John Brady - A Carra ring

“Keep tabs on Mitchell, Tommy, will you? And poke around with any other staff. Press him on the times again. It’ll count for a lot if we can fix the time. I’ll do me calls from the site van. We’ll see what we have to do if the rain keeps up.”

“Sixteen million,” Damian Little repeated.

The heater in the site van hadn’t made much difference. Minogue’s coat was saturated. His shoulders felt like they were encased in half-set cement.

“That’s quid too,” Little added. “The last album.”

Minogue checked his watch. Little rubbed the window and peered out.

“No tax either,” said Little. “Not a bloody penny. They’re artists, you see.”

He turned to Minogue again and cocked an ear.

“That frigging tent of yours might be flying up out of there yet.”

Griffin and his crew were still securing the scene. Minogue had watched him driving masonry nails into the tarmac to hold ropes over the tent.

“I’ve a young fella mad about them,” Little said. “Wanted the price of a ticket there a few weeks ago. Guess how much?”

Minogue shivered. He looked over the diagram he had sketched of the boot of the Escort. There’d be blood collected under the spare wheel.

“Tenner,” he said.

“A tenner?” Little scoffed. “Where have you been? Go on out of that.”

“Twenty, then.”

Little tapped the side of a video camera case.

“Twenty-two fifty! And that was a deal, I was told. A deal.”

Minogue studied the copy of the passport photograph again. The nose, maybe that was the Irish part of Shaughnessy’s face.

“Not a penny tax,” Little was saying. “The States, Japan. Oz. Everywhere. They spend half the year in the air.”

“Art,” said Minogue. “We’ve plenty to spare. Why not spread it around?”

Little laughed. It was clear to Minogue that Damian Little had had this conversation before and that he would have it, in varying forms, again.

“Art? Ever notice when they sing, all of them now, not just them — they all sing in American accents?”

“What age are you now, Damian?”

Little waved a finger at him.

“Don’t try that one on me. Nothing to do with it.”

Minogue tested the sleeves of his coat with his elbows. Wet through, a strange musty smell. Had the rain died down a bit?

“Sixteen million,” said Little. “That’s a hell of a lot of jack for stuff that doesn’t even rhyme half the time.”

“ ‘ Let the storms come, take them all | Shake the pillars, make them fall,’ ” said Minogue. “If it’s rhymes you want.”

“Jesus, I can’t even hear words half the time.”

“What about ‘Graveyard Baby’?”

Little rubbed at the window.

“Here’s someone over now.”

Malone, bareheaded, water dripping down his face, appeared in the doorway.

“Christy Griffin says come on out,” he said. “The rain’s dying down for the while anyway. He wants his orders.”

Minogue got up slowly. Christy Griffin says. Was that the way professionals worked? The backs of his trousers clung to his legs. He could almost hear his joints creak. Mr. Shaughnessy awaited. Six days missing, he had been, now missing no longer.

Kathleen Minogue was standing in the doorway. It had been the phone all right. Morning, then.

“Sorry, love,” she said. “It’s work ”

He rolled onto his back.

“It’s five to nine,” Kathleen said “I have to be off.”

He listened again to the distant traffic on the Kilmacud Road.

“Raining still, is it?”

“No. He said he’d wait.”

“Who said.”

“John Tynan.”

Minogue yanked back the duvet and sat on the edge of the bed. It was gone three when he’d hit the sack, he remembered. He pulled his dressing gown off the hook and headed for the stairs.

Kathleen followed him.

“I’m away now,” she said. “Anne’s outside.”

She opened the door, she took a step back, she kissed him. The air across his ankles made him shiver The hedge by the window was clustered with raindrops. From the kitchen he heard the fanfare for the news. He rubbed his eyes again. The exhaust from Anne O’Toole’s Volkswagen floating up over the hedge had a blue tint.

“Hello. John, is it?”

“And yourself. All in order, are you, save for the late night?”

“Touch and go for now. I’d be hoping for a fit of clear thinking shortly.”

“Good. A cup of something now would speed the process, would it not?”

Minogue watched the ancient and badly driven Volkswagen Polo take the bend around by the shops. The shocks were gone now, it was burning oil. My wife, he thought, my wife in that damned jalopy

“You’d be doing me a favor,” said Tynan “That cup of something on Mary Street. Upstairs by the window?”

Bewleys, Minogue gathered.

“Three-quarters of an hour then?” Tynan tried.

Minogue scratched a loose fiber on the knee of his pajamas.

“Fair enough. Should I be bringing anything with me?”

“Yes you should. Your ablest recollections of last night at the Garda Club.”

Minogue stopped scratching. He watched his fingernail turn pink again. “Do you know a journalist by the name of Gemma O’Loughlin?”

“So that’s who she was,” Minogue murmured. “Or what she was.”

Minogue couldn’t take his eyes off the couple signing to one another at a table by the fireplace. They seemed to be getting such joy from their silent conversation. Tynan’s driver, Sergeant Tony O’Leary, was eyeing them too. He watched O’Leary resume his pretend study of the massive stained-glass window over Mary Street below. Maybe O’Leary was replaying or plotting the perfect stroke on Ballybunion. A golf nut, O’Leary. He had done a stint with the UN in Africa and there had been a picture in the newspapers of him playing golf on some dusty plateau there.

Tony O’Leary had returned to duty in Dublin just in time to put his foot in it and thereby come to Tynan’s attention, ultimately to be posted to the commissioner’s staff. O’Leary had remained stubborn in his refusal to recant a statement about an arrest he’d witnessed. His statement had been used to defend and then acquit a thug with a long criminal record, who’d alleged mistreatment by nine arresting Guards during a free-for-all in a pub on Talbot Street. O’Leary had crossed a line within the force.

Tynan pushed his cup and saucer to the center of the table.

“Should have recognized her, I suppose,” said Minogue. “But there’s so many of them these days.”

“She was on a PR tour with Conor Lawlor. She’s just finished researching a series on the Guards for the papers. We’d been hoping it’d be a positive item.”

“Is this the same Gemma O’Loughlin who let FIDO out?”

Tynan looked away. Last year’s competition for schoolchildren to design and name a new Garda mascot had produced unintended results. Gemma O’Loughlin had ferreted out one of the more cynical Garda rank-and-file takes on what that mascot should be. New legislation and a cascade of regulations and guidelines for arrests, for ensuring the rights of an accused, had caused many Guards to throw their hands up. Fuck it, drive off had actually been put in print in the daily newspapers.

“She’s adamant,” Tynan said then. “The tone, the general agreement among the Guards there. Vehemence, she described it as. Ferocity.”

“Drink, John. Spoofing. Come on, now.”

“And the bit with the gun?”

“Fingers — no guns.”

“She’s sticking to it. ‘Any citizen would reasonably conclude… et cetera.’ That Kilmartin meant the Guards had done it. At the very least condoned or approved it.”

“Larry Smith?”

“Larry Smith,” Tynan said.