
“Jim, I’m late to meet someone.”
“Fine, fine. But don’t talk to me about spuds or the like. I think I must be the only man east of the River Shannon growing spuds of my own, or cabbage—sure, Lamb of Jaysus, it’s in a theme park they’ll put me in the finish-up.”
“There’ll be a pair of us so. Have you the names, the security firms?”
Minogue wrote down four. One of them he remembered meeting several times, Tony Ahearne, a retired Super.
“Says anytime, Ahearne does. First name of Kevin. Go first with him, will you.”
“Thanks, Jim. I owe you.”
“Before you go—but I don’t want to be agitating you. About that woman the other day. You’re in the clear, now, are you?”
“By law, I suppose.”
“What do you mean by that, ‘by law’?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, at the moment.”
“It was a Bean Garda went in for the hard questions, I heard.”
Minogue said nothing.
“The one you were shadowing. Right?”
“She had it rough, Jim—look, I have to—”
“—Well, I’ll leave you now, but don’t forget, with that ‘shadow’ of yours. I hope you’ve copped on already yourself. Thick and all as you are the best of times, don’t let anyone sell you down the river over this.”
Minogue had his thumb on the End button already.
“And don’t you forget it,” he heard Kilmartin as he broke the call. He checked his hair in the rearview mirror and he stepped out.
It’ll Be Like Old Times For You
The Guard in the public office glanced at the photocard and nodded at the stairs.
“They’re above there at the top of the stairs,” he said. “Next to the toilets.”
“Tunney,” Minogue asked. “A Sergeant?”
“Big long glass of water,” the Guard said. “You’ll spot him handy enough so you will.”
There was a smell of adhesive and paint coming from the upper floors. A drill started and then stopped somewhere in the building.
Slouched in an old swivel chair at the far end of a narrow room lined with cabinets, themselves loaded with cardboard boxes, Sergeant Lorcan Tunney issued a slow nod in Minogue’s direction.
Minogue made his way around other boxes, took in the long legs Tunney had stretched out to perch on a shelf, the tilt of the head where he held the phone jammed against his ear. Tunney was peeling an orange while he listened. He looked up at Minogue again and nodded at two chairs next to a chipped table.
“Kenny, Niamh,” Minogue saw on the file folder. Some of the papers were photocopies of snapshots.
“Okay,” Tunney said in a way that Minogue was sure meant the opposite, and he hung up.
Tunney slid back upright in the chair and reached out.
“Matt,” said Minogue.
“Lorcan,” said Tunney and he sat back. He tore off the last piece of peel.
“The book is here in the drawer,” Tunney said. “If you’d like to see it.”
“Well, thanks.”
Tunney held out a piece of orange.
“Thanks. There’s a Tunney over in CDU, is he maybe related?”
“He is bedad,” said Tunney. “I’ve a brother Fintan. We’re our own crime family, the ma used to say. My da was in Kilkenny for twenty-two years too.”
“No time off for good behaviour?”
“He stayed for the hurling, he used to tell people. ‘The clash of the ash.’”
“How well he didn’t ask for a transfer to County Clare, so.”
“You go west of the Shannon at your own peril, is the approach on that, I’d say.”
“Well, the Kilkenny team would know that.”
“That was the only game they lost,” said Tunney, the one in Tulla. “Sure it was knee-deep in muck there, you might as well be skiing.”
“A true test, all the same.”
“Ah, that’s sour grapes now on account of your crowd not measuring up in the end.”
“Next year,” Minogue said.
“Next year my arse,” said Tunney. “Unless the Clare crowd invent jet packs or something. Maybe jet-powered hurleys.”
“Who let the cat out of the bag on that?”
“Go away with you.”
Minogue returned the slow smile spreading across Tunney’s face. Still he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind that this man really, really did have the face of a horse. But the eyes were flat; maybe a fella who’d go at you in a row without warning.
“I’m Carlow, in actual fact,” Tunney said.
“I’ll settle for a truce then.”
“You will, will you.”
The wry smile meant less this time, Minogue knew. He wondered how long it would take before Tunney began to drop hints about this character parachuted in on him.
“Well,” Tunney said.
Minogue was suddenly and unaccountably sure that Tunney had made some decision based on the past thirty seconds. Tunney yanked open a drawer to his right and held out the book to Minogue.
“Feast yourself on it,” he said. “It’ll be like old times for you.”
Minogue took the familiar, ribbed hardcover they had used for years on the Squad.
“Wasn’t there talk of gizmos a while back?” Tunney asked. “Electronic yokes that could beam things around so’s everyone would be up to date and all the rest of it?”
