The squeak from the opening door was Malone. Donavan didn’t look up from the clipboard. Minogue moved to the sink. Malone eyed the body.
“We have a move,” he said. “Fella phoned in from the press. A photographer, says he took pictures at a do. He’s checking now but he’s almost sure Shaughnessy’s picture’s in the paper from ten days ago. A reception of some kind out in Goff’s, the horsey crowd out on the Naas Road.”
Goffs, thought Minogue. High glam: millionaires, film stars, sheiks and princes, pop tarts — any celebrity might show up at these world-renowned bloodstock auctions
“Name of Noel O’Hagan,” Malone said. “The photographer. He’s a freelancer. He says there were other newspaper fellas there too. It was a kind of a celebrity gig. There should be other pics somewhere handy.”
Malone looked over Minogue’s shoulder at Kevin, Donavan’s assistant, who was letting a stream of water play on the bloodstains by Shaughnessy’s ear.
“And the rented car,” Malone said. “Shaughnessy was number eleven to rent it. It’s a year old, the Escort.”
“What’s the story so far on the contents?” Minogue tried.
“I checked with Eimear again. They’ve inventoried the boot already. Very messed up. The bit of board over the spare wheel and that, well it’s broken. Like, something heavy had been dumped on it.”
“The weight of the body?”
Malone shrugged.
“Eimear says she doesn’t think so. There was something more compact, says she, but right heavy. And there’s a good-sized ding on the bottom of the car. Major, like. A bad road? That’s what left the hole under the boot, it looks like.”
“What’s the situation with prints, might I ask?”
“There’s a crew working through from the boot,” Malone replied. “They’re still at the inside of the car like. There’s no wallet yet. Passport, camera — nothing. There was a fair-sized bag of laundry. All man’s clothes. Guidebooks, maps, bits of stuff like biscuits, empty Coke cans. He smoked, or someone in the car smoked. Eimear says they see hairs coming from the carpet now too.”
“Are there good prints coming out?”
“Well yeah, as a matter of fact. A lot, even from the outside. They’ll start the comparison search on Shaughnessy’s this afternoon.”
Donavan was humming. Minogue tried again to pin the name of the tune.
“Ten renters before Shaughnessy,” he murmured.
“That’s the story so far,” said Malone “Yeah. And then there’d be cleaners, staff borrowing the cars out there.”
Minogue watched Donavan’s assistant wiping pieces of sponge on the body in a circular motion, dropping the pieces into a specimen bag hanging at the sides of the table — “The Moon Behind the Hill,” that was the tune. Donavan stopped humming. Minogue turned back toward the pathologist.
Water still trickled from the hose at rest by Shaughnessy’s elbow. Donavan was finished the external? Patrick Leyne Shaughnessy would shortly be sawn and eviscerated.
The music gave way to a too-chatty presenter with a strong Ulster accent extolling the virtues of Clare music in general. An impertinence, Minogue decided.
Malone murmured by his shoulder now.
“Spots of blood from around the lid of the hatchback,” he said. “They’re in being typed.”
The click of more instruments being laid on the stainless steel brought Malone’s glance to the table. He bit his lip, looked back at Minogue.
“Clobbered in the open doorway, the boot, what do you think?”
“Well it looks like he didn’t react,” he said. “But there’s a spray pattern to sort out still, to be sure.”
“He knew the guy, then,” Malone went on “Or the fella ran up, got his first one in?”
The whirr always reminded Minogue of the dentist. Malone’s blink lasted too long. Minogue eyed at the saw that the assistant was readying. Donavan leaned over his clipboard, staring at the schematic of the back of the body.
“Say he’d been drinking,” said Malone. “Closing time, you know? After hours even. A session maybe, buying rounds of drink and all. All hail-fella-well-met until they’re outside. Say he’s been blathering away with the few jars on him. Money talk. Fellas go out with him. ‘Give us a lift there, will you… ’”
“Easy done, all right,” Minogue said.
Malone eyed the body for several moments.
“Well-to-do, you know,” he said. “Lots of stuff, like. The watch, the clothes. You know the Yanks, the way they are, the way they look. Maybe Shaughnessy’s pulling tenners out of his wallet all night. So it’s a local. I say we’re going to find two fellas, two drinking partners. They wait their chance, wallop him, follow through — maybe in a panic, or pissed — finish the job. Then they decide to hide the body back up in Dublin. Where it belongs, to their way of thinking?”
Minogue thought of the American tourists he’d first seen as a kid. He’d been mesmerized by the diver’s watches, those expanding metal watchbands, the tanned, hairy forearms. Perfume, the jaws always going on them. And now? He’d seen video cameras the size of paperbacks, outdoor gear and packsacks with pockets and straps for everything. Still the big, capped teeth, the ready smiles, the ponderous way a lot of them walked. All overweight? Swaggering? How they seemed to occupy that part of the path or the space where they stopped to look around.
Maybe Mr. Patrick Leyne Shaughnessy had seriously pissed off some unemployed, restless, and angry young fellas, men very goddamned fed up of hearing about a booming economy, fed up of watching tourists pulling endless amounts of cash out of their wallets.
Donavan was looking over. He pointed to Shaughnessy’s head.
“This abrasion up here by the right side of the temple,” he said. “That starts at the cheekbone in actual fact.”
Minogue stepped back to the table. Malone, his face tight, followed.
“Falling, you could guess,” Donavan added
Minogue couldn’t see any difference in colors where the skin was scuffed. Hanlon maneuvred around him. Lots of blows says rage, drunken; panic: the basics here.
“How many times was he hit?” he asked Donavan.
“Well now. You have the base of the skull fractured, with bits of it up here. See those little bits on the X ray there on the right?”
Donavan picked up a scalpel and examined the blade.
“We have corresponding scrapes here on the right side of the head as he went down. I would hazard a guess that the first blow sent him to the ground. Defenseless, maybe even mortal. An iron bar?”
Hanlon leaned over the side of the table and snapped three pictures. What hitchhiker would be walking around with an iron bar handy?
“So other blows landed after he went down. Here’s a pattern on the side of the face that backs that up.”
Minogue followed Donavan’s finger. Kevin helped to turn the head.
“But, thing is, there’d be more to it — a collateral fracture even — if he was hit on cement now,” Donavan went on. “Or a roadway. I don’t see, I don’t recognize, gravel or tar here yet.”
Minogue’s mind slipped away again. Shaughnessy opening the boot lid: he’d have heard someone step up behind him? A word, a shout? He hadn’t raised his arm to fend off the blow. Drunk? He looked at the board. Shaughnessy was a hundred eighty-three centimeters. That was just over six feet. Hit hard the first time, Shaughnessy would have gone forward and down at the same time. The spots of blood on the underside of the hatchback looked like the outer edge of a spray pattern, fair enough. It could also be from clumsy, strained efforts to shove Shaughnessy into the boot. Eighty-nine point something kilos, about two hundred pounds: over fourteen stone? Well that’d take lifting. For an instant Minogue saw a pack of teenagers flailing at Shaughnessy.