by John Brady
In lieu of an answer, Hoey sprang up on the lawyer’s cupped hands. Crossan grunted and his shoes sank deeper into the mud as Hoey stood upright. Hoey’s feet moved up to the lawyer’s shoulders.
“‘Guard tramples on well-respected barrister en route to criminal offence,’” Crossan whispered as he grimaced. Hoey tapped in the remaining pieces of glass from the shattered frame.
“Accessories are supposed to help,” said Hoey. “So shut up.”
“Break and enter,” wheezed Crossan beneath him. “I’m a goner now, to be sure.”
Hoey ground his heels into Crossan’s meagre shoulders as he toed up and scrambled in the window. He was satisfied with the grunt of pain the barrister issued. He stood in the room and surveyed the floor by his feet first.
“What’s the story, then?” Crossan called out.
“Wait and I’ll open the front door.”
Hoey headed for the hall and opened the hall door. Crossan trudged up the steps, rubbing at his shoulders. Hoey spotted the phone and lifted it.
“Shite, it’s still not fixed,” he said, and slammed it down.
“At least someone’s made a start on fixing up the place,” said Crossan.
He began using his nails to get mud from his coat. Hoey walked up and down the hall, checking the kitchen and dining-room.
“It’s not as bad as I thought it’d be,” Crossan murmured.
“What isn’t?”
“The damage. The shooting. If you’d been here, you’d have thought the place was coming down around your ears.”
Hoey sprang up the stairs, calling out the Inspector’s name. Crossan heard him opening doors and swearing. Then Hoey came down the stairs fast. He stopped on the last step, frowning at the floor.
“They might have gone somewhere for a chat,” Crossan tried. Hoey snapped his head up and eyed the barrister. Instead of the retort the lawyer expected, Hoey skipped down the steps onto the pebbled driveway and began walking fast down the avenue.
He had been thinking of Eamonn. Black head of hair the day he was born, eyelids tight over his eyes. The small coffin. Beyond knowing that Eamonn had been a baby, he could not remember his son’s face. The three photos they had of him were not clear: one of Kathleen standing by the crib, the baby cradled but his face invisible; Eamonn asleep in the pram in the back garden, long before the shrubs and trees had grown there; Minogue’s mother holding and displaying her grandson to the camera two days before Eamonn had died. Countless times he had scrutinised the photographs asking himself if there was anything different about the child that he should have been alert to. Something different from the start, Kathleen had maintained over the years after Iseult was born-that bold, spoiled, raucous miracle.
Eamonn’s face under the teddy bear: his first thought, as the room exploded around him, the terror and awareness of death in the room changing everything, had been that Eamonn had suffocated. The quiet in the house, dawn, the stillness that had brought him from bed and across the hall, knowing something was amiss. Though the infant’s hands were cold, Minogue believed that Eamonn had died just before dawn. He recalled wanting his own death for relief from the pain.
He swung his hands over his head and clenched his eyes tight. There must be a way out of this. He stopped stretching: a car outside? He put his ear to the wall. Couldn’t tell. He scraped his fingertips hard over his face then but his mind had allowed the words out already-kidnap, hostage. He stopped and stared into the darkness: were they going to kill him? The darkness, the cold, all immediate things fell away. To his surprise, he did not free-fall into panic. His thoughts became clear instead. He began to go through the possibilities. They could hold him until they were safe away. But were they well enough in with whatever groups they belonged to to be handed passports, money and plane tickets? Not likely. These were local men and, if they were heart-and-soul IRA or affiliates, they’d want to be on home ground, not hanging around shopping malls in Cleveland or Cologne waiting five years for things to die down.
