‘Things are fine, Christopher.’
The boy held the knife awkwardly as he cut his sausages. Dixie watched his face, the lips pursed. He was wholly wrapped up in the task. The blue eyes, the soft cheeks, a tiny edge of his tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth. She could see Owen there still, somehow inside the soft little face. She felt a ripple of fear as she thought of Christopher at Owen’s age, the dreadful possibilities that might hurt him as well as the lovely things he might expect.
She wanted to talk to him about his birthday party last year and the time they went to Howth and walked all the way out to the end of the pier. She wanted to ask him if he remembered any of the stories she’d told him about Owen and about how Owen was watching over him from up in heaven. She wanted to kiss him on the forehead and touch his cheek and whisper to him like she always did, ‘You and me.’ She wanted to tell him how much she missed him but she was suddenly afraid that he wouldn’t remember anything she’d ever done with him or anything she’d ever told him.
Christopher put a piece of sausage in his mouth and said, ‘Can I go home now, mammy?’
Dixie was about to tell him that they couldn’t go home yet, that she was taking him on a little trip. Then it dawned on her that he’d said
I
and not
we
and she knew where he meant by home.
‘I don’t know, love.’
‘Why?’
‘We have some things to do.’
‘Can I have an ice cream?’
‘Later, love.’
They’d get the DART to Dun Laoghaire and find a B&B. In the morning they’d have breakfast, then do a flit on the ferry. There was no certainty about it, but a ferry port was a lot easier than an airport. Get through the ticket hall – sometimes the check-in was hectic, groups of Yanks milling around with their backpacks, going through on group tickets. Once you were through the ticket hall they didn’t check you at the gangway. Shelley’d done it years ago, when she’d been young and game for anything.
It works or it doesn’t.
Get to Holyhead – then what?
Onto the train.
Sorry – I seem to have lost the tickets.
It works or it doesn’t.
London. Then what?
Step by step. She had enough for a night or two in a B&B. If one thing or another doesn’t work out, improvise.
Stay here and – that’s it, end of story. Christopher’s gone.
Fuck it, go for it – nothing to lose.
‘Mammy, I’m bored.’
‘We’re going now, love.’
‘You said it’d be great fun.’
‘We’re going to take a trip on a big ship in the morning – how’d you like that?’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
*
Garda Joe Mills wanted to get an early start, but the sergeant said there was no hurry. Mills said that if they started before dawn they might even reach Dublin early enough to get the business over with and get back to Galway that night. The sergeant smiled and said, ‘I’ll take that under consideration.’
They set off around lunchtime, the sergeant driving, Mills in the front passenger seat. He’d told the Chief Superintendent that he could make his own way to Dublin, but the reply was that he’d need his wits about him when he met the Assistant Commissioner. ‘Sit back and let someone else do the driving.’
One week you’re standing on the roof of a pub, trying to persuade a moody nutcase not to turn himself into a thick layer of strawberry jam on the pavement below. Next week the Chief Super has scrubbed you from the roster to allow you take part in endless conferences with lawyers and senior officers, and you end up being ferried to Dublin by a sports-mad chatterer.
‘People who say he’s a thug, they don’t know football,’ the sergeant said. They were two hours into the journey and this was the second time he’d taken the topic for a ramble.
‘He’s the best player this island ever produced. The difference between him and George Best is that Keane is a professional to his toenails. He’s too disciplined to throw away his talent on beer and models.’
Joe Mills tried not to care, but he couldn’t suppress the unease he felt. Halfway through a sentence, the sergeant would look across at Mills, and wouldn’t turn his eyes back to the road until he got to the full stop. Quick glance at the road ahead, start another sentence, his head swivelling to the left again.
This is how I die. Fucking idiot driver. A wobble, a wallop, we go under a truck and as I’m crushed to mush in the back of a Primera the last thing I hear is shite talk about Roy Keane.
The sergeant made a scornful noise. ‘It’s called passion. Passion like he’s got, it inspires a whole team. And passion like that, there’s times he lost the run of himself and that’s the price he paid. It’s human nature. Passion and performance. You can’t have one without the other.’
The sergeant left the occasional silence for Joe Mills to fill, but Mills had no opinion on the Roy Keane debate, nor on any of the subjects that had preceded it. He had no opinion on George Best, and he didn’t know or care if D.J. Carey was a better hurler than Christy Ring, or whether Joe Louis could have beaten the crap out of Muhammad Ali. He had no opinion on the state of Irish rugby, the truth or otherwise about doping in Irish cycling, swimming or show jumping, the fixing of horse races or whether snooker was sport or show business.
Joe Mills tried to blank out the chatter. The dramatic moments and startling discoveries of the past five days played in his mind like a movie trailer.
‘The Assistant Commissioner isn’t into long reminiscences,’ the Chief Super had told Mills the previous evening. ‘He’ll expect you to edit this down to the essentials. Facts, to the point, no opinions. What was said, what you saw.’
Wednesday the nutcase came down from the roof, Thursday they found the two bodies. Saturday his sister turned up in a taxi at her house in Bushy Park, back from a week in Amsterdam, and found out that her husband and son had been butchered by her brother.
‘Woman?’
Mina Moylan didn’t know what woman her brother might have been talking about. No one else lived in the house. Wayne didn’t have a girlfriend in Dublin, as far as his sister knew. No, he didn’t have a girlfriend in Galway. He’d had someone when he’d lived in England – the sister didn’t know a name. He’d been living alone in Dublin for a few years. He came down to stay with her two or three times a year.
A detective sergeant did the interview. Joe Mills was allowed to sit in. Wayne Kemp’s sister spoke slowly. It seemed like part of her mind was off somewhere else, and maybe it would stay there. Whenever she came back from wherever that was, she folded up, sobbing, her face wet, red and saturated with disbelief.
