“Emerald Rent-A-Car?” he tried.
“Not yet,” she said.
Minogue tried to map the days and places but he was soon stuck.
“This museum thing, John, if he says he’s Leyne. What’s going on there?”
“Maybe to get the royal treatment researching the forebears and all that,” Murtagh said. “The lig in, the ‘influence.’ Researching the forebears and all that? Instead of lining up like Joe Soap at the genealogy office.”
“Garland,” Minogue said. “I’ve heard of him.”
“Wait a minute. He’s got a fancy job title as I remember.”
Murtagh fingered his notebook. He looked up with a faint smile.
“ ‘Keeper of Irish Antiquities.’ ”
“I thought that was Maura Kilmartin,” from Eilis. Minogue gave her the eye.
“Garland does lectures too, so he does,” said Murtagh. “Public lectures on history. The Golden Age. Monks and what have you. How we civilized Europe.”
Minogue searched Murtagh’s face for irony.
“Anyway,” Murtagh went on. “Shaughnessy’s in Jury’s Hotel until the Monday. He picks up the car at Emerald, down off O’Connell Street. He makes sure he’s booked back into Jury’s for the weekend, starting Friday. Plane’s out on Monday. He’s planned five days of touring then.”
Murtagh rapped the board with his knuckles.
“If Donegal is good, then Shaughnessy’s there on Tuesday. Say he’s on the road most of Monday. Donegal town’s six hours driving anyway.”
“What if he went through the North, but?”
Minogue rubbed at his eyes. He heard cracking sounds from somewhere near his sinuses. If this cold went to his chest he’d be shagged for a fortnight.
“Her Majesty’s would give us time and place on this, John. Without much sloothering around the issue, I mean. It’s not political.”
Murtagh scrutinized the map.
“Might have gone through Strabane.” He tugged at his lip. “Up to… ”
“Letterkenny,” said Minogue, “and points north. Derry maybe.”
He squinted at the timetable again.
“Who exactly filed the C65 to Missing Persons anyway?”
Murtagh capped his marker. Eilis answered the phone.
“I don’t know yet. But there were the calls from the States. And Billy O’Riordan.”
“All right so,” said Minogue. “Find out exactly, will you?”
Eilis was holding the phone up when he opened his eyes again. Three sneezes this time. His nose felt like a burst football.
“Fergal Sheehy,” she said “He’s on. Needs the money, says he. Will you brief him now or do you want him to stop by on the way to the airport?”
CHAPTER 5
Malone turned the nissan into Beaumont Hospital. The autopsy was set for eleven.
“How many’s this for you?” he asked Minogue.
“This’ll be thirty-seven.”
Malone cleared his throat again. He yanked the ticket from the parking robot thing and drove through as the boom lifted.
Minogue hated this hospital. Unreasonable, he knew, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that all this space here made it too quiet. Easy for him to say, was Kathleen’s take on this. He hadn’t been jammed into Mercer’s Hospital or Jervis Street in the middle of a Dublin summer for a bloody delivery, had he?
“The ma got her knees done here,” Malone said. “Lovely place, says she. But glad to get out early all the same.”
Minogue stole a glance at his partner.
“Says it’s haunted,” Malone went on. “Too long on the drip, says I, losing the head. No, says she Saw them.”
“Saw who?”
Malone parked next to a plumber’s van. He let his seat belt roll back slowly into its chamber, looked sideways at Minogue.
“Kids, she says. From the Starlight.”
Minogue tried to fix the year of the fire at the Starlight dance hall. He’d helped to direct the ambulances delivering the teenagers’ charred bodies. How often he’d thought of the dozens of ambulances grouped around the front of the then new hospital, their sirens off, their lights sweeping uselessly still. He remembered it being so terribly quiet. Then, when some of the parents and families began to show up -
He checked the phone again, stepped out after Malone. Wind and unreliable sun had dried much of the tarmacadam now. There were pools still in the shadows by the walls.
“Still no sign of a wallet,” Malone said. “Passport or the like, huh.”
“I’ll phone the lab again, I suppose.”
Malone scratched at his lip.
“Picked up a header, hitchhiking,” he said “Bang. Took everything. What do you think?”
“Keep it in mind,” said Minogue. “But why’s the car at the airport awhile?”
Malone held the door open for the inspector. Minogue paused, eyed Malone rolling his free shoulder. A boxer’s reflex as the bell went, he wondered. Was Malone so twitchy before every PM?
“Okay,” Malone said. “He meets another Yank on the road somewhere. He gives him — or her — a lift to the airport. This hitchhiker sees Shaughnessy’s loaded. Right? Shaughnessy’s a yapper, say, likes to spoof a bit. So he let’s things slip, about his da, et cetera. Moneybags, all that. Name dropping, see? He digs his own grave with his mouth. This hitchiker’s back in Reno or wherever the hell he came from. And we’re fu — we’re banjaxed.”
The hallway was busy. Minogue watched a man with papery skin pushing his own wheelchair ahead of himself. Two kids being walked quickly by their mother, flustered, annoyed, one of the kids with tear stains on his cheeks, the other one looking blankly around.
He slowed to take in the monument to the Starlight kids: THEY SHALL NEVER GROW OLD.
“Come on,” he said to Malone. “It’s gone eleven.”
An orderly stood by the window next to the lab offices eating a KitKat. Through a window Minogue spotted Pierce Donavan’s battered Land Rover. The state pathologist had brought it to every site since Minogue had started with the squad. Gerry Hanlon, Garda photographer, was reading the paper at a table. There were voices from the change room.
“Are we all aboard, Gerry?”
Hanlon closed the paper. A pathology assistant whom Minogue had once mistaken for a cleaner two years ago came in from the door behind them. The door to the change room opened.
“Ah, well now. The Clare connection, by God!”
Donavan’s greeting put Minogue in mind of a genial uncle, the sort of man who’d fart for the entertainment of children; a man who’d show kids how to make the best bows and arrows. A man who would always wave at trains.
The reserve that Donavan’s ebullience concealed was not widely known. A heavily armored introvert, he had married late to one of his students. She practiced as an obstetrician now. Minogue wondered what their dinner-table chat was like. A sometime insomniac who wrote poetry at night, Donavan had given Minogue one of his self-published volumes several years ago. It was after Minogue had become distraught during the autopsy of a child beaten to death by his mother’s fella. The mother had been out trying to borrow money to buy heroin.
Donavan had stopped the PM, sealed the room, bought a packet of fags. He had stood smoking with Minogue at the delivery door to the lab for a half an hour. Later he and Minogue had gone for a walk near his home in Howth. The inspector often recalled that cliff walk. The sun blinding them from the bay, the wind freshening as they rounded the outer edge of Howth Head. Minogue’s fury and despair and hatred had ebbed as if by magic then.
“Garda Malone,” said Donavan, “is it?”
“How’s it going.”
“You’re traveling in high society there, Garda Malone. Mind that boss of yours.”
“How’s the care at home, Pierce?” Minogue asked.
“Orla’s fifteen. She has a boyfriend with a ring in his eyebrow. You decide ”
“You want him to move it to his nose, is it?”
“She’ll do that handy enough, I’m thinking. Welclass="underline" the both of ye in attendance for the American, is it?”
“I’m principal, Pierce. Tommy’ll be in and out.”