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.”
“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.”
