by Declan Burke
‘You won’t mind if I come in,’ she said, ‘on the off-chance you’ve left any clues lying around.’
‘Or semen traces.’
‘We’re all human, Tom. I promise not to judge.’
Once inside I put on the central heating, got the kettle going and asked if she’d like another coffee. She said she would, and instant was fine.
‘Mind if I have a quick look around while the kettle boils?’ she said.
‘Should I ask to see your search warrant?’
‘If you have some reason I shouldn’t look around.’
‘No, fire ahead. But the only cupboard big enough to stash a body is in the master bedroom.’
‘I’ll start there so.’
Maybe she did, but I found her in the other bedroom, the one I use as an office. She was hunched over my laptop, scrolling down through my Gmail account. I stood in the doorway sipping my coffee.
‘Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?’ I said. ‘I’d hate for you to be in breach of the constitution for nothing.’
She only shrugged at that. Another couple of turns on the mouse wheel and then she minimised the window. ‘Just doing my job, Tom. And I do appreciate your cooperation.’ She stood up, jamming her hands into the pockets of her coat and rummaging around. She came up with a tattered card. ‘Right so,’ she said, ‘I’ll be off. If you hear from Mr Smyth, or remember anything you might want to tell me, give me a call on that number.’
I couldn’t see where she’d put it, but for all I knew the grey wool coat had been tailored with all kinds of secret pockets. ‘Are you going to put it back?’ I said.
‘Put what back?’
‘The folder. Manila, beige, containing Gerard Smyth’s testimony. Which I left lying on top of the printer.’
She hadn’t gone the Botox route just yet. An eyebrow rose slowly towards the ragged fringe. ‘There was no folder when I got here,’ she said.
‘Come on, Kee. It’s the only copy I have.’
By way of answer she pulled her overcoat wide open. No inside pockets big enough to hold a manila folder. No worn beige folder tucked under her armpit. ‘I’m not going to ask if you want to search me,’ she said.
‘You didn’t touch it?’
‘There was nothing to touch. You’re sure you didn’t lock it away?’
I was sure, but Kee had me pull out all the desk drawers anyway, root through all the files on top of the bookshelves. Then we moved to the master bedroom.
All told we spent more than an hour going through the apartment. If the floors weren’t bare wood she’d have had me pulling up the carpets.
The folder was gone.
NINE
Detective Alison Kee was a thorough cop with a particular flair for asking questions and presuming the answers were lies. When she asked me the same question for a third time, or maybe the fourth, tossing in a threat of having me up for wasting Garda time, I’d had enough.
‘You’re the one mooching around my apartment,’ I said. ‘Seriously, who’s wasting whose time here?’
Given that I’d already told her I had the folder, and the gist of what was in it, I had no good reason to hide it from her. For that matter, I’d had no reason to hide it from anyone else. Which was why I’d left it sitting on top of the printer.
‘Only,’ she said, ‘if you’re not playing silly buggers, we know someone wanted it.’
‘All I know is that it’s not here now.’
‘So who took it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Does anyone else have keys to the apartment?’
‘The landlord, yeah.’
‘No one else? A girlfriend, say?’
She’d seen the framed picture on my bedside locker, Rachel with Emily clutched to her lap, the pair of them laughing on a swing in a playground.
‘No one else has keys,’ I said.
‘See, my problem there,’ she said, ‘presuming that’s all true, is that there’s no sign of a break-in.’ She’d checked the door, the windows back and front. ‘And you’re saying there’s nothing else missing.’ I nodded. ‘Which means the folder evaporated or whoever swiped it knew what they were doing.’
‘Folders don’t evaporate.’
‘Science, right. But let me ask you this,’ she said, sitting forward on the couch, elbows on her knees, hands joined and forefingers pointed at me. ‘Say you were a pro, breaking in to steal one particular thing. Would you take it and go, or would you trash the place, lift some valuable stuff, and leave it looking like an amateur job, some junkie on the prowl?’
