Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  Though he couldn’t be sure, Minogue thought he heard a faint snort from Tynan.

  “No,” said Blake, with enough irony for Minogue to look over. “You’re taken care of only well in that department.”

  “So . . . ?” was as far as Minogue got.

  “Your session last night down on the Naas Road was verified already,” said Tynan. “There are two staff there who remember you and Malone a bit too well, it seems.”

  “But why all the secretiveness?” Blake asked.

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” said Minogue.

  “Well, maybe,” said Blake. “Malone backs you up on that aspect, you telling him he should be passing on his leads and his information. Fair enough. But at what point would you have stopped advising him, and actually made him contact us, or done so yourself?”

  “I’m at a bit of a loss to explain that one,” said Minogue quietly.

  “Leave that for a minute,” said Tynan. “And tell us what exactly the pair of you were up to in that place last night. Apparently there was a bit of a row.”

  “We were looking for someone. Tommy thought he might have a lead on a woman, one that supposedly was with Emmett Condon.”

  “‘With,’” said Tynan. “The late Garda Condon’s girlfriend, I believe you’re saying?”

  “That was what was described to me, yes.”

  “You know Garda Condon was married,” said Tynan. “Don’t you?”

  “I do,” Minogue replied. “I’d heard that, I mean. But if she could be found, well, we’d all be back in the game then.”

  “Were she to be found alive,” Blake said.

  “There’s been no trace of her since it happened,” Tynan said. “Right, Eamonn?” Blake nodded. The word “alive” kept circling in Minogue’s mind.

  “Remember now,” Tynan said, “this young woman has been sought for, what, six months now? There are several possibilities, as I understand them. She’s left the country. Or she’s hiding out here somewhere, under one of several identities, or being sheltered by persons as yet unknown. The other possibility is that she may be dead.”

  Minogue watched Blake turn his pencil over and over again, tapping its ends slowly and gently on his notepad.

  “But evidently Garda Malone has such contacts that he can turn his head and instantly, he has a tip to this Roadhouse place out on the Naas Road. Does your visit there last night throw any light on this?”

  “Well the lug who walloped Tommy and ran . . . ,” said Minogue, “he goes by ‘George.’ He had an accent.”

  Tynan looked over at Blake.

  “That name hasn’t come up,” Blake said.

  “He might have nothing to do with this at all,” said Minogue. “It’s a bit out there, the tip that Tommy was working on.”

  “Really,” said Blake. “How far out?”

  “Apparently there’s prostitution and the like out there, and he thought maybe the girl was mixed up in it. Being an illegal, I think, that was the logic.”

  Tynan seemed to consider this for a while.

  “Okay,” Tynan said then. “But let’s go back to Lawless for a minute here. Father Coughlin tells me he finished the session abruptly.”

  Minogue nodded.

  “Father Coughlin and I, we know one another,” said Tynan. “He says that Lawless was very shaky that day. Nervous, agitated. What was your take on him?”

  “Maybe both. I couldn’t tell the difference. He might have been climbing the walls. Maybe he wanted a fix. I don’t know.”

  “You think he had more to tell than he did?”

  “I got the impression pretty quickly that he wanted money before he’d come up with anything more specific. But as to whether he was spinning us one . . .”

  Blake paused in his notes.

  “Yes,” he said. “But you’re in no doubt he referred to ‘Garda higher-ups’?”

  “That’s right,” Minogue replied. “What I heard was, on one of his visits to his brother in jail, Lawless’s brother told him that he’d heard about criminals being so well set up now that they had Guards in their pocket. ‘Even higher-ups’ he’d heard, and it had gone on a while. For years, he said.”

  “Did nobody push him for details on that?” Blake asked.

  “Of course we did. Tommy asked a few times. But he wasn’t forthcoming. He’d always go back saying there’d have to be arrangements made if we wanted to go ahead.”

  “‘Arrangements,’” said Tynan. “Was he specific on what he wanted?”

  “No.”

