by John Brady
“She was an adult, wasn’t she? I mean, she’d been around, right?”
Minogue thought of the slime on the canal water. Mary Mullen shouldn’t have been there: why did he keep thinking that? His eyes came back into focus on Patricia’s cigarette. Her head was aslant, eyes steady on his now.
“She was doing,” she was saying. “Except for the once, I suppose.”
She let go of a strand of hair over her forehead.
“Why did you move in with Mary, then?”
“It was more she moved in with me.”
“Why did she move in with you, then?”
“I don’t know. What was I going to say to her: ‘Why’d you move in with me?’”
“Why do you think, then.”
“She-what difference does it make?”
“Any detail helps, Patricia. You say Mary kept things to herself, things beyond the usual day-to-day chat. We have to dig around for something.”
She examined a picture of Torremolinos, flicking her cigarette several times.
“She wanted a place, I suppose, didn’t she? Maybe somewhere ordinary, away from her other life. The high life, whatever she had going.”
“Tell me again about who called for her.”
She closed her eyes and let her head roll back.
“Phone calls, Patricia. Try and remember.”
“Fellas. Always the same.”
“Who were they?”
“Nobody. ‘Leave a message for Mary. Bobby’ll send a taxi around.’ Or, ‘Tell Mary to phone Bobby.’ That was it. I already told you that before.”
“Before? How do I know you’re still not holding back here?”
For a moment he thought she would hit him. After several moments, she shrank back in her chair. Her hands still gripped the table-top. He saw her Adam’s apple go first. Her arms went slack and her hands dropped away from the edge of the table. She elbowed the ashtray away and laid her head down on her arms.
“Bastards,” she wailed. “Yous’ll never give up, will you?”
Her father yanked open the door.
“That’s enough,” he growled. Minogue turned and stood.
“Enough of you listening in at the door, you mean.”
“Get out of my house this minute!”
“I’ll have a squad car around within ten minutes to pick Patricia up.”
“Like hell you will!”
“Obstructing police is a lot more serious of an offence than you seem to believe there, Mister. Turn down the volume and wait outside.”
“My daughter’s not going anywhere!”
“That’s what I was hoping to hear. We’ll conclude our chat shortly- as soon as you get yourself settled down and out of the way.”
“That’s what you think, pal.”
“If you’ve nothing to do for about six months, just stay right there and make a bigger iijit out of yourself. I go, Patricia goes. So do you.”
“Harassment! Look at her, she’s in tears!”
Minogue looked down at his shoes.
“What do you say, Patricia?” he asked. “Can we move on here a bit or…?”
She lifted her head a little and nodded. Her father jabbed at the air.
“If you-” he began. Minogue looked up. Fahy backed out the door, still waving his finger.
“As true as God,” she whispered. “I knew nothing. The nearest I got to knowing anything was them pictures. And they were the biggest mistake of my life, ’cause now you think I’m like her, like the way she was, I mean. And I’m not.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and lit another cigarette.
“Okay, Patricia. Let’s try again. Mary and you were talking one evening.”
“It was before Christmas. I remember, because I was thinking of the presents I was going to buy and all. I sort of wanted to know how I could, well-I’m not saying I wanted to live like Mary did. No way.”
“She told you about it then. The photography.”
She nodded and held in the smoke she had drawn so deeply.
“She brought me along. We’d had a few drinks, you know? I wanted to know and everything, sure, but I didn’t want to be too nosy, did I? And she told me too. ‘Just do what they tell you. Don’t be asking questions. They don’t like that.’ Yeah, right.”
“‘They’?”
“That fella with the pony-tail. She told me he worked for them. The Egans. Anyway. She puts on that face, the face she’d have on when you wouldn’t know if she was thinking you were a gobshite or if she felt sorry for you. She says: ‘I bet you don’t have the nerve.’ Like it was a dare. And I knew, I knew that she thought, well, this’ll teach the kid a lesson. That’s when I knew I’d go through with it. We go into the hotel. There’s more gargle-”
“Just the drink? Were there drugs produced?”
