He slipped off the bus, and lit his second-last cigarette. He watched the bus turn out of sight down the road. He’d have a bit of something to eat, have a wash-up and head back into town. He’d try the pubs along Leeson Street. Dwyers, O’Brien’s, that Unicorn kip. She might have gone to that club, Stella’s. Wash his hair and put on something sharp so’s he wouldn’t have the bouncer at Stella’s looking down his nose at him. But if he had to go to Stella’s to look for her, that’d mean money. A fiver cover charge! And she might be sitting with one of the Egans. Christ! He looked up and down the street. She’d throw a bleeding fit if she thought he’d come looking for a freebie.
He drew hard on the cigarette. The steady pulses over his eyebrows were getting stronger. There was a headache on the way, one of those killers. Then his stomach’d go wormy, about the same time he’d get that freaky feeling, like a thirst all over his body. He’d start to think of doing anything. An oul one even, with her shopping bag and a cane, and he’d see himself kicking her in the face just to get her bag. One of these days it’d happen. It was like he couldn’t stop it happening the way he had seen it going to happen, like it was somebody else with his face doing it. What was a fella supposed to do, for Christ’s sake? Kill someone to get a bit of help or money? His chest heaved with the first impulse to cry out. It frightened him. Was he that close to losing it? This is what a bit of blow does to you? He’d heard stuff but didn’t really believe it. The ones that cracked up had their own problems. No willpower. It was just lighting the fuse for a lot of them. Headers. It didn’t take much to put them right over the wall.
He had often thought about getting his hands on a gun. Noel O’Rourke had told him he’d get him one for seven hundred quid. Noelie thought he wasn’t smart enough to cop on that any gun he’d come by was probably dirty. Maybe even a cop getting shot with it. A gun’d do it, though. He could freelance for a few jobs. The Egans’d look at him different if he carried a gun. No one would dare fuck with him. No way: boom. You won’t do that again, you stupid…
He headed for home. He had it all worked out now. Mary had always seen the good side of him, the paintings and drawings he’d done. She liked that stuff. He’d bring her the one of the people with animal heads. Maybe if she was in a good mood, he’d try to suss her out about the chances of selling his stuff to that gobshite she had on the side. Mister Money, whatever the hell his name was Tony something. Alan? Alec? Him and his mates were the types to buy art, weren’t they? If she’d just level with him about what she was up to. How would he say it: Don’t you trust me, Mary? Let me in on it. I’ll be your back-up.
He rounded the corner walking faster. It was when he’d sit down at home, when the Ma would give him that look or start nagging, that he’d have to keep a cool. Another couple of hours, that was all. He could handle that. As long as he was doing something, he was okay. Exercise or something. Running. When he got that stash started up, he’d get a motorbike like Jammy-no, a car. Yeah! No. The stuff about a car was all shite. He’d buy a bike and get fit and everything. They’d laugh at first but then they’d see how organized he was, how he was his own boss. He’d eat right too, then there’d be no stopping him. Basically he was very healthy. It wouldn’t take much to get fit-
He saw the Escort a long way off. It was parked five or six houses down from his. It was the souped-up model, new, with fancy wheels and spot lamps. He didn’t remember seeing it here before. Maybe it was a robbed car. There was someone in the passenger seat. The back of his neck became itchy. He slowed. There was something familiar about the fella getting out of the car. Two cars passed on the road between them. He was a hundred yards from home. A shortish guy, bulky, with a green polo shirt. Where had he seen him before? Light caught on an ear-ring. The man skipped across the street onto the footpath ahead of him. He stopped as he approached the laneway between his home and the back of Carrick Gardens. The man’s hand moved down by his pocket. A signal he didn’t want anyone to notice. Something came from around the corner where he was walking by now. Cigarette smoke The man’s eyes met his for a moment.