  “And when exactly did he bring the name Emmett Condon, up?”

  Minogue wanted to ask them what Malone had said.

  “He didn’t,” he said instead. “What I mean is he never mentioned the name. He just said, ‘that Guard with the overdose, the one they found a while back.’”

  Blake cleared his throat with a single, soft cough.

  “Specifically . . .?”

  “That Condon’s death was ‘down to them.’”

  “‘Them’ being . . . ?”

  Minogue shook his head.

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “It was ‘they can do this,’ ‘they can do that.’”

  “What else did Lawless have to offer, then?”

  “Well he did a bit of rabbiting-on about gangs and the likes in Dublin, especially, and how the bad guys from the continent are setting up here, bit by bit.”

  “Specifics? Names? Places? Dates?”

  “Very slim,” Minogue said. “Very slim entirely. It’s only what you’d read in the newspapers, to be honest.”

  He met Blake’s eyes for a few moments.

  “That’s partly why I didn’t push Tommy more to contact the investigation team on Condon.”

  “I see,” said Blake. “But at the time, did you think Lawless was on the level?”

  “At the time, I couldn’t figure it out one way or the other.

  But tending toward the skeptical.”

  “And later on?”

  “Closer to disbelieving. Much closer.”

  Tynan looked down at his mobile, frowned while he twisted his wedding ring slowly around his finger once, and then back. Tynan never had idle thoughts, Minogue had learned a long time ago. He glanced at the Commissioner’s hat, the braiding.

  “All right,” Tynan said then. He exchanged a glance with Blake. Blake nodded, and then gathered himself more over his notepad. He looked across at Minogue as though for the first time he had met him.

  “I have a question for you now,” Blake said. “And I don’t want you to feel you have to answer it right away. But just consider it, and when you’re ready, you know?”

  Tynan had begun a scrutiny of the cabinets along the wall.

  “Fair enough,” Minogue said.

  “Did you consider the possibility,” Blake paused, as though to allow Minogue to reflect more deeply, “did you consider that something else was perhaps going on in that meeting you had in Clarendon Street Church the other day?”

  Minogue searched Blake’s face for a clue.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

  “I see,” said Blake. “Now you are aware of Detective Malone’s family, of his brother Terry and his situation?”

  “I was at his funeral. Is that what you’re asking?”

  Blake returned a cool stare of his own.

  “So you know the circumstances that led to his unfortunate death?”

  Minogue nodded.

  “Did you make any connection, or even wonder about one perhaps, with Mr. Lawless and the late Mr. Malone? Mr. Terence Malone?”

  “I suppose I might have,” said Minogue. “Fleetingly, can I say?”

  “Fleetingly?”

  “Lawless is, or was, an addict, wasn’t he? Father Coughlin’s group thing?”

  Tynan sat up abruptly.

  “Eamonn,” he said. “I wonder if I might ask you to give us a minute here, please?”

  Blake showed no surpr
ise at the request, and he rose and took his cup of coffee with him. They had prearranged this session, the pair of them, Minogue was sure now.

  Tynan waited for Blake to close the door.

  “I have to go in a minute,” he said. “So I’ll get to the point here a bit sooner than I would have liked.”

  Minogue sat up.

  “Well, before you go,” he said, “can I get a word in?”

  “Has anyone tried to prevent you getting a word in, up to now?”

  “Why is Blake trying to hang something on Tommy Malone?”

  “He’s asking a question that any policeman would ask,” said Tynan. “It’s because we take seriously the fact that a man, an informant, who talks to some policemen in the safety of the church, ends up shot to death soon afterwards. We need to give this a hard look, a very hard look. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “But why the eye on Tommy Malone then? It’s still basic police work to challenge an informant to repeat what he’s saying to another Guard, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t disagree. But Malone should have passed this one upstairs right away.”

  With that, Tynan lifted one finger, then another, and slowly he let each one in turn back on the table again.

