Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  “You need a rest. We’ll work it all out afterwards. Soon, all right?”

  “There’s another one.”

  Kilmartin was on the move. He said something Minogue didn’t understand, but he heard “business.”

  Kilmartin pulled hard at one of the drawers, making the wood squeal a little. He drew something out, and with his back to Minogue seemed to push at it, or pull.

  Minogue knew what it was, and still he refused to believe it. He glanced at the door half ajar.

  “We’ll see about that,” he heard Kilmartin say.

  He saw the gun held down near Kilmartin’s knee as Kilmartin lunged at the light switch.

  “What the hell are you doing, Jim?”

  “You shut up now. Enough out of you, with your let’s go for a walk. Hit that damned screen – quick!”

  Kilmartin’s whiskey breath seemed to have filled the room.

  “Jim, don’t.”

  Kilmartin said something under his breath, stepped over, almost missing his balance, and stabbed at a button under the screen.

  “Get over the back wall, behind the forsythia there. Into the O’Neills, and then– have you a phone?”

  “Yes, but–”

  “Don’t ‘but’ me, for Christ’s sake! Get going! These fellas won’t be polite about it. Get! Go!”

  Kilmartin brushed by him and slapped at a switch in the hall. Minogue heard his shoes crush something and scrape against the kitchen floor. He looked down the driveway. Nobody.

  “Jim, slow down, it’s nothing. Nothing, okay?”

  “Get out,” Kilmartin called out. “Out the back. They might be there already.”

  There was a swathe of pale light from somewhere across the kitchen floor. A moon, Minogue wondered. He saw shadows of broken things, some with the soft glint of glass or china. Kilmartin had pulled open the back door. Minogue couldn’t see his face.

  “Out!”

  “Jim! It’s probably just kids coming home late or something.”

  “Shut up, you gom,” Kilmartin said. “Don’t you know anything? They know where you live, they know everything – what’s that? Jesus, they’re out there.”

  Minogue ducked down alongside Kilmartin. Through the open door he heard something, a footfall maybe. He peered around the edge of the cupboard.

  The doorbell went then. Kilmartin started and brought up the gun. He turned on his hunkers, holding out his hand on the floor. Someone was definitely in the garden. There was roaring in Minogue’s head now, but still Kilmartin’s croaking whisper came to him.

  “It’s too late for the back, come on!”

  Kilmartin began to creep across the floor, scattering fragments and shards, crunching others, as he went. He pulled up his hand sharply after a few steps, swore, and lost his balance. Minogue’s heart leaped then: something was crossing the dimmer light bathing the garden. There was a hat to the figure though, a brim. It was standard if they were coming to a house where there’d been trouble, he remembered.

  “Jim, it’s Guards, stop! I saw one.”

  “No! – Jesus I’ve cut meself here, that stupid Waterford glass . . . ! We’re going out the front, Matt. It’s our best chance.”

  Kilmartin had slurred half his words. Minogue saw another movement, a figure detach itself from the shadows and begin to approach the side of the house.

  “Jim, put it down, they’re Guards!”

  Kilmartin was on his feet now, in a crouch. Minogue rose, felt his knees get some strength, and the dizziness and his racing jackhammer heart crest higher. He kept his eye on Kilmartin’s right arm, saw the pistol pointed to the floor. It took two steps to get to Kilmartin’s side. For a moment he thought of Maura, of something terrible Kilmartin had done to her. Then, with Kilmartin’s muttered curses coming through the roaring in his ears, he grabbed at the forearm with both his hands.

  With his left on Kilmartin’s wrist, he ran his other hand down over his knuckles to where he gripped the pistol. Kilmartin let out a shout that didn’t come close to drowning out the gunshot. Minogue had him off balance, and he pulled more. A man shouted outside, and something passed by the open door in a hurry.

  Kilmartin’s finger was locked inside the trigger-guard still. Minogue got his shoulder into Kilmartin as he turned, and he felt Kilmartin lose his footing and come with him. He had the gun and Kilmartin’s knuckles on the floor now. As Kilmartin came down, Minogue backed in harder. Kilmartin tried to turn, but Minogue pushed back while he pulled the arm against the joint.

