“The hairs you’re talking about,” said Murtagh. “Emerald gave me a list of customers they’d rented the Escort to. The car’s only six months old. There’s a total of eleven separate contracts on it, all of them tourists. Holland, the States. Germany. Some of the staff at Emerald are allowed to take the cars home too. And there’s delivery drivers and cleaners too.”
Minogue read down the inventory again. Michelin was misspelled.
“So far the wallet and the passport,” he said. “Camera, video camera — did he declare stuff on arrival?”
Murtagh shook his head.
“Nothing, but it’ll take a final search tomorrow at Customs to make sure.”
“Any start on a Bord Failte office, John? Visitor’s books?”
Murtagh bit his lip and scribbled on his notepad.
“I’ll start right after. Slipped my mind.”
“He wasn’t packing much for a jet-setter,” said Malone. “Four shirts, including what he had on when he was killed. Jeans, two other pairs of pants. Shoes, well three pairs.”
There was no booze in the car. Shaughnessy smoked. There were wrappers from bars of chocolate, two empty Pepsi cans, fragments of crisps, apple cores. They found paper hankies, the inside of an Irish Times. He studied the list of books and maps again. Two all-Ireland road maps but no marks on them. An ordinance survey for Donegal with a stamp on it from a shop in Donegal town. Life in Early Ireland by Professor Sean O’Tuama. Hardly meant drunken nightclub louts wavering in the middle of the street at 3 A.M.
A Bord Failte accommodations book had been folded open at Donegal. There were two national monuments and sites books. Minogue had spotted one of the titles browsing in the Official Publications office on Molesworth Street himself and wondered if anybody ever bought them. Land and People in Early Christian Ireland. A dictionary of Irish place-names. Had Shaughnessy written postcards? Minogue blew his nose as quietly as he could.
“Eimear,” he said then. “Are ye finished with the books? Prints, I mean ”
She told him they’d need another day at least to fluoroscope all the books. He’d loved Ireland, the mother had said; had thought of moving here.
“Ah ye’re great, Eimear,” he said. “Now I know it’s early, but maybe ye had something on placing the car at all? Those plastic shopping bags in the boot?”
They were generic to the shopping chain all over the country.
“Shit,” said Malone.
She’d already sent one receipt found in a bag to a man in the head office of Powers supermarkets to locate the shop. It was dated for two weeks ago.
Minogue leafed through the shots of the boot again.
“The damage to the car — John, did you phone Emerald on that?”
“I did. It’s news to them. They have no record from previous rentals.”
“What broke the panel over the spare wheel? Because he traveled light…?”
Sheehy cleared his throat.
“I’d be thinking I put the two things on the same line. The bang on the bottom of the car and the broken panel there over the spare wheel.”
“What,” said Malone. “You mean a big load in the back, and that broke it?”
“Going over a good-sized bump, and you with a load in the back, sure you’d give it a right good belt, so you would.”
“A boreen, are you saying, Fergal?”
“I am. And if you didn’t know the road. And if it was nighttime…”
“And if you were pissed,” said Malone.
Murtagh tapped on his watch. It was three minutes to six. Minogue nodded.
Murtagh rose and wheeled in Kilmartin’s Trinitron. Minogue asked Eimear about the hair from the comb. He received approximately the answer he expected. It was pretty well useless until more hair from the same person was had. Minogue thanked her. Did she want to hang around and see whatever they’d put in from the press conference? She declined and asked for squad autographs instead. Malone told her about the Works stuck at the airport, the autograph for his ma. Sheehy offered her an overused Northsider joke about a marriage proposal. Eimear Kelly, a champion middle-distance runner for Dublin, starting with her primary school days in Finglas, asked Sheehy if Kerry people had learned to cook their food yet. Malone opined that he’d heard Kerry people hadn’t even finessed it to killing their food before they started chewing it.
Sheehy affected to be stoical and even gently sage about Dubliners. He stroked his lip, sighed, and started on the airport details. There were twenty-something — wait, twenty-three — vehicles still in the car park checked in the same time or before Shaughnessy’s. There was no way to pin Shaughnessy’s car to a time until all the others had been claimed.
“People actually leave their cars in a car park in the airport for days on end?” Malone asked.
“Gas, isn’t it,” said Sheehy. “The most of them are only a few days, but it’s getting popular.”
“If he was done outside and then the car was parked at the airport,” said Malone, “then someone had enough of a cool head to dust the shagging trail by taking the ticket from the car.”
“Or a clean-up man after the event,” said Minogue.
Murtagh turned up the volume. The first shot of the news item was of the whole table. A voice-over introduced Mrs. Shaughnessy and played the last of her words. A tear glittered but didn’t run.
“Here, look,” said Malone when Minogue came on. “You’re baldier than I thought you were, er, boss ”
The next shot was of Tynan. It was prefaced by a remark that the Gardai needed the help of the public. The Garda commissioner stared out at the viewers as he spoke. The Iceman indeed, thought Minogue. The help-line number appeared on the screen. Then the newscast veered off to a civil war in Africa.
A phone was ringing already. Murtagh lifted it and waved it at Minogue.
“You’re on the telly,” said Iseult.
“You’re in the paper,” he said “A paper, anyway.”
“Looked quite extinguished I’d have to say,” she said. “Tie done up, the hair combed.”
Minogue’s head had began to feel very heavy.
“Thanks for the slagging now,” he said. “I don’t get half enough on the job.”
“Ah grow up,” said his daughter. “Has Ma seen the Neighbors thing yet?”
He watched Sheehy pointing to the entry to the car park on the map of the airport. Eastlands, they called it. They christened car parks now?
“I don’t think so, love. Why don’t you phone her, find out?”
“Ah, I couldn’t. That’d be showing off!”
“Better you explain it before she sees it cold herself.”
“What do you mean, ‘cold’? And this ‘explain’ bit?”
“Well phone her up and do whatever gostering and the like you want.”
“I thought you were beyond that kind of thing. Since when does art need to be — ah, now I get it. She’s going to think it has to do with…”
“That’s right. Think it over, now. I have to go. We expect to be busy. People phoning like.”
“Oh the brush-off now, is it? Well I’ve me own things to do, you know.”
Minogue pushed his fingertips hard into his temples. Touchy, he’d forgotten.
“We’ll talk later, can we, love? You’re taking everything handy now, I hope?”
“It’s not a disease, Da. You’re like Pat. ‘Sit down, dear I’ll do that, dear.’”
The inspector squashed the urge to ask about Pat, how his lectures were going. Iseult’s husband lectured three days a week in Limerick. Kathleen had been sharply rebuffed again the other day with her inquiries. She had been petrified to learn from Iseult herself that she, seven months pregnant, had been waist high in the sea by Killiney one evening recently. What in the name of God did she do that for? Wasn’t it cold, wasn’t the water dirty, couldn’t she have lost her footing even with Orla there? Didn’t she know how dangerous the tides were there? Iseult had cut her off. Didn’t Kathleen know about intrauterine intelligence? That babies learn so much in the womb? Imprinting? That they respond to music and talk?
Minogue remembered Kathleen trying to understand what Iseult was saying. He had turned up to a lunch date with Iseult to find her sound asleep on a seat in a great hall in the National Gallery. She was sprawled under an enormous picture, with a guide tiptoeing up and down next to her. Imprinting, she told him while she ate a meal bigger than his: her baby would feel the beauty she felt. A piano recital at the opening of a Cubist exhibition was proof, she told him. She’d never felt him — or her — move around so much.