“No, there weren’t! Jases! I wouldn’t even know what they looked like!”
“Go on then.”
“There’s make-up and stuff on a table. It kind of looks like the set of a film. It doesn’t look like what I expect, you know? That blond-haired fella at the camera: he was a prick. And the guy with the pony-tail just standing around. I thought he’d want to try a few moves, you know? So I tell Mary, look, I says, I don’t want anything to do with that creep. No way. She sort of smiles and says something to him.”
“Did she call him by his name?”
“No. She just says, ‘Don’t be getting ideas there. Eddsy wouldn’t appreciate it.’”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know, do I? I make one slip and now I’m supposed to be the expert on this?”
“Go on.”
“Go on with what? That was it! It was more than I expected but it wasn’t as bad as I expected. I’m telling you straight out that I was pissed by the time it was over. Mary had a few drinks too but I don’t think she was drunk. I cried me eyes out all the next day. And it wasn’t just the hangover, let me tell you.”
“Mary took part in the session, you said.”
“Yeah.”
“And you both, as a pair…?”
“That’s right. I didn’t really know what I was doing. It looked like Mary did. I was gargled by then. Not completely locked, now. But, you know…”
“You said that you talked to Mary about Eddsy Egan. Afterwards. About his likes and dislikes in this line.”
“Well, I didn’t talk, talk, did I? I just mentioned to her that, well, I’d heard that fellas got off on that and all… She said it was as good as it got for him or ever would get for him.”
She let the cigarette roll about between her fingers.
“For him, like. He’d been injured or something.” She looked up from her cigarette.
“That was it? Nothing came of this?”
“All I know is that nobody called about them. I was glad too. I felt like a right iijit, didn’t I? I mean, I asked Mary once or twice. Even asked her if I could get the pictures. So’s, well, no one’d get them. Know what I mean?”
Minogue nodded.
“Did you hear me?”
“Pardon?”
“I didn’t want anyone getting them, I said. Those pictures. Mary told me that if Eddsy liked them he’d want more or something. He never got in touch, though. I never got any pictures. After a while, I stopped worrying. A lot of make-up and that, you know?”
“What else did you get involved with as regards Mary?”
“I don’t like the way you’re talking.”
“You’ll like the way one of my colleagues talks even less then. Ready to pack and go?”
Her eyes narrowed. She drew slowly on the cigarette, barely moving it from her lips between drags.
“I’ll say one thing. It was only later on I got the feeling that Mary did it to shut me up. To turn me off any ideas I might have, you know?”
“About getting in on the good life or whatever you call it?”
“The good life. Christ. Look where it got her.”
He watched he
r run her fingertips across her eyebrows and back several times. Her elbow rested on the envelope. She drew herself up in the chair. Her tone had changed.
“I’m off, Patricia. For now. You have my number?”
“Yeah, I think.” There was something in her eyes which irritated him.
“Are these the only copies of, you know…?”
He looked down at the envelope under her elbow.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on! What kind of an answer is that?”
“It’s no answer at all really, I suppose. I want you to phone, Patricia. Any small thing you remember.”
“What does that mean? What am I supposed to remember?”
He raised an eyebrow. Her eyes were bright now. Yes, he noted, definitely there alongside the relief: scorn. She lit another cigarette. Number five, he thought. He turned on his heel and opened the door into the hall.
“Where’s Hard-Chaw today then?” asked Fahy. “Did he jack it in?” Minogue didn’t slow down.
“Blasting away at dummies out on the shooting range, I imagine.”
The door closed quickly behind him. Most of the other doors on the terrace were open in the late afternoon heat. He keyed off the alarm, sat in and took the phone out of the glove compartment. Great. He had forgotten the number for the incident room in Harcourt Street station. He dialled directory and waited. Alan Long-Shot, he’d call him, Alan Long-Shot driving a proverbial Mercedes. An apocryphal Mercedes. An it’s-just-an-expression Mercedes.
