by John Brady
“‘It’ll all come out,’ he said – McCarthy said. “‘I have to protect my sources.’”
“I think I heard that in a film a long time back.” Tynan snapped back to alertness. He moved his pen to a new spot on his desk.
“Well that was my thought too, I suppose,” he said. “I gave him the only response I could: present us with information. Better again, approach the Gardaí there in Dalkey.”
“Did that soften his cough?”
“I have no idea. But he did say that he’d look forward to the day when someone would ask him when he had first raised these issues with the Guards. So, who knows. No word to date.”
With that, Tynan turned his hands over and began to examine his palms. For no reason that he could think of then, or even later with the help of a drink, Minogue thought of Pilate.
“But then it was Mary,” Tynan said. “Sister Immaculata, the one who brought up his name again. She said that McCarthy had his heart in the right place. That he made sure her drop-in was mentioned in the paper.”
He looked over at Minogue again. Minogue issued his most thoughtful nod. It seemed to suffice.
“So,” said Tynan. “I did say perfect storm, didn’t I? You know Seán Brophy.”
Minogue didn’t even bother trying to hide his surprise this time.
“I do. Everyone knows Seán.”
It was Tynan’s turn to make slow, thoughtful nods. “Well then,” he said. “Here’s the next reason for asking you here for a chat. So that you’ll consider applying yourself to the Larkin case first. Seán Brophy is not well.”
Minogue frowned.
“Seán is apparently in crisis.”
“His daughter,” Minogue began to say, but let it go.
“Seán’s daughter, yes. She was the one who found the Larkin man there.”
“Seán was at Ryan’s last night, I spoke with him.”
“And you drove him home.”
Tynan’s expression was placid.
“I did. He was okay when I left him at his house last night.”
“From what people could gather there this morning, Seán never went in the door. He walked the streets all night apparently. It’s clear that – well, it’s what I said. Seán is under a doctor’s care, as we speak.”
Minogue’s mind scrambled for recall. What had he missed with Brophy?
“We depend a lot on Seán, as you well know. Too much, perhaps.
Tynan’s phone extension began to flash. He watched it for several moments.
“I don’t want to say that Seán is irreplaceable, but the fact is, we’re still trying to build capacity there in the Lab. We’re not there yet. But Seán never let us down, in all these years. You know that, I imagine?” “True enough.”
Tynan turned toward his keyboard. A hint of reluctance, or exasperation, tightened his mouth. He spoke facing the screen.
“We have a homeless man, murdered, and no arrest. A young girl traumatized, sinking by the day. And now, we have the father who doted on her, a man overworked already and carrying probably too much for us, and now he’s done down.”
He glanced over.
“My thinking is this: we need this to stop.”
Chapter 8
Minogue’s drive through the narrow, rambling streets of Dalkey brought him finally to a stop behind a delivery lorry. Gas canisters bulged under its blue nylon tarp. It wasn’t waiting a turn to move on, it was parked. Not a hundred yards from the Garda station, a vehicle taking up half of the road? As if the turn in from Castle Street hadn’t been awkward enough. Tubbermore Road, he mused: the Road of the Large Well. A rename would be in order: The Lane That Calls Itself a Road. The Cowpath of the Parked Lorry.
He worked his way around the lorry, and let his Peugeot coast in second. The mix of cottages and terraced homes and semis were well-looked-after, but there were a few too many dainty touches for his liking. Many of the reno’d ones made statements with interlocking stone and planter pots. The road ended in a T-junction, and there sat the older houses, taller and untroubled-looking, snug behind their high walls and gates.
He remembered the Garda station from a stroll he had taken several years back. The noise and claustrophobia of a boisterous wedding reception – Kathleen’s niece – had him out for a break from a nearby hotel. The station was an old house with a preservation order on it. An imposing look to it; a lot of steps up. Wasn’t the public office at the ground level, or a high cellar, the former servants’ quarters?
His mobile buzzed against the edge of the gearshift tray. Squinting against a glaring, metallic light that now welled through the clouds, he thumbed through to the text. Kathleen: Brídín, her friend at work, had been let go. The text ended in All caps: NO NOTICE CAN U BELIEVE IT! He returned to the Messages, and checked the names of the detectives here again. He was glad he had checked: it was Fitzgerald, not Fitzsimmons, who was the senior one.
Feeling he was overlooking something, he lingered over the phone menus. What had he forgotten? No, he had phoned Malone, and Malone was on his way. Names, contacts out here ready? They were. Was the Slattery case-work parked properly? All too easily, actually. Getting the briefing at Coolock station delayed had been no big deal.
Was it the actual speed of this flip to the Larkin case then? It wasn’t. Something else had rankled in his mind since he’d left Tynan’s office, and it was as simple to grasp as it was hard to credit: yes, some old nun had gotten on the blower to the Tynan, and lo and behold, Garda resources were at her disposal. That Ireland still existed?
