by John Brady
“Might come to nothing of course,” Fanning said. “But that’s the way.”
Cully looked sideways at him.
“You put a proposal, don’t you? A pitch?”
It was a Dublin accent all right, Fanning was sure.
“Or you get someone to do it for you. A connection in the business helps.”
“And then they…?”
“Well they see if it could have legs. They could shop it around for me.”
Cully nodded slowly. He looked down onto the counter where the barman was now placing Fanning’s glass. Fanning took a long swallow.
“That business earlier on today,” Fanning said afterwards.
“Yes. Something else. What do you think?”
Wotcha, Fanning heard. He shrugged, and exchanged a look with Cully. There was an indifference in his expression, almost a blurriness, that seemed to echo the monotone in his way of speaking. It didn’t come across as sarcasm, or even irony.
Impressions collided in Fanning’s mind: well dressed, maybe even fastidious, and yet there was something careless and unfinished about the guy too. There was an air about him that suggested to Fanning that he didn’t much enjoy, or even want, to be here.
“That was part of the research,” he said to Cully. “The visit to that place.”
“Right. Murph brought you.”
“He did. He’s my ‘guide.’”
“He says you pay him. Like you employ him.”
Fanning bit back his irritation again.
“That’s research for you,” he said. “I’d probably never get near the likes of that unless I know someone. And I don’t.”
“First time? The dogs, I mean.”
“First, and last. Never again.”
“Bit rough, isn’t it.”
Innit: Estuary English popping up clearly now. Fanning couldn’t decide if Cully’s tone carried some derision too.
“Left in a bit of a hurry, didn’t you.”
“And you stayed for more?”
Cully didn’t seem to take the remark as cheeky.
“Maybe I’m more used to it.”
“How does a person get used to it, to something like that?”
Fanning took a quick mouthful of beer. Cully had no answer to that one, apparently. He took his first sip of brandy.
“Now, I had a suggestion for Murph. What did you call him again, your…”
“Guide,” said Fanning. “I don’t really mean that. I don’t know what else to call it. Working for you isn’t Murph’s only line of work, you know. Obviously.”
Fanning nodded. It occurred to him then that Cully might well be high. He’d find a way to get a look at Cully’s pupils.
“A good idea,” Cully said, pausing to take a sip. “To get someone proper?”
“Well I don’t know about that,” Fanning said. “I’ll think about it.”
“He’s nothing but trouble,” Cully said. “Really.”
“But you don’t mean that in a bad way, I suppose.”
The sarcasm went by him, it seemed.
“Why do you hire people like Murph? Can’t you just make up a story?”
“That’s not what I do.”
“Everyone else does.”
“That’s why they’re crap then.”
“Ah.”
“I would think you’d agree with me.”
Cully shrugged. “Tell me, what do you care about this stuff. This crime stuff.”
“It’s not crime for its own sake. It’s like a window on life, generally.”
“I think I get that. Society, like? That kind of thing?”
“Yes. But I’m not out to give a message. No moralizing. I just want to show what goes on. Be objective.”
“Very interesting. Yes, very interesting.”
“You think so?”
“I do. But tell me something to think about. This the kind of research you do? You know, whatever you pick up could be very valuable to some people.”
“You mean the Guards.”
Cully didn’t react to the bluntness.
“They’d be the ones I was thinking of,” he said. “Yes.”
“I’m not telling the Guards anything. Why would I?”
Cully stretched his neck a little, and began to rub at it.
“That’s what Murph says. ‘Why would he do that?’”
“Well, what can I tell you.”
Cully stopped massaging his neck.
“You could tell me a lot, I think.”
“For instance?”
“Well, for instance this. Is there going to be a film here?”
Fanning let his gaze roam the pub with a calculated vagueness.
“If you’re actually paying to do this research,” he heard Cully continue. “And this film thing you want done so badly, this film goes belly-up…?”
Fanning had decided. He’d finish his pint, no hurry, tuck the stool under the counter and leave. No retorts, no arguments.
“I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.”
“I don’t get that. That bridge thing.”
“I’ll deal with it,” said Fanning.
“Murph’s a floater,” said Cully then. “You know what a floater is? A shaper. A dickhead. Hasn’t a clue. So you’re wasting your money on him.”
“So what I need,” Fanning said, “is real expertise, I suppose you’re going to tell me. The opposite of a dickhead. That should be easy enough.”
Cully seemed to savour this particular sip of brandy.
“But by definition,” he said, “that person won’t go near you.”
“Well I won’t take that personally.”
Cully was still immune to the sarcasm.
“The thing is, this crime business, as they say in the news, this crime business is like an iceberg. Not a good comparison, but you get the idea.”
“An iceberg.”
“Such a person,” Cully went on, “they could tell you, for example, that the cops are way behind, the Guards. That they only get lucky now and then.”
“You can back that statement up of course.”
For the first time Cully seemed to focus his attention on Fanning.
