Islandbridge (13 page)

He took his time going downstairs. He thought about slipping out the front door and hopping into the car, with the radio up loud so he had cover, or an excuse if she got to him before his getaway. Lately he had less time for Bridie and the husband, a stooped, quiet man who rarely made it outdoors. It was uncharitable, to be sure, but still. Did they have no family or relations to come in and, say, clean the place up, or bring them out shopping? And, God, the house had been left run to crap, with the grass and the peeling paint on the garage. Worst of all, if she thought you were home, she'd be over, like the other day. Couldn't a person take holidays in their own home, for the love of God?

McCann went through the kitchen and toward the door to the side passage that led to the iron gate beside the garage. He picked up his keys and mobile from the counter and took a glance at the window.

Whatever had happened, it had come though the garden. McCann felt his heart start to race. Burglars, was his first thought, and they'd been interrupted,. They had just ploughed through here as part of their getaway. The sea-grass had been really badly done in. Talk about brazen. Well, where were the Guards then? McCann stared at the still foliage, listening harder for any sirens. But Bridie Jennings was caterwauling again.

Instead of heading for the front of the house, he went to the television room and lifted the poker from its stand. He considered how stupid this might be, but soon continued heading for the back door that opened out onto the cement path. He paused there and unlocked the keypad on his mobile, and keyed in 911. Then he poised his thumb over the Send button and pulled open the door. He stepped down onto the cement and listened again. Still the plane. He flourished the poker a little, and tightened his grip.

Accountant or not, he was no pushover. His father had been a civil service clerk all his life, his grandfather a deliveryman. There was no way in the wide world that anyone was going to take one bit of that back. Joey McCann was not one bit ashamed of that anymore than he was embarrassed to be doing well, or that he still had enough of a Dublin accent for people to comment on it.

He looked from the patch of grass with the small hollows between three torn-up pieces, over to the remains of the sea-grass. Then he saw the hand, and with it the arm, and a white, worn shirt-cuff halfway up to the elbow. There was a blue tinge to dark skin.

This is ridiculous, he heard himself say loudly.
Candid
Camera
? He looked around the garden and back to the house. His eyes slipped out of focus for a moment. He wondered if he'd just had a heart attack. And there was Bridie Jennings' voice again, straining and breaking with her effort to yell. The smell of soap came to him stronger now.

He refocused his eyes, and looked back at the body splayed in the sea-grass. The limbs were bent at impossible angles. An Adidas jacket had pulled away from the man's trousers, to reveal the dark skin on his back. One foot was barefoot and the sole was bright like it had been scoured or scraped.

She was shouting again, but he could only make out the last words: fell out of a plane?

McCann lifted his mobile and looked at the screen for a moment. What was he going to say? There's a black man in my garden, and I think he fell out of a plane? A man with one shoe? He stepped back, taking deep breaths.

“I know, Bridie,” he yelled then. “I know, now will you whisht a minute?”

Then he saw the shoe over by the wall. He tried not to think what the impact of this man's body must have been.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” he said and turned away when the revulsion hit him, and he pushed Send.

It took forever for the network to connect. McCann squeezed the poker tighter and kept his eyes on the teak slats that made up the chairs by the wall. He had to fight not to think about this person who had mangled a corner of the garden, and the ways his body had been broken.

Was this an emergency call? the man's voice asked.

“It is,” said McCann, suddenly aware of a sour, metallic taste in his mouth and his heaving chest.

“There's a dead man in my garden, he fell off a plane – out of a plane, I mean, I think. A black man it looks like, in my garden, it just happened. Just now.”

Could he repeat that?

Chapter 2

“M
OVE THAT BIG FAT HEAD
of yours, will you?” Minogue was sure that the sardonic Dublin tone could only be the voice of Detective Garda Tommy Malone.

“Thanks very much,” said Malone. “Boss.”

Minogue gave his colleague – his former colleague – the eye before turning back toward the speaker. Light from the projector caught motes of dust circling above, and turned them to filaments of silver.

