by John Brady
The first one was from Sean Barrett, a hack who had thought himself an impregnable insider with the Guards until Tynan had come to the commissioner’s job. No more midnight jaunts on drug busts for Barrett, no more helicopter tours of uncovered arms dumps. Barrett, Kilmartin had heard, was more than pissed off at his fall from favor.
Minogue told Barrett he couldn’t release cause of death until he was sure of it. Had the postmortem been performed? It had. There was some doubt remaining? There were details that required careful examination. King picked out a face Minogue didn’t recognize. An English accent, by God. He took in the leather jacket, the hair, the earring.
Was Mr. Shaughnessy the victim of organized criminal groups? Try disorganized, Minogue wanted to say, as criminals tended to be. No, he replied instead. There was nothing to suggest this yet. It was very early in the investigation. It would naturally fall under our consideration. Were there criminal gangs operating at the airport?
Minogue sidestepped it, threw in a decoy: unprecedented. The tabloid had to have its chance then. Minogue saw King almost grimace. The reporter hung on, poked the air with his pencil: Was the Dublin area now acknowledged to be suffering from an epidemic of violent crime? Was there not documented lack of security, an alarming lack of security, at the airport? Was Shaughnessy targeted as a tourist?
Tynan weighed in. Minogue watched Gemma O’Loughlin scribbling fast. Tynan’s tone was almost kindly, the tone that Kilmartin most suspected: this wasn’t the occasion to discuss trends and statistics or crimes. This was investigation, not extrapolation. There was no confirmation or even assertion that the murder had been committed at the airport — hence our appeal for info on Mr. Shaughnessy’s whereabouts over the last several days and weeks.
A radio journalist next.
Had Mr. Shaughnessy been reported as missing? Yes, for eight days. A search made? Fogra Toradh issued to all stations Tuesday morning. Had there been any measures beyond the ordinary taken to locate Mr. Shaughnessy? Minogue had expected it earlier. He noticed that Tynan was sitting forward with his elbows on the table now. The Make My Day move, Kilmartin had called it, like I want the meeting over. Full resources of the Gardai brought to bear, came Tynan’s reply. Particularly tragic when the crime victim was a visitor to our country.
King took Gemma O’Loughlin next. She glanced at Minogue several times as she spoke. Had Mr. Shaughnessy’s family been the subject of any security concerns in the past? Prominent positions, well known, et cetera…? King steered it to Tynan. Public figures was Tynan’s tack; the world we live in, extra measures. Minogue looked from face to face in the front row while Tynan did his slow rehash of the Garda appeal for sightings of Shaughnessy. He let his thoughts go to the maps in the squad room. Donegal, with roads over the bogs like the twists and leavings of thread or wool on the floor after Iseult had been doing a tapestry.
A handful of reporters remained seated. The camera crew had nearly finished disassembling. Tony O’Leary sat on the edge of the deserted table. Minogue watched hotel staff carrying away chairs.
“All right,” said Tynan. “You’re headed back out to the airport?”
“Probably.”
The day was running away on him. He’d need to be back into town again by half-six to get his head straight for the briefing. Traffic…?
“But after I check with Eilis.”
“Tony’ll take you out so,” said Tynan.
O’Leary had parked the commissioner’s Opel at the taxi rank by the top of Dawson Street. Minogue rolled down the window. He was glad of the noise along the green.
“I’ll set up a meeting,” said Tynan. “Tomorrow early, say. Give them a bit of time to get themselves together. They have nothing recent on him, on the son, you know that? But Mrs. knows you want to talk to her.”
Minogue took out his phone.
“Did Leyne tell you anything on the way in?” Tynan asked.
Minogue switched the phone back to standby.
“He told me he was still an Irishman.”
“Did he run us all down as backward iijits, Guards included?”
“More or less.”
Tynan nodded.
“But I fell to thinking,” Minogue resumed, “well, that Leyne has the look of a man not in the whole of his health.”
Tynan stared at Minogue’s forehead for a moment.
