“No,” he said “I won’t bother me head. It’s only a holiday, not a coup.”
He trudged back to his own partitioned cubicle. Malone called it the Art Gallery, Kilmartin called it Bedlam, Eilis checked regularly to see if Minogue had put up new Magritte postcards. He dropped the Shaughnessy file on his desk. He didn’t believe Kilmartin’s excuse for not catching the Boston flight this morning. The diversions to Shannon or Manchester would’ve all been swallowed up by now.
There was a section of a newspaper folded on top of the phone. He opened it and turned it around. He barely saw Iseult’s name at the beginning of the first paragraph before a sneeze made him buckle. It hurt. He leaned on the table and waited, his teeth clenched. Damn, was that prostate? Prostrate from the prostate.
He sat up again. It was one of these free papers they gave out, three-quarters advertising. Garden furniture, vaccuum cleaners, new kitchens. He didn’t recognize the thing in the picture. It looked kind of like a sausage. Maybe it had been arranged with the harsh lighting to show up the shadows of the barbed wire so sharply. Vicious, really. He wiped his nose. Eilis was standing in the doorway when he turned to sneeze again. John Murtagh had shown up from somewhere too.
“Nice one there,” Murtagh said “A bit of celebrity there boss.”
“Nice what?”
“This gets delivered around our place,” said Eilis. “Does she know about it?”
Minogue wiped his nose again He picked up the pages. The Holy Family? He knew Iseult had been working with modeling clay recently. He knew because he’d caught her trying to lift what felt like a hundredweight of the damned stuff up the stairs to her studio. Six months pregnant, up till all hours working on things. Hormones were no excuse.
The Holy Family…? The dinner plate looked real. The eggs and rashers and brown bread were close but they looked a bit dead. But that was probably the idea. Plaster, it must be. Or could it be plasticene — then his eyes locked onto the words: “… father a senior officer in the Garda Murder Squad… ”
He sat back, held the paper away more. There was mention of County Clare in the interview. Holy wells at Barnacarraig; childhood visits to the zoo. Her first Holy Communion, altars and holy picture. Blood and flowers: what the hell was that supposed to mean? He skipped through the paragraph. “Bold.. startling. searing…” A quote from a gallery owner that Iseult Minogue was prodigously talented. Family violence, Ireland in turmoiclass="underline" a paean. A paean?
The last paragraph had pregnancy, love, rage. Then there was an admission that people would easily interpret this as a reflection on her own personal history as a woman in Ireland. An artist on fire. Minogue let the paper fall on his desk and he sat back Christ on the cross.
“That’s the first thing I thought of,” Eilis said.
He had said it aloud? She nodded at the paper.
“There’s that iconography there,” she added “It’s obvious.”
“What’s obvious?” Murtagh asked.
“Motifs,” said Eilis. “Plain as the nose on your face. See the cross there in the background? Behind the table there?”
“Motives,” Minogue said. “What motives?”
“ Motifs, I said.”
“Looks good on you, boss,” said Murtagh. “And the missus, of course.”
The missus, Minogue wondered; the missus will freak.
“It’s the rearing,” Murtagh added.
“Iseult’s going to be famous,” said Eilis.
Minogue looked from Eilis to Murtagh and back. He studied the picture again. A greasy Irish breakfast. The barbed wire, the crucifix. Motifs?
“She makes a point of saying it’s not her,” said Eilis. “Personally, like.”
Minogue let it drop back onto his desk. Murtagh picked it up and whistled.
“Don’t you get it?” Eilis asked again.
“Tell me what to get, Eilis.”
“It’s like that poem, Larkin. ‘Your mum and dad, they’ — well, have you heard that one? Philip Larkin?”
“He’d dead, but, isn’t he?”
“‘Your mum and dad, they… mess you up.’ Do you get it now?”
The call from Kilmartin saved Minogue.
“What,” was Kilmartin’s greeting, “are you bloody paralyzed and you couldn’t use a phone? Too heavy to carry, was it?”
“Forgot, Jim. The battery was low. I must have forgotten to switch it back.”
“Get off the stage,” said Kilmartin. “Pack of lies there! Try again.”
“All right. I turned it off because I don’t like the damned thing.”
“You’re a bollocks, Matt. What use is a cell phone if you won’t use it!”
“I’ll try again. To adapt better.”
“I’ll line you up for a course on it or something. How to relate to it.”
“You’re on holidays, Jim. What do you want?”
“The fella at the airport. He’s ours now, I take it. Who is he? The Yank?”
“Don’t you like holidays, Jim? Give ’em to me if you — ”
“Shag off, will you. You’d only waste them canoodling around dives in the arse end of Paris or something. Who’s the new case, I said.”
Minogue tried to condense it into three sentences.
“Leyne,” said Kilmartin. “He went big with frozen foods first didn’t he? Potatoes, was it? Chips.”
“I think it was.”
“And the whole frozen food thing took off. Yes. What’s the son doing here?”
“A tourist, it looks like.”
“Looking for his roots, was he?”
Minogue waited for Kilmartin to work his way around to asking about Tynan.
“Robbed at the airport? Then murdered?”
“We’re not up on placing him yet.”
“Jesus. ‘Cead Mile Failte,’ et cetera. How long’s he missing?”
“Six days. We can place him in a B amp; B in Sligo. He was booked into Jury’s Hotel here, but never showed. Then he didn’t appear for the flight either.”
“He traveled bed-and-breakfast down the country but then he went back to tycoon class when he hit Dublin?”
Minogue’s eyes prickled. He held the phone away. The sneeze didn’t come immediately. He tried squinting at the fluorescent lights with his eyelids half open. Kilmartin was still talking.
“That’s right, Jim,” he tried.
“What time?”
“It was getting on for half-three when I jacked it in at the site.”
“What? He phoned you at half-three this morning?”
“What did you ask me again, Jim?”
“Tynan! I asked you if you’d heard from him lately!”
The sneezes rocked Minogue. Four in a row: he scrambled for paper hankies he hoped he’d kept in the bottom drawer. A final sneeze left him head down, dripping onto a file folder. He let the phone down and swiveled around. He wiped the phone last.
“Mother of God,” said Kilmartin. “That’s dog rough, what you have. But I’ll tell you one thing, we’re all victims of foul play here. You getting pissed on at a site last night, me getting the treatment from the Iceman. Eight o’clock this morning for the love of God. The frigging Inquisition. When did he pounce on you?”
“Nine or so.”
“What’s he want to talk to you for? It’s me he’d want to slice and dice.”
Minogue let his eyes wander along the frosted glass wall of his cubicle He lingered on the black-and-whites of the footprints from the Dunlaoghaire Park murder. Ninety quid Nike runners, half-burned. His eyes finally settled on the road map of Ireland. Sligo. Had Shaughnessy been heading up to Donegal or down to Mayo? Where had the “touring the west of Ireland” bit come from anyway?
“Well, there’s a series being done on the Guards,” he said to Kilmartin. “He said to watch what I say.”
“Talk about the understatement of the frigging century. Are we running a police force or a PR outfit, I hope you asked him. Where did he put in the knife anyway?”
“He got word of some items overheard at the Garda Club.”
Minogue thought he heard the intake of breath in the pause.
“Is that a fact now,” Kilmartin said. “Let me tell you about that. That’s what has dropped us all in it. Hey, did you recognize her there? That bitch, what’s her name…?”