“No fix yet on whether Mary worked after quitting the Tresses place?”
“Wouldn’t I tell you if there was?”
Minogue squeezed the bridge of his nose.
“Well, what about this Egan thing?”
“Christ, the questions being fired at me! Amn’t I after telling you that I talked to Mick Hand in Serious Crimes? We know her there, says he. She used to come and go with one of the Egans. So I try to finagle the latest surveillance they have on the Egans, see if we can place her for the last while. They’re still looking. Some of the stuff is not in the computer yet. ‘We’re a bit behind in the updates, Jim,’ says he. ‘Volume of stuff,’ etcetera. Sure, says I. The old story: we’ll milk our own cows. Anyway. He’ll have them done up and copied for us by the morning. He’ll bring them along to our pow-wow.”
Minogue flopped into a chair. Kilmartin jammed the cap on his marker and threw it toward Murtagh’s desk. All watched it skitter across the desktop and fall to the floor.
“Christ,” said the Chief Inspector. He cocked his head and looked at Malone.
“Don’t you love it, Molly? No witnesses. Nobody saw anything, heard anything. And this is a high-traffic area in the middle of Dublin! Gurriers broke all the bloody lights by the banks. Only we know the locks are closed, we’d be faced with the bloody prospect that she went in anywhere along the canal, back up to Crumlin or somewhere- Christ, the River Shannon even! We don’t know where the hell this Mary Mullen spent her time. We don’t know for certain where she was killed, even. Did she have a falling-out with her fella? How the hell do we know she even had a fella? Her own father and mother hardly knew her this last few years.”
Malone shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall.
“Come on, lads, for God’s sake,” said Kilmartin. “A whole heap of rubbish, a filthy scene, no sign of a weapon, a girl with a record, a family that fights like cats and dogs…”
Minogue stretched out his legs. Kilmartin turned toward him.
“What about this flatmate? Surely to God she knows more about the bloody person she was living with. Didn’t they have friends in common? Is this Fahy one on the game too and only letting on? Logic now, lads, logic! Almighty God, can’t Doyle and the rest of them in Vice come up with more? Matt?”
“We’re not happy with Ms. Fahy,” said Minogue. “We’ll be talking to her again.”
“Okay. But what happened to Mary Mullen? Come on. Save me a headache here. What’s going on at all?”
Minogue eyed his colleague. “Right off the top of me head?”
“Where else?”
“In front of the new boy?”
“God between us and all harm! Go on. I’ll protect you.”
“Why was Mary at the canal at all?” Minogue asked. “To my mind, she shouldn’t have been there.”
“What do you mean? Chance? Bad luck? The canal’s just a place to dump her? Egans, you’re thinking? A row?”
“All of the above. Maybe.”
Malone scratched at the back of his head, cleared his throat and glanced at Minogue.
“Someone breaking into the flat is a bit too much of a coincidence,” he said. “Maybe she had something she shouldn’t have had. Something belonging to someone else.”
“Drugs?” asked Kilmartin. “A loan? Was she in hock and she couldn’t pay?”
“That might be why she tried to work the canal that night,” said Minogue. “A payment to keep someone off her back, maybe?”
“She’s no good dead,” said Malone. “To a shark, like.”
He began patting his crew-cut. He sensed Kilmartin’s eyes on him and stopped.
“She messed up on something, you’re saying?” Malone nodded.
Kilmartin turned away, stretched and groaned.
“God now, Molly, if you didn’t go to school here, you met the scholars coming home. Our Mary Mullen is gone down the glen and someone’s after sending her. She had more than this Fahy kid for a friend. And they didn’t just sell Tupperware, lads. Let’s get serious about this now.”
SEVEN
An aging Ford Fiesta was parked in the Minogues’ driveway. The Inspector eyed the rusting paint by the wheel-wells before he reversed out onto the road. The laughter from the back garden was his daughter’s. He stopped at the end of the garage wall and listened.
“Ah, Ma!” Iseult hooted. “He will!”
“He might,” was Kathleen’s reply. “You know how it is with him.”
“Da! You’re surrounded. Come out where we can see you! With your hands up!”
How had she known he was there? He glanced down at the pathway ahead: shadow, yes.
Pat the Brain and Iseult were sitting by the wisteria which had taken over the back of the coal-shed. Kathleen sat across from them in a deck-chair. Her hand was at her face. The grass was crunchy underfoot. He must water it tonight.
“You can put your hands down now,” Iseult said. “What’s in the envelope?”
“It’s a case about a black Fiesta used in the abduction of someone’s daughter.”
He made a curtsy toward Kathleen and winked at his daughter’s fella.
“Howiya since, Pat.”
Tea things were all over the garden table but, God help him, no wine in evidence.
“Jim Kilmartin maintains the heat is another grant thrown into the national begging bowl by the European Parliament. Should have kept our own independent weather, says he.”
Pat smiled. Minogue tried to figure out what was different about Pat this evening. The t-shirt still hung off his bony shoulders, the hair was as unruly as ever, but the face had changed. Iseult was looking down at the grass not far from where she had discarded her sandals. She was smiling at some secret joke. Would this one sting? A wary, off-duty Garda Inspector looked from face to face.
“Ye’re ornaments to the garden, all of ye.”
“Go way out of that,” said Iseult.
Minogue looked at the cups and plates.
“I must say now that I am of an age and humour where I’m interested in a glass of something more bracing than, em, tea. Who’ll court a bit of divilment with me? ”
No one answered.
“Pat? Red or white?”
“Well…”
“What’s holding us back here, lads?”
Kathleen had folded her arms. She seemed to be very interested in the apple trees. Iseult smiled again. He made a face at her and sat down.
“All right. Congratulations, then. It’ll cost you though.”
Kathleen started. She sat up and stared at her husband. Iseult began to laugh.
“Black Beauty out the front, I meant,” he said. “The highway robbery of tax and insurance and petrol prices and… What do you think I meant?”
Pat’s bashful look awakened something in him.
“Iseult,” said Minogue. He kept his eyes on hers. It seemed harder to breathe now.
“Is there something I should be let in on? Or am I supposed to go on looking stupid, is it?”
She threw her head back. Her black hair whipped back and settled. She hugged her stomach while she laughed.
“Well, Iseult,” he muttered. “Is it what I think it is?”
She recovered enough to nod her head twice. He glanced at her teeth and her bobbing throat. She rubbed tears from the corners of her eyes.
“Da, you’re a howl! I told them you’d know! I bet Pat a fiver you’d cop on.”
Minogue looked over at Pat the Brain. This was something which only happened on iijity television shows. So this was one of life’s moments, something which was already absorbed into family stories: Will you ever forget the evening Iseult… Remember that hot summer, when…? Something was passing, he knew, and it would never return. How was he supposed to react? Pat looked over and smiled. Nice lad, Pat, thought Minogue. Gentle, dry humour. A bit bookish, but his own man. He looked around the garden and thought of the photos Kathleen looked at more often now. Iseult in her First Holy Communion dress, Iseult’s graduation pictures. Iseult on a beach somewhere in Turkey.
The sun was behind the trees now. Dulled by the haze, it made the leaves shine and even glow at the edges. Nothing moved in the garden. A grasshopper took Minogue’s attention from the birds. He had put in the apple trees when Kathleen was pregnant with Daithi. The rockery with the pirated wildflowers from the Burren in Clare had taken him three years of intermittent, pleasurable work a decade ago. His eyes strayed from rock to rock, plant to plant. He had intended to reform it, recast it sometime, but something in him had resisted. His eyes began to sting.