Islandbridge (41 page)

“'Course they are.”

“He'll watch out for Seamus . . . ?”

“Hoey? Matt will. He misses nothing. He only lets on he's an iijit.”

She watched him try to close the new window in the dining room. They did a lot of squeaking, but the man said that was normal.

“Will we put on a fire, Jim, what do you think?”

He swore and there was a harsh click from the window. She surveyed the plates and the napkins she'd found in Switzers, and the silverware from the Kilkenny Design. You had to be careful, she knew, not too overreach, not to have fancy things in cutlery. The flowers weren't overdone either.

“I love a fire,” he said. “But you don't want people sitting around, that's the trouble.”

“Oh God,” she said, remembering. “What does the Assistant Commissioner drink, the new one, is it Italian?”

He gave her a glare.

“Arra Sweet and Holy Jesus, Maura, will you not be worrying about him. He's easy pleased. Sure isn't he a Monaghan man?”

“His wife, what's her name?”

“Noreen.”

“What does she like again?”

“I don't know. But if she's anything like the man she married, she'll drink a pint out of a whore's boot.”

“I hope you're not going to be talking like that tonight.”

He gave her a mock salute.

“Come on, Jim. Don't be like that.”

He tugged on the new curtains and gazed out at the rubble still left in the garden.

“I know we're high-mucky-mucky now, girl of my heart, but you can't take the bog out of the man. It's a party we're having, right? In our house?”

She thought of reminding him how much engineering had gone on to get him to this ‘our.'”

“It's a dinner party,” she said. “Not a tinker's bonfire.”

He made a face and walked over to the bottles of wine. He began to study the labels.

“It's mixing business with pleasure,” she said.

He started humming, “Lannigan's Ball.”

“I'll have my crowd from work too, you know. It's social of course, but we're going to be enjoying ourselves.”

He hummed louder and slipped in words.

“Networking,” she said. “As much as celebrating the promotion and that.”

“And your goings-on,” he said.

“Certainly,” she said. “That's why I asked a few clients along, but easygoing.”

He looked up from his study of the label.

“Well Christ, there's one you'd better not be bringing.”

“Who? I don't get it.”

“That Rynn fella.”

The name seemed to hang in the air for a moment.

“That's not funny. Where did that come from?”

He beamed, and he came over and grabbed her.

“I know. I know,” he said. “I'm only trying to get a rise out of you. His name came up, I was talking to a fella starting up that new section in Serious Crimes.”

“Did you tell them that he once tried to get the agency to get people for him?”

“No I didn't. Of course not – are you mad? But he's bulletproof, that bastard. We thought we had him but our man disappeared, no sign of him.”

She put her hands on his forearms.

“This is my outfit for tonight,” she said.

He nuzzled her neck.

“God you're like a plank” he murmured. “Have a glass of something.”

The doorbell still squeaked: the workmen hadn't looked at it she told one of them.

“Already?” he said, detaching himself a little.

“That'll be the caterer, the waitresses, I think.”

“Waitresses? Jesus, in my house? You're joking!”

She grabbed his shoulder.

“Jim, listen! Will you wake up? You're in 1999! You're a Chief Inspector. My job's going great. Ireland's woken up – haven't you read the business pages? We're not going to be standing around handing out little ham sandwiches like a wake. All right?”

He looked back into her eyes.

“You're a fierce bossy woman,” he said, but there was no sting in it.

“Just enjoy tonight, will you?”

She headed for the hall.

“Where's Liam?”

“Ah, he was a bit crooked after school. He's probably back at Brian's house.”

She glanced back at him and for a moment was pierced by the frown that had come on his face.

“He'll be okay, love. It's an age thing.”

It was very short waiters carrying tableclothes and a bag of something. Just as she closed the door, she saw figures at the gate.

“Perfect timing,” she murmured. It'd get Jim off to a good start tonight.

“Are we allowed in?” Kathleen Minogue called out. Her husband was closing the gate behind them.

