He looked down at his notebook.
“Can I take photocopies with me today, Pierce?”
“ ’Course you can.”
Donavan looked under his eyebrow from Minogue to Malone and back. Minogue glanced over at his colleague. Malone’s jaw was slack, his tongue was working slowly against the inside of the cheek.
“We’ll go in now,” said Donavan. “Kevin?”
Minogue nodded toward the door. Malone followed him over.
“Follow up on the newspaper thing now instead of waiting,” Minogue said. “Get this fella, the photographer again. O’Hagan, is it?”
Malone nodded.
“If Shaughnessy was on the society pages there’ll be other pictures somewhere. Pinch these photographers if you get waltzed around. Call in uniforms, even. Get Eilis to have the warrants express if we need them. I’d be thinking there’d be other pictures of the same crowd or the same do somewhere in their files.”
“Contact proofs,” said Malone. “That’s what they do first, right?”
“That’s it. And then do a check with the lab again.”
Malone looked up at the clock.
“No great hurry back now,” said Minogue. “But you’re buying dinner today.”
Kevin drew up jars from a cart he had wheeled over and placed six of them beside Shaughnessy’s left arm. Donavan switched on the saw for a test. Minogue became aware of a new ache at the base of his neck. He kept his gaze on the jars. Kevin placed the roll of labels by Donavan’s clipboard and began writing in Shaughnessy’s name and the date. Minogue forced himself to look over Shaughnessy again.
Donavan’s gloves looked very tight. Maybe they were some new type of plastic or rubber. He should really put on glasses himself. The saw might throw up bits of… He watched Donavan draw the scalpel up from Shaughnessy’s pubic hair. The radio began to play a reel. Donavan finished the Y with a sharp flourish. There was a flute and a harp, airy sounds that reminded him of a windy May morning. Kathleen was off tomorrow. Phone Iseult and…
The tissue parted by the rib cage as though it had been unzipped. Minogue held his breath again. It took an effort to keep his feet planted now. He let his eyes out of focus. He was already there, just in time: that turn in the lane by Tully, that sliver of sea off Bray.
Donavan turned the diagram around. Minogue recalled the deft slicing of the liver, the pathologist’s unwavering hand as he held the sample for the jars.
“I can’t tell,” said Donavan. “But it wasn’t more than a couple of hours before the systems shut down. A sizable meal, call it. Do Americans have big appetites?”
Irony? Minogue didn’t know. He squeezed the back of his neck. He looked around the conference room and tried another mouthful of tea. Pretty poor. He eyed his notebook next to the stain from the cup. His writing had definitely changed after Donavan had opened the skull. He remembered fighting against the noise of the saw, wandering through the woods by Carrigologan, stepping around the stones and the long grass in Tully. “Drink?” he had written under INTERNAL.
Malone had found out that both of Shaughnessy“ s parents would be coming over. Geraldine Shaughnessy, the mother and Leyne’s ex, hadn’t remarried. Leyne himself was already on the plane, someone said. It was O’Riordan, Leyne’s old pal in Ireland, who had identified the body at four in the morning. It had been at the joint request of the mother and father. A representative of Leyne had faxed through the confirmation to Tynan’s office this morning.
“The blood alcohol will be done by three or so, I imagine,” said Donavan. “If you have the queue jumped. As per your routine fashion.”
“Thanks, Pierce,” said Minogue. He looked down at his notes again.
“Do you be over Glencree much still?”
“Most Sundays,” said Minogue. “More, now the autumn is here.”
“Do you suffer company?”
Minogue managed a smile.
“Stop off at the house, can’t you. We’ll take the one car up.”
“Do you hear me arguing? Remember me to Kathleen.”
CHAPTER 6
Malone jammed second gear as he sped away from the lights. He accelerated hard on the motorway.
“You know what gets to me?” he said to Minogue. “Like, really gets to me?”
“Tell me, why don’t you.”
“It’s when they’re finished. I swear to God, man. I can take the face being pulled back down; I can. The brain flopping around on the table even.”
Malone glanced over at the inspector.
“It’s when they tie up the bag.”
“The bag,” Minogue said.
“With the stuff inside it. The organs, like? They shove things back in, inside the rib cage. Now that’s what really gets me. Know what I’m saying?”
Nowharamsane. Minogue yawned. He’d been counting: seventeen APF officers on the roster. A couple of hundred staff. Cleaners, baggage handlers, drivers. Maintenance, delivery people, bottle washers. Shop assistants, pilots, stewardesses. Passengers, passengers’ families saying good-bye to passengers. Passengers’ families saying hello to passengers. Sheehy’d need twenty officers to make a dent in this.
“Reminds me of well, you know. The Christmas? A turkey or something. Sick, isn’t it?”
Minogue followed a plane’s approach out over the sea. The plane seemed to hover there over Howth. A holding pattern.
“But you have to hand it to him,” said Malone. “An art. That’s what it is.”
The flaps down, Minogue thought, and the wheels were claws searching for a place to perch. Fifty, sixty tons, were they? Jesus. All in the space of a lifetime, this stuff too. Neither his father nor his mother had been inside a plane.
“And the size of the needle, but,” Malone said and began pulling at an eyebrow.
Minogue shifted to get his notebook out. He had the phone open when it rang. It was Tony O’Leary. The family was flying in from the States very shortly.
“It’s Leyne’s jet they’re coming in on,” said O’Leary. “Boss wants to know how you stand on it.”
Minogue looked out at the broken lines of the motorway rushing by them. As if O’Leary didn’t know.
“Strangely enough, Tony, we were on the way to the airport.”
“He’s tied up until after four. He wants you to represent him.”
“Haven’t you phoned Lawlor? He could do that handy enough.”
“Says will you phone him if you can’t.”
Minogue let a few moments go by
“The mother and Leyne, is it?”
“That’s it. Probably a few people with them. Justice is sending Declan King.”
Assistant minister for Justice, King was an ex-Guard turned barrister. King had been dubbed King Declan by Kilmartin in disdainful, edgy regard for King’s talents as the minister’s principal arm-twister for Gardai. An intense pain in the face, Kilmartin avowed.
“And wants you to brief Leyne,” O’Leary added “Within reason.”
The Nissan leaned in hard on the bend. Minogue realized that he was squeezing the phone hard against his ear.
“Give me a minute there, Tony,” he managed, and muffled the receiver.
He turned to Malone.
“Take it handy for the love of God, man. And pull in after the roundabout. We might be changing the menu here.”
He took his hand off the phone.
“Let me see if I have this right, Tony. The commissioner of the Gardai wants me to brief Leyne on a murder investigation that’s hardly gotten started?”
“That’s what he wanted.”
O’Leary must have been holding his breath too.
“Leyne is an American, zillionaire frozen food tycoon and I am a Garda inspector ”
“He says he’ll let you in on the thing soon’s he can.”
“Where do we take him? In town I mean ”
“There’s a press conference set for the Shelbourne Hotel.”
A press conference, Minogue thought. “ I can’t be running around like an iijit, chaperoning some fella,” he said “I have to break this case right away. It’s speed now, at this stage. He knows that I can’t be running around the city like an iijit. Tell him that, will you.”