"Gun!" Dunne screamed.
Corrigan looked over the roof of the Mini. Minogue looked down at the running man. He was zig-zagging around the cars, banging their panels with his arms and hand as he charged through. As he ran he was tugging at a pistol under his arm. The pistol out, he began shouting, the gun jabbing the air with each piston stab of his arm.
The gunman hesitated. A gorgeous brown suit, Minogue observed dreamily from somewhere behind the enormous, numbing nose. Incongruous, silly. A gun? Minogue looked to the slip-on shoes. A hundred quid, easy. Minogue's nose was pulsing slowly now. It felt like a slowly inflating balloon. The elegant gunman darted a look toward cars then, thumping panels heavily to slow himself as he ducked. Who was doing all that shouting now? Dunne, yes. Shouting at me, Minogue realised. Guns? Kathleen'll be livid with me…
Corrigan had the heels of his hands resting on the roof, aiming the Walther. Dunne screamed at Minogue again.
"You!" shouted Corrigan. "Put down that gun! Put it down or we'll shoot. Drop it now! Police!"
The gunman frowned, his arm wavering. Looked shocked, Minogue thought. So he should be… Maybe he was hurt? Well-dressed, but…
"Drop it now!" Corrigan roared. "Drop the gun now!"
Minogue heard the car radio come to life. The gunman's face eased then he raised his arm.
Corrigan shot him once. The man fell backwards with a surprised shout. The detective crouched by the car stood up and ran on tiptoe toward the fallen man. Standing near him, his gun pointed down, it seemed like a party game to Minogue. The detective moved to the side and gently toed something metallic, sending it skittering a few feet across the tarmac. Not smart,
Minogue's faraway brain tut-tutted. An automatic with a single-action could go off if you so much as open a box of Rice Krispies in the same room… Everybody's scared, aren't they? The man on the ground drew up his legs and groaned. The suit, the suit: it'll be ruined, Minogue's thoughts fluttered about nearby. That's blood, that is, Minogue's eyes began arguing with his brain. Concussed, the brain sneered back. You're concussed, my dear man…
A blue Nissan came tearing down the road and slewed to a stop, the driver's door flying open. Minogue stood up slowly from his crouch. He felt dizzy and pleasantly limp. He saw that one of the man's slip-on shoes was off. Dunne grabbed at the radio and began talking. While he waited for a reply, he pointed to Minogue and gestured toward his own nose. Minogue looked down at the blood on his own shirt. He touched the bridge of his nose and felt a resonant throb, not yet painful but vaguely warm. He walked slowly to the driver's side of the Mini.
Moore's window was open. The door was jammed, the front wing of the car crumpled and pushed up near the door-hinge. Moore was lying sideways across the front seats.
"Moore, are you all right there?" said Minogue. His voice vibrated in the lumpy blockage which was his nose. He saw liquid gleam, oily, on the seat-back.
"Can you hear me, Moore? Are you…?" Minogue wheezed out.
"Something in my back, I don't know," Moore said in a quiet, level voice. He did not try to move. "It's kind of numb there now…"
Minogue saw Moore's fingers moving slowly then, the eyelashes fluttering. The fingers clenched and loosened. A runnel of dark liquid crept out on the rubber matting of the floor, met a rubber vein on the pattern of the mat and spidered around it. Blood, Minogue saw. He turned to Corrigan's ashen face now framed in the window opposite.
"Tell 'em to get a move-on, Pat," he heard the nose say. "Two."
Corrigan's eyes bulged as he stared at Minogue. Then he nodded and shouted Dunne's name. Another car skidded to a stop next to him. Two detectives jumped around the open doors as they bounced back on their hinges. Minogue wondered if it really was a police siren he was hearing in the distance.
"I didn't know this…" Minogue began to say. His voice was completely trapped in his head, somewhere behind his face. "We'll look after you, don't-"
"He would have killed me, you know," said Moore. The voice carried a tone of fearful, lucid warning, at once earnest and pleading. Minogue would later remember the strained tenor in Moore's plea, as from his children's fevers or as they woke from nightmares, still pursued into their waking worlds.
CHAPTER 16
"I told the Commissioner I'd be happier with the other thing," Minogue murmured. He was trying not to stare at Kilmartin again. He had barely recognised Kilmartin on first entering the room. Jimmy Kilmartin's face glowed against the pillow.
"You mean that fella Pat Corrigan shot?"
"Him, yes. He was way senior to Ball. Ball was only the pot-boy really. That Murray character was the wild card. He had the power to pave the way and cover it up."
Kilmartin studied Minogue's nose and the two black eyes.
"Do you mind me saying that you sound like Donald Duck? No offence now."
"I've heard them all, Jimmy."
"You look like you were in a shocking row."
"I was. Moore's car hit us a good wallop. I was concussed and I didn't know it. I hit the lip of the seat, the metal frame where there's not enough sponge."
"A real hero," Kilmartin murmured.
"Kathleen says different. More like an ujit."
Minogue found himself staring at Kilmartin's face again. What was it about Kilmartin that was so different? Was it just the bed-rest and being forcibly kept away from his job that had cleared his face of cares?
"Not much hope of getting them to turn the fella over to us," Kilmartin added. "But you had the pig-iron to ask them."
"The embassy? I tried. Didn't get that far. But how do you know all this?" Pleased with his intelligence, Kilmartin winked.
"Ha ha. A little bird. Here, I'll tell you anyway. God Almighty was in visiting last night. Himself and the new Assistant Commissioner, Tynan, after he took his life in his hands and vetted you. To see if I was in the land of the living. Now I don't much like Tynan, but you know how it is with the man himself. Larger than life."
Minogue knew. God Almighty a.k.a. Thomas Martin Lally, the Garda Commissioner, was a porcine brute of a farmer's son from Longford. He was shrewd and overbearing, with a tongue like a rasp and a bottomless fund of fulsome bonhomie which he parlayed as charm. He repelled Minogue. Tynan he rather liked. Tynan had studied several years for the Jesuits before becoming a Garda.
"Oh yes. Himself has his own little copy of what you dug up, Matt. But that's between yourself and meself."
"And Pat Corrigan and half the world."
"Not a bit of it. The Minister put it all under wraps, the one copy. Or so he thinks."
"The prints I made, you mean?" Minogue said.
"Ah, no matter. Don't be upsetting yourself. Himself says to me he might have known it was a homo at the bottom of all this."
Minogue rose abruptly from the chair. "Look it, Jimmy-"
"Sit down, Matt. Sit down. There's people that don't have your delicate touch. I was just testing you. I wasn't trying to get a rise out of you."
"My eye, you weren't. Lally's a boor. He shouldn't be in the job. It's as well he didn't talk like that to me."
Kilmartin raised a supplicant hand.
"Easy, man. Don't be deserting a sick man's bedside. Come on now."
Minogue felt something give way in his chest. He sat down.
"Oh, but there was great crack and sport to do with the names that were in this notebook thing. Pillars of Tory Britain. One of them was head of MI5 after the war, even. Another one was a Home Secretary and he's still a big wind there, cocked up in the House of Lords like mutton dressed up as lamb. Aren't you glad when you wake up every morning to find you're living in a republic? None of this Lord and Lady Muck stuff. This King and Queen stuff is for children. Or gobshites."