Islandbridge (42 page)

“I heard there's a church group wants to sponsor the man's family here,” she said.

“Presuming they'd want to come here,” Minogue said, unwisely.

“Why wouldn't they?” she asked. “We're well on here now, aren't we? There's tons of less deserving landing here anyway, isn't there?”

“They'd better like rain, then. Long nights in the winter.”

She gave him a hard look.

“You're missing the point here,” she said. “The poor man probably hadn't intended to come here.”

“The point is what?”

“That there's somebody pulling strings, Matt. Someone is making it happen like this.”

She glanced up to the ceiling.

“Things don't just happen for no reason,” she said.

Kathleen muted it, and sighed.

“When do you think you'll be finished this, what is it again?”

“A case review.”

“Shunted over to Kilmainham, or Islandbridge, is it?”

“That's it. Not the most salubrious of environments, but sure, that's that.”

She finished her survey of his profile and turned to the television too.

He stifled a rising bubble from his gorge and held his breath so the smell of Jameson's would not escape. It was a bad plan. The first hiccup was massive.

“Cleaning up someone else's mess, it sounds like,” she said. “Is that what you want to be doing now?”

“I suppose I should have told Commissioner Tynan to shag off.”

“It's Tommy Malone you should have told that to.”

“‘Shag off, Tommy. No offence, like?'”

“I like Tommy,” she protested. “I really do – and I feel sorry for him. But if you'd have stayed away from that place . . . God, I suppose there's a funny side to it: the only time you go inside a church – willingly – and look what happened.”

“No-one would have known that in advance.”

“Says you. But you know yourself that Tommy is, well, he's not himself.”

“Tommy might have been on to something. There are leads.”

“Leads? Can't the others do that? Why does it have to be you?”

“To make a long story short, it's that Tommy got a tip on someone who might be able to bring us to someone else. . . . Who could open up the investigation. The team on the case never got that far, so Tynan wants to go with the one who seems to be able to make the progress.”

“‘Someone else,'” she murmured.

“She would be a good source for this case. If, well, you know.”

He had been caught, and he knew it. She looked at him.

“If what?”

“I think, well, we think,” he said. “We think she's out there still. So, well, that's part of it. We can only see how far we get.”

“You're delighted,” she said. “Admit it. It's back to the old line of business.”

He concentrated more on the screen. A shampoo that conditions as well as makes you look like a model.

“A one-off,” he said. “Then I'll be back on the Euro beat. The glamour, all that.”

She gave no sign of receipt of the peace offering.

He looked over at her, and took in the lines on her neck, the greying strands above her ears.

“
Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous, D
–”

She laughed and batted at his roving hands. It was warm under her arm. His finger traced the straps of her bra.

“Full marks for trying,” she said. “But when the French comes spouting out of you, I know you're covering up.”

“Why would I want to do that,
chérie
?”

He had her laughing now. It was a good time to press home the advantage.

The phone echoed in the hall. They stayed still, his chin on her neck, his hands flat. It rang again.

“Like I said. Cleaning up somebody else's mess again.”

“What?”

“That'll be Jim again. He's after phoning twice. You promised you'd try harder with that stupid bloody mobile, Matt. Come on now. I'm not an answering machine.”

“What's he want?”

“(A) ‘Turn on his damned phone'; (B) I don't know. Answer it, will you?”

Minogue listened for another ring. Kathleen stirred under him.

“Leave it,” he said. “He's been annoying the heart and soul out of me this past while. You think I'm bad, not being able to shake off the Squad. Leave him.”

Her voice was soft now, serious.

“Answer it, Matt. He sounds, I don't know. A bit lonely or something. Maybe he was drinking. I don't like to think . . .”

Minogue took his time. He went through what he'd say: do you know it's nearly eleven o'clock at night; buy a bloody ticket to the States and drop in on your son and don't be waiting on him; grow up, move on, stop looking over your shoulder.

