“Yes, of course I do.”
“The B Specials and the RUC? The black outfits, like storm troopers?”
“What’s this…?”
“You remember we were considering sending in the army, over the border into Derry?”
“Yes, there was talk — ”
“Talk?” said Tynan. “You know well there was more than that.”
“Why are you bringing this…”
He left the question unfinished. He stared at the commissioner. Tynan looked and sounded as though he was reminiscing about a clumsy prank as a schoolboy. Minogue knew the expression, the tone to be signs of a quiet fury.
“Where is this coming from?” he tried.
“Didn’t I tell you I had a chat with the Minister of Justice this morning?”
“Wait,” said Minogue, “I’m not on board here. First I’m thinking smuggling, then pay-off so Leyne can get his shot at immortality here, then cover-up for his son, but now…?”
“I had several questions to ask of the minister,” said Tynan. “At least the conversation ended on a civil note. Can I get back to this history lesson now?”
Minogue nodded.
“The North, the sieges around Catholic areas, the barricades. The arms that we didn’t officially notice being sent into the North from here.”
“Leyne was part of that?”
Tynan looked at the empty Seven-Up O’Leary had drunk.
“NORAID, the Americans — that was the start of that,” he said. “There was big money involved. You got caught in the tail end of a bit of the worst yourself.”
For a moment Minogue was back at the border that night, his legs beginning to give out as he tried to reach a car already rolling into the ditch, the bullets still slamming into it.
“What are you saying here?”
Tynan opened the snug door and asked O’Leary to phone a Hogan, tell him he’d call later. Through the doorway Minogue eyed a customer, an elderly man with a gaunt face and a long tongue, which he kept flicking around his lips as he hauled himself onto a stool. The knuckles were misplaced, jammed together. Tynan closed the door again.
“We heard a rumor a few years ago,” he resumed, “that Leyne had been involved back then. Yes — the self-made entrepreneur still with the politics of a Republican. It surfaced when he made his approach about giving back these artifacts, and donating all the money. He’s no stranger to donations, by the way, I learned: do you want to know how many millions he’s given to the Democrats over the past decade? Anyway, that was before the IRA went shopping in Moscow and Libya, and doing their deals with the other slime in Amsterdam and Prague and the rest of it.”
Tynan gave Minogue a quick survey.
“Even before the business phase kicked in,” he resumed, “with the robberies and the rackets and the drug trade. He believed, or he wanted to believe, that the IRA was the same IRA as had fought Black and Tans. Remember where he came from, Matt: small farmer, pushed around here. He walked away when the politics went way left. That’s history now.”
“History,” said Minogue. “But plenty stayed in, people that Leyne would know still, then?”
Tynan looked at his watch.
“Probably,” he said.
“What if the son knew that, had a name…? Or what if he’d told the father some of what he’d done here and Leyne pulled out some old contacts here to get the son out of the mess?”
He tried to arrange his thoughts but they kept going sideways on him.
“The son, Shaughnessy…” he began. “He was trouble, that we can tell. Would he have put the heavy word on people here, how he could spill the beans on something from way in the past, so’s they’d have to help unglue him from whatever he was up to here?”
Tynan nodded slowly. Minogue didn’t know whether he was agreeing with him or just placating him.
“More to the point,” Minogue went on, “if Leyne began to suspect that his contacts here had gotten fed up fast with demands the son was making in his name and then gotten rid of Shaughnessy, maybe even Aoife Hartnett because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time… Leyne might put them to the wall too?”
Tynan didn’t nod again. He had resumed fiddling with the coins.
“Freeman had access to Leyne,” Minogue resumed. “Even to his will: maybe Leyne might have let slip what was on his mind to him. So Freeman would be an unknown quantity here if people thought he could pass on something to the Guards.”
Minogue let his words drop away. The soreness in his knee came back to him.
“So that’s where your case goes off the map,” Tynan said then. “This is not just about smuggled stuff from old churches and graveyards down the country.”
“Shaughnessy, he lit the fuse, didn’t he?”
“Could be,” said Tynan. “But those gunmen today were part of something a damn sight bigger than you and your partner, and even your squad, can handle alone.”
“This is a squad case first and foremost,” Minogue said. “We can’t sit on our hands at the door here.”
Tynan eyed him.
“Seems like you have inherited Kilmartin’s selective hearing here,” he said “Safety’s number one: get through this, what just happened. And you can’t have an edge after this. You’re also going to have to take stock of the situation at home, get a break after this. Kathleen?”
“I’ll handle that. But we can’t walk away from this though.”
“There’s no disgrace,” said Tynan, his voice rising slightly. “We messed up because we were kept blind. You did the best job possible. Stand down for now, let me get Intelligence in with some of the old hands on the paramilitaries, going back to whenever. This won’t be buried any more.”
“We’re okay, Tommy and me,” Minogue said. “We have to keep a hand in, or we could lose momentum here, could bury the case even. It’s asking too much to walk at this stage. ”
“No, it damned well isn’t.”
Tynan’s murmur drew Minogue to check the anger in the commissioner’s dull stare.
“Everything costs something, Matt,” he said after a few moments. “Eventually. Sometimes a lot more than it’s worth. What I have from the minister is that you and Malone walk from that mess back at the hotel. ”
“It was obstruction,” said Minogue, “whatever way you want to dress it up. ”
“You should have listened,” Tynan said, “before you bounced them and whipped this Freeman off in the car. So. Hear me out now? You standing down means there’ll be no comeback from King or the minister, even. As for Hayes, I’ll deal with him myself, but part of the horse-trading on the phone this morning saves Hayes’s neck. If he wants to work for the minister, then he gets out of the force. And I’m going to see that he does within the week. Now, that’s what’s been happening this morning in my little world.”
Tynan’s stare returned to a gaze at the glasses on the countertop.
“This started as politics,” he said. “Or culture. Or heritage, whatever that is anymore. But it’s going to end as justice.”
CHAPTER 25
O’Leary drove them down the quays after he had dropped the commissioner at Harcourt Street. The giddiness was gone but so was the panic: Minogue just felt more jittery now. O’Leary didn’t try any small talk.
“I have such a bleeding headache,” said Minogue at last.
Minogue knew that Kathleen would be at the squad by now.
“What are you going to do then?” Malone asked. “Go home and put the feet up?”
“Maybe.”
