Unholy Ground imm-2

by John Brady

  Corrigan had the heels of his hands resting on the roof, aiming the Walther. Dunne screamed at Minogue again.

  "You!" shouted Corrigan. "Put down that gun! Put it down or we'll shoot. Drop it now! Police!"

  The gunman frowned, his arm wavering. Looked shocked, Minogue thought. So he should be… Maybe he was hurt? Well-dressed, but…

  "Drop it now!" Corrigan roared. "Drop the gun now!"

  Minogue heard the car radio come to life. The gunman's face eased then he raised his arm.

  Corrigan shot him once. The man fell backwards with a surprised shout. The detective crouched by the car stood up and ran on tiptoe toward the fallen man. Standing near him, his gun pointed down, it seemed like a party game to Minogue. The detective moved to the side and gently toed something metallic, sending it skittering a few feet across the tarmac. Not smart,

  Minogue's faraway brain tut-tutted. An automatic with a single-action could go off if you so much as open a box of Rice Krispies in the same room… Everybody's scared, aren't they? The man on the ground drew up his legs and groaned. The suit, the suit: it'll be ruined, Minogue's thoughts fluttered about nearby. That's blood, that is, Minogue's eyes began arguing with his brain. Concussed, the brain sneered back. You're concussed, my dear man…

  A blue Nissan came tearing down the road and slewed to a stop, the driver's door flying open. Minogue stood up slowly from his crouch. He felt dizzy and pleasantly limp. He saw that one of the man's slip-on shoes was off. Dunne grabbed at the radio and began talking. While he waited for a reply, he pointed to Minogue and gestured toward his own nose. Minogue looked down at the blood on his own shirt. He touched the bridge of his nose and felt a resonant throb, not yet painful but vaguely warm. He walked slowly to the driver's side of the Mini.

  Moore's window was open. The door was jammed, the front wing of the car crumpled and pushed up near the door-hinge. Moore was lying sideways across the front seats.

  "Moore, are you all right there?" said Minogue. His voice vibrated in the lumpy blockage which was his nose. He saw liquid gleam, oily, on the seat-back.

  "Can you hear me, Moore? Are you…?" Minogue wheezed out.

  "Something in my back, I don't know," Moore said in a quiet, level voice. He did not try to move. "It's kind of numb there now…"

  Minogue saw Moore's fingers moving slowly then, the eyelashes fluttering. The fingers clenched and loosened. A runnel of dark liquid crept out on the rubber matting of the floor, met a rubber vein on the pattern of the mat and spidered around it. Blood, Minogue saw. He turned to Corrigan's ashen face now framed in the window opposite.

  "Tell 'em to get a move-on, Pat," he heard the nose say. "Two."

  Corrigan's eyes bulged as he stared at Minogue. Then he nodded and shouted Dunne's name. Another car skidded to a stop next to him. Two detectives jumped around the open doors as they bounced back on their hinges. Minogue wondered if it really was a police siren he was hearing in the distance.

  "I didn't know this…" Minogue began to say. His voice was completely trapped in his head, somewhere behind his face. "We'll look after you, don't-"

  "He would have killed me, you know," said Moore. The voice carried a tone of fearful, lucid warning, at once earnest and pleading. Minogue would later remember the strained tenor in Moore's plea, as from his children's fevers or as they woke from nightmares, still pursued into their waking worlds.

  CHAPTER 16

  "I told the Commissioner I'd be happier with the other thing," Minogue murmured. He was trying not to stare at Kilmartin again. He had barely recognised Kilmartin on first entering the room. Jimmy Kilmartin's face glowed against the pillow.

  "You mean that fella Pat Corrigan shot?"

  "Him, yes. He was way senior to Ball. Ball was only the pot-boy really. That Murray character was the wild card. He had the power to pave the way and cover it up."

  Kilmartin studied Minogue's nose and the two black eyes.

  "Do you mind me saying that you sound like Donald Duck? No offence now."

  "I've heard them all, Jimmy."

  "You look like you were in a shocking row."

  "I was. Moore's car hit us a good wallop. I was concussed and I didn't know it. I hit the lip of the seat, the metal frame where there's not enough sponge."

  "A real hero," Kilmartin murmured.

  "Kathleen says different. More like an ujit."

