John Brady - A Carra ring

“Among other reasons, because the minister has requested it.”

Minogue put down his glass. He studied Tynan’s face.

“John,” he said. “Wait a minute here now. You bought me a cup of coffee the other day. A nice cup of Bewleys white coffee. You asked about Jim dirtying his bib at the club. Fair enough, I thought. It’s wise to be on guard with this newspaper article, the Smiths stirring up trouble again. And Gemma O’Loughlin is out to sell papers. And then you talked about Shaughnessy, how you want to be in the know every day. Still fair enough, I said to myself again: a visitor, tourist, well-known family, profile — whatever. It has to be done right. Fine and well ”

Minogue paused to get Tynan’s eyes back from a study of the glass.

“But today, out of the blue, there’s a murder. It’s a well-planned murder. How well planned? They knew there were Guards there, and maybe even that the Guards might be armed. But they were determined enough, desperate enough… or maybe they were so well paid, so afraid of failure, that they followed through anyway. ”

He leaned forward. He could feel the muscles at the back of his neck quivering now, his head beginning to shake.

“There’s part of me knows that those two fellas were only after Freeman, John. The poor iijit panicked and ran for it. That’s when they got him.”

Tynan nodded once and looked down at the floor.

“Now they were nothing to the Smiths, John, were they?”

Tynan raised his eyebrows.

“I say they were there for Freeman. ”

Tynan picked up the coins again.

“There’s something you’re not telling me here,” Minogue said. “And if you don’t tell me, I’m going to find out myself. If you won’t let me at King or Hayes, I’ll go after them myself.”

Tynan let the coins drop into his other hand. His voice was soft when he spoke now.

“The last person who spoke to me like that was an assistant commissioner,” he said. “Was, I say Now he hadn’t been threatened, or shot at, like you have. So you’re going to make it. For now. We’ll let that last remark go by.”

“The suits went around you,” Minogue said. “But they’re not going around my case. We have three murders, they’re related, and I’m not going away. A bunch of robbed antiques and fifty million notwithstanding.”

Tynan let the coins slide over one another in his palm. Minogue wondered if O’Leary and Malone could hear him on the other side of the partition. Tynan glanced up from his palm.

“Okay, then,” he said. “It’s not just the money. Or even these, what can we call them — artifacts — he says he’s going to give back ‘to the Irish people.’”

The commissioner looked at the distorted glass in the partition of the snug. That head could only be Malone’s, Minogue decided.

“You talked with Leyne, didn’t you?”

“In the car,” replied Minogue “At the press conference, a bit.”

“Well, did you ever hear him hold forth on the state of the nation here?”

“A short, sour few words, yes. He was still back in the fifties. I kind of switched off.”

“You remember 1969, Derry?”

Minogue searched Tynan’s face for a clue.

“What about it?”

“The riots in the Bogside, when everything was going up? How it looked from here? Nights of burning houses, riots, and petrol bombs? Remember?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“The B Specials and the RUC? The black outfits, like storm troopers?”

“What’s this…?”

“You remember we were considering sending in the army, over the border into Derry?”

“Yes, there was talk — ”

“Talk?” said Tynan. “You know well there was more than that.”

“Why are you bringing this…”

He left the question unfinished. He stared at the commissioner. Tynan looked and sounded as though he was reminiscing about a clumsy prank as a schoolboy. Minogue knew the expression, the tone to be signs of a quiet fury.

“Where is this coming from?” he tried.

“Didn’t I tell you I had a chat with the Minister of Justice this morning?”

“Wait,” said Minogue, “I’m not on board here. First I’m thinking smuggling, then pay-off so Leyne can get his shot at immortality here, then cover-up for his son, but now…?”

“I had several questions to ask of the minister,” said Tynan. “At least the conversation ended on a civil note. Can I get back to this history lesson now?”

Minogue nodded.

“The North, the sieges around Catholic areas, the barricades. The arms that we didn’t officially notice being sent into the North from here.”

“Leyne was part of that?”

Tynan looked at the empty Seven-Up O’Leary had drunk.

“NORAID, the Americans — that was the start of that,” he said. “There was big money involved. You got caught in the tail end of a bit of the worst yourself.”

For a moment Minogue was back at the border that night, his legs beginning to give out as he tried to reach a car already rolling into the ditch, the bullets still slamming into it.

“What are you saying here?”

Tynan opened the snug door and asked O’Leary to phone a Hogan, tell him he’d call later. Through the doorway Minogue eyed a customer, an elderly man with a gaunt face and a long tongue, which he kept flicking around his lips as he hauled himself onto a stool. The knuckles were misplaced, jammed together. Tynan closed the door again.

“We heard a rumor a few years ago,” he resumed, “that Leyne had been involved back then. Yes — the self-made entrepreneur still with the politics of a Republican. It surfaced when he made his approach about giving back these artifacts, and donating all the money. He’s no stranger to donations, by the way, I learned: do you want to know how many millions he’s given to the Democrats over the past decade? Anyway, that was before the IRA went shopping in Moscow and Libya, and doing their deals with the other slime in Amsterdam and Prague and the rest of it.”

Tynan gave Minogue a quick survey.

“Even before the business phase kicked in,” he resumed, “with the robberies and the rackets and the drug trade. He believed, or he wanted to believe, that the IRA was the same IRA as had fought Black and Tans. Remember where he came from, Matt: small farmer, pushed around here. He walked away when the politics went way left. That’s history now.”

“History,” said Minogue. “But plenty stayed in, people that Leyne would know still, then?”

Tynan looked at his watch.

“Probably,” he said.

“What if the son knew that, had a name…? Or what if he’d told the father some of what he’d done here and Leyne pulled out some old contacts here to get the son out of the mess?”

He tried to arrange his thoughts but they kept going sideways on him.

“The son, Shaughnessy…” he began. “He was trouble, that we can tell. Would he have put the heavy word on people here, how he could spill the beans on something from way in the past, so’s they’d have to help unglue him from whatever he was up to here?”

Tynan nodded slowly. Minogue didn’t know whether he was agreeing with him or just placating him.

“More to the point,” Minogue went on, “if Leyne began to suspect that his contacts here had gotten fed up fast with demands the son was making in his name and then gotten rid of Shaughnessy, maybe even Aoife Hartnett because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time… Leyne might put them to the wall too?”

Tynan didn’t nod again. He had resumed fiddling with the coins.

“Freeman had access to Leyne,” Minogue resumed. “Even to his will: maybe Leyne might have let slip what was on his mind to him. So Freeman would be an unknown quantity here if people thought he could pass on something to the Guards.”