Maura called out to them.

“Welcome the pair of ye, come on.”

She smiled back at Kathleen. That woman always seemed to be in good humour. It was infectious. Things would go great.

She watched Matt closing the gate and something cold spread though her. He had dark hair and he was tall, a bit like that fella that had come with Rynn to the pub that day. His bodyguard, or helper, or picker-upper – whatever you called someone who worked for a criminal. Weekes. He had a nasty look to him, and bad eyes. Sometimes she had wondered what he'd done at Rynn's bidding over the years.

The money had been put into her locked car sometime during the day, in broad daylight. It wasn't the slow mocking Dublin accent on the phone when Rynn phoned at the end of the day. He had spoken quietly. He hadn't sworn or raised his voice.

“Whatever else you can say about me,” he had said, “I keep my word, don't I.”

The face was Matt Minogue's of course it was, and that boyish look to him that made you think he was half-preoccupied with something else.

“There's a nip in the air already, isn't there?”

It was Kathleen's voice, and then she was beside her. A small look of concern, she noted, as Kathleen's face came in and she felt her cheek on hers.

“Gorgeous,” said Kathleen. “Way better than moving to mouldy old Foxrock! Wasn't that the place years back . . .?”

“Yes, I'd almost forgotten that.”

Maura knew Minogue didn't like the hug stuff. It was a shyness she liked. Since getting Matt on the Squad, her own husband had changed, and she was sure it was cues Jim picked up from him.

“Tell his highness to get the apron off, Maura,” Minogue said in that reluctant way he often spoke. “His betters are here.”

Kathleen elbowed him, but he had been expecting it.

He stepped back and held out something with a bow on it.

“A bit of art,” he said. “Iseult.”

Maura drew Kathleen into the hall, enjoying the oohing and awing from her about the decor.

She pointed out defects with the floor where the stairs stopped and rolled her eyes toward the bare patches of plaster still by the door they'd hung on the cloakroom.

The waitress had gone straight to the kitchen. That seemed to be enough to eject Jim from there.

“Look,” said Kathleen and rubbed her hand along the banister. “Is that oak?”

“Bog oak, Kathleen,” Jim said, and leaned in to give her a hug.

“Are we the first?”

“Kathleen Mavourneen, you'll be the first ones in that door to toast the goings on. Here, I'll get a few glasses from the servant girl.”

She looked from Kathleen to her husband.

“They'll all be along,” she said. “Róisín's coming up. Ma too. A crowd from work. The Commissioner even. Oh I hope I don't call him God Almighty by mistake.”

Kathleen said something about the new one, a rumour about an Assistant Comm. Tynan.

“But Jim'd know the day or the hour, I'm sure,” said Kathleen, as he returned with glasses and a bottle of Italian bubbly.

“Let them take the coats off Jim, will you?”

“Oh, are ye staying? Ha ha!”

“Don't you, Jim,” said Kathleen.

“Don't I what– Jaysus, don't let me spill this.”

“Don't you know every move that goes on in the Guards?”

“Bedad and I do,” he said. “And, I'm not ashamed to admit it.”

He almost overfilled Minogue's glass. Maura felt the twinge again and tried to fight it off. What was done was done – there was no going back. Ever. Weekes had been a criminal all his life.

“Somebody has to know what's going on, don't they, Matt?”

They touched glasses. The wine wasn't cold enough; she should do something about the ice. The doorbell went again and Jim wrenched it open. Róisín, Tom. It was starting. Her chest began to lose the tightness and she tried harder to focus on what was going on around her. The laughter from Jim – Kathleen's peculiar giggle – Róisín's husband Tom's new glasses.

The phone now. She was nearest. She picked it up, tried to guess who it was needed directions.

“How's the party going?”

She put down the glass and held her hand over her other ear.

“I said how's it going? Party started, is it?”

Her shoulders went rigid and the rush of heat seemed to race up her neck. “Who is this?”

“Oh, I know you'll have to do the who is this bit. Don't you have a second phone in that place of yours?”

