by John Brady
“Yep. Twittering, or MSNing or something. Her young one was over and back to someone, a pal. The mother got a bit suspicious. She doesn’t like the other young one. ‘Bad influence.’”
“Always the other one,” said Minogue.
“Well. The daughter was in this to-and-fro. Very secretive. Got into a set-to with the mother. A row ensued, and the mother got her dander up. The last straw, etc. Daughter ends up in tears. The mother says the girls were talking about doing an anonymous call or something.”
“Anonymous, like to the tip line?”
“Didn’t say. ‘Whatever else you can say about that daughter of mine,’ says the mother, ‘at least she has a conscience.’”
Wall examined his tie then, as though consulting notes.
“Yep,” he said and he looked up. “There was talk of some prank that she pulled on someone. ‘Some foreigner,’ says the mother. Gave him wrong directions.”
“How old are the girls?”
“Fourteen. The friend is thirteen.”
Minogue knew that Wall was waiting for a reaction. He turned a page that had a thick bookmark.
“Where’s it at now?”
“Mossie went out about half an hour ago. The mother is picking up the kid from school, taking her back home to talk to Mossie. He’ll be phoning me — us — here.”
Minogue looked down the page at a mobile phone number.
“The mother found it in the girl’s room.”
“Recent calls?”
“They’re working on it,” said Wall. “There were no calls to Ireland anyhow.”
Minogue looked at the email addresses.
“Phone shops, Kevin, what’s the story on them?”
Wall used his ring finger to scratch his crown.
“City Centre has been done, and they have his photo. Nothing yet. Some staff they haven’t reached, and that’s going to stay leaking until we find them. Holidays, two — wait — three of them. One quit, hasn’t been back. Dublin fella. Likely nothing to it.”
Minogue sank back slowly in his chair, and resumed scanning the pages. Soon enough, his eyes slipped out of focus and they came to rest somewhere near the broad margins of the page, or the desktop beneath. He heard Wall at the keyboard, and looked over. Wall had put on glasses.
Something stirred in Minogue again. Several moments passed before he realized that he had been remembering how she too had looked over her glasses every now and then yesterday. Maybe Danute Juraksaitis’ glasses stood out in his mind because of the absence of things he had expected — earrings, makeup, necklace. She had worn a white blouse, that could equally have been a man’s shirt.
Wall was going through the file log on the screen.
“Someone must have suggested Ireland to him,” Minogue said to him. “As a destination.”
Wall craned his neck.
“If he did, we haven’t a sign of him yet — or her.”
“And the police over there?”
“Four years ago, he showed up, but nothing since. He was a passenger in a stolen car. There was public drunkenness, name taken and cautioned.”
“He’d fit right in here, you might think. But did he have any reason to leave there in a hurry?”
“Not according to the coppers there anyway.”
Minogue narrowed his eyes. “Payback, Kevin? Someone collecting, revenge?”
Wall folded his arms, and seemed to consider it. Minogue saw how the folds from the ironing remained sharp.
“If he did put something over on one of his cronies beyond in Poland, and then he flew the coop, there’s no sign yet. Might be worth asking them again, of course.”
Wall might have been going to say something, but the phone went. Minogue returned to Mrs. Klos’ statement, but kept an ear open to eavesdrop on Wall’s conversation. The statement been sent over today — this morning — translated. The footer gave the email address of Danute Juraksaitis.
The phrases were empty, but hard to read now. “A fresh beginning.” “Maybe to study there.” “To improve his English and also try for the U.S.” “To get out into fresh country side.” “He always liked the sea on our family holidays.” Later: “to make new friends.” “To get away from other people who were not helping his life.”
“Helping his life?”
There was no mention of his past, or his troubles, in her statement. It was a list of her ruined hopes she had had for her son, and reciting them had been like her prayer, her eulogy.
He heard Wall say his name into the phone, repeat it, and then hang up.
“Mossie’s coming up,” Wall said. “It’s a go.”
“Grand. Is it something we can move on right away?”
“It looks like it. The girl has admitted she met him, Klos. She was with her pals.”