“No doubt.”
“They never showed up, did they, those organizers?”
Minogue shook his head. Tunney folded his arms and waited for something from his visitor. Minogue took in the times, the sketches. Marie Kinsella, the new assistant State Pathologist, had attended on the scene. A C.I. Healy was the nominal C.O. for the case.
“Yourself, was it, in the notes from the scene?” he asked Tunney.
“It was. Mickey Collins is the artist.”
“Great stuff,” said Minogue, surprised on
ly that the lie sliding out of him had such little effect. “A fair bit of foot traffic by the place, was there?”
“We sealed it, and kept control of the site.”
Minogue looked up.
“The copies of the Technicals’ reports are stuck in there later on too,” said Tunney.
Minogue turned the pages. Murphy. John Hynes, Kelleher from the Technical Bureau. They’d been there until after midnight.
“Like old times, then,” said Tunney.
“Well, I don’t know, Lorcan.”
“Lar, they call me.”
“Well, Lar, and thanks. I’m only here to assist.”
“You’re C.I. though still, right?”
“I parked the rank outside.”
Tunney didn’t blink.
“I suppose someone phoned?” Minogue tried.
“Oh yes, someone did indeed phone. Cig Healy passed it on to us.”
Minogue met his eyes for a moment. Passed it on to us, indeed. He realized that he had already written Tunney up as Garda detective number 1,001 in his list of hard, smart and mocking policemen he had met. He went back to the Technicals’ drafts.
“Grand, so,” he said. “Fit me in anywhere. I’m not one for standing around.”
“On the team, like.”
“Now you have it, Lar.”
“Do you know why you were sent over?”
Minogue was still willing to ignore the tone.
“There was a spot of bother with the parents, I believe. They weren’t happy with something.”
“Well, that’s a fact. You were in Fraud, were you.”
“In a manner of speaking. I’m on a training thing.”
Tunney stretched and yawned.
“Me and Collins do street crime usually,” he said. “We’re used to dealing with your basic gouger, like. The handbag men and the street dealers. On a slow shift, we’ve even been known to apprehend drunk teenagers puking in the street.”
“Plenty to be going on with, is there?”
“Oh stop, don’t be talking. But Cig put us on this on account of it was us did the beating death above in Rathmines there last year. You might remember it?”
“The rugger-bugger thing?”
“That’s the one, the young fella got beaten up. Less the Red Bull than the roid-rage type of thing. The stupidest thing you ever heard. Brats, basically.”
Minogue remembered bits of it now. A crowd of teenagers, underage drinking, some lads who were big in their rugby thing and took steroids and daddy’s car and girls and dares, all in one big mix on regular occasions. The boy had been seventeen, a star forward, drunk and then clinically dead on the curb.
“A real eye-opener,” said Tunney. “All around. But for the Dublin 4 crowd most of all. I’ll never forget the parents. All they could say was ‘But how could this happen?’”
Minogue closed the book.
“Is this one with the girl more of the same, do you think?”
“Well, Jesus,” said Tunney. “There’s a question.”
Minogue returned the smile. Tunney looked to the frosted window.
“The girl’s folks are well connected, let me say. They know where to push. I’m not saying they don’t have a right though.”
“Right,” said Minogue.
“But we’re already getting the same oul stuff, you know, the ‘where were the Guards when this happened?’”
“The parents?”
“No. The in-laws and out-laws there though, some of the neighbours even.”
Minogue ran his fingers up the spine of the book.
“Feel like telling them we were out chasing Junior who took his daddy's new Jag for a spin, looking for trouble. That tune, you know yourself.”
“The words might be new,” Minogue said. “But I certainly know the air.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something now,” said Tunney. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Minogue studied the hawk nose and the stylish cut that always reminded him of Caesar or a gladiator or someone from an epic film of bygone years. He wondered how Tunney acted out on the street.
“Her da is a big thing. He organizes these big dos, concerts even. The house is like, I don’t know, Malibu or something maybe?”
“Mr. Kenny.”
“Yeah. Colm Kenny. The mother is a basket case. She has basically collapsed. She can’t get by without tranqs or something since. It’s pretty bad, I don’t mind telling you, just awful—”
The face in the opened door put Minogue in mind of a friendly mouse, with whiskers thickened to a moustache.
“Mickey,” said Tunney. “A fella here is coming on board a while. The Kenny thing. C.I. Minogue.”
Something about Collins’ face made Minogue want to laugh. A stricken, hapless look, like a mime, but enough of a hint of a shy kid who’d gone underground years ago.