“This isn't a good time.”

“Oh, I think it is, Mrs. Kelly.”

She followed the line to the box at the bottom of the wall, where it connected.

“I'm phoning back in five minutes. That should be enough time. We're still in business, aren't we?”

“I told you, I don't want to do it anymore. And don't call me here.”

“You haven't told me anything for months.”

“There's nothing to tell, that's why.”

“Well, start listening to your husband again, then, will you? What am I paying you for?”

“I told you–”

“Now you shut up,” he said, calmly. “Let's have no more of this ‘I told you' stuff! This is a two-way street. Five minutes.”

He hung up.

She had to keep things going, she knew.

“Okay,” she said, and she put down the receiver.

She smiled back at Kathleen.

“Are we okay, Maura?” Kathleen asked.

Did it show?

“Can I . . . ?” Kathleen started to say.

“Don't you want your drink?” Jim called after her as she headed upstairs. She thought she heard someone, a man, say upset and then overwork. It would hardly be Minogue saying it.

She closed the bathroom door. She considered taking a knife, a pliers or something to the telephone line.

It was cold here. She opened the valve on the radiator and sat on the edge of the new bathtub. Jim, the slob, had left his razor out. She reached for it, turned it over. The edge of the blade had soap rime and whiskers. The steel was ice cold.

Chapter 26

M
INOGUE SAID NOTHING
after he got home, nothing, that is, about the latter part of his day. He ached. He went straight to the Jameson's, all the while carrying on a strained but reasonable conversation through the door into the living room where Kathleen sat, watching the English news.

“Anything about the African thing?” he called out.

“What African thing?”

He waited until the whiskey had gotten by his gullet.

“I came across some kind of a concert going on there in Dame Street.”

“No. But there was plenty of other excitement in town later on, I see.”

“I heard something about trouble down in the Temple Bar,” he tried.

“Trouble is right. Somebody fired off a gun. That place is, God, I don't know. Iseult's place is right there in the middle of all that, God almighty.”

Not for long, he didn't call out.

“She phoned anyway,” Kathleen said. “She got her contraption put together.”

“She's a welder now, is she,” he replied, and took another swallow of the Jameson's. “That's a good skill to pick up.”

In the light cast out from the window, he could see some of the results of his tentative efforts to relocate the rockery. Rockeries are not supposed to migrate, he had been telling himself for quite a number of years now, but somehow his efforts here each year had become almost a habit. He almost enjoyed Kilmartin's slow surveys of the rockery in transit, as it generally was, when he'd look over the latest effort. Bizarre, was Kilmartin's latest term, delivered in a murmur that was more curious than dismissive.

“Aren't you coming in?”

Hint, hint, he knew.

“I'll plug in the kettle first,” he replied.

He headed for the living room, and flopped down in the sofa beside her. She eyed him.

“I'm glad that day is over,” he said. “It was brutal, all the running around.”

“You're back to the eighteen-hour-day madness, are you?”

“Temporary.”

“A temporary posting,” she said.

He didn't let on he had registered the leaden tone.

“Me and Tommy were ready for a bit of, well, you know.”

“A pint after work.”

The ads were over. The announcer told them a Special Report was coming up later. To prove she was not fibbing, the screen was taken over by a view of some dusty plain with a few sparse trees, and African faces.

“Is that what's-his-name?”

“It is,” said Kathleen. “Look, it's Africa – Chad, it says. Is that a coinicdence?”

The famous reporter looked like he was being boiled red by the heat there, and he was surrounded by children, their brown heads like large eggs.

The children laughed about something. Several of the kids had baseball and basketball logos on their T-shirts. This released a strange dismay in Minogue. What could you expect, he thought then? Were Africans supposed to stay in loincloths? He remembered the picture of the dead man's family, all in their Sunday finery. They could as easily have been at one of those gospel churches in the American South. There was a sweeping shot of a hut with lots of kids in it, clapping hands and swaying.