He took the receiver but didn't lift it until there was another ring.

“Matt?”

“Yourself.”

“Where were you? I was trying to get in touch with you.”

Minogue absorbed the hurried tone, the odd flatness and almost accentless voice coming from Kilmartin.

“Kathleen said you were looking for me.”

He stopped immediately he heard the voice in the background, a woman's. She was upset. Kilmartin put his hand over the mouthpiece but Minogue still heard the raised male voice and a faint reply.

“Jim,” he said when he heard the scruffing again.

“I need to talk to you. Are you listening?”

“Jim, I'm jacked. I had a day of it today, let me tell you.”

“Did you watch the news earlier on?”

“I'm only after getting in the door.”

“But did you?”

“No, how could I?”

“Okay, look. Come over to the house, will you?”

Minogue looked at the photo of Eamonn that Kathleen had mounted in the hall.

“It's ten o'clock at night, Jim.”

“I know what the goddamned time is,” said Kilmartin, but his voice hadn't changed from the deliberate, slow intonation.

“Whyn't you have your phone on?” he asked. “I could've reached you then.”

“Can it be in the morning?”

“No. That won't do. No.”

An explanation would go a long way, he wanted to say. But it would only draw him in deeper.

“Did you see the news at all?” Kilmartin asked.

“No. What did I miss?”

Kilmartin waited a moment.

“Nothing. When you think about it. So come over. It's important.”

“Has something gone astray on you?”

Kilmartin didn't speak for a moment. Moniogue was sure he'd heard a glass, or a bottle.

“I'll tell you when you get here. I need your advice. Matt?”

“I'm half-jarred, Jim.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“But I've had the worst day–”

“I know. Believe you me, Matt. I know.”

However Kilmartin had said that stopped his words. He knew he wouldn't be able to get anywhere with the poor mouth routine.

“Couldn't you come up here?” he tried.

“No.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Not yet.”

“Well get in your fancy car and drive over here.”

“Matt! I can't! Okay?”

Minogue waited a minute in the hall and then returned to the sitting room.

“Well?”

“I'll be back in a while,” he said. “I have to go over to Jim's place.”

“At this hour of the night?”

“Something that can't wait, he says. I won't be long.”

He took Daithi's old Adidas jacket, the one that had become his gardening jacket. Kathleen demanded to see his mobile. She turned it on and locked the keypad.

“I'll go in late tomorrow,” he said to her. “Maybe come down and walk Dun Laoghaire Pier with me?”

“The nerve of you. Incorrigible. I can't be bought off, got that?”

“I want to ask you something,” he said. “Something that was on the news earlier.”

“The news?”

“Oh now I get it. You must know something about it then – yes, were you in on that?”

“What?”

“You were! That thing down in the Temple Bar. Why would you be asking me, if you weren't? You are a–”

She paused.

“Please, Kathleen?”

“You and Jim Kilmartin, honestly! You can't give it up, can you? Do you know that Maura told me he's forever phoning his old pals and asking around, any time there's a murder or that? Oh yes – it's that bad. The lads in the State Lab? The ‘Scenes Men'? Well, why doesn't he phone one of them then, and not be bothering you at home here?”

“Kathleen–”

“You're . . .
obsessed
or something. Maura even told me that he gets emails with pictures from the lab. He does! He says they do be asking him for any tip or thing the others would miss. You know what Jim thinks of ordinary Guards handling his old job.”

“Kathleen, do you mind? He's upset about something. I haven't heard him like this. Something he asked me, about the news. Okay?”

“As if you didn't know. It was something about some man in a car, out in Kildare. The Guards found a man, yes.”

“Kildare?”

“Somewhere off the Naas Road there. They said it might be some man they were looking for over something else this afternoon in town. Maybe even the thing down in the Temple Bar – yes.”

Chapter 27

M
INOGUE OPTED FOR
the Bray Road. Doing seventy-five in the short stretches between the lights didn't stop him from being passed by others. One, he was almost sure, had been a Maserati.

