Malone flipped back a page in his notebook. She glared over at him.
“He’s my alibi. Isn’t that the word? So’s I don’t have to keep on telling yous I didn’t do it?”
Malone looked up from his notebook. She returned his glare with a studied pout.
“Try to think, now, Patricia,” said Minogue. “There must have been people phoning the flat or coming around looking for her. Family, friends-anyone.”
She looked up at the lampshade.
“Look,” she said. “Mary told me that the last people she’d want calling around would be family. She told me she had no brothers or sisters. She said her oul lad was a bastard. She wasn’t keen to talk about her ma. I thought it was kind of, you know, strange, like. But I wasn’t going to be nosy like, was I? She wanted her own life, fair enough, like. That a crime?”
She dabbed her cigarette in the ashtray and then held it under her thumb. Minogue let his cheeks balloon with a held breath. He imagined questions floating around trapped in his mouth. How did she know? What else did she know? What was she leaving out?
“Well, there was one iijit,” she murmured as she released her thumb from the cigarette. “Yeah, now I remember… I mean, I don’t know if he’s…”
“Who?”
“Just a, well, Mary called him a gobshite. I don’t even know his real name. He showed up at the door once. She answered, that’s why I forgot until now. Yeah. Skinny fella. What’s that artist’s name, the famous one, he’s dead? Leo… Really famous, like?”
“Leonardo da Vinci?”
“Yeah.”
“A fella called for Mary,” said Malone. “A fella by the name of Leonardo da Vinci?”
“What are you looking at? I told you I didn’t know his name. Mary said she knew him years ago. He must have found out where she lived. Scruffy-looking type. No wonder she wasn’t keen on hanging around the likes of him.”
“Scruffy-looking,” said Malone. “Skinny fella? What else about him?”
“Average height. Got the feeling off him he thought he was something, but he wasn’t. A gobshite. Wouldn’t be surprised if he was into something, you know.”
“Criminal?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he stay over at the flat?” Malone asked.
“It was Mary answered the door. She was pissed-off he was there. I came back later on and he was gone. So was she.”
“Not what you thought of as her boyfriend then,” said Minogue. She shrugged.
“Said that he was a gobshite, didn’t she?”
The air seemed almost watery now. Minogue moved to the edge of the chair and tested his biro on a page of his notebook.
“To your knowledge, Patricia, did Mary take drugs?”
Instead of the sarcasm he expected, Minogue’s question drew silence. He looked up from the notebook. She was staring at the ashtray and biting her lip.
“Okay, Patricia,” he said. “We’ll finish off here for now. Think back more to this Leonardo da Vinci. When he came to the flat, a bit more on what he looked like?”
She glanced from Minogue to Malone and back, but her eyes were blank.
The air was still full of dust and glare. The sun’s orb seemed to have broadened. The Inspector hoped that somewhere behind this tarnished air there was a more proper blue than Dublin was stuck with today. His aches had localized themselves to his neck and shoulders. Malone’s hair stood out in slick bristles. He finessed his way through the hordes spilling out off the paths by O’Connell Bridge and let the Nissan find its way down the quays toward Kingsbridge.
“I dunno,” he said. “I can’t tell. Is it shock or is she just plain scared shitless?”
“Well, there was no point in trying to come the heavy.”
“I just couldn’t figure out how much she was lying. I mean, I’m not totally down on her, like. The Egans are animals.”
“Being pregnant,” said Minogue.
“What?”
“Being pregnant. That was the fuse lit, I’m thinking.”
Malone looked over.
“Tried to get the father to wear it and he wouldn’t?”
“Maybe, yes.”
“So she laid it on the line for him, he loses the head and clocks her? I wonder how many fellas Mary had on the go.”
“Well, maybe we’ll know quicker than we thought. This Liam Hickey that Eilis got from the alias search looks good. He grew up two roads over from Mary. We’ll know better when we get back to the Squad.”
Minogue let his eyes sweep along the buildings and the derelict sites turned car-parks along the Liffey Quays. Cheap furniture from hucksters’ shopfronts cluttered the path. He had a hard time remembering what had preceded the rash of boarded-up buildings awaiting demolition. For every tarted-up pub and pastiche of Georgian facades, there was a half-dozen scutty shops flogging junk. Grime, noise, carelessness. They passed Capel Street bridge and the Inspector saw that the tide on the Liffey was beginning to ebb. Soon the people lined up along the quays for their buses home would have the slimy walls of the Liffey banks and the mantle of lumpy masses to either side of the riverbed for company.
The Four Courts, which hid behind its stately facade much of the drab bulk of the State’s legal apparatus, slid by the two policemen. With its legions of barristers and solicitors and hard-faced, chain-smoking defendants and their families awaiting their turn in court, the place had always depressed the hell out of Minogue. Though rebuilt after its almost complete devastation during the Civil War, its echoing warren of hallways and rooms smelled of futility from the first day Minogue stepped into a courtroom there. People got lost in there, he believed, and not just criminals either. He didn’t want to be one of them.
The Nissan slowed for roadworks. In an alley next to a locked and boarded church whose name he couldn’t remember, Minogue spotted a man and a woman swaying and arguing. Both had red, swollen faces and tousled hair. Two bottles stood next to them on the footpath. If he hits her, Minogue thought, they’d have to get out. Couldn’t avoid it. Malone was talking.
“Sorry, Tommy?”
“I know Patricia Fahy has no record, but do you want to bet she’s on the game too?”
Minogue shrugged.
“Doyle can’t help us much there, he says.”
Mary Mullen had been pregnant. Pressure on her, a countdown, running out of time. How much did an abortion cost? Did she want one? Some ultimatum, he thought. Blackmail? Her flat had been trashed. An address book, an appointment book. Did anyone write love letters these days? Photos, mementos, letters. Leonardo da Vinci, someone she’d known growing up. Also connected to the Egans?
Malone inched the car by the yellow and white oil drums. They had a free run to the Squad car-park. Kilmartin was writing on the notice-boards. Minogue stood back and studied them. The timetable for the last week of Mary Mullen’s life was in Murtagh style: bright green and red. Minogue felt something drop in his stomach when he saw the blank spaces. He rubbed his head and looked again.
“Anything?” barked Kilmartin.
“Nothing that’d matter right now. Any news on this Leonardo Hickey fella?”
“A car dispatched to the house. He’s not home. I have his record here in front of me. A proper little shite, so he is. Break and enter, possession of stolen property. Drunk and disorderly-he was in a crowd that wrecked a patrol car outside a pub three years ago.”
“What’s under ‘Associates’?”
“Nothing, oul stock.”
“Nothing?”
“Divil damn the bit. Hickey is a fifteen-watt gouger. But you never know.”
“Give us some good news, can’t you? Any yield on the canal bank stuff yet?”
“Four hundred and fifty two tons of shit, six thousand tons of-”
“All right, Jim. I get the idea. What about Mullen’s taxi?”
“Shag-all. Yet. They’re still swabbing and poking it. Don’t hold your breath, I say. That’s why I started the door-to-door already. Murtagh is up to his neck building up likelies from the files. There was a fella released the day before, finished a sentence for rape. He’s chasing that one this very minute.”