SIXTEEN
Yes, well, spare me the rest of it,”said Kathleen. “It sounds like a very difficult case.” Minogue found a piece of garlic stuck to the bowl. He fished it out on the end of his finger and slipped it onto his tongue. Iseult chased crumbs of garlic bread around her plate. The guilt at his truancy from the squadroom was beginning to ebb. It had taken Plate-Glass Fergal Sheehy to put the tin hat on matters: nothing yet. Nothing? That’s right, Matt, came the slow, musical reply. Nothing.
He had felt like apologising just after he had hung up. Fergal Sheehy and his team were not responsible for the fact that there were no useful tips, leads or evidence from their door-to-door work. Minogue resolved to phone him in the morning, have a chat. An interview with a recent parolee was in progress in Crumlin station, Murtagh had told him, and it looked like the fella was spoken for. All the alibis completely sound, had been Minogue’s unbelieving query. Seriously, John? Seriously. What news on Jack Mullen then? Murtagh and two detectives from CDU had found and talked to some of Mullen’s fares. His alibi now covered virtually all the time that evening, with only scattered periods of five and ten minutes when he wasn’t either sitting in a taxi rank or with someone.
“Pardon? I’m sorry.”
“Away with the fairies,” said Iseult. “Again. Maybe it’s petit mal.”
“So you had it with the heat and the run around,” said Kathleen.
“Well,” he sighed. “In the heel of the reel, what we had seems to be slipping away. The suspects, I mean. And then, what we haven’t found… This girl kept things very much to herself.”
“Well, doesn’t that make you suspect she was involved in, you know, something, let’s say, illegal?” asked Kathleen. Minogue eyed Iseult.
“Easy for you to be so smart,” he said to Kathleen. “The word from on high as regards the organized crime stuff, well, that sort of tore the ar-it, er, sort of knocked the stuffing out of it for me. I can start fresh in the morning.”
“Please God,” said Kathleen. Minogue looked out into the garden. Please God? Did God, seeing everything, see what went on at the canal then? At night?
“Cooking for three is as easy as cooking for two,” said Kathleen.
“Not to speak of a fresh face at the table,” added Minogue. “And the chat.”
“I don’t want you to sell the house,” Iseult declared. Minogue kept a garlic belch to a muffled report by letting it linger around his larynx. Kathleen said nothing.
“I think those apartment things are bloody stupid, so I do,” Iseult went on. Minogue’s face twitched but Kathleen had spotted him. Iseult stood up.
“Leave the stuff, Ma. I’ll do it. I’m just going up the garden.”
Minogue watched his daughter’s progress up through the garden. She strolled with her arms crossed, by the shrubs and the trellis, one of his earlier follies now engulfed by creepers years before he had expected it.
“She’s making up for all the times we haven’t seen her since she moved out,” Kathleen said. “The bit of security now, I suppose. I don’t mind telling you, but I feel for Pat. I do. Now that he’s putting his foot down as regards the wedding. I never thought he would go for it myself. But God works in strange and mysterious ways.”
Put his foot down, thought Minogue. On a land-mine, if he only knew.
“What mysterious ways do you mean, exactly?”
“Stop that. You know what I mean. God looks out for people. We don’t always understand His ways. If we did, they wouldn’t be mysteries, would they?”
Minogue rubbed at his eyes. He had flunked Irish Catholic logic a long time ago. Mysteries indeed: what were the ones they had recited again at Lent? The Sorrowful Mysteries, The Joyful Mysteries? Which were which again? The Immaculate Conception, The Passion and Death of Our-
“Do you think she wants us to bring up the subject?” Kathleen repeated. “I have the feeling she wants to tell us something.”
“It’s only company she needs, love,” he said.
“Well, she knows what my opinions are. My beliefs, I should say. Not that I’d force them down her throat, now.”
Minogue opened his eyes again. She glanced at him.