Kill him? No: they’d try to deal their way out. But they’d get seven to ten for possession of the guns alone. Add to that kidnapping, assault. He traced the lump and the split skin on his head again. His nausea had gone and, except for any sudden move of his head, the ache was manageable. He pushed his knuckles into his eyesockets and tried to think again. Make some strategy or some fall-back position. Lie, talk-Over the water came the breeze, rippling the surface, wave and trough alike. The sea-skin stretched, swelled again and drew toward the rocks. Still it seemed to move nowhere. Sea-wrack drifted, sank and rose again. The fish searched below and then fled among the rocks. There they were, the shapes moving so fast, turning, moiling, streaming cascades of bubbles behind, revolving in rapture. As the image faded, he rose slowly to his feet. Still he couldn’t focus on a plan. Where did she fit? Why would she- Something had been going on all around him, Minogue knew, and he had finally stumbled in, clumsy and stupid. He had let his instincts carry him and had even dragged Hoey along. And, in the end, none of this mattered. All past and beyond reach now. No going back. The best of intentions-what did they matter anymore?
An electric jolt ran up his whole body when he heard the steps. They were coming for him. Suddenly frantic, he tried to put words together for argument. Where the hell was Hoey? Someone was working at the lock. He backed away into a corner. Stand firm anyway, he thought. Run at the door? If there was any chance at all.
The light blinded him. Could it be just those two lousy light bulbs? He squinted though his eyelashes. A flashlight beam ran over his face and chest. He wanted to say something.
“Just fucking well do it, Shea!” Kilmartin roared. “Don’t start up on that again or I’ll walk on you.”
“Well, I can’t just sit here like an iijit for a few hours-”
“You can do it and you’re going to do it because I’m shagging ordering you to do it! Do not leave the station. Do you hear me?”
Hoey bit back his reply. It wouldn’t help Minogue for him to fuck Kilmartin from a height on the phone here. The Killer could work things over the phone for now, get the personnel and the search started right away.
“Are you listening?” Kilmartin asked again.
“Yeah.”
“You last saw him at ten, right? And his car is still parked out at the house, the Howards’ place.”
“So is the woman’s, Mrs Howard. She has a Renault parked in a garage in the yard.”
“Where’s this fuckin’ lawman? Crosbie.”
“Crossan. He’s here.”
“If Matty has been diddled in any way by this little shite Crosbie, so help me, I’ll fuckin’ burst him. Crosbie, Crossan, whatever the hell his name is. You tell him that, do you hear?”
Hoey surveyed the listless barrister across the table.
“Okay.”
“Is Russell there yet?”
“Haven’t seen him come in.” Hoey was suddenly weary. “Let me ask. He might have come in and I didn’t notice.”
He put his palm over the receiver and asked Ahearne. The Sergeant shook his head, looked at his watch, blinked and returned to chewing the inside of his upper lip.
“No. Not yet.”
“Keep this line open. Sit by the phone. Anyone puts their hand near it, give ’em a puck in the snot. Hard. I’ll phone the Branch again.”
While he waited, Hoey returned to scraping the remains of a round sticker from a desktop in Ennis police station. Drops of sweat itched in his armpits and on his forehead. He could be back in five minutes from a pub. He scraped harder, oblivious to the sticky detritus collecting under his nails. Guards continued to come and go in the station. Hoey and Crossan had been called in but once to detail what Minogue and they had been doing. Hoey had noted the Emergency Response Unit men checking their pistols in the hallway.
Ahearne was standing by the table, holding a mug.
“No,” said Hoey. “Thanks.”
Ahearne laid down the mug, glanced from Hoey to Crossan and sat down slowly
with a sigh. Two Guards in plainclothes walked in from the yard and stopped by Ahearne.
“Within the half-hour,” Ahearne said to them. The two trudged off to the main office.
“Have you picked anyone up yet?” Hoey asked.
Ahearne shook his head. Hoey checked his watch. Kilmartin had told Hoey that he’d be at Ennis Garda station within the hour.
“There’s always the chance it might turn out to be a false alarm,” Crossan said.
“Shut up,” said Hoey.
Crossan considered retaliating but he found that Ahearne was staring at him. The Sergeant’s usual expression of detached politeness had been replaced by a hard, empty look. Hoey had relayed Kilmartin’s threat to Crossan verbatim, unalloyed by sympathy or parody. Hoey had then told him that what Kilmartin might leave intact of him, he, Hoey, a man of modest mien who had given the barrister the appearance of being a cautious, repressed man, at best indifferent to him, would take apart.
