“True for you,” he said. “But I don’t see that explaining away a murder.”
“A fairly big leap there,” said Mahon. “From Garda to prosecutor.”
“Drugs involved,” Minogue went on. “Exploitation of a minor: technically rape. Aggravated assault, robbery. Such a person needs to be off the streets.”
There was still no sign of annoyance on Mahon’s face.
“And have you said as much to my soon-to-be client?”
“I have.”
Mahon put his hands on the armrests of the chair.
“All right so,” he said, “I’m going to be working under the assumption that you are serious. These charges you’re telling me you’re going to take to the judge.”
“Why would you imagine that we might not be serious?”
Mahon stood slowly.
“I’d like to know what evidence you have could back up this… barrage of charges. It’s like fishing with sticks of dynamite.”
“A bit early now for seeking disclosure, I’m thinking,” said Minogue.
Mahon shrugged and left.
Minogue watched Wall’s stretch.
“A substantial bee in his bonnet,” said Wall.
“Substantial bonnet.”
“There’s women would kill for a head of hair like that.”
“Figuratively, Kevin. Remember what we’re working at?”
Wall conceded a smile.
“They’re all like that,” he said. “Not the hair. The attitude.”
“Solicitors?”
Wall nodded.
“The law and justice parted company some time back,” he said. ”Don’t mind justice: it’s morality that went south. And here we are, with the results.”
Minogue was a little surprised. He had to make an effort not to parse Wall’s words or tone any further into stereotypes.
“As my mother, God rest her, would say, ‘Man proposes, God disposes.’”
The awkward silence lasted several seconds. It ended with Wall clapping his palms on his knees.
“Well I wonder how Mossie’s getting on with the other one,” he said
“Sit in on it, why don’t you,” said Minogue. “I’ll call you, if and when we get our interview with Twomey proper. After he consults with his esteemed counsel.”
Wall closed the door behind him. Alone now, Minogue felt weary. He should be preparing a Charge Sheet to take to the Circuit Court in the morning. He should not care then that Cormac Mahon had tagged him as an overbearing cop, a tough nut trying to browbeat a suspect. He wondered what advice the same Cormac Mahon was giving his new client now. Start preparing alibis? Get off his high horse and realize that the Guards could hang a drug charge on him if that’s what it took to keep him? Ask him straight out if he’d had sex with this kid Tara?
Minogue put his feet up on the table and slid back in the chair until his neck met the top. Against his own grudging efforts, he now let caution to the wind, and fell to imagining that this might be done in a few hours. It’d be up and down the hall between the rooms, playing Matthews off against the Twomey fellow. Then one would run out of nerve. Again he considered putting this Tara kid on the spot. Bring her in this very evening, see if she’d spill the beans now that she’d had a bit of time to see her situation.
But did kids — adolescents — actually feel guilt? The furthest she’d gone was admitting she’d taken Klos’ money. By the time she had conceded this, she’d been almost hyperventilating, beyond hysterics. He’d heard that plaintive wail before, from his own Iseult, at that age. The martyrdom routine: “It’s true, I swear! Why doesn’t anyone believe me?”
Well, then.
All these dramatics had wearied him. The floods of tears and the wrenching sobs had gotten her what she wanted more or less: back into the custody of her parents, and home. He closed his eyes and listened to the faint background hum of the heating. He thought of Kilmartin looking furtively through the Self-Help or New Age shite in the bookshops, fighting off the gloom, waiting for a verdict. Waiting — something that James Aloysious Kilmartin had never been good at.
He shifted, tugged his jacket down, and closed his eyes again. He let himself wander again, and his mind took him straight to Graz and its lanes, where he had strolled with an Austrian copper and a French expert in counterfeit documents at a conference last year. Cobblestones, smells of ground coffee and sausage, violins on the street, trams and pedestrians in fine harmony, his own bewilderment that anything bad could have ever happened in such a beautiful city Footsteps outside the door: the door opened, cautiously; a shaved head, a moustache, huge frog eyes.
“Ah, Matt?”
Minogue sat back again. He hoped it didn’t show on his face that he believed this detective looked more like a pirate than a Guard.
“I was listening to Twomey lying in fifty-two different ways, and I realized, Jesus, I hadn’t introduced myself.”
“Good man.”
“A complete pain in the hole, I’m telling you.”
“Twomey, you mean, I take it.”
Duggan had a manic smile. A bit of the Mr. Bean about him, thought Minogue, but with longer arms and a looser way of moving about.
“Hughsie is on the mend, I hear,” Minogue said.
“Worse luck, the fecker,” said Duggan. “A slave driver.”
“Really?”
“Ah no. I’m only slagging.”
Minogue returned the smile.
“Me and Hughsie go back these years. A fierce hard goer, Hughsie. But he forgot to take care of himself, I told him.”
Minogue watched Duggan untwine his arms and begin to rotate his head and neck. He seemed so loosely put together that an extremity might fall off.
“This Twomey is cut from the same cloth as the Matthews lad. A bollocks, a complete fu-”
Minogue watched a mischievous expression come over Duggan’s face.
“Stoney wouldn’t appreciate that language,” Duggan said then. “You know?”
“‘Stoney’?”
“Stone wall…? He has a way of sticking to his guns, like. But not in a bollicky way now. Very, how would I say, very decent.”
“Good-living, you’re saying.”
“Doesn’t wear it on his sleeve now,” said Duggan. “No Holy Joe stuff.”
“Good. I like that in a man.”
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that you don’t meet many, er. These days.”
“Actual Catholics?”
“Oh more than that. Real believers, I mean, I suppose. No offence now. Are you, er, yourself, er..?”
Minogue shook his head.
“Oh, Church of Ireland?”
“No, Mossie. Pagan. Merely pagan.”
Minogue felt sorry for Duggan’s sudden awkwardness.
“But I’m well disposed,” he said. “In general, like.”
Duggan’s face eased again.
Minogue let it go with a non-committal shrug.
“So,” said Duggan. He looked at his watch. “No let up, no release?”