  He couldn’t make out what Kilmartin was shouting now. He knew he couldn’t be sure that Kilmartin was so drunk he couldn’t get out of the lock.

  “They’re Guards!” he yelled again. “Guards!”

  He hadn’t been able to get anywhere trying to pry Kilmartin’s fingers out from the trigger-guard. He considered trying to thumb the safety, or even to eject the clip. Kilmartin began to push back slowly now.

  “I’ll break your goddamned arm, Jim,” he hissed. “I will!”

  Then there was somebody in the doorway, and they were shouting. He felt Kilmartin’s arm slacken a little, as the man shouted again. Somebody else had come in behind them too, a second voice, not yelling.

  Minogue looked down the arm that held the pistol trained on him, saw no uniform, and his heart went cold. In one instant he believed that Kilmartin had been right all along. He saw the man framed in Merchant’s Arch, Malone ducking, flinching. Maura, he thought too: what had happened to Maura?

  “Flat!” the man with the pistol yelled again. “Arms out – straighter!”

  Minogue’s face pressed into tiles.

  “I’m a Garda officer,” he said.

  “Face down!”

  “We’re Guards,” Minogue said again, just as his arm was grabbed and pulled up.

  “I know,” the man above him said. “Just shut up a minute, will you.”

  Minogue’s left arm was yanked then and he felt the cut of the plastic restraints bite into his wrists. He knew they’d not turn him over, but he didn’t care. More footsteps came through the kitchen now. A piece of broken something went by on the tiles beside him. Still he heard the other sound, above the drag of feet scratching across the debris.

  “Jimmy,” he said. The sobs continued.

  “It’s him,” he heard a voice say. “Okay, we have it.”

  “Jim?”

  The sobbing paused.

  “Where’s my wife?” Kilmartin asked. “Where is she?”

  One of the detectives came down on one knee.

  “She’s outside,” he said. “She came with us.”

  “Is she hurt?” Kilmartin sobbed. “I would never . . . I didn’t mean to do that. I never did a thing like that in my life, I’d never raise my hand to a woman, I wouldn’t.”

  He began sobbing again, and Minogue heard his shoes scraping across the fragments on the tiles.

  “Watch him!” a voice called out. “He’s moving.”

  “It’s okay,” came the other voice, as the detective stood.

  “We have it. It’s okay.”

  “Let her alone,” Minogue heard his friend whisper between sobs. “She’s had enough trouble in her life.”

  Chapter 29

  MINOGUE WAS DOWN TO his last cigarette. He listened to the wind, and watched Jacky’s eyes. His brother’s dog was a tired and ancient collie, content enough to have trailed along at an easy pace with Minogue when he had started his climb up on the rocky Burren headlands above the farm, hours earlier.

  “Go down to the village and buy me some fags,” he whispered to Jacky.

  The tail wagged gently, and the eyes passed over Minogue. Soon the dog was resting its muzzle on its paws again, and looking out the doorway of the stone shelter. The drizzle had not quite obscured the line of Atlantic cradled between the hills.

  Those were Minogue’s first words since the ones this morning in the kitchen, to Kathleen. She had taken a few days off and come down with him here, to the family farm. She
and her sister-in-law had gone into Ennis the other day. Today it was Galway City. Back at the farmhouse earlier on, Minogue had lifted the phone back in the farmhouse to phone Kathleen on her mobile, ready to apologize for snapping at her. But he didn’t. He had just glanced at the front page of the newspaper, and on it he had seen enough in those two photos. Rynn, in cuffs, was being put into a patrol car. Sister Imelda Foran had her arm around someone who was wearing a coat over her head.

  “Natalia,” Minogue murmured. The dog’s ears went up a little.

  It was her real name. She had been brought over from England, along with some others who had already been forced into the racket there. It had been Rynn’s idea to let George – or Mike, or Mikhail, if the papers they’d found weren’t bogus – run things here for a while yet. Apparently he spoke the language.

