A Carra ring imm-6

by John Brady

  “He lashed out at people?”

  She let down the rolled up hanky on her saucer.

  “Yes.”

  “It carried into adult life, did it?”

  Her voice was low when she replied.

  “I think you know that by now. John and I agreed we could hide nothing.”

  Minogue watched the white-haired woman cleaning her glasses. An albino — of course. Albina?

  “If he brought it on himself we must face up to that,” she said.

  Minogue wondered if Patrick Shaughnessy had struck his mother.

  “The thought occurred to me, Inspector, that my son — ”

  He saw her bite her lip. He wasn’t ready for the glimpse of her contorted face as she lowered her head. He stood and drew his chair around beside her. The detective with the beard was watching him. Her words came out in the squeezed and bitter whispers Minogue had heard so often in interview rooms from innocent and guilty alike.

  “He wasn’t a psychopath, you know. He wasn’t.”

  He nodded at the older detective and mouthed “sister” at him. Her shoulders were bony, he realized. He didn’t know whether to hold her arm instead. Why had he thought her so remote?

  Geraldine Shaughnessy’s sister arrived out of breath. A small enough resemblance, he couldn’t help thinking, between Anne Boland and her. He let go of her shoulder and stood up. Behind the lenses, the white-haired woman’s eyes were enormous. Still she squinted. Minogue stared at her but she seemed not to notice. He headed off the older detective in the doorway.

  “I don’t want her leaving town now,” he said. The detective scratched at the back of his head.

  “There was talk of them going to Cork today. There’s two escort cars set up already, I know that much.”

  “Tell them no can do then, if you please. I didn’t get to recent stuff with the son at all. We have to have her here in Dublin until she can talk.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll pass it on. Who do we call if there’s a scrap over it? All we have is ‘do what the family wants.’”

  “Call Tynan.”

  The detective’s eyelid drooped a little.

  “Tynan, you said?”

  “That’s the one. Have your scrap with him.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said to Malone. “She just realized then that he wasn’t coming back. Ever, like. ”

  Minogue leaned around the partition.

  “Anyone call in about Mrs. Shaughnessy, Eilis? Is she sticking to some plan to go to her family below in Cork?”

  Eilis shook her head. Minogue returned to the table. Murtagh tapped his Biro on the duty schedule again.

  “Farrell took that APF fella’s statement. Murphy, Michael — Mick. Murphy leveled with him. So the car could have been there all through those shifts.”

  “Are the others still playing holy?”

  Murtagh shrugged.

  “They don’t want to get kicked, boss.”

  “Tell Farrell to go after them in earnest. Round two.”

  Minogue looked down the list again. Murtagh was eying him. Something he’d said?

  “Just pretend I’m Jim Kilmartin for a while, John,” he murmured. He turned to see Murtagh’s reaction.

  “Still nothing solid on phones? People who used the car park?”

  Murtagh shook his head.

  “Tell me about the photos then, how they’re coming. The, er, celebrity mob he was cozying up with.”

  Murtagh stood, tugged at his belt, and waved at the photos pinned to the side of the map.

  “This fella’s a stockbroker. He made a killing on the markets there a few years ago. That’s down at the auction place, what do you call — Goff’s. Doesn’t remember Shaughnessy at all. Nobody does. Oh, this one here, the fat fella, Kavanagh, he remembers being introduced to ‘an American.’ That’s all.”

  Malone strolled over. He held out a bag of crisps.

  “Those are the horses there, right,” he said.

  “Good for you, Tommy. ”

  “Is that O’Riordan there?”

  “That’s him, yes.”

  Hard to match this beaming face with the reserved, diplomatic companion to Leyne and his ex-wife Minogue remembered from the hotel.

  “Have we set him up for an interview?”

  Murtagh let go the crisps he had drawn from Malone’s bag.

  “He’d be, er… ”

  “It’s all right, John, I’m not going to bark. ”

  “You see him knowing much about Shaughnessy? ‘Friend of the family’?”

