“Mary was on the game, wasn’t she? Maybe that was it. I don’t know.”
“What about you, Patricia?”
“What about me, what? You’d know if I was. Same way you’d know Mary was, wouldn’t you?”
“We’re not here to make speeches, Patricia,” said Minogue. “We need to know Mary so’s we can find out what happened to her. Don’t you want whoever did this to get caught?”
She frowned behind a ball of smoke.
“I can’t get over it,” she murmured. “Your brother. Jesus! One’s the cop and the other’s the-”
Malone ran his fingers through his hair.
“What’s the use in giving us the run-around,” he said.
“Who pimped for Mary, Patricia?” asked Minogue.
Her mouth stayed open for several seconds. She rolled her eyes and looked away.
“Who broke into your place?” Malone asked.
“You’re asking me? Amn’t I supposed to be asking you that?”
Only her arm moved, Minogue saw, and its arc up to her lips was of such grace and careless accuracy that he could only stare at her. He sat forward and ran his palm across the soft, loose skin on the knuckles of his other hand. Damn, he thought. She thinks she’s a bloody ingenue doing an audition for something. Would she be giving him as much grief if he had taken her down to CDU? He turned his hand over and began rubbing at the palm with his thumb. Tiny flecks of dirt escaped the folds of skin and collected in rolls. He didn’t look up when he spoke to her.
“Listen, Patricia. We’re trying to work from the inside out here. Mary, her friends, what she did, where she liked to go. What she did or didn’t do that might be connected to what has happened. It’s a lot of stuff. Stuff you might know but you mightn’t think is important. Do you know what I’m getting at?”
He glanced over. Her eyes had glazed over. She drew on her cigarette. He thought of giving up then. Here was a woman with no criminal record being a substantial pain in the arse to the Guards.
“People know a lot,” he heard himself say. “They really do. They notice an awful lot, but they need to know something is important before they can drag it out of their memory. You can’t beat it out of people either. Things pop up and you can’t predict them: ‘Yes, she used to do that!’ or ‘Oh, that was the name of the fella she mentioned that night.’ There’s another way that’s less salubrious entirely.”
“Is this the good cop-bad cop bit now?”
Minogue thought of Kilmartin.
“We work from the outside in too, Patricia. It’s like cracking an egg. We go after records, suspects, associates. It’s a bit like crowbarring into somebody’s life, looking all the time for the killer.”
He engaged her look. She blinked once.
“But it gets people’s backs up, Patricia.”
Malone’s mouth twitched and he caught the Inspector’s eye. Minogue rubbed his palm again.
“Cracking the egg often works though,” he went on. “But it takes time. Sometimes the inside of the egg isn’t hardboiled so it gets messy. Sometimes the egg gets ruined. Ends up on the floor.”
“Eggs,” she murmured. “I don’t like eggs.”
“Did Mary seem out of sorts at all the last while?” asked Malone. “Worried, like?”
“I heard her getting sick last week. She said it was the gargle. She’d been out the night before.”
“With who?”
“I dunno.”
Malone’s eyes had narrowed to slits. He was staring at her.
“I fucking don’t!” she cried. “I keep on telling you! ‘Who was her boyfriend?’ ‘Who called to the flat for her?’ ‘Who’d she hang around with?’ ‘Why didn’t she talk to you about her life?’ Jesus!”
“You never knew where she went, what pub or who with?” asked Malone. “Ah, come on now.”
“Ah, come on yourself! Don’t you get it? I don’t fucking know!”
Minogue waited for her to lean back against the counter.
“Okay, Patricia. You saw her last yesterday morning. She was in the kitchen?”
“Just before eight o’clock, yeah. I was up late.”
“And you said she hadn’t been to bed.”
“That’s right. She was just sitting there at the table. Smoking a fag, drinking a cup of tea. Didn’t hear her coming in. She was still dressed from the night before.”
“How’d she look again?”
“Tired, that’s how. Looked like she’d been up all night. Shagged.”
“No remarks about where she’d been, nothing like that?” Malone tried.
“Nothing. Nothing. I knew better than to ask.”
Minogue stretched out his legs.
“Patricia. You’re telling us that Mary kept to herself-”
“You don’t believe me, do you. You’re thinking, ‘Well, the pair of them were into something, so that’s why she won’t tell us anything.’! Aren’t you? Yes, y’are!”
Minogue took in the red-rimmed eyes, the blotchy face. She pursed her lips and lifted her cigarette.
“How long did you share the place with her?”
“A year and a bit.”
“Where did she live before she moved in with you?”
“I don’t know. Some fella maybe.”
“A fella? Did she ever say his name?”
“I don’t know! I’m only guessing, that’s all! Jesus! Do you think I used to come home here and start firing questions at her the minute she walked in the door? Sure, she was hardly home, ever.”
“How long did you know Mary then?”
“Two years, about. I met her doing a thing for manicuring. She was always good for a laugh. Used to see her the odd time after that. Then about a year and a half back I bumped into her in a pub.”
“What pub?”
She curled her lip.
“I don’t remember. What do you think I am, a computer?”
“You went into a flat with her,” Minogue said.
“So? She didn’t tell me her life story.”
“You knew she worked the trade though,” said Malone. “How?”
“I found out one night, didn’t I. Met someone. We were talking about people we knew. The usual chatting. I mention Mary and he goes, ‘Is she still at it?’ So I ask her later. She got mad at me.”
“What did she say?”
“‘What’s wrong with getting money for it?’ ”
“Freelance, like?” Malone asked.
“I don’t know.”
“With the Egans?”
Minogue didn’t get the outburst he expected. She folded her arms and waved the cigarette around.
“Look. All I know about them is that she knew one of them. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” repeated Malone. “Why should the person who did this get away with it, Patricia? You’re helping them.”
“No, I amn’t.”
“You’re scared,” said Malone. “And it shows. Just like your da.”
“Drop dead. What do you know about anything?”
“Mary was your friend, wasn’t she?” said Minogue. She pushed off suddenly from the counter.
“I told her, and I told her!” she burst out. “She didn’t listen! She wouldn’t!”
“Wouldn’t what, Patricia?”
“Ah, Christ, I don’t know! That’s the problem! Can’t you get it through your thick skulls? She wouldn’t tell me! She had all these secrets. I warned her.”
“About what?”
She settled back against the counter and looked out the window.
“So Mary was still on the game,” said Malone.
“I don’t know. I suppose she was. Maybe she wasn’t. I don’t know.”
“She had no pimp, you seem to be telling us,” said Minogue. “But you were warning her against something. Was it people you saw back at the flat, people she told you about? People you heard about?”
“She used the flat as a place to hang her clothes,” she said. “So don’t be asking me again where she spent her time. All I know for sure is that Mary did manicures over at Tresses. There were times I wouldn’t see her for days. A week, even. I was getting tired of it, I tell you. I didn’t like being there on me own. That wasn’t the idea, like.”
An image came to Minogue: Patricia Fahy poking around amongst Mary’s stuff.
“Of moving in together, like?”
“Yeah. It worked out okay, splitting the cost and everything. But you’d want company, you know? I went out with me fella just to have company sometimes.”