Kilmartin’s tone had grown moody.
“It’s just that I know Tynan is looking right through me anytime I talk to him,” he said.
Bewleys in Grafton Street would be just about right at this time of the day. The dinnertime mob gone. But the rain? Jam the car up on the path in Dawson Street and scamper over. With any luck it’d be robbed. How much would insurance pay out for an eight-year-old Fiat…?
“Well?” Kilmartin repeated.
“I’ll give it my considered opinion. Will that do you?”
Kilmartin scowled and fixed Minogue with a one-eyed glare.
“When will you be talking to Monsignor Tynan, then?”
The irritation rushed back to Minogue.
“Jimmy-” Kilmartin waved away his response.
“I know, I know,” he interrupted. “ ‘Tynan plays above board.’ ‘He’d come straight to me to sort anything out.’ ‘He’d do right by us.’ Hail Mary, Holy Mary, and the rest of it. All I’m saying is-”
“I’ll phone and see.”
“Ah, Jases! I’d sooner you said nothing than go around to him with a puss on you. He’ll know I asked you.”
Minogue rubbed his eyes.
“You’re an iijit sometimes, Matt. All I’m trying to tell you is that the personal touch is what clinches things. I’m not asking you to butter him up. Look, I can tell you straight out that I know”-Kilmartin paused and pointed his finger at the desktop-“I know that Tynan thinks very highly of you-”
“He’s never asked me once-”
“Shut up a minute and listen. I don’t resent that one bit. Doesn’t bother me one iota that you might have more of Tynan’s ear than I do. Not one bit. And Tynan’s not stupid.”
“I’ll pass that news on to him for you.”
“Don’t be a smart arse, you. Listen. Tynan has to make some response to the Divisional Supers, we all know that. They want their own glory. What’ll decide Tynan in the end is not the computers and the stats. It’ll be the human factor. It’s our culture sure, man! Here, come on. You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?” Kilmartin rapped his knuckles on his colleague’s shoulder and gave Minogue a pantomime wink.
“Well…”
“Here, I’ll tell you in plain English. What the hell does Tynan need from us so’s he’ll leave us alone? Am I getting through to you?”
Minogue nodded. Kilmartin beamed.
“Ah, you’re a star! A real trooper. We’ll say no more about it. Now, tell us a bit more about this Saint place.”
“Santorini. It’s in Greece, I told you. Cradle of civilisation, don’t you know.”
“Oho! Greece is right. You’d want to watch you don’t end up on the flat of your back there with the runs, boyo.” Kilmartin nodded solemnly. “They cook up bits of meat and what-have-you there. Right in the street, bejases. A pal of Maura’s went there and spent half her holiday in the jacks-”
Minogue stared back at his superior.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Jim. Very sorry.”
Kilmartin guffawed.
“I’m sure you are,” said the Chief Inspector, hearty again. “Now shag off with yourself, ya bowsie. But phone me when you get your leg in the door with Tynan.”
Minogue reviewed the statements taken from one Tommy-John Casey several weeks ago. Casey had been in a dispute with a relation over the rent of pasture in the townland of Inisgeall, County Mayo. Casey and his victim, Patrick Tuohy, had repaired to a pub in Ballina in the hopes, Casey maintained, of coming to an amicable arrangement. The two men had continued drinking until midnight, whereupon Tommy-John Casey left the pub, got into his car and ran over Tuohy on a narrow road a mile outside town. Didn’t know what had come over him, Casey had repeated over and over again. Kilmartin had read the statement with Minogue. What came over him, Kilmartin had scoffed, was the car. Casey had been contrite and candid with the Gardai. Minogue, unimpressed, had pointed to the fact that Casey had driven a further two hundred yards along the road beyond the point where he had catapulted Tuohy over the hedge, smashing his windscreen and leaving Tuohy dying, his skull shattered.
He glanced over at Hoey. His colleague’s face looked a little puffy. Lack of sleep, bachelor diet. Drink, of course.
“Well, Shea,” he said. “Can I leave you in the lurch with Jelly Nolan? It’s well cooked already.”
Hoey blinked and cleared his throat.
“No bother,” he said.
The tight smile looked bleak to Minogue. Murtagh, another of the detectives permanently attached to the Murder Squad, walked through the office with file folders under his arm. He whistled softly around the pencil protruding from his mouth. Minogue found himself smiling at the sight, then he remembered Hoey. How could policemen be so different? Hoey, the dark horse, moody and reserved; Murtagh, surely beloved and spoiled as a child, a cocky athlete who gleefully chased nurses in night-clubs.
Minogue closed the folder on Tommy-John Casey and sat back. A countryman himself, Minogue understood rows about land. Dublin people wouldn’t, he believed. The primal hunger for land bred during starving centuries wasn’t imprinted on them. Land hunger, land disputes, wills’ probate fought over, aging bachelor farmers, family farms. But Jelly Nolan and his likes still remained ciphers to the Inspector. He wanted to know as little as possible about Nolan’s life. Self-protective, he knew, and he felt himself recoiling from the thought of just how cramped and ugly Nolan’s life must have been. There had to be a better line of work than sitting across a table from the Jelly Nolans of this world.
His thoughts wandered to Kilmartin’s probes about the Commissioner. Damn him for sending him like a spy to Tynan. What the hell use was it trying to explain to Kilmartin that he had no influence with Tynan? Tynan: a jigsaw with no guarantee you’d find all the bits, ever. Maybe Tynan was trying to get Kilmartin and Minogue amp; Co. ready for the end of an era. The soft glove of a blunt hand in elegy, a broad hint that Kilmartin and Minogue would do well to retire before the Squad was dispersed. His eyes focussed again on the papers. He considered phoning a travel agent and trying to book some airline seats but realised he didn’t know how many days they’d be staying in Clare. Damn again. He shoved the Casey file in the Current Trial cabinet and saw that the rain had stopped.
Minogue in Bewleys was a happy man. The stained glass below the restaurant’s skylights seemed to be moving. Clouds, he judged. He stood in line for coffee and noted that the racket from dishes and chairs and cutlery seemed muted today. Minogue had just deployed his coffee and bun when the clink of china on the marble table-top drew his head up from his newspaper. John Tynan, Commissioner of the Gardai, edged into the booth next to Minogue.
“Damn,” said Tynan and headed out again. “Sugar.”
Minogue tried to gather his wits as he studied Tynan’s well-tailored frame marauding around the cashier’s desk. What was Tynan doing here? Coincidence?
“Slow day?” said Tynan. He sat on Minogue’s side of the table.
“It’s always murder,” said Minogue. “I’m charging the batteries. I was late into the night on a case. Just a break to, em, build morale.”
Tynan eyed Minogue while he stirred his coffee.
“‘Building morale’? I phoned the Squad and was told that you were, quote, ‘doing research.’”
“Eilis might have given me the benefit of the doubt.”
“Anyway. I’m on a walkabout myself.”
Minogue smiled.
“That’s it. Look surprised. No minders, no gun in my pocket.”
Tynan plucked a slim cellular phone from his jacket pocket and showed enough of it for Minogue to recognise the device.
“What do you think?”
The Inspector knew of Tynan’s ways. The new Garda Commissioner had taken to walking about town in civvies, getting a feel for how Dublin was policed. It didn’t seem to bother him that he was annoying several senior civil servants and Gardai with his perambulations.