“And wants to be first in the door,” said Wall, nodding, “before the others.”
“Hard not to think that, isn’t it,” said Duggan, and looked down at his nails.
Minogue realized that this was Duggan’s way of showing he was excited — calmly excited. He glanced at Wall, and received a slow nod in return. The momentum would only pick up from here.
“Go ahead, Kevin,” he said to him. “It’s your call. I’m only window-dressing here, to be honest.”
Wall made a brief smile, and lapsed back into thought.
“Could always start with the tough route,” said Duggan. “Set them up here in the station, the four of them, and play the game. You know: he says, she says — and then wait. Throw a few shapes if things bog down: accessory, withholding, obstruction?”
Wall tugged gently at his tie again.
“Ah what would Hughsie do?” Duggen asked with a pained expression after a few moments.
“All right, all right,” said Wall, his slight smile soon pulled back. “We’d better get started. Bring in the others — and uniforms and squad cars to do it. But fair’s fair. We’ll interview this girl at her house. But the minute it turns scrappy…?”
Chapter 21
Murphy answered his mobile on the second ring: but it wasn’t Murphy. “He’s busy,” said the man who answered. Fanning recognized the accent right away.
“I’ll phone him later on then.”
“No need. Where are you?”
“It’s Murph I need to talk to.”
“You said that already.”
“So tell him I’ll give him a ring later on.”
“He told me you’d ring. He said for me to meet you. Help things along.”
Fanning listened for any sounds in the background. That nowhere accent still confused him, often starting as a Dublin accent but getting lost quickly, only to roll back into it for certain words.
“Are you there? Did you hear me?”
A dropped h: East Enders. Fanning held his thumb over the button.
“Murph doesn’t want to work on the project anymore.”
“He didn’t say a word to me about that.”
“I know. That’s how he is but, isn’t he.”
“He gave you his phone?”
“He loaned it to me. Mine fell and broke.”
“Look, he and I have an arrangement.”
“Right. That’s why I’m here. Now I don’t want to spread rumours now, do I. But you must know by now. Like I was saying to you back in that pub. I mean you can figure things out.”
“What things?”
“Come on. You’ve got to admit, he’s not the most reliable bloke.”
“Well I wouldn’t be discussing that here-”
“You know he’s got a habit. I told you that, right?”
“I doubt Murph is too busy, especially for me.”
“You mean his business. He was getting burned out, did he tell you?”
“No, he didn’t tell me he was getting burned out.”
“Sad to say, but there’s problems in his family, mental things. He didn’t tell you? It’s a manic thing. He goes off the deep end every once in a while. Very rough I hear.”
Fanning’s thumb was getting a cramp.
“I’ll meet you, and explain it all. Then you’ll see.”
“No, that’s not going to work.”
Fanning heard a “when” just as he hung up.
He placed the mobile on the table next to his saucer. His coffee was finished. It had found its way to someplace in his stomach where it now ate away, acidly. The two men at the next table were speaking Spanish. Georges Street looked grey, and traffic had come to a standstill. He looked down at the yellow stickies and the notes he had started. There’d be no way any director would put in a real dog fight.
He started when the phone vibrated. It was Murph’s number. A hollow, airy feeling returned to his chest. He pushed the Power Off button, and held it. He thought about more coffee, and then the guilt of spending three Euro that were really Brid’s earnings wrung out of the brats that she taught.
He turned to the notes he had written about the sound of gunshot that had killed the dog:
— took/punched the air out of the room
— screaming silence in its wake
— shockwaves hammering the air
Not bad. He switched the phone on again, and watched it search for a signal. The tink of a notification came within seconds. There had been a mistake, according to Murph, but it had all been settled now. Phone him back.
Fanning picked up his pencil and drew an exclamation mark on the paper. Murph, scammer and schemer extraordinaire. So he had a habit, so he was a liar. Big surprise there. This carry-on was part of the package.
He didn’t much care if Murph took him for a gobshite. After all, he had gone into this with his eyes open, and he had paid four hundred something Euro to Murph so far — then a hundred fifty for yesterday. That was what he had to do. Price comparisons hardly applied in this business. Whatever Murph charged was the going rate.
He made a quick inventory of what he could recall that Murph’s “tours” had brought him so far. Characters he had met, sure — that family in Walkinstown who fenced anything, with the sister in on it too, as tough or tougher than the three brothers who made the deals. Less colourful, and much more malevolent was One-or-Two Tony, also Tony Bony, a slight and unassuming man whom Murph had pointed out in a pub. Tony was an enforcer who kept a selection of pieces of old plumbing pipe for breaking arms and legs. According to Murph, he gave some victims a cruel choice, usually their pick of which two limbs he’d break.
Yes, he now knew, and had documented expressions these lowlifes used. Their taste in clothes, and what their choices meant. Cars they had, or liked to rob, or aspired to. Sexual tastes, if that’s what you could call them: more like a mixture of porn and animal husbandry. Murph had even given him a description of how you should walk, if you wanted to signal you were serious.
He now knew where some criminals Murph said he knew liked to go on holidays, and how they made their connections there. He had notes on Murph’s stories and gossip about their petty fights and their drinking. Their troubles with wives and girlfriends, and kids. Epic family fights, at least two he remembered involved brawls, knives, hospital and prison time.
Murph had relished relating incidents of biblical cruelty by criminals who wanted revenge for stupid, childish things. Embellished or not, Murph’s stories of cordless Black and Deckers into kneecaps, floor crucifixions, and rape of a rival’s kid were now lodged in Fanning’s mind, probably forever. His script would make damned good use of the shrewdness and native intelligence that some of them had, faculties so often sabotaged by their greed or their addictions, by bad genes, by mental illness.
But in the final analysis, Fanning had to admit that what he had learned on their excursions was often not because of Murph, but in spite of him. Like Cully had said — he talks, and he talks. His chatter ruined Fanning’s observations, drawing people’s attention, when all Fanning wanted to do was blend in. And the crowning irony: Murph continually telling him to say nothing, and to follow his lead always, while he, Murph, revved up the bluster and the bullshit himself.
That was not to say their time together had been wasted. Not at all. Parsing Murph’s ramblings and boasts, and his self-staged dramatics had given Fanning a clear character for the script. Would Murph recognize himself in the film as that blundering, not-so-bright, petty criminal, with a grandiosity and a stupidity that would be his — and others’ — undoing?
Fanning let his pencil run along the page and he watched the circles and the lines that his hand was drawing intersect, and then continue. His own private Ouija Board he called it, when people asked him what he was doing. It was to help him think, or rather to still whatever part of him was stopping him thinking clearly.
Soon he put down the pencil, and he examined the lines and shapes he had made. There were no shapes or patterns he could discern. His thoughts went back to the phone call, to Murph. Loyalty…? Hardly: Murph would screw him as quick as he’d screw anyone.