Minogue watched the presenter,
Inspektor
Peter Moser of the Austrian state police, aim a laser pointer at the map of Europe. Yes, he thought again, Moser might well be the type of policeman that Basically Lally, Superintendent Cormac Lally, host and convenor of the meeting, wanted to be.

Moser was yet another visiting Euro-cop from Vienna, and he was good. The man's English was simply brilliant, better than many native speakers on Minogue's own island of preening yappers. Here was a man who finished his sentences, and ambitious sentences they were too, grand long ones with clauses that never strayed far or long, but were instead reeled back to one powerful statement.

Moser had snappy clothes, and could tell jokes to beat the band too. It wasn't fair that Arnold Schwarzenegger kept popping up in Minogue's mind when Moser was speaking. But whose fault was that? It had been Moser who'd said it almost first thing, as an ice-breaker:
I sound like Ah-nold up there, don't I?
Were Austrians supposed to be this funny?

But had he been asked directly, Inspector Minogue would have readily admitted to his own misuse of this interdepartmental meeting for the purposes of daydreaming. It wasn't his first time so engaged, but his guilt quotient for this lapse was negligible. Minogue had learned that these monthly meetings he attended, representing his International Liaison Section, were not as useful as Lally, their convener, seemed to still believe. Anyway, there were always good notes available afterwards.

Try as he might, Lally could not seem to help saying “basically.” Minogue liked to believe that Lally's recourse to this term was a sign of his desire to be candid and economical with words. It was not so for begrudgers and slaggers in the ranks, however, such as Minogue's old friend and tormentor, and former boss on the Murder Squad, James Kilmartin. It was from the same Kilmartin that he had heard Lally called The Powerpoint Prince of Darkness. Minogue still did not believe this was quite fair.

The same Lally was bound for big things, to be sure. And why not? Lally definitely had the lingo: relationships, interdiction, proactive. There was much reaching out, plenty of building bridges, a fair bit of empowering. The phrase “comfortable with” had showed up too often in the TV and radio interviews where Lally seemed to pop up quite often this past year. Minogue had even heard him say “win-win” twice, when he had introduced Moser earlier on.

Lally's law degree, his year at Europol, the live Internet feeds and video conferencing up on the big screen at his meetings – none of this had impressed Kilmartin much. He had confided to Minogue that he believed that Lally had set up these meetings as fodder for his own promotion. A trick bicyclist, was Kilmartin's irrevocable verdict on Lally: basically a media man, an operator, not a real copper anymore.

Well, little would impress Superintendent James Kilmartin these days, Minogue was beginning to believe. Indeed, he often wondered if Kilmartin was chafing even more than he was himself to get back to what he knew and liked. That consisted of chasing murderers and catching them, and dressing in his best suits to attend court, where he liked to stare at the defendant as he gave testimony, and particularly as a verdict was announced.

But Kilmartin's bluntness, and his ferocity, made up for his temperamental deficiencies. He was beyond ardent, a zealot in fact, and had often been brutal in tracking and seizing a killer. Shrewd enough to call on the right people, Kilmartin had not minded taking troublemakers on the Squad staff. It helped morale immeasurably that he wasn't shy about buying a round of drinks either. Even Tommy Malone, the first Dublin-born Guard that Kilmartin had inducted into the Murder Squad, had allowed that Kilmartin was bearable, some of the time.

This did not cause James Kilmartin to let up in his slagging of Dubliners and their accent, as personified in his final “hire” before the Squad was disbanded – Garda Thomas Malone. But Malone had proven as dogged and as smart and as capable as any who had ever come though the Squad. This was no small feat. Kilmartin in his cups was willing to quietly concede that fact also, to concede that Malone had been up with the likes of former Squad members Plateglass Fergal Sheehy, Jesus Tony Farrell, and Head-The-Ball John Murtagh.

Kilmartin didn't restrict himself to Dubliners, however. It was pretty much anyone not graced by fortune to have been born in his native County Mayo. Accordingly, Minogue routinely fell under the rubric of “a Clare savage,” or perhaps a “buff,” or “mucker.” Kilmartin seemed oblivious to the fact these almost archaic terms of lethal understatement had resonance only for himself really. Minogue didn't mind one bit. Hiding within them remained a refuge, a strength, even a weapon.