Which came first, him running or the guy in the denim shirt coming around the corner of the laneway, he didn’t know. The panic was like an electric shock. A shout fell in the air behind him. He gathered speed, the balls of his feet bouncing off the pavement. By the bus stop and around the shops he sprinted. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that only the guy in the green shirt was after him. He had to get off the street: the car would be barrelling after him any second. He dashed across the road and leaped the parapet into the playground. He ran by a group of children down into the park. He was putting more distance between himself and the guy chasing him but he was getting a stitch. He heard the shriek of tyres and looked back. The driver of the Escort jumped out and leaped over the parapet after his mate.
His throat was burning when he came out of the park. Still he kept up his speed. Even in his terror he felt a glow of pride at being able to leg it like this. He remembered the races he had won in school, the only part of the bleeding school he had liked, the teacher who had tried to con him into staying on so he could go on for real training. He spotted the bus taking on its last passenger by Traynor’s shop. The indicator was already on before he made it across. He ran in front of the double-decker as it pulled away. The brakes squealed and he ran to the door.
“You stewpit iijit!” The driver reminded him of his uncle Joe. “Where in the name of Jases are you headed? Glasnevin cemetery?”
Patricia Fahy’s father kept rolling the cigarettes until he had ten made. He worked slowly, pretending to be intent on the paraphernalia in his lap. Minogue looked over at intervals. Fahy’s daughter hadn’t opened up, the Inspector reflected, and he was still undecided as to what to do about this.
“So she didn’t even mention a boyfriend,” Malone said. “Not even once?”
Patricia Fahy’s face looked grey against the glare on the wall outside the kitchen window. Minogue heard children yelling on the terrace.
“No.”
“You mean she had no fellas?”
“That’s what she said,” said her father. He moved his head from side to side as his tongue ran along the cigarette, but his eyes remained fixed on Malone. Neck like the trunk of a tree, thought Minogue.
“Let Patricia answer for herself, Mr. Fahy.”
“She did answer. It’s just you weren’t listening.”
“We’re doing our best here,” said Minogue. “We need Patricia’s help.”
“She’s in no condition to be interrogated.”
“She’s not being interrogated.”
“Then what the hell are two cops doing here in me kitchen?”
“Mr. Fahy,” said Minogue. “We’re not keen on this.”
“Keen on what?”
“You pitching comments around when we’re trying to conduct an interview on a murder investigation.”
“Too bad then, isn’t it? Why don’t you leave? And take Hair-cut there with you.”
“You’re here as a concerned parent worried about his daughter,” said Minogue. “Great. Now shut up, like a good man. Otherwise we’ll be conducting interviews on our own premises.”
Fahy stood.
“Will you now? Your mug on a card doesn’t get you anywhere here, sunshine.”
“Da! Give over, Da, will you?”
Her father didn’t hear her. His hands came into play. One pointed at the door.
“Cops don’t come around here without an armoured car, pal. Hair-oil here should know that, even if you don’t.”
“Da! Stop it, for God’s sake! It’s only making it worse!”
Patricia Fahy stalked out of the kitchen, sobs tearing at her breath. The Inspector turned back to Fahy. He seemed unable to find the words he wanted. His hand moved around the air instead. He sat down again.
“Phone calls,” he grunted. “Four or five of them the past couple of days. Two different fellas’ voices. Then there was a car. Did she tell you about the car?”
“What car?” asked Malone.
“She’s in shock, isn’t she, I mean to say. Last night about half-ten. It was parked up at the head of the street. Blue, it was. Stripes, the fancy wheels. New car, I’d say. A telephone thing sticking up out of it.”
“You’re worried that we can’t protect your daughter from the Egans,” said Minogue.
“Who said anything about the Egans?”
“Why are you so scared of them?” asked Malone. Fahy’s brows dropped.
“Fuck you, Hair-cut. I’m not afraid of any man.”
Malone set his jaw.
“You didn’t see the registration plate?” asked Minogue.
“It was dark last night, in case you didn’t notice.”
“But you saw it was new. Colour, fancy wheels. You saw it had a phone aerial.”
Fahy maintained his stare but his eyebrows moved up. He licked the edge of a cigarette paper.