Wall was waiting for a reaction, Minogue realized. He nodded approvingly.
“She’s no daw, this kid, says Mossie. A bit of an operator. Wised-up, like.”
“Covering for her pals no doubt,” said Minogue. “The usual.”
“Well yes and no. Gangs are big here, I suppose you know?”
Minogue hoped his surprise didn’t show. How could he not have thought about that?
“First mention of gangs in this case anyway,” he said. “I have to say.”
“We sort of take it as a given up here.”
Minogue detected no one-upmanship in Wall’s voice. He remembered the Apache Country routine from Ward and Callinan.
“She told Mossie he gave them a bit of a fright. Asking about ‘the river.’ The Liffey like, down by the quays. We’ll see what her pal says, the other one who-”
As though on cue, the door opened, and led by a long beak of a nose that preceded a tightly cut frizz of wiry, rust-coloured hair over a pale face, Detective Garda Mossie Duggan arrived. Minogue rose and shook hands with this too-tall, bony-shouldered man with an Adam’s apple half hanging over his collar.
“Kev brought you up to speed here?”
“So far, so good,” said Minogue. “I think.”
“Well your timing is good,” said Duggan. “This young one I talked to, she was with her friend — and their boyfriends. Four of them.”
“Now there’s a picture,” said Wall. “Give me names, will you.”
Duggan flipped open his incident book. Minogue began to copy the names that Wall transcribed on the board. Tara Lynch (14); Alison (“Ali”) Rogers (13); Aidan Matthews (?); Justin Twomey (?).
“Thirteen-year-old girl,” Wall said. “What does that say. Skangers, is what.”
“Have you run the boys’ names yet?” Minogue asked.
“Not yet,” said Duggan. “But I could take bets before I do.”
He walked to the end of the boards, and tapped at the timeline with his knuckles.
“This Tara Lynch puts Klos there at about half-eleven,” he said. “‘We just happened to be going that way, it was a shortcut to catch the last bus.’ My nose isn’t the only one twitching, is it?”
“Did she say how he looked?” Minogue asked.
“‘Scary.’”
“Drink? Soliciting? Lost?”
“She thinks he might have had a few, but not falling-down drunk or anything. Said she couldn’t understand him. ‘The river I go, the side,’ she thinks he said.”
“The hostel,” said Wall. “He was trying to get back to base.”
“So they sent him up toward East Wall,” said Duggan. “And off he went.”
“She saw him walk off, she says?” Wall asked.
“Didn’t get to that,” said Duggan. “That’s when the father walks in. The mother was grand with me asking a few questions, but then in comes your man. Very het-up, very belligerent. Starts telling me the law.”
Duggan paused to set up his mimic.
“‘That child of mine is an effin minor, I’ll have you know!’”
“‘I know my rights!’” said Wall. “The usual rigamarole?”
“‘No effing way is she going to be drag
ged down to any effing Garda station!’” said Duggan. He dispensed with the fake Dublin accent then.
“And all the rest of it,” Duggan resumed. “Big row with the wife, right in front of me. Not the first time, I imagine. She was grand with the chat we were having, but in he barges, minor this and minor that.”
“Was she still minor,” Wall asked, with neither amusement nor rancour that Minogue could spot, “when she was traipsing around at that hour of the night?”
“Well don’t get started on that one, Kev,” said Duggan. “But it got better than I thought it would. I wished I’d taped it, in actual fact.”
“The parents having a row?”
“What she said to him, the wife,” said Duggan. “Remember, she’s the one who made that phone call. ‘My child knows right from wrong,’ et cetera. So she laid into him after he gave me the heave-ho. It was funny: there I was in the hall, him yelling at me. I’m ready to walk out the door, go back to the station here, start me paper work to get an interview with this kid, the whole letter-of-the-law routine. But out she comes, tells me not to budge. Stay right here, says she to me. ‘I’m the child’s mother! I come first, so I do!’”
“Standing up for her kid,” Wall said. “Maybe a history of abuse there.”