  “Try anyway. Get hold of him. Tell him we’ll be wanting a statement. If he fights shy, I’ll talk to him. Eventually. Shaughnessy must have had at least a chat with him. Even if it’s only a how-do. There he is — and again — two places they’re in the same crowd.”

  “He’s a big deal, boss. You see the picture in the papers a lot.”

  “The ponies, the castles for the Hollywood mob, yes, I know. ”

  “More to him than that, isn’t there? He put money in films here at the right time. Remember that one that got it all started there about ten years back, Leaves Are Green, was it?”

  “ Leaves of Green,”said Minogue.

  “You saw that?” from Malone. “The drug one and the IRA? Shite wasn’t it?”

  “Never got around to seeing it.”

  “Well the Guards look like iijits in it,” said Malone. “Shaughnessy was in on the music scene too, when it took off, right?”

  Minogue nodded.

  “The Thicks were the first. I remember them. Then there was Goddammtohell, remember the ones used to piss on the stage? Then came the Works, managed from day one. But where’s whatshername, this Aoife Hartnett, in this?”

  Minogue searched the eight-by-tens.

  “That’s her next to the sculpture. There’s the side of Shaughnessy. Looks like he’s smiling at someone. Nothing in his hands there — look.”

  “Put it on a table,” said Malone.

  “Maybe. Or maybe he went on the wagon,” said Minogue.

  “Huh. She has something. Wine.”

  Minogue stared at the shots of Shaughnessy in a group next to a banner about film.

  “Is she in the Film Museum thing?”

  “Don’t know yet, boss.”

  Minogue searched the half-turned faces, even the ones in shadow behind Shaughnessy. The hairdos were so short now, shaved almost.

  “Will you look at all the black in that,” said Malone. “Artsy-fartsy crowd. What’s the story there, with them always standing around looking pissed off?” Minogue stepped over to the shots of the Carra Fields.

  “There’s the Taoiseach, God be good to him,” said Murtagh. “The back of his head in anyhow. The good side of him. The minister — there’s Garland. Hard to truss him, with the dickey bow — the size of him. ”

  “O’Riordan again,” said Minogue.

  “Shaughnessy’s talking to someone there, that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Damn,” said Minogue. “Your man, the cameraman, can’t remember?”

  Murtagh crunched a few crisps.

  “‘Do you know how many people were there?’ says he. ‘Everyone.’”

  “Ask him who then. ”

  “What, a list?”

  “A list, John, yes. We’ve lots of paper.”

  Malone crushed the crisp bag slowly. Minogue turned back to Murtagh.

  “What are our sources on Aoife Hartnett?”

  “Well she had friends. Pals at work. Had a social life too. She played squash at a club. She knew a lot of people, it looks like.”

  “Who, like?”

  Murtagh glanced over at Malone.

  “Well the sister says she knew a lot of people in the art scene. The exhibitions were a thing for her.”

  “Who have we been drawing on here, John?”

  Murtagh began counting.

  “First, the sister, now she’s in a bad way. Her husband, Nolan, well he’s gotten over being a pain. Th
e sister felt sorry for her lately, the past while, says Nolan.”

  “Why so?”

  “Well it’s a bit thick really. I mean, who’s to say here. The sister stays at home. Nolan’s a solicitor so they’re okay for the few shillings. She left Telecom after they started having kids. Anyway, Nolan says that the wife says that Aoife wasn’t that happy. Especially the last while, like. ”

  Minogue leaned against the wall.

  “She couldn’t settle. A let-down with a fella, Whelan. He’s a Eurocrat type. In Brussels now. No hard feelings, it just didn’t work. Nolan thinks — and the wife too — the job might have been losing its appeal too. ‘She’d only complain the odd time though’ ”

  Minogue looked around the squad room. Malone was trying to dislodge a piece of potato crisp from somewhere in his lower back teeth. The inspector couldn’t settle on a question to ask Murtagh.

  “Go on, then,” he said.

  “The money thing was okay. She had her own place and that, paid her way. Got to go to conferences and that. But said there wasn’t much elbow room left. That, well, she’s kind of hit a level. All the jobs are filled like.”