  “But what I want to tell you here is this,” he went on, in a lower voice. “If this murder really does have any bearing on Emmett Condon, then what a number of very skilled, very astute, very experienced Garda, high and low, have been intimating to me on the quiet for some time, is true. When I hear one of them whispering to me that it looks bad, do you know what they mean by ‘bad’?”

  Minogue shook his head.

  “They’re telling me that Garda Condon was a criminal,” Tynan continued. “Pure and simple. That he had gone over. They’re also suggesting that he may not have been the only one.”

  He fixed Minogue with a glance for several moments.

  “Garda Condon’s death left a lot of unanswered questions, a lot of damage in his section. In our whole service, in fact. Here was a detective who used unorthodox, and unapproved, methods. ‘Undercover’ is one thing, but running your own show is quite another. From what we now know of Garda Condon’s last weeks and months, we should have seen a pattern. Poor judgment, impatience. Not documenting his contacts and leads, being out of sight of his colleagues and unit commander for days. His parents have said to me, through their lawyer, I better add, that we were negligent in supervision. We did not take proper care of a Garda detective doing dangerous work in a dangerous environment. That we gave him enough rope, you might say.”

  “There are not too many to stand by him,” said Minogue. “Are there?”

  “Correct. But now we have Malone coming in sideways with this, and dragging you in with him. And look what’s happened.”

  “Are you saying, drop the matter?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m saying something quite different.”

  Minogue felt a slow eddy of excitement work its way up into his chest.

  “I am saying that Eamonn Blake and myself are not at all convinced by what’s come up to the surface here.”

  “That . . . ?”

  Tynan nodded.

  “That Emmett Condon went to the bad. I’m not saying it won’t turn out otherwise. But it seems to me that six months of work on the case should have, could have, turned up at least something not so damning.”

  “Too easy, you’re saying?”

  “It has that feel, all right. I met his wife, his widow. I met his parents. I thought about them for a long, long time. The kind of people they are, how absolutely . . . crushed is the word, I suppose. So I want another look at this. I talked to Eamonn Blake, and he’s okay with it.”

  “So he’ll get someone then.”

  “No. You’re going to do it.”

  Minogue frowned at him.

  “You’re going to round up Malone and go visit the team who first did the work on Emmett Condon.”

  “Malone,” was all Minogue could think to say back to Tynan’s stare.

  “Malone seems to be able to find people, or leads, in one day. I want to run with that, see how far it can go. So work it through again, see what might have been missed.”

  “Treat it as a pending, do the review . . .?”

  “That’s right. We need to find out if this Lawless story holds any water at all.”

  “Well, my head of section will be wondering.”

  “Not so much now,” said Tynan, rising from his chair. “I briefed him on it just before we started here.”

  Tynan opened his briefcase folder and slid a stapled set of pages over.

  “Start with that. Then get Detective Malone to read it.”

  Minogue glanced at the PM summary, the State Pathologist’s runaway signature.

  Toxic, he read, arrest, coma, before Tynan began speaking to him again.

  “You report to me, and I’ll be consulting with Eamonn Blake. As for the team who carried this case, you can tell them it’s just a routine once-over before it’s put back in the long-term basket.”

  Minogue let the cover page fall down over the booklet again.

  “I’m to work with Tommy Malone on this,” he said. “Did I get that right?”

  Tynan made no reply.

  “It’s not for me to be inquiring further as yet, is it?” he asked.

  “Exactly,” said Tynan. “But I know that you will exercise good oversight with Detective Garda Malone.”

  Minogue felt the chill settle in his stomach now. He suddenly wanted to say something about forty pieces of silver.

  “And you will phone me if you see the need,” said Tynan. “In the light of what we have discussed earlier concerning the matter.”

  “You’re asking me to,” Minogue began to say, but stopped. Tynan’s stare was not intense, but there was something sombre about it. It was enough to persuade Minogue to leave the words unsaid.

  Tynan grasped his hat and settled the brim low on his forehead. He eyed Minogue before pulling open the door.

