The Going Rate Read Online Free PDF Page B

tight over his forehead, a man who seemed to be perpetually straining, or holding back some great revelation, or fury.
    The same Feeney had a soft manner that Minogue didn’t trust one iota. There had been a civil servant there at the second meeting, a woman from Justice who liaised with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Minogue remembered she wore those small and severe oblong glasses that were the style everywhere now. The suspicion, maybe even the assumption, that a friend of Jim Kilmartin’s like Minogue had to have been privy to Kilmartin’s doings sat like another party in the room. It was hardly news that Coopers looked after one another, was it.
    Several fragments of the conversation had lodged in Minogue’s mind, and he had replayed them over and over again since.
    â€œYou and Superintendent Kilmartin are friends for some time.”
    â€œThat we are.”
    â€œWorking together for many years, I believe.”
    â€œA good long while, yes.”
    And on it had gone, with Feeney making observations more than asking questions. All very mild and civil, like a chess game. Minogue knew that a lot of it was for the benefit of the civil servant. She’d had to report to her department and minister, and so he had resolved not to react strongly to anything Feeney might say or insinuate. He had nevertheless prepared an aggressive statement, and he often itched to pull the pin on it.
    Even at the time, he was glad that his chance never came, and more pleased yet when he got out of the meeting. He was nevertheless dismayed that he had been unable to divine: whether anyone clearly believed a) Kilmartin had been dirty, or b) had been in cahoots with his wife when she was having her odd phone conversations – very, very odd indeed – with the head of a Dublin crime family.
    It wasn’t so much a shunning of Kilmartin that Minogue had observed since that night. It was noticing how few of Kilmartin’s contacts in the Guards had made a point of meeting Kilmartin face-to-face, or showing up at any of the sessions in Clancy’s.
    Well who could blame them, Kilmartin had quietly explained to Minogue. They probably thought he was gone off the deep end. Or maybe being seen with him might affect their careers. Kilmartin had chuckled to himself then, Minogue recalled. Career, Kilmartin had mused wryly later on, and raised a smile. He had turned the word from a noun back into a verb, hadn’t he?
    The point was, Kilmartin was owed, and that was that. Minogue wasn’t going to budge on that. It had been James Kilmartin who had set up the shaky Matthew Minogue in his Murder Squad years ago, when Minogue himself was damaged goods. Jittery, inert, and numbed by his own near-miss with death, Minogue was soon a probationer with Kilmartin’s Squad, and the years that followed had been Minogue’s best, working with Kilmartin, close to the dead.
    A few cars passed faster now as the city traffic fell away. Minogue again pretended to check his far mirror. He saw that Kilmartin had fallen asleep.

Chapter 5
    C OLM B REEN DID A LOT of his trademark slow nodding while Fanning talked. He kept his spoon going, carefully turning it on the tablecloth in a series of quarter rotations clockwise, stopping every now and then to rotate it back. Fanning refused to be distracted, or irritated, by it.
    Fanning was aware that he was nearing the end of his time.
    â€œIt’s so intense,” he said. “Dublin, the real Dublin. No U2 concerts, no trendy apartments by the Liffey stuff. Life in the raw.”
    â€œGritty, Dermot. That’s the key.”
    â€œGritty doesn’t go near it. Think of it as a medieval city all over again.”
    Breen nodded again.
    â€œWhat I’m trying to get across,” Fanning went on, “is something beyond any genre, you know. That’s the thing about it being a medieval city.”
    â€œRight,” said Breen. “Not a lot of people would