of the hospital entrance.
The briefing file contained a copy of a passport photo and four photos taken in the hospital. Three of the four haunted Minogue much of the evening and early morning. It took a lot to crush a man’s skull with kicks.
The matter was being handled by a crew from Fitzgibbon Street Garda station, and they were going full tilt at it. Already there were copies of emails in Polish, complete with literal, often clumsy, translations. The inventory of effects from Klos’ room at the hostel offered little. His wallet was missing, but no one had tried to use his bankcard since the assault.
There were no arrests as of last night. Nor were there suspects.
Mr. Klos had a mother, but no siblings. His parents had separated when he was a child. His father had minor convictions from a decade back. He had not had a close relationship with his son, or his former wife. There was a matter of alcohol abuse in the father’s history.
Klos had what looked like a post-secondary certificate of some kind to do with tourism. He smoked roll-your- owns. There were no indications of drugs on his person or in his belongings. In his pockets were clippings from a Polish newspaper published in Dublin. Along with those items were scribbled notes including phone numbers of restaurants and hotels and an immigrant aid office on Church Street, and several Dublin City bus tickets. There were remnants of potato chips in his pockets, foil from bars of chocolate, matches. An optimist apparently, Mr. Klos also carried three condoms.
An iPod type of thing was found at the scene, in several pieces. A note from the Technical Bureau declared that its flash memory could not be read, as it had been trodden on. Minogue surmised that this deed would have been close to the moments when Klos’ white earphone wire had been pulled up through his jacket and lodged in his zipper, peeling the plastic back to the bare wire.
The file made no mention of friends and associates, Polish or otherwise, in Dublin. Klos’ mobile phone, an unlocked Nokia he’d brought with him from Poland, with an Irish SIM card, had not been found. There was one page to the mobile phone records. He had made two brief calls to his mother, seven to the hostel where he was staying, four to restaurants. Two restaurant managers deposed that Klos’ English was spotty. One thought he “had issues.” Meaning? “Wouldn’t look me in the eye… shifty impression…”
Minogue had already read the copies of statements from people in the hostel several times, in full. One mentioned the Internet cafe where Klos had visited, and a reference to Skype, an MSN account, Hotmail. No-one knew Klos’ passwords. A search of the routine online jungle — MySpace, Bebo and FaceBook — came up dry. Googling Klos’ name returned four hits, all relating to Polish sites and sources, but only one relating to him, or rather his email address.
This was Minogue’s fourth re-read of the files on Klos. In spite of their efforts, the team was getting nowhere. His gaze slid from the pages and over the dashboard to the passenger seat. The bit of sun yesterday had really awakened the new-car smell again. Kathleen had told him that the new-car smell was very toxic. She didn’t mean to take the good out of it, she reminded him.
Peter Igoe, the Chief Super for Minogue’s department, had floated into the office yesterday afternoon with this file under his arm, and a tight smile that Minogue knew right away meant trouble.
Igoe wasn’t above flattery. While going over what was needed of Minogue in this afternoon’s meeting concerning Klos, he made much of Minogue’s past expertise in the Murder Squad. The Poles needed to leave that meeting knowing that the Gardai were putting everything they had into the investigation.
Naturally, Minogue wouldn’t be called upon to give any detailed answers specific to the case. The case detectives would do that, with the Technical Bureau to back them up. The optics needed to be sharp, Igoe had said. Telephone calls had been made between governments. Minogue already knew that the newspapers in Poland had fairly leaped on the matter.
PR, in other words, Minogue muttered that evening when Kathleen asked why he seemed so cross-grained. He should be flattered to be invited, was her retort; another feather in his cap et cetera.
Minogue had to let that go by. Since his posting to the International Liaison Unit at HQ in the Phoenix Park, his wife’s proud conviction had been unshakeable: her husband finally had a proper nine-to-five. He should be delighted to be out of the pressure-cooker that had been Jim Kilmartin’s fabled Murder Squad, now decorously disbanded two years ago.
So now with the guidance of the Aspergian Sergeant Aine Collins in the Europol National Unit, Minogue was learning how to process Analytic Work Files. He worked with coppers from London and Spain, and another from Austria, a gateway for Eastern European crime. The dubious excitement of a month on the Offshore Financial Centres section awaited. He had taken to making up his own acronyms from those initials for the OFC.
So far on his way through the unit, Minogue’s training had taken in matters that Kathleen believed were very exciting. There were counterfeit designer goods coming in from China to figure out. A Croatian immigrant making good money as a window-washer had three passports. The case of three Nigerian brothers who preyed on West African refugees with a mixture of witchcraft, intimidation, and extortion was still dragging through the system. The twenty-first century…?
Minogue powered down the window, pausing and reversing it twice to test it. It was quicker than he liked, but there was no slack. He looked down to the files again. He might as well practise pronouncing names. Klos, like close. Tad-eh-oosh.
Another name he had to know was that of the middling bigwig from the Polish Embassy, an attache named Juraksaitis, who would be accompanying Mrs. Klos. Juraksaitis was to be pronounced like You’re Excited.
A diesel clanking announced Kilmartin’s arrival. Minogue watched him in the mirror as he reversed a battered and sagging farm Jetta he had borrowed from his brother, to the curb behind. There was some difficulty to locking the door. Kilmartin put his overcoat on the back seat next to Minogue’s funeral gabardine and he sat in.
Chapter 3
Dermot Fanning’s bike had a puncture. It was the same wheel as last week’s. It might even be the same puncture. He leaned the bike back against the wall and he resolved to be calm about it. There were basically two possibilities: a) a fresh puncture, b) he hadn’t mended the last one right. It was likely b), he decided. It was all too easy to pinch the tube during a repair, enough to cause a slow puncture.
But the truth was, there was a c). He could have bought a new tube and a new tire as well. This he had refused to do, citing to Brid the outrageous prices of same. This wasn’t news, of course.
Brid, his wife, needed the car: a teacher couldn’t be late. Their daughter Aisling had still said that she liked going to the child-minder’s on Dadda’s bike anyway. That had changed lately, when she had become very clingy with Brid in the mornings. Tears, haste, annoyance, guilt. Repeated several times daily. Were there Terrible Three And A Halve’s?
Fanning didn’t like to think that Aisling had picked up on something between himself and Brid. He felt sure that Brid had been on the brink of asking him why exactly Aisling had to go to a child-minder’s all day. It was understood that he needed time to himself for his writing and the freedom to think — or not think.
He checked the windows around the house again. Then he set the alarm, pulled the door behind him, and he locked it. It was only a quarter to ten, so he had plenty of time yet to get into town, and up to that restaurant in Smithfield. Even if he were a few minutes late, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to keep Breen, Colm Breen, Irish film’s mover and shaker, waiting for once. And whether Breen liked to be reminded or not, he and Dermot Fanning went back a long, long way. Breen had been the gawky newcomer in the Film Society then, and Fanning the third- year student running the meetings.
Breen had become master of the schmooze, his country accent massaged to mid-Atlantic over the intervening years. To be fair, he had always made time for Fanning, and as much as it had angered Fanning over the years, Breen’s praise had also buoyed him.
But it was no time to think of the past now. This was business, networking, something he had neglected for far too long, and realized its costs only lately.
Some things were working his way, Fanning saw then, as the 62 bus appeared at the bend. He stayed downstairs after he got on, at the back of the bus, and took out his notebook. He thought about the points he wanted to leave Breen with, the three key things he’d remember. It took only a few moments of this for Fanning’s
