his green safety vest and yellow hard hat almost glowing now in the spring light.
Mulhall teetered between annoyance and relief: so it was the gas company, after all.
“Howiya,” he called out, warily. He was frowning now, his eyes straying to the pistol in Mulhall’s hand.
A bit late to be trying to hide it now, Mulhall decided. He waited for fleeting eye contact, and then the man quickly looked down at his feet.
“Howiya yourself,” Mulhall said. “Get to work, why don’t you, you fat gobshite. And not be annoying people this early in the day.”
Well that was settled, then. More relieved than he was sore, or even angry, Mulhall strode down the lane, mapping out in his mind the entry of the laneway onto Ossory Road. He’d cross there, and head somewhere where he could lie low. The dumpsters behind the shops there would do for a short while, or even an old garden shed in one of the houses there. Then, back to Bernie, get some stuff and clear off. Mr. Gas Man down the lane was hardly going to keep his trap shut about seeing a fella with a gun, was he. Mulhall could hardly blame him.
The weight of the pistol dragging on his arm with each stride came to his attention. The laneway was covered in damp patches, with clumps of mashed cardboard every now and then. It felt greasy underfoot. God, but he must look totally stupid, he thought, like a schoolkid holding his mickey and going up to the teacher to get permission to go to the toilet.
He thought for a moment of Bernie, and suspicion flashed across his mind. It didn’t last. Bernie, if it were possible, was even thicker than Martin. He slowed, and the anger returned. This was what he was reduced to, hanging with the likes of Murph, and Martin, and Martin’s retarded missus? Something had to give here, he murmured. Maybe it was time to do the thing, make his move.
He had saved the copper’s number in his mobile under the name “Paddy,” and he had added two digits to each number in case anyone ever snooped through his numbers there. Molloy — no: Tommy Malone. It was Murph told him about Malone, warned him about him. Malone was a Dub, and he was smart. He knew the score in Dublin nowadays, with everyone paranoid and jumpy, and looking for a place to hide, or an escape hatch from this dump of a city. Malone was doing what coppers always did, putting out feelers, trying to get fellas to grass on the higher- ups.
But according to Murph, Malone talked serious money. He hinted that he could even deliver the whole package, even a new identity. According to Murph anyway: as far as that went. He didn’t believe Murph on the last part, but money could sort a lot of issues.
This was the end of the lane ahead. He slowed, his chest pumping in the cold air and his own hot, rank breath coming back over his face. It was definitely the lie-low-and-wait option.
There was a car up ahead, not moving. Green, older Jap car: a Corolla? Someone was standing behind its half-opened driver’s door, a man in a leather jacket. He had noticed Mulhall too. He did not seem in the least bit put-out to be seeing a man in a T-shirt on a cold spring morning, holding something the shape of a gun.
Mulhall stopped, undecided. There was a faint smell of aftershave, or cologne or something expensive. In this laneway, here in this kip, on a lousy damp cold Dublin morning? Hallucinating, that’s what it must be surely.
But it was too quiet here. It’d have to be back the other way, he decided, over the walls and off through the gardens. He picked a cement block wall a half-dozen houses away and headed for it at a jog.
Then there was a door opening into the alley to his right, a figure emerging as he ran by. He did not slow, but he took the pistol out, and broke into a sprint instead, weaving from side to side. There were other footsteps running behind him now, almost matching his own. Turning to cast a quick glance over his shoulder he saw flashes, and he felt himself being punched over against a wall.
He was able to squeeze the trigger once but then his arm fell as did everything else, sideways and buckling. He heard his own knees hit the cement, and the skin tearing as his momentum carried him scraping along the laneway.
He came to a stop, and felt his chest rising and falling on the slimy, cold cement. This new sideways world was way too bright. He’d need to lie here a few moments only, until he could figure out if he had broken something. Slowly, he flexed his fingers. The pistol was gone somewhere.
There were footsteps on the cement nearby, soft shoes at a walk.
Mulhall wanted to shout, but the voice that came out was a whisper.
“Hey,” it said.
He wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken the words.
“Why did you do that?”
It was his own voice. His chin and his cheeks were scraping the cement.
“Who are you?”
Someone was breathing hard nearby.
“Ma?” Mulhall said then. “Jesus, Ma. I’m having a terrible dream.”
There was a ticklish movement around his cheek, and something red flowed by his chin. A car started nearby but the noise soon died away. This is a concussion, he decided. He must have slipped or something.
“Going to wake up now,” he said, or thought.
He was being rolled over. The sky was blinding him.
He couldn’t focus his eyes. A shape moved dimly not far above him. He heard the strained breathing again, breathing out the nose. A black spot appeared between him and the shape above, wavering slightly, and Mulhall had a moment to conclude that it was the barrel of a gun.
Chapter 2
Good Friday came and went, and in its wake the Easter. A freakishly warm holiday Monday drew Minogue into the garden, and there he worked fitfully at rehabilitating the rockery. It was a yearly ritual now. That was how he missed the phone call with the news that the Commissioner’s wife had died.
He replayed the message twice to be sure he had the funeral details right. When Kathleen came home, he waited until she was settled before telling her the news. She was more upset than he had expected. After a while, he brought out two kitchen chairs, and then two tumblers of Jamesons to the patch of grass that was now home to a dozen or more large, marooned rocks.
The sun made an unexpected appearance, taking the edge off the cool air, and turning the scruffy spring growth a bright green while it incited more noise from the birds gadding about unseen in the undergrowth.
The whiskey was quickly downed.
Kathleen and he sat together for the better part of a half-hour, adrift in the smells of torn earth, the stirring leaves and grass, and the birds’ unceasing bustle. Every now and then Kathleen recounted things that Rachel Tynan, artist and teacher, had done in the recent past.
Minogue did not tell her that it had been only a fortnight ago that he had spotted Rachel Tynan and her husband on Dunlaoghaire Pier. She had been pale and thin, and she moved haltingly along arm-in-arm beside him. Minogue had not wanted them to see him, and a gap in the sea wall let him escape. His excuses — it was dusk and they wouldn’t have spotted him, they needed no interruptions — had crumbled long before he had gotten home, but the shame of his evasion stayed with him.
Wednesday was a long time coming, but by nine o’ clock that morning, Minogue was backing out of the garage in his new Peugeot, listening for squeaks from the chassis as it rolled down to the gate. He was trying not to be impatient, but he was losing. The collar on his new shirt chafed. He just couldn’t find a decent driving position in his new car, and he was bewildered as to how he had missed this on the test drive. And now, Kilmartin, the very one who had guilted him into taking him along to the funeral, was late.
At least he had time for a re-read of the file he had been hurriedly handed yesterday afternoon.
Tadeusz Klos, a twenty-three-year-old Polish national, had arrived in Ireland five days before the assault that ended in his death. Klos had been beaten and stomped into a coma a stone’s throw from the Custom House, in the centre of the city. The considerable amount of blood that he had left on the footpath behind him was quickly determined by the State Pathologist to have been cranial in origin. The report did not mention that it would have been thickly mixed with that night’s rain into something that Minogue knew would be as greasy as it would be acidic from the roadway to where it had flowed. Klos was resuscitated twice in the ambulance. He died about a mile short