“You wouldn’t be the first to notice,” he said. “There’s keen interest in that very subject. He’s sitting on about two hundred million dollars.”
“He didn’t mention that to me on the trip in from the airport.”
Tynan didn’t bite.
“Well did he tell you anything?”
“He did but I don’t know what it means. ‘It’ll all come out eventually,’ he said.”
“What ‘all’?”
“Family, I think,” Minogue said. “The son was a bit wild.”
Tynan stared at the open door of the Opel then across the roof at O’Leary. “I’ll walk it, Tony,” he said. “Meet me up at the office.”
O’Leary glanced at Minogue
“No he wouldn’t be loaded, Tony. We’ll be okay.”
Minogue followed Tynan across to the broad footpath that surrounded Stephen’s Green. The commissioner was a brisk walker.
“All the free advice I get,” Tynan said. “Now Tony is supposed to carry a gun and take bodyguard training.”
“Have you…?”
“Threats? ’Course I have. Tell me, what’d you make of Mrs?”
“I don’t know. Genteel, if the word means anything anymore. Are she and Leyne, what’s the word — ”
“Amicable? They are now The marriage lasted only a few years. He didn’t fight the settlement.”
“Well-heeled, is she.”
Tynan slowed his pace for a moment
“Get the notion of preferential treatment out of your head. Face the facts: Leyne’s high profile, and we’ll be in the spotlight along with him. There’s a lot of other baggage as well: the Leyne Foundation, the half-dozen companies he has a stake in. Biotech, food processing, mining.”
“I know a little bit more too. He was a lousy parent. A lousy husband.”
Minogue thought of Leyne’s grip on his arm as they stepped out of the limo for the press conference
“A philanderer I was told,” Tynan went on “Not a boozer, but.”
Tynan turned sharply in through the gate into the green.
“So how’d he strike you?”
Minogue watched two kids feeding lumps of bread the size of tennis balls to the ducks. The pond was gray today Downy feathers lay on the scum by the walk.
“He wants what he wants,” he said “Whatever that is. Guilt too, maybe, about the son. And he said he’d, er, back me up.”
“Well that’s nice to hear,” said Tynan. Minogue eyed him.
“Back me up against a wall maybe, John. If I don’t come through the way he wants.”
They turned by the fountain for the German airmen and headed down the walk toward the Harcourt Street gate. Minogue tried to hold on to the sound of the flowing water as long as he could.
Eilis answered. Murtagh was on the phone but he’d said he wanted to talk to him. Minogue waited. Sitting in the passenger seat of the commissioner’s car being sort of chauffeured around didn’t feel glam so much as stupid. O’Leary adjusted the volume on the radio. Dispatch was trying to reroute a payroll van and its escort around an accident scene on the North Circular Road.
“Okay,” said Murtagh then. “Good. Are you in town, boss?”
“I am. I hardly got a look in at the airport before this jaunt back.”
“There’s stuff coming in, pictures. Pictures of Shaughnessy at some dos. The races, some get together with the music crowd. He was socializing hot and heavy before he went west.”
Minogue wondered if Murtagh had intended the wit.
“There’s a photographer at the Evening Press doing some legwork for us. He’s been phoning around fellas he kn
ows in all the papers. So far we have Shaughnessy at four different dos. Four, no less. Quite the lad.”
“Who’s with him, or near him, even?”
“Yes. I’m looking at one just in over the fax. It’s spotty and all, but he’s got a girl under his oxter in one.”
One night stand? Minogue wondered
“Find her, can we?”
“The snapshots are being couriered over.”
“Nothing new on placing him after he left Dublin?”
“No. But I was just talking to Serious Crimes about the airport. Kevin Cronin’s got names from stuff late last year. Cars robbed. There was a mugging in one of the car parks. Never nailed down, but Cronin says he could point us to a few gougers who should be in the know. Here’s the catch: one’s in the Joy. The other one’s out of the picture in England somewhere.”