“Such a person,” Cully said, slowly, “would have no reason to talk to you, no need to. You see? I mean if your work is to fade into the background, the fly on the wall routine, you don’t go having a fit like we saw back at the, the event.”
“I couldn’t take it. It was too much.”
“Ah.”
“Is that a character defect or something, in your opinion?”
“I’m only making observations,” said Cully. “Offering a bit of advice.”
“It’s only losers need lots of advice I suppose.”
“Now there’s another thing with you.”
“What is?”
“Sarcasm. I didn’t come here to call you a loser, or run you down.”
“Fooled me.”
“Back to the point here. Giving Murph the heave-ho is proper order.”
“I haven’t given him any heave-ho.”
“Well do you see him here?”
“What does that mean?”
“He doesn’t do it anymore. He got out of the research business.”
“Says…?”
“He’d wreck your project. He talks, and he talks. It’s all he does.”
“I’m okay with that. The talking.”
“Except when he’s smoking crack.”
“Who told you that?”
“Come on now. How much of what he told you is bullshit, would you say?”
“Some days ninety percent,” said Fanning. “Other days, maybe ten.”
“You’ll never know, will you.”
“Well it’s like you said, I can make it up then, can’t I?”
Cully pushed away slowly from the bar. He shoved his hands into his trouser pockets, and looked down at his shoes for several moments.
“There’s a man over there,” Fanning said. “A man who was
at the, the event, earlier. Friend of yours.”
Cully raised his eyebrows.
“Is that a coincidence he’s here?” Fanning asked.
Cully turned, picked up his glass.
“A mate of yours. Right?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Cully.
Fanning waited until Cully had finished his brandy.
“Likes a certain football club. Reputation for crazy fans?”
“Pretty observant bloke,” said Cully.
“Well thank you. Just so’s I’m clear on this before I go.”
Cully nodded.
“You wanted to meet me to…?”
“Advice. Like I said.”
“And to tell me Murph is a useless iijit. To give him the sack.”
“Right. Better off without him.”
“And that this project will go nowhere.”
“Did I say that?”
Cully reached into his jacket pocket, and flipped open his mobile.
“Remember what I said about people who know,” he said
“Sort of. I suppose. What did you say?”
“They’re the ones who wouldn’t want anything to do with your research.”
“Very encouraging.”
“Unless,” said Cully, eyeing the display. “Unless it’s something they want.”
“I don’t get this. What am I missing, again?”
“Say you had this,” said Cully. He held the mobile toward Fanning.
The sound on the video was little better than static. The camera had moved unsteadily when it panned. But there was Murph on his tiptoes, staring at the fight, and Dermot Fanning. He heard the yelping of the dog in the static.
“People notice things,” Cully said. “I mean I did, didn’t I?”
“Do they know you did that?”
Cully shrugged.
“They had no problem with you doing this.”
“Here look, wait: that’s you again. Can you see it? Crap screen, I know.”
“Nobody tried to stop you. I find that interesting.”
“…that’s when he had him, he got under his jaw but he kept him rock steady. And over he goes…”
Fanning wasn’t watching. Instead he took in details. Cully’s hairline, a small scar by his ear.
Cully held the phone up closer to Fanning’s face.
“And now look.”
It was a still image when Fanning first looked. Then Cully pushed with his thumb and the clip began. Fanning saw Delaney, the bearded man, close his eyes and then flinch. In the blocky, shadowed movements behind, a man’s figure shook when the gun went off.
“I missed it,” said Cully. “But you know the rest.”
He folded the phone and let it drop into his jacket pocket.
“Came with its own script,” he said. “You just had to press Record.”
Fanning picked up his glass. His back was tightening up, and he was suddenly aching. The noises in the pub around him seemed different now, sharper, somehow personal.
Chapter 18
Minogue spotted Eilis in the car park, standing by her new Mini. The cold breeze had reddened her eyes. She was smoking. He was disappointed for her, but relieved too. He parked and, skirting the grey, mossy wall that separated the Liaison office from the hulking headquarters and its sprawl of offices built in the 1970s, he made his way toward her.
She was indeed humming. It could be a Buddhist prayer for all Minogue knew. Sparing with words, this widely read and travelled Irish-speaker loner might well be proof positive of reincarnation. She was taking night courses, she told him last month. Spanish, for Peru. Eilis seems to have been serially “disappointed in love” for all the years he had known her.
“Dia dhuit, a stor.”
“God be with you, too, Your Honour,” she replied in Irish. “All well with you and yours.”
“Not bad at all. Considering the times we’re living in.”
There were piled-up grey-brown clouds looming over the trees. He spotted the trailing wires from an iPod hanging from her bag.
“April will be doing us no favours, Eilis, I’m thinking.”
She flicked her head for an answer and she drew on her cigarette. Kilmartin had first hired Eilis for the Murder Squad nigh on twenty years ago. She had applied for an opening in Liaison, telling Minogue later that it had sounded glamorous. Kilmartin had recently admitted to Minogue that he was half-afraid of her yet. He had also asked him if he, Minogue, had ever wondered if Eilis was one of them. Minogue baited him with it, goading Kilmartin to say “lesbian.”