“I sort of wish she’d move back,” she said. “But I could never say it to her.”
“You could, but you’d better put your fingers in your ears after you say it.”
“You tell her then.”
“I will not. But I’ll let her know it.”
“What are you saying? You’ll tell her, but you won’t tell her?”
“Something like that. How did you get on at work?”
Kathleen rested her chin on cupped hands. Minogue smiled.
“Huh. Those apartments in Donnybrook are selling like hot cakes. We were run off our feet.”
“Investors no doubt.”
“A lot of them, yes.”
“Spelled with an F, as the bold James Kilmartin might say.”
“They stimulate the economy, Matt.”
“My economy’s not for stimulating. It’s trying to get rid of stuff I am.”
He spotted Iseult’s head above the lilacs. She stooped. Had Iseult inherited, learned to mimic, his unease with the world? At least she had that flair for life, that appetite and gaiety which he now remembered had been native to his mother. It had come to him late enough. There was no knowing. It might well be one of those mysteries Kathleen fortified herself with. But Iseult, she had a lot of living to do to get to that stage. He suddenly feared for her, for the bills she’d be presented with daily for being different and averse, bills she could never pay. An innocent, for all her tough talk, and she hadn’t a clue about the price of things. Her words, the look on her face, had stayed in his thoughts: teach me how to be alone.
He launched himself up from the chair.
“Come down to Dun Laoghaire,” he said. “We’ll do the pier. I’ll buy you ice-cream.”
Kathleen stayed looking at the garden.
“Be still my heart. I’ll go and change, so I will.”
“Thanks now. Thanks a lot. Stonewalled at work, sarcasm at home.”
“What about Iseult?” Kathleen called out from the foot of the stairs.
“I’ll ask her.”
He trudged up the garden. Iseult was examining the underside of a leaf. She declined his invitation with a murmur. He didn’t ask a second time.
“Slugs,” he said. “There better not be. It’s too dry, sure.”
“Maybe there are under one o
f the leaves. I was looking for Pat.”
“Ah, give over. Are you going to get a voodoo doll next?”
She let go of the leaf and the stem swished back. There was a glint in her eye.
“He let me down, Da. I’d never tell him how much either.”
“Consider it a free installment in the marriage preparation classes.”
“Go to hell. You think it’s funny.” She jerked her head away. He felt ice in his veins. A swarm of midges moved in under the hedge. “Sorry,” she said.
“It’s me that’s sorry,” he said.
“Well, I can take the details,” the cop said again. He had a culchie accent. Probably a big fat lug with the shirt hanging out of his trousers. He took another swig of the vodka. A belch came up from deep in his belly. Christ. Maybe he shouldn’t have started so early, but he’d started only to try to stay clear of going looking for a hit. And it wasn’t early anyway, it was after tea. He realized that he was swaying slightly. He leaned his shoulder against the side of the telephone box. The cop was still jabbering away.
“What,” he said. “What are you fucking rabbiting on about there?”
The cop’s voice stayed the same. It was like he hadn’t heard him.
“Leave me a number and I can have them get in touch with you very shortly.”
At least he hadn’t tried asking for the name again. As if he was stupid enough, or pissed enough. He focussed on the window where the phone was telling him he had two pence credit left. The telephone box stank. Someone had pissed in it. He watched the traffic turn up Hatch Street. His stomach gave another wormy twist. Christ, enough is enough! He’d been on the phone too long already.
“But why isn’t there someone there right now?”
The cop kept talking in that careful, polite voice.
“Well, it’s the kind of section where people are on the go at irregular times now. Calls are routed through that number you dialled if-”
“Are you fucking deaf or something? You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do here? You think I’m a gobshite or something, is that it?”
Another belch stole his words.
“I’m not exactly sure now what you-”
“Shut up a minute! I’m talking. You hear? This is fucking important. This is about someone getting killed, man, someone getting murdered. Did you get that? You’re trying to keep me talking here so as yous can trace me!”