“They came back to take the Howards and your man happened to be there at exactly the wrong time,” said Ahearne.
Hoey maintained his stare at the window.
“They probably wanted Dan,” Ahearne tried again. “Bold and brazen of ’em to come back the next day to do it, I say. Exactly the last time and place anyone’d expect to try and lift Dan-”
“What for?” said Crossan.
Ahearne shrugged. “Well, I’m not up on that. But they’d want to drive some kind of a deal, I imagine.”
“How did they know that Mrs Howard was staying put in the house?” Hoey asked. “They’d hardly expect the Howards to stay put in the house after the shooting.”
“And a deal for what?” Crossan probed further.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Ahearne quickly, as though fending off an accusation. “That’s what we’re waiting to hear, seems to me.”
Hoey turned from the window and looked at Ahearne for a moment.
“Someone had started repairs to the windows anyway,” said Aheame. “They’re still trying to reach Dan Howard in Dublin to get the name of whoever was hired to fix the place. Maybe they saw something.”
Kilmartin came through the doorway, followed by Russell. Hoey stepped smartly to the side of the door and suffered Kilmartin’s sharp, interrogative stare for several moments. Kilmartin nodded at Ahearne who stood. He spoke in a low voice.
“Are you Crosbie?”
The barrister rose slowly from his chair. Russell stood next to Kilmartin and stared at Crossan too.
“You, mister”-Kilmartin jabbed a finger in the air separating him from the lawyer-“you had better have some big, fat rabbits in your hat. Because, by Christ, we’re letting everything off the leash here. If and we can’t find rabbits to run down, we’ll eat anything that looks like a fuckin’ weasel!”
Crossan studied the bulk of James Kilmartin, recently disgorged from a helicopter onto the pad at Ennis County Hospital.
“Tell me now,” said the barrister, “did you gallop all the way down from Dublin in a pack or on your own?”
Kilmartin’s attention seemed to be suddenly taken up with a particle of undigested food caught on the tip of his tongue. His tongue scraped his teeth several times as if to flush out any more pieces of food still hiding in his dentures. When he spoke, it was in the gentle and intimate tone the Chief Inspector reserved for his better threats.
“Listen, head-the-ball. If and you don’t co-operate 200 per cent with us here”-the Chief Inspector paused and took a piece of something from his tongue with his thumbnail; he looked down his nose at it as though puzzled at its provenance, flicked it away and looked back into Crossan’s glazed, bulging eyes-“I’ll personally give you such a fucking belt that they’ll stop you for speeding above in Portlaoise.”
Kilmartin turned on his heel and headed for Russell’s office. Russell pursed his lips and looked out bleakly under his corrugated brow at Crossan.
“That’s merely a figure of speech, Mr Crossan,” he murmured, and followed Kilmartin.
The Chief Inspector couldn’t or wouldn’t sit. Russell closed the door behind him and watched Kilmartin as he stood by the window rolling on the balls of his feet.
“Minogue has a mouth on him,” said Russell.
Kilmartin’s reply came in a restrained monotone. “Well I know it, Tom. And I told him often enough. Sure, don’t I have to put up with it every day myself?”
“Didn’t help him much here, I can tell you. Matter of fact, I tore into him for it.”
Kilmartin nearly lost it then.
“I know, Tom, I know,” he said as he drew in a breath. “He has that knack. Definitely, yes, I’d have to agree with you 100 per cent on that.”
“Is that a job requirement for your mob or that class of thing?”
Kilmartin’s teeth were set tight.
“He’s Clare, Tom,” murmured the Chief Inspector. “He came by the sharp tongue honest enough.”
Russell weighed Kilmartin’s anger before he looked away to his desk.
“Well, he’s after pissing in the wrong pot today, Jim.”
Kilmartin whirled around and strode to the door.
“Wait until we have all the units-”
“I can’t fucking wait,” Kilmartin hissed. He slapped the door with the heel of his hand. “He’s out there somewhere. I was never a man to sit around like a dog by the fire.”
