“As we go forward, it becomes necessary to go backward also.”
He turned his back to the breeze. Mischief rising in him suddenly
“God almighty, Eilis. That’s a bit dark. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
She drew on her cigarette, ground it underfoot, and then fell into step beside him. She always had an athlete’s easy, ranging walk, Minogue remembered. That observation alone had been enough for him to like her, from the moment they had begun working together so long ago. It, and her unceasing restlessness, signalled to him a kinship, another who might also wonder how and why one was so often an apparent stranger to so much about them.
“Taking a turn at the old job should brighten things up,” she said to him.
Peter Igoe spotted him on the way in.
“So you’re off, Matt,” Igoe said. “‘At the pleasure of the Commissioner.’”
“God help me so.”
Igoe raised an eyebrow. Minogue had heard that Igoe’s success in golf was attributed to his ability to provoke and to distract.
“You’re right, of course. It’s Tuohy you answer to. Technically.”
Assistant Commissioner Tuohy had come on strong the past few years as Commissioner Tynan’s chosen one.
“‘No big to-do,’ says Tuohy,” Igoe said. “‘Matt’ll hit the ground running.’”
Minogue let his gaze drift across the notice board. Dance and Social for the AGSI; training courses in Britain, deadlines highlighted in yellow. The newish daily circulars reminder, the “Have You Seen?” that every Guard in every corner of Ireland was to eyeball daily now.
“All the joys of Fitzgibbon Street,” said Igoe. “El Paso. But it’s different than when I knew it. I shouldn’t be talking.”
For several moments, Minogue’s mind roved the night streets around the quays, that lone figure walking from light to light.
“And wrap it up quick” Igoe called out.
“As if,” he said.
He took his time getting to Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station. He crossed over the River Liffey by the Custom House, ignoring the honks when he slowed to peer down the quays where Tadeusz Klos had passed. Soon enough, he was turning around Mountjoy Square.
It was part of the city he had never liked. He could not get by what he had known of the area when he had first come up to Dublin, with its scarred blocks of flats and its hard-faced inhabitants. Several flowing robes and more brown faces at the corner of North Earl Street drew Minogue’s eye. He was careful not to stare, or, more precisely, not to be seen to be staring. Gardiner Street began its slow ascent and Minogue turned his attention to the budding trees that crowned the summit of the street, behind the railings of the Square.
He steered into one of the spaces reserved for Garda cars almost directly in front of the station. He checked twice that he had left nothing valuable on show, and then locked the face-plate for the stereo in the boot. Casting a last gaze at the reflections of the clouds running across the gleaming panels, he pressed the remote. He wasn’t much reassured by the wirps from it, and so did it twice again. His new car still looked very vulnerable.
A poorly cleaned Garda squad car slid in quickly beside him.
“Shift it, boss,” said a Guard from the passenger seat. “Garda cars only.”
A lifer, Minogue could see, with sunken cheeks and wavy grey hair. The driver leaned down to see Minogue under the edge of the roof.
“Wait a minute, you’re what’s his name.”
“That’s me, all right,” said Minogue.
The driver eased himself out from behind the wheel. He winked at Minogue.
“Long as you’re not a social worker-type or something,” he said.
A shot across the bows from two hard chaws like this wasn’t so much cheek, Minogue knew, or even challenge. It was merely the talk that got Guards through their shifts here in the inner city.
The driver was still waiting for a reaction. There was something about him that put Minogue in mind of the white pudding that the Minogues had taken off the breakfast menu a decade and more past. Tightly held together, fleshy.
“Jehovah’s Witness,” Minogue said finally. “How’d you make me so quick?”
“Nice wheels. New?”
“It is. And thanks.”
“You’re Kilmartin, aren’t you? Or wait — you’re the other one?”
“I’m the other one.”
The driver was out on the street now. He hitched up his belt.
“It’s the Polish man, am I right?”
“You’re in the right job,” said Minogue.
“Nothing to it. I heard Hughsie got himself taken to the hospital all of a sudden. Appendicitis or something?”
“Could be,” said Minogue.
“We did some of the door-to-doors on it. Round one of them, anyway.”
The driver introduced himself as Dan Ward. There was a cantankerous edge to him, Minogue decided, another copper poisoned by his work, maybe.
“Enda Callinan,” said the other, shaking Minogue’s hand.
“‘Enda the world,’” said Ward.
“Long here at the station, are ye?”
“At Skanger Central here…?”
Minogue gave Callinan the eye.
“Seven year,” said Ward quickly, as though to be first with a reply.
“Me, four and a bit,” said Callinan. “Hoping for early parole.”
Callinan thumbed his way through menus on his mobile.
“It’s that good here is it,” Minogue said.
A radio transmission came through Ward’s walkie talkie. He turned his lapel to get at the mouthpiece.
“We are,” he said. “He flew the coop yesterday, she says.”
He waited for Dispatch to respond.
“Fella has a go at his missus yesterday morning,” he said to Minogue. “But she only phones in this morning. What do you think about that?”
Minogue shrugged.
“Could hardly understand a word she said,” Ward said, his thumb wavering over the button. “They do speak English in Nigeria though, don’t they?”
“Ten-four Badger One,” Dispatch said. “We’ll just log it, so.”
“So there,” said Callinan. “Something new every day, they say.”
“Except it’s not new,” said Ward
Minogue realized he had little chance with this twosome.
“So you did door-to-door,” Minogue said, instead. “How did that turn out?”
“Useless. Am I allowed to say that? Anyway, they’re in the case files, er.”
“Matt.”
“‘The Book,’ they call it, right? When it turns to murder?”
“That it is.”
“We weren’t the only ones,” said Ward, “there were upwards of a dozen out the first day.”
“They’ll have to broaden it out no doubt,” said Ward. He spoke as though it had been a serious, unwarranted imposition. “The zones business of theirs.”
“Unfortunate poor divil,” said Callinan. “Whatever possessed him to wander up here?”
“More than enough head cases there,” Ward added, almost placidly. “Any day of the week. Day or night. You name it, it’s here.”
“Is that a fact.”
“Not so much the numbers,” said Callinan. “It’s the types.”
“All comes down to drugs,” said Ward. “Take a stroll over there, down the lane, and it’s all there: needles, bits of pipes, johnnies…”
Callinan had slid his mobile into the breast pocket of his tunic and he was giving his partner the eye to go.
“Social work,” Ward said. He yawned as he shifted the Kevlar vest under his tunic. “That’s the line nowadays, isn’t it.”
Minogue stood by the duty sergeant’s desk waiting for someone to fetch him. It was quiet enough. A man with his arm in a sling, and bloodshot eyes, was watching him from a seat. He half-heard a Garda trying to explain that a barring order had to be renewed.
“Psychosomatic,” said the Sergeant and looked up.
“No doubt,” said Minogue, for lack of any clue.
“Hughsie, I mean. The stress of it all. Did he tell you?”