“So what’s that word again,” Kilmartin was saying. “Lugubrious, is it?”
“Listen to you,” Minogue said. “You and your Half-Three Divils.”
“You can laugh. Hey, you’re allergic to churches, as I recall.”
“I don’t be leaping out of cars when I get near one, do I.”
“Each to his own, but.”
Kilmartin let out a long breath through pursed lips. Then he held up the page he had grabbed on the laneway.
“Well, here’s one of your bits of paper,” he said. “Makes no sense to me.”
“It’s Polish.”
“Good. I thought I was after having a stroke or something.”
“Half the County Wicklow will think the same thing, when they read it.”
Kilmartin reached inside his jacket and took out another sheet.
“Well this belongs to you too then.”
“Any more you’re hiding on me?”
“As if I would. But what’re you doing with scene photos? You’re not in the game anymore, remember?”
Minogue gave him the eye.
“What,” Kilmartin said. “I’m only making conversation.”
His gaze returned to the muddy tire tracks in the yard alongside.
Minogue jammed the remaining pages between his seat and the console. He recalled Kilmartin’s talk about being powerless to protect his wife, and the panic attacks he got. Maybe Kilmartin had really gone over the edge that night, and there would be no coming back — at least to his job as a Garda.
Someday he’d ask him if he had really believed that Rynn or one of his gunmen had been out there in the garden that night, coming to kill him and Maura. Things you remember, but things the mind decides to hide under the bed. But the body remembers things. At times, Minogue himself could feel the broken china and glass under his elbows that night in the Kilmartins’ shattered kitchen, scrabbling and grappling for Kilmartin’s arm — or rather the police-issued automatic at the end of that arm — then the blinding floodlights, and the shouting.
Betrayed was an odd word. It had an old-fashioned sound to it. It was plain that Kilmartin loved his wife. Minogue knew that because he had sat with Kilmartin for two nights at the hospital after Maura Kilmartin had overdosed. It had been exactly one week after the fiasco at their home. The whole thing had been his fault, not hers, Kilmartin had said several times. After all, what kind of a detective was he, that he’d miss something right under his nose for years?
Wind buffeted the car once, twice.
“I’m going in,” Minogue said finally. “Come on in yourself, sure.”
Kilmartin pretended to think about it.
Chapter 9
“Jacko’s a psycho,” Murph said. “Only you here, I’d tell him what’s what.” Murph had insisted that Fanning give him the two fifties. He would do the business with Jacko. His role, he had called it. Fanning eyed three more men arriving from the parking area. With their darker, wind-burned faces and their country accents plain in the sparing words, he was sure they were tinkers.
“Extortion is what it is,” said Murph. “I’ll sort him out later. Come on.”
Fanning watched Murph hand over the money.
“Behave yourselves,” Jacko said. “And bet lots.”
Murph pulled the handle on the galvanized door, and Fanning followed him into the dimness beyond. A short passageway led to a room the size of a school gymnasium, a storey-and-a-half high. Small groups stood around, men all of them, and they talked in low voices under small, slow clouds of cigarette smoke. There was some kind of half-disassembled industrial shelving at one end of the room, and discarded pieces of engine parts in a heap to the side.
Fanning’s first thought when he saw the chain-link was that it was a mistake. A chainlink cage simply belonged outdoors, not indoors. The strangeness of it continued to rub at his mind until the astringent smells pressed in sharply on him, cleaning fluids and fresh sawdust scattered in the enclosure. The chain link had to be six feet high, at least. A yard brush leaned against the outside of the cage, and beside it a shovel. The bright blue heads of masonry nails stood out from the bases of the sockets that anchored posts to the cement floor.
Fanning stood next to Murph, and avoided any eye contact with the groups of men. He studied the walls instead, the windows that had been filled in, the two painted-over skylights. One man from a group had detached himself and had begun strolling toward the far end of the room, slowly rubbing his face up and down like a comedian pulling faces while talking on his mobile.
“How come he gets to keep his phone?” he whispered to Murph.
“None of our business.”
A squat, bearded man walked smartly in from the hallway. His beard had the same blue-black tinge as his hair. The groups of men had noticed him, and they shuffled and turned to face him.
“I’ll take bets before,” he called out.
He had the same torn and gravelly voice as one of the Dubliners, the folk group that Fanning’s father had liked, and whose LPs he had later regretted discarding after the funeral. The bearded man coughed, and rubbed his hands.
“No bets during. For those of you here the-.”
He held up his arm then, and he fumbled in the pocket of his wind-cheater. He turned away then and spoke into his phone.
“We’ll see the talent in a minute,” Murph murmured to Fanning. “No rush.”
The smell of disinfectant was stinging Fanning’s nose now. He noticed darker patches on the cement floor next to the wire. The bearded man closed his phone, and whistled.
“A squad car taking its sweet time out on the Ballygall Road,” he said.
The shuffling stopped, and most of the men looked away. Low talk resumed. The man with the beard strolled toward where Murph and Fanning sat.
“Do I know you,” he said to Fanning.
“No way,” said Murph, smiling. “A mate of mine. Sound, so he is.”
“Is he not able to talk?”
Murph’s laugh was forced.
“Ah no, he’s not. He’s a dummy. Aren’t you?”
Fanning said nothing.
“There’s a pair of you then,” the bearded man said. “If and he’s in your line of caper, Murph.”
“Comedy club we’re in here, is it.”
“I’m not trying to make a joke.”
He turned back to Fanning, who concentrated on putting on his most neutral, attentive expression.
“Been here before?”
Fanning shook his head.
“He’s just trying it out,” said Murph. “See if he can make a few bob. I got the okay from Jacko.”
The bearded man’s eyes drifted slowly away from Fanning’s.
“You have him gambling for his fix, do you,” he said to Murph.
“Christ,” said Murph, and shook his head. “What a thing to say.”
“Why’s that? Business these days. Oh. Tell him if he pukes he’ll be cleaning it up himself.”
His eyes darted back to Fanning.
“No hard feelings there, head-the-ball.”
“Ah no,” said Fanning. “You’re grand.”
Something that was almost a smile came to the man’s face, but his stare remained flat and empty.
“He says I’m grand. Did you hear that. ‘You’re grand’ says he.”
