“No,” he said after several moments’ thought. “She’d be just notifying me as a courtesy now, not asking me. We’re civil servants and all, but it’s more like a, well, a crowd of academics really. Aoife’d decide on leave and such, like.”
“Traveling on her own?” Minogue tried.
“Well now. I really don’t know.”
“‘I’m going to Portugal’ or ‘We’re going to Portugal’?”
Garland scratched under his chm.
“No, no,” he said slowly. “I’m afraid not. No… Now, is this connected with this American that you were looking for, the man who was found the other day?”
Minogue nodded. The coffee arrived in a small cup. He glanced up at the waitress. Was there something else, she asked. A bigger cup, a lot less jazz on the speakers, windows. A pint; at home with a book. He smiled and shook his head.
“Now I’m worried,” said Garland. “What can I do here, what can we do?”
“Sorry, Mr. Garland. Sean. We’ve been in touch with others about Ms. Hartnett’s whereabouts. She has or had a sometimes boyfriend, and a sister here in Dublin. The sister thought she was going with a gang from work, a girls’ week type of thing. That’s what she told her. So here we are. Do you and she work together on a daily basis, now?”
Garland’s frown deepened.
“No, not every day at all,” he said. “But we’d be bumping into one another pretty well every day. Aoife headed up project teams with the OPW. We have regular meetings and consultations. Now, it’s very informal too, of course.”
“The Office of Public Works, is it?”
“Yes, sorry. We work very closely with their Historic Properties section there. That’s their National Monuments Department.”
“The last time being…?”
“Thursday, I think — yes, Thursday. I thought back after you phoned. I left the office at lunchtime. She was going off to lunch as well. Aoife had been meeting with people to do with an interpretive center.”
He glanced down at Minogue’s notebook.
“After one,” he added. “I remember. ‘How”d it go,’ I asked her ‘Great,’ she said.”
“She left alone?”
“So far as I know yes. I was talking to someone. Des McNally, yes. Out in the hall by the stairs, and she went by.”
Minogue wrote two ls for McNally.
“We do be flexible in this environment,” said Garland. “Everyone works hard. There’d be stress at certain times, of course, like any other…”
He returned Minogue’s skeptical gaze. Then he gave a short laugh.
“Stress you’re thinking — in a museum? Not like your work now, but…”
The missed sleep, the late-night calls, Minogue thought. The hunkering over a corpse, for hours sometimes, the ever new bafflement and disgust, the moment of truth for families and lovers.
“Ms.. Hartnett’s in a high-pressure job, do you mean?”
“Well no, not exactly. She’s an assistant curator. She has responsibilities for several key parts of heritage. There’s an awful lot going on these days.”
Minogue leaned in over his cup. A couple was steered to the adjacent table.
“Tell me what that means in her case, will you?”
Garland put on a puzzled expression
“I’m not sure now that this is where we should be going, now, er, Matt.”
Minogue let the pause linger. He knew Malone would be giving Garland the look. That quiet barrage of indirect scrutiny, the restrained irritation, the aggressive indifference of a seasoned Garda to the fate of anyone who tried to bollock him usually had the desired effect. He lifted his cup and looked around the restaurant. Not bad at all, at all, the coffee. He watched Colm Tierney finish a glass of wine. Ireland’s disappeared, he thought. Had it now.
“What I mean,” Garland said then, “is that of course I’ll be very glad to help out in any way I can.”
“I’m much obliged, Sean,” he managed. Garland sighed.
“I’m not comfortable discussing a colleague’s professional life,” he said.
Minogue watched Malone poke gently at the edge of his eyelid.
“Maybe I’ve given you the wrong impression here now, meeting here with a bit of socializing going on. I forget sometimes, you know. We tend to, well you can tell, try and stay informal. To someone outside looking in, it might look different.”
Minogue nodded. He looked into his cup.
“Sorry now,” Garland went on. He gathered himself in his seat. Fifteen stone, Minogue was thinking. Was that a hundred kilos?
“But I have to step back into my job and be duly cautious.”
“Don’t be sorry at all,” said Minogue. “Enough said now. At this moment there’s a Guard on his way to Ms. Hartnett’s place to see if we can locate her, now.”
Garland sat back.
“My God,” he whispered. “You mean we have reason to be worried, do we?”
“Well now. This much I can tell you, Sean. We can’t find Ms.. Hartnett on any flight out of Dublin. I’d be most obliged if you were to keep this to yourself, Sean. We need to contact others, her family. It may all turn out to be a misunderstanding. A series of misunderstandings.”
“But Aoife is not under investigation by the Guards, is she?”
“Not a bit of it,” Minogue replied. “Now, you were good enough to phone us about a visit from this man who is the current focus of our investigation. Did you know anything about what he and Ms.. Hartnett discussed with this American?”
Garland adjusted his dickey bow again.
“Well I don’t really,” he said. “It was only after me seeing the picture in the papers that I remembered him. I wonder if Aoife herself knows who he is, sorry, who he was. You see, we get a lot of people and groups and requests coming through the department. An awful lot.”
Garland leaned in over the table.
“Culture and history and heritage, they’re all very hot issues now. We’re answerable for a lot more than digging up an oul pot and putting it in a glass case for a busload of schoolchildren to gawk at now. The way histories are handled and researched and presented is all very contentious.”
“There’s more than one history now?”
Garland gave Minogue the eye in return.
“Oh there’s a right can of worms there. There are any number of people and interest groups and the like — stakeholders, they call them — in heritage now. That’s a side of the job that takes a lot of time and training. It takes delicate enough management by times, I can tell you. I have three staff with MBAS, even.”
“So you’re busy, then,” said Minogue. “Inquires, visitors, conferences?”
“All that and more, to be sure.”
“Would Ms.. Hartnett have discussed the visit with anyone else at the office? The American, I mean. Mr. Shaughnessy. She kept notes maybe?”
Garland looked up at a recessed light for several moments.
“To tell you the God’s honest truth, I’ve no idea. Aoife’s very organized. She’d probably have a note if there was something to it. She’d certainly have come to me if there were prospects from this thing, this meeting. But she’s a fierce busy person. She’s project leader on a big site plan that’s moving ahead fast.”
“Which, now?”
“The Carra Fields, out in Mayo.”
Minogue knew that Malone had heard too.
“There was an opening of an exhibition about that recently?”
“There was indeed,” said Garland. “With all the plans and models for the interpretive center laid out. Marvelous. It rewrites a lot of history, so it does.”
Minogue met Malone’s eyes for a moment.
“I’ve a colleague who’d like to persuade me that Mayo people are civilized.”
“Well now he’s got you,” said Garland. “Stone Age people — late enough on in the Stone Age, to be sure. There were thousands of them — a huge cleared enclosure, with grazing and crops. And a big surprise was that there were no fortifications or the like. All of them living a grand existence without the rowing and beating one another we have later. Can you imagine?”
“Very civilized,” said Minogue. “For Mayo. A Garden of Eden.”
“Oh, I could go on and on,” said Garland “It’s excited a lot of interest in Europe. It’s the most important site since, well, we know what happened at Mullaghmore.”