  They’d found a Bulgarian passport as well, and a Russian passport too, in the man’s place, a swish flat on Pembroke Road. One was in the name of Mikhail somebody, the other a name that translated as George. There had been a hundred and something thousand euro in envelopes about the place. They’d also found a small pistol – not the one he’d pulled on Malone that day, it turned out – along with plastic bags of amphetamines, one of cocaine, and a collection of pornography. There were keys for safety deposit boxes, airline tickets, phone numbers to places Minogue had to check out on a map: Skopje, Belgrade, places near the Black Sea, more.

  There were first names that matched people known to Interpol. Entry stamps from Moscow airport, Heathrow, Athens, everywhere. And Kilmartin had been right about the paratrooper bit. The man also had the women’s families’ addresses, even phone numbers for them, and sets of some of the best fake papers that the Guards had come across yet – including passports from Canada and Spain and some other places.

  There had been headlines for several days: ‘A shocking glimpse of the reality of Eurocrime.’ ‘Syndicates come to Ireland: are we sitting ducks?’ Sullivan had told him before he’d left that even Moser was helping out on it, from over in Austria, and wanted to send his regards. It had made front pages in papers over there one day. Serious Crimes were holding one of Rynn’s fixers on a drugs charge from the day after the shooting. They were going at him night and day to give them any piece of Rynn. But Rynn was holding tight: he hardly knew this Mike character at all, friend of a friend, etc. He had hired two barristers. He was out on bail. He’d even given an interview where he said he was getting advice on suing the Guards for interfering with a legitimate entrepreneur and businessman.

  None of this Minogue wanted to know.

  But Malone was almost sure they were going after Rynn for both Lawless and this shooting of George/Mike too. Rynn was saying nothing about Emmett Condon. Malone was confident that as more of Rynn’s people were brought in, something would give – especially now the girl had turned up alive.

  In the same phone call that Minogue himself had cut short, Malone also told him there was no word yet on the raid the Guards in Portlaoise had done on the poultry plant there, or the house where the other girls had been kept. The man they’d arrested there was local – “the foreman,” he described himself, and claimed he was running a legit business with people who wanted to work there. Chickens, Malone had repeated the man’s protestations: chickens is my only concern!

  Mister Chicken-tycoon denied ever meeting Rynn, or even this Mike. That he was shielding the girl from Rynn did not occur to him, apparently: if it had, he would have jettisoned her, no doubt. Fear would put things in perspective, no doubt, and any fees or earnings from it would become suddenly very, very unimportant if he’d known Rynn was involved. Defying Rynn, and running the girl out on the Naas Road along with the others, had been his erstwhile foreign partner’s fatal calculation.

  Minogue reached into his back pocket, and felt around for the page he had torn out of yesterday’s paper. It was a bit the worse for wear already. He spread it out on the rocks underfoot, pausing again to study the photos of the African man’s family getting ready to board a plane for the first time, before turning it over to the coverage of Kilmartin. Hand in hand with an equally haggard-looking Maura, Jim Kilmartin had been caught by a photographer coming out of some barrister’s office up near The Four Courts. The charge of assault (domestic) had been tacked onto the firearms one. There was no word on the rest, whatever they would be. Could you be charged for talking to your wife? For having a big mouth, for resorting to that most Irish of habits, the heroic tales of struggling, merry and wily, against an enemy?

  Minogue couldn’t stop thinking about Kilmartin. Somehow he looked much smaller here in the picture, this man in whose company Minogue had been so often over the years. Maura had lost a lot of weight. There was shading on her right side still, but the eye didn’t look as bad. Their son had flown home from the States to help out. Some homecoming. Nobody answered the Kilmartins’ home number. His mobile went straight to a message.

  But Minogue would not give up. He looked around the shed that had always been here, even before he was born. It hadn’t changed in decades. It was the first place he thought of when Kathleen had suggested going away for a few days. Its drystone walls were imperfectly capped by rusting corrugated iron, and that roof itself was held down and almost covered with smaller stones.

  His mind was made up: he pulled out his mobile. A weak signal. He dialed anyway. The same message. He’d do the same as he had done every day since, anyway.

  “Jim, it’s Matt. Phone me. I swear I’ll have it switched on.”

  Just as he readied to End it, he stopped, and lifted it again.

  “Jim, you have to believe me. I never for a minute thought . . .”

