Islandbridge (26 page)

“I was at his funeral. Is that what you're asking?”

Blake returned a cool stare of his own.

“So you know the circumstances that led to his unfortunate death?”

Minogue nodded.

“Did you make any connection, or even wonder about one perhaps, with Mr. Lawless and the late Mr. Malone? Mr. Terence Malone?”

“I suppose I might have,” said Minogue. “Fleetingly, can I say?”

“Fleetingly?”

“Lawless is, or was, an addict, wasn't he? Father Coughlin's group thing?”

Tynan sat up abruptly.

“Eamonn,” he said. “I wonder if I might ask you to give us a minute here, please?”

Blake showed no surprise at the request, and he rose and took his cup of coffee with him. They had prearranged this session, the pair of them, Minogue was sure now.

Tynan waited for Blake to close the door.

“I have to go in a minute,” he said. “So I'll get to the point here a bit sooner than I would have liked.”

Minogue sat up.

“Well, before you go,” he said, “can I get a word in?”

“Has anyone tried to prevent you getting a word in, up to now?”

“Why is Blake trying to hang something on Tommy Malone?”

“He's asking a question that any policeman would ask,” said Tynan. “It's because we take seriously the fact that a man, an informant, who talks to some policemen in the safety of the church, ends up shot to death soon afterwards. We need to give this a hard look, a very hard look. You can understand that, can't you?”

“But why the eye on Tommy Malone then? It's still basic police work to challenge an informant to repeat what he's saying to another Guard, isn't it?”

“I don't disagree. But Malone should have passed this one upstairs right away.”

With that, Tynan lifted one finger, then another, and slowly he let each one in turn back on the table again.

“But what I want to tell you here is this,” he went on, in a lower voice. “If this murder really does have any bearing on Emmett Condon, then what a number of very skilled, very astute, very experienced Garda, high and low, have been intimating to me on the quiet for some time, is true. When I hear one of them whispering to me that it looks bad, do you know what they mean by ‘bad'?”

Minogue shook his head.

“They're telling me that Garda Condon was a criminal,” Tynan continued. “Pure and simple. That he had gone over. They're also suggesting that he may not have been the only one.”

He fixed Minogue with a glance for several moments.

“Garda Condon's death left a lot of unanswered questions, a lot of damage in his section. In our whole service, in fact. Here was a detective who used unorthodox, and unapproved, methods. ‘Undercover' is one thing, but running your own show is quite another. From what we now know of Garda Condon's last weeks and months, we should have seen a pattern. Poor judgment, impatience. Not documenting his contacts and leads, being out of sight of his colleagues and unit commander for days. His parents have said to me, through their lawyer, I better add, that we were negligent in supervision. We did not take proper care of a Garda detective doing dangerous work in a dangerous environment. That we gave him enough rope, you might say.”

“There are not too many to stand by him,” said Minogue. “Are there?”

“Correct. But now we have Malone coming in sideways with this, and dragging you in with him. And look what's happened.”

“Are you saying, drop the matter?”

“No, I'm not. I'm saying something quite different.”

Minogue felt a slow eddy of excitement work its way up into his chest.

“I am saying that Eamonn Blake and myself are not at all convinced by what's come up to the surface here.”

“That . . . ?”

Tynan nodded.

“That Emmett Condon went to the bad. I'm not saying it won't turn out otherwise. But it seems to me that six months of work on the case should have, could have, turned up at least something not so damning.”

“Too easy, you're saying?”

“It has that feel, all right. I met his wife, his widow. I met his parents. I thought about them for a long, long time. The kind of people they are, how absolutely . . . crushed is the word, I suppose. So I want another look at this. I talked to Eamonn Blake, and he's okay with it.”

“So he'll get someone then.”

“No. You're going to do it.”

Minogue frowned at him.

“You're going to round up Malone and go visit the team who first did the work on Emmett Condon.”