“Matt,” he said, and caught a limp handshake from Collins.
“Anyway,” said Tunney. “The father’s talking murder, and where’s the expertise we’re supposed to have to deal with this, and why is no one accepting the facts as he sees them, and . . . All the rest of it.”
Collins took up station against a cabinet. He leaned on his elbow, studied his shoe, and nodded.
“Murder,” Minogue said.
“Well, I mean fair enough,” said Tunney. “I mean the man is in bits, and of course he’d be angry and that. You can’t reason with a fella in that state. Goes without saying. But he won’t back off. I do believe . . .”
Tunney waited for Collins to look over.
“. . . I do believe that he got the Commissioner in on it.”
Collins nodded again.
“Do we have cause yet?” Minogue asked.
“No. But we had a preliminary, and when do they get that wrong, I’d like to know. It was pills.”
“Suicide?”
“No. What it looks like is that this girl took something at a club, a rave type of thing. And it was bad. She was with another girl. She got bothered and confused and she felt sick.”
“Disoriented,” said Collins, without looking up.
“This was about one o’clock,” Tunney went on. “She went off, to see someone the far side of the club, the friend thought. But no, she tried to get home, it looks like.”
“Alone?”
“Well, there you go,” said Tunney. “That’s where we are.”
Collins stroked his moustache and cleared his throat.
“The club is in Earlsfort Terrace,” he said. “It’s new. It was her first time there, as far as we know. It looks like so far that she started walking. It’s do-able, two maybe three miles.”
“Isn’t there a late bus?”
“There is. We’re trying to track her there, or a taxi. But I think she walked. Maybe she thought—well, it’d clear up or something.”
“Walk it off, that kind of thing?”
“Yeah. And then, whatever she was thinking then later on as she got a bit closer to home, she decides to lie down and have a rest or something.”
“Was there anything at the scene that said that, and only that?”
“My first thought when I got there was, well you can imagine,” said Tunney. “Sexual assault, that sort of a thing.”
“Do you know much about rave drugs?” Collins asked.
“Not a thing,” said Minogue. “Only what I read in the papers. They can make you overheat and that?”
“That’s right,” said Tunney. “There’s dehydration and the like too.”
“You think maybe she overdosed then?”
Tunney shrugged.
“I can’t back up what I’m thinking, with the lab, I mean. Yet, anyway. I say she got hold of bad drugs. I’d be guessing Ecstasy, or what was supposed to be Ecstasy.”
“I know the name, but that’s all.”
“Well, it’s up and down the country,” Collins said. “It’s part of a whole scene. There’s been a big number of hospital admissions this past while because of con
taminated stuff. There are people setting up labs of their own now even, but a lot of them are wild. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Isn’t it supposed to make you relax or something?”
“Well sure,” said Tunney. “Peace and love and that. That’s what you see with the soothers and the glow-bands at the all-nighters. There’s a lot of horsepower in them. You’d be dancing away all night.”
“With the way the clothes were,” said Collins, “you’d think she was trying to cool off, you see?”
“Ecstasy,” said Minogue. “‘E,’ right?”
“Oh you’re quick,” said Tunney. “Do you want my edumacated guess?”
“Fire away.”
“I’ve seen the trade on the streets, and talked to fellas who know about it. The pills have little designs on them, little symbols. It’s MDMA. That’s the name of the chemical. Don’t ask me to remember what the words are. That’s the basic Ecstasy pill, see, and you can get one in any pub in town, any night of the week. Really.”
“MDMA,” said Minogue. “I’d better look it up.”
“No—my guess is that it was something else. This other stuff showed up a few years back. A variant, and it’s mad. PMA is what it’s called.”
“The same effect, a bit more of it?”
“They were sold as Ecstasy then, down in Cork City, I remember. Two lads died from them. The PMA is bad because it takes a bit of a while to get going, you see? So a user, a novice, let’s call it, might take one, think it wasn’t working, and then go and pop another one. That’s when things would go haywire.”
“How long would that take?”
“A couple of hours. Longer, even.”
Minogue imagined the girl heading home. Was she too addled, too guilty to phone home? But that would mean she was lucid and had some judgement, so why would she walk . . .? Yes, she thought she could walk it off then.
“Well, what kind of shape would she be in, mentally,” he asked Tunney.
“Patchy. Look at where she ended up.”
“That wasn’t the most direct way home,” said Collins.
“What girl in her right mind would take a short cut through a park in the dead of night?”
Minogue opened the book again. He went to the map of the scene.
“So the da is saying she was either brought up there, in a panic maybe, by someone who was with her.”