“It had to do with resurrection,” Minogue replied. “I suppose.”
“Right,” said Kilmartin, thoughtfully. “Easter and all that. But you’d have to know poetry or that, mythology, to get that. Bit over my head. Other people too.”
Minogue did not agree. That disagreement was not sufficient to prompt him to discuss the matter further. Kilmartin shifted his feet so he was looking over Minogue’s shoulder into wilder Wicklow.
“Never in all my life did I think I’d hear people singing in Irish in a Protestant church,” he said. “It was Irish, wasn’t it? But fierce old Irish…?”
Minogue was suddenly weary of Kilmartin’s archaic approach. Maybe Jim Kilmartin would be wondering next why the hesitant fiddle playing of the nine-year-old girl for the hymn had brought everyone to tears.
“I want to ask you something now,” Kilmartin said, clearing his throat. “And of course it goes without saying, I understand your position.”
Minogue waited.
“Any word on whether Tynan is going to call you in?”
“Why would he call me in?”
“You know what I mean. A straight answer is all I’m asking.”
“He’s busy,” Minogue said. “As you can see.”
This drew a scowl.
“The whole Garda doesn’t just shut down if Tynan’s out of the picture, does it? All I want to find out is one simple thing: how long is he going to leave me hanging. He’s the man with final say. Something’s got to give here.”
Minogue spotted Sergeant Brendan O Leary emerging from the church. He was talking to a short, older man with a hearing aid. O Leary took his leave of the man, and he began to thread his way toward Minogue and Kilmartin.
“What more does he want,” Kilmartin went on. “Listen, Tynan has had all the documentation for what, three months now? What’s stopping him?”
Minogue pulled his coat tighter around his chest.
“Well,” he said, “if he calls me, in I go. I suppose.”
“Of course you do — but not without an AGSI go-ahead, right?”
Minogue had already had two calls from the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors on the matter. He had not told Kilmartin.
“Maybe you should give me your script and I’ll just memorize it.”
Kilmartin took a step back.
“Kick a man when he’s down. Very nice, I’m sure.”
Minogue watched the Commissioner’s aide, Sergeant Brendan O Leary, talking to a grey-haired, fiftyish man in a navy-blue Loden overcoat. O Leary eyed Minogue, and the man looked over too, squinting against the unexpected patches of sunlight. He began to make his way toward Minogue.
“Barry,” he said to Minogue. “Barry Conlon, Foreign Affairs.”
Kilmartin had already made himself scarce.
Conlon’s vigorous handshake was rendered uncongenial because of his bony hands and long, skeletal fingers. Minogue had dropped his cigarette behind, and now attempted to locate the smouldering butt with his heel. He noted that in contrast with the out-of-date cosmopolitanism in his overcoat, Conlon’s shoes were a generation too ambitious, going on forever to narrow, squared-off tips that curled upward.
“I’m glad I was able to reach you,” said Conlon, his eyes blinking rapidly under thick iron-coloured hair, trimmed tight. Impatience showed only around his mouth.
“We wanted to be sure you were on track concerning this man Klos.”
“Yes.”
Conlon raised his eyebrows.
“Didn’t want to leave anyone out of the loop.”
Minogue waited several moments for the slurs to subside within.
“Well I know where I’m going anyhow,” he said. “And why.”
Conlon nodded, as though a weighty issue had been settled.
“We don’t want to step on one another’s toes, now. Last thing we need.”
Minogue hadn’t a clue who or what Conlon meant.
“True for you,” he said.
He could no longer see Kilmartin. For a moment, he imagined him sprinting in panic through the fields and across the vast bog to the southwest.
“And it goes without saying,” said Barry, “that it will be comfort to them, the man’s mother, I mean, to know of your background.”
“Grand, so.”
“As long as it’s brought up with, you know, with sensitivity to the situation we find ourselves in.”
We find ourselves in: the phrase ran back in Minogue’s mind a few times.
Conlon seemed to be waiting for his reaction. Minogue thought he saw Kilmartin disappear around a bend in the laneway
“Your former work?” Conlon said.
“Oh, the Murder Squad, you’re referring to,” said Minogue, caught between embarrassment and annoyance that he had missed the hint.
“That sort of expertise, yes.”
“Well, I’m — the team on this case, the people at Fitzgibbon Street station — they would… Well they would be the people who would…”
“We’ll touch base then,” said Conlon.
“We’ll talk anon, em, Barry. Yes.”
“Feel free to phone — me, or the department. Any time.”
“Well, thanks very much now.”
He took Conlon’s card, and set out to find Kilmartin.
He and Kilmartin had a free run all the way back to the city. Minogue considered parking, and going into the shopping centre for a cup of coffee, but Kilmartin would keep him there for hours, yapping.
“Thanks,” said Kilmartin, pulling open the passenger door. “Glad I went.”
He paused and looked over.
“But that was funny,” he said, and winked. “You have to admit, those papers blowing around like that.”
Minogue waited until Kilmartin had started his relic of a Jetta, and as the sooty cloud from the exhaust settled over the street, he gave Kilmartin a salute and headed into town. The Dublin area had fared even better than Wicklow with clearing skies. Except for the usual curse-of-God Donnybrook village and the Mercedes cluttering up the kip there while their owners shopped for courgettes and sun-dried tomatoes, mid-day traffic was obliging.
The Garda at the barrier in Harcourt Terrace was unfamiliar to Minogue. He looked up from the HQ parking sticker that Minogue had slid down the dashboard. “Doesn’t work here,” the Guard declared.
“They usually make an allowance here in the visitors’ section.”
“They put in bike racks there last month,” said the Guard.
“But sure I’m only coming from the funeral.”
The Guard’s expression didn’t change.
“So I imagine that there’s at least one spot that won’t be used today.”
The Guard gave no sign that he had gotten the hint.
“Well try your best with the visitors’ spots,” he said, and turned away.
Minogue pulled in to the Commissioner’s spot, wrote his mobile number down on a piece of paper and placed it on the dashboard. He checked the file again and decided that there were indeed five pages missing at most. Locking the car and taking in the Dublin-filtered spring air about him, he imagined his missing pages fluttering against a hedge, and then being suddenly whisked into the air again higher up into the Wicklow Mountains.
He was waved by the desk by Moo, the near-to-retirement Garda Mooney, a man with a fearsome memory for hurling games, teams, errors, players, catastrophes, and tactics back at least thirty years. Minogue recognized several of the faces that he passed on the stairs, and he returned the nods and one “How’s the man.” Two flights above him he heard two men with heavy Midland accents, laughing. “What odds says I,” one man said quickly between guffaws. “Isn’t that what we have car insurance for?”
A short hallway opened out into a room sectioned off by a half-dozen cubicles. Newish dividers covered in grey cloth and lateral filing cabinets filled in the spaces. Beyond it was an open area where desks and tables faced one another. Minogue remembered that there were two conference rooms at the far end of the open area.
There were only two people he could see in the whole room. One, a woman, was on the phone and smiling, the other, a detective who looked or at least dressed and coiffed like a rowdy film star.