right wallop.”
Minogue looked up, met his eyes.
“I daresay. Yes. We’ll need to look into that.”
Noonan refilled his cup from the teapot.
“You’ll be wanting to make calls here, is it?”
Minogue watched Noonan fill his own cup. Bony fingers, sinews: a townie. Minogue tested the chairback and crossed his legs.
“Thanks,” he said. “Will you release the remains to Dublin for the PM?”
“I will indeed.”
“I’ll be wanting the car to be loaded on and sent up too.”
Noonan nodded. Minogue looked down Noonan’s list again.
“They had a bad time of getting her out of the car,” Noonan said.
“Well you’re ahead of us there, er, Tom.”
“Ah, there was talk. The fellas taking the car in off the boat there.”
Minogue nodded.
“Car’s rightly smashed up now after that. A straight drop so far as I can see ”
“I imagine so,” Minogue agreed.
“The remains would be, well… sure I suppose it’d be the same as a head-on. Without the seat belts maybe?”
Noonan looked from Minogue to Malone and back. Malone jiggled his mug and took a mouthful of tea.
“I’d be obliged for the use of the phone for a while.”
Noonan sat back and then stood.
“Fire away. It’s all yours.”
“We can-”
“Not a bit of it. Go right ahead and use the office. I’ll be outside there.”
Minogue took out his notebook and flipped to his telephone list. He looked around Noonan’s office again while he tried to muster his instructions and queries for Murtagh to relay to the teams in Dublin.
The photos of Shaughnessy at the dos, the call-ins from Donegal needed mining properly. He lingered on the wood-framed photo of the group by a door somewhere. Noonan’s broad smile, the uniform, sergeant’s stripes on the ceremonial gray uniform. The hair looked wispy and soon to be departed even then. Ten years ago maybe? Minogue fingered the number for the Castlebar Garda station from the photocopy he taped into each of his notebooks. He turned the phone around and found a line out.
“I’ll try Castlebar, Tommy. See if there’s anything from the Micra before they wrap it.”
A Sergeant Gerry Murphy handled scenes of the crimes. He had bagged the loose items and wrapped the car again.
“Thanks very much, now. Do ye have transport for it to the state lab up in Dublin?”
Murphy replied that they did indeed. Had he time to go over a preliminary with Minogue? He did.
Minogue added to the list Noonan had given him. Accordioned: was that now a technical term? Passenger compartment had been severely crushed. All seats out of their anchors. Anchors, Minogue wondered. Roof down at the front. Impact seems to have been on the bonnet, shared with the edge of the roof. The weight at the front, Murphy tried to explain. Minogue drew what he hoped looked like a hatchback. It had gone over nose first then? Most likely forward, yes. A bit of momentum seems to have carried it over the ninety degrees as it fell. Maps, carry-all bags with clothes, a rucksack, women’s shoes. He waited for a pause before interrupting.
“Still no effects, Gerry? Handbag?”
“None, no.”
“How much have ye done?”
“Well, we’ve emptied the car in actual fact.”
“The boot too?”
“We have.”
Minogue looked down the list again.
“Is there something we should be maybe have an eye out for, er, Inspector?”
It wasn’t sarcasm, Minogue realized. He breathed out and rubbed at his eyes.
“Bits of string,” he said. “A rope maybe?”
“No sign.”
“Ashtrays?”
The dashboard had been shattered but the ashtray had stayed in place There had been a gap and the water had worked in. Some fibers from the filters floating free had been bagged for the lab.
“I’m surprised there’s not more. Stuff belonging to a man — shoes, clothes?”
“No,” said Murphy “Not yet identified, I’d better say, I suppose.”
Had he come across that pushy, Minogue wondered.
“We’re not playing paper chase here now, Gerry. Say what’s on your mind.”
“Well,” Murphy said. “We don’t want to make a slip here now, being as, well, it’s tied in with the thing up in Dublin. The American?”
How could they not know, Minogue heard the voice mock him within, Murphy and Noonan and McGurk and half the bloody country, and it on the radio and telly?
“It’s a tin opener you’d be needing to get at some bits,” Murphy added.
Pushed up that track, Minogue wondered. Shoved off with another car? The keys could be anywhere off the cliffs too.
“The ignition was definitely off?” Minogue tried. “No bit of broken-off key?”
“No. We have the steering column in one piece.”
Minogue let his Biro drop on the paper. He had drawn a box with a circle inside, and another box inside the circle. Put Shaughnessy in the damn car for us, he heard the voice again: that’s all we want. Make one thing easy for us today, for the love of God. He looked down the list again.
“Rubbish in the car, Gerry? Tins of Coke or that?”
“Pepsi, actually. Two empties, one torn up in bits — by hand. You know the way people do it with the aluminium ones?”
“Not from the smash?”
“No. Peeled, one of them.”
“Pepsi,” Minogue said aloud. Malone looked over and raised his eyebrows. A sign of nerves, the shredding of a can during a row, to keep the hands busy?
“I wonder what we could lift off them after a few days of seawater…”
“Depends,” Murphy said. “Ask Eimear above at the lab in Dublin. Alkaline deposits and brine… could be. They’re bagged and ready to go to the lab in anyhow ”
As in don’t be asking things we can’t deliver. Minogue wondered if he had missed other hints earlier. He thanked Murphy and remembered to ask for his phone number again.
McGurk was sitting at a desk by the door to the public office of the Garda Station pretending to work. Minogue paused in the doorway. Noonan again told him it’d be no bother to set him up in the Western Hotel.
“Thanks, now, but we’ll go along tonight as soon as we have the items from the car and the remains.”
Noonan looked skeptical. Minogue couldn’t tell if it was annoyance.
“Sure there’s expertise already over the site now,” Minogue added. And ye’re doing a first-class job of it over at the Fields.”
“An oul newspaper,” said Noonan. “Cigarette packages That’s not much.”
“You have a driver who’ll do the run to Dublin tonight?”
“I do,” said Noonan, and made a shy smile. “Beamish, the undertaker, will do it. ‘There are no complaints about Beamish,’ as they say. Will you take a lift with him?”
Minogue didn’t know, as he thought about it later, if he’d done it for a dare, or because Noonan had said the driver was fast and knew the routine. Malone muttered something about the culchies looking for a chance to slag them, sending them back to Dublin in a hearse. Minogue shrugged that off.
McGurk led them out to the yard There was a break in the clouds to the west and beams of light had broken