  Minogue found himself staring at Kilmartin's face again. What was it about Kilmartin that was so different? Was it just the bed-rest and being forcibly kept away from his job that had cleared his face of cares?

  "Not much hope of getting them to turn the fella over to us," Kilmartin added. "But you had the pig-iron to ask them."

  "The embassy? I tried. Didn't get that far. But how do you know all this?" Pleased with his intelligence, Kilmartin winked.

  "Ha ha. A little bird. Here, I'll tell you anyway. God Almighty was in visiting last night. Himself and the new Assistant Commissioner, Tynan, after he took his life in his hands and vetted you. To see if I was in the land of the living. Now I don't much like Tynan, but you know how it is with the man himself. Larger than life."

  Minogue knew. God Almighty a.k.a. Thomas Martin Lally, the Garda Commissioner, was a porcine brute of a farmer's son from Longford. He was shrewd and overbearing, with a tongue like a rasp and a bottomless fund of fulsome bonhomie which he parlayed as charm. He repelled Minogue. Tynan he rather liked. Tynan had studied several years for the Jesuits before becoming a Garda.

  "Oh yes. Himself has his own little copy of what you dug up, Matt. But that's between yourself and meself."

  "And Pat Corrigan and half the world."

  "Not a bit of it. The Minister put it all under wraps, the one copy. Or so he thinks."

  "The prints I made, you mean?" Minogue said.

  "Ah, no matter. Don't be upsetting yourself. Himself says to me he might have known it was a homo at the bottom of all this."

  Minogue rose abruptly from the chair. "Look it, Jimmy-"

  "Sit down, Matt. Sit down. There's people that don't have your delicate touch. I was just testing you. I wasn't trying to get a rise out of you."

  "My eye, you weren't. Lally's a boor. He shouldn't be in the job. It's as well he didn't talk like that to me."

  Kilmartin raised a supplicant hand.

  "Easy, man. Don't be deserting a sick man's bedside. Come on now."

  Minogue felt something give way in his chest. He sat down.

  "Oh, but there was great crack and sport to do with the names that were in this notebook thing. Pillars of Tory Britain. One of them was head of MI5 after the war, even. Another one was a Home Secretary and he's still a big wind there, cocked up in the House of Lords like mutton dressed up as lamb. Aren't you glad when you wake up every morning to find you're living in a republic? None of this Lord and Lady Muck stuff. This King and Queen stuff is for children. Or gobshites."

  Minogue stroked his chin. Forgot to shave this morning. Saturday senility.

  "But sure the crunch is we have no way of ascertaining whether the stuff from this notebook is true at all. The business that happened to him after the war and so on. There's no mileage in that for us. But the Costello racket-and that fella in the embassy, God rest him. I'm sure it's ninety-nine percent true. They must have been mad entirely. All grist for the mill here, though, I needn't tell you. Couldn't have happened at a better time, hah?"

  "Costello," Minogue murmured.

  "Ah, but this poor Combs divil overplayed his hand with that ultimatum. And he was right to be wary of that Ball character; I mean to say, look what Ball seems to have gone and done to Combs in the end. I'm not for a minute saying that Combs wasn't hard done by in Britain, mind you."

  "Wasn't the only one hard done by," said Minogue.

  "War's war, Matt. Are you thinking of that fella they sold down the river just to keep Combs looking clean wherever he was then, Berlin? That would have sold a lot of Sunday papers if that had come out."

 
; "Urn. Vogel. Means bird. Yes…"

  "I didn't get through the full bit about them throwing Vogel to the wolves," Kilmartin prodded.

  Minogue ignored the hint. He was thinking of the hour he had spent earlier this Saturday morning, sitting in his car at Sandymount. A lone horse and rider had been cantering back and forth, far out on the strand.

  "This Vogel back in the war, Matt? That trickery?" Kilmartin said again.

  "Combs said that he didn't realise what had happened to Vogel until after he got out of Berlin himself. He doesn't go into specifics, but he says that Vogel was betrayed in such a way as to have the credit for uncovering an Allied spy reflected on Combs himself. All he knew was that the Germans weren't so suspicious of him after they got their maulers on Vogel. He says he was sure that he was about to be arrested. He was warned that some people suspected him of being a double agent. That bit. That was in 1943 and very few of his pals were around to look after him in Berlin."