“Malone,” was all Minogue could think to say back to Tynan's stare.

“Malone seems to be able to find people, or leads, in one day. I want to run with that, see how far it can go. So work it through again, see what might have been missed.”

“Treat it as a pending, do the review . . .?”

“That's right. We need to find out if this Lawless story holds any water at all.”

“Well, my head of section will be wondering.”

“Not so much now,” said Tynan, rising from his chair. “I briefed him on it just before we started here.”

Tynan opened his briefcase folder and slid a stapled set of pages over.

“Start with that. Then get Detective Malone to read it.”

Minogue glanced at the PM summary, the State Pathologist's runaway signature.

Toxic, he read, arrest, coma, before Tynan began speaking to him again.

“You report to me, and I'll be consulting with Eamonn Blake. As for the team who carried this case, you can tell them it's just a routine once-over before it's put back in the long-term basket.”

Minogue let the cover page fall down over the booklet again.

“I'm to work with Tommy Malone on this,” he said. “Did I get that right?”

Tynan made no reply.

“It's not for me to be inquiring further as yet, is it?” he asked.

“Exactly,” said Tynan. “But I know that you will exercise good oversight with Detective Garda Malone.”

Minogue felt the chill settle in his stomach now. He suddenly wanted to say something about forty pieces of silver.

“And you will phone me if you see the need,” said Tynan. “In the light of what we have discussed earlier concerning the matter.”

“You're asking me to,” Minogue began to say, but stopped. Tynan's stare was not intense, but there was something sombre about it. It was enough to persuade Minogue to leave the words unsaid.

Tynan grasped his hat and settled the brim low on his forehead. He eyed Minogue before pulling open the door.

“I don't expect any PowerPoint shows when you have something to tell me either.”

Chapter 11

September 22, 1984

E
IMEAR
K
ELLY LAY AWAKE
at the usual hour. She didn't bother with the light. It had been a few days now since she'd stopped, or maybe forgotten about, the thoughts about the car in the garage. It would be easy and painless; there'd be no mess, no melodrama to it at all. She used to imagine the carbon monoxide like a rising pool creeping up the stairs, like a fog or a mist, across the carpet and up the legs of the bed. She wouldn't smell it, and she wouldn't see it. Oddly, she'd prefer to.

And that was probably why she was never alone now. Her mother was coming Thursday, to take over from her sister Róisín whose whistling breath she could hear through the open door of the second bedroom. Róisín had always slept on her back, even as a little child. Róisín had cried a lot since that night, something she hadn't done much as a child, a tomboy, and now as a civil servant clerk just starting out in Social Welfare on Pearse Street. She had heard that Mam had gotten the local TD at home to pull strings with the civil service so's Róisín had time off.

Mam. Well Mam was a tough one, so she was. She was like a colonel now, grim and determined. She'd do her crying in private, or at least away from her daughter. Her daughter the widow: there – she'd said it, in her mind at least. What a terrible, ordinary, damning, unbearable, simple word.

Eimear knew, with that peculiar knowing that seemed to come from a long distance away, that Mam believed she was fighting for her own daughter's life now, and her grandchild to be. How angry she had been, Mam, how stricken, when Eimear had stumbled in on her crying helplessly into a cushion downstairs. A stronger sleeping pill, she'd heard Mam telling the nurse, and seen her eyes flashing when the nurse had tried to whisper about the baby.

Four. Then it'd be a quarter after. Then half. On to five and then six, and all hands ticking and shuddering as they jerked from second to second. If she kept her eye on the clock on the mantelpiece below she could see the minute hand more. She ran her hand under her breast, held it there for a moment to see if her fingers still caught under it. Then her belly; it was like a drum. The baby had been active enough in the evening.

She rested her hand on her belly now, and she imagined a hand within, reaching to touch hers. Surrounded, floating no longer but curled and tight, needing to stretch. Eyes like an old man. The fears she'd had, the shiver at the thought of that cut and the blood, they'd faded. Now she just registered them, wondered, moved on.