“Maybe,” said Duggan. “I don’t think she was scared of him. She was just fed up. Flaming row, but then… He backs down. Strangest thing. I thought I’d have to call in some lads, get the thing under control. Oh but if you could have heard it: ‘I’m not having her grow up like I done! She’s not going to end up like me!’ Hell of a thing to say in front of him. But it worked. Bottom line: parents consent to us interviewing her at the family home, a proper interview. Parents attending, of course.”
Duggan looked from Wall to Minogue and back.
“It gets even better,” he said. “They were with two fellas that night. Boyfriends, surprise, surprise. You ask me, I think the mother knows what happened, had a heart-to-heart with the daughter.”
“And wants to be first in the door,” said Wall, nodding, “before the others.”
“Hard not to think that, isn’t it,” said Duggan, and looked down at his nails.
Minogue realized that this was Duggan’s way of showing he was excited — calmly excited. He glanced at Wall, and received a slow nod in return. The momentum would only pick up from here.
“Go ahead, Kevin,” he said to him. “It’s your call. I’m only window-dressing here, to be honest.”
Wall made a brief smile, and lapsed back into thought.
“Could always start with the tough route,” said Duggan. “Set them up here in the station, the four of them, and play the game. You know: he says, she says — and then wait. Throw a few shapes if things bog down: accessory, withholding, obstruction?”
Wall tugged gently at his tie again.
“Ah what would Hughsie do?” Duggen asked with a pained expression after a few moments.
“All right, all right,” said Wall, his slight smile soon pulled back. “We’d better get started. Bring in the others — and uniforms and squad cars to do it. But fair’s fair. We’ll interview this girl at her house. But the minute it turns scrappy…?”
Chapter 21
Murphy answered his mobile on the second ring: but it wasn’t Murphy. “He’s busy,” said the man who answered. Fanning recognized the accent right away.
“I’ll phone him later on then.”
“No need. Where are you?”
“It’s Murph I need to talk to.”
“You said that already.”
“So tell him I’ll give him a ring later on.”
“He told me you’d ring. He said for me to meet you. Help things along.”
Fanning listened for any sounds in the background. That nowhere accent still confused him, often starting as a Dublin accent but getting lost quickly, only to roll back into it for certain words.
“Are you there? Did you hear me?”
A dropped h: East Enders. Fanning held his thumb over the button.
“Murph doesn’t want to work on the project anymore.”
“He didn’t say a word to me about that.”
“I know. That’s how he is but, isn’t he.”
“He gave you his phone?”
“He loaned it to me. Mine fell and broke.”
“Look, he and I have an arrangement.”
“Right. That’s why I’m here. Now I don’t want to spread rumours now, do I. But you must know by now. Like I was saying to you back in that pub. I mean you can figure things out.”
“What things?”
“Come on. You’ve got to admit, he’s not the most reliable bloke.”
“Well I wouldn’t be discussing that here-”
“You know he’s got a habit. I told you that, right?”
“I doubt Murph is too busy, especially for me.”
“You mean his business. He was getting burned out, did he tell you?”
“No, he didn’t tell me he was getting burned out.”
“Sad to say, but there’s problems in his family, mental things. He didn’t tell you? It’s a manic thing. He goes off the deep end every once in a while. Very rough I hear.”
Fanning’s thumb was getting a cramp.
“I’ll meet you, and explain it all. Then you’ll see.”
“No, that’s not going to work.”
Fanning heard a “when” just as he hung up.
He placed the mobile on the table next to his saucer. His coffee was finished. It had found its way to someplace in his stomach where it now ate away, acidly. The two men at the next table were speaking Spanish. Georges Street looked grey, and traffic had come to a standstill. He looked down at the yellow stickies and the notes he had started. There’d be no way any director would put in a real dog fight.
He started when the phone vibrated. It was Murph’s number. A hollow, airy feeling returned to his chest. He pushed the Power Off button, and held it. He thought about more coffee, and then the guilt of spending three Euro that were really Brid’s earnings wrung out of the brats that she taught.