“All right, Mr Fahy. You win. We’ll decamp. We’ll be off down to Store Street station where we can talk to Patricia in peace. ”
Fahy was up out of the chair fast.
“Like hell you will. You’ve no warrant to be in my house. ”
Malone stood slowly, as did Minogue.
“This ain’t Hollywood, brother,” said Malone. “Get a grip, there.”
Fahy nodded in Minogue’s direction but he kept his eyes on Malone.
“Take Junior for a walk there, Kojak, or he’s going to be part of the scenery. Rapid, like. Cop or no cop.”
“You and whose army,” said Malone.
“I’ll set your head singing before my daughter is-”
The door swung open again. Patricia Fahy looked over her hanky from face to face. Tears had left streaks down to her jaw line.
“God, Da! Go out and get stuff for the tea or something! Jesus! Ma left a list there in the hall.”
“I’m going nowhere until these two get to hell.”
“Well, go in the kitchen or someplace then!” Fahy looked from his daughter to the policemen and back. He shook his head and made for the door. He paused in the doorway and his face darkened again.
“Don’t you try anything,” he growled. Minogue looked at the photos over the table while he waited for Fahy to go. A wedding, a woman who looked like Patricia Fahy. A sunburned couple standing on white sand, an apartment or hotel in the background. Pennants for Spurs and last year’s Irish World Cup team. He heard Fahy swear and then the kitchen door slammed.
“The Egans, Patricia,” he said. She leaned against the cooker and folded her arms.
“What about them?”
“They’re on your da’s mind a lot.”
She narrowed her eyes and dabbed at her nostrils again with the tissue.
“He doesn’t know them,” she said.
“What would they want with you? What did they want with Mary?”
“Who says they want anything with me? Or Mary?”
“Ah, Patricia, come on,” said Minogue. She pivoted and took a packet of cigarettes from the counter. Her hands were steady as she lit one. She took a hurried second drag down deep in her lungs. Her words came out quickly with puffs of smoke.
“Mary was on the game, wasn’t she? Maybe that was it. I don’t know.”
“What about you, Patricia?”
“What about me, what? You’d know if I was. Same way you’d know Mary was, wouldn’t you?”
“We’re not here to make speeches, Patricia,” said Minogue. “We need to know Mary so’s we can find out what happened to her. Don’t you want whoever did this to get caught?”
She frowned behind a ball of smoke.
“I can’t get over it,” she murmured. “Your brother. Jesus! One’s the cop and the other’s the-”
Malone ran his fingers through his hair.
“What’s the use in giving us the run-around,” he said.
“Who pimped for Mary, Patricia?” asked Minogue.
Her mouth stayed open for several seconds. She rolled her eyes and looked away.
“Who broke into your place?” Malone asked.
“You’re asking me? Amn’t I supposed to be asking you that?”
Only her arm moved, Minogue saw, and its arc up to her lips was of such grace and careless accuracy that he could only stare at her. He sat forward and ran his palm across the soft, loose skin on the knuckles of his other hand. Damn, he thought. She thinks she’s a bloody ingenue doing an audition for something. Would she be giving him as much grief if he had taken her down to CDU? He turned his hand over and began rubbing at the palm with his thumb. Tiny flecks of dirt escaped the folds of skin and collected in rolls. He didn’t look up when he spoke to her.
“Listen, Patricia. We’re trying to work from the inside out here. Mary, her friends, what she did, where she liked to go. What she did or didn’t do that might be connected to what has happened. It’s a lot of stuff. Stuff you might know but you mightn’t think is important. Do you know what I’m getting at?”
He glanced over. Her eyes had glazed over. She drew on her cigarette. He thought of giving up then. Here was a woman with no criminal record being a substantial pain in the arse to the Guards.
“People know a lot,” he heard himself say. “They really do. They notice an awful lot, but they need to know something is important before they can drag it out of their memory. You can’t beat it out of people either. Things pop up and you can’t predict them: ‘Yes, she used to do that!’ or ‘Oh, that was the name of the fella she mentioned that night.’ There’s another way that’s less salubrious entirely.”
