by John Brady
“There’s part of me knows that those two fellas were only after Freeman, John. The poor iijit panicked and ran for it. That’s when they got him.”
Tynan nodded once and looked down at the floor.
“Now they were nothing to the Smiths, John, were they?”
Tynan raised his eyebrows.
“I say they were there for Freeman.”
Tynan picked up the coins again.
“There’s something you’re not telling me here,” Minogue said. “And if you don’t tell me, I’m going to find out myself. If you won’t let me at King or Hayes, I’ll go after them myself.”
Tynan let the coins drop into his other hand. His voice was soft when he spoke now.
“The last person who spoke to me like that was an Assistant Commissioner,” he said. “Was, I say. Now he hadn’t been threatened, or shot at, like you have. So you’re going to make it. For now. We’ll let that last remark go by.”
“The suits went around you,” Minogue said. “But they’re not going around my case. We have three murders, they’re related, and I’m not going away. A bunch of robbed antiques and fifty million notwithstanding.”
Tynan let the coins slide over one another in his palm. Minogue wondered if O’Leary and Malone could hear him on the other side of the partition. Tynan glanced up from his palm.
“Okay, then,” he said. “It’s not just the money. Or even these, what can we call them — artifacts — he says he’s going to give back ‘to the Irish people.’”
The Commissioner looked at the distorted glass in the partition of the snug. That head could only be Malone’s, Minogue decided.
“You talked with Leyne, didn’t you?”
“In the car,” replied Minogue. “At the press conference, a bit.”
“Well, did you ever hear him hold forth on the state of the nation here?”
“A short, sour few words, yes. He was still back in the fifties. I kind of switched off.”
“You remember 1969, Derry?”
Minogue searched Tynan’s face for a clue.
“What about it?”
“The riots in the Bogside, when everything was going up? How it looked from here? Nights of burning houses, riots and petrol bombs? Remember?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
“The B Specials and the RUC? The black outfits, like storm troopers?”
“What’s this . . .?”
“You remember we were considering sending in the army, over the border into Derry?”
“Yes, there was talk — ”
“Talk?” said Tynan. “You know well there was more than that.”
“Why are you bringing this . . .”
He left the question unfinished. He stared at the Commissioner. Tynan looked and sounded as though he was reminiscing about a clumsy prank as a schoolboy. Minogue knew the expression, the tone to be signs of a quiet fury.
“Where is this coming from?” he tried.
“Didn’t I tell you I had a chat with the Minister of Justice this morning?”
“Wait,” said Minogue, “I’m not on board here. First I’m thinking smuggling, then payoff so Leyne can get his shot at immortality here, then cover-up for his son, but now . . .?”
“I had several questions to ask of the Minister,” said Tynan. “At least the conversation ended on a civil note. Can I get back to this history lesson now?”
Minogue nodded.
“The North, the sieges around Catholic areas, the barricades. The arms that we didn’t officially notice being sent into the North from here.”
“Leyne was part of that?”
Tynan looked at the empty 7-Up O’Leary had drunk.
“NORAID, the Americans — that was the start of that,” he said. “There was big money involved. You got caught in the tail-end of a bit of the worst yourself.”
For a moment Minogue was back at the border that night, his legs beginning to give out as he tried to reach a car already rolling into the ditch, the bullets still slamming into it.
“What are you saying here?”
Tynan opened the snug door and asked O’Leary to phone a Hogan, tell him he’d call later. Through the doorway Minogue eyed a customer, an elderly man with a gaunt face and a long tongue which he kept flicking around his lips as he hauled himself onto a stool. The knuckles were misplaced, jammed together. Tynan closed the door again.
“We heard a rumour a few years ago,” he resumed, “that Leyne had been involved back then. Yes — the self-made entrepreneur still with the politics of a republican. It surfaced when he made his approach about giving back these artifacts, and donating all the money. He’s no stranger to donations, by the way, I learned: do you want to know how many millions he’s given to the Democrats over the last decade? Anyway, that was before the IRA went shopping in Moscow and Libya, and doing their deals with the other slime in Amsterdam and Prague and the rest of it.”