He got off at Loughlinstown, and wound his way over through Ballybrack and up the back of Killiney village, where the Kilmartin family, all two of them, had resided for a few years now. How long, he tried to remember exactly: hadn't there been a do there for the millennium New Year?

He let the Citroën onto the avenue where the Kilmartins' house was, five down from the turn in. He spotted two Range Rovers in adjoining driveways. Audis and midsized Beemers seemed to be favoured on this road. The Kilmartins' house was an Olympian stone's throw from the back end of a pub that Minogue despised, the only pub in the old village of Killiney.

Timing is everything, he said to himself as he came in sight of the gates. Maura Kilmartin was the brains behind the move here, there could be no doubt, and James Kilmartin, many years removed from being the bogman-in-the-ditch, had wisely coasted in her wake. Maura had gotten them moved in here just when people wondered if the house-price boom was over. It was not. Kilmartin had confided one night last year that the place had more than doubled in price. Shrewd in every way, was Maura, and she had parleyed a small employment agency into a well-known “recruitment office” over the years. Then Minogue remembered the flat tone in his friend's voice on the phone. Illness? Maura? He hoped not.

He pulled in by the gate. Kilmartin's Granada was in the driveway. Maybe he was daring someone to steal it, with car theft so endemic here. Maura's Audi, the “little red number” as Kilmartin called it, was probably in the garage already.

Yes, Minogue reflected again: being in the right place at the right time. Iseult had said that enough times lately for him to take notice, almost always with a mordant cynicism that made him anxious for her for days afterwards. She had surely meant talent or originality, or the Arts themselves, he believed, and that these meant little enough in the New Ireland. Then a thought came to him as his hand settled on the gate: his own daughter had no place to go. She had no real home anymore at all.

He ran his hand along the railing. How could anyone ever afford to buy a house here? Iseult could rent a flat maybe, or a small house, if she were lucky, but she had no home of her own, and no prospect of one here in her native city. And where would people in Iseult's position go, if they didn't want to move in with their parents again? Migrate, emigrate?

So too did that African man, desperate enough and naïve enough, to stow away on a plane, not knowing where he'd land. Anywhere but where he'd come from, he might have thought. Was it some cosmic curse to be born African these days, to scramble for any home, or any opening in the fortress of a rich white, European world?

The gate had not been latched, he saw now. He looked at the dark windows. In an upstairs window, though, he thought he spotted some movement. But the lights in that bedroom did not go on. Maybe Kilmartin had been standing up there, waiting for him. Had he gone to bed or something, after phoning him to ask him over?

The hall door opened as he was reaching for the bell. Kilmartin, in shirt sleeves, pulled open the door. The hair was skew-ways on him, Minogue noticed. Maybe he'd been having a snooze. Smells came to him then; whiskey, he believed, and some kind of food maybe, but not from cooking.

“A bit early for Hallowe'en there, Jim. The hair. Did I wake you up?”

“No,” said Kilmartin. “Come on. The front room there. Wait–”

Minogue turned and looked down toward the gate.

“That your jalopy there, down by the gate?”

“It is. Are you expecting someone else?”

Kilmartin looked at him, but Minogue wondered if he saw him at all.

“Are you all right?”

“Come in, there.”

Minogue felt the hand on his shoulder, turning him toward the doorway to the left. The “office” he'd heard Kilmartin calling it once, half-seriously he had thought then.

“Do you use lights here at all in these parts, Jim?”

Kilmartin reached in and flicked on a light.

“Jemmy?” he said. “Bushmills? I have cold beer.”

“Cup of tea?”

“No,” said Kilmartin. “I have Jemmy in the dresser there. You don't take ice.”

Minogue had already made a plan to pour it back in the bottle when he got a moment.

Kilmartin put a tumbler half-full of Jameson's by the monitor. Then he filled his own.