Minogue had to smile. Tynan’s code when he resorted to the biting irony and the endless clauses would be harder to take than a clear FO. That it would have been over Freeman’s finely coiffed American spin-doctor, legal- minder, courtier’s head might have made it even funnier to witness.
“Here’s the thing though,” said O’Leary. “Why I had to call you now. Leyne took a turn. He’s in the hospital, the clinic out in Blackrock.”
Minogue thought of the scar tissue he’d seen in the open-necked shirt. An unconscious thing with Leyne, he had wondered, displaying his wound, exposing it to the healing of the light and air. Or an I-don’t-give-a-damn?
“He’s had bypasses and open heart,” said O’Leary. “He’s not out of the woods at all. He took dizzy or something, said Freeman, so he’s signed into that clinic.”
“Before or after he’d heard the news about Aoife Hartnett?”
“Two and two makes five,” said O’Leary. “You decide. He’s ‘comfortable,’ says Freeman. Cohm-foht- abbel.”
“Well, they worked,” Malone declared. He left his mountaineering boots by the wall, picked up their trailing laces, and dropped them inside. Minogue tugged on his change of socks. He noted half-past four looking back skew-ways at him from his watch.
“Dry as a bone, man.”
Minogue looked at his own wellies.
“Bet you it was the shock,” said Malone. “Maybe he knew all along.”
Minogue looked up sideways at him.
“You say Leyne knew the son murdered her?”
“Capable of, I’m saying. Want to bet the son phoned him from here, from Ireland, I mean?”
“How will we know that until he gets out of the hospital, is the question.”
“Ah,” said Malone and threw his head back. “What they call diplomatic flu, boss. The timing?”
Minogue looked up at his colleague. The scorn was plain enough.
“What,” he said to Malone. “He’s putting moves on us?”
Malone rested his chin on his knuckles and stared at the boots.
“Why’d he bring the handler with him? Covering up for the son, boss.”
Malone brushed his hair with his fingers, ran his palms around his face and breathed out heavily. He shook his head once. Minogue reached down to zip his bag tighter. Then he stood and moved his toes around in his shoes. There’d been no offer of lab coats or even aprons. He and Malone had been steered into this changing room and left to themselves. He glanced down at Malone, still immobile.
“Are you any better now?” he asked
Minogue had known straightaway it was her. He’d heard Malone gasp at the bloated body. Whatever had been feasting on her legs and her belly had seemed to be methodical. Dr. Kelly, a man so like Minogue’s dentist that the inspector had asked him if he was related, had made two pages of notes. His hands had been shaking, Minogue had noticed. He looked down at his own notes. He’d been studying his own handwriting too long not to notice the dropped endings of the letters and even the words, the scattered look to the page.
“Looked like she was pregnant,” Malone murmured. “The bloating, like.”
He lifted his head and squinted at Minogue.
“Crabs, is that what he said?”
“I think so, Tommy. A guess.”
“Jesus. If I had a known that.”
Minogue closed his notebook and slid it into the pouch in his carryall.
“I didn’t write a bleeding word, boss Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Do you think you’ll make it?”
Malone looked around at the lockers and the stacked boxes.
“Well, Jases, I’m not staying here and that’s a fact.”
An orderly came in and began taking his clothes out of a locker. Minogue exchanged the greeting with his own estimates of the weather and quick agreement with the orderly’s scorn for forecasts. Malone wrapped his boots in a plastic shopping bag and closed his travel bag.
Malone didn’t look much better by the time Minogue finished his call from the phone at reception. Noonan would have a car over for them in five minutes.
“Cup of something, Tommy?”
“Not in here.”
They watched an elderly woman inch her way down the hall using a walking contraption. Is that in his own near future too, Minogue wondered.
“Well that was the worst yet,” Malone said. “She must have broken every…Ah well, what’s the point of talking about it.”
At least five days in the water, was Kelly’s estimate. The marks of the string or rope had gone maroon. The X rays showed a broken spine and a fractured skull from the impact of the drop. Her lungs did not have enough water in them to suggest drowning. Minogue had welcomed with relief that numbness that had come over him when he had looked over Aoife Hartnett’s body for the first time. His hands had made notes, while some other part of him had issued the questions of Kelly. He remembered his repeated queries for clarifications, the patient fencing with Kelly’s irritated and defensive reluctance to say anything conclusive about how long ago Aoife Hartnett had been killed.
“Hoey told me he never got used to it,” Malone said. “It’s why he walked.”
The drive outside was wet but it had stopped raining again. Minogue was pleased to see the expansively mustached and double-chinned Garda McGurk of the drooping eyelids and the rock concert query driving the squad car up to the door.
“There’s our man,” he said.
“Are they looking after you?” was McGurk’s greeting. Minogue sat in beside him and sized up the face offering the gently mocking glances.
“In a manner of speaking now, and thanks.”
“Back to the station, is it?” McGurk asked
“To be sure. CI Noonan’s in residence still?”
“He is, he is. Ye’ll save the barley sandwiches until later on, will ye?”
“For a while, I’d say.”
“Six months or so,” said Malone.
McGurk leaned over the wheel to check traffic by the entrance to the hospital.
“Bad, was it?”
“As bad as you’d expect,” Minogue said.
“The poor woman,” was all McGurk said for the rest of the trip to the station. Minogue noted the frown settling over this affable, overweight rock fan he had taken a liking to. A Romeo, he wondered, charming them into bed with drollery and consideration.
Noonan had tea ready. He finished a radio exchange with a patrol car about registration numbers on a traveler’s van. He ushered them into his office.
“There’s a long day’s work done,” he said. “Terrible, isn’t it?”
“It is that. It is.”
Noonan slid out a sheet of photocopy paper from under a tray.
“I phoned about the car,” he said. “Here’s a partial list so far. She was in the backseat.”
“There’s no key in the ignition?” Minogue asked. Noonan shook his head.
Malone looked over Minogue’s shoulder at the list.
“A tent, bejases,” he said. “Sleeping bags… no stuff that’d be worth robbing? Didn’t she have a camera or stuff?”
“No wallets or valuables yet,” said Noonan. “Now isn’t that something. What was the story with the American’s car up in Dublin?”
“Nothing there either,” muttered Minogue. “No.”
“There could be stuff down in the rocks there,” said Noonan. “At the bottom of the cliffs. It must have hit a