Soured as this made him, he had to admit that this abrupt shift to the Larkin case was starting off not bad at all. He ticked off the steps that had already been taken. This Sergeant Fitzgerald had already arranged a two o’clock get-together to kick off the case review. He was offering to get the original case detectives in. ‘No worries,’ had been his response to anything Minogue asked. Would Minogue want to start in on the case files right away? ‘Can do. No worries.’
Minogue’s eye was drawn then to the sign on an older house sliding by to his right. A Period Residence as they’d say in the ads, it was freshly painted in taupe, with dark brown details. He slowed and read the writing. Choice residence… Full of the tradition and character of Old Dalkey… Exceptional. Wrought-iron gates closed over a passageway that ran back to some kind of a walled garden – a courtyard maybe – behind. A doctor’s house in former times, he guessed, a barrister’s maybe. There was something desperate about the gleaming BMW convertible parked back there. A prop, like the garden furniture, and that fountainy thing too, he felt sure.
The road narrowed even more, and a line of tightly parked cars began. He resumed his search ahead for the familiar blue lamp of a Garda station – was that Malone’s Escort? He braked and came to a complete stop.
Malone was on his mobile. He seemed to have trouble winding down his window. It was hardly the time to urge Malone again that he should just to go for the 1,500 euro from that scrap-page scheme, and put this old banger out of its misery.
“There’s a bit of parking in a yard behind the station,” he said to him.
He heard Malone say Sonia’s name, as in ‘But listen, Sonia,’ before his window was fully up again. The gate fronting the laneway that adjoined the Garda station was painted the same cop-shop blue as the door to the station itself. It was work to reverse into the parking spot. At least no one seemed to be eye-balling his efforts. He pocketed his mobile, reached back for the soft attaché case that Kathleen had bought him when he was drafted into Liaison, and stepped into the chill air.
Right away, he was sure that he smelled the sea, and some part of his mind was judging this as benign, that any tribulations that this Dalkey stay might put in his path would be bearable. Coming along Castle Street, the ruin of Dalkey Castle filling his mirror, his vague dislike for the place had returned. He had always wanted to like Dalkey, and it baffled him yet why he had never quite made it. If he didn’t like Dalkey, well maybe Dalkey didn�
�t like him right back? But it wasn’t Dalkey’s fault.
He had tried to get a fix on this before. Was it the way the place was set up? Dalkey meant a certain frustration, it had to be said, with its roads and its avenues and its abrupt changes of camber confusing. It felt tight. Its outlying mansions and villas blocked views of the sea too, and he felt there was something grudging about how little a sliver of the coast had been left as a park for the plain people for Ireland.
But maybe that was a bit petty. Those same winding roads and secluded avenues spilled out verdant greenery, sea views, glimpses of the Wicklow Mountains. There was plenty of ambitious architecture on show. So what if a ruck of arrivistes had elbowed in where old money doctor-dentist-barrister trinity had rooted before? Like it or not, those building tycoons, the financial services wizards, the best-in-Ireland media stars – they were the new Ireland. He might have to admit that there was something else going on here, a shameful atavism: Dalkey felt English. Naturally he’d keep this insight to himself.
A sudden gust of wind tore about the yard, peppering his face with grit. He grasped his attaché case tight, and headed for the front of the station. Malone was trudging up the laneway to the yard.
“I was wondering if you’d make it this far across the MasonDixon Line.”
Malone, the Dublin Northsider, blinked and offered a blank look. Minogue looked again: there was indeed discoloration.
“What’s that there, on your left side there? Below your eye.”
“That’s my cheek. I’ve another one, on the other side.”
“The welt there, the bruise. Whatever the technical name for it is.”
Malone ran his hand lightly over the pebbledash on the wall behind.
“What the hell were you doing last night in Ryan’s? After I left?”
“Minding my own business, in actual fact.”
“It’s everybody’s business now. It came at me secondhand in that meeting this morning. The one I didn’t know I had scheduled, with the Commissioner?” Malone studied the gatepost.
“They started it, you know. Wasn’t me at all.”
“‘They started it.’ Are we back in the schoolyard?”
“They were looking for trouble,” said Malone. “I’m telling you. So here’s a question for you before I get a lecture. What’s being done about them yo-yos?”
Minogue studied the bruise again. It might spread even more.
“Who were they? Was it that pair with the eff-off faces I saw at the table?”
“Yeah. The one with the stupid-looking face on him, the tall one, he was Iijit One. Sly fecking eyes on him. I’d gone to the jacks, see? One of them was in there, he starts muttering. ‘How’s about an autograph,’ says he to me. I says nothing.”
“Sounds like you, all right. What kind of nuttin’?”
“I swear to God. I know I have to keep me head down. But he just wouldn’t shut up. Starts in on me, like, ‘Did you push him or did you pick him up and throw him?’”
“What did you say to this fella to get him going wild like that?”
“Don’t you want to know what he said to me first? Like, ‘Nice job offing that Kelly gouger, pal – only another hundred thousand to go’?”