“Is this the good cop-bad cop bit now?”
Minogue thought of Kilmartin.
“We work from the outside in too, Patricia. It’s like cracking an egg. We go after records, suspects, associates. It’s a bit like crowbarring into somebody’s life, looking all the time for the killer.”
He engaged her look. She blinked once.
“But it gets people’s backs up, Patricia.”
Malone’s mouth twitched and he caught the Inspector’s eye. Minogue rubbed his palm again.
“Cracking the egg often works though,” he went on. “But it takes time. Sometimes the inside of the egg isn’t hardboiled so it gets messy. Sometimes the egg gets ruined. Ends up on the floor.”
“Eggs,” she murmured. “I don’t like eggs.”
“Did Mary seem out of sorts at all the last while?” asked Malone. “Worried, like?”
“I heard her getting sick last week. She said it was the gargle. She’d been out the night before.”
“With who?”
“I dunno.”
Malone’s eyes had narrowed to slits. He was staring at her.
“I fucking don’t!” she cried. “I keep on telling you! ‘Who was her boyfriend?’ ‘Who called to the flat for her?’ ‘Who’d she hang around with?’ ‘Why didn’t she talk to you about her life?’ Jesus!”
“You never knew where she went, what pub or who with?” asked Malone. “Ah, come on now.”
“Ah, come on yourself! Don’t you get it? I don’t fucking know!”
Minogue waited for her to lean back against the counter.
“Okay, Patricia. You saw her last yesterday morning. She was in the kitchen?”
“Just before eight o’clock, yeah. I was up late.”
“And you said she hadn’t been to bed.”
“That’s right. She was just sitting there at the table. Smoking a fag, drinking a cup of tea. Didn’t hear her coming in. She was still dressed from the night before.”
“How’d she look again?”
“Tired, that’s how. Looked like she’d been up all night. Shagged.”
“No remarks about where she’d been, nothing like that?” Malone tried.
“Nothing. Nothing. I knew better than to ask.”
Minogue stretched out his legs.
“Patricia. You’re telling us that Mary kept to herself-”
“You don’t believe me, do you. You’re thinking, ‘Well, the pair of them were into something, so that’s why she won’t tell us anything.’! Aren’t you? Yes, y’are!”
Minogue took in the red-rimmed eyes, the blotchy face. She pursed her lips and lifted her cigarette.
“How long did you share the place with her?”
“A year and a bit.”
“Where did she live before she moved in with you?”
“I don’t know. Some fella maybe.”
“A fella? Did she ever say his name?”
“I don’t know! I’m only guessing, that’s all! Jesus! Do you think I used to come home here and start firing questions at her the minute she walked in the door? Sure, she was hardly home, ever.”
“How long did you know Mary then?”
“Two years, about. I met her doing a thing for manicuring. She was always good for a laugh. Used to see her the odd time after that. Then about a year and a half back I bumped into her in a pub.”
“What pub?”
She curled her lip.
“I don’t remember. What do you think I am, a computer?”
“You went into a flat with her,” Minogue said.
“So? She didn’t tell me her life story.”
“You knew she worked the trade though,” said Malone. “How?”
“I found out one night, didn’t I. Met someone. We were talking about people we knew. The usual chatting. I mention Mary and he goes, ‘Is she still at it?’ So I ask her later. She got mad at me.”
“What did she say?”
“‘What’s wrong with getting money for it?’ ”
“Freelance, like?” Malone asked.
“I don’t know.”
“With the Egans?”
Minogue didn’t get the outburst he expected. She folded her arms and waved the cigarette around.
“Look. All I know about them is that she knew one of them. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” repeated Malone. “Why should the person who did this get away with it, Patricia? You’re helping them.”
“No, I amn’t.”
“You’re scared,” said Malone. “And it shows. Just like your da.”
“Drop dead. What do you know about anything?”
“Mary was your friend, wasn’t she?” said Minogue. She pushed off suddenly from the counter.
“I told her, and I told her!” she burst out. “She didn’t listen! She wouldn’t!”