  “A plateau,” said Malone. “The roof like.”

  “Nolan says he thinks the oul biological clock thing was getting to her too. Things passing her by.”

  “Kids?”

  “Yes. Family, he says.”

  “That was all over the phone to you?”

  “Yep. I told him to phone us as soon as the wife was in shape to interview. Ah, I was on the phone to him for half an hour. He’s shook now. The wheels fell off the solicitor bit when he got the idea maybe something bad’s after happening to her.”

  “Who’s doing her apartment?”

  “Driscoll. They started the search just after eleven. Said he’d phone us at four, whether or which. I fed him pointers we were keen on: any sign Shaughnessy was there, like. Travel stuff.”

  “Her car, the Micra?”

  Murtagh nodded at the clock.

  “I phoned at half-nine. It’s somewhere between Castlebar and Dublin.”

  Minogue slid the fax paper out from under the photocopies of statements from the airport. The list of contents, bagged and boxed and also en route to Dublin, was two tightly written pages. Minogue rubbed the paper between thumb and forefinger.

  “At the museum, John. You’ve put in for interviews with the staff there?”

  “I have, to be sure. One of her mates is on holliers in Kilkenny since Tuesday but he’s checking out sound anyway. Him and the wife and the kids visiting in-laws. She had a secretary who’s very shaky now. Eileen Brogan. I got her to go through the desk for us, appointment diaries, messages, and that.”

  Malone was tapping his Biro on his knuckles now. Minogue watched it hop. Malone stopped.

  “Phone Garland, John,” said Minogue “Ask him to free up the people she was closest to there. I’m going over there myself.”

  CHAPTER 2O

  Garland stared out the window of Aoife Hartnett’s office and rubbed at his eyes again. Minogue could hear Malone’s tones in the adjoining room, a meeting room where staff were now coming in one by one, some in tears, to tell him what they could of Aoife Hartnett. Minogue was waiting for Eileen Brogan to return from the toilet so he could interview her.

  “But they must be connected,” said Garland finally. “I don’t remember seeing this Shaughnessy character at those things, but there he is in the picture. There were loads of people there.”

  “Aoife went on leave the twenty-eighth, I have here?”

  “That’s it,” said Garland and blew his nose. “I checked.”

  “And the sick leave was in April. Two weeks, was it?”

  “The seventh to the eighteenth. Yes.”

  Minogue fixed the eight in eighteenth. His Biro wasn’t putting out. Garland slid one across to him. April is the crudest month; who wrote that one?

  “We’ll be needing to know why.”

  Garland squirmed, laid his hands on the table.

  “Well, is that not confidential information still?”

  “I don’t mean why you didn’t tell us the other night about her sick leave,” Minogue said. “I mean the reason for her taking the leave.”

  “Well, you’ll be consulting with Aoife’s doctor, maybe?”

  “When we need to. Her apartment’s being investigated as we speak.”

  Garland looked down at the desktop. He made a table setting of two Biros and a pencil.

  “As much as I’m allowed to divulge, now, I suppose,” he whispered.

  “Aoife’s dead, Mr. Garland. ”

  Garland swallowed. His eyes darted to Minogue’s.

  “We’re all on the one side here, I’m thinking,” Minogue added. “She’s being examined today here in Dublin. There’s not much privacy left in the process now, if you follow me. ”

  Garland leaned to one side of his chair and rubbed at his nose. He sighed and ran his hand down his face. He left his eyes closed for several moments.

  “Well if you can talk to her doctor. She was getting treatment this last while ”

  “For what, now?”

  “Depression,” said Garland. “I think it was more burnout. Aoife needed time away from the job. I think she finally realized that.”

  “Was there something that helped her realize that, something specific?”

  Garland held his breath for a moment while he sized Minogue up.

  “Yes.” The breath rushing out seemed to make him suddenly tired.

  “Remember that Aoife and I worked together, God, nine years now. She’s a first-class scholar and archaeologist. None better, let me tell you. Single-minded, dedicated — always the one to go the distance. Very, very dedicated. I still, well.”

