“How are you. I’m looking for a meeting…?”
The detective put down his sandwich.
“The Polish man? In 207 there. People there ahead of you.”
He gave Minogue the eye and he tapped his nose.
“Thanks.”
The door was half ajar. Minogue passed and glanced in. The two women there turned toward him. No Detective Hughes. He smiled sympathetically at the two and headed for a man’s voice.
Kevin Hughes was on his mobile by a window. He raised his eyebrows at Minogue and he shifted his feet.
“We’re starting now,” he said. “I’ll be off.”
But before he closed the phone, Hughes listened, and his eager look, with Viking blue unfocused eyes resting on the view across Harcourt Street. The brace of fat pigeons on a parapet seemed to make him half grin. His lower jaw moved from side to side.
“No,” he said finally, with a smile. He closed the phone, pocketed it, and extended a hand toward Minogue.
“Kevin Hughes, Fitzgibbon Street.”
“Matt Minogue. I’m up in the Park. Next to the Zoo, as they say.”
Hughes smiled. Minogue saw that his front teeth crossed slightly.
“With International Liaison,” Minogue said. “I had better say.”
Hughes stooped to pick up a slim leather briefcase. Late thirties, Minogue decided, thinning a bit up top, and filling out his jacket with little enough room to spare. Hughes rummaged in his briefcase and then he looked up.
“How’s the weather in there?” Minogue asked.
“Not bad at all,” said Hughes. “Stoic, is the word. The mother was prepared for it, so she was.”
“So, no changes? We go ahead with this meeting?”
“Information session, we’re calling it. Yes. You had a look at the file we sent over yesterday evening?”
“I did, Kevin. Yes.”
“You don’t read or write Polish, anymore than I do, I take it.”
“True for you. Has the mother any English at all?”
“Little or nothing. The one from their embassy will be helping. I have her name here, starts with a D. See if I can say it.”
“Danutay?”
“Danute Juraksaitis.”
“You do speak Polish,” said Hughes.
Minogue waited for the humour to do its work.
“What do you see then, er, Kevin?”
Hughes hesitated. Then he spoke carefully.
“Well what we’re seeing is this man, Mr. Klos, and he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. Basically. The old story, I know.”
He looked to Minogue for some approval.
“Here’s a man doesn’t know his way around Dublin,” he said. “A newcomer. He’s had a few jars — but he’s not drunk. He’s nowhere near his place, the hostel. Is he lost, wandering about? Or is he tagging along with somebody? Was he told to go down there off the quays? Was he lured?”
Minogue’s inner eye moved through the streets and lanes that led back from the Liffey quays.
“Then,” Hughes went on, “they — there were two different sets of shoes — start to kick the shite out of him. It’s a sudden attack. Full speed right from the start. And down he goes. Pretty soon he’s defenceless. His hands and his nails tell us nothing, except that he didn’t put up much of a fight. Didn’t get the chance to put up a fight? He had marks — ruptures, bruises — all along the small of his back. It looks like there were people taking penalty shots at his head.”
Minogue winced.
“Swarmed?” said Hughes, with a sigh. “I’d say yes. A gang, some savage initiation thing? Don’t know. Onlookers, kickers, I’m thinking — or I’m hoping, I should say. It’s the ones who looked on will grass the others. How many’s a swarm? Was he with someone, someone offering him something? Don’t know.”
“Substance abuse issues with him?”
“Not known.”
“What’s top of the list for pending? Closed circuit? Door to door? Site material?”
Hughes sighed and stroked his Adam’s apple again.
“The post-mortem?”
Hughes stopped stroking.
“Say he’s dropped there,” he said to Minogue. “Afterwards, like.”
“Bouncers at some club, or a pub, and they went too far? Dropped him there?”
“Yes,” said Hughes. “That’s open. We’re working on it.”
“What have they given you from the lab so far?”
“There’s dust and things on his clothes. He was dragged, or he was falling around, or being thrown around. Roll-up papers. Tiny traces of dope. Marijuana, I mean.”
“And all you have from the pathology so far for cause is on the file that I got? The brain hemorrhage, the fractures?”
“Skull fractured. Eye sockets broken, broken nose. Teeth out. A dozen and more serious soft tissue injuries. Several fractured ribs, fingers broken.”
“Toxicology, how long are they telling you for that?”
“Monday. Hopefully.”
Something scattered the pigeons from the roof opposite. Minogue followed the movement of a crane as it slid across the rooftops.
“It was wet that night,” Hughes said. “So what we got at the site isn’t clear. I don’t know if it will ever be clear. We pegged it all out, lasered it.”
“Footprints, shoe markings?”
“Yep. Incomplete, the lot of them. Mixed and mucked up with the rain.”
“You tapped into the station for local info.”
“First thing, yes. There’s plenty of lowlife roving about the area. In spite of the fancy, what d’you call it, rehabilitation?”
“Gentrification, I believe they call it.”
“Yes,” said Hughes. “A lot of people passing through the area. Not just the office people during the day. Dealers, we know them, most of them. There’s sex trade. Low key. It’s a zone for a particular group, or shall we say family.”
“Let me guess. Egans?”
“Fair play to you. We have it — via some Guards in that area — that the Egans have nothing to do with this though. Legit.”
Minogue had checked area stats twice on the computer, but the GIS plotted only three years back. He had clicked through each year watching the lanes and buildings appear as the map changed. The whole area had been transformed in a very short time indeed.
“So he’s off the map a lot that evening?”
“So far, the only times we can place him are leaving the hostel. A Slovenian — where exactly is Slovenia anyway? I forgot to find out.”
“I’m not sure. Across the water, anyway.”
“A Slovenian fella said he had a few words with him. Like, the Polish lad asking if he wanted to go out on the town a bit.”
“‘A bit.’ What’s a bit?”
“Fella says he had the impression that it was whatever he could find — pubs, clubs. That’s just before eight. But there might be something from a shop there in Abbey Street. Maybe bought some papers, like roll-ups. The girl’s not sure.”
“What’s the story at the hostel? Any talk of him there, pals? His effects?”
“Well, Slovenian boy alluded — is that the right word?… Well he says that they’d be doing a little pot at the hostel — no not inside, obviously. Everyone does, says he. He had — the Polish lad now — he had a suitcase back at the hostel, and a rucksack. Clothes, toiletries, magazines, some johnnies. Some class of foreign booze, Polish writing on it. Biscuits — local. Gum, matches. A few bits of paper with writing on them, turned out to be names of organizations and things here to do with Polish living here now. I got it all handy from people down there at St. Michan’s. That’s their church now, you know, the Poles.”
“No grudges or bad feeling with people in the hostel? A row at all?”
Hughes shook his head.
“No-one checked out in a mad hurry either. We got ahold of every one of them who was there that day. Only two we had to go foraging for, one girl went to Cork on the train. Another fella, a Swedish lad, was doing his biking around Ireland thing. We found him down in Waterford.”
Minogue remembered then that all of Hughes’ information had been gathered in only two days.
“That’s a hell of a lot done since the murder there, Kevin. I just realized.”
Hughes shrugged, and tried not to show his pleasure at the comment. He winced then, and took a breath.