Tynan gave Minogue a quick survey.
“Even before the business phase kicked in,” he resumed, “with the robberies and the rackets and the drug trade. He believed, or he wanted to believe, that the IRA was the same IRA as had fought Black and Tans. Remember where he came from, Matt: small farmer, pushed around here. He walked away when the politics went way left. That’s history now.”
“History,” said Minogue. “But plenty stayed in, people that Leyne would know still, then?”
Tynan looked at his watch.
“Probably,” he said.
“What if the son knew that, had a name . . .? Or what if he’d told the father some of what he’d done here and Leyne pulled out some old contacts here to get the son out of the mess?”
He tried to arrange his thoughts, but they kept going sideways on him.
“The son, Shaughnessy . . .” he began. “He was trouble, that we can tell. Would he have put the heavy word on people here, how he could spill the beans on something from way in the past, so’s they’d have to help unglue him from whatever he was up to here?”
Tynan nodded slowly. Minogue didn’t know whether he was agreeing with him or just placating him.
“More to the point,” Minogue went on, “if Leyne began to suspect that his contacts here had gotten fed up fast with demands the son was making in his name and then gotten rid of Shaughnessy, maybe even Aoife Hartnett because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. . . Leyne might put them to the wall, too?”
Tynan didn’t nod again. He had resumed fiddling with the coins.
“Freeman had access to Leyne,” Minogue resumed. “Even to his will maybe. Leyne might have let slip what was on his mind to him. So Freeman would be an unknown quantity here if people thought he could pass on something to the Guards . . .”
Minogue let his words drop away. The soreness in his knee came back to him.
“So that’s where your case goes off the map,” Tynan said then. “This is not just about smuggled stuff from old churches and graveyards down the country.”
“Shaughnessy, he lit the fuse, didn’t he?”
“Could be,” said Tynan. “But those gunmen today were part of something a damn sight bigger than you and your partner, and even your squad, can handle alone.”
“This is a squad case first and foremost,” Minogue said. “We can’t sit on our hands at the door here.”
Tynan eyed him.
“Seems like you have inherited Kilmartin’s selective hearing here,” he said. “Safety’s number one: get through this, what just happened. And you can’t have an edge after this. You’re also going to have to take stock of the situation at home, get a break after this. Kathleen?”
“I’ll handle that. But we can’t walk away from this though.”
“There’s no disgrace,” said Tynan, his voice rising slightly. “We messed up because we were kept blind. You did the best job possible. Stand down for now, let me get Intelligence in with some of the old hands on the paramilitaries, going back to whenever. This won’t be buried any more.”
&n
bsp; “We’re okay, Tommy and me,” Minogue said. “We have to keep a hand in, or we could lose momentum here, could bury the case even. It’s asking too much to walk at this stage.”
“No, it damned well isn’t.”
Tynan’s murmur drew Minogue to check the anger in the Commissioner’s dull stare.
“Everything costs something, Matt,” he said after a few moments. “Eventually. Sometimes a lot more than it’s worth. What I have from the Minister is that you and Malone walk from that mess back at the hotel.”
“It was obstruction,” said Minogue. “Whatever way you want to dress it up.”
“You should have listened,” Tynan said. “Before you bounced them and whipped this Freeman off in the car. So. Hear me out now? You standing down means there’ll be no comeback from King or the Minister, even. As for Hayes, I’ll deal with him myself, but part of the horse trading on the phone this morning saves Hayes’ neck. If he wants to work for the Minister, then he gets out of the force. And I’m going to see that he does within the week. Now. That’s what’s been happening this morning in my little world.”
Tynan’s stare returned to a gaze at the glasses on the countertop.
“This started as politics,” he said. “Or culture. Or heritage, whatever that is anymore. But it’s going to end as justice.”