‘I’d probably go the junkie route. Unless I was trying to make a point.’
‘There’s that,’ she conceded.
Which meant they knew who I was, what I was doing and where I lived. My first thought was Jack Byrne, working his latest angle, although I found it hard to believe that Jack would be subtle enough to slip in and out without leaving any sign of his being there.
My second thought was that Gerard Smyth had been very badly mistaken when he’d laughed off the idea that he was being watched.
‘It’s possible,’ I said, ‘that they didn’t actually break in.’
‘That they got the keys from the landlord? Sure. You have a number for him handy?’
The landlord was a she, and I did. While Kee made the call I wandered back up the hallway to the office, had a rummage through the coat she’d left hanging on the back of the chair when we started our search. No secret pockets, and no folder or loose pages. Unless she’d eaten it while I was making the coffee, Kee knew nothing about the folder.
What I did find, in her inside breast pocket, was a couple of ballpoint pens and a small hard-backed notebook. More interesting was the mini tape recorder in the deep outside pocket on the left side. I rewound for a couple of seconds, pressed play. Heard Kee’s voice first:
‘Put what back?’
‘The manila folder. Smyth’s testimony. Which I left lying on top of the printer.’
‘There was no folder when I got here.’
‘Come on, Kee. It’s the only copy I have.’
Then a click, and silence.
All of which made sense of the moment, earlier, when she’d opened her coat wide – ‘I’m not going to ask if you want to search me’ – and I’d thought for a second she was flirting, undercutting the flasher’s dirty-mac routine with a little crackle in her voice, a slow burn. I wondered if she’d accidentally knocked off the recorder spreading her coat wide, or if the gesture was a magician’s misdir-ection, so I wouldn’t notice her switching it off.
I put the recorder back in the coat pocket, trying to guess what it was she’d been after. Proof that I’d had the only copy of Smyth’s testimony, or that I no longer had it?
When I heard her end the conversation I went back down to the living room. Her expression was sour.
‘She says no,’ Kee said. ‘No one has asked her for keys to access a tenant’s apartment.’
‘You don’t believe her.’
‘I’ve no reason not to. But she’d have been warned, wouldn’t she? And if anyone who was asking had the power to force her to hand over keys …’
‘I know they weren’t worried about getting caught,’ I said.
‘How do you make that out?’
‘The laptop. It’s still there.’
‘And?’
‘The folder, Smyth’s story, it was the only copy. But they’d have assumed I’d made another copy. You would, wouldn’t you?’ A terse nod. ‘So they’d have checked the laptop, to make sure I hadn’t typed up a version or scanned one in. And they couldn’t have been sure I didn’t bury it somewhere, so they’d have been thorough.’
‘How long were you out?’
‘Since early this morning.’
‘Plenty of time, if they knew what they were doing.’
‘Especially if they weren’t particularly worried about me coming back and barging in.’
Kee sighed and thumbed her
nose. Not a happy woman. She’d started out this morning following up on some doddery old geezer who might have been missing or who might have just taken a wrong turn on the way home. Now, if I was telling the truth, and especially about the friendly chaps who’d offered to help Gerard Smyth carry home his shopping, she was tiptoeing around the edges of something that looked to be way beyond her pay grade.
‘Kee,’ I said, ‘there’s not a lot of people who know there’s only one copy. Me, Jack Byrne and Gerard Smyth.’
‘And you’re thinking this is out of Jack Byrne’s league.’
‘Well, maybe I don’t know Jack as well as I thought.’ A bad time, I gauged, to mention that Jack Byrne had been planning only yesterday evening to hack into the Department of Foreign Affairs. ‘When I rang him this morning he told me he was on a job. Maybe he was here, filching the folder.’
‘But he’s the one who brought you to Smyth. Right?’
‘Correct.’
‘So there’s no good reason for him to break in and steal Smyth’s story. I mean, he already knows what’s in the file.’
