“Cormac Mahon,” he said. He seemed to know that handshakes were out of the question.
The Garda who had let Mahon in made sure that Minogue and Wall witnessed his Mona Lisa smile.
“Your client had a cup of tea and a ham roll,” Minogue said. “And a visit to the toilet, into the bargain.”
Mahon unslung his knapsack.
“I’ve been in touch with his parents. His mother is on her way.”
Minogue began to clean up the crumbs from his ham roll. The indigestion was already announcing itself just below his ribs.
“He wasn’t brought for questioning first?”
“No,” said Minogue. He tried not to notice how Mahon flicked his ponytail.
“You went straight for an arrest.”
“Just so.”
“Serious concerns?”
Asked so innocuously, Minogue was nearly caught flat-footed. He decided he had to kick for touch, while he pondered how to deal with any subliminal advantage this ponytail had allowed its owner.
“Ipso facto,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“A sine qua non really,” Minogue added.
“An arrest without a warrant?”
“Yes,” said Minogue, “Section Two.”
“Of the…?”
“Drug Trafficking Act, 1996.”
“The time of arrest?”
“An hour and a half ago.”
“Objections to release?”
“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it, Mr. Mahon. There’ll be other charges in due course.”
“There’s someone else involved?”
“Let’s have a wee chat after you see your client.”
Mahon stopped taking a folder out of his bag to give Minogue a skeptical look.
“I get it,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to sound unhelpful. But we go one step at a time.”
Mahon nodded as if he now understood something vital. He took his jacket off and laid it over the back of the chair.
“Goretex?” Minogue asked.
“I’ll disclose that during our information exchange,” said Mahon.
“Good one. I’m only asking because I’m destroyed half the time with the gorse. Savage growth this year again. It must be global warming.”
“In Wicklow?” Mahon asked.
“ actual fact. I’m nearly ready to stay home.”
Mahon sat down and looked from Minogue to Wall and back.
“What are the other charges you’re considering here?”
“We have several in mind.”
“They would be?”
“Trafficking in drugs. Sexual exploitation.”
“That’s to keep him. What’s the one you want to put on him?”
“I’m thinking Mr. Twomey would have confided that in his phone call?”
Mahon didn’t give any sign he was miffed.
“But in the heel of the reel,” Minogue added then, “it’ll be murder.”
Mahon bit his lip and looked down at his shoes for several moments.
“Well,” he said, “it’ll be a long evening.”
Minogue smiled.
“It doesn’t need to be,” he said.
“You badly want him remanded, don’t you?”
“I certainly do,” said Minogue. “A man was kicked to death. A visitor to our country of Saints and Scholars. Looking for a better life apparently, a wee share of our Irish good fortune.”
“A tragedy,” said Mahon. “You’ll know then that there are plenty of Irish people, people in certain Dublin neighbourhoods especially, looking for the same thing.”
Minogue couldn’t disagree.
“True for you,” he said. “But I don’t see that explaining away a murder.”
“A fairly big leap there,” said Mahon. “From Garda to prosecutor.”
“Drugs involved,” Minogue went on. “Exploitation of a minor: technically rape. Aggravated assault, robbery. Such a person needs to be off the streets.”
There was still no sign of annoyance on Mahon’s face.
“And have you said as much to my soon-to-be client?”
“I have.”
Mahon put his hands on the armrests of the chair.
“All right so,” he said, “I’m going to be working under the assumption that you are serious. These charges you’re telling me you’re going to take to the judge.”
“Why would you imagine that we might not be serious?”
Mahon stood slowly.
“I’d like to know what evidence you have could back up this… barrage of charges. It’s like fishing with sticks of dynamite.”
“A bit early now for seeking disclosure, I’m thinking,” said Minogue.
Mahon shrugged and left.
Minogue watched Wall’s stretch.
“A substantial bee in his bonnet,” said Wall.
“Substantial bonnet.”
“There’s women would kill for a head of hair like that.”
“Figuratively, Kevin. Remember what we’re working at?”
Wall conceded a smile.
“They’re all like that,” he said. “Not the hair. The attitude.”
“Solicitors?”
Wall nodded.
“The law and justice parted company some time back,” he said. ”Don’t mind justice: it’s morality that went south. And here we are, with the results.”
Minogue was a little surprised. He had to make an effort not to parse Wall’s words or tone any further into stereotypes.
“As my mother, God rest her, would say, ‘Man proposes, God disposes.’”
The awkward silence lasted several seconds. It ended with Wall clapping his palms on his knees.
“Well I wonder how Mossie’s getting on with the other one,” he said
“Sit in on it, why don’t you,” said Minogue. “I’ll call you, if and when we get our interview with Twomey proper. After he consults with his esteemed counsel.”
Wall closed the door behind him. Alone now, Minogue felt weary. He should be preparing a Charge Sheet to take to the Circuit Court in the morning. He should not care then that Cormac Mahon had tagged him as an overbearing cop, a tough nut trying to browbeat a suspect. He wondered what advice the same Cormac Mahon was giving his new client now. Start preparing alibis? Get off his high horse and realize that the Guards could hang a drug charge on him if that’s what it took to keep him? Ask him straight out if he’d had sex with this kid Tara?
Minogue put his feet up on the table and slid back in the chair until his neck met the top. Against his own grudging efforts, he now let caution to the wind, and fell to imagining that this might be done in a few hours. It’d be up and down the hall between the rooms, playing Matthews off against the Twomey fellow. Then one would run out of nerve. Again he considered putting this Tara kid on the spot. Bring her in this very evening, see if she’d spill the beans now that she’d had a bit of time to see her situation.
But did kids — adolescents — actually feel guilt? The furthest she’d gone was admitting she’d taken Klos’ money. By the time she had conceded this, she’d been almost hyperventilating, beyond hysterics. He’d heard that plaintive wail before, from his own Iseult, at that age. The martyrdom routine: “It’s true, I swear! Why doesn’t anyone believe me?”
Well, then.
All these dramatics had wearied him. The floods of tears and the wrenching sobs had gotten her what she wanted more or less: back into the custody of her parents, and home. He closed his eyes and listened to the faint background hum of the heating. He thought of Kilmartin looking furtively through the Self-Help or New Age shite in the bookshops, fighting off the gloom, waiting for a verdict. Waiting — something that James Aloysious Kilmartin had never been good at.
He shifted, tugged his jacket down, and closed his eyes again. He let himself wander again, and his mind took him straight to Graz and its lanes, where he had strolled with an Austrian copper and a French expert in counterfeit documents at a conference last year. Cobblestones, smells of ground coffee and sausage, violins on the street, trams and pedestrians in fine harmony, his own bewilderment that anything bad could have ever happened in such a beautiful city Footsteps outside the door: the door opened, cautiously; a shaved head, a moustache, huge frog eyes.