“Wouldn’t what, Patricia?”
“Ah, Christ, I don’t know! That’s the problem! Can’t you get it through your thick skulls? She wouldn’t tell me! She had all these secrets. I warned her.”
“About what?”
She settled back against the counter and looked out the window.
“So Mary was still on the game,” said Malone.
“I don’t know. I suppose she was. Maybe she wasn’t. I don’t know.”
“She had no pimp, you seem to be telling us,” said Minogue. “But you were warning her against something. Was it people you saw back at the flat, people she told you about? People you heard about?”
“She used the flat as a place to hang her clothes,” she said. “So don’t be asking me again where she spent her time. All I know for sure is that Mary did manicures over at Tresses. There were times I wouldn’t see her for days. A week, even. I was getting tired of it, I tell you. I didn’t like being there on me own. That wasn’t the idea, like.”
An image came to Minogue: Patricia Fahy poking around amongst Mary’s stuff.
“Of moving in together, like?”
“Yeah. It worked out okay, splitting the cost and everything. But you’d want company, you know? I went out with me fella just to have company sometimes.”
Malone flipped back a page in his notebook. She glared over at him.
“He’s my alibi. Isn’t that the word? So’s I don’t have to keep on telling yous I didn’t do it?”
Malone looked up from his notebook. She returned his glare with a studied pout.
“Try to think, now, Patricia,” said Minogue. “There must have been people phoning the flat or coming around looking for her. Family, friends-anyone.”
She looked up at the lampshade.
“Look,” she said. “Mary told me that the last people she’d want calling around would be family. She told me she had no brothers or sisters. She said her oul lad was a bastard. She wasn’t keen to talk about her ma. I thought it was kind of, you know, strange, like. But I wasn’t going to be nosy like, was I? She wanted her own life, fair enough, like. That a crime?”
She dabbed her cigarette in the ashtray and then held it under her thumb. Minogue let his cheeks balloon with a held breath. He imagined questions floating around trapped in his mouth. How did she know? What else did she know? What was she leaving out?
“Well, there was one iijit,” she murmured as she released her thumb from the cigarette. “Yeah, now I remember… I mean, I don’t know if he’s…”
“Who?”
“Just a, well, Mary called him a gobshite. I don’t even know his real name. He showed up at the door once. She answered, that’s why I forgot until now. Yeah. Skinny fella. What’s that artist’s name, the famous one, he’s dead? Leo… Really famous, like?”
“Leonardo da Vinci?”
“Yeah.”
“A fella called for Mary,” said Malone. “A fella by the name of Leonardo da Vinci?”
“What are you looking at? I told you I didn’t know his name. Mary said she knew him years ago. He must have found out where she lived. Scruffy-looking type. No wonder she wasn’t keen on hanging around the likes of him.”
“Scruffy-looking,” said Malone. “Skinny fella? What else about him?”
“Average height. Got the feeling off him he thought he was something, but he wasn’t. A gobshite. Wouldn’t be surprised if he was into something, you know.”
“Criminal?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he stay over at the flat?” Malone asked.
“It was Mary answered the door. She was pissed-off he was there. I came back later on and he was gone. So was she.”
“Not what you thought of as her boyfriend then,” said Minogue. She shrugged.
“Said that he was a gobshite, didn’t she?”
The air seemed almost watery now. Minogue moved to the edge of the chair and tested his biro on a page of his notebook.
“To your knowledge, Patricia, did Mary take drugs?”
Instead of the sarcasm he expected, Minogue’s question drew silence. He looked up from the notebook. She was staring at the ashtray and biting her lip.
“Okay, Patricia,” he said. “We’ll finish off here for now. Think back more to this Leonardo da Vinci. When he came to the flat, a bit more on what he looked like?”
She glanced from Minogue to Malone and back, but her eyes were blank.