‘The general gist of it. But Smyth wouldn’t give him the testimony, he wanted it to go straight to a journalist. Maybe Jack wants it for insurance. So I don’t try to gip him.’
‘It’s possible.’ She was shaking her head. ‘Although there’s also the possibility that Byrne told someone else … Why don’t you ring him, see what kind of mood he’s in?’
‘I don’t know if that’s likely.’ I pulled up Jack Byrne’s number, hit redial. ‘Jack didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d run around cutting anyone else in on his deal.’
‘You’re presuming he had a choice in the matter. Then again, the same scenario applies to Gerard Smyth.’
The call went straight to voicemail. ‘Jack? It’s Tom. Give me a buzz back when you get this. We need to talk.’
I hung up. Kee beckoned for the phone, made a note of Jack Byrne’s number, tossed it back.
‘There’s a couple of options here,’ she said. ‘One, there’s some kind of clean-up going on; someone wants Smyth and his story taken out. The other is they’ve suddenly decided to take him seriously, investigate his story, and they don’t want you making a balls of it by putting it all in the public domain before they’re ready to roll it out.’
‘They could’ve just told me that.’
‘Right. Because that’s how journalists make a living, sitting on stories to keep them warm until they’re ready to hatch out.’
If her theory was sound, then whoever had broken in had made no more distinction than Kee between investigative journalists and guys who reviewed books and movies for a living. So I didn’t bother pointing that out.
‘If these boys,’ I said, ‘have the power we think they have—’
‘We’re making a lot of guesses here, Tom.’
‘I know. But if you’re right about the keys or you’re right about the break-in, and if we believe Smyth about the spooks, then we’re dealing with serious people. The kind who’d have no problem getting an injunction against me. Or maybe pull out the Official Secrets Act.’
‘Possibly.’
‘Meanwhile, you’re still at square one. As in, where’s Gerard Smyth? Skulking around the Four Seasons under a fake name while these guys get their ducks in a row?’
She sat a while and thought about all that. Or maybe she was trying not to think about it. For all I knew she was wondering about what she’d be having for dinner. Eventually she said, ‘You’re entitled to report the break-in.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you want to?’
Make it official, she meant. ‘Might be smarter not to,’ I said.
‘I’d have thought so.’ A shrug. ‘They took something you can’t prove is gone. And there’s no sign of forced entry.’
‘Sure. But what I mean is if they wanted to make a point it might be better to let them think it’s been made. That they’ve put the frighteners on and I’m letting it go.’
‘I wouldn’t imagine you’ve anything to worry about in that department,’ she said. ‘If they wanted to throw a scare into you, they’d have been waiting when you came home.’
I’d worked that much out myself.
‘So what happens now?’ I said. ‘With Smyth.’
‘We’ll take it to the next level, get a team in play. Public appeals, the works. He’s a priority now, he’s at risk.’
‘And what about the spooks? Are they in play too?’
‘Not my decision to make, Tom. I’ll have to send that one upstairs.’
‘Just so long as it doesn’t get stashed in the attic.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means I don’t want him forgotten about, deliberately or otherwise. And if I don’t hear that Gerard Smyth has been found safe and well in the next couple of days, I’ll be asking why, and how much your bosses know about these guys who helped Smyth with his shopping.’
‘Tom,’ she said, ‘you really don’t want to take this personally.’
‘They broke into my home, Kee. Made their point, some power-play bullshit. I’m not the one who made it personal.’
‘You’re not thinking this through. You’re pissed off they broke in, I can understand that. And you’re worried about Smyth, sure. But you’d be causing yourself all sorts of problems if you get involved here.’
‘Because they told me to back off? Fuck ’em. Listen, you go ahead and write up your report, and you let the boys upstairs know about the spooks. While you’re at it, mention that the break-in put me in the mood to cause them problems. What are they going to do, blacklist me? Lift me off the streets like they did Smyth?’
‘We don’t even know that happened.’