  He lost track of what he should say then. He closed the phone slowly, in the hope that he’d remember what he should be saying before the connection went. Jacky was staring at him. When he looked back, the tail wagged.

  “You’d talk if only you could, wouldn’t you? Same as myself.”

  Minogue leaned over, his eyes still on the view over the stone fields that led off to Black Head, and took out the bottle.

  “Don’t let on you saw this. We have enough misery.”

  It scalded a bit. His stomach was empty; it didn’t matter. He felt for the letter, and confirmed with his thumb under the flap that he had sealed it. A stamp too, he felt. Dear Sir/Madam, This letter is to inform you of my decision to . . .

  His eyes glazed over. They were then drawn to a distant movement, barely visible through the drizzle. It was a bus, a tourist bus, no doubt, and it was making slow progress, winding its way toward far-off Corkscrew Hill. Minogue had seen no walkers here since he’d come up across Corcabawn earlier, the long way that wound around the unmarked graveyard and the ruins of Cathirmore. The grey from the limestone had long closed in on the leaking sky, and only the fissures in the rocks kept them apart in places. It’d be dark in a couple of hours.

  “And so what,” he murmured. The dog’s ears quivered.

  Soon Minogue’s eyes slid out of focus again. The dog had closed his eyes, he noticed.

  He closed his eyes, but his thoughts wouldn’t stop churning. The whiskey wasn’t helping. Still things swirled and paused, and they came back worse, before moving on around again. As though burned on his eyelids, he saw Maura Kilmartin’s desolate face out on the driveway again that night, and the bruises on her face worse than the closing eye. He had heard Kilmartin wail once in the house, and then something being hammered a few times. Two squad cars showed up very damn fast after the gun went off. The sergeant who came tearing in from Dalkey Station started out very belligerent. He soon backed off. Still, Minogue had felt like hitting him, hard.

  Blake had shown up within the hour. He got nowhere with Kilmartin, who was still drunk. He had taken to long silences which he’d interrupt with a curse at whoever was asking him something. They had charged Kilmartin the same night all the same, with the firearms charge. There was no bail set. They’d put him on paid leave, pending.

  Kathleen
heard that Maura had gone down the country to her sister’s, and that Jim might be with her. They were worried about Maura. Nobody had said they were worried about Superintendent James Kilmartin. And what were they going to charge her with, she’d asked Minogue several times, until he’d snapped at her. He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know. He had even told Tadhg Sullivan he’d wipe that grin off his face if he thought he could say anything about Jim Kilmartin and his doings. Power, his head of section, had met him the first day in, and said why didn’t he take a few days’ leave, and he wasn’t asking. Great idea, Minogue had told him, as though to let him know he wouldn’t be back anyway.

  His mind slowed, or rather went sideways, and the breeze against the stones and whistling low in the roof took over. In his dreams, if they were dreams at all and not some delirium, he saw the African man. He was picking up all the wreaths and cards from the footpath, and giving them to Iseult, who dropped them into something and then hammered a piece of metal to another, and said something that sounded like Moravia. Then there was a gavel, and Sister Imelda, smoking, in front of a collie who guarded some red stains on a roadway, and Maura Kilmartin saying something. She said it again, and she turned and ran into a river, or was it a lake. Then the dog was back, baring its teeth and growling low in its throat.

  Minogue opened his eyes. He was blind! No: it was dark. It was Jacky growling. The growl began to rise, and just before it tore into barking, Minogue heard a voice, something scuffing against stones outside.

  “Turn off the dog, will you?”

  Jacky wouldn’t go beyond the doorway. Minogue called to him, and tried to get up. The stiffness had almost locked his joints. The bottle was by his hand. He got the neck of it, and tried to hear the words between the barking.

  “Boss, the dog? Can you switch it off?”

  Minogue rolled slowly to his knees, and ran his hand down the dog’s back to the collar.

  “I brought a big stick, I don’t want to use it on him. Boss?

  Are you there at all?”

  “Give me a minute, Tommy.”

  He stayed on his hunkers and got through the doorway. Malone’s silhouette against the last of the sky to the west showed a sizeable blackthorn stick. The dog lunged, almost pulling Minogue over.