The Going Rate (8 page)

His belt held him back. He pulled up the handbrake and released his belt, and dove across the passenger seat to get at the door handle. Another page hit the top of the door, curled, cracked, and flew out. Another was flattened against the front window. Minogue lunged at it, and crumpled it just in time to have another nick him in the cheek as it went by.

He cursed again. Kilmartin, hunch-shouldered and indifferent to anything but his own hurried strides along the muddy lane, did not look back.

Pages hurtled over car roofs, one slapping a windscreen of a Nissan. It was one of the hospital pictures, the full-on one of the man's swollen face streaked with blood. One of the laser-printed photos was inching its way up his window. It flapped once and then took off, higher than any of the others.

Cars were waiting behind. Minogue let off the handbrake and headed toward a gap in the high bank by a bend, where a man was waiting to direct him.

The farmyard was half-full of cars already. He turned off the ignition and leaned back to get the folder from the back seat. There were only two pages left in it. He heard paper rustle when he moved his feet by the pedals. There was another page half under the seat. Ten pages missing, fifteen?

He took out his mobile and he waited, his thumb over the Send, trying to compose a sensible question: Eilís, thank God you got a transfer over to Liaison, you know how thick I am, so you won't mind asking for copies of that file…?

A man rose up from a crouch in Minogue's side vision, holding up one of his pages. Minogue closed his phone.

Kilmartin's face had changed completely. The page flapped enough to tear as he held it up to eye level. He tugged on the door handle, and holding the door against the wind, slid into the passenger seat with a sigh.

“Mother of God, Jim. What the hell was all that about?”

Kilmartin didn't look up when he spoke.

“It's hard to explain.”

“There's three-quarters of my briefing notes flying around Wicklow – scene photos, personal information!”

“No need to be roaring at me. I couldn't help it.”

Minogue looked around the farmyard for any of the pages.

“A savage bit of wind,” said Kilmartin, quietly. “Always like this up here?”

“It's March,” Minogue declared. “That's what it is.”

“Fierce bleak too. Bog, bog, and more bog.”

Minogue threw another glare at Kilmartin. Sure enough, he had that faraway look again.

Within a few moments Kilmartin started out of his thoughts, and ran his hand along the armrest.

“It was a panic attack,” he said.

“A panic attack.”

Kilmartin nodded.

“No warning?”

Kilmartin shook his head.

“It has to do with the other business,” he murmured. “You know.”

Minogue waited.

“I get these, well…,” Kilmartin went on, his voice dropping even more, “…images, I suppose you'd call them. Sometimes I get them in dreams.”

He looked up suddenly at Minogue and smiled bleakly.

“‘The Half-Three Devils,' I call them,” he said. “They kind of crowd in all of a sudden. And you don't know whether you're awake, or whether you're asleep. Ever have them, back when, you know, the, em, episode?”

The bombing he meant, Minogue knew.

“I suppose I did,” he heard himself reply.

This seemed to release Kilmartin from something. His voice took on its customary assurance again, and he sat back.

“Funerals,” he said. “Churches. Graveyards even. It keeps coming back, that I could be going to Maura's. Sort of a flash-forward, not a flashback. You see?”

Minogue nodded. Somehow, his patience had returned.

“I remember you talking to me years ago about your little lad,” said Kilmartin. “Éamonn. How you'd see him at different times. And you couldn't go into the bedroom for fear you might see him again, and you knew you couldn't get to him in time.”

The waving new growth on the banks all about suddenly faded for Minogue.

“Am I out of order in bringing it up?” Kilmartin asked. Minogue shook his head.

“For me, it comes down to this,” Kilmartin went on. “With Maura, I couldn't protect her, I couldn't save her. And that's the crux of the matter. Where the shite hit the fan for me. Simple enough to say, but…”

The seconds ticked by. Minogue listened to the wind hissing around the car, trying to see if there was a melody in it. “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” skittered through his mind, his father's favourite tune. Or was it “The Pigeon on the Gate”?

“So what's that word again,” Kilmartin was saying. “Lugubrious, is it?”

“Listen to you,” Minogue said. “You and your Half-Three Divils.”

“You can laugh. Hey, you're allergic to churches, as I recall.”

“I don't be leaping out of cars when I get near one, do I.”

“Each to his own, but.”

Kilmartin let out a long breath through pursed lips. Then he held up the page he had grabbed on the laneway.

“Well, here's one of your bits of paper,” he said. “Makes no sense to me.”

“It's Polish.”

“Good. I thought I was after having a stroke or something.”

“Half the County Wicklow will think the same thing, when they read it.”

Kilmartin reached inside his jacket and took out another sheet.

“Well this belongs to you too then.”

“Any more you're hiding on me?”

“As if I would. But what're you doing with scene photos? You're not in the game anymore, remember?”

Minogue gave him the eye.

“What,” Kilmartin said. “I'm only making conversation.”

His gaze returned to the muddy tire tracks in the yard alongside.

Minogue jammed the remaining pages between his seat and the console. He recalled Kilmartin's talk about being powerless to protect his wife, and the panic attacks he got. Maybe Kilmartin had really gone over the edge that night, and there would be no coming back – at least to his job as a Garda.

Someday he'd ask him if he had really believed that Rynn or one of his gunmen had been out there in the garden that night, coming to kill him and Maura. Things you remember, but things the mind decides to hide under the bed. But the body remembers things. At times, Minogue himself could feel the broken china and glass under his elbows that night in the Kilmartins' shattered kitchen, scrabbling and grappling for Kilmartin's arm – or rather the police-issued automatic at the end of that arm – then the blinding floodlights, and the shouting.

