“The ma got her knees done here,” Malone said. “Lovely place, says she. But glad to get out early all the same.”
Minogue stole a glance at his partner.
“Says it’s haunted,” Malone went on. “Too long on the drip, says I, losing the head. No, says she Saw them.”
“Saw who?”
Malone parked next to a plumber’s van. He let his seat belt roll back slowly into its chamber, looked sideways at Minogue.
“Kids, she says. From the Starlight.”
Minogue tried to fix the year of the fire at the Starlight dance hall. He’d helped to direct the ambulances delivering the teenagers’ charred bodies. How often he’d thought of the dozens of ambulances grouped around the front of the then new hospital, their sirens off, their lights sweeping uselessly still. He remembered it being so terribly quiet. Then, when some of the parents and families began to show up -
He checked the phone again, stepped out after Malone. Wind and unreliable sun had dried much of the tarmacadam now. There were pools still in the shadows by the walls.
“Still no sign of a wallet,” Malone said. “Passport or the like, huh.”
“I’ll phone the lab again, I suppose.”
Malone scratched at his lip.
“Picked up a header, hitchhiking,” he said “Bang. Took everything. What do you think?”
“Keep it in mind,” said Minogue. “But why’s the car at the airport awhile?”
Malone held the door open for the inspector. Minogue paused, eyed Malone rolling his free shoulder. A boxer’s reflex as the bell went, he wondered. Was Malone so twitchy before every PM?
“Okay,” Malone said. “He meets another Yank on the road somewhere. He gives him — or her — a lift to the airport. This hitchhiker sees Shaughnessy’s loaded. Right? Shaughnessy’s a yapper, say, likes to spoof a bit. So he let’s things slip, about his da, et cetera. Moneybags, all that. Name dropping, see? He digs his own grave with his mouth. This hitchiker’s back in Reno or wherever the hell he came from. And we’re fu — we’re banjaxed.”
The hallway was busy. Minogue watched a man with papery skin pushing his own wheelchair ahead of himself. Two kids being walked quickly by their mother, flustered, annoyed, one of the kids with tear stains on his cheeks, the other one looking blankly around.
He slowed to take in the monument to the Starlight kids: THEY SHALL NEVER GROW OLD.
“Come on,” he said to Malone. “It’s gone eleven.”
An orderly stood by the window next to the lab offices eating a KitKat. Through a window Minogue spotted Pierce Donavan’s battered Land Rover. The state pathologist had brought it to every site since Minogue had started with the squad. Gerry Hanlon, Garda photographer, was reading the paper at a table. There were voices from the change room.
“Are we all aboard, Gerry?”
Hanlon closed the paper. A pathology assistant whom Minogue had once mistaken for a cleaner two years ago came in from the door behind them. The door to the change room opened.
“Ah, well now. The Clare connection, by God!”
Donavan’s greeting put Minogue in mind of a genial uncle, the sort of man who’d fart for the entertainment of children; a man who’d show kids how to make the best bows and arrows. A man who would always wave at trains.
The reserve that Donavan’s ebullience concealed was not widely known. A heavily armored introvert, he had married late to one of his students. She practiced as an obstetrician now. Minogue wondered what their dinner- table chat was like. A sometime insomniac who wrote poetry at night, Donavan had given Minogue one of his self- published volumes several years ago. It was after Minogue had become distraught during the autopsy of a child beaten to death by his mother’s fella. The mother had been out trying to borrow money to buy heroin.
Donavan had stopped the PM, sealed the room, bought a packet of fags. He had stood smoking with Minogue at the delivery door to the lab for a half an hour. Later he and Minogue had gone for a walk near his home in Howth. The inspector often recalled that cliff walk. The sun blinding them from the bay, the wind freshening as they rounded the outer edge of Howth Head. Minogue’s fury and despair and hatred had ebbed as if by magic then.
“Garda Malone,” said Donavan, “is it?”
“How’s it going.”
“You’re traveling in high society there, Garda Malone. Mind that boss of yours.”
“How’s the care at home, Pierce?” Minogue asked.
“Orla’s fifteen. She has a boyfriend with a ring in his eyebrow. You decide ”
“You want him to move it to his nose, is it?”
“She’ll do that handy enough, I’m thinking. Well: the both of ye in attendance for the American, is it?”
“I’m principal, Pierce. Tommy’ll be in and out.”
Donavan glanced at Malone before he headed back to the change room. Minogue heard him break into song.
“ Are you right there Michael are you right?
“ Do you think that we’ll get home before the night?”
Minogue shook his head and turned to Malone.
“Check on anything coming in on the squad lines, if you please, Tommy.”
“You don’t need me in on the, the thing here?”
“Later maybe. See if we can start a paper trail on his credit cards. He’s hardly traveling without any, now. Find out what the interviews are looking like at the airport. I’m a bit worried that we’ll need to be getting a lot of staff in a hurry.”
“I’ll tell Sheehy.”
Minogue stared at the pattern of the floor tiles again, the marks from wheels. Fergal Sheehy would hardly be at the airport yet. The site van and four forensic technicians were working the car park. Swords and Finglas stations had coughed up eight staff between them to keep up with interviews.
He looked up at Malone.
“We’ll be there by dinnertime, tell him. One or so. Tell him to push Fogarty. The security log books, thefts and break-ins at the airport. Any gang related especially. Allegations even. Bang heads if he has to, tell him. All the way up to Tynan.”
“Okay,” said Malone. “But let me ask you something. This Fogarty fella, the security chief there. He was shaping up kind of cagey last night. What do you think?”
“He was edgy all right.”
“He knew the patrols were bollocky,” Malone said. Minogue nodded.
“That’s on the menu to be sure,” he said. “But what’s the story on video at the airport?”
“It’s a bit dodgy yet,” replied Malone. “There’s surveillance indoors but…”
“While you’re at it,” Minogue said. “Phone Eimear at the lab and see what they’ve turned up from the car that we’d need to move on right away.”
Malone had his notebook out but he hadn’t written anything. He nodded as Hanlon and the assistant moved around him and entered the change room.
“I’ll see you inside then,” said Minogue. “Later on. No hurry.”
A second pathology assistant was putting on a plastic smock next to Donavan. Minogue slipped off his jacket, introduced himself, eyed the headline on the sports page left on a chair. His nose began to tickle, but the sneeze didn’t arrive.
“Tipperary always pull one out of the bag,” Donavan said. “The whores.”
Minogue felt his nose block, blotting out the stale, sweet smell he’d had with him since he entered the lab. A mercy, the timing.
“Well the Clare crowd let us down badly this year, I’d have to allow, Pierce. Maybe we should stick to the football for a few years.”
Donavan rearranged X rays in a folder.
“How are yours,” he murmured “Is it different when they’re grown?”
Minogue shrugged.