The air was still full of dust and glare. The sun’s orb seemed to have broadened. The Inspector hoped that somewhere behind this tarnished air there was a more proper blue than Dublin was stuck with today. His aches had localized themselves to his neck and shoulders. Malone’s hair stood out in slick bristles. He finessed his way through the hordes spilling out off the paths by O’Connell Bridge and let the Nissan find its way down the quays toward Kingsbridge.
“I dunno,” he said. “I can’t tell. Is it shock or is she just plain scared shitless?”
“Well, there was no point in trying to come the heavy.”
“I just couldn’t figure out how much she was lying. I mean, I’m not totally down on her, like. The Egans are animals.”
“Being pregnant,” said Minogue.
“What?”
“Being pregnant. That was the fuse lit, I’m thinking.”
Malone looked over.
“Tried to get the father to wear it and he wouldn’t?”
“Maybe, yes.”
“So she laid it on the line for him, he loses the head and clocks her? I wonder how many fellas Mary had on the go.”
“Well, maybe we’ll know quicker than we thought. This Liam Hickey that Eilis got from the alias search looks good. He grew up two roads over from Mary. We’ll know better when we get back to the Squad.”
Minogue let his eyes sweep along the buildings and the derelict sites turned car-parks along the Liffey Quays. Cheap furniture from hucksters’ shopfronts cluttered the path. He had a hard time remembering what had preceded the rash of boarded-up buildings awaiting demolition. For every tarted-up pub and pastiche of Georgian facades, there was a half-dozen scutty shops flogging junk. Grime, noise, carelessness. They passed Capel Street bridge and the Inspector saw that the tide on the Liffey was beginning to ebb. Soon the people lined up along the quays for their buses home would have the slimy walls of the Liffey banks and the mantle of lumpy masses to either side of the riverbed for company.
The Four Courts, which hid behind its stately facade much of the drab bulk of the State’s legal apparatus, slid by the two policemen. With its legions of barristers and solicitors and hard-faced, chain-smoking defendants and their families awaiting their turn in court, the place had always depressed the hell out of Minogue. Though rebuilt after its almost complete devastation during the Civil War, its echoing warren of hallways and rooms smelled of futility from the first day Minogue stepped into a courtroom there. People got lost in there, he believed, and not just criminals either. He didn’t want to be one of them.
The Nissan slowed for roadworks. In an alley next to a locked and boarded church whose name he couldn’t remember, Minogue spotted a man and a woman swaying and arguing. Both had red, swollen faces and tousled hair. Two bottles stood next to them on the footpath. If he hits her, Minogue thought, they’d have to get out. Couldn’t avoid it. Malone was talking.
“Sorry, Tommy?”
“I know Patricia Fahy has no record, but do you want to bet she’s on the game too?”
Minogue shrugged.
“Doyle can’t help us much there, he says.”
Mary Mullen had been pregnant. Pressure on her, a countdown, running out of time. How much did an abortion cost? Did she want one? Some ultimatum, he thought. Blackmail? Her flat had been trashed. An address book, an appointment book. Did anyone write love letters these days? Photos, mementos, letters. Leonardo da Vinci, someone she’d known growing up. Also connected to the Egans?
Malone inched the car by the yellow and white oil drums. They had a free run to the Squad car-park. Kilmartin was writing on the notice-boards. Minogue stood back and studied them. The timetable for the last week of Mary Mullen’s life was in Murtagh style: bright green and red. Minogue felt something drop in his stomach when he saw the blank spaces. He rubbed his head and looked again.
“Anything?” barked Kilmartin.
“Nothing that’d matter right now. Any news on this Leonardo Hickey fella?”
“A car dispatched to the house. He’s not home. I have his record here in front of me. A proper little shite, so he is. Break and enter, possession of stolen property. Drunk and disorderly-he was in a crowd that wrecked a patrol car outside a pub three years ago.”
“What’s under ‘Associates’?”
“Nothing, oul stock.”
“Nothing?”
“Divil damn the bit. Hickey is a fifteen-watt gouger. But you never know.”
“Give us some good news, can’t you? Any yield on the canal bank stuff yet?”