He turned to the notes he had written about the sound of gunshot that had killed the dog:
— took/punched the air out of the room
— screaming silence in its wake
— shockwaves hammering the air
Not bad. He switched the phone on again, and watched it search for a signal. The tink of a notification came within seconds. There had been a mistake, according to Murph, but it had all been settled now. Phone him back.
Fanning picked up his pencil and drew an exclamation mark on the paper. Murph, scammer and schemer extraordinaire. So he had a habit, so he was a liar. Big surprise there. This carry-on was part of the package.
He didn’t much care if Murph took him for a gobshite. After all, he had gone into this with his eyes open, and he had paid four hundred something Euro to Murph so far — then a hundred fifty for yesterday. That was what he had to do. Price comparisons hardly applied in this business. Whatever Murph charged was the going rate.
He made a quick inventory of what he could recall that Murph’s “tours” had brought him so far. Characters he had met, sure — that family in Walkinstown who fenced anything, with the sister in on it too, as tough or tougher than the three brothers who made the deals. Less colourful, and much more malevolent was One-or-Two Tony, also Tony Bony, a slight and unassuming man whom Murph had pointed out in a pub. Tony was an enforcer who kept a selection of pieces of old plumbing pipe for breaking arms and legs. According to Murph, he gave some victims a cruel choice, usually their pick of which two limbs he’d break.
Yes, he now knew, and had documented expressions these lowlifes used. Their taste in clothes, and what their choices meant. Cars they had, or liked to rob, or aspired to. Sexual tastes, if that’s what you could call them: more like a mixture of porn and animal husbandry. Murph had even given him a description of how you should walk, if you wanted to signal you were serious.
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br /> He now knew where some criminals Murph said he knew liked to go on holidays, and how they made their connections there. He had notes on Murph’s stories and gossip about their petty fights and their drinking. Their troubles with wives and girlfriends, and kids. Epic family fights, at least two he remembered involved brawls, knives, hospital and prison time.
Murph had relished relating incidents of biblical cruelty by criminals who wanted revenge for stupid, childish things. Embellished or not, Murph’s stories of cordless Black and Deckers into kneecaps, floor crucifixions, and rape of a rival’s kid were now lodged in Fanning’s mind, probably forever. His script would make damned good use of the shrewdness and native intelligence that some of them had, faculties so often sabotaged by their greed or their addictions, by bad genes, by mental illness.
But in the final analysis, Fanning had to admit that what he had learned on their excursions was often not because of Murph, but in spite of him. Like Cully had said — he talks, and he talks. His chatter ruined Fanning’s observations, drawing people’s attention, when all Fanning wanted to do was blend in. And the crowning irony: Murph continually telling him to say nothing, and to follow his lead always, while he, Murph, revved up the bluster and the bullshit himself.
That was not to say their time together had been wasted. Not at all. Parsing Murph’s ramblings and boasts, and his self-staged dramatics had given Fanning a clear character for the script. Would Murph recognize himself in the film as that blundering, not-so-bright, petty criminal, with a grandiosity and a stupidity that would be his — and others’ — undoing?
Fanning let his pencil run along the page and he watched the circles and the lines that his hand was drawing intersect, and then continue. His own private Ouija Board he called it, when people asked him what he was doing. It was to help him think, or rather to still whatever part of him was stopping him thinking clearly.
Soon he put down the pencil, and he examined the lines and shapes he had made. There were no shapes or patterns he could discern. His thoughts went back to the phone call, to Murph. Loyalty…? Hardly: Murph would screw him as quick as he’d screw anyone.
But to be fair, Murph had peeled the lid back enough to give Dermot Fanning some inkling of what it meant to be born into crime, to live it. Never to have had a job — to scorn any job, actually — to go from day to day, taking what you could, or what you liked, what you could get away with. No waiting, and all guilt-free. No lost sleep over global warming, or the direction of the Euro or house prices, or the meaning of life. To see the world as something to prey on, to resent not having what others seemed to have and to feel entitled to grab it, to steal it just to show you could, to use it and to break it if it disappointed you, to discard it. Murph and the rest of them would never need the services of a shrink to help them unravel their neuroses, would they.