‘In that case I have nothing to worry about, do I? But on the off-chance they did lift Smyth, you might want to mention in your report that I was planning to send an email to my good friend Father Iggy Patton just as soon as you left. It’s a new service he’s running: online confessions.’
‘I can do all that,’ she said. She stood up, looked around. ‘But Tom, think about this. If we’re right about Smyth, and he hasn’t just wandered off somewhere, you kicking up a shit storm could put him in a very bad situation. Where’s my coat?’
I told her I didn’t know, and then she remembered she’d left it in the office. While she was gone I conceded that she made a good point about not causing any more trouble for Gerard Smyth, much as I grudged admitting it. By the same token, if Kee was a stooge, sent along to persuade me not to follow up on the burglary, then that’s exactly the kind of thing she would say.
Except when she came back she had the grey coat folded over one arm, the tape recorder in her other hand. She tossed the coat on to the couch, sat down and placed the recorder on the coffee table between us.
‘You know what’s in the folder,’ she said. ‘You’ve read it, right?’
‘A couple of times, yeah.’
‘OK.’ She pushed the record button. ‘Tell me everything you remember. And please, spare me the confidential bullshit.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if I’m in this, I need all you have. Any little thing you can remember.’ There was no humour in it this time. ‘You never know what might turn out to be a clue.’
‘OK, so my name is Tom Noone, I’m a journalist and author. I had a meeting yesterday morning with a man called Shay Govern, he’s an Irish-American—’
‘Hold up.’ Kee, on the couch, had her notebook on her knee, pen poised. ‘Who’s this Shay Govern?’
‘That’s what I’m about to tell you.’
‘What I mean is how come I’m only hearing about him now?’
‘He didn’t come up before.’
‘But he’s important enough now that you’re starting with him?’
‘I can leave him out if you want, go straight to Smyth.’
‘Leave nothing out, Tom. Leave no one out.’
‘That was the plan, yeah, before you in
terrupted me.’
She took a moment to pinch at the corners of her eyes, massage the eyelids. Then she exhaled, slow. ‘Go on,’ she said.
So I told her about Shay Govern and how he’d commissioned me to ghost-write a book about Sebastian Devereaux, a forgotten thriller writer who lived on Delphi Island in Lough Swilly, Donegal.
‘Except then, this morning, Govern told me that he was an eye-witness to the murder of six children during a Nazi massacre on Delphi Island in 1940, shortly before he left home for America.’
‘Why is that name familiar?’ Kee said.
‘Shay Govern? Maybe you heard about this gold mine he wants to open.’
She nodded to herself, scribbled a note.
‘So it’s bad timing for Govern,’ she said, ‘if this story comes out now.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ I gave her Govern’s spiel, the mine as a philanthropic gesture, the expiation of sins.
‘Jesus. Go on.’
‘So then Jack Byrne comes to see me. He’s tracked down Gerard Smyth for Govern, except he—’
‘And Jack Byrne is …?’ Kee said, nodding at the recorder.
‘Oh, yeah.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Jack Byrne’s an ex-Garda detective, now a private investigator, hired by Govern to find Gerard Smyth, his long-lost friend. When Byrne locates Smyth, he realizes Govern’s not telling the truth. So he has a chat with Smyth, gets the gist of his story, and decides Govern might pay more than a finder’s fee to keep Smyth quiet.’
‘Not realizing that Govern wants Smyth to corroborate his story,’ Kee said.
‘Exactly. Anyway, he takes me to meet Smyth, which is when Smyth gives me a folder with his testimony of the atrocity, one he’d typed up himself. That original and only copy is now lost, possibly destroyed, so this account serves as a secondary source.’
‘Relax, Tom. You’re not testifying here. Just tell me what Gerard Smyth told you.’
I couldn’t see how it could hurt, so I told her everything. Kee was either genuine or she was going through the motions so that I wouldn’t suspect she was a stooge – and if she was, they already had Smyth’s account. Telling her the story could only keep it fresh for when I came to write it down.