“Get the notion of preferential treatment out of your head. Face the facts: Leyne’s high profile, and we’ll be in the spotlight along with him. There’s a lot of other baggage as well: the Leyne Foundation, the half-dozen companies he has a stake in. Biotech, food processing, mining.”
“I know a little bit more too. He was a lousy parent. A lousy husband.”
Minogue thought of Leyne’s grip on his arm as they stepped out of the limo for the press conference
“A philanderer I was told,” Tynan went on “Not a boozer, but.”
Tynan turned sharply in through the gate into the green.
“So how’d he strike you?”
Minogue watched two kids feeding lumps of bread the size of tennis balls to the ducks. The pond was gray today Downy feathers lay on the scum by the walk.
“He wants what he wants,” he said “Whatever that is. Guilt too, maybe, about the son. And he said he’d, er, back me up.”
“Well that’s nice to hear,” said Tynan. Minogue eyed him.
“Back me up against a wall maybe, John. If I don’t come through the way he wants.”
They turned by the fountain for the German airmen and headed down the walk toward the Harcourt Street gate. Minogue tried to hold on to the sound of the flowing water as long as he could.
Eilis answered. Murtagh was on the phone but he’d said he wanted to talk to him. Minogue waited. Sitting in the passenger seat of the commissioner’s car being sort of chauffeured around didn’t feel glam so much as stupid. O’Leary adjusted the volume on the radio. Dispatch was trying to reroute a payroll van and its escort around an accident scene on the North Circular Road.
“Okay,” said Murtagh then. “Good. Are you in town, boss?”
“I am. I hardly got a look in at the airport before this jaunt back.”
“There’s stuff coming in, pictures. Pictures of Shaughnessy at some dos. The races, some get together with the music crowd. He was socializing hot and heavy before he went west.”
Minogue wondered if Murtagh had intended the wit.
“There’s a photographer at the Evening Press doing some legwork for us. He’s been phoning around fellas he knows in all the papers. So far we have Shaughnessy at four different dos. Four, no less. Quite the lad.”
“Who’s with him, or near him, even?”
“Yes. I’m looking at one just in over the fax. It’s spotty and all, but he’s got a girl under his oxter in one.”
One night stand? Minogue wondered
“Find her, can we?”
“The snapshots are being couriered over.”
“Nothing new on placing him after he left Dublin?”
“No. But I was just talking to Serious Crimes about the airport. Kevin Cronin’s got names from stuff late last year. Cars robbed. There was a mugging in one of the car parks. Never nailed down, but Cronin says he could point us to a few gougers who should be in the know. Here’s the catch: one’s in the Joy. The other one’s out of the picture in England somewhere.”
Minogue yawned. He might as well go out to the airport and shoulder his share of the interviews.
“Listen, I forgot,” he said to Murtagh. “Get Eilis to update the appeal in the press release as soon as she can, will you? Along with anyone who used that car park at the airport — I forgot to put in about any snapshots or videos people might have taken there. Coming and going, like.”
“Okay. Remember the call in from some fella in the museum? Shaughnessy was talking to someone in there…?”
“Go ahead, yes.”
“When he signed himself in as Leyne? I have a name on the woman he talked with there. Aoife Hartnett ”
“Is she handy?”
“No,” said Murtagh. “She’s on her holidays, wouldn’t you know it. Away off in Portugal is the best I can give you right now.”
“Since?”
“Em. A week back.”
Minogue looked down at the book that had slid out from under the seat when O’Leary had braked hard at the lights in Whitehall. Where was Asmara again? He thought back to the name of the woman who’d called in from the B amp; B in Donegal.
“John,” Minogue said. “The call-in that said something about Shaughnessy may be traveling with a woman. That was Donegal, wasn’t it?”
He took another drink from his cup. He grimaced and searched around the room for something to get rid of the taste.
“I don’t know what that is,” he sighed. “But coffee, it ain’t.”
Malone and Sheehy seemed to be surviving the tea. Malone tapped on the list again.
“This fella’s on the level. Coughlan. The APF. He’s going to drop Fogarty in the shite.”
That wasn’t the plan, Minogue wanted to say.
Minogue watched a feeble, fussy granny enter the airport restaurant on the arm of a hungover-looking man in an ill-fitting suit. Not the emigrant Paddys of old, he thought, with the string around the suitcase at the dock for the night sailing.
“Want to bet Coughlan or other fellas have a chip on the shoulder,” Malone said. “And they want to drop their boss for something?”
Minogue shrugged.
“There are no direct pointers yet,” said Sheehy. “The patrols all log in the checkpoints but sure they might as well be sleepwalking, some of ’em.”
“How are we for response from people who parked there over the week?” Minogue asked. He looked down at his scribbles. “Five people so far, is it?”
Sheehy nodded. Malone looked at his watch.
“Half-four,” he said. “There’s only six or seven security staff left to do.”
Minogue looked down at the personnel lists and the companies under contract.
“Is this it, Fergal? The whole shebang?”
“There’s a few missing,” Sheehy said. “But they’ll come through.”
“All right. What’s the story on the vicinity search?”
Malone said that the dumpsters were still being checked. They’d located the tip where the terminal rubbish was disposed of.
Minogue thought of a rubbish tip, flocks of seagulls circling and squabbling. He’d better go down to the site, close it up. The technicians had come up dry. They’d worked it all morning. He checked his watch.
“Let’s head down to the security office,” he said. “We’ll deal out what we have.”
He turned to Sheehy.
“We’ll aim for half-seven. At the squad, if you please, Fergal. Run up summaries, like a good man, and smarten us up on where we’re headed with leads from here anyway.”
Eoin Gormley, one of the newest forensic technicians, and Paddy Tuttle, probably the longest serving, were in the site van.
“Well, men,” Minogue said. “We’ll give it the once-over again.”
Tuttle talked to Gormley about cigarette butts on their way across the access road to the car park. Minogue’s bad shoulder ached worse. He thought about his brother’s gnarled hands, how he could hardly walk down the lane on the farm now.
The tarmac in the car park looked soft. There were clumps of moss like sponge by the cement bollards. The Guard on shift was leaning against an unmarked car. Minogue studied the space within the tape, the holes where the tarmac had been taken up.
“A right lot of rain we’ve had,” said the Guard. Soil samples, the contents of the boot, Minogue was thinking:
