line.”
“Well, I didn’t talk, talk, did I? I just mentioned to her that, well, I’d heard that fellas got off on that and all… She said it was as good as it got for him or ever would get for him.”
She let the cigarette roll about between her fingers.
“For him, like. He’d been injured or something.” She looked up from her cigarette.
“That was it? Nothing came of this?”
“All I know is that nobody called about them. I was glad too. I felt like a right iijit, didn’t I? I mean, I asked Mary once or twice. Even asked her if I could get the pictures. So’s, well, no one’d get them. Know what I mean?”
Minogue nodded.
“Did you hear me?”
“Pardon?”
“I didn’t want anyone getting them, I said. Those pictures. Mary told me that if Eddsy liked them he’d want more or something. He never got in touch, though. I never got any pictures. After a while, I stopped worrying. A lot of make-up and that, you know?”
“What else did you get involved with as regards Mary?”
“I don’t like the way you’re talking.”
“You’ll like the way one of my colleagues talks even less then. Ready to pack and go?”
Her eyes narrowed. She drew slowly on the cigarette, barely moving it from her lips between drags.
“I’ll say one thing. It was only later on I got the feeling that Mary did it to shut me up. To turn me off any ideas I might have, you know?”
“About getting in on the good life or whatever you call it?”
“The good life. Christ. Look where it got her.”
He watched her run her fingertips across her eyebrows and back several times. Her elbow rested on the envelope. She drew herself up in the chair. Her tone had changed.
“I’m off, Patricia. For now. You have my number?”
“Yeah, I think.” There was something in her eyes which irritated him.
“Are these the only copies of, you know…?”
He looked down at the envelope under her elbow.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on! What kind of an answer is that?”
“It’s no answer at all really, I suppose. I want you to phone, Patricia. Any small thing you remember.”
“What does that mean? What am I supposed to remember?”
He raised an eyebrow. Her eyes were bright now. Yes, he noted, definitely there alongside the relief: scorn. She lit another cigarette. Number five, he thought. He turned on his heel and opened the door into the hall.
“Where’s Hard-Chaw today then?” asked Fahy. “Did he jack it in?” Minogue didn’t slow down.
“Blasting away at dummies out on the shooting range, I imagine.”
The door closed quickly behind him. Most of the other doors on the terrace were open in the late afternoon heat. He keyed off the alarm, sat in and took the phone out of the glove compartment. Great. He had forgotten the number for the incident room in Harcourt Street station. He dialled directory and waited. Alan Long-Shot, he’d call him, Alan Long-Shot driving a proverbial Mercedes. An apocryphal Mercedes. An it’s-just-an-expression Mercedes.
SIXTEEN
Yes, well, spare me the rest of it,”said Kathleen. “It sounds like a very difficult case.” Minogue found a piece of garlic stuck to the bowl. He fished it out on the end of his finger and slipped it onto his tongue. Iseult chased crumbs of garlic bread around her plate. The guilt at his truancy from the squadroom was beginning to ebb. It had taken Plate-Glass Fergal Sheehy to put the tin hat on matters: nothing yet. Nothing? That’s right, Matt, came the slow, musical reply. Nothing.
He had felt like apologising just after he had hung up. Fergal Sheehy and his team were not responsible for the fact that there were no useful tips, leads or evidence from their door-to-door work. Minogue resolved to phone him in the morning, have a chat. An interview with a recent parolee was in progress in Crumlin station, Murtagh had told him, and it looked like the fella was spoken for. All the alibis completely sound, had been Minogue’s unbelieving query. Seriously, John? Seriously. What news on Jack Mullen then? Murtagh and two detectives from CDU had found and talked to some of Mullen’s fares. His alibi now covered virtually all the time that evening, with only scattered periods of five and ten minutes when he wasn’t either sitting in a taxi rank or with someone.
“Pardon? I’m sorry.”
“Away with the fairies,” said Iseult. “Again. Maybe it’s petit mal.”
“So you had it with the heat and the run around,” said Kathleen.
“Well,” he sighed. “In the heel of the reel, what we had seems to be slipping away. The suspects, I mean. And then, what we haven’t found… This girl kept things very much to herself.”
“Well, doesn’t that make you suspect she was involved in, you know, something, let’s say, illegal?” asked Kathleen. Minogue eyed Iseult.
“Easy for you to be so smart,” he said to Kathleen. “The word from on high as regards the organized crime stuff, well, that sort of tore the ar-it, er, sort of knocked the stuffing out of it for me. I can start fresh in the morning.”
“Please God,” said Kathleen. Minogue looked out into the garden. Please God? Did God, seeing everything, see what went on at the canal then? At night?
“Cooking for three is as easy as cooking for two,” said Kathleen.
“Not to speak of a fresh face at the table,” added Minogue. “And the chat.”
“I don’t want you to sell the house,” Iseult declared. Minogue kept a garlic belch to a muffled report by letting it linger around his larynx. Kathleen said nothing.
“I think those apartment things are bloody stupid, so I do,” Iseult went on. Minogue’s face twitched but Kathleen had spotted him. Iseult stood up.
“Leave the stuff, Ma. I’ll do it. I’m just going up the garden.”
Minogue watched his daughter’s progress up through the garden. She strolled with her arms crossed, by the shrubs and the trellis, one of his earlier follies now engulfed by creepers years before he had expected it.
“She’s making up for all the times we haven’t seen her since she moved out,” Kathleen said. “The bit of security now, I suppose. I don’t mind telling you, but I feel for Pat. I do. Now that he’s putting his foot down as regards the wedding. I never thought he would go for it myself. But God works in strange and mysterious ways.”
Put his foot down, thought Minogue. On a land-mine, if he only knew.
“What mysterious ways do you mean, exactly?”
“Stop that. You know what I mean. God looks out for people. We don’t always understand His ways. If we did, they wouldn’t be mysteries, would they?”
Minogue rubbed at his eyes. He had flunked Irish Catholic logic a long time ago. Mysteries indeed: what were the ones they had recited again at Lent? The Sorrowful Mysteries, The Joyful Mysteries? Which were which again? The Immaculate Conception, The Passion and Death of Our-
“Do you think she wants us to bring up the subject?” Kathleen repeated. “I have the feeling she wants to tell us something.”
“It’s only company she needs, love,” he said.
“Well, she knows what my opinions are. My beliefs, I should say. Not that I’d force them down her throat, now.”
Minogue opened his eyes again. She glanced at him.
“I sort of wish she’d move back,” she said. “But I could never say it to her.”
“You could, but you’d better put your fingers in your ears after you say it.”