  “I don’t expect any PowerPoint shows when you have something to tell me either.”

  Chapter 11

  September 22, 1984

  EIMEAR KELLY LAY AWAKE at the usual hour. She didn’t bother with the light. It had been a few days now since she’d stopped, or maybe forgotten about, the thoughts about the car in the garage. It would be easy and painless; there’d be no mess, no melodrama to it at all. She used to imagine the carbon monoxide like a rising pool creeping up the stairs, like a fog or a mist, across the carpet and up the legs of the bed. She wouldn’t smell it, and she wouldn’t see it. Oddly, she’d prefer to.

  And that was probably why she was never alone now. Her mother was coming Thursday, to take over from her sister Róisín whose whistling breath she could hear through the open door of the second bedroom. Róisín had always slept on her back, even as a little child. Róisín had cried a lot since that night, something she hadn’t done much as a child, a tomboy, and now as a civil servant clerk just starting out in Social Welfare on Pearse Street. She had heard that Mam had gotten the local TD at home to pull strings with the civil service so’s Róisín had time off.

  Mam. Well Mam was a tough one, so she was. She was like a colonel now, grim and determined. She’d do her crying in private, or at least away from her daughter. Her daughter the widow: there – she’d said it, in her mind at least. What a terrible, ordinary, damning, unbearable, simple word.

  Eimear knew, with that peculiar knowing that seemed to come from a long distance away, that Mam believed she was fighting for her own daughter’s life now, and her grandchild to be. How angry she had been, Mam, how stricken, when Eimear had stumbled in on her crying helplessly into a cushion downstairs. A stronger sleeping pill, she’d heard Mam telling the nurse, and seen her eyes flashing when the nurse had tried to whisper about the baby.

  Four. Then it’d be a quarter after. Then half. On to five and then six, and all hands ticking and shuddering as they jerked from second t
o second. If she kept her eye on the clock on the mantelpiece below she could see the minute hand more. She ran her hand under her breast, held it there for a moment to see if her fingers still caught under it. Then her belly; it was like a drum. The baby had been active enough in the evening.

  She rested her hand on her belly now, and she imagined a hand within, reaching to touch hers. Surrounded, floating no longer but curled and tight, needing to stretch. Eyes like an old man. The fears she’d had, the shiver at the thought of that cut and the blood, they’d faded. Now she just registered them, wondered, moved on.

  Praying was useless. All she had wanted to pray for anyway was that what had happened wouldn’t affect the baby, and then she didn’t want to pray for that. That had been a shock, but it too, like everything else, had faded into what used to be. Work, she could be at work, like Maureen what’s her married name in Collections, who went straight to the delivery room from her desk last June. Maureen was a jogger, she was always going somewhere.

  She stared at the picture of the River Shannon over the chest of drawers, the wedding present from her aunt in Portumna. For a while she thought back to the summer holidays there by the banks of the river, the warnings not to stray into the water or the reeds where there was muck that’d draw you in, hold you, and drown you. She and Róisín had gone lots of times, even put their bare feet into the mud, to feel the malevolent power they imagined.

  It disappeared, as her eyes left the picture, and she stared at the dark corner above the door, willing it to turn to some picture she could see, or at least to make her eyes so tired she could close them. It was like being on life-support or something. She’d just drift away; it didn’t matter much one way or another.

  The anger had been sometimes pure rage, so much that she thought she’d burst or jump or do something in an uncontrollable spasm. She couldn’t cry now, that had all stopped. Everyone else was in bits still, Mam even, and they all were telling her to cry, to say her feelings. She couldn’t say her feelings because she couldn’t find them now. And they said that the women were the emotional ones. Yes she felt like someone had gutted every organ out of her, and that inside her was not their baby, but clouds, air and empty, empty space. That the baby, hers and Declan’s, was part of her own body and then not there at all. That was mad enough to think, she knew, much less to say. They’d bring her into hospital for that, for sure.