“There’s a man over there,” Fanning said. “A man who was at the, the event, earlier. Friend of yours.”
Cully raised his eyebrows.
“Is that a coincidence he’s here?” Fanning asked.
Cully turned, picked up his glass.
“A mate of yours. Right?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Cully.
Fanning waited until Cully had finished his brandy.
“Likes a certain football club. Reputation for crazy fans?”
“Pretty observant bloke,” said Cully.
“Well thank you. Just so’s I’m clear on this before I go.”
Cully nodded.
“You wanted to meet me to…?”
“Advice. Like I said.”
“And to tell me Murph is a useless iijit. To give him the sack.”
“Right. Better off without him.”
“And that this project will go nowhere.”
“Did I say that?”
Cully reached into his jacket pocket, and flipped open his mobile.
“Remember what I said about people who know,” he said
“Sort of. I suppose. What did you say?”
“They’re the ones who wouldn’t want anything to do with your research.”
“Very encouraging.”
“Unless,” said Cully, eyeing the display. “Unless it’s something they want.”
“I don’t get this. What am I missing, again?”
“Say you had this,” said Cully. He held the mobile toward Fanning.
The sound on the video was little better than static. The camera had moved unsteadily when it panned. But there was Murph on his tiptoes, staring at the fight, and Dermot Fanning. He heard the yelping of the dog in the static.
“People notice things,” Cully said. “I mean I did, didn’t I?”
“Do they know you did that?”
Cully shrugged.
“They had no problem with you doing this.”
“Here look, wait: that’s you again. Can you see it? Crap screen, I know.”
“Nobody tried to stop you. I find that interesting.”
“…that’s when he had him, he got under his jaw but he kept him rock steady. And over he goes…”
Fanning wasn’t watching. Instead he took in details. Cully’s hairline, a small scar by his ear.
Cully held the phone up closer to Fanning’s face.
“And now look.”
It was a still image when Fanning first looked. Then Cully pushed with his thumb and the clip began. Fanning saw Delaney, the bearded man, close his eyes and then flinch. In the blocky, shadowed movements behind, a man’s figure shook when the gun went off.
“I missed it,” said Cully. “But you know the rest.”
He folded the phone and let it drop into his jacket pocket.
“Came with its own script,” he said. “You just had to press Record.”
Fanning picked up his glass. His back was tightening up, and he was suddenly aching. The noises in the pub around him seemed different now, sharper, somehow personal.
Chapter 18
Minogue spotted Eilis in the car park, standing by her new Mini. The cold breeze had reddened her eyes. She was smoking. He was disappointed for her, but relieved too. He parked and, skirting the grey, mossy wall that separated the Liaison office from the hulking headquarters and its sprawl of offices built in the 1970s, he made his way toward her.
She was indeed humming. It could be a Buddhist prayer for all Minogue knew. Sparing with words, this widely read and travelled Irish-speaker loner might well be proof positive of reincarnation. She was taking night courses, she told him last month. Spanish, for Peru. Eilis seems to have been serially “disappointed in love” for all the years he had known her.
“Dia dhuit, a stor.”
“God be with you, too, Your Honour,” she replied in Irish. “All well with you and yours.”
“Not bad at all. Considering the times we’re living in.”
There were piled-up grey-brown clouds looming over the trees. He spotted the trailing wires from an iPod hanging from her bag.
“April will be doing us no favours, Eilis, I’m thinking.”
She flicked her head for an answer and she drew on her cigarette. Kilmartin had first hired Eilis for the Murder Squad nigh on twenty years ago. She had applied for an opening in Liaison, telling Minogue later that it had sounded glamorous. Kilmartin had recently admitted to Minogue that he was half-afraid of her yet. He had also asked him if he, Minogue, had ever wondered if Eilis was one of them. Minogue baited him with it, goading Kilmartin to say “lesbian.”
She held out her pack of Gitanes.
“No thank you. Later, when there’s no one looking, maybe.”
“No later for you today, Your Honour. You got marching orders I hear. Someone hors de combat on a case. The Polish matter.”
“Just as you say.”
Eilis’ Munster Irish had revealed to Minogue exquisite nuances of sarcasm and irony that had escaped him before. Kilmartin had always been suspicious of her use of the state’s other official language. He had made irresolute efforts to match her using his own lumpen schoolboy Irish. It had never once been anything but a massacre, of course, and Kilmartin had learned to desist.
“As we go forward, it becomes necessary to go backward also.”
He turned his back to the breeze. Mischief rising in him suddenly
“God almighty, Eilis. That’s a bit dark. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
She drew on her cigarette, ground it underfoot, and then fell into step beside him. She always had an athlete’s easy, ranging walk, Minogue remembered. That observation alone had been enough for him to like her, from the moment they had begun working together so long ago. It, and her unceasing restlessness, signalled to him a kinship, another who might also wonder how and why one was so often an apparent stranger to so much about them.
“Taking a turn at the old job should brighten things up,” she said to him.
Peter Igoe spotted him on the way in.
“So you’re off, Matt,” Igoe said. “‘At the pleasure of the Commissioner.’”
“God help me so.”
Igoe raised an eyebrow. Minogue had heard that Igoe’s success in golf was attributed to his ability to provoke and to distract.
“You’re right, of course. It’s Tuohy you answer to. Technically.”
Assistant Commissioner Tuohy had come on strong the past few years as Commissioner Tynan’s chosen one.
“‘No big to-do,’ says Tuohy,” Igoe said. “‘Matt’ll hit the ground running.’”
Minogue let his gaze drift across the notice board. Dance and Social for the AGSI; training courses in Britain,
