Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(66)
“Bring him whatever you want. Just don’t be bringing him any excuse to ring me again. I don’t like gobshites annoying me before I’ve had my cup of tea; banjaxes my bowels.”
“I’ll be in Wexford, boss, remember? I won’t have the opportunity to get Little Miss Murder’s frillies in a twist, even if I wanted to. I’ll just tidy up a few things”—I jerked a thumb in the direction of my office—“and I’ll be on my way, out of everyone’s hair.”
George inspected me, under heavy lids. Eventually he flapped a big weary hand and said, “Tidy away. Take your time.”
“Cheers, boss,” I said. This is why we love George. One of the things that makes a great super is knowing when he doesn’t want to know. “I’ll see you in a few weeks.”
I was halfway out the door when he called, “Frank.”
“Boss?”
“Anywhere the squad can make a donation, in your brother’s name? Charity? Sports club?”
And it hit me all over again, like a rabbit punch straight to the gullet. For a second nothing came out of my mouth. I didn’t even know if Kev had been in a sports club, although I doubted it. I thought there should be a charity created specially with f*cked-up situations like this one in mind, a fund to send young guys snorkeling round the Great Barrier Reef and paragliding down the Grand Canyon, just in case that day turned out to be their last chance.
“Give it to the Victims of Homicide crowd,” I said. “And thank you, boss. I appreciate it. Tell the lads thanks.”
Deep down in his heart, every Undercover believes that, by and large, Murder are a bunch of big * boys. There are exceptions, but the fact is that the Murder lads are our pro boxers: they fight hard, but when you come right down to it they have gloves and gumshields and a referee ringing his little bell when everyone needs to take a breather and wipe off the blood. Undercovers fight bare-knuckle, we fight backstreet and we fight till someone goes down. If Scorch wants into a suspect’s house, he fills in a square mile of paperwork and waits for the rubber stamps and assembles the appropriate entry team so no one gets hurt; me, I bat the baby-blues, spin a good story and waltz right in, and if the suspect should decide he wants to kick the shit out of me, I’m on my own.
This was about to work for me. Scorch was used to fighting by the rules. He took it for granted that, with the odd minor bad-little-boy breach, I fought the same way. It would take a while to occur to him that my rules had sweet f*ck-all in common with his.
I spread out a bunch of files on my desk, in case anyone happened to stop by and needed to see me busyworking towards a handover. Then I phoned my mate in Records and asked him to e-mail me the personnel file of every floater working on the Rose Daly murder. He did a little fussing about confidentiality, but a couple of years back his daughter had got off on possession charges when someone was sloppy enough to misfile three wraps of coke and her statement sheet, so I figured he owed me at least two major or four minor favors. Underneath the fussing, he saw it the same way. His voice sounded like his ulcer was growing by the moment, but the files came through almost before we got off the phone.
Scorcher had himself five floaters, more than I would have expected for a stone-cold case; apparently he and his eighty-whatever percent really did get props with the Murder boys. The fourth floater was the one I needed. Stephen Moran, twenty-six years old, home address in the North Wall, good Leaving Cert results, straight from school into Templemore, string of glowing evaluations, out of uniform just three months. The photo showed a skinny kid with scruffy red hair and alert gray eyes. A working-class Dublin boy, smart and determined and on the fast track, and—thank heaven for little newbies—way too green and too eager to question anything a squad detective might happen to tell him. Young Stephen and I were going to get along just fine.
I tucked Stephen’s details into my pocket, deleted the e-mail very thoroughly, and spent a couple of hours getting my cases good and ready for Yeates; the last thing I wanted was him ringing me at the wrong moment to clarify something or other. We did a nice quick handover—Yeates had too much sense to give me any sympathy, beyond a slap on the shoulder and a promise that he’d take care of everything. Then I packed up my stuff, closed my office door and headed over to Dublin Castle, where the Murder Squad works, to annex Stephen Moran.
If someone else had been running the investigation, Stephen might have been harder to find; he could have finished up at six or seven or eight, and if he was out in the field, he might not have bothered to check back in at the squad and hand in his paperwork before he headed home. But I know Scorcher. Overtime gives the brass palpitations and paper gives them orgasms, so Scorchie’s boys and girls would clock out at five on the dot, and they would fill out all their forms before they did it. I found myself a bench in the Castle gardens with a good view of the door and a nice anti-Scorch screen of bushes, lit a smoke and waited. It wasn’t even raining. This was my lucky day all over.
One thing in particular was slapped straight across the front of my mind: Kevin hadn’t had a torch on him. If he had, Scorcher would have mentioned it, to back up his little suicide theory. And Kevin never did dangerous shit unless he had a damn good reason; he left the because-it’s-there stuff to me and Shay. There wasn’t enough tinned Guinness in all of Dublin to make him think it would be fun to go wandering around Number 16 on his own, in pitch-darkness, just for kicks and giggles. Either he had seen or heard something, on his way past, that made him think he had no choice except to go and investigate—something too urgent to let him go get backup, but discreet enough that no one else on the road had noticed a thing—or someone had called him in there, someone who had magically known that he would be passing the top of Faithful Place right about then; or he had been bullshitting Jackie. He had been heading to that house all along, to meet someone who would come prepared.