  "That was a real eye-opener about how Combs got his info back to the Allies. The codes," Kilmartin said.

  "He used to use specific words in his broadcasts, he says," said Minogue. "The words being codes for different cities where he had found out that, say, troop trains were being assembled or that they were working on new armaments."

  "Then the Allies would bomb those cities and get the most for their money," Minogue added.

  "I have no knowledge of that sort of stuff, the history and the moves during the war," Kilmartin reflected aloud.

  "Apparently those bombings drove a lot of armaments production underground or at least dispersed it and gave the Allies time to set up something else during the delays."

  "Anyway, they gave Vogel away to keep Combs looking good," said Kilmartin. "Yes. When Combs got to Lisbon and asked what had happened to Vogel, he heard that he had been picked up. He didn't know anything except what he had heard from the Nazis about a big coup, finding an agent and knowing his code-name and all. The officer who he talked to in Lisbon-he's the one who went on to be head of their MI5-told Combs that they had hoped to get more mileage out of Vogel but that Combs had chickened out early. 'A poor return on our investment,' he said to Combs, if I remember reading it right."

  "God that was a terrible thing to say to him. Dirt and treachery," Kilmartin murmured.

  "And then they wouldn't touch him with a forty-foot pole after the war."

  "Indeed," said Minogue. "While they sorted out what they wanted to do with him. They tried to slot him into the Russian zone to do spying for them again; he turned them down flat. That might have been Combs' biggest mistake. And the thing is, who's to say the Russians would have welcomed him with open arms anyway, even if he passed on info to them as well as back to London?"

  "Um," said Kilmartin. "They'd be just as suspicious as the Brits and the Yanks, I suppose. They'd be thinking the same as the Brits were thinking, that

  Combs was being planted as a double by the other side. Jases. Allies, it it? The ins and outs of it all. The man was left with no ground to stand on."

  "They kept on putting him off over the years," Minogue continued. "When he asked to be allowed to live back in England, I mean. Then they wanted some innocuous gaffer to look in on some goings-on here. Quid pro quo, I suppose. He doesn't talk about details of what they offered him, but they must have promised him that he would be, what's the word… rehabilitated. After he did a bit of work for them in Ireland. The rest you have to guess at," Minogue said.

  "Then Ball gave him the chop?"

  "Looks very like it to me. Combs miscalculated."

  "While he was thinking and bellyaching about what they did to him years ago, they thought he was going to do the dirty on them in their efforts here."

  "Now you have it," Minogue concluded. "He said that Ball was continually boasting about Costello being looked after. Not alone that, but Ball dropped heavy hints that suggested he was present at the Costello murder. There was some torture and mutilation carried on, if you remember. Maybe it was just to let Combs know that he was a tough nut, so not to be getting ideas himself…"

  Minogue lost the thread of the conversation when Kilmartin started talking again. Minutes later, he became aware that Jimmy had finally stopped talking. Now he, too, was staring out the window.

  "I want me dinner," Kilmartin said solemnly. "And I'm not going to sit here in the bed waiting for them to plonk some muck in front of me, stuff you could drink out of a shagging straw. I want me meat and me two veg. Will you come down to the cafeteria with me?"

  Kilmartin shuffled down the hallways, eying the nurses and avoiding the doctors.

  "God but that was a wicked dinner. Healthy, I suppose," Kilmartin said, shaking his head. "Ah, but you should have seen the two of them, Matt. Tynan and Himself. Himself sticks his big snoot in the door and tiptoes into the room first. 'Matty Minogue isn't here is he, Jimmy?' says he. Putting it on, of course. But there was something to it. And do you know what I said to myself when I saw that?"

  "I don't."

  "I says to myself, well I wish that I could inspire such fear as Matt Minogue, such as would cause him to do that."

  Kilmartin paused in the hallway to stare at a nurse. Minogue took in the compound smells of the hospital, struck again at how powerful a sense the nose housed. Time to take a swipe at that Proust chap again, maybe.

  "Oh yes. He was much as told me you were a pain in the neck about it all. His neck like, too."

  "I hope I was," Minogue observed. "He has plenty of it to pain, let me tell you."

  "Didn't he explain the ramifications to you?"

  "The ones he thought were important, I suppose. After he reminded me of the Garda oath to keep my trap shut."

  "Tough enough job for a Clareman."

