Minogue couldn't deny her. He had been sitting there as a visitor drinking tea. He was afraid to intrude upon her by asking her questions about her own family. That was none of his business. She had told him as much as she could about Jarlath Walsh. Agnes prepared to go. He couldn't stay here. He was supposed to be detectiving, not sitting here with a girl, daydreaming.
He walked down the flights of stairs ahead of her and side by side to the carpark. Allen leaned over and pushed the passenger door open for her. When Allen fussed with attaching her seat-belt, Minogue believed that this was a different Allen, a solicitous man taking custody of a precious cargo. A fatherly concern? Easy in a man with no brood at home to be keeping him in the real world, a part of Minogue's mind jeered.
Minogue closed Agnes' door. It closed with a solid clap. Beads of rainwater quivered on the waxed paintwork. A nice, big, new Toyota without an excess of chrome, Minogue mused. He would have had to put his boot to his own door on the Fiat to get it to close first time. As if reading the thoughts of a poor but secretly favoured suitor, Agnes looked up briefly and smiled through the glass. Unreachable, going. As he walked aimlessly back into the college, Minogue worked at persuading himself that he was not somehow envious of Allen. A moment of juvenile insecurity, he chided within.
What Minogue could not put aside, however, was the belief that the case had left him beached with the ebbing tide no longer touching him. Funerals. The last funeral Minogue had attended was that of an old IRA man from 1916, one who had survived the Civil War and a spell interned in the Curragh, to write memoirs and die renowned as one of the last of the hard men. There couldn't be many left. Three old men, propped up by their relatives, had stood over the grave. Mick had been among the hundreds of mourners there. Minogue had caught his brother looking over at him several times. He thought it was a look of some satisfaction on Mick's face, as if to claim the damp countryside and its people as his inheritance, not Minogue's.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back in his room, Minogue doodled. He wrote down names and events. Then he tried to join them with lines so he could work out cause and effect later. Nothing.
They'd be burying the boy now. There'd be beads of rain on the coffin. The wet would give the bouquets more colour. Minogue reached a disagreeable decision. He phoned the Drug Squad.
While Minogue doodled, thought and telephoned, a well-dressed man in his late thirties took up a padded barstool in the Bailey public house. He held a copy of the Irish Times under his arm. He had stepped from a taxi but feet from the door.
The barman prided himself on recognising customers' occupations by the way they dressed. He took the order for a small Paddy, and he registered some surprise at an American accent, soft but there all the same. The customer unfolding the paper had the ruddy tan of a robust Yank with any amount of rhino for holidays and grub. Took care of himself.
The barman put him as a legal eagle, but that was a long shot, he realised, as he poured the water into the jug. Irish-looking, all the same, probably in the early thirties. The barman recognized a forty quid shirt when he saw one. The plain grey suit had the looks of having cost three hundred quid. Although he hadn't seen the customer hang up his coat, the barman guessed an Aquascutum.
The customer opened the paper to the editorial, which concerned itself with a condemnation of the murders of policemen, culminating in another one yesterday. He sipped at the whisky. The barman returned to his preparations for the lunchtime crowd.
When the customer's pal showed, the barman pegged him for a journalist or a theatrical type. Maybe not though. He served him a pint and returned to setting up glasses. He felt the light grab at the small of his back, the twinge that would grow to an ache by lunchtime. The barman's name was Gerry, and he wasn't any more interested in politics than he was in soccer, but he talked about both endlessly every working day. He heard enough guff. The tanned and fit-looking barrister who was not a barrister was likewise disinterested in what passed for politics. He was so antipathetic toward the way politics ran on this island that he carried a large-calibre automatic pistol holstered under his armpit. The magazine was fully loaded and there was a bullet in the spout. The man wanted nothing to do with talking politics or any other conversation which policemen might wish to engage him in.
Before starting out on this project, he had weighed the things he felt were necessary and those which he could get around. Daily, and with no sense of excitement, he cleaned the gun in his hotel room. Carrying it was a non-negotiable item in his list and he felt quite at home with yet another hard and fast rule in his life.
Gerry the barman's guess about the other fellow, who was dressed half as a farmer and half as a priest, was partially correct in that the man was a playwright. The playwright had spent the best part of a half hour making sure he was not being tailed.
The tanned man disliked the playwright, not least for the maudlin viciousness of his nationalism. He regarded him as a fool whose brains were stewed by decades in fifth-rate theatricals. He did not trust the playwright, but he knew that having to work with him was a test which others were watching.
'You can see that results come quickly,' he began.
'There's no gainsaying that,' agreed the playwright. 'So it went smoothly this time and the volunteers got away. Maximum effect, oh yes, I can see that.'
'But…? You have reservations?'
The playwright observed the bubbles rising to the ice in his glass before replying.
'I'll say this much. All this firepower and technology are fine and well. You are well able to do the fancy footwork. But I've been in this thing for most of my life. I know how the lads on the ground feel. I can tell you that they're not too excited about the Russians getting in on this like they've started to.'
The tanned man saw the beginnings of a faint irony in the smile on the other's face. Patronising.
'What don't they like?'
'Don't get me wrong. The movement is all for arms supplies, even from the man in the moon. As long as there's no strings attached. What do I say when they ask what we're supposed to hand over in return? Some of the lads'll think maybe it's too much of an assembly line thing. They wonder what we had to give to get this kind of support.'
The tanned man looked directly at the playwright.
'Does it really matter to the active service units where the stuff comes from? It's a command council decision. I haven't traded away the place to get this stuff. And that consideration has really nothing to do with either of us, has it? I'm here to monitor things. I have to report to them at some point otherwise they won't hand over any more,' he added.
'Risk,' the playwright said.
'Everything has risk. It was even a risk trying to persuade the council to go along with this scheme. The drop to the trawler went off without a hitch, didn't it? The Soviet boat didn't pick up on anyone. And they're stuffed with monitoring gear. It went off perfectly. The guns were in use and even safely back across the border within a week.'
'Could be the Yanks are stringing them along and waiting for a big haul so they can tip off the Brits. I read where those satellites can read the paper you have in your hand from up there,' the playwright said.
Testing my patience, the tanned man thought, to see how far he can go with me, how much he can find out.
'Could be,' he began. 'But we're not talking of sheer numbers of weapons. The risk of detection is not as high as you might think. It's a matter of having the right weapon at the right time. Look at all the publicity about the grenade launcher. Let them think we have these things coming out our ears. They think we have any amount of nightsights. That's what works. Effectiveness, economy. There's more yet.'
'Another toy?' the playwright asked.
'You don't need to know details. Just get your guys to set up a car to take something the size of a suitcase. The guidance and the sights fit into the suitcase too. It looks like a typewriter case. Light, portable; about twenty- five pounds.'
'A suitcase?' The playwright had become very attentive.