When she was coherent, she didn’t have much to offer. Wayne wasn’t the most sociable of people, yes, but she loved it when he came down to stay with her and her family. He was quiet, maybe a little distant, but he could be charming. No, he’d never received psychiatric treatment, and no, he’d never made any threats against her or her family. ‘He’s always been – I mean, even as a kid, he was a bit odd. Nothing violent.’ She was hesitant, distracted, like she was trawling her mind for an explanation. ‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Any family tension?’
‘He always got on with Davy and Joseph – he—’
Mina Moylan’s eyes shut and her mouth opened and she made an involuntary sound. She sat that way for maybe a minute, her eyes tight, her cheeks wet, and when she spoke again her voice was quiet and high-pitched.
‘Jesus, there’s no reason.’
That’s the way it stayed until Sunday.
‘Wouldn’t fancy that—’
The sergeant took his eye off the road and glanced across at Joe Mills.
‘– one-to-one with the Assistant Commissioner.’ He looked at the road again and shook his head. ‘Could land yourself right in the shit. Make a bad impression, it goes in the file, twenty years from now they’re still turning you down for promotions and transfers and no one’ll tell you why and there’s nothing you can do except go on delivering summonses until you drop in your tracks.’ Another quick glance across at Mills. ‘No, I wouldn’t fancy your job today.’
Joe Mills looked out at the passing streetscape and went over his mental notes. Wednesday, the nutcase on the roof – keep it short. Thursday, they got the wallet, identified Wayne Kemp, found the bodies – again, it was all straightforward and the Assistant Commissioner would have a copy of the file. Saturday, the interview with Kemp’s sister – she knew nothing about anything, Joe Mills could deal with it in a few sentences. All that was just a frame for the picture that the Assistant Commissioner wanted to examine in detail – what Kemp had said yesterday.
Mills had his notebook in his pocket, but he’d hardly need it. Wayne Kemp, when he finally spoke on Sunday, had been plain and simple and matter-of-fact in his explanation.
‘Hope it goes well for you’. The sergeant had taken his eyes away from the road again and was looking across at Joe Mills. ‘Rubbing shoulders with the brass –’ He shook his head.
The sergeant looked again at the road. Eighty feet ahead, a traffic light went from green to amber, which the sergeant seemed to take as a challenge. He gunned the engine. Joe Mills felt the acceleration in his back as the car jerked forward. His legs were rigid, his feet braced against the front of the footwell, as the car went through the red light.
‘Yes indeedy’, the sergeant said, ‘risky business, putting on a show for those lads’.
37
Garda Mickey Rynne was putting the frighteners on the street sellers on Henry Street. All he had to do was show up and word rippled through the pedestrianised street and the hustlers started shuffling off into the distance. Over by the pharmacy, one hurriedly closed his shabby attaché case. Around by Roches Stores two more covered up the contents of the tables that they’d propped on ramshackle buggies and shuffled out of his line of sight.
Mickey Rynne had no personal objection to unlicensed peddlers. If someone wanted to work long hours sourcing and selling fake Calvin Klein sweaters, phoney Gucci perfumes or bogus Versace jeans, more power to them. It wasn’t like they were selling illegal fireworks to kids, or retailing cigarettes smuggled in by some bunch of thugs. That was different. If someone wanted to pay crazy money for real Gucci or Versace, Garda Rynne didn’t see why that should stop someone else paying a fraction of the price for a good imitation. And he didn’t feel strongly about protecting the copyright of some poncy foreign billionaires.
However, if he didn’t show up to hassle the hustlers the shopkeepers got stroppy. So, at least twice in every shift, Garda Rynne got to stroll through the Henry Street shoppers, pretending not to notice the hustlers packing up and moving quickly away into the distance.
Past the junction with Liffey Street, coming into Mary Street, Garda Rynne avoided looking directly at Jimbo Norton, shuffling down past M&S, pushing a makeshift countertop on a buggy. Garda Rynne slowed his pace. Jimbo was a decent, hard-working hustler, respectful of the police if not of the law.
Oh, you poor cow.
The woman might as well have had a neon sign attached to her head, a big red arrow blinking on and off and pointing straight down at her joyless face. This time of day, the kids were at school and if there was a woman coming out of a café holding a six-year-old boy by the hand there was a reasonable possibility that she was the woman mentioned in the abduction alert that had gone out around two hours ago. The wine-coloured trouser suit matched the description. What put the tin hat on it was the face – like she’d been carrying something very heavy and she hadn’t set it down in a long time. Face like that, someone right out on the edge—
Look at the kid – Jesus, the way he’s looking up at her. His hand, she’s holding it so tight—
Her name – Garda Rynne was good at this. He could riffle the pages of his memory like a deck of cards.
Peyton.
Something Peyton
.
He riffled again.
The woman saw him.
She stopped and stood there for a moment. Her head jerked to the left, looking up towards the Spire. Then she quickly glanced back inside the café, mouth loose, eyes wild.
Oh, you poor, poor cow.
Don’t make it worse than it has to be.
Abduction cases were shit. Demented parents, mostly, custody disputes, foster care. Garda Rynne figured that when you got an abduction alert it started out like an all-points bulletin on the Lindbergh Kidnap but it almost always ended up with some poor bastard in a cell down the station, weeping into a pillow.
‘Deirdre Peyton?’
Up close, he could see it was all over. Running wasn’t an option, not with a kid in tow. The danger was that when the woman saw she was cornered she’d get hysterical, screaming and thrashing, all teeth and fingernails.
Then again.