She held out her pack of Gitanes.
“No thank you. Later, when there’s no one looking, maybe.”
“No later for you today, Your Honour. You got marching orders I hear. Someone hors de combat on a case. The Polish matter.”
“Just as you say.”
Eilis’ Munster Irish had revealed to Minogue exquisite nuances of sarcasm and irony that had escaped him before. Kilmartin had always been suspicious of her use of the state’s other official language. He had made irresolute efforts to match her using his own lumpen schoolboy Irish. It had never once been anything but a massacre, of course, and Kilmartin had learned to desist.
“As we go forward, it becomes necessary to go backward also.”
He turned his back to the breeze. Mischief rising in him suddenly
“God almighty, Eilis. That’s a bit dark. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
She drew on her cigarette, ground it underfoot, and then fell into step beside him. She always had an athlete’s easy, ranging walk, Minogue remembered. That observation alone had been enough for him to like her, from the moment they had begun working together so long ago. It, and her unceasing restlessness, signalled to him a kinship, another who might also wonder how and why one was so often an apparent stranger to so much about them.
“Taking a turn at the old job should brighten things up,” she said to him.
Peter Igoe spotted him on the way in.
“So you’re off, Matt,” Igoe said. “‘At the pleasure of the Commissioner.’”
“God help me so.”
Igoe raised an eyebrow. Minogue had heard that Igoe’s success in golf was attributed to his ability to provoke and to distract.
“You’re right, of course. It’s Tuohy you answer to. Technically.”
Assistant Commissioner Tuohy had come on strong the past few years as Commissioner Tynan’s chosen one.
“‘No big to-do,’ says Tuohy,” Igoe said. “‘Matt’ll hit the ground running.’”
Minogue let his gaze drift across the notice board. Dance and Social for the AGSI; training courses in Britain, deadlines highlighted in yellow. The newish daily circulars reminder, the “Have You Seen?” that every Guard in every corner of Ireland was to eyeball daily now.
“All the joys of Fitzgibbon Street,” said Igoe. “El Paso. But it’s different than when I knew it. I shouldn’t be talking.”
For several moments, Minogue’s mind roved the night streets around the quays, that lone figure walking from light to light.
“And wrap it up quick” Igoe called out.
“As if,” he said.
He took his time getting to Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station. He crossed over the River Liffey by the Custom House, ignoring the honks when he slowed to peer down the quays where Tadeusz Klos had passed. Soon enough, he was turning around Mountjoy Square.
It was part of the city he had never liked. He could not get by what he had known of the area when he had first come up to Dublin, with its scarred blocks of flats and its hard-faced inhabitants. Several flowing robes and more brown faces at the corner of North Earl Street drew Minogue’s eye. He was careful not to stare, or, more precisely, not to be seen to be staring. Gardiner Street began its slow ascent and Minogue turned his attention to the budding trees that crowned the summit of the street, behind the railings of the Square.
He steered into one of
the spaces reserved for Garda cars almost directly in front of the station. He checked twice that he had left nothing valuable on show, and then locked the face-plate for the stereo in the boot. Casting a last gaze at the reflections of the clouds running across the gleaming panels, he pressed the remote. He wasn’t much reassured by the wirps from it, and so did it twice again. His new car still looked very vulnerable.
A poorly cleaned Garda squad car slid in quickly beside him.
“Shift it, boss,” said a Guard from the passenger seat. “Garda cars only.”
A lifer, Minogue could see, with sunken cheeks and wavy grey hair. The driver leaned down to see Minogue under the edge of the roof.
“Wait a minute, you’re what’s his name.”
“That’s me, all right,” said Minogue.
The driver eased himself out from behind the wheel. He winked at Minogue.
“Long as you’re not a social worker-type or something,” he said.
A shot across the bows from two hard chaws like this wasn’t so much cheek, Minogue knew, or even challenge. It was merely the talk that got Guards through their shifts here in the inner city.
The driver was still waiting for a reaction. There was something about him that put Minogue in mind of the white pudding that the Minogues had taken off the breakfast menu a decade and more past. Tightly held together, fleshy.
“Jehovah’s Witness,” Minogue said finally. “How’d you make me so quick?”
“Nice wheels. New?”
“It is. And thanks.”
“You’re Kilmartin, aren’t you? Or wait — you’re the other one?”
“I’m the other one.”
The driver was out on the street now. He hitched up his belt.
“It’s the Polish man, am I right?”
“You’re in the right job,” said Minogue.
“Nothing to it. I heard Hughsie got himself taken to the hospital all of a sudden. Appendicitis or something?”
“Could be,” said Minogue.
“We did some of the door-to-doors on it. Round one of them, anyway.”
The driver introduced himself as Dan Ward. There was a cantankerous edge to him, Minogue decided, another copper poisoned by his work, maybe.
“Enda Callinan,” said the other, shaking Minogue’s hand.
“‘Enda the world,’” said Ward.
“Long here at the station, are ye?”