TWENTY-FIVE
O ’Leary drove them down the quays after he had dropped the Commissioner at Harcourt Street. The giddiness was gone but so was the panic: Minogue just felt more jittery now. O’Leary didn’t try any small talk.
“I have such a bleeding headache,” said Malone at last.
Minogue knew that Kathleen would be at the squad by now.
“What are you going to do then?” Malone asked. “Go home and put the feet up?”
“Maybe.”
The Four Courts slid along the top of the quay walls. It looked ragged today.
“Hey,” Malone said to O’Leary. “Were you ever shot at?”
O’Leary nodded.
“Where, in Dublin here?”
“No.”
“Where?”
“In a small town in the middle of nowhere. Near the border with Sudan.”
“And what was it like? Not the place, but what did you do, like?”
“I ran the other way,” said O’Leary. “They were robbers. I was on leave with another UN fella. We probably shouldn’t have been there.”
“You weren’t a basket case after it though?”
“I don’t remember really.”
“Well, I thought I’d be a basket case by now. After this, I mean.” He turned to Minogue. “But I feel, like, up. I’m actually very fu—, very annoyed, like?”
Minogue shivered. O’Leary had them in the car park in short order. Minogue looked over at his Citroen. It looked damned fine. He longed to sit in and coast off, away out to the west in it. Himself and herself, the Galway road, no hurry. He returned O’Leary’s wave. There was a bite to the breeze now. He looked around the sky.
“So, are we going home or what?” Malone asked.
Minogue wondered what Kathleen would say. She hadn’t freaked entirely during the phone call, but she was damned if she wasn’t coming in to see him. How could he fight that off without hurting her.
“I’m going to do a bit of reading and a bit of thinking,” he said. “Maybe a bit of talking. I don’t care where I do it. But, I’m not sitting and waiting.”
Malone looked around the yard.
“Plans, have you?”
Minogue nodded.
“Was that an order from Tynan or a suggestion?”
“An order, Tommy. He has to answer to people to, as well as we do.”
“There’s no way this was the Smiths’ caper then. Is that what you’re telling me?”
Minogue nodded. Kathleen appeared in the doorway. Minogue went for her. She dug her fingers into his shoulders, hugged him tighter. She was fierce annoyed. She let him go and held him at arm’s length. Her eyes were red but the anger made them bright and steady.
“They were after the other man,” he tried.
“How do you know?”
He shrugged.
“And does that matter anyway?” she insisted. “Does it?”
He gave her another tight squeeze when he felt the tremor in her chest. She sniffed and detached herself. She turned to Malone, his hand on the door.
“You look after this iijit, Tommy Malone,” she said. “You hear me?”
“Yeah, Kathleen. Sure all the culchies need hand-holding up here.”
They followed Malone in. Farrell and Éilis met them in the hall. The squad room was quiet. Kilmartin’s door was shut. Minogue wondered but didn’t care where Purcell was. Éilis drew on her cigarette and studied the boards.
“It has to stop,” Kathleen declared to no one in particular. “The place is being run by gangs and mur— ”
Her voice broke. Minogue smelled shampoo from her hair, felt the folds where her strap had dug in a little tighter over the years. She had asked him out of the blue if she looked fat the other day. He hugged her tighter and listened without much interest to a two-way about a man who had collapsed in a pub. In his twenties, he thought vaguely. Overdose, he wondered.
Minogue felt her relax. It was Kathleen who pulled away this time. Éilis slid a box of paper hankies across the table. Farrell looked up from his study of the floor.
“Cup of tea,” said Éilis at last. “Or a smathán from the cupboard?”
“Tea’s grand, thanks,” said Kathleen a little too quickly. “You’re a star, Éilis.”
Éilis stubbed at her cigarette and looked up warily at Kathleen.
“Tell us about Iseult, will you?” said Éilis. “I’m dying to know how she’s going on.”