Russell hurried out after him. Kilmartin waved at Hoey.
“Drive us, D.J.,” Russell called out to Ahearne. “We can work from the car.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The small, choking black space around his face had become his world. Minogue tried counting his heartbeats to control his claustrophobia. His face felt swollen from the heat, and the musty, mildewed smell of the sack still stung his nostrils. He knew he was facing the wall and that there was a rickety back to the chair he had been tied to. Three men, he knew from their voices, the two from the van and a third he sensed was an older man. He tried to breathe more shallowly. The twine around his wrists was thin and sharp and he worried about the circulation in his hands. His body ached as he tried to sense some movement in the air around him. It was the voice of the third man, this newly arrived stranger, that took Minogue’s concentration. He knew that the man was using a clumsy but effective disguise to muffle his voice. A cloth or a towel, he guessed. Amateur or expert? He couldn’t decide. His skin prickled in anticipation when he heard someone getting up from a chair behind him.
“You’re not giving us much to work with,” came the muffled voice. “I’m after telling you that you need to do a job a work here. It’s up to you.”
Country accent, Minogue could tell. Clare?
“You have the solution, but there’s not much time.”
Minogue felt he should say something.
“A solution?”
“Yes, a solution. Get to work persuading us.”
For a moment, Minogue wanted to shout back that there was nothing he could tell them, that they were stupid to imagine he could.
“Well? Do you think we’re fucking iijits here, then?”
Though the man hadn’t raised his voice, Minogue felt some shock of familiarity. It was less the swearing than a tone of voice he had heard before.
“I was down here on account of a family matter. My brother’s family had-”
“Your brother, hah! And the son, no doubt. A right pair, they are. But sure, at least their hearts are in the right place. What brought you down the second time then?”
“When I heard about Bourke being shot-”
“Ah, don’t be trying to pull the wool over my eyes with some cock-and-bull story about this fucking thing, whatever it was. You were down here on dirty work-”
“I came down to see about Bourke. Doesn’t anybody care that he got shot out the back of-”
“What the hell do you care one way or another?” came Ciaran’s voice. “You took up with this Bourke thing as a cover for doing your spying and sneaking around. What
was your mission here?”
Minogue coughed and the twine cut into his wrists.
“…this shite about you crusading down here, you and Crossan…”
He strained forward coughing and his chest tightened with the spasms.
Was this a ploy to make him believe that Crossan was in the clear? The stranger’s tone was less contemptuous now.
“…so stop being a fucking yob. You’ve worked up a speech and a story that you think is going to work. Guards are like that, aren’t they? You think everybody else is stupid.” The voice came closer. Minogue stiffened as he heard shoes squeak.
“Ah, but I shouldn’t be so hard on you,” the voice resumed. “You tried. But there comes a point when a man has to look out for himself. So let’s get down to business before we run out of time.”
Minogue sat very still now.
“Right. You’re an Inspector in the Guards. You work for the Technical Bureau, whatever that is-”
“The Murder Squad is one of-”
“Start with the Howards now. You were nosing around there this morning. What brought you there?”
Clare accent for sure, Minogue decided, but he could tell no more.
“I wanted to talk to Mrs Howard.”
“About what?”
“Other details from the night of that fire, when Jane Clark-”
Something shrieked on the floor and Minogue instinctively ducked his head.
“I told you he was a-!” shouted Ciaran.
“It’s the truth,” Minogue protested.
“Fuck you and your lies!” Ciaran shouted. “You’re scouting around for us! Waiting to pounce! You and a whole posse of cops and Branchmen and God knows what else! Aren’t you?”
A shiver ran up Minogue’s chest and seemed to light with a small piercing shock on his nipples. He waited for the stranger to calm them down a bit. The voice was no longer muffled when it whispered into his ear.
“I’m coming back in ten minutes, and I may have to do for you. It might be quick, and it might be slow. It all depends on you. You’re quick enough with the wit when you want to be, but this is not the time or the place for smart remarks. Think hard now, mister polisman. I’ll be back. If you’re still at this codology, it’ll be all over.”