Praying was useless. All she had wanted to pray for anyway was that what had happened wouldn't affect the baby, and then she didn't want to pray for that. That had been a shock, but it too, like everything else, had faded into what used to be. Work, she could be at work, like Maureen what's her married name in Collections, who went straight to the delivery room from her desk last June. Maureen was a jogger, she was always going somewhere.

She stared at the picture of the River Shannon over the chest of drawers, the wedding present from her aunt in Portumna. For a while she thought back to the summer holidays there by the banks of the river, the warnings not to stray into the water or the reeds where there was muck that'd draw you in, hold you, and drown you. She and Róisín had gone lots of times, even put their bare feet into the mud, to feel the malevolent power they imagined.

It disappeared, as her eyes left the picture, and she stared at the dark corner above the door, willing it to turn to some picture she could see, or at least to make her eyes so tired she could close them. It was like being on life-support or something. She'd just drift away; it didn't matter much one way or another.

The anger had been sometimes pure rage, so much that she thought she'd burst or jump or do something in an uncontrollable spasm. She couldn't cry now, that had all stopped. Everyone else was in bits still, Mam even, and they all were telling her to cry, to say her feelings. She couldn't say her feelings because she couldn't find them now. And they said that the women were the emotional ones. Yes she felt like someone had gutted every organ out of her, and that inside her was not their baby, but clouds, air and empty, empty space. That the baby, hers and Declan's, was part of her own body and then not there at all. That was mad enough to think, she knew, much less to say. They'd bring her into hospital for that, for sure.

Declan's side of the bed would always be cold, and the clothes there always unruffled. She wished she had told him how she looked at the stains on the sheet from his side, and the other secrets she had been too sparing with. His belly and his hair there, how he frowned in his sleep sometimes.

All in the long ago, as Nana used to say. She had to pee. She wondered again while she pushed herself upright if they had been putting something in her drink to keep her like this. Probably not: they all knew you could harm the baby.

She held her stomach again, felt the shifting weight settle, thought of how it was possible this baby could grow to be an adult. It held none of the wonder for her now. Like everything else, that had faded and fallen away somewhere, and on she went, a familiar enough figure in a familiar place but not trying much to figure out why this all seemed to be happening to someone else. It was someone she knew, yes, and was on good terms with, but still a stranger in many respects, someone else.

This had frightened her the most. It was losing your mind, she believed. People went mad like this when they shed themselves of who they were, or had been. She got used to it, even remembered the details of where she was when it first happened. It was like a sudden, silent snap, and immediately she was cold and terrified. They expected her to be numb, she realized later, the lines and lines of Guards at the funeral, the Superintendents and even the Commissioner she'd heard but couldn't tell which one he was in that daze of strange hand-holding and hand-shaking and hand-patting.

Disconnected, that was all. You lift a receiver; expect tone, a voice, an engaged burr. But there's nothing, and there never would be.

Her legs were swollen a long while now. Her ankles felt they'd give way easily. She threw a cardigan on and headed out into the landing.

Róisín, God love her, was awake before she even crossed the threshold. Going to the toilet only, she told her.

She pulled the cord for the little tube light over the mirror and backed onto the seat, her spine as straight as a board. “Are you all right?” from Róisín. “Will I come in?”

She told her she was. The cabinet still held Declan's stuff and it probably always would. She shuddered when the thought came to her about his toothbrush, and how a person could need one, and use one, one minute and then never again. No more shaving foam needed, or an Elastoplast for a cut. The vitamins she'd made him take were still untouched in their bottles by the cooker.

She looked down at her knees, almost hidden by her stomach. A part of her knew that this was dangerous, to be thinking you were gone and that this was someone else here in your place, but it no longer scared her now. She had been able to let her mind go to the hospital room where they'd brought Declan, and where she'd looked at his unmarked face.