Solely for the sake of a staged row, Minogue would occasionally affect to seek redress in the matter of Kilmartin's slurs. The scene for this mischief was usually licensed premises. The raillery itself was the point. It built thirst, and sooner or later it would end in a bit of play-acting, and elaborately fake umbrage to go with an extravagant show of bad language.

Minogue felt obliged to do some
pro forma
jabbing back at Kilmartin, and his reminders that County Mayo was no Parnassus, and that Mayo men no standard bearers of civilization, only kept things simmering nicely. After all, Minogue liked to remind his friend, the same Jim Kilmartin's fellow Mayo men couldn't all be as thick as they were reputed to be. Hadn't they had the good sense to kick Kilmartin out of the county years ago, and up to annoy Dublin . . . ?

Moser had a remote in his other hand, and it acted like a mouse. Minogue squinted at the names that had appeared on the map. The walls on the squadroom had always been plastered with maps, even after a case had been cleared. Ambiance, was Kilmartin's explanation, and he even directed Eilís, the Squad secretary, to rearrange them rather than remove them.

Minogue shifted a little in his slouch in an effort to dislodge himself from this slide into reminiscence. A total waste of time, to be sure, and in all fairness, it had to be said that the closing of the Squad had been engineered with a grand, soft landing for them all in the land of Cushy Numbers, or Grand Strokes, as Kilmartin called their new posts.

Since the disbanding of the Garda Murder Squad, Kilmartin spent plenty of time in the monthly get-togethers down in Willie Ryan's Pub near the old Technical Bureau offices by Islandbridge, boasting about the perqs of gadgetry trials, and the budgeting and faraway conferences that were part of his new nine-to-five in Procurement. It was as cushy as Minogue's posting to Liaison, and his twice-a-week Alliance Française lessons to get him to become one of the Garda point men in for European police initiatives that were rolling into Ireland now. The Big Time, as Kilmartin called it: no more economy-class policing, no sir.

Maybe it was time to give the regular meetings of the old Squad members at the Willie Ryan's Pub a miss for a while then, Minogue reflected now. “Club Mad,” John Murtagh's name for the get-togethers – it had come from his harrowing tale of food poisoning after a tryst with a Danish gymnast at his first, and only, Club Med holiday – had served its purpose. It had run its course, and everyone should move on, as they say. Or maybe not, Minogue wondered yet again. Jesus Farrell still showed up most times too, but he often spent much time on his mobile, phoning in bets. Sheehy, Plateglass Fergal Sheehy, was gone to Serious Crimes again. He had gone moderate on the jar. Minogue had heard that Sheehy wasn't happy in the job at all.

But still Minogue could feel for Kilmartin. Plainly, it was because he had the same rebel heart in his own new job himself. There had been too many days when he'd felt like a civil servant, or someone whose job was to be in meetings, or to be trapped in reports of meetings that only gave way to preparations for other meetings.

At home some evenings, Minogue's gaze stayed fixed on the page of his book without seeing a word for minutes at a time. Meanwhile his thoughts brought him to the ditches and alleys, and the small rooms where he listened and watched as someone lied or sweated more, or cried, or all three. To be hunting down a killer, to be staying awake and half-raving even, for forty hours, and to be living on yesterday's sandwiches and too much instant coffee as well as a few pints that soon soured in the gut, or to be standing in the long grass beside where a human being's body had been discarded. . . . How could any man in this day and age justify that shameful excitement to anyone, to his wife and family especially, or even to his own waking self?

“Jesus fell for the second time,” Minogue thought: now he was becoming annoyed as well as a little ashamed of his wandering thoughts. He sat upright and wrote a new heading in his notes, using the most recent words to appear onscreen: “The Balkan Route.” This meeting was important, he told himself, just like the other ones Lally organized. It was here for a good reason. Crime trends and developments on the continent mattered. It was very good for morale and staff development to attend these sessions, and to want more of them. Information shared was better information. No more reinventing the wheel, less time playing catch-up. This is Europe we're in; our streets have brown and black faces, and everything is on the move. Prosperity puts Ireland on the map for organized crime anywhere.