“Four hundred and fifty two tons of shit, six thousand tons of-”
“All right, Jim. I get the idea. What about Mullen’s taxi?”
“Shag-all. Yet. They’re still swabbing and poking it. Don’t hold your breath, I say. That’s why I started the door-to-door already. Murtagh is up to his neck building up likelies from the files. There was a fella released the day before, finished a sentence for rape. He’s chasing that one this very minute.”
“No fix yet on whether Mary worked after quitting the Tresses place?”
“Wouldn’t I tell you if there was?”
Minogue squeezed the bridge of his nose.
“Well, what about this Egan thing?”
“Christ, the questions being fired at me! Amn’t I after telling you that I talked to Mick Hand in Serious Crimes? We know her there, says he. She used to come and go with one of the Egans. So I try to finagle the latest surveillance they have on the Egans, see if we can place her for the last while. They’re still looking. Some of the stuff is not in the computer yet. ‘We’re a bit behind in the updates, Jim,’ says he. ‘Volume of stuff,’ etcetera. Sure, says I. The old story: we’ll milk our own cows. Anyway. He’ll have them done up and copied for us by the morning. He’ll bring them along to our pow-wow.”
Minogue flopped into a chair. Kilmartin jammed the cap on his marker and threw it toward Murtagh’s desk. All watched it skitter across the desktop and fall to the floor.
“Christ,” said the Chief Inspector. He cocked his head and looked at Malone.
“Don’t you love it, Molly? No witnesses. Nobody saw anything, heard anything. And this is a high-traffic area in the middle of Dublin! Gurriers broke all the bloody lights by the banks. Only we know the locks are closed, we’d be faced with the bloody prospect that she went in anywhere along the canal, back up to Crumlin or somewhere- Christ, the River Shannon even! We don’t know where the hell this Mary Mullen spent her time. We don’t know for certain where she was killed, even. Did she have a falling-out with her fella? How the hell do we know she even had a fella? Her own father and mother hardly knew her this last few years.”
Malone shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall.
“Come on, lads, for God’s sake,” said Kilmartin. “A whole heap of rubbish, a filthy scene, no sign of a weapon, a girl with a record, a family that fights like cats and dogs…”
Minogue stretched out his legs. Kilmartin turned toward him.
“What about this flatmate? Surely to God she knows more about the bloody person she was living with. Didn’t they have friends in common? Is this Fahy one on the game too and only letting on? Logic now, lads, logic! Almighty God, can’t Doyle and the rest of them in Vice come up with more? Matt?”
“We’re not happy with Ms. Fahy,” said Minogue. “We’ll be talking to her again.”
“Okay. But what happened to Mary Mullen? Come on. Save me a headache here. What’s going on at all?”
Minogue eyed his colleague. “Right off the top of me head?”
“Where else?”
“In front of the new boy?”
“God between us and all harm! Go on. I’ll protect you.”
“Why was Mary at the canal at all?” Minogue asked. “To my mind, she shouldn’t have been there.”
“What do you mean? Chance? Bad luck? The canal’s just a place to dump her? Egans, you’re thinking? A row?”
“All of the above. Maybe.”
Malone scratched at the back of his head, cleared his throat and glanced at Minogue.
“Someone breaking into the flat is a bit too much of a coincidence,” he said. “Maybe she had something she shouldn’t have had. Something belonging to someone else.”
“Drugs?” asked Kilmartin. “A loan? Was she in hock and she couldn’t pay?”
“That might be why she tried to work the canal that night,” said Minogue. “A payment to keep someone off her back, maybe?”
“She’s no good dead,” said Malone. “To a shark, like.”
He began patting his crew-cut. He sensed Kilmartin’s eyes on him and stopped.
“She messed up on something, you’re saying?” Malone nodded.
Kilmartin turned away, stretched and groaned.
“God now, Molly, if you didn’t go to school here, you met the scholars coming home. Our Mary Mullen is gone down the glen and someone’s after sending her. She had more than this Fahy kid for a friend. And they didn’t just sell Tupperware, lads. Let’s get serious about this now.”