  Minogue watched Garland swallow and pinch his eyes. The dickey bow had gone askew. Garland took out another paper hanky and turned away. Minogue studied the postcards and photos. Columns: Greece, Rome? Turkey, it turned out.

  “Mr. Garland. Is there something you’re leaving out? Out of respect for Aoife?”

  Garland’s face was blotchy now. He stared dully at Minogue.

  “Do you always look for the dark side?”

  Minogue held back his first answer. He raised his eyebrows instead.

  “I’d hope I could persuade you that I’m not trying to dig up dirt,” he said. “I can think of no other way to say it at the moment. So: sorry. Help me, help us. That’s what’s needed.”

  Garland cleared his throat

  “All right, so. The leave was for Aoife to think over what she wanted to do. Where she wanted to go. In her career, her life, I mean.”

  Minogue thought of the group he had detached Garland from the other night at L’Avenue. He’d heard the phrase so often lately: What I want to do with my life.

  “Was it an ultimatum to her?”

  “God, no!” said Garland and sat back. “We all liked Aoife. She lived for her work, you know, but things hadn’t been going her way or at least she’d maybe forgotten the knack of adapting.”

  “Give me a for instance, can you.”

  “Well the job itself: on the one hand we have fewer staff and more responsibilities. She took them all on, to be sure, but there were weeks on end that I know she was here until ten or eleven at night. She managed great until a few bumps in the road came along.”

  “Which, now?”

  “Well, to be blunt, there were things disappearing. From sites.”

  “Monuments, do you mean?”

  “Yes. There were three gone in April of last year. They were set into walls even and Public Works themselves thought they’d be secure against anything. But these people were determined and up to the job it seemed.”

  “Stolen? Did they turn up?”

  “Not here they didn’t. Oddly enough it died down this year. It’d be an impossible job to keep them all safe, short of bringing them in here. We took in several after Crom Dubh below in Kerry. Did you hear of that one last year?”r />
  “I seem to remember something.”

  “Fifteen hundred years old. But pre-Christian to be sure. No trace.”

  “Is there money in these?”

  “I don’t rightly know. No one does. But I’ll bet there is.”

  Minogue looked down at Garland rearranging the Biros.

  “What does this have to do with Aoife?”

  “Well technically the assistant keeper would be responsible for securing sites — along with the OPW, of course. The Office of Public Works, sorry. Aoife was up to her eyes already. She wanted a lot of them taken down and brought in here for safekeeping. But there were other interests, local groups wanting things kept, for the tourism thing, it came down to really. But Aoife’s idea was to put all these things out to the world internationally. That was the project she got funding for, the computer stuff you had a look at there.”

  “Oration?”

  “Ovation. The logic was sound the pieces would be seen by millions, and they’d be secure. Irish culture would reach around the world. A bit like the missionary work the monks were doing in Europe all those centuries ago. Funny in a way, isn’t it?”

  Minogue’s hands remembered the feel of the stone cross at Tully, the centuries of weather and other hands coming through his skin to entrance him.

  “Oh, something like that,” Garland was saying. “But without leaving your home. Yes, it’s cheap — oh, there are umpteen perfectly good, rational reasons…”

  A redundancy, Minogue thought. Too reasonable maybe, too well thought out.

  “And she got some European funding,” said Garland. “ ‘The past is the future,’ do you get it?”

  The words were out before he’d thought about it, and Minogue regretted them almost immediately.

  “You don’t mean Bosnia, I take it,” he heard himself say. “Or Belfast.”

  Garland stopped wiping his nose and fixed a look on Minogue.

  “By God,” he murmured and started rubbing again. “You’d fit right in with the crowd up in L’Avenue, my crowd: ‘The past is a nightmare from which we struggle to awaken’ and all that. My overeducated generation, far from bare feet now. Dublin intelligensia, with their mental theme parks.”

  “I take it you have a different point of view then.”

  “The past is real,” said Garland. Minogue saw the keenness in Garland’s eyes. “It’s with us. It’s not a nightmare. Stephen Daedalus was a bit too precious for my liking.”