“You can’t take a slag these days? Couldn’t you at least have ignored it?”
“That’s not just a slag. It’s an accusation, that’s what it is. But like I’m telling you, he was going to keep drilling away until he got to me.”
“Walk. Out. The. Door. Of. The. Toilet. Without. A. Word. Think of that, no?”
“Boss, are you getting what I’m saying here? He wasn’t going to stop.”
“Since when did you get to be so thin-skinned? How many times did I hear Kilmartin run the Dublin gurrier bit over you? Teaching you elocution even?”
“That was different. That was in that Squad, and anyway, he’s all hot air, Kilmartin. Rocky Balboa on the outside, Richard Gere on the inside.”
Minogue couldn’t not smile.
“See? You know it too. But look, this thicko last night, he sees I’m having a lash, and I can’t just walk away in the middle of it. And still he keeps needling? He even throws in the flight recorder routine. ‘Don’t worry, Kelly’s flight recorder will back you up.’ How’s that funny? Funny if you’re some culchie from Bally Go Shite maybe?”
“No offence to present company, of course.”
“Goes without saying. But look, boss, this is a big nothing, or it should be. Hop in the ring, would be my preference. But he’s the one starts throwing shapes at me. Jaysus’ sake! Posers – babies: two big babies, that’s what they are. Baa baa bah. Boo hoo hoo.”
“Just tell me what you said. I don’t want to find out secondhand.”
“Something about his sister.”
“You knew he had a sister?”
“Everybody has a sister. Anyway. He has a go at me, so I give him one.” “One what.”
“A get-the-message dig. Not a hard dig, just sharpish.”
“And?”
“Well he didn’t like it, did he. Next thing I know, his mate’s piling in the door. That’s when I’m thinking, Christ these cowboys – armed, like – they could let on they don’t know I’m a Guard and … So I had to put the other fella to the wall. I just had to.”
“You hit the second one, the one coming in to break up the row.”
“It wasn’t a ‘hit’ hit. How did I know that he was coming in for a hundred mile an hour, like Jackie frigging Chan? What, I’m going to ask him, ‘Are you here to help?’”
Minogue eyed the restless foot, the glances thrown at the street outside.
“Look,” he said. “You know how it’s going to be on this job. Am I right?”
“Pretty much. I think.”
Minogue ignored the oversized load of irony.
“So you know the situation here. Why we’re here, why there’s been a change of plan. Why we’re here and we’re not in sunny, pleasant Coolock reworking Slattery?”
“You told me already, boss. This thing here’s getting flack about it, and stuff.”
Minogue tugged his jacket tighter.
“And we’re here in Dalkey to help,” he said. “You’re hearing this, right?”
“Here to help, right.”
“Not to have fights in the toilets. Not to look over people’s shoulders either. And most of all, not to show anybody up. Is that going to be too frustrating for you maybe?”
“No. I’m grand on that. Sound as a bell. ‘Here to help,’ that’s me – us.”
***
The railings at the front of the Dalkey Garda station had been recently painted. The walls too, Minogue noted, pausing a moment on the footpath.
He decided to enter by the public office. A man’s voice resonated behind the frosted glass panel, a phone conversation. There was time to peruse the Missing Persons circulars, dog licence reminders, the kids’ Traffic Safety drawings. Prodigious red crayon blood flowed from a stick man cyclist’s head. Xs for eyes.
A duty officer who opened the wicket soon let them know he was one Garda Corcoran. He glanced at Minogue’s photocard, but didn’t bother with Malone’s. “The lads call me Corky.”
Modest-enough sideburns, and a thick mat of dark curly hair put Minogue in mind of a long-ago Tom Jones. Corky made a cautious grin.
“It’s all go,” he said. “Heard ye were coming only an hour ago.”
“Not too long after ourselves,” said Minogue. “But we do what we’re bid, don’t you know. Plans exist to be altered, and all the rest of it.”
“Same story everywhere, sure – Listen, I’ll come around and let ye in.”
Minogue tracked Corcoran’s form moving behind the glass. No surprises in the public office. The worn and cramped look, the customary desks head-to-head, a thicket of notices on cork-boards. Manila folders leaned awkwardly in their ugly holders, backed up by hanging wall files of a type he didn’t remember seeing before. The radio set was in the open by the back of the roo
m. A duty-jacket and vest lay on the counter next to a boxy set of shelves with sets of forms. Postcards were taped on the walls.
A brief exchange about the weather ensued while they waited for Fitz to answer the phone. Minogue still couldn’t place Corcoran’s accent, but with the Rs barely making it out of the man’s gob, he’d begun to lean toward the soft option, the Midlands drawl.
Garda Corcoran, source of the enigma, put down the phone. “Fitzie says how-do, and sorry he’s tied up. But he’ll see youse later on. ‘Make yourselves at home’ is his instructions. If it’s instructions ye want? The canteen’s out the back there, across the yard? And a fitness room too – in case ye get bored.” “Where should we pitch our tents, do you know?”