Kathleen sat back in the chair and closed her eyes.
“Sacred Heart of Jesus, Éilis. Between Iseult and your man here . . .”
“I’m going to make coffee then,” Minogue said. He waited in the kitchen for Malone.
“Worse, are you?” he said.
“It’s got to hit me sometime. But I’m still so bloody wired.”
Minogue took down the kettle and began filling it. Malone was fidgeting with a fork.
“Boss? If we’d stayed we’d a been in Hayes’ pocket, or King’s. Wouldn’t we?”
“Probably. Hard to say. I don’t know, Tommy.”
“Well, that’s what I need to think right now. You know what I’m saying?”
Minogue glanced over. The tremor in Malone’s voice was quickly disguised. He plugged the kettle in and leaned back against the counter. Malone breathed out between pursed lips several times.
Was that a laugh he heard from the squad room, Kathleen? He toyed with the filter as he drew it out. Malone was staring at Minogue’s coffee jar.
“Well?”
The kettle ticked. It was Kathleen’s shriek of laughter he’d heard. What was Éilis talking about? A man’s voice, could only be Farrell, derision; more hoots of laughter. He opened the lid and shook the jar of beans.
“Well, what?”
“What’s the story now?” Malone asked. “We sit around this kip chewing our nails, is it?”
Minogue was not really surprised to realize that he had made up his mind a lot earlier. Maybe it was even when Tynan had led the way leaving the pub.
“The story is this, Tommy.”
Malone stopped hopping the fork off the countertop.
“Sooner or later I’m going to try my hand at a bit of, what would you call it, treasure hunting. Looking through haystacks, you might call it.”
Malone’s eyes narrowed.
“Still the job, like? This case . . .?”
“That’d be it, Tommy. Yes.”
“You’re not too pushed that he’ll be dug out of you, Tynan?”
“Well, no. In a word.”
He eyed Malone.
“I have three murders to solve,” he said. “We can’t stop the clock on them.”
&n
bsp; He poured the beans into the grinder. One by one he picked up the half-dozen that spilled onto the counter. The laughter was louder. He cocked an ear. Éilis, that gift for making people laugh.
“Would you be considering going a bit of the road with me, Tommy?”
“Am I going to get a sudden attack of lead poisoning if I say yeah?”
“Doubtful.”
“Who minds the shop here?”
“John Murtagh. Farrell, too. We’ll pull Plateglass Sheehy in here to do his interviews.”
“Will I be on the dole if I survive the lead poisoning?”
“There’s always room in the dole-queue, I suppose.”
“You’re not much on the hard sell here, boss . . .”
“Do I need to be? Give me a couple of hours to get started.”
“Started on what, though?”
He closed the lid and looked up at Malone.
“It’s out there somewhere, Tommy. It exists. Whatever it is.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He had it in the boot. It’s heavy. It broke the panel over the spare wheel, it was so heavy.”
“What is? The thing you were telling me about on the way back from Mayo?”
“He had it. He told his da he had it.”
“This stone?”
“He wanted his da to tell him how to get it out to the States.”
Malone took a step back. He spread his hands on the counter.
“Leyne had it done before, you’re saying. The robbing. Right?”
Minogue nodded.
“Or he knew someone who could do it.”
“Lookit,” said Malone. “What if this goes all the way to gang stuff, paramilitaries? They’re crossed over anyway, half the time. Hey, I’m not stupid. Tynan could be kicking us off the field for a good reason. Jases, you can see that, can’t you?”
“See what, now?”
“If they’re all tied in, boss. Scratch one and it all goes back. To the IRA, their outfits — we’d be in the ha’penny place if we found ourselves, just the two of us, up against them.”
Minogue pushed down the lid. He held the grinder, shook it. Malone stared at it while it spun. Minogue lifted the lid and sniffed the ground coffee.
“I’m in then,” Malone said. “But just so’s you know: I’m not going up against the IRA or their fucking partners.”