  "He spent a lot of time telling me that I could never expect the British secret service to fork over one of their, what did he call them, some antiseptic name… operatives, yes. That Murray fella. I couldn't expect them to hand me one. He wasn't overly excited about the conspiracy to murder charge I wanted issued."

  Kilmartin laughed light-heartedly and slowed his promenade to peep into the rooms they passed.

  Minogue remembered God Almighty starting with the flattery, soothing. He had made a great show of welcoming him into his office. It was the greater,

  Minogue knew, because the Minister's Secretary was waiting there, too. Minogue instantly read Lally's gesture as a territorial display for the civil servant.

  "Heard a great account of you, Matt, as did Mr O'Reilly here and indeed the Minister," the Commissioner began.

  "And what with Jimmy Kilmartin laid up for a while and him forever singing your praises, sure the promotion is long overdue. Mr O'Reilly brings the Minister's commendations."

  Not a word from O'Reilly, just a watchful interest. Minogue knew O'Reilly from two telephone calls and a curt letter received the morning after the shooting. It was O'Reilly who was to do the lecturing, apparently.

  "… Goes without saying that this was a shocking crime, Sergeant. But as the Commissioner had pointed out, we are fully behind you and the Special Branch officers who assisted you in this matter. The Minister has expressed, his whole-hearted commendation and a recommendation for your promotion."

  God Almighty's jovial expression faltered but slightly when Minogue finally balked.

  "It's very likely that the State could charge and convict Murray on first-degree murder in the deaths of Arthur Combs and Tim Costello," Minogue said mildly.

  To his credit, O'Reilly didn't duck.

  "If your assumptions are accurate, yes."

  "But how close are you, Matt?" the Commissioner asked blithely to drive home what O'Reilly would be delivering presently.

  "Well, we're stuck. They're holding to the business about Combs. They've sent dental records and everything. The package looks watertight. They insist the fella we're talking about was drowned in Lisbon under mysterious circumstances in 1946," replied Minogue.

  "It was all a long
time ago to be sure," said the Commissioner. "God knows what kind of tricks and twists they got up to during the war, that crowd. That's how they treat their own, I suppose. A great argument for Irish neutrality, wouldn't you say, Mr O'Reilly?"

  O'Reilly ignored the mild jibe. Minogue was not ready to give in yet.

  "And Costello?" he said.

  "Oh, right, him," said the Commissioner. O'Reilly looked quizzically at Minogue.

  "I don't need to remind you that we're all bound by the rules of disclosure and confidentiality we signed when we became public servants. Let me put it to you like this, Sergeant. Costello was killed by unknown assailants-"

  "— a known professional assailant, you mean," Minogue interrupted.

  "That's not clear at all, Sergeant. Costello had made a lot of enemies, it's safe to say. Oddly, Costello has become useful to the cause of peace and security here. And you're forgetting that Costello was killed outside the jurisdiction of the State. A productive outcome, I think," O'Reilly continued.

  "Anyone ask Costello if he wanted to be such an altruist, posthumously?"

  "Costello was rabid, Sergeant. He lived and died by the gun. I'm surprised to hear you taking his part so steadfastly after your experiences with his ilk," O'Reilly replied without any reprimand that Minogue could detect. O'Reilly wasn't to be baited without showing some of his own sharp tongue, apparently.

  Minogue saw God Almighty rub a knuckle to his nose and nod once. Tidy, ironic, almost funny about Costello: more use to us dead than he ever was alive. And Combs? Minogue returned O'Reilly's unblinking gaze. He wanted to inquire as to how the British had reacted when the photocopies of Combs' notes were laid on the table. He would not give the two men the satisfaction of asking.

  "Both you and Inspector Corrigan demonstrated great foresight," O'Reilly said.

  Both you and Inspector Corrigan, Minogue repeated within. Pat Corrigan running with the envelope, looking for the highest rank he could find from the dozens of policemen converging on the train station. Like a grenade he wanted to rid of.

  "And another thing, Matt," the Commissioner broke in. "Nobody walks around the streets in this country waving a gun about. Not a fancy embassy attache or whatever they want to call this Murray. Not the Queen of England, for that matter. This is a democracy. I can tell you in all candour that it wouldn't have caused a stir here if Pat Corrigan had popped him for good."