Minogue yawned. He might as well go out to the airport and shoulder his share of the interviews.
“Listen, I forgot,” he said to Murtagh. “Get Eilis to update the appeal in the press release as soon as she can, will you? Along with anyone who used that car park at the airport — I forgot to put in about any snapshots or videos people might have taken there. Coming and going, like.”
“Okay. Remember the call in from some fella in the museum? Shaughnessy was talking to someone in there…?”
“Go ahead, yes.”
“When he signed himself in as Leyne? I have a name on the woman he talked with there. Aoife Hartnett ”
“Is she handy?”
“No,” said Murtagh. “She’s on her holidays, wouldn’t you know it. Away off in Portugal is the best I can give you right now.”
“Since?”
“Em. A week back.”
Minogue looked down at the book that had slid out from under the seat when O’Leary had braked hard at the lights in Whitehall. Where was Asmara again? He thought back to the name of the woman who’d called in from the B amp; B in Donegal.
“John,” Minogue said. “The call-in that said something about Shaughnessy may be traveling with a woman. That was Donegal, wasn’t it?”
He took another drink from his cup. He grimaced and searched around the room for something to get rid of the taste.
“I don’t know what that is,” he sighed. “But coffee, it ain’t.”
Malone and Sheehy seemed to be surviving the tea. Malone tapped on the list again.
“This fella’s on the level. Coughlan. The APF. He’s going to drop Fogarty in the shite.”
That wasn’t the plan, Minogue wanted to say.
Minogue watched a feeble, fussy granny enter the airport restaurant on the arm of a hungover-looking man in an ill-fitting suit. Not the emigrant Paddys of old, he thought, with the string around the suitcase at the dock for the night sailing.
“Want to bet Coughlan or other fellas have a chip on the shoulder,” Malone said. “And they want to drop their boss for something?”
Minogue shrugged.
“There are no direct pointers yet,” said Sheehy. “The patrols all log in the checkpoints but sure they might as well be sleepwalking, some of ’em.”
“How are we for response from people who parked there over the week?” Minogue asked. He looked down at his scribbles. “Five people so far, is it?”
Sheehy nodded. Malone looked at his watch.
“Half-four,” he said. “There’s only six or seven security staff left to do.”
Minogue looked down at the personnel lists and the companies under contract.
“Is this it, Fergal? The whole shebang?”
“There’s a few missing,” Sheehy said. “But they’ll come through.”
“All right. What’s the story on the vicinity search?”
Malone said that the dumpsters were still being checked. They’d located the tip where the terminal rubbish was disposed of.
Minogue thought of a rubbish tip, flocks of seagulls circling and squabbling. He’d better go down to the site, close it up. The technicians had come up dry. They’d worked it all morning. He checked his watch.
“Let’s head down to the security office,” he said. “We’ll deal out what we have.”
He turned to Sheehy.
“We’ll aim for half-seven. At the squad, if you please, Fergal. Run up summaries, like a good man, and smarten us up on where we’re headed with leads from here anyway.”
Eoin Gormley, one of the newest forensic technicians, and Paddy Tuttle, probably the longest serving, were in the site van.
“Well, men,” Minogue said. “We’ll give it the once-over again.”
Tuttle talked to Gormley about cigarette butts on their way across the access road to the car park. Minogue’s bad shoulder ached worse. He thought about his brother’s gnarled hands, how he could hardly walk down the lane on the farm now.
The tarmac in the car park looked soft. There were clumps of moss like sponge by the cement bollards. The Guard on shift was leaning against an unmarked car. Minogue studied the space within the tape, the holes where the tarmac had been taken up.
“A right lot of rain we’ve had,” said the Guard. Soil samples, the contents of the boot, Minogue was thinking: that comb under the seat. The odometer said Shaughnessy had gone nearly 1,400 km. He stared at the stripped section of tar by the back of the Escort.
“Anything definite to tell us he was attacked here?”
Tuttle tugged at his ear.