Betrayed was an odd word. It had an old-fashioned sound to it. It was plain that Kilmartin loved his wife. Minogue knew that because he had sat with Kilmartin for two nights at the hospital after Maura Kilmartin had overdosed. It had been exactly one week after the fiasco at their home. The whole thing had been his fault, not hers, Kilmartin had said several times. After all, what kind of a detective was he, that he'd miss something right under his nose for years?

Wind buffeted the car once, twice.

“I'm going in,” Minogue said finally. “Come on in yourself, sure.”

Kilmartin pretended to think about it.

Chapter 9

“J
ACKO
'
S A PSYCHO
,” Murph said. “Only you here, I'd tell him what's what.” Murph had insisted that Fanning give him the two fifties. He would do the business with Jacko. His role, he had called it. Fanning eyed three more men arriving from the parking area. With their darker, wind-burned faces and their country accents plain in the sparing words, he was sure they were tinkers.

“Extortion is what it is,” said Murph. “I'll sort him out later. Come on.”

Fanning watched Murph hand over the money.

“Behave yourselves,” Jacko said. “And bet lots.”

Murph pulled the handle on the galvanized door, and Fanning followed him into the dimness beyond. A short passageway led to a room the size of a school gymnasium, a storey-and-a-half high. Small groups stood around, men all of them, and they talked in low voices under small, slow clouds of cigarette smoke. There was some kind of half-disassembled industrial shelving at one end of the room, and discarded pieces of engine parts in a heap to the side.

Fanning's first thought when he saw the chain-link was that it was a mistake. A chainlink cage simply belonged outdoors, not indoors. The strangeness of it continued to rub at his mind until the astringent smells pressed in sharply on him, cleaning fluids and fresh sawdust scattered in the enclosure. The chain link had to be six feet high, at least. A yard brush leaned against the outside of the cage, and beside it a shovel. The bright blue heads of masonry nails stood out from the bases of the sockets that anchored posts to the cement floor.

Fanning stood next to Murph, and avoided any eye contact with the groups of men. He studied the walls instead, the windows that had been filled in, the two painted-over skylights. One man from a group had detached himself and had begun strolling toward the far end of the room, slowly rubbing his face up and down like a comedian pulling faces while talking on his mobile.

“How come he gets to keep his phone?” he whispered to Murph.

“None of our business.”

A squat, bearded man walked smartly in from the hallway. His beard had the same blue-black tinge as his hair. The groups of men had noticed him, and they shuffled and turned to face him.

“I'll take bets before,” he called out.

He had the same torn and gravelly voice as one of the Dubliners, the folk group that Fanning's father had liked, and whose LPs he had later regretted discarding after the funeral. The bearded man coughed, and rubbed his hands.

“No bets during. For those of you here the–.”

He held up his arm then, and he fumbled in the pocket of his wind-cheater. He turned away then and spoke into his phone.

“We'll see the talent in a minute,” Murph murmured to Fanning. “No rush.”

The smell of disinfectant was stinging Fanning's nose now. He noticed darker patches on the cement floor next to the wire. The bearded man closed his phone, and whistled.

“A squad car taking its sweet time out on the Ballygall Road,” he said.

The shuffling stopped, and most of the men looked away. Low talk resumed. The man with the beard strolled toward where Murph and Fanning sat.

“Do I know you,” he said to Fanning.

“No way,” said Murph, smiling. “A mate of mine. Sound, so he is.”

“Is he not able to talk?”

Murph's laugh was forced.

“Ah no, he's not. He's a dummy. Aren't you?”

Fanning said nothing.

“There's a pair of you then,” the bearded man said. “If and he's in your line of caper, Murph.”

“Comedy club we're in here, is it.”

“I'm not trying to make a joke.”

He turned back to Fanning, who concentrated on putting on his most neutral, attentive expression.

“Been here before?”

Fanning shook his head.

“He's just trying it out,” said Murph. “See if he can make a few bob. I got the okay from Jacko.”

The bearded man's eyes drifted slowly away from Fanning's.

“You have him gambling for his fix, do you,” he said to Murph.

“Christ,” said Murph, and shook his head. “What a thing to say.”

“Why's that? Business these days. Oh. Tell him if he pukes he'll be cleaning it up himself.”

His eyes darted back to Fanning.

“No hard feelings there, head-the-ball.”

“Ah no,” said Fanning. “You're grand.”

Something that was almost a smile came to the man's face, but his stare remained flat and empty.

“He says I'm grand. Did you hear that. ‘You're grand' says he.”

“He only means he gets it,” said Murph. “He understands, like. Not as thick as he looks.”

The bearded man's attention went to the hallway then, and he turned away. Murph elbowed Fanning. “What did I tell you? Didn't I tell you to keep your trap shut? Didn't I?”

“He asked me a question.”

“No he didn't. He gave you notice, that's what he done.”

“Notice, what notice.”

“You're on his radar, is what. Don't be telling people ‘You're grand.' Especially him. He runs the thing.”

“I know who he is, you know.”

“It doesn't matter who he is. This is just something he does. On his own.”

Fanning stretched slowly, to put distance between himself and Murph's breath. Turning, he saw the bearded man in profile. He was talking quietly to a man with a deeply furrowed forehead and bloodshot eyes.