“Do you want the considered version or the man-in-a-hurry version?”
“Whichever you like, now Paddy. No miracles expected.”
“That’s where the back bumper was, see? The ‘B’?”
Minogue looked along the chalk line.
“We ’scoped and scrubbed for blood all up and down there before we took that patch up. The rain would’ve carried it off fair enough, but there are plenty of crevices in the tar that’d hold it. Minute though, very minute. It’d be degraded there fast too. Acidy. The compounds in there, well…”
“Tires, shoes?”
“There’s residue all over the place,” said Tuttle “But you’ll never distinguish them. That’s going nowhere. We measured under where the wheels were. There’s a difference all right but that’s good for nothing, time-wise ”
“Cars parked there before, you’re going to tell me,” Minogue murmured. “And will do so again?”
“I measured just a half an hour after to compare,” Tuttle went on. “Sure the damn stuff comes back up again. Spongy. The time of day. A bit of sun.”
“Paddy. The site. I know you’re not a betting man now.”
Tuttle looked away toward the terminal. The sky had brown tints.
“Sorry, Matt. I couldn’t really.”
“ ‘Forensic science wouldn’t support it’?”
Tuttle nodded.
“Eoin?”
“Ditto. You’d be reading tea leaves.”
“It’s in the car you’ll get anything here,” said Tuttle.
Minogue tugged at the tape. Emerald Rent-A-Car had an option to leave their car at the airport but Shaughnessy hadn’t taken it. Had he changed his mind, or had whoever driven the car thought they could lose it for a while? Some bloody scut, he thought again, a hitchhiker, traveling on Shaughnessy’s credit cards. Match the entry to the exit from the Aer Lingus passenger lists: point of entry passport controls from the ferries. But if they’d come through the North he’d have the UK control data to reckon with.
Tuttle was still waiting.
“Sorry, Paddy. Yes. Thanks. The car, yes, we have that, to be sure.”
The Guard helped them take down the tape and fold the uprights.
Inspector Minogue was getting to know the Swords Road a bit too well. He thought of the trips back from the airport each time they’d brought his son and de facto daughter-in-law out for their flight back. Kathleen silent, her crying done. Daithi pale, himself bewildered. The trips were getting spread out now. There had been three trips in four years — a trend — and Daithi wasn’t sure about
this Christmas either. Wasn’t sure, quote unquote. The job was intense. It was the price you paid for the fast track. If he’s not coming home at least once a year well… Kathleen had started the sentence often but had never finished it.
A low-slung sports car with a laughing driver and a woman pushing back her long hair rocketed by only to brake sharply as a taxi passed a van at a leisurely fifty miles an hour. Malone kept trying to see the driver.
“Jases,” said Malone. “That’s what’s his name. Isn’t it?”
Minogue looked over. A Porsche, by God, and a turbo at that.
“It looks like him all right.”
“Yeah, I knew it was. The film fella. A Rebel Hand What’s his name?”
Malone gave the inspector a sly look.
“Fannon. Gary Fannon.”
“Will I flash the badge? Have a go at him for the driving?”
Minogue studied the gestures of Ireland’s enfant terrible director while he waited for the taxi to move out of the fast lane. Who was the girl?
“He was doing ninety,” Malone said. “Seen him bombing along in the mirror. Eighty in anyhow.”
“Ah, leave him alone ”
“Why? Are you hoping to stay the good side of him? Get hired?”
“He’s a cultural icon, Tommy ”
“Icon? Is that the same as a fucking chancer?”
He stood on the brakes in time to leave six inches or so between their Nissan and the van ahead.
“Shit — sorry. What’s he like, Leyne?”
Minogue waved him back to watching the road.
“The son and him weren’t that close, right?”
“He wants to help,” Minogue said. She was a singer, the girl, wasn’t she? What was her name? “He told me he’ll back me up. Anything I want.”
“Me too?”
“No. Only me. You’re from Dublin. But I’m a countryman ”
“Fu — . That’s not very nice, is it.”